Closing Time (48 page)

“Joey, I know I treated you and your sisters badly when you were kids,” he began. “One of the things I’ve learned through Alcoholics Anonymous is that you have to admit that you’ve hurt people and let them know how sorry you are. I know that I did some bad things back then, and I apologize. Son, I’m sorry for anything I may have done to harm you.”

Then he stuck out his hand.

I did not have it in me to forgive him, as absolution was not my line of trade, but I shook his hand anyway, if only because this creepy vignette made me uncomfortable and I wanted it to be over. Clemency was not included in my limited roster of emotions, but because he seemed to be making an effort to turn his life around, I did not express my true feelings at the time. Still, the whole thing rankled. I didn’t like the way my father phrased his apology; it sounded like he was working from a script. I knew, of course, that the self-abnegation-by-numbers routine was a stunt suggested to people like my father by Alcoholics Anonymous. You had done many bad things and now realized that you were powerless before the fearsome suzerainty of demon alcohol, but you were man enough to fess up to your mistakes. You said a few words, you stuck out your hand—meekly, if you were any good at this sort of thing—your apology was accepted, and then everything was even-steven. It was, I believe, Step Number Five in AA’s Golden Road to self-redemption. Or maybe Number Seven. The gauchest element in this procedure was that the drinker’s victims were recruited—“commandeered” is a better word—into the ceremony, assigned the unfulfilling role of cogs in the miscreant’s wheel of redemption. Accepting the proffered apology was de rigueur, for without it, the penitent substance abuser might relapse, if only out of disappointment at being denied absolution.

Nothing my father had done in all the years I’d known him infuriated me more than this fleabag apology. By this time, of course, America had entered a dismal era when alcoholics demanded ceremonial exculpation for their wrongdoing because they professed to be powerless before their addiction. They were like Austrians trying to explain away Hitler: Forget all that Anschluss unpleasantness; we were victims, too. Where alcoholics had long been viewed as selfish people with flabby wills, they now professed to be saddled with a misfiring gene that made it impossible to resist the allure of the bottle, or afflicted by rogue enzymes that did not break down the amino acids in their eighth martini properly. Alcoholism was no longer a sign of weak moral character; it was a malignancy that lay outside the substance abuser’s control. Alcoholism had traditionally been viewed as a deliberate transgression against the social code or, in the community I grew up in, a sin. Now it was being repackaged into something closer to melanoma or lupus.

By this point in my life, I knew quite a bit about alcohol. I’d been drinking since I was fifteen, sometimes too much, sometimes too often. I never for a moment thought I would end up like my father, but by my middle thirties I was still working at a backwater job, making little headway as a writer, and I was starting to wonder if alcohol might be part of the problem. Unlike my father, who turned belligerent when he drank, I turned passive. I didn’t want to fight with people when I was drinking; I was content to sit and watch sports. But in the long run, alcohol was having the same effect on both of us: We were not achieving any of the things we had hoped to achieve when we were young.

One day, I decided to attend a support group for the children of alcoholics. It scared me speechless. The other people in the group were hard drinkers, which I was not. They got up in the morning and thought about alcohol, which I did not. They’d ruined marriages and lost jobs and wrecked automobiles because of alcohol, which I had not. All the same, I liked a drink or two when I came home from work. Sometimes, more than two. Did this mean I was doomed to end up like them?

One night Francesca announced that she was pregnant for the second time. We soon found out that she was carrying a boy. My drinking days were over. It would be nice to think that I made a solemn vow to never put my son through what I’d been through as a child; but why then had I not stopped drinking when my daughter was born, two years earlier? No, it was more a case of fatigue with alcohol as a substance, a rationalization, a topic, a word. For thirty-five years, alcohol had been at the center of every conversation my family engaged in, and now I wanted that conversation to end. I didn’t want to drink alcohol, think about alcohol, talk about alcohol. I wanted alcohol—as a beverage, a theme, a backdrop, a depressant, a leitmotif, an excuse, a casus belli—out of my life forever. I stopped drinking the day I found out that my wife was carrying a boy. I never drank again.

