Drinking — A (Fragmentary) Memoir

 

Me, drunk in 2023. Unretouched.

As a graphic artist of some dexterity, I can make myself look how I want to a very large extent. I can look younger, older, handsomer, more sinister, etc, with a couple of filters. I even smile in some of my selfies. Yes, I take a lot of pictures of myself. I am the main character of my story, like all writers, and to the extent possible in my later years I have documented the process of becoming older after having started my life seemingly much younger than everyone around me. There are very few pictures of the youthful me. There were no cellphones in the days of my infancy. We had to be posed in the studio of a photog called Uncle Phooey, who created the one baby picture my parents chose to frame and feature on family photo displays. I was a fat baby and the selected pic showed a clear stain of overflow vomit on my onesie. But I was smiling. Beyond that there were a few snaps of me in my school uniform or in the company of cousins and grandparents. We weren’t big picture takers.

There’s a graduation year photo of me from Mercersburg, where the Prime Directive was airbrushing acne, of which I had none at the time, but all the pics look kind of washed out anyway. And there’s one photo of a Thanksgiving dinner with my parents and sister in my college years, which seems both oddly staged and, well, somehow awkward. We weren’t getting along at all by then.

There may have been other pictures in between. But they got lost. There was one significant chapter of Writing America Down I deleted in full. It was a memory of my having bought my father’s house (scene of the pic just above), which had been his father’s house since 1922, and the family wreckage good intentions can cause. I realized my parents could no longer manage a fairly huge Victorian house and needed to go smaller. My dad knew that too. He had put the house on the market and there were no takers. He had a good Plan A. Move to a smaller house on Market Street in Salem, make construction changes for one-story living by seniors, and go gently and even elegantly into that good night. But he was stubborn about reducing his asking price, which the realtor told him was unreasonably high because kitchen, bathrooms, all the utilities, etc, were in need of serious upgrade while property taxes were already going crazy. 

So I bought the house for his asking price. On the day before the closing, the mortgage company phoned me that the down payment they needed was not 10 but 20 percent, which consumed all my cash. So I signed a promissory note to my dad for the difference between asking price and mortgage value I had negotiated with him. All’s well that ends well. (It didn’t of course, but that’s another story…)

What matters is that the moving process exposed all my father’s infirmities. He sat at his computer writing stories for the Salem County Historical Society, while my mother sorted, boxed, and arranged for the transport of all their goods to the Market Street property. By this time he was like I am today, leaning on the kitchen counter so as not to fall down and looking lazy when he was, in fact, physically and emotionally spent. I was still toiling to extricate myself from the financial obligations I had up north over the unexpected fact that I no longer had any cash. I missed a lot of my mother’s labor because she was never one to complain, and then came my moment of revelation, on the day I and my increasingly skeptical wife were supposed to move in to the family manse and begin a fine new life.

They had not moved out.  My mother had simply cherry-picked the furniture she liked and left everything else behind. She was building a new home. The old one would have to take care of itself. The house we moved into was a barrack of Grand Rapids furniture from the 1940s falling apart as you looked at it, junk pots and pans, and cheap framed things that had never been on the walls except to fill empty spaces. I  moved from floor to floor and had a life-changing moment on the 3rd floor where I had lived for a time and had had my last spiritual encounter with my grandfather Laird. The floors were a chaos of abandoned paper, spread out across the old second-grade hardwood of Victorian servants’ quarters. Here were the things my mother had kicked her way through and abandoned. Pictures of me and my sister (many taken by her own sainted father with his state of the the art 1930s camera), old book reports we had written and made artistic construction paper covers for, letters from our boarding schools, old birthday cards and childish drawings (you know the talentless cartoony shit parents trumpet online these days), report cards, school achievement citations, and all the stuff that had ceased to matter to her since her own father had died a dozen years before.

I closed the door on it and left it there. If it didn’t matter to her, it had already lost 90 percent of its value to me. I kept some of the books and magazines my grandfather had saved a generation before, but I wound up losing them too. 

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I told you my story is about me, and it is, but it’s also about the so-called Greatest Generation, in which my parents were both signal members. My own story in their context is simply a kind of symbolic proof of the good and the bad of that generation and of the group that is now being labeled as some kind of monolithic villain called “white people.” 

My sister and I both lost key parts of our childhood because we had to be sent away to boarding schools on the cusp of puberty, after which the parental bond so meticulously nurtured before was truncated and finally starved into well learned exercises of mere duty. 

