Alcoholism isn’t a spectator sport. Eventually the whole family gets to play.
—JOYCE REBETA-BURDITT
The Lucky Charm was a workingman’s bar located in the middle of a dilapidated housing project in Stamford, the city next door to Greenwich. Every week our local paper reported that a drug dealer or gang member had been shot or stabbed to death in that neighborhood. The Charm, as we called it, was a cinder-block fortress. The building’s facade was fitted with a small window covered by rusty security bars and a thick oak door with leaf-shaped hinges and an arched top. The owner must have felt that placing these medieval touches on the entrance would help customers feel like they were entering a friendly tavern in Merrie Olde England rather than taking a tour of the set of Black Hawk Down.
In the fall of my junior year, my mother’s work began requiring more travel. My older brother Phillip was married and living on the other side of town; my brother Connor was with friends on a farm in upstate Connecticut; while my sister, Caroline, was living and modeling in Paris.
Several days a week, it was just Dad and me in the house.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. My father was bitter that he’d been passed over for the post in Eastern Europe, my mother wasn’t home to keep an eye on him, and I was working overtime to get into college.
Children of alcoholics are pros at adapt-and-survive. My days were methodically planned. I would go home after school to let Waldo out and relax. I knew my father would arrive home at around 6 p.m., often after having stopped at a restaurant or the club for drinks, so I’d leave the house at 5:45 and go to the Lucky Charm, where I would spread my textbooks and papers out over two tables in the empty dining room. I would eat, do my homework, or even get a head start on future assignments.
By 9:30, my father would either be conked out in his oversized chair in the study or have gone to bed. At 9:40, I’d leave the Charm and drive home. Playing it safe, I’d turn off my Bug’s engine and headlights and coast the last fifty yards down the little hill to our driveway. I would walk around to the back of the house and peer through the window to see if my father was in his chair. If he wasn’t, I’d cross my fingers and hope he was in bed, rather than in the bathroom or some other part of the house. But one had to be prepared for anything.
For me, being prepared meant not leaving the Charm without a good buzz on. If you got home and all was well, then being lit helped you drift off to sleep quicker. If all was not well, then you were fortified against what might be waiting.
For instance, some nights Dad would be drunk and jovial and marching around the house, singing German songs he’d learned during the war. Sometimes he’d make me join him. If that sounds harmless, then you’ve never been taken hostage by someone else’s idea of fun. It’s easier when you’re buzzed.
Other times, I came home and the house felt off beam, like a sneering prankster had moved everything two or three inches from where it had been content to sit or hang for years.
One night I was shaken from a deep sleep by the sound of my father yelling from downstairs. He’d been sleeping in his chair when I tiptoed into the house hours earlier, but apparently he’d awoken and was drinking again.
“Phillip . . . Connor . . . Ian, get down here!” he barked.
More often than not, it took my father several attempts to land on the right name of the child he wanted to see. Sometimes even our dog, Waldo, made it onto the list. My father’s tone of voice was amped up and brusque, so I didn’t even take the time to put on my pants or shirt. I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs and across the house to the study.
“You’ve got five seconds!” he yelled as I barreled into the study. He was sitting in his chair, feet up on an ottoman, hands folded across his stomach, grinning like a well-fed cat.
I instinctively performed an appraisal comparable to a Homeland Security Threat Assessment. Were we facing a Low, Guarded, Elevated, High, or Severe Threat Level? Did the situation call for me to raise the threat level from Yellow to Orange, or should I make the rare hurdle to Red? These assessments took seconds and were based on a subjective but historically accurate visual appraisal.
First were the eyes. I could determine how drunk my father was by where his gaze was directed when he spoke to me. If he could maintain steady eye contact, even of the glazy variety, that meant he’d only had three or four drinks. If while addressing me his gaze was fixed on the center of my forehead, it was certain he was at least three-quarters of the way into a bottle of something flammable.
The second phase of the Threat Level Assessment was more nuanced. To gauge his mood I had to figure out what type of liquor he’d been drinking. Vodka made him arrogant and overbearing. Too much Stolichnaya and he became an authority on everything. Wine was tricky. It made him either mischievous and playful or mawkishly nostalgic for the good old days. Single malt Scotch, however, was the dark prince’s elixir. It made him cruel.
This was a single malt Scotch night. We were at Threat Level Red.
“Bring me another Glenlivet and water,” he said, holding out his empty glass with one hand and flicking his fingers in the direction of the dining room, where an antique cart filled with crystal decanters and tumblers sat in the corner. I gaped at him, heart pounding from being scared out of a deep sleep at 1 a.m., breathless from having sprinted across the house.
“That’s what you want?” I asked.
He frowned. “Do as you’re told, corporal.”
What made this request so heartless was that the bar cart was no more than fifteen feet away from him, in full view of his chair.
Then I understood. My father didn’t want a cocktail. He was staging a play. He was starring as lord of the manor, and I was playing the role of the cowering serf. The plot required a scene in which the antagonist keeps the lowly servant in his place by humiliating him. He’d done things like this before, but never to this degree.
My jaw locked until my teeth hurt. Sweat formed on my chest. “I’m not doing it,” I said, my body taut and trembling.
He leaned forward and placed his hands on the worn arms of his chair. “You’ll do as you’re told, corporal.”