A few months later, perhaps not coincidentally, my career took off. Articles I wrote appeared in rapid succession in
The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The New York Times.
Doors that had been shut now swung open. One such door was the “My Turn” column in
Newsweek.
“My Turn” was designed as a forum for nonprofessionals, a sounding board for voices that did not resemble those of the solid, reliable, but uninspiring members of the staff. Because I was still technically considered a layman at the time, and because good essays were hard to come by,
Newsweek
was happy to purchase my wares. My first column was a tongue-in-cheek defense of bean counters, whose numbers included my wife: Francesca, a chartered accountant, had led a life that was far more interesting than that of most of the people I knew, because she was, in fact, far more interesting than most people.

The second column, “Too Late to Say ‘I’m Sorry,’ ” was an all-out assault on alcoholics in general, and my father in particular. It recounted the beatings, the terror, the rationalizations, the halfhearted handshake. It was uncompromising and vicious, taking direct aim at AA and its army of smarmy self-congratulators. Since I had struggled with the same predisposition toward alcoholism that my father had inherited from his father, and that his father had inherited from his father, and that everyone named McNulty or Monaghan or O’Rourke had supposedly inherited from some male progenitor in our engaging but accursed ethnic group, I knew that reinventing alcoholism as a medical condition was despicable. Physiologically, alcohol was not an especially addictive drug; it was certainly much less addictive than cocaine or, for that matter, nicotine. Everyone who put a glass of liquor to his lips knew exactly what he was doing; it was not like coming down with malaria because you’d strayed into the wrong jungle.

While it was true that hard-core alkies might suffer from delirium tremens and need to be hospitalized for a few days after trying to conquer their addiction, this was not the case with the vast majority of alcoholics, who merely used liquor as a socially sanctioned medication enabling them to pretend that they were not the people they so obviously were. It was certainly not true of my father; as with most alcoholics, his nocturnal bacchanalias did not prevent him from getting up bright and early the following morning, suffering no physiological effects more serious than a headache or a bad case of the heaves. He never once got so drunk that it deprived him of the physical ability to hit us the next day. The Aquarian Age approach to alcoholism suited him to a tee: First you beat your kids, then you blamed on it on your metabolism.

Because I had pulled the plug on liquor forever in a relatively short period of time, I had little patience or sympathy for alcoholics. Others felt the same way. The day the
Newsweek
column appeared, I received a string of phone calls from children of alcoholics. The calls kept coming all day, always from women. Their stories ran much the same: Their fathers had beaten them. Their boyfriends had raped them. Their boyfriends had beaten them. Their fathers had raped them. Then, years later, as if on cue, the unexpected call came from out of nowhere: “Margie, you probably don’t remember me, but I did some terrible things to you when we were together. And now I just want to say I’m sorry.” “Betsy, I know that I hurt you . . .” “Louise, I know that when we were together . . .”

Several weeks after the “My Turn” column ran, a UPS truck pulled up outside my house and a large box was deposited on my porch. The box contained hundreds of letters and packages responding to the column, forwarded by
Newsweek
. Unlike the callers, the letter writers were apoplectic. By a margin of nine to one—I counted—they condemned me for writing the story. They said I had hate in my heart. They deplored my callous refusal to forgive. They quoted scripture in the way that believers always quote scripture to nonbelievers, as if an argument were closed simply because Saint Paul had once written a letter to the Corinthians about it.

Some of the packages included Bibles, missals, religious tracts, pamphlets, creating the impression that an incompetent Christian publishing house had inadvertently sent a single misbegotten atheist enough inspirational reading material to convert an entire heathen Zip Code. Virtually all of the letter writers were recovering alcoholics, who were unanimous in their belief that the refusal to forgive usurped the power of the Lord, that withholding forgiveness upset the natural order of the universe. It was clear from my exegesis of these unsolicited materials that the only thing a drunk enjoyed more than talking about his sobriety was writing about his sobriety.

