Shades of Eva (7 page)

He gave me a gesture of secrecy, placing an
index finger playfully to his lips as he handed me the key. He ran
a hand through my hair, and said, “Happy birthday!”

My trembling ceased. My skin warmed just a
bit, and my eyes met the prideful eyes of my father. Maybe that was
what it was like to be a son. 

Dad had a makeshift liquor cabinet in the
toolshed. It was a four drawer filing cabinet he called his
toolbox. The toolbox bore a label on each drawer. From top to
bottom
: nuts and bolts, wrenches, hammers,
and
drill bits
and drives
. The shed was a kind of speakeasy, heretofore
accessible only to Dad. I didn’t know what to expect inside, but I
was hopeful the shed contained the gifts I so badly wanted: that
football and maybe that toy truck.

It was an otherwise forlorn, forbidden place
of wonder and great mystery. I watched Dad enter that shed on many
occasions, entering in one mood—usually somber and sometimes
enraged—emerging minutes, sometimes hours later in another
mood—usually sedate, and sometimes manic. That was the mystery of
the toolshed—it seemed a place that transformed Dad. That’s what
frightened me about it. That’s what frightens me now, looking back
on it. That toolshed was transformative, and not in a good way.

So when Dad offered to let me pull the lock
on its door and wished me happy birthday that day, I was filled
with surprise and a little bit of honor, hope, and yes, confusion.
Dad had intended on taking care of me, but this didn’t feel like
the verge of a whipping. It felt like the undertaking of a rite of
passage.

The toolshed was a rickety, clapboard
structure on a concrete slab. It had a barn style door and no
windows. When I first stepped in, it smelled of stale beer and
must, much like the way Dad smelled most of the time. There was a
mash of bugs littering the floor—earwigs mostly—some dead, some
alive, and a cotton candy of webs hanging from the ceiling. The
roof consisted of slightly pitched trusses upon which a few sheets
of blood-red tin, porous, rusty, and dented from years of falling
walnuts and weathering, had been tacked. Dad had screwed four
eyehooks into some of the trusses from which hung two old bicycles,
also covered in cotton candy, and just as rusty as the old tin
roof.

Dad swept the bugs aside with his foot and
ripped a handful of webs from the rafters, then gestured me over to
take a seat on a stool.

He was rifling through a cup perched on an
inside shelf. He was looking for another key, he said, one that
would unlock the toolbox, and each of its mysterious drawers. He
playfully fished for it as if this were a game he was playing, as
if he was fishing for that toy I had been wanting. He told me to
relax, to wait, to be patient, explaining that there was a magic
key therein, a key to a gift, a key to another universe even, one
meant for just him and me.

I was mystified watching him, waiting to see
what the magic key looked like, wondering what other universe there
was—and what a universe was to begin with. I was expecting a
skeleton key, something grand or golden like you see on TV.

The key he pulled from the cup was tiny. It
was a small, rusty key, smaller even than the key to the outside
door. Dad handed it to me and with a prideful, expectant glare, he
said, “This is for you, son. Go ahead and open up the toolbox.”

He lifted me up and I inserted the key into
the cabinet’s lock, turned it, and listened to a click resonate
like a pistol misfiring in an empty room. I can still hear that
resonant click to this day. As I opened that drawer, my
disappointment returned, however. There was no truck inside. There
was no ball. There was only a bottle with a strange design on it
and a word I’d never seen that started with a J. 

My first drink wasn’t a splash
of
light beer; it was a shot of Irish whiskey called Jameson. It
tasted like a cross between the castor oil Mom was fond of giving
me, and gasoline. It nearly turned my stomach. It would have if it
hadn’t been for the smile on Dad’s face. You see, in that shed I
was given a sort of paternity test: I could swallow and ask for
more, or I could gag and throw it up. I could be a son, still in
the moment with his father, or a nobody, restless and alone.

I chose to swallow, clenched my teeth, then
swallowed again, and then asked for more.

