Chapter 5: The Promise, 1985 (from my never-to-be-fully-released memoir, Midnight Tracks)

The Promise

1985

The Camaro looked out of place among the Buicks, Cadillacs and Lincolns, but Bev didn’t seem to care. No matter the look, she was incredibly proud of this car. Almost every time she sat down on the tan leather seats, you could sense the memories flowing back and oftentimes, you could see the tears starting to make their way forward. Billy had died just over a year ago, and the car he’d worked on almost every day meant more to her than anything. The tape deck needed a perfectly placed book of matches jammed between the cassette and the bottom lip to work and the chronic problems having to do with the alternator acting  up, but none of that mattered. As she shifted the car into park and turned down the car stereo, I could tell that she wanted to talk first. She pulled out a Virginia Slim Menthol, her third in the three-mile trip and put the pink Bic lighter to the end. I had heard that sizzle thousands of times. That final drag of the end of the butt usually marked the moment prior to a conversation. She pursed her lips and gathered her thoughts. Her mannerisms made it probable that this was going to be one of those uncomfortable chats. And given where we were parked and the room we were about to enter, it was a near certainty.

“Chris, we’re just going to try this. Remember, your dad doesn’t know we’re here. We’re just going to try it once. If we think it helps, we can come back. If you’re not comfortable, we don’t need to. I just think it might help.” I nodded. Her long fingernails, coated in a blazing red, reached for the door handle, and with my gnawed off fingernails, I followed suit on the passenger side. We walked across the nearly empty parking lot in the rear of the building and located an entrance door. She opened the steel door and with just a quick glance inside, I could immediately sense the cold and barren feel of the building, despite being on a major suburban road and temperatures outside having just eclipsed 90 degrees. As we walked up the stairs and made our way down the second-floor hall, all of the rooms appeared to be vacant. The hallway was just as sterile: no posters, signs, color. The walls were an off-white and the only marks were the outlines of the oversized bricks. These halls were more depressing that our high school halls. I mean, at least we painted them the lame school colors. In the distance, I could see an empty corkboard gracing a far wall. We approached room 202 and Bev gave me that, “Ready?” look. What could I do but once again nod. The door opened and I stepped inside and turned to her. My shoulders tensed up and I looked around with my head midway to the floor at the few strangers in the room. As we found seats, the rest of the folks in the room seemed to be waiting for things to get under way. A woman probably about 60 or so finally entered. “Hi everyone, I’m Madeline. I’ll be leading the group today.” I already felt ill. I’d always loathed speaking in front of people, whether classmates or complete strangers, and knowing the subject at hand only made this that much worse. What in the world could I say? Shouldn’t he be here and not me?

“Hi, I’m Bev. This is Chris, my stepson. Chris’ father has been drinking since his early teens and still drinks every day. He drinks beer and only beer; about ten or so a day, if not more. Chris and I are here to talk about him and our feelings about his drinking.” My thoughts turned to college basketball. The University of Louisville was my team and with the season on the horizon, I began envisioning the starting lineup; anything to take me away from this. But I couldn’t escape as Madeline shot me the sad and understanding look; a look I’d come to know so well, yet detested whenever it met my eyes. As my emotions swirled in different directions, they seemed to settle on one for a bit: anger. I never agreed to talk; I agreed to come and that’s it. Madeline could seemingly sense my unease and turned her focus to Bev, her own stories and other folks in the room. It was clear that a few of the others in the room had been here before, if not once, many times. They had obviously grown more comfortable with the setting, Madeline and sharing their stories. As folks talked, I tuned it out. I didn’t need to hear this. I did not speak for the remaining hour and sat there in a fog of nerves, uncertainly, loneliness and anger. All of these emotions were sweeping over me almost at once, and I couldn’t quite process where they came from and to whom, if anyone, they were directed at. I was thinking about my mother and why she gave the ok for me to attend this meeting. I was thinking of my older brother and his absence here. I was thinking of my father and knowing that, whether he knew we were here or not, he couldn’t care less about this family effort we were undertaking. And I was looking at Bev and realizing that her intentions were in the right place, but that her “parenting” of me isn’t something I welcomed or asked for. But now my main emotion was that feeling of being completely alone. Despite the folks in the room, my mother and father living only one town apart, and my siblings scattered between both towns, my inner core felt completely vacant. Whether it was my heart, stomach, brain or some sort of combination, I could literally feel the hollow sensation. It was a feeling that had always been hovering, but lately my awareness of this had come to the forefront. I couldn’t break free of it. School, friends, baseball games, television….nothing abated this feeling. And this meeting only exacerbated the pain it brought on.

