Drinking Diaries

ONE NIGHT WHEN I WAS a senior in college and visiting my mother, a U.S. diplomat in Greece, we went to a nightclub to hear a band. She ordered a glass of white wine and dumped ice cubes in it. I ordered my drink of choice, a sickly sweet mixture of amaretto and orange juice.

Because of my mother’s career, I went to high school in Mexico City, where alcohol was socially permissible once you were “tall enough to reach the bar.” I had my first drink at age fourteen, when after-school comidas—lunch parties—had open bars and very little food.

My mother knew that my friends and I drank, and there wasn’t much parents could do to stop it other than lock up their teenagers or send them to boarding school. She wasn’t happy about it, but she didn’t want to send me away, either. So she chose to trust me to, as the ads say, “drink responsibly.”

Amaretto and OJ was hardly a potent cocktail, but when I finished the first and tried to beckon to the waiter for a second, my mother looked at me sternly and said no. It wasn’t the first time she’d cautioned me about alcohol. I didn’t order the drink. I knew that if I did, she would worry, and I would hear about it for the rest of the evening.

My father was an alcoholic. According to all the research, there’s an increased risk of alcohol abuse if you have a parent with alcoholism. Still, in my teens and early twenties, I was a carefree drinker. I didn’t consider my own drinking habits in relation to my father’s. My drinking as a young adult was, I think, typical. In college I got drunk on cheap white zinfandel with my girlfriends by the Charles River in Boston on warm nights. I snuck into bars and clubs and had a couple of vodka cranberries. Mimosas were nice at brunch. I drank consistently but not excessively. I didn’t think about addiction. I could be okay with or without a drink; I just preferred life with drinking.

My father’s story haunts me. He started out with such promise. No one could have predicted the dark place his road would lead to. This is at the heart of my fear: At one point, he too was enjoying only a drink or two to unwind after work.

My father, a tall handsome Italian, adored me. As a toddler, I would affix myself to his leg like a little monkey when he had to go to work at the restaurant where he waited tables in Seattle. He would walk around the house like that, his foot just big enough to support my small bottom. As he went about getting ready for work, wondering aloud why his leg felt so heavy, I would squeal with laughter and cry when he had to either pry me loose or be late for work.

My father grew up on a farm in northern Italy and told me that when he was born, he was strapped to a board so his spine would grow straight. As if being strapped down instilled him with an insatiable urge to wander, he spent his young adulthood working in the restaurants of transatlantic ships. My mother met him aboard a boat on the open sea, on her way to study in Italy when she was twenty-three. He always worked in restaurants, considered a proper profession in his culture. In American culture, being a waiter was the domain of college students and people who were in between “real jobs.” This attitude affected his self-esteem. In the traditional Italian family he came from, a man provides for his family, but my mother earned more working at the Italian consulate than he did as a waiter. My mother’s father was a doctor, and my father went from serving the country club crowd at a restaurant to socializing among them during his off time. He never seemed comfortable in my mother’s upper-middle-class environs; my grandmother always says he was out of his element.

While he was working at an Italian restaurant, he began to shift from wine to vodka. The staff socialized after work—such was the life of a waiter in America—and he was probably more at ease around his restaurant colleagues than he was with my mother’s friends. My father wasn’t used to drinking hard liquor, or drinking that much of it. He started coming home later, and he and my mother started fighting. I was only three at the time, but I recall two episodes: the car accident and the sculpture incident.

I don’t know whether my father hit a tree or another car, or whether anyone was hurt. I only remember him pacing in the driveway as my mother stood there watching. His white Honda had been towed back to the house, totaled. My father leaned forward and pushed back into place one of the parking lights, which now dangled from a wire. The light popped back out again.

A few months later I came home from a preschool art class with an abstract sculpture made of wire, clay, and driftwood. I proudly displayed it on my dresser. Late at night, a few nights after I brought the sculpture home, I was startled out of my sleep by the loud voices of my parents arguing. My father then came into my room, picked up my sculpture, and hurled it against the wall. It shattered everywhere, and I cowered under the covers. It was out of character for my loving father to do something purposefully destructive, especially toward me.

