Your Sunday Anti-Doxology

Kids are pretty adaptive, I think. These days, psychologists throw around terms like dysfunction to explain why Johnny can’t go out for recess without trying to beat Billy to death (lazy eye, my ass, he could see well enough to rat me out to Mrs. Larrick for passing notes) or liberally dosing Peggy Browley’s sandwich with cayenne pepper (okay, I admit it’s lame, but the bitch wouldn’t let me copy her answers and I damn near flunked fourth grade). ‘Dysfunction’ was the rule rather than the exception in my neighborhood, we just accepted it as the norm and went on about our business.

When I was a kid, my father relied on the Working Man’s Bloody Mary, Coors beer and tomato juice (aka Colorado Kool-Aid), to cure his frequent hangovers. These he'd drink as my mother screamed bloody murder across the breakfast table at him; if he continued drinking the way he did, his liver would soon be shot to hell and never mind that what was left of his brain was already pickled and what's more, maybe me and the kids won't be here some morning when you finally decide to wake up and smell the coffee! How would you like THAT, Mister? Oh, what am I saying; you'd be ECSTATIC about that, wouldn't you? Don’t shake your head at me, you goddamn, drunken ol’ bastard. Just stick your head in your drink and do what you do best, the kids and I can learn to eat sand when you get your ass fired again. The saddest part of the entire opera was her eventual lack of enthusiasm for the exercise. She’d played the role for so long that the defining aria crested while she grabbed his hair as she tried (usually unsuccessfully) to lift his head from the table and set it back down into the plate of bacon and eggs she’d just fixed him. He’d get up from the table, swearing and threatening, slam the back door and go to work, leaving us with the silence of the lambs; an enraged woman fueled by two pots of black coffee and enough frustration and desperation to nourish an Al-Queda terrorist cell. Getting ready for school on these mornings was tricky at best.

I used to really hate my father for what he did to my sisters and me, for leaving us to fend for ourselves with a mother who, for all intents and purposes, had become our responsibility.

When I finally became an adult myself and became intimately acquainted with the vicious throes of hangovers myself, sometimes I can't blame him… not really. I wouldn't want to listen to that kind of shit either when I'm hung-over… never mind having four stricken-looking children silently eyeballing me in mute reproach.

Yes, it’s true, for the better part of his adult life, my father was a drunken bastard. But I understood him a lot better after becoming an adult myself (arguably), because I grew up to be a drunken bastard, too. Fortunately for all concerned, I married above my station and, saints be praised, my wife possessed the capability of modifying my behavior without playing the role of shrew or harpie, high sheriff or exalted executioner. Her techniques were far more subtle and devious, the psychological equivalent of the rubber hose treatment; the only marks were implanted on my brain—I have no specific memories of what she did, I just knew that I never wanted any more of it.

Bob Church©3/09/08