WHIP
I drank the vodka bottles on the plane. . I drank to excess. I was drunk. I’m drunk now. I’m drunk right now. Because I’m an alcoholic.
There we are, the magical, epiphanous incantation. Our resolution: Whip in prison, serving his four or five years’ time, and storytelling to his fellow inmates at an AA meeting:
WHIP
That was it. I was finished. I was done. It was as if I had reached my lifelong limit of lies. I could not tell one more lie. And maybe I’m a sucker, because if I had told just one more lie, I could’ve walked away from all that mess, and kept my false sense of pride. . but at least I’m sober. And I thank God for that. And this is going to sound stupid coming from a guy locked up in prison. But for the first time in my life, I’m free.
And good for him, yes, Whip transforming tragedy into the art of instructive narrative, just as Helen had urged Don. Another happy ending.
Watching Flight, I am so proud of my father. After a year of AA meetings, my father had stopped going — he couldn’t stand the God stuff, all that higher power crap, he said, and they were all a bunch of losers. Fuck it. And he didn’t need it, he felt; he certainly was an alcoholic, sure, a label he now announced to anyone who would listen and wore with a pride I recognized as a self-professed form of distinction. But he could do it all by himself, he insisted,
WHIP
I won’t drink, I can stop on my own,
it would be just that easy, yes,
KIRSTEN
I will just use my willpower and not drink,
and for fifteen years we clenched our stomachs and held our breath, hoping he could stay afloat. But he did do it, all on his own. Not a drop, not a sip. Seeing Whip on the floor, bloodied and rock-bottomed, I am so relieved and grateful those gut-sinking, hold-your-breath days are over, that my father’s final binge didn’t involve the straightjacket or the convulsions, that he didn’t kill himself or anyone else. That he was now, finally and for the first time, free.
But. . I wonder. . isn’t Whip’s sobriety assisted, eased, enabled, just a little, by his being locked up in prison? I’m sure it’s possible to brew up some moonshine out of cafeteria raisins or something. . but what will happen to Whip when he gets out? Into the world of liquor stores and parties and bars with blinking signs, dates with old lovers and a lifetime of habits, the betraying biochemistry of his own body? Is this really the end to his story? Is he really so free?
Because my father isn’t. Now in his eighties, his body has betrayed him, imprisoned him; he can no longer sculpt with his shaking hands and he has fallen multiple times, not because of the alcoholic’s delirium tremens but because of advanced Parkinson’s disease. It is my turn now to sit by his hospital bed, to hold his hand. And he has abandoned everyone, in a way, all of us; he is still retreating from the world, from attempting authentic connection with the people who love him, although that is mostly due to the narcissistic solipsism of old age. But the bitterness of the Tortured Artist remains, amplified by the clock now tick-ticking out on his life. I know he is afraid of death, and I believe it is because he feels, when he dies, that without leaving the artistic legacy he once dreamed of, any record of his existence will simply disappear from the planet. Sometimes I wonder if his longing to be an artist, if his self-perceived failure,
DON
The reason is me, what I am. Or rather, what I’m not. What I wanted to become, and didn’t. .
was what led to his alcoholism.
Some of us drink because we’re not poets.
Or did the alcoholism lead to his inability to bring that identity fully into being?
Or is it just an unlucky, predetermined genetic quirk, a question of biochemistry?
“Your father has started drinking again,” my stepmother told me a few weeks ago. Twice, on two recent occasions — dinner out with friends, a party — had raised that glass of wine to his lips with his shaky hand, guzzled, gulped, swallowed, as the theremin wailed. Then another glass, and another.
Why can’t he just stop at half a glass? my stepmother asked.
Because he’s an alcoholic, was all I could say. One’s too many, and a hundred’s not enough.
And yet I still had to ask him: Why, Dad? After all these years?
He just shrugged. He didn’t even like it the first time, he told me, he didn’t like the taste, or the way it made him feel. So why the second time? He shrugged again.
Fuck it, he said.
I don’t know — he doesn’t know — if it will happen again, if we all have to get back on that merry-go-round, ride it round and round until that blasted music stops. And stops where, at what? The hospital, the holes in the wall — punched by his enfeebled, shaking fist — the smell of his shrinking liver and pickled kidneys, the bloody bathroom floor? At least he isn’t lying anymore. But One day it’s going to kill you, I think, and I am afraid.
And maybe I should also be afraid for myself now. I take after my father so much.
Last night I met my friend Theresa at a hotel bar for a few glasses of cheap Happy Hour house white — for me. She has been sober for twenty-four years and six months, is well-versed in the language of alcoholism. I presented her with the logbook of my drinking behaviors, my subterfuge and self-consciousness. Maybe I am my father’s daughter after all, I tell her. Maybe I am a drunk, not just a drinker. Maybe I am destructive to myself and the people around me; maybe it’s time I take a good hard look at myself and realize I’m turning into a bum. She wasn’t buying it. Perhaps I don’t warrant the actual label, I say, but can you at least acknowledge that I have a “drinking problem”? She agreed it was possible, and we parsed terminology — a “reliance” on alcohol, a “dependency,” an “addictive habit.” But she was more interested in why—not why I drink, but why am I trying to convince her? Why am I so insistent I have a problem?
And I am eleven years old again, fearing invisibility, hoping to be heard. Seeking the distinction and complexity of dysfunction and dark secrets. Hoping to seem deeper and more interesting than I am, to offer evidence of the Tortured Artist to fulfill narrative convention, something to add a justifying glamour to my story.
33Sarah T. — Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (Universal Television, 1975): written by Esther Shapiro and Richard Alan Shapiro; directed by Richard Donner; with Linda Blair, Verna Bloom, Larry Hagman, Mark Hamill, and Michael Lerner
34The Lost Weekend (Paramount Pictures, 1945): screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, based on the novel by Charles R. Jackson; directed by Billy Wilder; with Ray Milland and Jane Wyman
35Arthur (Warner Bros., 1981): written and directed by Steve Gordon; with Dudley Moore, Liza Minnelli, John Gielgud, and Jill Eikenberry
36Days of Wine and Roses (Warner Bros., 1962): screenplay by J. P. Miller, based on his teleplay; directed by Blake Edwards; with Jack Lemmon, Lee Remick, and Jack Klugman
37When a Man Loves a Woman (Buena Vista Pictures, 1994): written by Ronald Bass and Al Franken; directed by Luis Mandoki; with Meg Ryan and Andy Garcia