Olive Branches Don't Grow on Trees (7 page)

A
few people spoke for only a few minutes each giving brief updates of their
week.  One man was having a very bad week.

“A
huge tree fell on my car this week,” said the man through his big seventies
mustache. “Lucky I wasn’t in it.  But maybe it would have been better if I
had been in it.  I got pink slipped this week at work, and my ex is
bringing me back to court to get an extension on her alimony.”

A
skinny woman with dark, almost black,
lipstick,
spoke
up in a cigarette voice.  In addition to her bad week involving a cheating
boyfriend, it seemed that her entire life consisted of nothing but
problems.  She spoke quickly as if to squeeze all of her problems into the
short amount of time that she was given to share.  Most of what she said
was an indecipherable blur with certain select phrases like
“cheating-no-good-mother-fucker” and “some-crazy-bitch-at-work” popping
out.  The poor lady had been to three other meetings this week alone,
including Narcotics Anonymous, Adult Children of Alcoholics, and Love and Sex
Addicts Anonymous.

Next,
a guy who looked like an over-aged high school burnout, talked briefly about
how he had recently traded in his addiction to pot, or as he called it, his TCH
maintenance, for drinking.  He never liked the taste of alcohol too much,
so he figured it would not be so dangerously addictive for him, but he was
wrong.

“And
before I knew it, I was a boozer,” he said with the laugh of a simpleton.

Next,
a very hunched over tall lady spoke.
 As she spoke,
her eyes grew big and filled with fire.  “I’m feeling like I’m going to do
something scary.  
Really scary.
 I don’t
know what it is yet.”  Her hands were shaking, and she was moving back and
forth in her seat, making her stringy hair move through the air like strands of
hay blowing in the wind.  Creepiness permeated the room as she spoke and
remained when she had finished.

After
each person spoke, no matter how grave or sad or lighthearted their story was,
no one else in the group commented.  They all just sat there listening
with blank faces and stiff bodies. They remained this way for the entire
duration of the main speaker’s long sad story, which lasted for about a half an
hour.  The speaker was a thin, older man with white hair, a face full of
worry lines, and a navy blue suit that looked as worn out as the rest of him.
 His tired eyes and broken smile spoke loud and clear of the many
hardships through which he had stumbled.  But not as loud and clear as his
story that had a marked similarity to Silvia’s story.  Despite the man’s
soft-spoken voice, his words blasted in her ears.  This man had her same
proclivity to move from state to state and city to city, and he referred to
himself as a “geographic.”  With each move, he had conveniently erased his
past mistakes only to make new ones.  He stopped moving once he got sober,
but sobriety took years.  Meanwhile, he lived in denial of his alcoholism
and his inability to stay in one place.  Each new place was more than a
clean slate.  It was an opportunity to be a new person.  
A person who might magically lose his desire to drink.
 
A person without pain.

Silvia
was sitting forward with her shoulders back and her head straight up, as she
listened intently to the speaker.  He too had grown up in a household with
a drunk for a parent.  His mother started drinking when his father left
her and their three children for a shot as a film star in Hollywood.  As
her drinking progressed, so did her erratic behavior towards her children, who
did not know what to expect from her and, eventually, from the world.
 They remained in a constant state of fear, always on guard.  The
speaker grew to hate his home and left it as soon as he could at the age of
eighteen.  He wanted to get as far away as he could, but he had very
little money, so he hitchhiked to Los Angeles.  He said that he may have
secretly wanted to find his dad, but that he had never found him.
 Instead, he found a group of free loving acidheads who encouraged him to
come with them up to San Francisco.  “And that’s when it all started,” he
said, as if he was exhausted merely by the act of talking about his past.

There
began his twenty-year career of drugging, drinking, and moving.  He
started over more times than he could remember.  He lived in twenty-five
different cities in ten different states, many of which he had moved back to
repeatedly.  Every move brought with it a set of high hopes, which he
knew, somewhere in the back of his head, would soon be shattered.  With
each new move, he drank more and more, and quitting seemed more and more
hopeless. Eventually he gave up on trying
to quit
, and
one night, he ended up passed out on a sidewalk in the lower east side of New
York, where he had just moved back to for the third time.  It was on this night
that some homeless guy stabbed him in his right leg.  “I thought I knew
what
bottom
was until then.
 This was truly bottom, though,” he said.  He was rushed to a
hospital, where his doctor urged him to join Alcoholics Anonymous.  He
took the doctor’s advice and he had been sober ever since that night.  His
move to south Jersey in 1985 was his last.

Silvia
felt that the speaker may have been there to warn her to change her ways or she
too would be going down the same tragic trail.  But her story could never
possibly be that tragic.  For one thing, she was not an alcoholic and had
no intention of becoming one.  For another thing, this move to Portland
would very well be her last move, or at least that was what she was telling
herself at this moment.  Besides, her habit of moving was not a
compulsion.  It was bohemian.
Gypsy.
 It was
just something that she needed to get out of her system.  It was just a
coincidence that both the speaker and Silvia grew up in alcoholic households,
and grew into people who liked to move from place to place on a very frequent
basis.  She would not end up as some broken down person telling a room
full of people about her regrets and mistakes and how AA had saved her life.

Frank
wanted to leave right after the meeting had finished, and Silvia, feeling weak
from trying to differentiate herself from the speaker and convincing herself
that she would not end up anything like him, did not have the energy to make
her father stay and try to socialize with the others.  She wanted to get
out of there herself, away from the speaker, away from the doomed version of
what she might become. 