The following year, 1984, my mother joined the foreign service, and after a training period in Washington, D.C., she was assigned to her first post, in Guadalajara, Mexico. My father came along and stayed until my mother divorced him a year later. I was six. He returned to Seattle, to a studio apartment and his job at the Italian restaurant. When I visited him, he always seemed depressed, though he tried to wear a smile for my benefit.

I saw him during summers, from when I was six until I was seventeen. My mother wouldn’t let me stay with him, saying that his work hours were too unpredictable and his neighborhood wasn’t safe, so I stayed at my maternal grandmother’s and visited him on his days off. Dad days were visits to the aquarium, Volunteer Park, and Urban Outfitters in the hip neighborhood where he lived. All year long I looked forward to summers in Seattle.

In my early teens I realized exactly how similar we were. We looked alike, with our olive skin and dark hair and eyes. I identified with his need for solitude, his love of getting lost in a movie and walking through the city or on the paths around Volunteer Park. We were both woolgatherers. We listened to the same music (Sonic Youth, Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana) and always agreed on video store selections.

For a long time I blamed my mother for keeping me from my father. Drinking allowed me to forget that he wasn’t present. My father’s absence was not because my mother was bitter (she wasn’t) but because he was an alcoholic. I’d been able to deny it to myself until then.

My first concrete memory of this realization was one Sunday during one of my summer visits with my father, the year I was sixteen. We decided to go to the beach. When I met him at his apartment building, I noticed his body swaying as we walked toward his front door to go into his apartment and pack our picnic. It was 11:00 AM and he was drunk. I put together the pieces of my life’s primary puzzle: What’s wrong with my father? His drinking was the problem.

We took the bus to Madison Park, a beach on Lake Washington. After the white-car incident, he never drove. On our picnic, he tried to hide it but I saw him pour vodka into a thermos. Then he poured in juice. I stared out over Lake Washington. My father lay on his back, soaking up the sun.

At the end of the day, when my grandmother’s pale blue Toyota pulled up in front of his building to pick me up, my father muttered in Italian, “Sono finito con queste genti.” I’m done with these people. Even though he was right in front of me, he was already gone. That day, at age sixteen, I came to a full awareness of what my father had tried to conceal.

Two years later, while in film school in Boston, I came home to find a letter I’d sent to my father returned undeliverable. I tried calling, but his phone was disconnected. I wanted to go to Seattle, but my mother convinced me to stay at school and focus on my studies. No one seemed to be trying very hard to find him, including me. Pretending everything was fine and immersing myself in my new life at college was far easier than taking time off to try to figure out where he’d gone. On some level I must have been afraid of what I might uncover, though at the time I would have said I was heeding my mother’s advice.

He resurfaced right around the time I graduated, on a postcard with a picture of Portofino and a few scribbled sentences. He had moved back to Italy. Something about it didn’t sit right, but at least he was there. The postmark said so. It took another four years to find out why my father had disappeared. This was the secret my family was keeping from me.

Two weeks after my twenty-fifth birthday, at the Thanksgiving table at my grandmother’s house, Grandma had a thimble too many of red wine and told me there were some things about my father I didn’t know but probably should. “It’s been six years,” she said.

My grandmother had run into a family friend, Roberto, on the street. Roberto told her he was worried; he had run into my father. My father was living outside, Roberto said. Homeless. He had been evicted from his apartment. He had shown up drunk for work at the restaurant and then stopped showing up at all. Whether he quit or was fired, I don’t know, but the family friend told my grandmother that he had found my father living in Volunteer Park—the place we used to go for long walks. My grandparents went to search the park. They found my father lying on the grass, his ankles swollen, toenails grown long, and clothing tattered.

My grandparents tried to coax him from the park, but he wouldn’t go. Sometime during all this, my mother told my grandmother never to tell me about my father’s becoming homeless. She wanted to protect me. After a few more tries, they succeeded in getting him off the ground and to the hospital, where he was treated for cirrhosis. They bought him a plane ticket back to Italy. My father was now in his sixties and back living with his mother. In America he’d had a reverse immigrant experience: He didn’t have much, but he had lost everything.

I finished my glass of red wine that Thanksgiving eve, feeling that something had clicked into place—I was now forced to grasp the extent of my father’s alcoholism and how drastic his situation had become. Yet I had a strangely calm “this is how it is” reaction to this realization, which I later learned was typical for the child of an alcoholic.

