For those two weeks that summer in which I turned seventeen, my father and I shared those evenings after work, in the small space of his apartment, in the silence that often befell us when together, and in a car that he could handle so much better than I.  When we went out, he drove my car.  He’d, of course, been driving longer than I had.  He’d owned stick shift cars before and drove, as far as I could tell, better than anyone else I knew.  The lack of power steering and power brakes in my car didn’t faze him at all, while I had nightmares during this time in which no matter how hard I jumped on my car’s brakes, the car wouldn’t stop and I couldn’t turn the wheel to avoid the oncoming traffic.  I dreamed I was out of control.  The fear of not being able to control what was mine to control woke me up every time with my heart beating fast.  I sensed, I see now, that owning this car, having a job, and the fact that I’d graduate from school in a year all pointed to my quickly-approaching adulthood, for which I was completely unprepared.  And which scared the shit out of me.

I was well on my way to wasting all four years of high school.  Three down, one more to go.  I showed no initiative, received poor grades, and decided that taking the SAT would be a waste of my time and my money since I couldn’t see myself in college.  No one in my family knew what took place in college so the word had never been used in my house.  College was an unknown that I had no desire to explore.  That left my job at the warehouse.  They told me that during my senior year I could work part-time and then stay for the summer months.  Come the following fall they couldn’t promise me anything.  They might hire me full-time with benefits and pay me fifty cents over minimum wage. That meant I could be just like the other guys in the warehouse—working a job I hated while not making enough money to move out of my mother’s house.  And, if they had no openings, they would let me go.  Either way I had little to look forward to.

 

The two weeks with my father wound down, just Saturday and Sunday left.  That Saturday evening, my father, his girlfriend and I, walked up to Mario’s for pizza.  Afterwards we walked on the sidewalks of the town, around the square, passed block after block of tightly-packed row homes.  There proved little to talk about.  I’d learned over the years that I felt better about myself with my father when I said as little as possible since my father rarely showed any interest in the things that occupied my mind.  In fact the best moments I can remember with my father are the long, silent walks we used to take in the fields near our house when I was a kid.  We said next to nothing, just walked and watched our unleashed dog run ahead looking for groundhogs. Always best not to draw attention to myself, there were times I couldn’t help it and I said something and hoped that he would listen to me and care about what I had to say.

I risked it that night on the way to Mario’s.  I’d learned that to get a positive response, it was always best to bring up a topic that he wanted to talk about.  That summer the topic was Florida.  He dreamed of moving there.  He loved hot weather. “I hate freezing my balls off in the winter.  I’m sick of it.  I want to wear shorts all the time and have a grapefruit tree in my yard so that I can pluck them off the tree and squirt them into my drinks,” he said.  Now that he was jobless and his unemployment would run out soon, his desire to try something new, to start from scratch in a place he most wanted to live, took hold of his imagination.  As we walked, I turned my head to him every couple of seconds as he went on about where in Florida he wanted to live, the job he might be able to land, the type of house he wanted to live in. I listened to my father intently.  I needed to hear someone as futureless as I imagine possibilities.  It made me happy for a while, and I guess you could say it made me feel connected to my father.

 

Later that night, the three of us watched TV for an hour, then my father got out of his chair and said to his girlfriend that it was time.  “Time for what?” I said.

“We’re going out,” he said.

“Where?” I said, trying to hide my surprise and disappointment.  I hadn’t planned on spending the night alone.

“The usual places,” my father said.

“Oh,” I said, turning away.  In the past, before my father moved from our house, when he went out at night, arrangements were made for me to sleep over at my friend’s house next door, and since he’d moved to the apartment, sometimes we’d watch a late- night movie together. I’d fall asleep then he and his girlfriend would go out without my knowing it until I woke up and went to the bathroom and looked in his open bedroom door and saw the room empty.  Now, though, I was seventeen and had my own car.  There was no need to think about me.

On their way out, my father told me that there was a bottle of champagne in the fridge a friend of his had given him for helping him move.  “If you want to open it, go ahead,” he said.

I stood at the sliding glass window, watching from three stories up my father and his girlfriend getting into his car.  At least they didn’t take my car, I thought to myself.  But so what if they had?  I had nowhere to go.  I had drifted away from my old friends from the neighborhood, and my friends from work had girlfriends. I was the one with a classic car, the night ahead of me, and here I was, alone in my father’s apartment.

For a while I tried to get interested in the TV. But Saturday night was such a terrible night for TV back then.  Only twelve channels to choose from and all of them playing stuff for mostly old people—like The Lawrence Welk Show—since old people were supposed to be the only people who didn’t have something to do on a Saturday night.

I don’t know how long I flipped through channels before I remembered the champagne.  I’d had champagne before as well as other alcohol.  After my mother left my father, he started drinking more and made his alcohol available to my sister and me if we were interested.  For me, a sip here and a sip there proved to be the extent of my experience with the stuff.

I opened the refrigerator door, pulled the bottle out of the door shelf and peeled off the gold foil.  Then I popped off the plastic stopper.  I drank out of the bottle and sat back down on the chair in front of the TV.  I liked the taste of champagne.  I kept sipping and sipping.

I don’t know how long I sat like that, watching TV and drinking (gulping actually).  I do know though that at some point my head felt too heavy to hold up so I slid down to the floor and lay on the firm carpet.  After a while I became afraid that I would fall asleep with the TV and the lights on, which would have made my father very unhappy.  He hated to pay for wasted electricity.

I tried to get up but I fell right back down.  The only way, I determined, that I could make it to the TV and then all the way to the other side of the living room to hit the light switch—about eight feet away—would be to get on my hands and knees and crawl.  That was the longest crawl of my life.  I had to pause several times.  When I finished, I relocated the champagne bottle and took more swigs.  I drank it all.