012 — Messages in a Bottle

I've never been drunk. I've never been high.
It's not as if I never had the opportunity. I grew up in an era when uncles and older cousins would sneak sips of beer to the kids during family cook-outs. New friends in a new school offered me weed a week into seventh grade. Later that year, we had to walk one of those same friends up and down a ditch when he took too many pills one day. During my junior and senior years of high school I spent almost every weekend in neighboring Juarez, where the legal drinking age was 18. College was dotted with various parties in parent-free homes, apartments, and rented hotel rooms. And so on.
Still, I never drank. Never took drugs. I didn't even start drinking socially until I was in my 40s, and it didn't take. I can't remember the last time I had a beer, and honestly would rather have an Arnie Palmer anyway. Weed, much less anything stronger than that, remains undiscovered country.
None of this is bragging, or some sort of self-righteous stand. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with alcohol, just like there isn't anything inherently wrong with weed. If I get cancer again and have to get chemo, or if I develop glaucoma someday, you'd better believe I'm gonna smoke. No, the only thing I have a problem with is overindulgence, the kind that puts someone, or the people around them, in harm's way. Or the kind that makes you annoying, because man, I am not here to babysit.
People used to ask me, "Why don't you drink?" And I would usually say something along the lines of how I just never developed a taste for it. Which is true.
What's also true is my father was an alcoholic.
Almost from the time I can remember, Dad would take me and my younger sister with him to the bar. Specifically, I remember the Night Gallery, a little neighborhood bar only a few blocks from my grandparent's house. Going to the Night Gallery was a treat, because Dad would get us Shirley Temples and a shot glass filled with maraschino cherries, and it had the air of the forbidden, a dark and empty place echoing with the ghosts of something we couldn't understand.
It was also the stale-smelling cavern home of Tom the Monster. Tom the Monster (never just Tom, never just The Monster) was the owner of the Night Gallery and he lived up to his name. He was, to my eyes, enormous, a living mountain of a man with a tumbleweed beard and a low voice that rumbled like landslide. If seeing two elementary school-age kids in his bar in the middle of the afternoon surprised him, Tom the Monster never showed it. As he made small talk with Dad at the bar, my sister and I were allowed to play with the billiard balls and the shuffleboard table as long as no one else wanted them.
I'd come back to the Night Gallery, and other bars, in the years to come. Then I'd be in the back seat as my mom drove angrily past the parking lot to see if Dad's truck was there. If it was, she'd park and tell us to stay in the car, she'd be right back. More reverberations with echoes I was too young to understand, except that Mom was upset, and it was because of Dad. Soon enough I could figure out it was the drinking, the beer and the way it made my father behave.
It got worse, and it was terrifying. Thankfully, Dad wasn't an angry or abusive drunk. Mostly he was sloppy and affectionate, telling us he loved us before becoming enveloped in a profound sadness, a melancholy he wore like a deep blue mantle. "I never had a father," he'd tell us, a ragged razor of desperation in his voice. He'd met his birth father only once, and was raised by an abusive and unloving stepfather I knew as Grandpa Luis. "You're lucky to have a father," he'd say, jabbing a dusty mahogany finger at us. "I never had a father."
What had been a stable childhood was steadily becoming more and more unpredictable, and I dealt with it the way I think most young kids do — through avoidance. If Dad was drunk, I tried to stay in my room. I didn't talk. I tried not to cry when I saw Mom getting upset. In the morning, I told myself, things would be back to normal.
It was around then I decided I would never put my family through that. About a year later I would have enough understanding to decide I would never put myself through that.
Over time it got worse, as alcoholism tends to do. His drinking became a constant in our lives. He'd sometimes come home, stumbling and reeking of beer, and we'd have to help him undress and get into bed. More than once we'd hear the truck pull up, but when he didn't come in we'd go out to look and he'd be passed out behind the wheel. We'd wonder how he even made it home.
Eventually he got busted at his job with the railroad when he came back positive for marijuana after a random drug test. To this day I'm not sure how it happened, it must have been the result of some sort of evaluation done by the people running the tests, but Dad was officially declared an alcoholic and given a choice; go into a monthlong rehab or lose his job.
Rehab was amazing, and made me a lifelong advocate for therapy and counseling. Dad attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the hospital, and the family went to AlAnon. We had individual sessions, and group sessions where I told him how his boozing made me feel and how I felt about him. Dad and I had always had a gap between us, a chasm that yawned with our inability to understand each other. Those counseling sessions bridged the gap, and for maybe the first time, I empathized with my father.
When the month was up, Dad was clean, ready to make a new start, and happy to show off his 1-Month Sober chip.
No. Of course it didn't last.
