My Father
My father always promised us
That we would live in France.
—JUDY COLLINS, “My Father”
MY father told me, in the autumn of 1966, that he was dying. He was depressed. He was drinking hard and couldn’t stop. I suggested a shrink, knowing that while therapy had not helped me stop drinking, it had helped me have fewer depressions. I hoped it might help my father.
“It’s no damn use when I can’t even pay my bills,” he said. He had lost his most recent radio program and was trying to sell mutual funds and trying to believe in what he was doing. “Anyway, I don’t want to change and look at myself and explore my psyche and my navel and my asshole. That’s for you and those half-witted friends of yours.” (Which friends he meant I didn’t know. Not one of my friends is in any way half-witted, but this is the way Daddy sometimes talked.) “Taking your brains apart and paying a fat fee to bellyache to some Ph.D.? No, I’m a cornball from Idaho, ain’t nothin’ in that stuff for me!” Daddy would revert to twanging country slang when he wanted to make a point, an educated, erudite man making fun of his past or his intelligence, I could not always tell which.
We were in Boulder, Colorado. My parents had come to a concert of mine earlier that night, and then we went to an old friend’s house for some food and talk. There was a lot of drinking—when was there not when we were together? Martinis, bourbon on the rocks, Canadian or German beer for the courageous. My mother usually drank Manhattans, each new glass decorated with a red maraschino cherry perched on the lip like a Christmas gift. Tonight she was drinking Presbyterians, a sort of watered-down highball of ginger ale and bourbon. She was driving, she said, and wanted to be awake. At the concert, my father drank glass after glass of Jack Daniel’s, smacking his lips. He shouted merrily at my performance, making a ruckus on my behalf, proud of his daughter. On the one hand, his appreciative shouts and applause always gave me courage; on the other, these public outbursts, especially when he was drinking, usually resulted in Daddy becoming the center of attention, and always scared me to death. I did not want people to look too closely at him when he was “in his cups.” He could be unpredictable, too enthusiastic, too loud, too there.
Still full of praise for my performance, Daddy greeted new and old friends at the small gathering. Slowly, as the evening progressed, I watched him become silent, surrendering conversation to the others, his lips narrowing, his eyes tightly shut or wide and roaming the room, seeing something inside his head that none of the rest of us saw. He moved about the unfamiliar house, finding the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom, walking, as he always did, as though he could see.
I lost him for a while, then sought him out on the deck, where he had wandered. The cold late summer air was clear and fresh and I could smell the sage. My father’s usually straight back slumped as he sat at a redwood table. He always walked with such a proud stride, compensating for his slight stature.
“Smell that?” he said, knowing me from my walk. “Sage.”
“Yes,” I said.
I took a seat across from him and reached out for his hand. He raised his head and that bright smile flickered across his face for a moment. He told me again, this time quietly, how good I had been, how proud he was of me. Soon, as I watched him, his face fell once more, again becoming a tight-lipped mask. He seemed to be collapsing into himself as he and I sat, drinks in our hands.
It was quiet except for night birds and the soft wind in the pines. Then he started talking. I was pretty drunk by now as well, as I listened to my father tell me of his deepening depression, telling me that, for him, life was no longer worth living.
There was silence.
I felt my breath freeze in my throat, ice crystals in the air. I tried to speak and my voice cracked. I cleared my throat. “No,” I thought, “this can’t be happening; this is not in the script. He is supposed to get in and out of these depressions; he is the original cheerleader. He’s the one who always brought on the band, the baton twirlers. He’s the man.”
“Daddy, you’re only depressed. It will clear up tomorrow. It couldn’t be that bad,” I said.
I talked brightly to counter the darkness I felt behind his words. I wouldn’t accept, couldn’t accept, that he had reached a place that was too dark and too painful for him to overcome.
“You’re just drunk,” I said. “You know how you sometimes get when you drink.” The drunk would pass, I said, and with it the depression. I knew him—he would dry himself out again with Tiger’s Milk and Gayelord Hauser, with wise words about fate, the future, and staying the course, as he had done for years, turning his depressions around by a monumental effort of his will—like seeing when he could not.
Chuck could do that. He was the father who brightened our mornings with his call to “rise and shine,” the blind man who took on the world with both fists, flinging himself into his career in the radio business as a singer and radio personality in 1937 in Seattle, becoming a star in every town he worked in, making a living to support five kids and his wife with gusto and bluster.
But there was something different about this night, about these words and this man. He had come to the edge. I could feel something in my heart breaking, cracking like the sound of ice breaking up.
There was always the drinking, and we didn’t talk about it, except in nervy conversations when more than one of us was drunk. The drinking and the depression, the deep remorse, and even the shouting and staggering around in the kitchen late at night were not new to me or to my family. We knew by then that the dragon my father lived with could breathe fire and death, that it wasn’t him talking when he was drinking but the dragon. Though we understood what was the matter with him when he drank so much that he became a stranger, it was still frightening. He was simply a different person, talking wildly, insulting the wrong person, coming on to the wrong woman.
Now he was in one of those confiding moods brought on by booze or sometimes just by his deep need to communicate. I never thought to walk away or not to listen. I was the confidante, the fixer, the oldest. I thought it an honor that Daddy confided in me.
I knew he hadn’t been happy in the recent past. People still stopped him on the street, still thought of him as a star. That night, speaking to me in a hushed voice that seemed totally sober in spite of all he was drinking, he kept saying, as he turned the tumbler of whiskey in his hands as though it were a looking glass and he could see the future in it, that his life was hopeless, that he couldn’t go on living.
I emphasized all the good things that were in his life. Even though I drank probably as much as my father did and knew that whatever was wrong with Daddy’s drinking was what was wrong with mine as well, I was a functioning person with a career and with my demons mostly under wraps. I had certainly learned to manage my drinking from my father, and I believed, although I couldn’t see the damage, that I was almost okay with it.
Somehow my parents would have to get back to Denver that night. Mother would drive, and my father, blind as well as drunk, would be her co-pilot and navigator, discussing the route, making sure that she drove at a safe sixty miles an hour. He would not, I knew, fall asleep in the passenger seat. He never passed out.
A few months later, he got sick. His doctors all said there was nothing they could find wrong with him, that he was not that ill.
They were wrong.