On the Rocks

John Doe grows up in the suburbs of Chicago, where he is the quarterback of his high school’s football team. John has one sister and one brother. His father is a Libertarian who designs bridges, and his mother is a homemaker who doesn’t care about politics. The night of homecoming, after the dance, John’s friends are shotgunning beers in the homecoming queen’s basement, and she only weighs 90 pounds, so nobody can tell the difference between what she looks like wasted and what she looks like after John’s best friend Richard roofies her.

John has everything, his house might even be haunted. He’s still shy, though, and it makes it hard to hang out with Richard and the rest of the football team. John decides to start shotgunning beers with his friends and discovers that not only is he very good at it, he finds it fun, too. To each their own, I guess, but I wish he’d just gone home after the dance.

I am a child, and every special occasion in my family — birthdays, anniversaries, minor holidays — is celebrated at the Claim Jumper outside the mall. I don’t know why this restaurant is so appealing — it’s always dark (and I hate eating in the dark) and crowded (and I hate noise) and features several racist paintings of Native Americans (which I also hate, but it feels cheap and obnoxious to say that I hate racism like it’s a personality trait). Still, it’s our go-to: if my parents ask where my brother and I want to get dinner, the answer is always Claim Jumper.

We all have our usual orders — for me, it’s shoestring fries, and for my brother, it’s a side of frozen grapes. My mom orders tortilla soup as an appetizer no matter the weather, and my father can’t go a meal without drinking a Stoli on the rocks.

My brother finds the name fascinating. “What’s on the rocks?”

“Ice,” says my mom, shoving a box of crayons in his direction. “Don’t ask.”

A year later, when he’s six and I’m eight, my brother interjects before my father can order his own drink. “He wants a Stoli on the rocks,” he tells the waitress.

My father grits his teeth. “No,” he disagrees. “Just water for me.”

John Doe works in tech in San Francisco before tech is A Thing in San Francisco. After several week-long temp gigs, he’s hired as an IT worker for some corporate law firm, whose mission he disagrees with in theory but can’t complain about in practice.

Sometime in 1996, he’s lifting a mainframe — a physical object at the time — and pulls something in his back. The doctor prescribes him codeine but he doesn’t like the way it makes him feel. He drinks instead, because it’s more familiar.

If you ask my mom when my dad’s alcoholism started, she’ll say 2014, when we moved into this house. It’s larger than the one I grew up in, elevating us officially to the upper middle class and completing the arc of my mother’s immigrant American Dream story. Her parents move into the back house, and now we pay their bills, too.

A year after we settle, I start at private school for the first time in my life, to satisfy my Lola’s expectations of me (I will die happy if you either go to girls’ school or become a nun). My dad comes home from work in September and sits on my bed. “My job is moving to Missouri.”

This is fascinating to me, and the most I’ve ever thought about the state of Missouri in my life. “I’m Asian,” I say dumbly, in case he’s forgotten. “We can’t go to Missouri.”

“I know,” he says, fiddling with the keys on the carabiner. “I know.”

John Doe’s first child is born on October 3, 2001. Seventeen years later, he writes her a letter about it.

On the night you were born, I said goodbye to you and your mom at the hospital and drove to our house on White Oak. Amos, Roxy and I went out to the backyard and I cried thinking about how your mom and I had such a beautiful baby and how it felt to hold you for the first time. I was so full of love for you. So full of a love I couldn’t have imagined until that day. The best days of my life have been the ones spent with you, your brother, and your mom. You make me proud in so many ways.

It’s a sweet message, but it’s read out loud to his daughter’s entire high school senior class by her principal as part of a religious retreat she’s stuck on. The letter doesn’t make her feel loved, it makes her wonder where she went wrong. She looks for it in her wrists and is sent home the next day.

My family split down the middle when I was a kid. I was my father’s and my brother was my mom’s. In pre-school, I used to wake up an hour before I had to, just to spend more time with my dad in the morning. He’s an early riser: up at five to feed the dog (dogs, back then), make my mom’s coffee, and pack our lunches. Nobody understands me like my father, and nobody likes me all that much either, except him. I’m mean at school, I try to manipulate the other four-year-olds, I lie to get my best friend in trouble when she makes me upset. I think I’m the smartest person in every room I enter, and I announce it loudly solely to make everyone else feel bad.