Our particular experience is noteworthy because of the extremes of it. We were raised exactly as my father and his sister had been raised, as members of the next generation of upper class WASP cultural custodians. When Susie and I went off to boarding school, nothing had prepared us for the peers we would encounter and have to coexist with. And when we began to exhibit stress fractures, they never took responsibility for it, except to surmise that they hadn’t been rigorous enough.

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I’m trying to tell you the truth about a generational affliction. One I have battled my whole life without anyone in the family ever coming clean about it. My grandfather recognized it right away and relayed it in fables about his past. Told me this when I was six. He was playing pool with his spectacular brother John and drank three shots of rye, after which he never remembered anything. Swore off drinking from then on.

My dad’s story was more complicated. He was a fighter pilot in WWII. He gave us a complicated history of the end of his military and academic careers. Somehow he dropped out of Cornell with a young wife from Ohio and wound up working at a job procured for him by his bigwig father at duPont. We could hear alcohol in the story somewhere. A couple martinis in, he would confide to me, “When I left college I was a bum.”

He conquered the booze in his own life. He made it a kind of ritual. He waited till cocktail hour. He knew exactly how many he could have. But the drinks were always strong. Took me years to understand how strong Old-Fashioneds, Manhattans, and Martinis could be. 

And he prospered at duPont. He had an insuperable desire to achieve. I remember watching him create the forerunner of ALL modern computer consoles, in his dad’s workshop, on weekends, out of plywood and poster board and hand-drawn dials. It won him an A-bonus at duPont, a rarely achieved accolade worth $10,000 at a time when it was worth ten times in today’s dollars. I remember seeing versions of his console design in movie after movie years later, and I remember him holding his head in his hands when Three Mile Island happened. “You have no idea,” he said, “just how outdated all these instruments were.” He could see they were all stuck in the 1950s when his own design was the latest.

He went on to be nominated for a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Society of Chemical Engineers for inventing computer-controlled chemical manufacturing systems. He didn’t win, of course. Never got his degree or the title that should have gone with it. He wasn’t bitter about that. He was bitter about the fact that for a period of five years before he retired early at 57 his superiors had lied to him about key components of their plans. Plans he didn’t approve of. So this man who I never heard utter an F-Bomb said, “Fuck you,” and walked out of the room.

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Could make a similar context case about my mother. She served on the Manhattan Project, also by way of my grandfather. At Ohio State she had majored in Romance Languages, including French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Her job was translation. She never knew what she was working on. But then when the bomb fell, everyone associated with Manhattan knew at once they were part of the story.

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Where does alcohol figure in all this? Good question. In the genes perhaps, Celtic you know, but also in the educational and experiential context. The Laird grandparents weren’t big tipplers, but then came the postwar veterans who wanted to stay together and make their own mark in the Cold War. And quite by coincidence, I’m sure they were all white men with some unique abilities and appetites. As a kid I socialized with these men until I had gotten safely through a prep school they all had to respect because it was also Jack Seabrook’s, and then they helped turn me loose on Harvard when I had just outgrown the age of 16 by 60 days.

At college I immediately passed all the tests required of born alcoholics.I drank to drunkenness on first exposure, I threw up on first exposure, and I appeared to have no inhibitory signal to prevent me from behaving this way repeatedly. Two questions. Why had my father never informed me of this possibility and warned against it? And how in hell had he managed to become a fighter pilot and survive 91 combat missions if this was also his genetic destiny?

What I was beginning to realize were the benefits of alcohol. 

Champagne didn’t make me smarter. It made me charming. The smart just came through in a different way. Whereas the case could have been made that the Mercersburg Laird brain was intimidating and remote, the Harvard Laird brain was a different person altogether. Alive, creative, inspirational, witty as hell, fun to be in the company of, and amazingly enough, better looking.

We were about the same age then. People were drawn to me.

Nobody intervened. Nobody took me by the scruff of the neck and said, “Stop it!” Nobody cared. 

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Is this an excuse? A Blame Game of some kind? No. It really was what they now call White Privilege. I may have been an extreme example, but I survived it and subsequent extreme tests to become a fearless success in the world of business. And later in literature. 

That’s the real story underlying this apparent tale of woe….

