guy?”
“James.”
“James what?”
Of course, I have no idea what the answer to this question is.
“Vera?”
“Yeah. James—uh—I can’t pronounce it. Starts with a K.”
“James Starts-with-a-K?”
“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
“James.”
“James what?”
Of course, I have no idea what the answer to this question is.
“Vera?”
“Yeah. James—uh—I can’t pronounce it. Starts with a K.”
“James Starts-with-a-K?”
“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
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