Drink, Ma

When I was of a certain age, I joined with a band called Drink, Ma.

My Father threatened to break it over his knee.

He was the kind of man who loved contest.

He waxed philosophical regarding competition.

As a boy, he never allowed me to win at anything. Indeed, for many years, he took great pains to ensure that I never bested him even at games of chance, when his hand was transparent, palpable.

Somehow it was unimportant that we both felt it, saw it lying there on the table—a bunch of knackwurst—playing its own game, one only tangentially related to our own but nevertheless disruptive. We played around it and I always came off worst.

Afterwards, it would come alive and palpate my shoulder and sometimes tilt my chin up gently so that between our faces there was a clear and unbroken line of sight and his grey eyes shone with wisdom preternatural in one still florid with manly vigor and he would talk at length about the nature of play. I remember that he would seem to wink occasionally but whether this was significant or merely a confusion of some morbid boyhood fascination with the behavior of my Father’s eyes I cannot for certain say. Blame the ravages of youth but I have forgotten a great deal of what it was he said to me during these intimate lectures except for that great nostrum: “Every game is two games; one, which is lost, and the other, which is won.”

Before truly considering this koan, my Father’s behavior, in general, was puzzling to me. I did not understand how he was so easy to please, so quick to anger.

The subject of masturbation, for example, was a source of particular volatility.

It was healthy of course, like a good breakfast. Still, he did not like me to joke about it. He referred to it darkly as, ‘heavy work’ and would ask me often if I had been engaging in it lately. If I answered that yes I had, he would take me on a long, slow walk into the forest and he would talk gravely and obliquely of the trees whose names he didn’t know, his head bowed, one hand in his pocket and the other extended, fingering the leaves gently, clinically. He would do this silently and I would listen to the murmur of the brook and the songs of the birds high in the uppermost boughs and he would turn to me suddenly and turn his head to the side, examining me and say: “It is peaceful here, is it not?”

I would reply that yes it was and he would search me with his eyes head to toe and look at me, turning his head still further, so far that it seemed he had the neck of a bird or else his neck must have snapped, and then he would allow it to spring back so that his head vibrated so rapidly that it created a kind of illusion that he had many heads; that he was a kind of hydra, my Father. And then we would walk in silence back to the home.

Though my Sister and I were nearly alike in age, he never seemed as concerned with her habits. When we were very young, he would frequently ask us both questions such as: “Have you brushed your teeth?” and regardless of our replies, the consequences were quite mild. Furthermore there was no discernible discrepancy between how he received our answers, though we were certainly all of us conscious of the differences between the three of us—even at that early stage—and acutely aware of the profound difference between each of us and our Mother.

We were each fiercely devoted to her in our own ways and it was this devotion that provoked such a fearsome reaction from my Father regarding the name of the musical group I had joined.

I believe he found the name to be in bad taste.

Though my Sister and I were both in the band, he only insisted that I quit. I recognize this now as having been a kind of chivalry. It wasn’t that he didn’t care for her, he simply recognized that his authority over her did not extend to matters of the heart. This is not to say that he did not occasionally presume to act in her best interests—such as the numerous instances in which he slew her suitors—but then only after they had revealed some gross inadequacy of character that would surely spoil any expectations of future happiness and productivity.

He was what a layperson might call 'a man’s man' although this designation would have puzzled him as a sort of tautological nursery rhyme. He did not differentiate in the slightest among categories of men, a fact that spoke volumes he may have easily filled with treatise on the spirit of equanimity, which so animated his own character and manifested in the dispassionate mode with which he dispensed with those who did not conform exactly to the platonic mold from which he himself was cast. In reality, he was a tender man—wounded long ago, it seemed, by some fantastic inner struggle so fierce that occasionally the memory of it seemed to overwhelm him and there would be no remedy except to have Mother tuck him into bed and read to him from his book of maxims. Always after a few short hours of rest and the low, steady voice of Mother, he would be completely recuperated and able to return to his daily tasks.

When I reached a certain age he encouraged me to take up the habit of writing down maxims for myself and presented me with a discrete brown book for this purpose. I joined to the task enthusiastically and every evening looked forward to the review my Father would make of my progress in this regard, eager to discover which maxims he would underline as meritorious and worthy of further consideration and which he would scribble out ferociously as perfidious and possibly injurious. I once wrote a maxim which so inspired him to anger that he not only scribbled it out but also tore out the page on which it was written from the book and broke the paper over his knee. It was such an awe-inspiring display that I forgot the maxim immediately, though secretly I harbored a hope to one day conjure something that might excite his rage to even greater heights.

I believe that I achieved this in joining the band.

I believe that when I joined the band, I understood the kind of reaction joining the band would provoke in my Father and I believe that, given my desire to see him excited beyond my prior witness, this was chief among the reasons I decided to join the band.

Shortly before joining the band, he had enjoined me to accompany him in the slaying of one of my Sister’s favorite suitors. I had known even then that this was a highest honor but had been reticent to accept for reasons I can only guess. I knew that my refusal had wounded him, deeply—yet there was also a light of compassion in his eyes through the tears, which fell silently onto his cheeks, which puzzled and—I dare say—disappointed me. Later that same evening I telephoned the school friend who was the de facto leader of Drink, Ma to inquire if I might henceforth possibly join my Sister in supporting the band in its further endeavors. He replied in the positive and we agreed to discuss the matter further the next day. I hung up full of gladness and promptly informed my Father, who was sitting in the kitchen, cleaning and dressing the entrails of the suitor he had butchered while I was on the phone, in preparation for the meals my Mother would subsequently devise from them. I recall his blood-soaked hands shaking with emotion, his knees quivering, the torrent of threats pouring from his throat, which I judge must have been badly constricted, given the unusually high-pitched timbre of his normally robust and melodious voice. He threatened to break it all over his knee. He cried. He growled. Then he grew circumspect.

He led me to the bathroom, placing his hands his hands upon my shoulders and guiding me until I stood in front of the mirror, which was housed there, not in a spirit of vanity, but strictly to keep up appearances. He stood behind me. He spoke my name slowly, firmly, again and again. He enjoined me to look into his eyes using only the mirror, without turning around to face him. I did so. I could not determine whether his gaze was reciprocal.

“Above all,” he said, calmly now, his voice a shovel engaged in gravel, “I advise you not to turn around.”

I wrote this piece in the office of the now defunct literary magazine Black Clock sometime in 2011 while I probably should have been doing something else. It's certainly in the same vein as King of the Road, though harder won and of course not necessarily the better for it. I read it aloud at the cave in Griffith park as part of the Griffith Park storytelling series in 2012 shortly before committing major social faux-pas. A version of it appeared in print in the short-lived Red Sky in 2012.