Dad was impressed. He was smiling, and I
think he was surprised, too, at my resolve, judging by the upturned
eyebrows punctuating his face as I gestured for yet another cup. He
gave me a little more and I was initiated, finally, into his
transformative universe, a place of mutual torment and simultaneous
pleasure that only an alcoholic can truly understand. I had found a
momentary peace, both in my father’s drunken smile and in the
effect the whiskey had on my tiny body. Though I had had only a
little, the drink stilled me and it allowed me to be—at least for a
moment—what Dad always wanted me to be. I was the still son he
wanted: a chip off the old Rennix block, and for a few moments
sipping drinks in that speakeasy with Dad, I was happy.

And how the whiskey’s flowed ever since!

And so from sobriety to stillness I swung;
from a drunken peace to a sober state of agitation I swayed for the
remainder of the summer. I was riding a sort of pendulum with my
father, oscillating between total elation and physiological agony,
and I was only five.

You might wonder about the likelihood of
such a story. I often wonder about it myself. Mom thought me sick,
whatever the truth. She must have smelled the alcohol on me some of
those days, but I think she dismissed the idea that I could be
drinking for two reasons: the entire house carried with it the
faint aroma of whiskey because the house carried with it the faint
aroma of Dad—and I
was
only five. How likely was it that Mom
could have the world’s youngest alcoholic for a son?

Mom didn’t know about the toolbox. She
didn’t know about the frequent visits Dad and I paid it in those
subsequent weeks—weeks leading up to the shooting when Mom killed a
man in there. She didn’t know about the extra key or the birthday
paternity test Dad had given me. She only knew that something was
different, that something wasn’t right with me, and that something
had to be done.

She called the pendulum I rode a mood swing,
and mood swings were something Mom knew something about. She said
they could commit me for them, and that it had happened to her, so
to be careful. She said there were doctors in hospitals who watched
for such things.

That made me think of Dr. Norris and Dr.
Shurz, and it scared me. It didn’t scare me enough to make me stop
drinking, though. Drinking with Dad was all I had in those days. It
became all I ever wanted.

I overheard Mom on the telephone sometime
later telling a friend, “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think
Mitchell was pregnant! He’s been throwing up every morning for two
weeks like a woman with child.”

So as the summer of 1970 came to an end, so
did my childhood in a way. I was by the age of five an addict, and
eternity was just a gunshot away.

***

He
who checks a child with terror,

Stops its play and stills its song,

Not alone commits an error,

But a great and moral wrong!

~David Bates

1970

The waning months of summer had given way to
a chilly fall. The air was perfumed with alpine, hop sedge and
honeysuckle, tinged with the hint of a bonfire. A thin layer of ash
from a billion burning leaves covered the neighborhood and made me
sneeze. On most days the breezes swept that ash to one side of the
compass, toward places I’d never seen before. In Michigan the
leaves morph into an array of vivid colors in autumn. Delicious
greens, bright yellows, poignant oranges, and hearty reds paint
their leaves like billions of tiny Monet creations. The sunnier the
autumn, the livelier the colors on those leaves. They fall like
confetti in the breezes, and they dot their streets in blotched
colorful prints that bring a life to an otherwise colorless
pavement. In our neighborhood, people raked those leaves into
wonderful piles of tree-colored fun and would dump them at the curb
in front of their houses to be picked up later by huge vacuum
trucks. Boys like me would use those piles as play things, leaping
into them and cocooning ourselves in them, coloring ourselves with
their crispy, tickling surfaces, and laughing all the while. We’d
hide beneath them and make forts out of them, then rake them back
into bigger piles and do the same all over again.

Mom pulled me from the bottom of one of
those piles one day and told me it was time to see the doctor. She
brushed what soot she could brush off of me as if she’d just pulled
me form the hearth of a fireplace and off we went…again.

Mom had taken me to a few different doctors
that fall, none of whom found anything wrong with me. I wasn’t
underfed. My eyes were clear. My feet jumped when the doctors
tapped my knees with those odd-shaped hammers, and my pupils
followed their fingers like a cat’s eyes following a swinging
canary in a cage. My skin was healthy except for the soot-smudges
and Monet stains of those colored leaves, stains that prompted this
bemused doctor to comment, “He’s quite a colorful kid, isn’t he,”
to which Mom offered an apology and a deep sigh.

“I’m sorry!” she told him. “I will give him
a good bath as soon as we get home.”

