Author’s Note: I also wrote this about a year ago. The theme was taking something of a “Sacred Cow” in American culture and turning it around. I chose to express my lack of excitement for turning 21.
Hell’s Bells
First 13, 16, 18 and then the big 21. It’s the last age before there’s nothing left to look forward to except retirement. Thirteen-year-olds and up dream of reaching 21—becoming a grown-up and looking cool—because by 21 you’ll have a future set and beer and/or bar picked out for your first legal alcoholic purchase. Twenty-one is the age when you get asked for your ID, a smile appears on your face because this time, you’re legit. Enter the liquor store and walk confidently toward an alcoholic beverage that an older friend has recommended to you. I mean, first you’ll dribble in glory at the irrational selection of beer and liquor, but after, the recovery period will begin as you wonder where that Malibu Rum is located. After fulfilling your Quest for Malibu, you’ll head to the cashier and mentally check your inventory for your license.
“Hi, did you find what you’re looking for?”
A “YES,” accompanied with a happy grin.
“Hm… that’ll be $14.32.”
Are you not going to ask me for my ID?
“Oh, and your ID please.”
Yay! “Sure…. Here you go.”
A quick glance and an assured nod.
Oh, snap. Sweet legal victory.
It’s the dream of the underage college student who wants to party but can’t always because you’re in the post-jailbait stage but haven’t reached the top of the “cool” food chain yet.
The age between 18 and 21 is the awkward in-between stage. You aren’t quite a teenager anymore, but you’re not a full-fledged adult yet. You can buy lottery tickets, buy cigarettes, be tried as an adult, marry without parental consent, get a tattoo and/or piercing, join the army, rent a hotel room and buy porn. Added to the perks at age 21 are purchasing alcohol, renting a car and legally owning a handgun. Ironically, it’s at 18 you get the majority of rights an adult does but it isn’t until 21 comes around that you really feel like you’ve gained something special. Probably because that’s the last line of defense in society’s efforts to keep you sheltered. So long, the age of innocence and goodbye immaturity (in theory). You can still be an addict for dramatics but acting your age will be expected much more often.
Turning 21 means I don’t have to get those annoying tags whenever I enter a bar. I’m not much of a drinker, but it’s nice to accompany a group of friends and laugh at their drunken antics, especially, when I can convince them to re-enact scenes from Jackie Chan’s “Drunken Master”. Drunks are hilarious. The hilarity of drunk martial arts is almost ruined because it irritates me whenever I look down and I’ve got an X, a smiley face or one time, a Mickey Mouse stamp on the back my hand to mock the fact that I was born a bit later than everyone else. They scream “CAUTION: BABY IN THE BAR.” The blurry ink of the markers or stamp leaves behind a lingering buzz, like cacophony of knocking in the back of my head. My stamps pulse with annoyance and the unrelenting reminder that even though I’ve had my fair share of life experiences, I’m still not cool enough to drink. I’ll get my dignity back when I turn 21. My friends, the alcoholics, the drunks and the bartenders will see my clean hands and look away, trying to search out some other schmuck with the mark of Cain.
Nevertheless, that’s all I have to look forward to. I’m not that excited to be seen as an adult. I already am. It won’t make a difference to me that I’ve added another tally to my years, except in the bars department. Turning 21 doesn’t mean I get to stop paying bills or my rent or working 39 hours a week to support myself. If anything, there’s more of a burden placed on you because being a teenager means you’re exempt from real-world responsibilities. The two-one means that whenever I go home now, my dad will send me to all the Valeros, Shells and Texaco’s of my hometown to buy beer for him. Twenty-one will be the stage of my life where I have to decide whether to feed my father’s alcohol addiction.
I’ll be in the living room of my home, lounging in the old leather couch that doubles as my bed, flicking through the channels and admiring the Guide feature that comes with our cable. Then I’ll hear it. The bellow of my father’s deep voice will cause an echoing discord throughout the halls of my house.
“MIJA!!!!”
I’ll stay silent, hoping to feign sleep and escape daughterly duties.
“MARICRUZ! MIJAAAAAA!”
A pause.
A phone call.
The beginning of “Hell’s Bells” will ring because no one ever said my father wasn’t insistent or lazy. He loves that I chose that ringtone for him. My fascination with AC/DC matches his love for guitars with badass beats.
I’ll answer.
“Huh?”
“Go get me beer.”
“Aw, why can’t Mom do it?”
“Because she’s not your slave. Now go get me beer.”
“UGH. Fine… Gimme money.”
“OK, come get it. And hurry up.”
I’ll get up, walk the few feet from the living room to my parent’s room and wait impatiently while my father digs out a ten from his wallet without moving from his recliner.
“Here. Keep the change.”