I don’t know if I’m mean because my mother doesn’t like me, or if it’s the other way around, but I’ve never quite been able to sell her on who I ended up becoming. I’m difficult; I’m unloveable. And she just doesn’t have the time for that sort of thing. I predict she’ll have an aneurysm if she goes an hour without insulting me — this is so messy, are you sure you want to wear that?, why do you have to make stupid choices?, you embarrassed me in front of everybody in there, I need a break from you. With my dad, though, it’s easy. If I forget my homework on my desk in the morning, he shakes his head and says, “Oh, Ava,” but turns the car around anyway.

When I get older, I struggle to wake up on time, but it’s okay; he makes it okay, by driving like a demon to get me to school by eight. At the corner of Linnet and Rhea, I say goodbye, shivering because my psychiatrist prescribed too much Adderall for my little body, and watch him drive off to work. I won’t see him until the next day.

The man who picks me up is someone I named Purple as a child. He looks like my father but he doesn’t — it’s a physical distinction I could never quite explain. Purple doesn’t hear me if I talk about my day, or if he does engage, he does so with the intention of cruelty. His insults are sloppy and half-finished, because he forgets the beginning by the time he reaches the middle. Usually, he’s distracted by his mission to race other cars down Ventura Boulevard, swerving violently before a half-dozen almost-collisions. He doesn’t remember the names of my friends, the day of the week, or that I have softball practice that night. All he cares about is being the fastest driver on the 101.

“You’re not listening to me,” I say. He’s going 88 miles per hour in the eco-friendly Prius.

“I got up early,” he dismisses. 89. 90. 91. “I’m just tired.”

Purple and my father divide their body evenly for most of my life, but when I’m in high school John begins hibernating for longer and longer winters. He accepts a job at another law firm and is told that they’ll be hiring three other people to work with him, but his boss never gets around to it, so he’s stuck working overtime. My mom finds a plastic water bottle of vodka under the driver’s seat of the Prius and realizes that he’s been picking my brother up from soccer practice drunk. He’s exiled to the guest bedroom on the opposite side of the house, but we never really talk about what happened.

On the way home from school, while I am controlling the aux chord and torturing my mother with Mitski song after Mitski song, I ask, “Is dad an alcoholic?”

Her hands flex on the steering wheel. “Don’t ask.”

“Are you going to leave him?”

I wait. She never answers.

My mother is never wrong about things, so I trust that she’s handling it somehow. He’s not an alcoholic if she lets him order white wine at dinner without protest. He’s not an alcoholic if he still drives us around. Everyone has a little too much sometimes, I decide, only I wouldn’t know because the last time I drank anything, it was the wine at my First Communion.

It’s because he hates his job, my mom says, so it’ll be fixed when he gets a new one. This time it’s not at a law firm, it’s a consulting position for a company that loans out IT workers to smaller businesses. He works from home most days and takes me to rehearsals for the show I stage manage. I get bad again when winter starts, and I’m so busy fighting with my mom and threatening to kill myself with my Lolo’s pistol that I don’t notice when my father is fired.

For the months that he’s unemployed, he has little to do but drop me off and pick me up from school. He resents that I quit softball, because now he doesn’t have anywhere to go during the evenings. When he’s bored, he spends his time being cruel, because what else is there to do? Whatever kindness remains, he reserves for me, but I don’t want it.

It’s mean to call him pathetic but I’ll do it anyway, because I’m a mean person. He sends me emails about different restaurants he sees driving around and asks me if I want to try them with him, but I never answer. Remember how we used to go to Hugo’s? I recorded this movie that looks cool, if you want to watch this weekend. When he asks about school, I’m cagey. Fine. Yeah. Good. Do you want to stop somewhere on the way home? We can get something to eat. No. I’m tired. I just want to go home. I can’t stand to look at you anymore.

John interviews for many different jobs after he’s laid off and accepts the first offer that comes his way. The congratulatory email is from an HR Director named Jessica. We’ll see you Monday for your onboarding session. This should fix things, with everyone. No more fighting with his in-laws over the financial burden of caring for them. No more rejection from the rest of the family. No more empty space to fill with vodka.

Things get better and his daughter goes to college and she’s happy. His wife is nicer to him, and his son starts high school. They bond over basketball. Jessica’s husband is neglecting her and her mom is dying of cancer so she and John become friends, and then John starts to think that he’ll never get to move out of the guest bedroom of his own house, so maybe he should look into other options. He initiates the affair. No, Jessica starts it. It doesn’t really matter, though, because either way — his son is the one who finds the dick pics he sent her over LinkedIn, and the topless photo she sent back.

