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59 SHIT GATHERS IN GENERAL AREA OF FAN 6 You-know-who came home in a foul mood tonight.” That sentence, in one of Mom’s 1958 letters, was the lump in the breast, the iceberg off starboard bow. In 1958, the term “chemical dependency” didn’t exist. “Boozer” might have. “Party guy,” definitely. But “alcoholic”? “Chemically dependent”? Forget about it. Alkies flew under the radar. You could smack the wife, wreck the car, take a shit in the neighbor’s birdbath, and as long as you showed up for work on time all anybody did was roll his eyes. “Having a delicious highball or two is a great way to unwind,” read the magazines. Even today when drinkers get shitfaced and do horrible things, people give them yards and yards of slack. But in the 1950s and ’60s, America was an especially confused culture on the subject of drunkenness. Dean Martin slurred his way to prime time and all the dads in suburbia laughed whilepouring another one.Drunkjokesare still common;andthey’refunny: So this drunk staggers into the church, okay? He sits down in the confession booth but says nothin’. The bewildered priest coughs to attract his attention, but the man says nothin’. The priest knocks on the wall a couple of times in a final attempt to get the man to confess. The drunk replies, “No use knockin’, buddy. There’s no paper in this one either.” Couple the cultural confusion about alcohol with a woman’s place in 1950s America and you have something like checkmate. My mother didn’t see checkmate coming and even if she had she couldn’t have done a thing about it. Mention to Roger that his drinking was starting to scare her? It wasn’t in the realm of possibility. As I sort through Mom’s letters, I wonder exactly when Roger became an SHIT GATHERS IN GENERAL AREA OF FAN 60 alcoholic. Was it the drink Mom mentions in a letter on January 30, 1958: to “unwind” after his boss cut the time he needed to prepare a presentation on pediatrics? Perhaps it was the one he poured on May 30, 1956: the night she wrote about how he came home angry at a medical technician in the operating room. I picture Roger putting the stopper in the neck of the bottle, then maybe popping it off again to pour that extra half inch over the ice, talking over his shoulder about how the idiot technician didn’t move fast enough and this is an operating room, for crying out loud. Maybe it was his very first drink. The one on that marvelous night twelve years ago. You remember, in medical school, back when the war was over and Irene was no longer just down the hallway listening for heresies, and it was just you and Mack and Kupe and Tunk, you all had your booth at the Town Taverne and—damn—the wine really warms your chest from the inside out, doesn’t it, though? And the words, they just come so fast and easy and everybody seems so happy and Jesus how you laughed and you all fit in so well and the cigarettes tasted better and even though it was late you didn’t wanna go you didn’t wanna stop you just wanted more of that same good feeling and more and more of it. Going through the photos and letters, I begin to realize that trying to carbon-date the exact hour of the monster’s appearance is futile. It wasn’t a moment anyway, but the slow dawn of a long era. Alcoholism crept into the Millstone so quietly no one noticed. In fact, as I reread Mom’s early letters I begin to see where she was writing about Roger’s alcoholism without realizing it. Mom writing to her parents, January 30, 1958 I seldom see Roger lose his patience with Clinic policy or pronouncements but he came home last evening in a monumental rage. His time to prepare for the presentation of his paper had been worse than halved! He goes to Chicago early to set up an exhibit he has planned but now has to be back Tuesday. His exhibit and paper prove a theory of his that the blood supply to the talus is not through a single artery but several. Says Roger, “It simply stands to reason. God wouldn’t have made it that way!!” My mother says she...

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