Please Ignore Vera Dietz(22)
Author: A.S. King

“Can I go to bed now?”

He leans in and inhales. I am so up shit’s creek.

“Yeah. Go to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.” He puts his coat back on the hook and looks out the front window. The flashing cop car is gone, and so is James’s car. I go to the bathroom and wash the feeling of getting caught off my face. I’m feeling more like my mother every day.

A BRIEF WORD FROM KEN DIETZ (VERA’S FRUSTRATED DAD)

Vera thinks I don’t know she’s drinking. As if my past is just a vocabulary word (alcoholic [noun] 1. a person who habitually drinks excessive amounts of alcohol) that will stay in the past. She has no idea what it means to be me. She has no idea that when she came in the house stinking of liquor, part of me wanted to hop off this seventeen-year-old wagon and tap into her veins to suck out the booze. In one way, I hope she never understands this. In another way, I wish she’d look beyond herself once in a while. But that’s a side effect of alcohol, isn’t it? Stopping to think about other people is not on the bar menu.

I had my first beer when I was ten. My teenage brother Caleb and his friends were having a tent sleepover party in our backyard and one of the boys brought a six-pack of Michelob. I stole a bottle and drank it in the shadow of our brick bi-level. It didn’t make me feel drunk. It made me feel a little bit sick. From my bunk bed a half hour later—where our brother Jack slept above me, seemingly immune to the low self-esteem Caleb and I inherited from our father walking out when we were kids—I could hear the boys fighting over who drank the last beer, but no one ever figured it was me, because I was ten and still messing around with cap guns and frogs.

But from that night on, all I ever wanted was the next drink. Which was easy to get, because my brothers and my mother always had something in the fridge I could steal.

In junior high school, I became good pals with the truancy officer in the area. He’d pick me up from home a few mornings a month when I’d oversleep from a hangover and bring me to school in the back of his cop car.

“You know, son, I think I know why you’re oversleeping.”

“So?”

“So I think you should know that if you get caught drinking at your age, you won’t be allowed to get a driver’s license.”

“So?”

“So don’t you want to get a car and drive the girls around? Don’t you want to get a job and grow up and make some money?”

“No.”

He sighed. “Well then, you’d better get used to sitting in the back of squad cars,” he said. “Because I’ve got my eye on you.”

Mostly, I’d steal liquor from my mother, or from her friends’ houses when I went to mow their lawns on the weekend. Then I’d go to the 99¢ noon matinee and drink up through whatever movie was playing at the time. I was a complete drunk by the time I was in tenth grade. I got a part-time job at the Burger King at the end of our road, and started stealing from the till once I found a manager who would buy me a fifth of Jack Daniel’s at the state liquor store. That job lasted three months. Then I got a job at the Snappy Mart across the road. Rather than steal from the till, I started to give wrong change to customers for my booze money. It worked, too. I got really good at reading people to see if they’d count their change or not. The best were distracted mothers who either had kids with them or left them in the car, with one eye always toward the window. They never checked their change, and if they did, by the time they noticed I’d shorted them five bucks, they had the kids strapped into the car and wouldn’t bother coming back in.

The worst, of course, were old men. Old men always count change.

That job lasted a while. Almost two years. I’d shortchange enough people each night to pay Caleb for a trip to the liquor store or beer distributor. My boss didn’t mind me working drunk, and Cindy Sindy, my girlfriend since junior high, didn’t mind me not buying her anything. She’d say, “I don’t love you for your money.”

I dropped out of high school after Christmas my senior year. The vice principal had it in for me and gave me detention every day for not making it to detention every day before that. But I told him I had a job and couldn’t miss it.

“If you felt the same way about school, you wouldn’t be in this position in the first place.”

“I work until midnight and I’m tired,” I’d say. But really, I’d work until midnight, drink until about four, and then pass out until noon, when I’d decide, ultimately, that I’d missed too much of the school day to go in. My mother had given up on me long before the vice principal did. Our last conversation about school, while she signed the forms the vice principal gave me to drop out, went something like this:

“Why couldn’t you be more like Jack?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wish I could be.” Jack loved school. Loved dissecting frogs, doing word problems, going to football games, and dating cheerleaders. He was already in college, learning how to make money off money.

“At least Caleb got a trade. At least he got something.”

“Yeah. He was lucky.” Caleb was a cabinetmaker and worked in a shop making kitchens.

She looked up from signing and slapped the pen down on the table. “Damn it, Kenny! When’re you gonna stop blaming everyone else for your shit? Caleb isn’t lucky! He’s responsible!”

What I’d meant was, Caleb was lucky to land a job and keep it while being a closet drunk. Because he had my father’s drinking genes, too.

In the end, I went to AA first, after one night babysitting Vera when she was seven months old. She wouldn’t stop crying and it started to drive me crazy and I thought, just for a split second—a split second that would turn out to be life-changing—that I should shake her or stuff her head in a pillow or something to make her stop. The only reason she was crying was because I was too drunk to remember to feed her. Lucky for both of us, Cindy Sindy came home from the club and found me half nuts, pacing the house, hugging the baby, crying like Vera was. I remember she said, “Ken, look at you! You’re worse than her!”

The next day, I went to my first meeting. Caleb followed me eight years later, after losing three of his fingers to a table saw because he was drinking on the job.

I’ve warned Vera about the drinking genes, but she acts like it’s funny. She jokes about stripper genes too, but she’s too young to understand the situation Cindy Sindy was in when she was born and I was drunk. Plus, youth is judgmental. With time, she will experience enough shit to free her own demons. I just wish I could give her a ticket to pass Go faster.