When I was four, my dad stood in the driveway talking to a neighbor and drinking a Michelob. I'd been playing alone in the backyard for the past hour, waiting for him to set up the tee-ball, and a thin layer of dirt was glued to my skin with sweat. Dad towered over me in the driveway, his hair black in those days, his body still lean under his Case Western football t-shirt. He looked down and said, "You want a taste?" I nodded, and he handed me the beer.
I told on my dad once, not long after that. "Dad was drinking and driving," I told my mom, thinking of the glass of orange juice he had in the cupholder.
My dad's youngest brother damn near killed a woman. On a back road, on his way back from a bar, he blew a stop sign in his blue pickup and t-boned a Ford Escort at nearly 50 miles per hour. The truck bed had a white cap on it. Uncle Paul had the front sawn off and jacked the back half of his Silverado up in my grandmother's driveway, filled with junk, for over a decade.
The house I grew up in was a ranch. Not a split-level, but long just the same and built into the edge of a hill. From the street, the house looked like a one-story, but both stories looked out onto a half acre of backyard that Dad babied. He'd see tigerlillies the color of Buddhist monk robes and pull his car over to dig them up, transplanting them around the dogwood or the shed where we kept the riding mower. Each summer, from the time I was six until I was 13, Dad and his two brothers would spend weekends building a deck up against the gray brick of our house until a cascade of treated lumber flowed like water around the flowerbeds from the garage downhill to the sliding door in the center of the house. They'd start early, before the heat set in, cracking Michelobs as soon as they broke sweat. I always wanted to help, but after the first two years, I learned the answer would be no and stopped asking.
I must have been about eleven. Dad was driving down the two-lane main drag by our house, and a 20-something cyclist decked out like he was riding the Tour de France — yellow jersey, skin-tight shorts, sleek black helmet — was grabbing fenders, hitching a ride up the hill. Dad took it personally. He held out his arm like he was about to hit the brakes, pushing me back against the passenger seat. My window whirred open as he steered with his knee and blew a thick wad of smoker's phlegm past me onto the cyclist as we passed. I tried to slide low enough in my seat that I wouldn't be seen, and I remember having no idea what was driving my dad.
Dad's first DUI and his second, two years later, happened on his way to Cleveland Hopkins Airport. He missed both business trips.
Mom and I came back from a day of yard work at grandma's house around dinnertime on a Saturday. I headed for the shower and stopped dead in the hall. Dad's legs poked out of the door, protruding from the white terrycloth robe he'd stolen from a hotel. I stood in the kitchen seeing caskets and sprays of flowers until Mom came back a minute later. "He's fine," Mom said. "Where do you want to go for dinner?" I figured he had the stomach flu and didn't bring it up again.
Who drinks orange juice on the rocks while he circles the lawn on the riding mower?
Dad had a split personality. At home he was either pensive and quiet, as if he were nervous around my mom, my brother and me, or bombastic and loud, roughhousing or throwing footballs too hard when he played all-time quarterback for his kids in the backyard. But around mixed company — cookouts with work friends, cousins' birthday parties — he'd morph into something charming. Crowds would coalesce around him like asteroids around a planet. It felt good to be in his orbit.
You can only stuff so many Absolut bottles into a trashcan until they clink together.
I hear from my mom that Dad said, a few years before the divorce, that he never drank on business trips. Only at home.
I've never had a knockdown, drag-out hangover, not even during college. But it is awfully easy for me, once I have a couple drinks, to push that boundary. I'll start feeling sickish, then vanish from the party and have to explain my absence later. I never have liked Absolut or Michelob.
Uncle Bill, Dad's middle brother, nailed for DUI, reckless driving, and two counts of child endangerment, one for each of my cousins he had in the car. His divorce is pending.
Dad lost his license for a year after the third DUI. This was five years after the divorce, when I was 24. Dad lived off his severance package for three years until he stopped paying alimony and served more than 90 days in county lockup for contempt of court.
I was damn glad he left my wedding early. He had the shakes and was bloated, which happens when your liver doesn't work so well. With all the commotion of that day, I hit the open bar pretty hard. Didn't get even a buzz until the wedding party was closing down the after-hours hotel bar. My best man bought shots of iced-down vodka. That did it.
The wife and I have a well-stocked bar in a cupboard of our kitchen, and I'm thinking, in the years until we get around to having kids, we might do well to lock it up from me.
Daniel Prazer is a former reporter and an MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago. He was the Assistant Artistic Director for the 2008 Story Week Festival of Writers and has co-edited issues of Hair Trigger and the Story Week Reader. His creative nonfiction has appeared in Fictionary, Reservoir, Bike Shorts, Hair Trigger 30, and The Story Week Reader 2006. An excerpt of his novel-in-progress will appear in Open to Interpretation. He lives in Chicago with his wife Ann.