He always lets me keep the change. When I was younger, I’d ask for five dollars and he’d give me 20. He’s always been generous when it comes to giving his kids money.
“OK. What do you want?”
I know what he wants. I just pretend I don’t.
“A six-pack of Miller Light. And hurry up.”
I’ll head to the store and bitch under my breath the whole time, wishing I were back on the sofa and basking in the atmosphere of lethargy. I’ll get his six-pack of Miller Light and the only highlight of my trip will be when the bitter store clerk asks for my ID. I’ll smirk triumphantly because I’m old enough to pass the legal test. Then I’ll go back home, sink-sigh into my favorite couch and wait for my father to howl again in a couple of hours so I can fetch him some more.
And I can’t refuse to go and buy him beer. It’s not how it works with him. His temper overwhelms and consumes everyone. I still don’t know if he’s more of an asshole off or on alcohol. I don’t think I want to know, because I like to think the alcohol makes him worse. It makes me feel better to use the alcohol as an excuse for his crap behavior. My interaction with him sober is limited as is, mostly because he works nights and I go to school during the day. Essentially, 90 percent of the memories I have of my father feature a beer in his hand. The beer-in-hand will trigger two modes in him: the loud and funny drunk or the glowering, belligerent drunk.
My dad and I have a history of rotten verbal exchanges and violence. At 13, I developed insomnia because I made the mistake of falling asleep before he got home and he hit my mom. He’s always been an aspiring party animal. He would go out to the bars every weekend and come back the next day, smelling of smoke, perfume and ruined parentage. Multiple beers in his system transformed him from an awkward father trying to get in touch with his family to a belligerent jerk ready for to yell. He’d get home and try to start fights with my mother. Understand I’m not the type of person to hide in the face of adversary, so at 13, I’ll be damned if I’m going to let somebody get away from messing with my mother. None of this hiding under the cover business. I’d sleep at 3 a.m., at least an hour after he’d get home to ensure my family’s safety. For some reason, I couldn’t stay awake one night. I fell asleep on my vigil. I woke up two hours later to the sound of muffled arguments and a clenched heart. Usually, I intervene and keep my dad’s fist at bay. He refrains from hitting his children but he has no qualms lifting his hand to the wife. So logically, my presence between him and my mom will escalate yelling but keep violent levels brimming but not bursting. But on the night I gave in to sleep, this one night of all nights, he hit her. I fucked up. I failed. I wasn’t there to protect her. I hadn’t been there to stop him and he hit her. I haven’t slept before midnight in seven years because of that.
At 16, I got kicked out of the house because I got the courage to give him shit for borrowing money from me to buy beer. He’s what some would call “pig headed” and because I am my father’s daughter, the argument exploded and I evacuated the house. It was the weekend so I hid out at Barnes and Noble for most of the day, taking updates from my mother and waiting for the moment when I could walk back in my home without crying. I wasn’t apart of the family for one day and six hours, until he sobered up and realized what he’d done. My mom asked me to come back finally. I had made my way through the science fiction section and settled into the fiction before I received an invitation. When I got home, he said he wanted to stop drinking less because he knows how he gets when the beer takes over. He didn’t apologize though. Too stubborn to do it. I didn’t either. If he didn’t apologize, I sure as hell wasn’t going to for standing up to him.
At 18, I remember hiding my mom and brother in my room with a bat in my hand, my back barricading the door and listening to him pounding and pulsing for us to come out. He’d exploded after my mother and I had cornered him and started lecturing him on his drug use. We should’ve waited during the day, when he was sober. We started in the garage, an argument ensued and a volcano erupted. He argued, my mom yelled back and I cried.
My dad may be a jackass and an asshole and every other curse word imaginable but he’s also my father, which means he’s family and that means I love him unconditionally. I can’t help it. He’s my dad. He’s made his mistakes, I know full well he does, and I may not like him that much, but I still love him and I still care. It’s not like he’s a purposeful asshole. One time, when a news story came on about a local family whose house had burned down, my dad went through our junk pile in the garage to donate to them. He’s always lending out his tool collection to neighbors or friends who need a helping hand. I just don’t think he knows how to be a dad. My parents had me when they were 18. My mom fresh out of high school and my dad a high school drop-out for two years already. They did what they could and the loved me. I always had the fleeting suspicion that my dad wanted a boy, just because it would make it so much easier for him to talk. Just because my dad and I are of the same blood doesn’t mean we automatically connect. There’s an awkward tension between us but it’s not hostile. It’s a quiet disconnection. I’m pretty sure our thoughts are on the same wavelength in each other’s presence.
Should I ask him about work?
Would it be weird if I mentioned the Cowboys to him? Crap, I don’t even know who’s who now… who’s the quarterback again? …I’ll just sound stupid.
