Day 4: BFTbookchallenge: Your Troubles

State law made Charley close at nine P.M. and when I came in near that hour I could see Father’s lunchtime grins had grown into great smiles of greeting. Love shone from his eyes, but it, and the toothy displays which always became bigger as the day lengthened, was not motivated primarily by my presence, or happy relief that the day’s work was ending, or even at the thought of collecting the dollars he had earned. Rather, the main reason for the increasing size of the excited leers, and the frequent gleaming glances now radiating from his flushed face, was simply that ever closer was coming the anticipated time for the gratification of his insatiable craving. And there was a surety to his satisfaction, for Saturday held a double guarantee, but of opposing conditions. Father’s morning sobriety for work was guaranteed, and equally assured, whether achieved often throughout the week or not, was his Saturday Night Drunk.

I early learned not to expect success when asking Dad not to drink. For many months he answered these impossible pleas with assurances that he would stop, abstractly spoken even while in the act of buying the destroying beverage. Then, as I grew older and he was forced to cope with me on this subject more adequately, he designed sincere-sounding attempts to wean my suspicions with the implied reformation in the dodge of “just this once”. And often when drink’s distraction loosened his restraint, a nostalgic drive to cry overcame him and then I was smothered for hours in a blueberry bath from which I always averted my embarrassed face. Neither self-pitying sobs nor many verbal protests helped to make a reality of his good intentions and eventually I came to see he could never stop. Less and less I asked him to quit and accordingly the announcements of his attempts slackened until came the day he openly rejected all efforts to do so. With this final resignation to alcohol, in which he honestly accepted his inability to even try and contain it, I gave up and settled instead for a question of degree. Of course, he won in every stage of these exchanges and all my bickering proved useless for by the time several years later we had reached an agreement of only one bottle in any one day his condition of saturation was such that to absorb only an ounce of liquor would at once render him nearly unconscious. But all this was yet to come, and in the freshness of our first season he simply hid his drinking from me as best he could.

From Neal Cassady’s The First Third: