It is Thanksgiving Day, 1982. I am seventeen years old and a senior in high school. My mother, a gourmet cook, has been working in the kitchen since early that morning. She is preparing for an event that has not happened in many years; my father is coming to Thanksgiving dinner. My parents have been separated since I was nine and officially divorced since the summer after I turned twelve. My childhood, spent navigating the trenches and minefields of their fractious and turbulent marriage, has revolved chiefly around placating one parent or the other, all while reading the tea leaves and scattered chicken bones of their unpredictable moods. It has been several years since I have seen my mother and father in the same room. My sister and I tidy up the downstairs and glance nervously at the clock. The house vibrates with tension as we await my father’s arrival.
My earliest recollection of my father is a fond one. It is 1968, and we are visiting with my cousins at my grandparent’s summer home in Southold, Long Island. My father, dressed in overalls and a large straw hat, has taken on the persona of “Shacknasty Jim,” a character of his own invention. He hides in a broken-down shed on the property as various cousins attempt to stealthily approach, running and squealing with delight as he emerges in mock outrage. Shaking his fist as he chases us about, he shouts at us, telling us to get off of his land. I am breathless with exhilaration. This will be one of the most pleasant and unspoiled memories I have of my father. Less than a year later, he will move my family from our home in Connecticut to Rochester, New York, where he has taken a higher-paying job with Xerox. It is here that the rapid unraveling of my young life would begin.
The decade that followed would be spent watching my father descend rapidly into the alcoholism that would eventually overtake every aspect of his life. My mother, insecure, isolated, and woefully unequipped to deal with the shame and unpredictability of my father’s drinking, often unleashes her mercurial temper on my sister and me, and our home becomes a place filled with tension and anger. On one memorable summer night when I am five, my mother rouses me from bed after a loud and physical argument with my dad in the kitchen below where I sleep. There was no need to wake me, as I was already awake and rigid with terror as I listened to the chaos below. “Get up,” she commands, and I do so without hesitation, already well trained in survival. Quickly we move to my sister’s room, where she is also roused from bed. My mother then engaged in a brief standoff with my father as he attempted to block our path. We run down the stairs and into the garage, where the family station wagon is parked. My mother attempts her escape, slowly backing out of the garage. Suddenly my father, hideously drunk, mounts the car’s hood in an attempt to prevent our departure. We exit the car and run down the street to a sympathetic neighbor’s as my father stands shouting in the driveway, unable to pursue on legs made unsteady by copious amounts of gin. I am breathless now, too, my fear of my father as pure as a blue flame. The next day, we return to the house, with no mention made of what had occurred. It is as if the night has simply never happened. But I refuse to forget.
The years that follow are a blur of the same sad play, repeated in countless acts, repetitive and predictable. My father, who I would later learn had been an alcoholic since the age of fourteen, maintains his high-level executive job for over a decade as his alcoholism grows worse and worse. There are DWI arrests, bitter fights, and more midnight runs down our quiet suburban street. And worst of all, there is secrecy. My mother, paralyzed by the fear that others will know the shame of what happens behind the closed doors of our home, reminds my sister and me frequently that we must never, ever tell anyone of what goes on inside the walls of our house. I live the first twelve years of my life unaware that anyone else in the world lives the way I do, envious of the families I see on TV sitcoms and in the movies. There are no family gatherings, no overnight guests. I spend the vast portion of my time in the fields and woods behind our house or hiding in my room, escaping into books. One memorable Christmas when I am seven, my father is entirely and inexplicably absent from our home. My mother offers no explanation for his disappearance, only telling my sister and me that he will not be home for Christmas. He will not return until late spring, living in a room at the YMCA in downtown Rochester. Years later, when I become a police officer, I will learn that he had been in jail following a felony DWI arrest, and my mother, fed up with his antics, had refused to bail him out. Their separation comes soon after, followed by a bitter, acrimonious divorce.
In late 1981, my father lost his job with Xerox, and his alcoholism rapidly entered the acute stage. From this point forward, he is largely absent from my life, so deeply buried in his own shame that he cannot bear to spend time with his children. I will learn to shave, tie a tie, and all the rest of the small passages a boy makes into manhood on my own. I come to dread my father’s occasional phone calls, able now to gauge his level of intoxication from just his first few words. Often, he simply passes out on the phone, and I quietly hang up, feeling both sorrow and relief. Panicked by the loss of income, my mother will regularly tell my sister and me that we will have to move, that I will have to start my senior year in a new school, that my sister will have to drop out of the college she has come to love. I go to class each day wondering where I will finish high school. Once content with the occasional Sunday movie visit, my father is a minimal presence in my life by the beginning of my senior year, but for some odd reason, the hope that my parents could somehow reconcile still lives inside me. There is some of this hope mixed in with the fear I feel inside as we await his visit that Thanksgiving day.
He arrives promptly at 4pm, our family’s customary time to start Thanksgiving dinner. As he enters the house, I notice that he has lost weight. His clothes hang off of his frame, and his paper-white skin seems to stretch over his skull. Years of hard-won experience tell me that he is dreadfully hungover. As we all sit down to dinner, my mother says grace, and the young child still alive within me allows the hope of a new beginning to burn for just a moment. But new beginnings are not my family’s stock in trade. My father takes a tiny bite of the turkey my mother has spent hours preparing, then bolts to the small powder room off the hallway from our dining room.
We listen in silence as he vomits over and over, the sound of his retching roiling my stomach. My mother begins to cry softly. I ask her to go upstairs to her bedroom, and she wordlessly complies. My father, unsteady on his feet and shaking, reenters the dining room, unable to meet the gaze of his children. I tell him to leave, and he does so without a word of protest or explanation. We finish our dinner without any discussion of what has occurred. It is the last holiday I will spend with my father. Two years later, his brothers will manage to get him admitted to a rehab facility in New Jersey. He will have a short period of sobriety before his slow death from a brain tumor a few years later, our tentative reconciliation having barely begun.
I have heard people, mostly fellow cops, laugh and joke about my “soft” upbringing in a wealthy suburb throughout my adult life. I would mostly laugh it off, but deep down, I always knew the truth. Green lawns, stylish clothes, and nice cars don’t mean a thing. Behind those polished wood doors and neatly drawn shades hides a world unspoken and unseen. I never lost sight of this as I entered my chosen profession, and I brought the baggage of my own experiences into all of the sad homes I visited. A favorite quote of mine has always been this one by Socrates; “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” You can never really know what someone has been through, what tragedy hides behind their eyes. If you had, or have created, the type of life that many can only dream of, give thanks, today and every day, for that minor miracle. Remember that possessions mean little, and that love is the only essential thing in life. And always, always be kind.
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