All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir(20)

“You know, I am not quite sure how I got here,” he mused, almost as if I wasn’t there. As if he were talking to someone else. “But I have some guesses.” A cute waitress sauntered over to our table and asked if he wanted another round. He ordered a martini. I ordered a glass of pinot grigio. This would be the first drink we ever had together. It felt nothing like a celebration. Not even close.

I could sense that he was at least a couple of drinks deep when we started to talk and that slur came back. I knew it because I had heard my own voice fall into it on occasion.

“Where in the relapse are we? Did this just start?”

He shook his head. To lighten the mood, I started to tease him about the shirt he was wearing. It was an oversized blue shirt with a sort of gingerbread man on it. It seemed a bit childlike, not at all his typical uniform. He stared at me and said, “Don’t you say that. My sweeto gave this to me.” We were back to silence. The wine didn’t help me much; I would need a couple more glasses before I felt any sort of effect.

Finally, I asked the only real question that mattered: “Why are you drinking and do you want to stop?”

“I do want to stop, I know I need to stop.” He described to me what life had been like lately: Twitter, covering the glittering parties, the deadlines that followed. He continued, “It’s just all the stuff at work, the parties, the people. I just felt like I wanted to be part of it for once.” He looked down. He knew how he sounded. He added, “It’s hard to come into middle age. It doesn’t feel like I should be here yet, but I look in the mirror and this is what I am left with.”

His mind was quick as ever, but his body and his health made it clear that he needed to slow down. As a deeply ambitious person, he resented it. I was unsure how to respond. It wasn’t something I had ever really thought about. For the first time, my dad was revealing himself to me to be a flawed human being, not just my father. Not just the writer. But even then I understood that middle age had not led to the relapse; he himself had. That was what I needed to focus on.

“What will happen if you continue drinking?” I wondered out loud. “It’ll just get worse, I imagine. We’ve watched this episode before.” I reminded him of the detox that followed his drunk-driving arrest a few years back, the rebuilding of family trust. The necrotizing pancreatitis that left him with diabetes. I knew that alcohol and diabetes could be a lethal combination, and yet here we were.

He seemed genuinely mystified but knew it had to be a short run. His forehead wrinkled as he joked about being one of the incurable ones. We both ordered another drink. I knew it was bad form to drink with your relapsed parent, but I was going to need a drink if I was going to get through what came next.

He told me Jill was upset with him; I knew how she felt. I felt resentful seeing him repeat the same behavior, for putting his health in jeopardy right in front of my eyes. But I didn’t have it in me to reprimand him. Instead I held my anger deep within. I was twenty-three years old and didn’t have the faintest idea about what advice to offer my dad. He didn’t care; our relationship knew very little in the way of boundaries. I could yell at him, but what good would it do? He already hated himself.

Then he said something that made me panic. “I was standing on the platform, trying to get here on the L train. I thought, just for a second, about throwing myself down into the subway and just letting it fucking hit me.” He stared at me. I asked if this was a joke, and he noncommittally shrugged. I had never heard him admit a suicidal thought before. He was hurting. We needed to get him into treatment. Again.

I felt a mixture of emotions as we made our way through our drinks. I felt a responsibility to let him know that I loved him unconditionally. I also knew, from previous experiences, that there needed to be consequences for addicts that did not change. I felt stuck and unsure what to do or say.

And then it was over. After my second drink and I am guessing his fourth, he called it a night. I hailed him a cab, feeling frantic about the idea of him on a subway platform. I asked if he could go to a meeting tomorrow or a detox. He assured me he would figure it out and would be on his way back to sobriety, back to being my dad. He held me close as we said goodbye and thanked me for loving him no matter what. I started to cry and he said, “None of that, now. You are a Carr. You are strong.” A tear leaked down his face as he said this. He finally climbed into the car and told the driver to head toward Midtown. I slammed the yellow door closed and looked at him through the window, for a second wanting to get in and make sure he got home okay. I smiled weakly and he waved. The cab pulled away and I stood there for a moment taking it in, sobbing.

I sped toward my local wine store and grabbed a big bottle of cheap white wine. Tears lined my face and the cashier made no attempt at small talk. I took it back to my apartment and said nothing to my roommates, drinking it glass by glass until I was numb and pretty much blackout drunk. I thought about emailing him, but I had nothing to say. I was too far gone.





12


    The House of Many Felled Trees



“Austin was kind of a revelation, you need to move here and then I need to follow.”



My dad loved Twitter. With twenty-nine thousand tweets and a follower base of more than four hundred thousand, his feed was the perfect mixture of high-and lowbrow content. People followed in droves to read his honest, funny, and human interpretation of the world around him in 140 characters or less. I was one of those 400K, and as a blood relative I got a follow back. I was one of the few.