I decide my first semester of college that I want to be a nicer person, after realizing that places exist where I am not always on the defensive. I take a class on love and realize that the world is full of it, even the parts that hurt. Love and fear — that’s all there is, even in anger. Even in grieving. I call my dad before finals week and tell him about James Baldwin and an essay I’m writing on Queen, and he tells me that the kitchen flooded so I should prepare for lots of takeout over break. Insurance will reimburse us for it, though, so it should be fine. I say it’s okay, anything’s better than dining hall food. He laughs. I’m just warning you.

I’m at the dining hall later when my mom calls me and tells me to check in on my brother. I can’t tell you what happened. That night, she cracks, calls me again, and does. Your father’s been texting with another woman. How’d they meet? Work. Oh.

John wakes up on the couch to his wife shoving the phone in his ear. His daughter is on the other line. “How could you?” She throws expletives at him in an order that makes no sense.

“I never cheated on your mother,” he slurs. “I never, ever cheated on her.”

“Bullshit,” she says, but he’s already falling back asleep.

The Thursday before I go home for break, I debate trying to kill myself but can’t figure out a way to do it, because my dorm isn’t tall enough to jump and my roommates know where my epipens are if I try to take myself out with a PB&J, so I settle for an olive branch instead. I write my father a letter about love.

As the anger has faded and understanding has set in, I feel more sad than anything. I am sad because you are my father and I knew you were hurting for a long time and I am sad because you are a good person and I am sad because that loneliness you felt was probably a lot like the loneliness I felt growing up.

On Saturday, my mom picks me up from the Greyhound station and I am stiff as she tries to hug me. I’ve started to think that maybe it wasn’t my dad’s fault at all. My mom knows everything, so she must have known this was going to happen. My mom doesn’t feel pain because she inflicts it. My mom knew she should leave him, so this is what she gets for the in-between.

That night, I find her lying in bed with a pillow over her face. I thought you’d come home and help me, because things have been so awful, but now you’re here and you don’t want to. I have never seen her cry before. I want to be cruel because she deserves it — if not for this, for convincing me as a child that I was completely unlovable — or worse, undeserving of it. But I can’t find it in myself to hurt her. I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven someone before in my entire life, but we are both sitting in the dark four days before Christmas, and I’m trying not to be the person I’ve always been. “I’m sorry,” I say.

She tells me that she took his computer without confronting him, but he knew, and tried to wrestle it away from her, but he wasn’t strong enough. “I was hitting him with my fists,” she says. “He was grabbing me so I kept hitting him.” Later, she noticed that her hands were covered in bruises. But he was unmarked.

John fucks up Christmas and then he fucks up his wife’s birthday three days later because he won’t accept the takeout order over text, and his kids are watching a movie in her room without him. He’s mad and nobody cares enough to stop him, so he takes the car and leaves his phone behind. His daughter wonders if he left to go kill himself, but he comes back a few hours later, announcing his arrival by crashing the car into his in-laws’ garden and knocking over several potted plants. “Fuck this bullshit!” he yells when he’s inside.

He tells his wife that he doesn’t remember anything. I blacked out, he says. I don’t even know where I went. But she found the receipt on the floor of the car, so he can’t gaslight the family out of this one.

My mom calls her 52nd birthday Rock Bottom for my father, but he beats his own record the next week by rekindling his romance with Jessica. I can’t wait to kiss you ;-) he tells her in an email. Like the last time, my mother finds out, but this time, it’s worse.

It’s Purple, now, but Purple’s a nocturnal animal and seeing him during the day is nauseatingly unsettling. He sleeps eighteen hours a day, on and off, and spends his waking hours threatening my brother and I while my mom is at work. I never wanted my life to turn out like this. I think about the letter he wrote me.

I am proud to be your father and so fortunate to be a part of your life. I will always be there for you.

“I never wanted my life to turn out like this.”

I threaten to go to his manager and have them both fired, but he just laughs.

“Your mom can’t afford anything without me, it’s why she can’t leave,” he says. “Do you want your grandparents to die? She can’t take care of them.”

I never wanted my life to turn out like this. I wish he was dead. I tell him so. We start throwing things back and forth. His eyes darken like he might kill us, and my brother and I take the dog and flee to my aunt’s house.

Anger is exhausting, and after a while, I give it up for my sake. My dad starts AA and anger management, and my parents see a couples’ therapist. I go back to college and sit outside in the rain and I don’t want to die as much, I just want to walk to class and back and occasionally make stops in the library to look out the windows. COVID eventually shuts down campus, so I move home, and my mom reveals that he’s talking to Jessica yet again.