The doctor responded to Mom’s apology with a
confused look, the kind of expression given to those who’ve
responded to an otherwise innocent remark with unexpected shame.
His reaction, and Mom’s, made me hang my head. I was, again, the
subject of confusion and I didn’t dare say why.

I had a faint aroma of alcohol about me to
go along with the scent of burning leaves, but that was nothing
odd. Mom smelled faintly like alcohol, too. I remember him asking
Mom about it. “Do you keep alcohol in the house?” He was looking at
me as he asked the question.

“No. No we don’t,” Mom said, somewhat
emphatically. “His father drinks, but I don’t allow alcohol in the
house!”

And then came the question that intensified
Mom’s irritation, and frightened me. “Is there a chance,” the
doctor pressed, “that Mitchell might be somehow…that he might be
drinking with your husband?”

Mom’s eyes grew wide, and so did mine. “No!
There’s no way Brad would allow such a thing.”

The doctor was careful, but he was
assertive. “I detect a little ethanol on his breath.”

“That’s probably the castor oil I gave him
this morning.” Mom looked to me as if I was supposed to validate
her.

I nodded and a bit of ash from my hair fell
onto the doctor’s floor. Mom had given me a dose of that stuff
earlier that day, so it wasn’t a lie.

The doctor seemed to sense how explosive Mom
just might be, and how agitated she was becoming over the
conversation, but this doctor was undeterred. He knelt down in
front of me and asked with a gentile tone, “Mitchell, have you ever
been given alcohol—like a beer or something other than castor oil?”
I looked to Mom, but the doctor turned my chin back to face him.
“By anyone?”

I shook my head.

He stood up and shook his.

My diagnosis: migraine headache. Treatment:
none. “He’ll outgrow them,” the doctor told Mom, as if the
headaches I was getting were but a pair of shoes soon to be too
small for my feet.

Turns out he was wrong on two counts: my
headaches weren’t migraines, and I never outgrew them. They were
something called hangovers, and they’d stay with me until I chose
to toss them away.  

I came home from that appointment
as
thirsty as I was dirty—and ready to play. To my chagrin, Dad was
still gone. Mom was trying to corral me to bathe, but I wanted to
get back outside, to get back to the leaves and to the ground. I
ran from Mom as I’ve been running from her all my life, and took
the Frisbee Tweedle Dee (or maybe it was Tweedle Dumb) had given me
and stormed out of the house. I tossed it angrily into the backyard
as far as I could, and then ran after it.

River Bluff was on the verge of a storm. In
a way that’s how I remember feeling, as if there was a tempest
brewing inside of me. My insides were churning as if I was filled
with a thousand little butterflies, and I didn’t know why. I
thought it might be anger, but the more I studied the butterfly
sensation, the more I realized it was connected to a feeling of
thirst, which was somehow connected, now, to the toolshed and to
the liquor cabinet inside of it.

When I approached the shed’s doorway, the
breeze picked up. The air had somehow cooled itself. I looked up
into the swirling sky, churning as if God had given the dirty
autumn atmosphere a giant stir, and put an ear to the wind. I was
listening for Dad, listening for his laughter or for his call,
distracting myself with my Frisbee and the earwigs falling in large
clusters from the back of the toolshed’s door. They dropped to the
ground when I opened it and scattered. They crawled to whatever
hiding places they chose, and then they were gone as if they were
never there to begin with.

I distracted myself with tiny nips from the
Jameson bottle, and took my seat on the stool Dad had raised a few
weeks ago for me. The stool had one of those spinning seats that
when turned one way, rises, and when spun the other, lowers. It was
a fun thing to play with, and a fun toy to ride when the whiskey
was doing its thing. It made me dizzy like a merry-go-round makes
you dizzy, and off of it I often fell, usually laughing as I did
so.

Finally the thunder came.

Everything was magnified sitting on that
stool—the thunder, rolling in deep, powerful booms; the walnuts
banging the tin roof like billiard balls being tossed onto an empty
metal drum. Even Mom’s calls for me to come in took on a shrill
impatience; they were ripping through the wet atmosphere like a
siren screaming or a banshee yelling. Everything was magnified in
that shed, especially the solitude.