CHAPTER 12
F-A-M-I-L-Y
“Hi, I’m Frank. I’m an alcoholic.”
“Hi, Frank!”
I am swaddled in a wool blanket sitting at the edge of a big circle of fifty people around an enormous campfire. Above us is a canopy of pine trees, beyond that a clear night sky filled with a thousand dots of light. Tony is sitting on the dirt ground whittling a stick with a pocketknife. Everyone here is an alcoholic, I’m told, who’s trying to go through “recovery.” When Paul returned, we spent the winter being told that it was time that we all started acting like a “family.”
It’s a strange word. F-A-M-I-L-Y. It’s big and comforting and each letter is different. Just look at it. The F is for father right there at the front. The M for mother is in the middle, connecting all the others. It’s a long word but usually people say it in one breath, like “famly” as if the I doesn’t matter. Without the F it’s just an “ambly,” a thing that ambles around from place to place. Without the M it’s just a “Fably,” which is a story about something that does not exist. For months after Paul got back, that word was all we heard. It was time to “act like a famly,” to learn to “talk like a famly,” to eat together “like famlies do.” The word seems to me like a cave, something big and simple you can walk inside to get away from a storm called loneliness.
Frank’s got a big nose that erupts from his face over his red cheeks. On his head is a fishing cap covered in lures, like the ones Paul showed us on our trips to the Willamette under the West Salem bridge. His big belly sticks out from under his buttoned overalls and blue flannel shirt. This is Frank’s fire. He lit it by placing a roll of black toilet paper, soaked in motor oil, beneath a structure of kindling and logs. It burned slowly for thirty minutes as the dry kindling caught and smoke poured out of the wet, mossy wood. “Me and Barb been comin’ up here to Detroit Lake for twenty years now, sittin’ round these fires, listening to old drunks talk about forgiveness and serenity.”
Barb is his wife. She’s a very kind, large woman with short brown hair who sits next to him nodding and smiling. She looks like she’s been inflated with air, her thighs bursting, fighting against the blue denim of her jeans as she sits in a fold-up chair with her hands clasped in her lap.
Mom told me that Barb was a popular speaker in Al-Anon, that she traveled as far away as Eugene and McMinnville to “tell her story.” When I asked her about what she meant by story, Mom said, “Everybody has a story in AA and Al-Anon. You know, what you went through with the disease and how it ruined your life before you found the program and admitted you were powerless and your life was in the hands of a higher power.” I asked her what a higher power was and she said, “Like God.” The point is to have a personal relationship, a “conscious contact,” with him. I asked who him is? Jesus? Does he sit in a chair? Does he have a beard? She said some people say Jesus, some say nature and some say it’s just “knowing the universe is bigger than all of us.” I didn’t know what she meant. I heard about how people go to church and that’s where God is but we’ve never been to one except to get the government cheese. We knew some of the stories about him and at that point I know there’s a God because whenever something good happens I look up at the sky and say thanks. I can feel that I’m talking to something real whether it’s Jesus or a guy with a beard or just an enormous blue sky stretching out beyond anything.
“We used to come up here and fish for the weekend on the Santiam, me and my buddies from the navy. I don’t know if we ever caught anything, because the whole point was to get as drunk as we could.” There is a howl of laughter, led by Leslie McCarthy, who everyone calls Les, with his huge muttonchops and red suspenders where he hooks his thumbs when he speaks. His wife Diane sits by his side and laughs with him. Mom says it’s good I met Les because I need male role models, ones that know how to talk about their feelings not just ride motorcycles or watch sports. It’s basic Child Psychology.
Frank’s voice sounds like a tire on gravel, like the Vega as it goes up the driveway at the house, low and patchy. It’s like listening to a mountain talk. “We drank in the war too. One for courage, we would say. So I figured if one brought courage, what would four bring? How about seven?” More howls of laughter. “It got to the point where I hardly even got up unless I’d already finished a fifth of whiskey. Any drunk here could probably do goddamn brain surgery if he had a drink first.” Somber faces, reflecting the orange warmth of the fire, smile and nod as they stare into the past. “You can do anything when you’re drunk. You’re the smartest person who ever lived and anyone who don’t agree is a son of a bitch for sayin’ so. Damn it if I couldn’t have flown a B-25 over Tokyo and ended the whole goddamn war if I’d just had the money for the whiskey.” The laughter floats in the air with the smoke as the circle closes in. It starts to feel like we are physically connected, all of us through the story that AA calls a “share.”
I close my eyes and listen to the gravelly voice.
“Somehow I made it through the war without killing myself.” He spits on the ground and wipes his face. He takes a pack of red-and-white Lucky Strikes out of the front bib of his overalls and lights one while he talks, the smoke falling out of his nose and mouth like a leaky chimney. “I honestly don’t know how I did it. And when I came back, well, the world didn’t make much sense. Found myself married, had Frank junior.” He pauses, gathering himself. “All this was more reason to drink. If I was happy ’cause I was home with the baby, I would drink to celebrate. If I was upset, I had to drink to feel better. And if I was deep in the national forest, I would drink to pass the time.”
My feet are warm and I like these stories. The alcoholics are better storytellers than the women in Al-Anon, which is mostly for wives. It’s all fights in the street, calling Child Protective Services, divorces, phone calls from bars on birthdays, all the ways a man can mess up.
Mom says to me, “You see? That’s why you can’t ever drink.”
But those men. The husbands. I wondered about them. All these old guys sitting around with battle scars and cigarettes talking about run-ins with cops and speeding down highways and fights in jail and war, hunting, tractors driven while drunk that ran into houses, boats capsized, guns fired, faraway homes filled with wives and children waiting for them, begging for them to come back. I wonder if I’m going to grow up to be one of them.
“People talk about rock bottom,” Frank says. There’s a shift in the circle, a tightening. “I don’t even know what that is really. I once heard someone say, ‘Rock bottom is when you drank up all the life in you, when you look down and the only thing you see is death.’ Well, I wake up one morning alone in the house. My truck is in the driveway, the door is still open, my head is split in two, my face covered in filth ’cause I’d been throwin’ up all night drinking that rotgut I kept in the shed. And I knew. Right then I didn’t think, I damn well knew if I didn’t stop drinkin’, I would die. Every drunk knows he’s got a problem, but the drink is his God and his mistress so he thinks, aw shit, I’ll figure it out because you can’t betray your God and mistress. Gotta have that flask. But then, sitting there alone in my house, I knew it was time. So I cleaned myself up and called my buddy Don, who said he’d been to a couple meetings in something called AA, and the next thing I knew I was sitting in the basement of the Catholic church listening to drunk after drunk tell story after story that coulda been straight from my own life.