As friends! he insists, which is fair enough, because he was only offering to get her coffee the Monday after her mom’s funeral. Still, I compare it to an alcoholic attempting social drinking. Then he tells me I have a lot of nerve blaming him for anything when I’m the one who ruined his life. You’ve caused a lot of grief that I guess you’ll never own up to. He says it like I’ve killed people. Like I sleepwalked to Chicago and strangled Richard in his bed. Like I stabbed Jessica in the neck in front of her husband and three children. Like I was the one who gave her mother cancer.

He already hates me, so I don’t think about it too hard when I punch him in the mouth. A few days later, I write a poem called “Killing My Father In A Poem” and google docs share it with his whole family, who then call my mom, concerned I might actually commit murder. I am mean; I am tired of denying myself the only thing I’ve ever been good at. My brother won’t leave his room because he hates my father so fucking much; he becomes nocturnal so that he can eat without the risk of encountering him. My mom is so worried about fixing her marriage that she forgot to protect us, so now I have to do it myself. This can be love, can’t it? It’s like mercy, isn’t it?

My mother makes me apologize for the poem but I never apologize to his family — fuck you, homemaker mother; fuck you, Libertarian father. I will never forgive you because I don’t have to. I write my father a letter and tell him that I was supposed to be able to count on him but he left for some whore on LinkedIn. I say it more nicely, though, and he interprets it as forgiveness and gives me a hug.

Over the summer, I decide to aspire to kindness again, even if I’m bad at it. I spend a month trying to figure out how to forgive my father and care for my brother at the same time, and end up failing at both. Two weeks later, I try again and get a little better. We’re cordial until autumn, and then I move back to Berkeley and spend every day alone in my apartment. It’s harder to leave home this year than the last, because there was no days-long standoff against my mom to yank me out of the house by my eyelids.

The loneliness gets to me after a few weeks, and I relapse while my roommate is out of town and I’m fighting with my mother. I call the suicide hotline three times a day for a week, so hungry I’m barely conscious, because if I leave my room to go to the kitchen I will have to admit to my housemates that something is very, very wrong with me. On Thursday night, a woman named Heather answers the phone and asks if there’s a safe place for me to go.

I burst into tears. No, I say. There’s nowhere to go.

“Do you have anyone?”

No. There’s nobody. I’m sobbing so hard I can barely speak. I’m bad at loving and so I’ve never done it right, and since I don’t know how to love anybody, nobody loves me back. I want to go to the roof of my apartment and jump off. I want to buy Reese’s from the corner store and lock myself in the bathroom while I suffocate.

“Wow,” Heather says. “That is sad.”

I decide that this is not helping and hang up the phone and go out on my balcony and think about how much homework I have. When I go back inside, still deliberating whether I want to die badly enough to make it happen, I see an email from my dad with the HBO free trial login he set up so that I could watch the last five episodes of Lovecraft Country. I cry so hard I almost pass out from hyperventilating.

I hate my father so fucking much for not choosing me over booze, and I hate him. for choosing his married coworker’s tits over our family. I want my dad back, and I want nothing to do with the person who took him away from me. I don’t know what to do about it, so I read his email eight more times and realize that this is what he looks like when he’s trying, because nobody in our family knows how to name the things we talk about. I try to answer his email but I’m no better. That’s the crux of it. I thought I could be good and honest, but maybe I’m just a person, like him. Like my mom. I can’t tell him what I need or how I feel so I say Thanks! Will watch soon, and never do because the reviews for the last episodes weren’t that good. I fill up a styrofoam cup of ramen with hot water from the shower and eat it on the floor because my pillow is gross and wet from crying into it and my back hurts too much to sit at my desk.

Nothing makes any sense and I am learning to hold two apples in my mouth at once. It’s possible that my father was so unhappy he had an affair but also that he will be sad if I plummet to my death from the roof of my apartment complex. It’s possible that my mother finds me insufferable most of the time but admires me the rest of it. It’s possible that I’m so fucking miserable I would walk in front of a bus if I were to happen upon one, but also that my instant ramen tastes really good.

My parents can’t change what they’ve done to me, so I guess I’ll have to live with it. That’s all there is for people like us — like them, and like me. We hurt each other in ways that never fully heal, and we try not to do it again. We’re better if we’re taught how to do it right from the get-go, but otherwise we ruin everything and spend the rest of our lives atoning.

I call the suicide hotline again when I’m done with my ramen but I’m doing better, so I go to sleep. I wake up and nothing’s changed, but it all feels different anyway. Open wound, shoddy stitches. It’s better than bleeding out.