Well Let’s Just Hope This Doesn’t Happen Again
I went to the window to see who’s headlights were pulling into the driveway.
Through the parted curtains, I watched my mom help my step dad from car and through the yard towards the house. He was drunk.
I sprang into action, scanning the house for anything that might piss him off. I desperately wanted this monster to go to sleep and deflate.
When he walked in the door, I was in the middle of picking up my sister’s toys on the living room floor, which were in the path to his bedroom.
Not old enough to understand, she protested.
Leave my stuff alone!!
Shhh, I’m just trying to make room for dad…
Noo!
What’s going on in there!?
Fuck.
In this state, all of his movements and sounds were a hammer. Yelling, throwing, stomping, grabbing, and knocking things over.
What are you doing to my daughter?!
Nothing, I was just trying to clean up for you.
What are you doing to my daughter?!
Our babysitter, his mother, was efficiently getting on her coat.
Well, I better get home.
Desperate, I whispered to her to please not go. Pretending to not hear, she put on her hat and gloves, and slipped past the brewing tornado, out the door.
What are you doing to my daughter?!
When sober, I’d get some kind of mind-fuck lecture about how it was my fault her stuff was out or that they were actually my toys.
When drunk, there was only one channel. Rage. His rage, staring right at me. As I braced for another rage explosion, the memory of all the past rages primed my nervous system and I started to re-experience them before this one even happened.
Anything I do in this moment gets the same response. Escalation.
I could: Apologize, claim innocence, admit guilt, stay silent, cry, get out of the way, make noise, be happy, look irritated, hesitate, mispronounce a word, argue back, move the object that’s in his way, try to find the object he insists I’ve hidden… They all make his face a burning stove and ratchet my face another inch closer to it.
What are you doing to my daughter?!
This kind of event is mostly what I remember of his drinking, the years when he was trying to get sober.
He’d make pledges of benevolence and sobriety. But over the next weeks or months he’d progress from kindness and laughing, to growing irritable, and eventually getting drunk some weekend, coming home, and terrorizing us.
Sometimes my mom would get a call warning her that he’d been out drinking.
Come on, get in the car. He’s been drinking.
How I felt hearing this is how I imagine school kids in the 50s felt during nuclear bomb drills.
Anxiety bubbling, I’d get on my shoes and coat, grab a toy or a sketchbook, and scurry to the car.
My heart would pound as we backed out of the driveway, wondering what would happen if he pulled in at that moment. I’d watch every passing set of headlights wondering if they were his and if he could recognize ours.
I loved it once we got to which ever family or friend’s we were hiding out at. It was a bubble of happiness, where I imagined my life without him. Things felt new. Sometimes we’d get pizza, watch movies on fancy cable TV, and I might get to sleep on a couch or a water bed.
I liked it when we stayed with my biological father’s sister. I felt so loved by her and I loved playing with my cousins.
On one visit she said to me:
I sure hope you don’t become an alcoholic some day.
Me too.
Then I looked down at the can of soda in my hand, suddenly aware of how I had been coveting it and savoring each sip over the past 15 minutes.
Fuck. Fuuuck.
Coincidentally, my biological dad, whom I barely knew, was visiting from out of state. The next morning, as we were headed out the door to go back to the aftermath, he said:
Well, let’s just hope this doesn’t happen again.
At the time, his sentiment felt empty because the optimism seemed naive and simplistic. Silly.
Now, his sentiment feels empty because in a few days he was going back to sunny California to smoke pot and fuck girls and not have to think about this. And because what was needed was action, not hope.
Hope without action can go fuck itself.