“Let’s head out; I need a smoke,” said Bev as Madeline stood up and adjourned our first, and what would be our only, Al-Anon meeting. I headed for those stairs again. It felt like my own prison, but I knew that the stairs had nothing to do with my feeling of being encapsulated in myself, but rather stood as a stark symbol of the many external things in my life that formed my barren collage. As I reached for the staircase railing, Bev quipped, “Bathroom. I’ll meet you outside.” At the first step, the scent of the building brought on other senses:  there was the smell of my dad’s basement; the broken down basketball hoop at my mom’s house; and the always empty left side of the house at my father’s house; the rooms that were built to be filled by families, but not us. These were the images that made up my view of the world around me. And Bev’s Camaro, which oddly enough, was one of the few sights that lifted my spirit. There was history in that car; history that wasn’t embedded in my day-to-day. Billy was in the military; he lived in Minnesota. His story was foreign, interesting, not mine. I felt safe. When Billy was murdered and Bev received the car, this new car represented the outside world in my eyes. It was a vehicle to a bridge that was beyond my parents divorce, the infighting, the shame and the constant, constant worry. And the fucking booze.

As we headed home, Bev suggested a stop at McDonald’s for dinner. “Shouldn’t we see what Dad wants to do? I mean, this is his first night and we should probably celebrate.” “Good thinking”, and a smile rose in her face as we cruised by the oft-visited McDonald’s and headed home. As we barreled down the suburban road, I searched through the glove compartment and shuffled my fingers around in search of some music. “Can I put this on?”, I asked, as I revealed Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The River’. I knew she’d say yes, as it was ‘The River’ that first introduced Bev to my father. They met while my dad was still married to my mother, and evidently spent an entire evening at Bev’s apartment in New York City listening to this record. My dad was unfamiliar with Springsteen, but this night started his, and later my, infatuation with Springsteen. Unlike most fans of this record, I always started with side 2. There was something about “Point Blank” that I felt deep inside. “It’s one false move, and baby the lights go out”, Bruce sang as the first few drops of rain hit the windshield. We drove by my school where my friends were just an hour or so from being excused for the day. Given the rain, I knew that schoolyard football would probably be out today. We pulled down Fawn Hill Court and my father’s massive home stood at the end. “I’m a Rocker” had just started and I could see Bev perk up as the front tires hit the driveway and Bruce belted out, “Now I don’t care what kinda shape you’re in. If they put up a roadblock, I’ll parachute in.”

“Do you really think Dad meant it last night? Do you really think he’s done for good?”, I asked Bev as I sat at the kitchen table awaiting Dad’s arrival. “It’s the closest I’ve ever seen him to wanting to truly quit. Sometimes people with drinking problems don’t get it right the first time, but your dad has said he’d quit before, but never like last night. He’s never sat down the entire family and promised to stop.”

I went into the living room and clicked on the tv. As I flipped through the channels, my nerves started to become more and more uneasy. I knew that Dad would likely be home any minute, and there was something about this “new” Dad that brought on almost panic. For one, Dad rarely came home when he said he would. Secondly, he almost always smelled of a mix of Polo cologne and beer. I couldn’t imagine both of these not being part of the nightly routine. If the cologne was gone, I’d truly be at a loss. I had enough trouble finding time to talk to him as is, how would this play out? What would he be like? When he closed the front door and headed for the kitchen, what would he grab from the refrigerator? Sprite? Water? Milk? No way. I couldn’t fathom any of these.

