Dad's Birthday: An Unexpected Confession

Here's a picture of my dad. He's at his favorite watering hole, Dick and Floyd's, in Kellogg. A mystery my family would love to solve is identifying the man with the Miller Lite in front of him. Had Dad not died in 1996, he would have turned seventy-seven yesterday.

I was too busy grading papers yesterday to write about my dad on his birthday, and maybe that was a good thing. Today, with the papers graded, my mind has moved more easily to memories of him and there has been one memory that's haunted me all day.

It was September of 1994 and Mom and Dad were in Eugene, the last time they would visit me together.

One afternoon, Dad wanted to go to a local watering hole for a few beers and see if he could get to know the locals. I hadn't been drinking alcohol since 1985 and so I dropped him off at a place I didn't know very well, Sher's, and went to Fred Meyer to do some grocery shopping.

Dad was always a heavy drinker. Fortunately, alcohol was either a merry or a sentimental habit for Dad. While it did remove him from our lives in that it was hard to talk seriously with him when he was drunk and his drinking often made him the butt of our jokes, the one thing alcohol didn't bring out of him was a mean streak.

I don't really know why Dad drank so much. I know part of it was just being in Kellogg. Kellogg, for many men, was a drinking town and alcohol, especially beer, flowed freely around everything: weddings, funerals, sporting events, picnics, hunting and fishing trips, holidays, and pay day.

I won't go any farther than that. I'm not going to pretend to know my father's psychological profile and I think my eyes will start bleeding if I hear the word "self-medicate" again.

His drinking was such a normal aspect of our family's landscape that when I lived at home, we never thought of it as a real problem. Yes, my dad embarrassed me when he was drunk in front of my friends. He angered me when he'd want to have a talk with me and tried to corner me somewhere in the house, drunk, so he could unpack his feelings about how much he loved me or to be sentimental about my mom. And, yes, there were countless times that he'd come into my bedroom to want to talk with me and I'd pretend I was asleep and couldn't be awakened.

But, I never thought of my father as an alcoholic until I was older, until I quit drinking myself, and until I began meeting and talking with other adults who had grown up in alcoholic homes.

When I went back to Sher's to pick up my dad, he'd found some barfly to bullshit with. Dad told the guy that I was an instructor at LCC and was taking acting classes. I can't remember exactly what the guy said about his acting experience, but he told Dad he'd been involved in the theater at LCC and Dad was pretty excited about having me meet him.

The guy was full of shit. It was his bullshit tale for the day. He'd found someone to listen to him so he'd improvised a line of shit and Dad took it in. It was harmless.

Sher's had a bank of video poker machines. A couple or three were being played by older women drinking draft beers and smoking long menthol cigarettes. Dad said he'd like to give one a try before we left. I think he only fed the machine a buck, or maybe a five, and he was done quickly.

We started back to my house and Dad, who was a little loose, but not drunk, started to ramble. "I used to gamble. Playing cards up town." I remembered that. I remembered Mom being distraught one day, the day I got my first library card, and, having no one else to talk to, told me, after Dad had been out all night playing cards and losing money, that she might have to divorce him.

He went on. "I knew I had to quit that and I did. I wanted to see what that machine was like, but I've got to stay away from that."

Then he said, "I know I'm an alcoholic. One bad habit is enough."

I nearly drove off the road. Any time, when I was younger, and naive, that I had said anything to Dad about his drinking, he'd always shut me up by telling me that a man's home is his castle and he worked hard and he'd do what he wanted to or that he didn't have a drinking problem because he only drank beer and laid off the hard stuff.

But here, near the corner of west 11th and Chambers, Dad told me he knew he was an alcoholic.

I didn't respond. I didn't know what to say. I might have said, "Yeah." The moment had too much gravity for me say anything back to him. My mind was spinning too fast.

Dad died of liver cancer. He'd been ill with asbestoses, but in the end it was his liver that failed. When he was dying and I was part of the family effort to help him do so as comfortably as possible, I often went to his bedside while he was sleeping and silently bitched him out.

He knew. He always asserted that his drinking wasn't hurting anyone but himself. Here we were, grieved by his dying, and he'd known he was an alcoholic. He'd admitted it.

The alcohol, in the end, laid him to waste. Right to the end it hurt us all. He wasn't only hurting himself. And he knew.