Greasy Spoons

Dad called me this morning, asked me what I was doing.  My neice spent the night and he wanted to get breakfast.  I hadn’t seen him since our terrible argument when I took him home from the hospital.  He was still gaunt.  He just had a hair cut, and he was walking fine.  So here we go again.

He starts saying how he is eating like a horse since he quit drinking, and how he’s regular.  How his neighbor brought up a full plate of breakfast and he ate it.  How when he was drinking, he couldn’t stand the smell of coffee and now that he’s not, he can’t have enough coffee.  I asked him how often he goes to his bar.  He said once a week just to check up on his friends.  He said they don’t serve iced tea, and shows me his sugar packets, and he asked me if I’ve ever had a Busch N/A and so I begin to tell the future.

Next he is going to say that is what he ordered that night in a bar.  It always starts with that damn fake beer to get an alcoholic going again.  Last time he almost died I saved him.  I wanted him to stop drinking so bad that I had an idea.  I knew he would die if he ever drank again so I wanted to get him hooked onto something else.  Maybe all the other times he just had to stop drinking or he would die, he couldn’t because he didn’t replace it with anything.  I figured I’d rather have him hooked on pain killers, that would give him a good 10 extra years.  So he says he wants some valuim for the pain from falling down all the time.  No doctor or drug store was going to give him that.  So I went to a "friend" from his bar and got it taken care of.  Next I went and bought some extra strenghth tylenol.  I mixed them up in a bottle with no label and convinced him they were all the finest pain killers in the world.

It is working, I had done it 3 times after that and I have just ordered his lunch, about to pick it up and take it to him so I can give him his breathing treatments, clean, flush…I’m not gonna get pissed off and start typing what I’ve done for him.  Anyway, he calls me up and asks me for one more thing.  He wants me to pick him up a damned six pack.  I said no, of course I would not do that and not to ask again.  By the time I showed up with lunch, I opened the fridge and there was his six pack.

So, I ask him the question, might as well get it out of the way.  I look at him and know exactly what he’ll say.  This is what he said.  "Are you asking me if I quit drinking!?"  He immediately became the lion out of the cage, I just needed to spring the latch with my question.   We were sitting at a greasy spoon my dad used to take me too when he had visitation.  He goes on to say "I’ll drink what I want when I want, and right now I choose not to drink alcohol.  I’m doing this for me, he spits his food and points furiously, those Sundays, he’d always give me a dollar and insist I go play the juke box number 146 Daddy’s Hands.  I hate that song.  Every Sunday.  Today is Sunday.

So here we go again.