Grizzly

When I was younger I used to find the soft snores rumbling from deep within his chest endearing. He was like a giant Grizzly bear in hibernation, big belly and all. Now those snores serve as a reminder of broken promises.

“I promise I’ll stop drinking,” he said after his first DUI.

“I promise this is the last time,” he said after slipping on a patch of ice and getting a concussion while 2x over the legal drinking limit, according to the ER doctor.

“I promise I’ll do better,” he said after my mother’s birthday. After having spent the entire night binge drinking, when he finally showed up, we had to put a blanket under him to drag him into our living room floor so that our tenants wouldn’t see him passed out drunk in the hallway during their dinner party.

I don’t remember what was heavier, the shame or the weight of his unconscious body as my mother and I struggled to drag him in. The blanket was my mother’s idea. She had seen it on one of the medical shows she watches to escape the disappointing truth she refuses to face. You see, my mother is one of those people who likes to pretend there’s nothing wrong. She could be standing in a room, flames all around her, yet she won't admit there’s a fire.

There have been so many broken promises, so many tears, so much shame over the years. Witnessing his drunken antics in public as onlookers cast their judging stares upon him. He never sees those stares nor does he hear the whispers as they pass. He just lays there, in inebriated bliss. I feel his shame. I feel the anger and despair bubbling in the pit of my stomach.

There’s a rattling in his chest now. Every time he snores, I hear a rattling, like a loose nail in a steam radiator, dancing in the pipes as the steam rises to the surface. I even hear it when he’s not around. It haunts me. I wonder if it has been there all along.

The realization that he’s never going to change and I’ll always forgive him because he is my father jolts me awake some nights. My mother has never left him, I suspect she never will. They just carry on in this endless cycle of disappointment and worry. When the clock strikes twelve and he’s not home, Sometimes I wonder if he’s passed out somewhere, whiskey in hand. Sometimes, I’m ashamed to say, I wish he won't come back, at least not like that.

He could’ve been somebody you know. He had a successful business, money to invest, and people who believed in him. Yet, it all went down the drain along with countless empty bottles of whiskey. It’s not too late for me though. I’m plotting my escape. One day I’ll be free. I’ll be free from this Grizzly’s vicious grasp.