I heard the car. I tensed up. I grabbed one of the gray and white striped pillows and pulled it close. A few minutes later, the sound of the front door opening echoed throughout the living room. I thought of those stairs a few hours earlier. I looked outside and it was now downpouring. Much of the grass in the backyard had turned to deep mud, a repeated reminder that no one had time to work on the house. This was Dad’s third house in as many years, and despite living there for just shy of ten months, the place still felt rented. But it was massive. As dad’s jobs switched and he briskly moved up the corporate ladder in the apparel industry, his subsequent homes would double in size. But every house we lived in never felt like a home. The exterior would draw admiration but the interior was frosty and spiritless.

“Dad’s home”, he bellowed as he walked into the kitchen. The tension in my shoulders, jaw and legs was shortening my breath. I turned around from the television and saw my dad removing his suit jacket, placing his leather bag on the coffee table and reaching for his Vantage cigarettes. He pulled the New York Daily News out of his bag, sat down, lit a smoke and began reading. “Hey Chris, Shane Rawley’s on the hill tonight. You going to watch?” “Yeah, it starts in about ten minutes. You wanna watch with me?” Dad was already halfway to the bathroom, or the garage, or his bedroom, and didn’t respond. I turned to channel 11 anyway. Phil Rizzuto and Bill White were doing the pre-game. It looked like a rain delay. Wherever dad was, it felt as if he was gone for an hour. There was something about this interim period between his arrival and confirmation of our plans for the evening that was torturous. My mind felt as if it was supplanted at some sort of crossroads, but a crossroads of no one’s doing, not mine, not his, not the family’s. But it was there.

“Why don’t we go out and celebrate” Dad said immediately upon returning to the kitchen. “Chris suggested the same thing. He even skipped McDonald’s,” Bev said in ever- so-slightly nervous yet forced jovial agreement. “How about Kinchley’s? They should have the game on and I’m dying for pizza. We’ll pick up Lane at your Mom’s house and we can all eat together.” Just a few minutes later, we piled into Dad’s Cadillac and pulled out into the rain. We stopped by my Mom’s house and Dad honked. Lane was out the door in less than a minute and beside me in the massive backseat. “Rain delay”, I said to Lane. “Like I don’t know that”, he replied. Dad and Bev were both smoking and barely another word was said on the 15 minute drive.

“What can I get you all to drink?” said the woman who’d served us for years now. “Coke”, said Lane. “Coke”, I said. “Make that three”, said Bev. “I’ll take a pitcher of Bud”, said Dad.

All of my tension eased up and despite feeling confused, a feeling of warmth swept over me. Lane didn’t flinch as he was unaware of the past two days’ events and discussions. Bev was composed but looked mildly disappointed. Dad appeared excited and completely oblivious to our conversation the night before. I searched for the game. Rawley was pitching to George Brett and the Royals led 2-0 in the third. “Will the Yanks just release this scrub”, said Lane. Just last week I’d declared Shane Rawley my favorite Yankee, replacing Don Baylor. Aware of this, Lane had to dig at my favorite. I mean, his ERA was over five so there was some justification in his take on Rawley. But even if Rawley were perfect, Lane would dig at me. He knew it upset me.

As the game moved into another rain delay, Dad headed to the jukebox and put in a dollar or two. First came “Like a Rolling Stone”, then Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” and then a few others. Dad was now on pitcher number three. “We should wait for the game to come back on”, he said as he waved over our server. “We’ll have one last pitcher.” He said the same after the last one. My dad was now talking to folks at other tables, most of whom seemed charmed by his spirit and confidence. My stomach started to tighten up. I now just wanted to get home.

As Dad held the restaurant door open for us all, he bumped into the payphone, knocking the black phone handle off the silver hooks. “Your boy did ok today. No win, but I think he’ll probably stay in the rotation”, he said as he rested the phone back in place. My mind was elsewhere. As he started the car, he reached for the silver radio buttons and hit the second one in line, which I knew went straight to 770 for the postgame coverage. I looked to the front console and felt dreamlike as I locked my eyes on the blue 770 lights shining, almost sitting on a ledge that was Dad’s freshly opened can of beer. As the gravel turned to pavement, Dad turned to Lane and me, “He’ll get another chance.”