My mother died and, as a result, my father drank. He drank a lot. He would sleep all day in his dark bedroom, the bedroom where his wife had died, locked up tight to keep everyone away, and then he would drink some more. During this period my father survived on a diet of Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls. And beer, obviously. Oh, how he drank beer.
I remember a family friend bringing my father home one evening. My father was so drunk that I was entrusted to check on him throughout the night to make sure he didn’t choke on his own vomit and die in his sleep. I was thirteen. (The family friend would later go through a messy divorce and become an even more pathetic shambling drunk than my father was [quite a feat!]. No idea why he thought it was appropriate to saddle a teenage boy with the responsibility of safeguarding his grown-ass father like that.) Appropriately, I was listening to Alice Cooper's classic anti-drugs/booze/sex/fun screed Hey Stoopid when I got the call to watch my pop snore drunkenly.