Week One (25 July 2012): Our prompt this week was to write a piece with a specific song in mind. Here is the story I wrote (and a link to the song I used):
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Everytime We Say Goodbye, Julie London
The first eight notes of the first
phrase are all the same. My father said it was like the slow, even
glugs of liquor coming out of a bottle. But then, to alcoholics,
everything is analogous to alcohol. Music especially.
The first two lines were the ones on
which he'd always get stuck. They'd come seeping out of his mouth
regularly, on the exhale and again on the inhale. At a certain state
in his drunkenness, he'd repeat them in a low, breathy murmur, like a
mantra.
It was a sad, lonely sound, like an old
boat makes rocking back and forth on the dark water. He phrased it
that way when he sang it, with an ominous rhythm. Imagine a lunatic
sitting with his knees up to his chest, pitching his torso forward
and back, forward and back:
Everytime you say goodbye
I die a little
Every time you say goodbye
I wonder why a little
He came home from work each day already
enveloped in the smell. Before I even knew what it was I knew what
it was. It was the smell of 6 o'clock. It meant my father would soon
enter the state with which I was so familiar. His state of crooning
and howling. Howling either with laughter or with tears.
Later, when it occurred to me to try
and classify the smell, I called it akin to rotting cherries. Still,
it was so inextricably linked to my memory of him that it was more
evocative than a photograph.
My aunt Helen sat with me for two hours
each afternoon from the time I came in from school until the time my
father arrived home from his job at the insurance office.
Breezing through the door he'd greet
her the same way each time, a peck on the cheek and a thank you.
Often he granted her extravagant
compliments. Ones that seemed especially ludicrous when bestowed upon
a thick-waisted and pious dowager.
“Dear Aunt Helen, you are ravishing
today,” he'd bellow. Or, “Helen! Thou art worthy of thy name!”
He could turn a phrase, like Cole
Porter himself, my father. He was endlessly charming and endlessly
disappointing.
Dismissing Aunt Helen, my father sent
her off into the regular world. Then there we were.
We lived in a kind of limbo. In the
normal world, but apart from it. We regarded our diseased existence
the way all functional alcoholics do, with understatement in our
eyes, resignation in our shoulders.
We died every time, but just a little.
We wondered why every time, but just a
little.
I call us both alcoholics, my father
and I, because my life was tempered by, dependent on, concurrent with
the ebb and flow of booze too. The level of alcohol in my father's
blood stream determined my degree of terror for the day, how much I
ate, how long I slept. It wasn't a simple proportionality either.
Drunker didn't necessarily mean quieter, it might mean clumsier,
weepier. More sober might mean more rational, but not always.
Still, his unpredictablity was
predictable to me. My anxiety linked itself to his undulating
consciousness. My vigilance balanced his carelessness. The nights
he stayed awake pacing, drying himself out, were the nights I slept
like iron.
Nights he passed out early I paced
wide-eyed as the wee hours laid an eerie enchantment over the house.
I would wander from room to room, confronted by the subtle tension
objects have as they wait to be illuminated. The coffee pot, a jar
of peanut butter on the counter. Things seemed to smile at me
sympathetically. Soon it will be morning, they seemed to say, and we
can all pretend like this never happened.
They helped us, of course, my father's
sisters, his mother.
At night, though, it was me helping him
up the stairs, or onto the couch when he couldn't make it up the
stairs. I was the one braving the concerned, penetrating glances of
shopkeepers and teachers, frying him eggs at eleven o'clock at night,
dropping a tab of alka seltzer into a glass of ginger ale the next
morning.
He was never cruel to me really, except
that he trained me for a life enabling alcoholics.
My father preferred
Julie London's rendition of the song. That low, breathy voice and
the brush on the drum. ”It's a drunk's dream,” he'd say, “easy
on the head.”
Why the God's above me
Who must be in the know
Think so little of me
They allow you to go
It never occurred to me to miss my
mother. Once I heard my father's sisters snarling in the kitchen,
“Wasn't the maternal type, that one. Saw it from the start. Once
she got that kid out of her, she couldn't get away fast enough.
They're better off anyhow, I reckon. She was dangerous crazy.”
Dangerous crazy, she said it just like
that. The phrase came snaking out of my of Aunt Helen's mouth with a
weird mix of revulsion and envy.
At least she only left me one time, I
thought to myself. Right then and a million times after. At least
she only left me once.
My father turned his famous charm on me
when his chemistry was right.
“My darling girl,” he'd say, “what
did I do to deserve you?”
He sweet-talked me with a hesitant look
in his eyes, like he scarcely believed himself. It was a consolation
prize, and he knew it. He abandoned me at every turn, but at least
he told me I was pretty now and then.
There's no love song finer
But how strange the change
From major to minor
Every time we say goodbye
He drank himself to death, of course.
I was 19. We were both so used to his being sick he never even went
to the hospital. He just passed out one night and didn't wake up the
next morning. When I came in and realized he was dead, I rolled my
eyes.
I cried without the contorted faces one
makes out of shock and grief. I sang his favorite song and my tears
came down in a straight, even stream. That's what happened. The
world changed with the key. From major to minor. We had been saying
goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, for so long. I repeated the refrain one
more time and made the arrangements for him to be taken away.
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