I'm going To Take A Shower, First: Then I'm Going To Bed

He was a young Army private, just learning to be on his own. When he finally got leave, he traveled to Southern California to stay at my home. He was my oldest son, not yet 21, but old enough to be on call to go to the Middle East when they drew The Line In The Sand.

At home, he reconnected with his childhood friends. They planned to go party. I didn’t like the idea of him going out to drink, but reconciled it with the idea that if he was old enough to protect the country, he deserved a beer or two.

He left with his friends, laughing and joking like there had been no time away from them. I watched them walk down the sidewalk, to the driveway and get into the car. I shut the door after they backed out of the driveway and went back to watching TV with my boyfriend and my youngest son.

We all went to bed around midnight. He wasn’t home yet, but I didn’t expect him to be home early. I turned on the CD player and fell asleep listening to Missing Persons, “Do you hear me? Do you care?”

Around 2:00 in the morning, I heard fumbling at the front door. Although he had a key, my oldest son was having trouble getting the door unlocked. I got up, walked to the front door and let him in.

He stumbled in, stinking of hard liquor sweated through his pores. I stepped back warily associating that smell with an abusive alcoholic father even though I knew my son was no danger to me.

“I’ve partaken of a genuinely superior nocturnal occasion,” he said haltingly, using $2.00 words in 50¢ sentences. He always talked like that when he’d had ten too many drinks. I hated it when he was that drunk. I didn’t want to talk to him.

“You should take a shower before you go to bed,” I told him, breathing shallow so as not to take in too much of the stench emanating from his body. I didn’t want the house to smell like that in the morning.

“Affirmative,” he replied. “I’ll incorporate a shower first; then I’ll proceed to bed.” He staggered into the bathroom and shut the door.

I pulled a towel out of the hallway closet and knocked on the bathroom door. He pulled it open immediately, creating a breeze that ruffled my hair as I handed him the towel.

“Good night,” I said.

“To yourself, also,” he replied.

I rolled my eyes as he shut the door, then turned and went to back to bed. I was just dozing off when I heard two loud thumps. I listened, but didn’t hear anything more than the steady flow of water through the pulsating showerhead.

“He must have bumped the shower wall with his elbow,” I thought just before sleep overtook me.

I woke about 7:00 in the morning. I felt alarmed and sat up in bed, quickly, still hearing the shower run. The same moment my feet touched the floor, I heard my youngest son call me.

“Mom! There’s water in my room.”

“Mine, too!” I said, panicked as my feet rested in a puddle seeping in from the hallway.

I got up and ran to the bathroom. I knocked loudly on the door calling my oldest son’s name over and over. He didn’t answer. I tried the knob. It was locked. I pounded on door, yelling at him to open it. Still I heard no sound except the shower spray hitting water.

By this time, my boyfriend was up. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“He started taking a shower last night when he came home. He’s still in there and the shower’s still going and he doesn’t answer.”

My boyfriend knocked on the door and called my son’s name. He still didn’t answer. He started to try the knob.

“Break the door down!” I yelled.

My boyfriend turned to look at me with a slow deliberate gaze that warned me not to be so abrupt. I didn’t care. I wanted to know what was going on behind the door. He stepped back and rammed his shoulder into the hollow core door. The frame splintered and the door banged off the bathroom wall as it crashed opened. We pushed past each other to get into the bathroom. My youngest son waited in the hallway.

I saw him floating sideways in the tub with his eyes closed. Half of his face was above water and the other half was submerged. Water ran over the edge and down the outside of the tub onto the floor. I felt intrusive. He was naked. I stood there frozen with indecision.

“Is he dead?” I whispered to my boyfriend. “I don’t have my contacts in. I can’t see if he’s breathing.”

“I don’t know,” he answered.

I felt anger towards my boyfriend. He should be able to tell. He could see perfectly.

“Well, tap him on the head!” I barked. “He’s naked.”

My boyfriend looked at me quizzically, not understanding that I felt like I was infringing on my son’s privacy. He stepped forward and rapped him on the side of the head. My son’s head dipped below the surface, then gently bobbed to the top, causing ripples across the top of the water and spillage over the edge of the tub. I held my breath, not wanting to know that he was dead.

My boyfriend rapped my son’s head again and called out his name. The eye above the water slowly opened and rolled downward into place. He placed his hands on the bottom of the tub and labored to push himself into a sitting position.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Shut off the water!” I snapped. My voice sounded shrill and furious.

He leaned forward and turned the hot and cold knobs until the shower quit running. He looked down at the drain.

“Oh. I must have puked and plugged up the tub.” He murmured. He scooped the chunks of vomit away from the drain and the water started draining.

He looked up at me. “I think I passed out,” he said apologetically.

“I thought you were dead!” I angrily sobbed. “Get dried off. We have a lot of work to do.”

I walked out of the bathroom, stopping in the doorway to look at the damage to the door frame. “Do you think you can fix this?” I asked my boyfriend. He nodded.

“Mom, the front room is soaked, too!” said my youngest son.

I walked into the living room to check out the damage. The carpet was soaked about eight feet out from the wall. The bathroom separated the living room from my youngest son’s bedroom. The hallway separated my bedroom from the bathroom. All four rooms were flooded.

My youngest son and I grabbed towels to sop up water from the tiled floors. My boyfriend got his shop vac from the garage and started pulling water out of the carpet with it.

My oldest son staggered out of the bathroom. “I’d like to help you guys, but I’m still so drunk,” he said. He headed into the living room, lay down on the couch and went to sleep,

We moved furniture, mopped and wrung water from towels, then dried the tile floors in the bathroom, the hallway and the bedrooms. We moved the entertainment center, pulled the carpet back and sucked water from the padding with the shop vac. My boyfriend glued and nailed the splintered door frame back together. We worked for three hours while my drunken son slept off the alcohol.

My anger grew out of resentment with each moment of work. By all rights he should be taking care of this, but this couldn’t wait until he was in shape to take care of it. By the time we were done, I was ready to kill my sleeping, oldest son.

My boyfriend went out to get breakfast and coffee for me, my youngest son and himself. We ate together at the table in the dining room. I calmed down as the first swallows of caffeine permeated my blood stream, soothing me like the familiarity of an old friend.

Later, when my son came to, we had a discussion, albeit rather one sided. He was subdued. I don’t know if it was from the effects of his hangover or the shame of flooding the house.

“You. Can. NOT. Drink. Like. That. When. You. Stay. At. My. House!” I commanded through clenched teeth.

“Okay, Mom. I won’t”

“And I don’t want you to call me when you’re that drunk!”

“Okay Mom.”

“I’ll know. You use those $2.00 words in 50¢ sentences when you’re that drunk. It doesn’t sound smart. It sounds like you’re showing off a vocabulary that you don’t know how to use.”

“I won’t call if I’m that drunk, Mom.”

“I thought you died. That was horrible.” Tears welled in my eyes.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry.”

I don’t know how he survived that night or the many others like it. During the last confrontation we had about his drinking, many years later, I made him choose alcohol or family. I was at that place where I could no longer watch him commit a slow suicide by alcohol. I was ready to cut him from my life and he knew it. I was lucky. He chose family. He attended his first AA meeting that night after he sobered up and began working the steps of sobriety, not letting the pain of self evaluation stop him. He hasn’t had a drink in over nine years. He does it one day at a time.