As many of you know, I’m recovering from both brain surgery and alcoholism. Tomorrow I will be sober two weeks.

But my recovery assignment for the next week, ugly to think about on Father’s Day, will be to deconstruct my dad.

I’ve spent the last twenty years mythologizing him, writing about him frequently in my blog. He has assumed heroic stature. And he was such a big influence on my life. He was a masterful storyteller, and in many ways he taught me how to teach. He was brilliant, capable, very funny and charming. An accountant, he was, as was his father, in supreme command of dense columns of numbers, arranged like parade-ground soldiers. His adding machine emitted machine-gun bursts from the den of our home on Huasna Road.

The part I’ve been concealing for twenty years is the other side. He, like me, was an alcoholic; It finally killed him in 1985, when he was only 67, and now I’m a bewildered 74.

You might say that I‘ve outlived him. No, I haven’t.

You might say “he did his best.”  No, he didn’t.

My father was terrifying. He had an explosive temper and was sometimes violent, attacking our mother. He was inexplicably cruel toward my big brother. There was always an undercurrent of violence in our home. I might go to bed wondering if I would die.

After one of his explosions, he would open the bedroom door and plaintively apologize. It was confusing.

After our mom died, he locked her Basset hound in his kennel, and when the dog bayed, begging our company, he beat it with his belt. Now you know why I have Basset hounds.

He drove drunk with us in the car down the Kern River Canyon. I still have nightmares about going over a cliff into the water. Once on Branch Street, he left Bruce and I in the car for three hours while he got drunk at Bill’s Place. He came out staggering and squinting in the sunlight and some stranger—an angel?—intervened, took his keys and got us home safely.

He did income taxes in addition to his work at Madonna Construction. The Outrigger, a Shell Beach bar, was his favorite place to do taxes. He’d show up late for open houses at school or my Boy Scout meetings. Or he wouldn’t show up at all.

On weekends he would get drunk twice. He’d start with Coors in the morning, start to slide, and take a nap. Then when he started the barbecue he’d transition to Ten High whiskey.

It was my job late at night when he was passed out at the kitchen table to make sure his cigarette would not burn the house down. Just before he passed out he demanded ice cream. I want my ice cream! he would shout.

Later, if I didn’t have to carefully remove the burning cigarette from his fingers, I might find it stubbed out in the ice cream

There are a lot of other things I need to talk about in this recovery business. But on Father’s Day I wanted to put this down because I know that some of you had had a similar experience with your father.

It’s okay for you to love your father. It’s okay for me to love my father. But now I have to make a break with him so that,  unlike him, I can be free.