My Father: An Alcoholic Analysis

Help me somebody help me For almost half his life, my father has been an alcoholic. He would never drink in front of me when I was little, but slowly I grew accustomed to the sight of empty green glass bottles in the garage. Sometimes he would use them as makeshift ashtrays, filling them with water before shoving in Marlboro butts until they reached the top of the glass. I used to look at them with confusion – dozens of white sticks with blackened tips, jammed into a Heineken and left to drown in the tobacco-stained water. My grandmother, however, would smother her cigarettes in a crystal cut glass ashtray until their bodies broke in half, and their lights were extinguished. I never understood why my father preferred his strange method of

He was supposed to drive me home, but after numerous calls that led to voicemail, I deduced he had drunk himself to sleep. It was normal for him to do so. Tired of his recurring unreliability, I figured I should know how it all started. She responded vaguely, answering with descriptions of my father’s drunken calamities. The one I remember the strongest was a night where my father had disappeared entirely; during that time he and my family owned a restaurant which they regularly managed, making his absence apparent and worrisome, especially to my mother. By then, they were well aware of his condition, and attributed his disappearance to alcohol. The night passed, they closed the restaurant, and my father was still missing. When my uncles began to look around the general vicinity of the restaurant, they found him unconscious on the side of the

My mother did not say what happened next, and I did not bother to ask. It was clear enough – my father survived the ordeal yet remained unconvinced that his addiction was slowly consuming him. His ailment has plagued him and his family for years, and has taken its toll emotionally and physically. What pushes a man to drink himself to the side of the road? What requires such an excess of indulgence and a purposeful alteration of the mind to the point of pain – pain to himself and the ones who love him? Is it the selfishness that lies dormant in man, to put himself over others in all his actions? Or is there a pain causing the addiction that lies in secrecy, hidden away like the small bottles stashed in brown paper bags? After a while, I do not think my family cared why he drank. Instead, they concerned themselves with dealing with him as a drunk: the shouting over dinner, his stubbornness to drive despite being clearly inebriated, and his terrible, shitty moods. After a while, we all grew