The last time I saw him, my father made a point of alluding to his sobriety. My mother and I went to Genoa and stayed with him for three days. (The two of them had remained amicable over the years.) My father fixed dinner and poured a deep orange-colored drink into three cocktail glasses. It was some combination of tropical juices.

He hadn’t told me his version of how he had ended up back in Italy, and I didn’t ask. I feared that bringing it up would add too much weight to our brief time together, and I wanted us to enjoy these moments. More than that, I didn’t want to cause him any shame. He looked healthy, and I was relieved.

The next day we walked by the docks and visited the city’s new aquarium, strolling through darkened rooms full of fish, often in silence save for water lapping against the edges of the open tanks. I reached for my father’s arm and he smiled, his teeth white and straight. The visit was short, but I saw it as the first step in a process of rebuilding. We were setting the stage for spending a longer time together in the future, maybe even an entire month. Probably August, we agreed.

August came and went unrealized, as most of our plans had been. I took my usual “disappointment is normal” approach. I was frustrated but not surprised, trying to focus again on things I could control or at least rely on: work, friendships, writing.

I heard nothing more about my father until my mother received an email from his younger brother. My father had started drinking again. He stayed inside his apartment, refusing to see anyone. I considered going there, but my mother thought it was a bad idea. Who could say what my father would do or in what kind of condition I would find him? I went back and forth with the idea of showing up on his doorstep but never had the chance to decide.

My father died on July 2, 2008. I didn’t find out until a week after he was admitted, comatose, to the hospital. His younger brother had called my mother from Italy. He’d been on vacation and came back to the news that my father had died. I emailed my uncle seeking answers. “Your father is in the Christian heaven. Stay strong,” he wrote back.

Now that my father was dead, I no longer had to wonder why we weren’t in contact. During this time, my own drinking habits remained the same: cocktails with friends, wine at parties, and happy hour with colleagues. Usually I had two drinks. Occasionally more.

Three years later, entire weeks pass with hardly a thought of my father’s death. Then it will hit me out of nowhere, while I’m unloading the dishwasher, fixing dinner, or reading a book. If I had flown to Italy and shown up on his doorstep, would he have known that somebody, his daughter, cared enough to try to stop him? Save him? What was it about the alcohol that he couldn’t quit? At what point does it become too late? If I’d had the chance to ask him these questions, might I not be so consumed with my own drinking?

I read an article in The New York Times Magazine called “The ‘Wet House’ Where Alcoholics Can Keep Drinking” by Benoit Denizet-Lewis. It tells of “chronically homeless and alcoholic men,” members of the “unfortunates,” who will drink themselves to death. That’s what my father was, a so-called unfortunate, one who couldn’t quit and lost his life as a result. The story shed new light on his situation for me—that he was not alone. “I’ve fought it my whole life, and it has cost me my whole life,” one resident is quoted as saying. Maybe this is what my father would have said if we had been able to talk about it.

It’s been eleven years since my mother cautioned me at that bar in Greece. I still drink socially, only now I pay close attention, monitoring my alcohol intake in a way that lends new meaning to the expression “keeping tabs.” I measure and calculate. I notice the level of liquid in my glass compared with others’ glasses and sip slowly, making a point to be the last one left with a glass half full while everyone else is ordering a second round.

Will I end up an alcoholic like my dad? The answer to the question is either yes and I’m not aware of it, just as my father never seemed to be, or no. But I constantly ask myself if I might have a problem because he did. Do I drink to escape? Is it bad that I enjoy drinking a glass or two of wine when I’m alone, writing or relaxing? Is that how it started for him?

The thing about my stopping is that I don’t want to. A lychee martini with Thai food, a sidecar in a bar that brings back a speakeasy vibe, a hearty glass of good pinot noir to complement pasta, a Magic Hat #9 on tap at happy hour—drinking is one of life’s pleasures, and I love every drop. I pass all the online “Are you a problem drinker?” quizzes. Do you drink to get drunk? No. Black out? No. Need a drink in the morning? The idea of one makes me queasy.

Though I can’t understand or change what happened to my father, I do have control over myself and, I hope, the awareness to recognize if I were losing that control. I choose to drink, despite what might lie dormant in my genes.