If you knew my dad, you knew his refrigerator had a few staples. One was ice cream. Growing up, it was an unwritten rule that the Neapolitan was off-limits. Another was tomato juice. We did not need an unwritten rule to stay away from the V8. A third was Natural Light, the low-quality beer the old man always had around.
I assume he drank Natty Light because it was cheap as hell and we didn’t have much money. As the years progressed and he made more, he’d occasionally splurge for imported beer. But even until the final few months of this life, he had Natty in the fridge.
“You want a beer son?” he’d say.
“Dad, I’m not drinking that. That’s not beer,” I’d reply.
“Son, it’s your heritage,” he’d counter with a hearty laugh.
Dad wasn’t an alcoholic, but he definitely liked his beer. He sipped on a few during the day as he worked from home, and he always had one at dinner. Before he went to bed, of course, he enjoyed a hearty helping of ice cream.
I never thought the drinking was a problem. He didn’t miss events. He was never late. He worked a ridiculous number of hours trying to keep the small family business alive. He always found time to play catch, shoot hoops or go hunting and finishing with my brother and I.
But, after years of sipping on beer throughout the day, and enjoying a couple in the evening, Dad decided that he was drinking too much. One evening when my brother and I were visiting him after our parents divorced, Dad asked us to come outside with him. He walked out with a couple of cases of Natural Light, opened one containers and placed a beer on top of a wooden post.
“I’m drinking this too much, and I’m going to stop,” he said as we walked about 50 feet from the post and turned around.
Dad grabbed his .22 rifle, took aim and pulled the trigger. The can exploded, shooting suds and beer everywhere.
“It’s your turn,” Dad said as he handed me the gun.
My brother and I didn’t need an explanation. We took turns, obliterating 48 cans of beer. On that day in 1994, the old man decided to quit drinking beer cold turkey. He didn’t have another beer for more than five years. During the final 20 years of his life, he’d have a beer here and there, and for a while he had a glass of wine before he went to bed.
When I think about that day, I’m impressed that he could just stop consuming something he’d been drinking for years. Several years later, he did the same thing with chewing tobacco. Years before, he’d quit smoking.
The main reason I was so surprised about that day in 1994 is I never thought drinking that Natty Light was a big deal. But he did. By then, I was almost 18 years old and had only seen my father drunk one time. That happened five years earlier during our last party with the good old folks in Lebanon.
That party and softball game, in 1989, was just a few weeks before we moved to Burlingame. All the men drank a ton of beer, but Dad shifted to hard drinks late that night, something I’d never seen him do, and was completely tanked by early in the morning. He was so out of it that my mother, who left the party earlier to go to sleep, had to come and get us at 3 a.m.
Dad typically woke up by 4 a.m., but on that day, he wasn’t up until noon. He looked awful, spending the afternoon on the couch. I asked how he was feeling, and he said, “I just want to die.” I’d never seen him like this, so I was scared. He made the best of it, telling me to remember this when I thought about drinking. And I did. I rarely drank more than a few beers at parties until my senior year of high school.
That hangover day in 1989 had another scary moment. That afternoon, as I often did in our driveway in rural southwest Missouri, I was hitting rocks. As I was swinging away and running play-by-play of the 1999 World Series with Ernie Webb III hitting a game-winning home run for the Royals, I heard the loud screech of tires, followed by a pop and what sounded like a loud crash down the road.
I didn’t think much of it at the time, figuring a driver had peeled out miles down the road. Ten minutes later, I looked up the road and was startled to see a young man walking up the pavement, clutching his arms, his face and clothes drenched in blood. That was far more scary than seeing Dad struggle.
I dropped my club and sprinted to the house, screaming for Dad and Mom. He might have been hung over, but Dad moved quickly, racing out of the house.
“Oh, my God!” Dad yelled. “Jane, call 911!”
Dad ran to the young man, who turned out to be a high school senior in the area Dan and I rode the bus with until he got his own truck. Dad carried him into the house and laid him on our brand new couch, which my mom had smartly covered with a sheet.
Dad and Mom did what they could for him until the ambulance arrived a few minutes later. He survived, though he has in the hospital for quite a while with severe injuries. We learned later that he’d been driving way too fast when he hit a steep curve not far from our house, lost control and slammed into several trees. Somehow, he managed to walk nearly a half mile up a hill to our house.
We were gone to Kansas a few weeks later. Dad was on his way to sobriety, even if it took a few more years to get there. He never did kick the Neapolitan habit, though.