Dad held on for a year. He tried so hard, and we all really thought he was going to pull it off. I think even he felt he could do it. But other times I think he gave himself a year, 12 months with a finish line ribbon to cross just to prove he could. Then it started off with a beer, just one beer, a day. For an alcoholic, though, a beer might as well be a six-pack, a case, a fridge full of dwindling returns.
This time was different. This time Dad was careful not to get too drunk, careful to not get caught the way he had been before. We could tell, of course, but even we didn't realize, for a long time, that somewhere along the way Dad had become a functioning alcoholic. He didn't stumble around like a drunk much anymore, but that was because, like some sort of pie-eyed Hulk, he was always drunk. He had to drink just to feel normal. When I think about it, this might the second-most tragic part of his disease. His illness was a burglar, a mugger, a pickpocket that had stolen his god-given right to normalcy when none of us were looking, but right in front of us all the same.
Like all good Mexican-American children, I was in my 20s and still living at home. I was working at the newspaper and promising to go back to finish up my degree someday soon. I don't remember exactly how it happened, but Dad came home, obviously drunk that day, and I'd had enough. I said something sarcastic and judgmental and hurtfully true. Dad became angry, and announced I finally thought I could take him. (There had never been violence in our house, so this was as much a surprise to me as it was to him once he sobered up.) He pushed me, and pushed me again, until I was out the door and he told me I didn't live there anymore. Pissed and tearful, I walked to the neighborhood Good Times Store and called Sandy, who was my girlfriend then, and I went to stay with her.
Dad was prideful and could hold grudges like no one else, but I imagine he was haunted by the shadow of his stepfather, and he called me at the apartment a few days afterward. He apologized and said I could come back if I wanted. We talked and cleared up a lot of things, reaching a new understanding of each other once again. I didn't go back.
Years passed, and the family reached as much of a detente with Dad's alcoholism as could be possible. Informally retired thanks to layoffs and no real desire to find another job, Dad made trips to Sam's, doted on his grandchildren, and carried around a big thermal mug filled with wine. He was drinking, but he was functioning. Things were good.
I can't remember where I was when I got the phone call. Was I at work? At home? I know Sandy later had to get a ride from the newsroom to the hospital. What I do remember is being told, "Dad's going to the emergency room. Get there, now. You have to hurry." The freeway was a blur, and I pulled into the parking lot just behind the ambulance. I jumped out in time to see Dad being wheeled in.
Esophogeal varices develop as a result of liver disease, and are essentially enlarged and weakened veins in the throat. At the time I didn't know Dad had been coughing up blood recently. I didn't know that with the wear and tear of regularly drinking, Dad had worn his throat down to the point that one day, that day, the lining of his esophagus would give away. He died that night, bleeding so fast from his ravaged throat the doctors couldn't give him blood fast enough to keep up, his belly distended and swollen with the runoff.
We all said our goodbyes before letting him go. He was heavily sedated, but we poured our hope and whispered our words into his ear anyway. And in that moment, I told him the truth.
I told him how much I loved him. I told him I would always love him. I thanked him for everything he taught me, and everything he tried to teach me. I told him, over and over, what a good father he had been. "I have a father," I told him. "I was lucky that I always had a father."
Because I was. Dad was an alcoholic, but that was his disease. It wasn't who he was. My dad was a compassionate, passionate man. He was unabashedly kind to his family, to friends, and to strangers. He loved art and music, and sci-fi movies, and his heritage. He loved to laugh and give bear hugs, and couldn't help doing either, anyway. He'd call my grandmother every April Fool's Day to prank her, and would cry tears of laughter when she'd get him back. He brought lonely people to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners because "no one should be by themselves tonight." Every year he made homemade pizza for my birthday.
When I cried because my Spider-Man doll broke, he popped the head off the Starskey & Hutch doll I had, switched clothes and heads, and Spidey was back in action. He told me and my sister to ride our bikes to the Good Times Store by ourselves, even though he knew it would give Mom a heart attack. One Halloween, Dad made me a mask that looked just like the guy on the cover of the Quiet Riot album out of cardboard, gray spray paint, and chain. He made the wooden arch Sandy and I got married under. He could make or fix almost anything.
HIs hands were dry and rough, like the finest sandpaper.
Dad taught me and my sister the thrill and rewards of taking risks. That the world wasn't fair but was still achingly beautiful if you looked. To appreciate what I had, whether it was a little or a lot. He taught me generosity. He also taught me to appreciate the kind of hard work that produced scraped knuckles and hard, yellowed callouses, and the bright desert flowers in the corner rock garden that came later. He taught me that all things were possible through sheer force of will, and if that didn't work, you could always Chicano that chingadero.
I still don't drink, and I still don't do drugs. I've never been drunk. I've never been high. A small part of that is because a small part of me didn't want to be like my father.
I'm lucky that a bigger part of me wants to be just like him.
SHARING IS CARING
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