The tendons in my neck tightened painfully. I squinted at him. “You woke me up in the middle of the night and made me run across the house to make you a drink?” I said, hissing through clenched teeth. As I continued, my voice built to a roar. “I have school tomorrow, you stupid drunk!”
My final three words detonated in the space between us like a thermobaric bomb, the weapon that turns air into fire. From the time I was small, I’d been told that my father was a “sick man” with a history of life-threatening medical problems. Whenever we were close to exploding at him because we couldn’t take anymore, we would be pulled aside and reminded that making him angry could lead to his having a stroke or heart attack, and that his death would be our doing. Of course, the people who said this didn’t believe it. They were terrified of conflict, and would do anything to keep my father on an even keel, even if it meant making children believe that their words, even words that were true and needed to be voiced, could somehow kill people. When I was a child, I’d believed what I was told. Even then, as a young man, that message remained unchallenged. Some part of me still believed my words were potentially lethal, and now I had loosed them.
My father glowered. “That’s insubordination, corporal,” he said, rising unevenly and shaking out his hands.
“You come near me,” I said, pointing at him, “and I swear, I’ll—”
“You’ll be bucked down to private for this.” He took a swipe with his foot at the ottoman that separated us, but missed and reeled.
I charged him. I drove my left shoulder into his chest, launching him back into his chair. Had the chair not been snug to the wall, its back would have flipped over, spilling us onto the floor in a heap of tangled limbs and twisted history. A piece of the chair’s wood frame cracked, while the rest of the chair protested with groaning creaks and sighing cushions. The lamp on the side table crashed into the wall, and the exploding light-bulb flashed white, while Waldo barked and whined.
I wish I could claim it was a long and desperate struggle, but it was more like tackling a scarecrow. I stood back up, then leaned over him, pinning his arms back, my face inches from his. His breathing was heavy, and his breath reeked of cigarette smoke and Scotch.
“If you ever do this again,” I whispered. “I’ll—”
He spat in my face.
My head recoiled. I stood up straight, looking down at him as he wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand, never once taking his eyes off me. I knew this gesture was fraught with meaning, but my heart was too young to fully grasp it.
I raced back upstairs. I wiped my face on a towel I’d left on my floor, threw the same clothes on I’d worn earlier that day, heaved my book bag over my shoulder, and dashed out the front door half-dressed. I pulled into a gas station parking lot to button my shirt, put my pants on right, and buckle my belt. It was too late at night to call Nanny or show up at a friend’s house, so I headed to the high school.
On the way, I passed St. Joseph’s Church, and my eyes were drawn to something I’d never considered before. The gold cross atop the steeple, illuminated by concealed lights, was bare. I was taught in Catholic school that crucifixes should be “inhabited,” meaning that the battered corpse of Jesus should remain hanging on the cross to remind humankind of the terrible sacrifice the Savior made on its behalf. The more lifelike and gruesome the crucifix, the better. Most Protestants believe crosses should be uninhabited as a sign that Jesus is no longer dead but risen. As I watched the empty cross at St. Joseph’s fade in my rearview mirror, I realized that the Protestants were right—the cross should be empty. But for a different reason than the one they offered.
The cross was empty because there was no Savior to put up there.
There was no God who loved me or my father or anyone else so much that he died for us.
Jesus’ tomb wasn’t empty. It just hadn’t been found yet.
For two thousand years, people had followed someone no different from my crazy Uncle Kenny. He thought he was the Messiah too. I wished Jesus had died and stayed dead. Instead, he’d hung around for two thousand years making promises he couldn’t keep.
I drove to the high school and pulled into the most sought-after space in the lot. Small consolation. I tilted the rearview mirror down and saw a dried patch of my father’s spit still on my face. I grabbed an old T-shirt from the backseat, wet it with my tongue, and rubbed it off. Years later I would realize that I had rubbed it in.
It was only a matter of time before he called. I had a hunch that waking up with bruised ribs, discovering the broken lamp, and not being able to remember what had happened would rattle him. Sooner or later, he’d call, fishing for clues. I was working on an Honors Asian History paper at my mother’s desk when the phone rang.
“Hi. Your mother home yet?” my father asked.
I rolled my eyes. My mother’s itinerary had been on the refrigerator door for days. He knew her plane didn’t land at LaGuardia until 8 p.m. Clue fishing always began with lame but innocent-sounding questions.
I stood up and held the phone between my ear and shoulder and lit a cigarette. “Not till nine thirty,” I said.
He chuckled. “Oh, that’s right.” I was waiting for him to say something about having a senior moment. Instead, I heard the rapid click of his reel as he cast his line out again.
“What time did you come home last night?” he asked. I heard him shuffling papers in the background. He was working it.
“Around ten,” I said, exhaling a stream of smoke.
“I was wiped last night. I must’ve been in bed by then,” he said, the end of his sentence on the verge of sounding like a question rather than a statement.
I made him wait a long time before I said, “No, you definitely weren’t in bed.”
The paper shuffling stopped. Now he knew something had happened the night before, and he could tell from my cold answers that it had been serious.
He sighed. “Your mother told me that if anything happened while she was away on business, she’d leave me,” he said. “You don’t want that on your conscience, do you?”
I pulled the handset away from my ear and thrust my middle finger at it before bringing it back.
“I’ve got to go,” I said and hung up.