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When you have this thing in you, and you know very early what it is, it’s a lot like having a mistress, say Lilith, who has her own purposes and spars with you about who’s in charge. I wound up getting what I most wanted, the bragging rights for having graduated from Harvard as a Final Club President of the smartest of all Harvard clubs, at the age of 19. Nothing can ever take that away, ever, except as Lilith points out when five, six, seven years out you’ve accomplished nothing. “You never me give me credit,” she says. “Who got you out of that foul Cornell Business School racket?”  She had a point there. At Cornell, the apogee of career aspiration was a job with a ‘Big 8’ accounting firm. Top of the heap was Arthur Anderson. This is back in the mid-Seventies when an Arthur Anderson offer was worth $20k a year. Today? Maybe 200K. 

I wound up dropping out of Cornell. Alcohol never got mentioned. In fact, they actually solicited my return for degree studies when I was at NCR years later, but alcohol was instrumentally involved. Lilith didn’t like me being a CPA, which I was one course away from qualifying for, and she sent me on a bender to end all benders. Remember one night on Stewart Street sitting with an all night motel manager who bought my story that I was Errol Flynn’s nephew just banging around the world for fun. “”I can almost believe it,” he said. “And I’ve heard a lot wilder stories than this. Turn your head again..” I wound up going to earth in a hotel room and fled home lying to my parents that I was suffering from mononucleosis. 

Alcohol makes you do things you wish you hadn’t. Then again, maybe not always. Turns out graduate business school was a pretty complicated and expensive way of getting out of law school. Yes, I have let people down along the way. An attorney I worked for had moved heaven and earth to get me a spot at Dickinson Law School, which turns out to be far better than the snob I was at the time I considered it. He said they were just waiting for my application to arrive. The same week I had heard the same story from the Amos Tuck Business School at Dartmouth, a smaller clone of the Harvard Business School featuring preppies and bullshit case studies. Why anyone wanted a Harvard Final Club drunk in their little world was beyond me. So I went to Cornell with a curriculum poised about midway between Harvard’s and the quant-heavy regimen of U. Chicago. Why? Because my sister was there. Because my dad had gone there. Because Lilith knew what she what she was doing.

I went to Cornell because I felt I owed it to my dad. He had hated every minute I spent at Harvard. He hated Harvard, even hated me because I went to Harvard. Susie had been holding down the fort at the Cornell School of Architecture, which was its own little sinecure. It was a 4-year undergrad program at a time when mostly no one had that. The strength of Cornell Architecture was supposed to be that they, being an engineering intensive university, knew more about structural engineering than the ones who put up buildings that fall down a few years later. 

So, in the after hours of micro-economics and statistical probability math, I started getting a late-night education after B-School. Every week they got a design problem they had to solve with the wisdom of Le Corbusier (form follows function brutalist). They were building models of ugly. What did I know? I just kibitzed. Cheryl had mostly forgiven me after the prom a year before by now, but even she was brutalist. 

Susie wasn’t getting it. She could talk the talk on Le Corbusier. But her designs were better than that. She did a summer home with pleasing references to Pompeii. She did a gas station that looked more Venturi design than Corb. I just hovered. They were all talented but struggling. 

Me too. Le Corbusier. Remembered I’d had to write a paper at Harvard, in art history, expressing the brilliance of the architecture of the Boston Government Building. I got a C, having failed to love it much. Brutalist. Now on the register of most ugly buildings ever built in America.

My sister dropped out of architecture school. She thought she wasn’t good enough. Of course she was. But she was already in love with another student, and nothing I could say after that ever made any difference…

What I learned. Talent aside, Architecture is not a female sport.

Meanwhile, I was having my own love problems. I was desperately in love with a California woman who drove a VW with one discolored fender. She was 10 years older and a spitting image of Jean Seberg if she’d had coal black hair and a smarter mouth. I even knocked on her door one night. We talked. Guess I was stalking. But not. She was the first woman who recognized that I was running completely alone in life. Even realized that what I wanted more than love was a hug. We even arranged how I would pick up my textbooks next day. 

I do know her name. Won’t ever tell. Can’t seem to find her on the register of business successes. Like most of them. I was the dropout who made good.

I guess this is going to have to be Part 1. I’m tired of the whole subject for now.

[In interests of full disclosure, there is a Part II already written to about the same length as this post, but it’s located at another site, one with a well-earned age and content warning. No need to trespass that barrier here.]