Time in a Bottle
The last time I saw my dad, we fought.
Not an argument: a knock-down, drag-out wrestling match in the front yard as cars passed by and leered.
It was my summer before coming to Harvard and I just wanted peace, but after I’d picked him up from jail a few days before, I knew there would be none.
That day, he was drunk, as usual, and thus vicious as a rabid dog. He would always needle my family, spit at us, say deeply hurtful things to provoke a reaction.
This time, he might have been trying to drive the family car, deep into a bottle of vodka. Or doing something else that would get him arrested. Whatever the case, I’d tried to talk him out of it and only succeeded in getting him angry enough to fight me.
We grappled each other down into the scratchy summer grass and became a mess of elbows and knees. I shoved him down hard, trying to keep his face to the dirt until he relented.
I’d never had a real fight with my dad before, but this was a long time coming. I clawed at him with sorrow and rage, remembering every time his drinking had lost a job and a home, every late night he’d kept me awake through drunken ranting, every milestone he’d missed because he was locked up in jail, every mess of his I had to clean up when I should have been enjoying my youth.
I screamed.
I thought college could be a new beginning.
From the time I’d learned the word, college meant an escape from my childhood. Other kids studied hard to impress their fathers; I did it so I could get away from mine.
I loved my dad. When he was sober, he was kind, caring, and thoughtful, but that was rarely the case for long. It was as though he was two different people — my loving father and the monster that dwelled within him and took control for days or weeks on end. And no matter how much I cried and begged for my dad to lock it away, the monster would always come back.
Every time I had taken a foray into adulthood previously, my dad would find a way to ruin it and remind me of the pain.
So I pulled away.
When I was in high school, I got my first job at a local campground, cleaning pools and doing yard work. My dad showed up to one of the pools, drunk. I had to take off work early and drive him home because my supervisor said he was scaring the children.
The night before I took the SAT, my dad stalked into the room and raved at me, talking and yelling and eventually crying. I yelled back at him, but it didn’t seem to have much of an effect. I must have gotten about four hours of sleep that night.
And of course, that last time — with Harvard in sight and Indiana soon in the rearview, I learned that my dad was getting out of jail, and I was to pick him up. I always secretly hoped that he would come out of jail ready to get his life together and swear off drinking for good, but instead, he stumbled into my car reeking like a liquor store.
He brought me chicken teriyaki, he said. We drove for more than an hour in the sweltering heat — my AC was broken. The saving grace of the trip was that he fell asleep, cutting our shouting match short. By the time we arrived, the chicken was putrid.
I finally got to college. I thought coming to Cambridge would allow me to run away from it all. I thought if I went far enough away from him, he would fade into nothing.
But just days after I moved into my new dorm, I got the first of many calls from him: He was sobbing, drunk. The distance didn’t matter; it was as though the monster was in the next room over. I felt the same helplessness I did when I was the kid bawling in the liquor aisle of the grocery store.
I did do one thing right,” my dad tells me over the phone. “I sacrificed myself to show you the wrong things to do. Now I can, you know, chill out and maybe not do it so much.”
He was sober this time — and homeless, living in San Diego. I’d asked to interview him for a journalism class project I was putting together.
I’ve been writing this story since childhood. In high school, I wrote horror stories, spinning up monsters who leeched off the heroes and poisoned their minds — thinly veiled addiction metaphors. In my journalistic work, I’m drawn to the police and the courts. In some ways, I’m always looking for answers as to why these systems failed my dad.
At times, I thought that throwing myself into pursuits like The Crimson was an attempt to further escape my dad — to draw a clear dividing line between then and now — but in truth, I was trying to solve the puzzle of how something so horrible as addiction can happen to someone. The project freshman year was an attempt at a journalistic approach to understanding why my dad was this way — and maybe trying to imagine how it could have turned out differently, or how it still might.
“Well, honestly, an answer to prayer might be me going to jail, because then I’m not drinking,” he says. “God works in mysterious ways, so if you ask him for patience, be wary about it.”
My dad is no longer drinking.
At the end of freshman year, I got another call — not from him, but from my grandpa, his dad. The hospital wasn’t sure how it happened, but my dad had taken a fall, hard. He had a severe head injury, and there was bleeding in his brain.
I didn’t cry, I didn’t shout, I just numbly nodded along to the news. I thought he might die.
But he’s still alive. For the last three years, my dad has been recovering in a long-term care facility. He’s made some progress: he can speak and move, though in a limited capacity.
I called him once. We talked a bit about the Bears. It was like he wasn’t really present, like I was having a conversation with someone who was half-asleep. He responded sluggishly at first and eventually, not at all. Grief welled up in me — he was there, but I felt as though I had already lost him. He was neither the dad I loved nor the monster I knew. I even wished for a shouting match.
I’m told this is as much as I should expect him to recover, that the function you regain in the first few months is often the only function you ever regain.
Whenever my dad comes to mind, I feel sorrow. I always held some faint hope that despite it all, he could come back and be the dad he always should have been. I still believed he could beat addiction, that it would take just one more try each time and I’d finally have him back.
Now, I never will.
In some ways, I loathe myself for all the times I’d wished him out of my life, wished never to speak to him again.
But I remember how terrified I was as a kid when he would drink. I remember nights like the one when, panicked, my grandma and I locked him out of the house and stacked pots and pans in the window in case he tried to break in.
I don’t know how to reconcile my time with him. I don’t know how to forgive him for the scars he left. I want the closure that I know I will never get.
I think about visiting him. But I don’t know if I can.
— Brandon L. Kingdollar is the Managing Editor of The Crimson’s 150th Guard.