**********

Frank
insisted on driving home and stopping off at a local diner that was inconveniently
positioned on a traffic circle.  It was a big, shiny, chrome-covered
rectangle filled with red vinyl booths and a counter that stretched almost the
entire length of the place.  They ordered garlic fries and
milkshakes.  When the waitress asked if Frank wanted anything to drink,
Silvia just glared at him, forcing him to tell the waitress that he would just
have water.  Silvia went to use the restroom. By the time she got back,
the waitress had brought their milkshakes, and Frank had nearly finished his.

“I
hate it when it's over,” said Frank, taking the final sip of his malted shake.

On
extremely rare occasions, Silvia felt connected to Frank, and this was one of
those rare occasions.  He was like a big, overgrown boy saddened by the
ending of a milkshake.  She even offered him some of hers because she knew
that, despite his intense craving for more, he was too cheap to buy another.
 He was simple and innocent at that moment, and his eyes turned
young.  She had trouble comprehending how this harmless, youthful creature
could coexist in the same body with the scary, old man that was Frank.  It
seemed like whenever any good tried to glimmer through, the stronger more
powerful side of his being would crush it.

She
remembered back to the time that she got the scholarship to art school, and how
proud he was of her achievement. “You're going to be the next Botticelli!” he
told her with a smile so big that it looked almost painful.  At first she
thought his elation was due to his being off the hook of having to pay her
tuition.  But it was more than just his sense of frugality.  He
really was proud, and Silvia felt his approval shining down on her for the
first and only time in her life.  It was, however, a very short-lived
period of time, as she suspected it would be, and soon Frank was back to his
typical way of being in the world.  Silvia came home one day to find her
belongings out on the front porch, and upon going inside, she saw a note on the
table that said that she had to leave the house immediately.  Donna was
away at a conference for work, so she could not intercede, as she usually did
on her children’s behalf.  Silvia wondered what she could have done to
upset Frank, but she also knew that her wondering was probably useless because
it was almost impossible to know such a thing. What might upset him was
anybody’s guess.  Maybe he was upset that she, like all of his other
children, was not following in his footsteps and studying law or studying
something like philosophy that would prepare her for law school.  He was
as unpredictable and volatile as a volcano.  She also knew that, whatever
eruption was happening inside of him, would soon settle down, and so she
gathered her belongings on the front porch and went to a friend’s house for the
night. 

“So
what did you think of the meeting?” she asked him.  His face turn from
remorse, for finishing both his and her shakes, to suspicion.

“Why
are you so interested in getting me to an AA meeting all of a sudden?  Did
Mom put you up to this?” he said.

“Oh
what the fuck Dad!
 Can’t a daughter take some
interest in her father’s well-being?” she said as she gathered bits of garlic
and placed them on a fry.

“Watch
your language.”

“What
about you?  You curse all the time.”

“That’s
different.  I’m old.  It doesn’t matter that I curse.”  He
looked down sadly again at his remaining couple drops of milkshake.

“So,
you still haven’t answered my question,” she said, disregarding his warning
about the use of profanities.

“It
was pretty much what I expected.”  His face looked jaded.  And then,
in an effort to take himself out of the discussion, he said, “Boy, that speaker
had some story, huh?”

“Well,
how did you feel about being there?” she said, with an emphasis on the word
you.

“Alright,
I guess,” he said, like her question made no sense.

“Did
you get anything out of it?”

“What
do you mean by that?”  He squished up his face like a prune.

“Could
you relate to any of the other little stories or the big story?”

“Not
really.”

“So,
what’s the chance of us going back next Wednesday?”  She said this
mustering up as much hopefulness as she could in her face.

“I
don’t really see the need for it.  Look at that one woman with all the
problems. 
The one with the dark lipstick.
She
goes to meetings all the
time,
and they don’t seem to
be doing her any good.  In fact, they could be making her worse.” 
Then he said he had to go to the bathroom and left without giving his daughter
a chance to respond.  As soon as he came back, she said, “I doubt the meetings
are making her worse,” as if there had been no break in the conversation.

“Making
who worse?”

“Dark
Lipstick,” she said, making her father laugh at the nickname she had suddenly
adopted for the woman from the meeting.  His laughter was loud and mighty,
like the rest of him. It made Silvia remember that he was not always miserable,
that he liked to laugh, and that he had a good sense of humor when he was not
busy being angry.

“Well,
do you think you might go back, Dad?” she asked again, taking advantage of his
current lighthearted state.

“Yeah,
why not?”

Silvia
accepted this reply and thought of her venture on this night as a great
achievement.  She was getting through to him when no one else could. 
She had a very quick miniature fantasy about him being a sober man, a good
father, winning Donna back, and them all living peacefully ever after.
 She was quite proficient at fantasizing.  Within twenty seconds, she
was able to have a complete vision of what her family would become thanks to
her amazing self.  She saw Frank and her sitting in the living room with
Vince and Cosmo and Angie.  He was talking about how grateful he was to
Silvia for saving him.  He was calm and still and not his usual jumpy
self,
and he sat all the way back in his chair instead of on
the edge.  He was apologetic for not being a better father and was
soliciting his children for ideas on how to get Donna back.  Angie may
have felt some slight jealousy towards Silvia for not being Frank’s favorite
for the first time in her life, but Silvia was, after all, the savior. 

She
would be the one to save Frank, and he was someone worth saving.  He was,
in fact, a great person in terms of his abilities and past achievements, and to
have his greatness lost in a bottle of scotch was a terrible thing that affected
not only himself and his family, but the world at large, as he was the type of
person that had the potential to make a difference in the world.  He was
not the type of attorney that was just out to make a quick buck.  He was
the kind that was always on the side of the underdog-- the old, the poor, the
disabled-- the most unfortunate people who had been wronged by the system and,
therefore, by life.  Even for clients not wrongly accused, he could look
well beyond their rightful accusations and into the real cause of their
wrongdoings.  He was an empathic in every sense of the word.