I did not write the
Newsweek
essay in order to be cruel to my father. I wrote it because I knew that it was a story others would appreciate, because it was the best story I would ever have an opportunity to recount in a nine-hundred-word format, and because it was the only story that ever really mattered to me. None of us knew where my father was living when the piece appeared, nor did any of us have any real expectations that he would ever read it. One report had him yet again settling in with his younger sister Rosemary behind the Venetian blinds that never opened. Another indicated that he was out in the suburbs somewhere. Recently, he had been spotted in Philadelphia’s historic district. No, he was sharing an apartment with a mysterious jewelry dealer who later turned up dead. There were occasional sightings at Old Saint Joseph’s Church, where he was said to be attending mass every morning. Or perhaps it was Saint Mary’s, where Commodore Barry, the father of the U.S. Navy, and Jackie Kennedy’s wayward father, Black Jack Bouvier, were buried. The grapevine also served notice that he had fleetingly returned to a truly awful neighborhood in North Philadelphia where he had spent a few years as a boy, but that he was now living on the third story of a building on the stretch of Vine Street known as Skid Row. He was out there somewhere, hither or yon. He had gone walkabout, and would for all intents and purposes drop off the face of the earth for the next decade.

 

Seven years after the
Newsweek
essay appeared, I made a mordant, amateurish film called
Twelve Steps to Death
. Its central character was a stone-hearted police officer investigating a murder in which all the suspects were alkies, cokeheads, junkies, credit-card addicts, porkers, chocoholics, sex addicts. Into it I channeled all my contempt for twelve-step programs, built up over the course of a lifetime. Some people thought I was being gratuitously mean at the time, playing the substance-abuse joke for laughs, but there was nothing gratuitous about it.

We finished shooting the movie on a Sunday night. The next day, Francesca and I had plans to take our two children on a vacation in Ontario. When I returned to the house Sunday evening, my wife had not yet begun packing. She’d been keeping something from me until the film was in the can. Now she broke the news: She’d received a call from one of my sisters, announcing that my father had been admitted to Pennsylvania Hospital in downtown Philadelphia, suffering from cancerous nodes on his lungs. He had, so she gathered, been living in a nearby flophouse and had begun to suffer breathing pains. He had always had the most exquisite taste in flophouses, for even though the building itself was a stinking dive with crummy lighting, a fetid bathroom, doors that would not lock, and a clientele consisting entirely of the living dead, it was right around the corner from Independence Hall, one of the most beautiful buildings in America. It was also within easy walking distance of several of the finest teaching hospitals in the United States.

We canceled the trip to Canada, and the next morning I took a train down to Philadelphia to check on my father’s health. This time, he had stepped in clover; if you were a cancer victim recuperating from malignant nodes on the lungs, this was a swell place to do it. Pennsylvania Hospital is an ingratiating, Federal-era redbrick building on one of those leafy cobblestone streets that give Old Philadelphia all the charm that New Philadelphia lacks. My father was surprised when I sidled into his room that morning, as well he should have been. It had been a while.

“I never thought I’d see
you
down here, buddy,” he said.

“I’m full of surprises.”

“You sure are.”

“I sure am.”

We chatted affably, in the fashion of convivial men, as if we were a normal father and a normal son; as if I hadn’t moved 130 miles north just to get away from him; as if he weren’t living in a vermin-infested hellhole; as if the last forty-four years hadn’t happened. I checked on his medical condition and learned that the operation had been a success. He would have to stop smoking, of course, but otherwise his health wasn’t all that bad, considering that he’d been drinking since he was thirteen and smoking since he was ten and had last done any physical exercise the year the Reds crossed the Yalu.

The doctors said he would be free to leave within a few days, provided he had someplace to go. We discussed his options, such as they were. Then I did what I always did in situations such as this; I pulled out my checkbook and made a problem go away. There was never any possibility of my wife and I taking my father into our home in suburban New York; I did not want to expose my children to him on a regular basis and then have to explain why we had to throw him out, or why he had disappeared and taken several of the appliances with him. Besides, he loved Philadelphia, where all his memories were. On the other hand, I couldn’t simply fork over a substantial sum of money to get him settled somewhere, because any spare cash would prove an insurmountable temptation that would send him hurtling back into the nearest saloon. So we put our heads together and figured out precisely how many of his expenses would be covered by Social Security and how much he would need from our end to maintain a decent standard of living. It wasn’t really much of a discussion; it was more like an edict.