What should I say???
When I left for college is when my dad and I really started to form a better relationship. Why? Because he missed me even though we didn’t interact all that much at home. How could I tell? He drunk-dialed me just about every night. Our conversations were short and sweet.
“HIIIIII MIJAAAAAAAAAAAA!” I could always tell he was drunk because he shrieked into the phone.
“Hi, Dad.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m studying. How about you?”
“I’m here with your mom. How’s school? Everything OK?”
“Yup. Everything’s fine. All my classes are going well.”
“Do you have money?”
“Yeah, I’ve got some. I just got paid and everything.”
“Well, good, because I don’t have any because your mom took it away from me. Can I borrow some?”
“Um, NO.” Mild annoyance.
A chuckle from him. “Well, call your mom if you need anything.”
“K.”
“Love youuuuuuuuuu!”
An exasperated sigh from me. “Love you too, Dad…”
End call.
I looked forward to these calls all the time.
At 18, I became the co-conspirator to his unhealthy lifestyle by scoring his cigarettes. I’d hand-deliver his pack and watch him inhale the smoke that rots away at his lungs and heart. Those small white cylinders dispatch tiny carcinogenic razors into his body and eventually led to his heart attack.
My father is a 39-year-old diabetic. His heart tried to commit suicide when he was 37 because of his excessive drinking and smoking. When his heart tried to quit, we were two days away from Thanksgiving. My father is the kind of guy who isn’t going to stop something until he gets a warning. A major warning. It’s like laws. The government didn’t realize you were supposed to wear your seatbelt until people started flying with twisted metal and shattered glass. Then people started whispering and thinking that when others met their death while trying to pull an unintentional Cirque de Soleil wasn’t a good idea.
My dad is like that. When his heart attack happened, he quickly changed his ways and went cold turkey for six months. It was great. He lost weight. He said he felt better, but only after he detoxed because a guy who’s been smoking and drinking since he was 14 can’t quit quick without after effects. My family had some extra cash because we weren’t wasting it on beer. He stayed at home much more often. Before he’d spend a few nights out of the month at a bar or waking up in places even he didn’t know. Now he was home all the time and I got a decent amount of sleep because I didn’t have to stay up for him to get home. However, things can’t always stay classy.
He slowly started sneaking in cigarettes and light beer around the seventh month. I remember walking out to take my brother to Wal-Mart and seeing him outside with a burning ember in his hand. I double-taked.
“What’s that?” I asked in disbelief and disgust.
“Mija, it’s just one. It’s not going to do anything.”
“Are you serious?”
“Mija… C’mon, it’s OK.”
NO, it’s NOT.
I didn’t say anything. I kept walking toward my car.
Said he felt so great he thought the doctors had reset his lungs, liver and arteries. Now it was as if he had a new body to destroy.
The jaded journalist in me squirmed. Yaaaay, my dad really is an alcoholic. This is gnarly material for when I go through my Emo Stage…
Since then, his drinking and smoking habit have returned full force, knocking me down and leaving the family feeling helpless three times as bad. We know what it’s like now to see someone you love gasp for breath and cling to the dashboard as you drive them to the hospital. Now I know how pale he can get. He’s a full-bloodied Mexican, red-skinned because of the sun. He shouldn’t ever be that white. It’s weird. The white sheets of the hospital bed don’t help contrast, they emphasize.
Turning 21 means sentencing my father to another round of “Epic Heart Failure”. Starting my car to go to the store thickens the fat in his arteries. When I open the door to the freezers and grab the handle to the beer, I’ll see large fatty globules latching onto his liver cells and making plans for D-Day. Giving the store clerk the money and stepping out of the door will reflect the day I have to run out of my house to get the car started for the race to the hospital. Turning off the ignition of my car will stop the beating of his heart. Handing him the beer will signal the death of my dad as he flat lines on a stiff hospital gurney. I’ll never hear “Hell’s Bells” again without crying.
I don’t want to turn 21. Even though I think getting marked at bars is one of the most irritating things in the world, I’d much have the whole spectrum of colors represented on the back of my hand than buy beer for my dad and watch him kill himself. It’s not Peter Pan syndrome. I’ll take paying a mortgage and a 401k any day. I’m a semi-insomniac and emotionally retarded because of him. By all standards and statistics, I should be following in his footsteps, drinking myself into oblivion and swapping hospital beds for bar stools. I don’t get drunk because I’ve seen what it does to him. I don’t smoke because I’ve seen him out of breath from climbing up two flights of stairs. I avoid confrontation because I’m afraid I’ve inherited his temper. I appreciate that though. I wouldn’t be who I am now if it weren’t for him. I just hope he can see me grow up to be his opposite.
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