Another Dumbo Drop

My father recently decided that it would be a good idea for him to become an alcoholic at age 79. You can’t really blame him for wanting to anesthetize himself. My mother is in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease and last year we had to put her into a nursing home.

My parents have been married for 57 years. My father shows up faithfully at the home every day to feed my mother her pureed lunch. My poor mother has been lost to us since August 2003. In the months before, when she was still cognizant, she begged to die as she was slipping in the netherworld.

Last year when Ronald Reagan died, I never thought I would find myself sympathizing with the Reagan family, but I had to chuckle at Ron Jr.’s and Patti Davis’s macabre stories about their own experiences caring for a parent afflicted with some ass-fucking neurological disease. Like the Reagan children, I had developed a black humor about the whole thing. You have too, because the only other alternative is to curl up in bed in a fetal position and bawl your eyes out. I will save the big cry for when my mother passes away, which will be a blessing.

As my mother was slipping in and out of the dementia that would eventually claim her brilliant mind, she was convinced that my father was having an affair with the woman who cuts his hair at Bo-Rics. She almost had me convinced of it, and when I offered to confront the harlot, she begged me not too. My father was extremely hurt by these accusations and would make grand proclamations about how he had been faithful throughout their half-century-plus marriage. It was about this time, that he started hitting the Old Milwaukee and his current favorite, vodka in a water bottle stashed in the glove box of his Chrysler.

It was not a smooth transition into the nursing home. My mother was a breeze – I was relieved that I would get my life back and would no longer have to spend my weekends cleaning up poo – but the old man was a handful. My dad is not the most cerebral guy in the world. He is a lifetime member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. A good part of his career was spent as an electrician working on huge construction projects in downtown Chicago. Riding into the city on the Kennedy Expressway, eight of the buildings he helped build rise from the Chicago skyline.

My father, who served in the Navy during World War II, is still bitterly angry at the Japanese. It’s not uncommon for him to start loudly talking about “the dirty Japs” in restaurants or other public places where there are large numbers of Asians. Another one of his favorite stories, shouted to us in a crowded restaurant, is how he once emptied a bucket of piss off the top of the Equitable Building and laughed as it splashed the other construction workers working on the lower floors.

When my mother first moved into the nursing home, the staff thought my father was adorable. I knew it would last for only a few weeks and soon enough, we began getting calls from them telling us what a huge pain in the ass he had become. Shortly after we had admitted my mother, I got a frantic call early one Sunday morning from the nursing home. The nurses were demanding that we come get my father immediately.

According to my father, one of the Alzheimer patients had wheeled into my mother’s room while he was there visiting and was about to crash into my mother’s shins. My father grabbed the patient’s wheelchair and sent the woman careening down the hall like a Mack truck.

We had to send my father to counseling, which went in one ear and out the other, as well as meet with the nursing home’s social worker. During this meeting, I also learned that my father had been eating other residents’ unfinished lunches and was grabbing food off the food line. He was put on probation and could only visit during certain hours. If he violated the terms of his probation, we were told, my father’s visits to my mother would have to be supervised by one of his adult children. None of us wanted this to happen so we told my father we would kick his ass if there were any more incidents.

Since then, things have been going smoothly between my father and the nursing home staff. We have received only one other call, last winter, from one the CNAs who said that my father had shown up drunk and stinking of alcohol. The CNA was concerned about my father driving home. The call came during a huge snowstorm and my brother and I had to jump in our cars with our respective cell phones and go out looking for him.

We found my father waiting for us at the nursing home. He told us the reason he smelled like booze was because he had spilled Windex all over himself while cleaning his car windows earlier that day. We drove him home, but found out later that he had coerced a neighbor into driving him back to the nursing home so he could pick up his car.

We have come to refer these crises with my father as “Dumbo drops.” Lately, there have been a lot of alcohol-related “Dumbo drops.” Apparently, there was some incident at my brother’s house a few nights ago. My brother found a fifth of vodka lying on the front seat of my father’s car. My father claimed that someone from the Chrysler dealership must have put it there. It was a big mess.

For the past few days, I have been badgered with apologetic phone calls from my father. This morning, he told me he wants to stop drinking. He’s tried lately, but can’t stop. I have been on the phone all morning calling AA, trying to set him up with meetings, other alchys to talk to, etc. He told me he couldn’t go an AA meeting tonight because of severe thunderstorm forecasts.

Since my mother’s illness, it has been every man for himself in my family. It has dredged up all kinds of dysfunctional family shit from the ‘70s between me and my brothers, shit that I’ve spent thousands of dollars in psychotherapy trying to recover from. Other friends are going through similar situations with their own aging parents and I tell them it’s normal.

My father is still the foreman and the boss.

I gave him some numbers to call and he just got off the phone with a guy named Bill. He claims he’s going to an AA meeting tonight at 8 p.m. We’ll see if that happens.