My Dad, the Drunk

Coming to terms with a dead parent's alcoholism

Edgar Degas, The Absinthe Drinker (1875-76)

I interrupt my usual chronological narrative to bring you a different sort of memoir. This was simply an issue I wanted to deal with. No recipes this week.

Until I was well into my undergraduate years, I thought all parents had cocktail hours and enjoyed martinis before lunch on Saturdays and Sundays. My drug of choice in college was pot, which was ubiquitous and cheap, and I didn’t smoke all that much. My first beau and I used to share a joint before a 9:40 philosophy class in Aristotle and Plato, and because the course was pass/fail, I didn’t pay much attention. So getting stoned in the early morning seemed a larky way to start of the day. I tried speed once and ended up playing pool all night, crawling onto the table to make particularly difficult shots.

Just as my drugs were emblematic of the 1970s, my parents’ rituals were a holdover from the had-partying Mountain Lakes years of the ‘50s, and for a long time I didn’t find anything particularly alarming about their intake. On Saturday, after my mother’s appointment at the hairdresser, they liked to sip their cocktails before lunch and read what they called “the dirty Post,” meaning The New York Post, which was otherwise considered a trashy low-rent way to get the news. Then they took naps. If these were of an amorous nature, I had no clue. Nor any curiosity.

The routine didn’t vary much at the Montauk house, except for mornings spent at the beach or running errands. An otherwise teetotaling neighbor often dropped by for a martini at noon, and invariably his wife called to summon him home. “Bobby, you get home right now. It’s time for lunch!” In those days, they were drinking quality booze, Tanqueray gin and Black Label scotch. As for wines, by the time they got to the dinner table, there wasn’t much point in being terribly discriminating. So Gallo and Mateus rosé sufficed.

For my mother, this was not much of a problem. As she got older, she lost her taste for hard liquor and limited herself to a glass or two of wine, perhaps a little more on weekends. For my father, the escalation in consumption was alarming, until he was indulging in scotch with dinner and perhaps another afterward before stumbling to bed around 8.30. He was never a mean or angry drunk. He simply drifted off into some distant country, from which he issued odd proclamations, like “The French have a strange history” or “New York will be a wonderful city, once they get it finished.”

He was a scheming sort of drinker. If they were coming to visit my husband and me—and I assume other people as well—he would be sure to arrive at five, the designated start of the cocktail hour. I suspect that his body’s internal clock told him at five that it was time to ingest alcohol, and that this may have cost him the executive-level job that brought him from Allentown to Manhattan. He never stayed late at the office.

My father soon after his stroke

From time to time the excessive drinking was a source of profound embarrassment. At a family dinner in Massachusetts, where my ex and I briefly owned a house, my dad appeared at the dinner table in his best bib and tucker—which is to say a sports coat and tie—but by the second or third glass of wine he was spitting up on his shirtfront. I was mortified and pulled my mother aside in the kitchen. “Can’t you do something about this? Get him to cut down?”

“Your father is a very disappointed man,” she said. “He has a death wish.”

“My father is an alcoholic!” I shot back. “And you are the perfect enabler.”

I would try to talk to him, I would encourage him to drink sherry instead of scotch or martinis before dinner. But it was to no avail, and my mother seemed helpless. If he wasn’t driving while drunk, if he wasn’t screaming or beating up on anyone, what was the harm?

I believe he retired to Florida so that he could be warm in the winter, read The New York Times, and drink himself into a stupor nearly every day.

Remember that this was an outwardly successful man. He made enough to put two kids through Ivy League schools, he had a happy marriage, an apartment on the soon-to-be-fashionable Upper West Side, and a summer house in a never-to-be fashionable part of Montauk. This does not seem like the profile of an alcoholic loser.

And then when he was 78 and they were spending the summer on the Island, and I was in my forties and newly divorced, I visited over Memorial Day weekend with my friend Roland. He slept in the den with the Murphy bed; my room was next door to my mother and father’s. Early on Saturday morning, I heard low-pitched growling, and assumed there were cats scrapping outside my window. The growling turned to a wail, and I realized the sounds were from my parents’ room. I clambered out of bed, snapped on the hall light, and could see my father turned on his side in bed, curled in a fetal position, his arms pumping against his ribs. “Your father’s just having a nightmare,” my mother claimed.

This was beyond a nightmare, it seemed to me, and when he couldn’t be roused from his seizure, I called 911.

The paramedics came and hauled him away to Southampton Hospital, about an hour’s drive from Montauk. When he was diagnosed as a stroke victim, I can’t recall--whether this was within the EMT’s province of responsibility or if a doctor had to pass judgment at the hospital. My mother, Roland, and I followed in his car, and all I recall of that weekend was a miserable breakfast at the Princess Diner in Southampton.

My father was moved to a hospital in Stony Brook, halfway down the island, and for the next few weeks, I left my office at ARTnews early each Friday and drove out to Montauk for dinner with my mother and a visit to my father on Saturday. And then drove back to the city on Sundays, sometimes stopping at the hospital en route. In all, about ten hours of driving over a two-day period  (my ex graciously provided the funds to rent a car). My mother remained deep in denial, calling friends and relatives to explain that Dad had simply had “a little stroke.” She was so shockingly dependent on him for money that we had to guess at the bank code to get her cash from ATM machines, somehow lucking into the right sequence based on their phone numbers.

The ordeal was not without its comic moments. During one visit, my father beckoned me to lean close and confided, “Do you know what the doctor said? The doctor told me I’m an alcoholic.” He was sincerely astonished.

My mother in Florida. Note the bloody Mary, possibly prepared by my dad.

One Saturday night, after driving back to Montauk from the hospital, I took my mother to dinner at a posh restaurant on Fort Pond. With my father at risk of being incapacitated for the remainder of his life, I had questions I wanted to ask my mom. And so over cocktails (we were not about to quit on his account), I found the nerve to inquire: “Mother, something I’ve always wanted to know. Were you a virgin when you and Daddy got married?”

Her eyes flashed daggers. “That is absolutely none of your damn business!”

Given the amount of booze that had roared through his system over the years, my father made a remarkable comeback. He was a bit dotty, yes, but he recovered his ability to walk and talk, only occasionally lapsing into gibberish or total incoherence. And without joining AA or seeking any sort of outside help, he quit drinking completely for the rest of his days (he lived another seven years). He would pour my mother her nightly glass of wine or mix her Sunday bloody Mary, but he never touched another drop.

We never talked about his “problem drinking” or his stroke. But I sometimes wonder if I could have done more—forced a confrontation, brought my brother into the loop, asked for advice from his friends. After a while, though, you simply have to forgive everyone, including yourself.

My parents and I had our scraps, we had our feuds, but oh to this day, how much I miss them, more than two decades after they left for the planet for that great cocktail party in the sky. Bottoms up, my dear ones, but please take it easy!