July 1993, Pasadena, California

By Winifred Wallace

Miles Alcorn had a thin, nasal voice, high in pitch. He had a boyish, clean-shaven face with snappy blue eyes that crinkled at the edges. He was a small man who matched his voice - slender, nervous, with short gray hair that looked unhealthy. He laughed easily, and when he found something amusing he would tip back his head and laugh a long, singing chorus, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. Miles was a friend of my father’s. He worked in the movie industry - though as what, I do not know, nor ever learned.

I was 11 and uncoordinated when I met him. My sister and I were fascinated. He sat in an easy chair in the living room and discussed with us our school, our Christmas bicycles, the movies we loved and the instruments we (reluctantly) played. He told my father jokes we couldn’t understand but laughed at anyway. He got down on the floor to help finish the 5,000-piece puzzle we had struggled with for three weeks straight. My sister, at 5, conned a piggyback ride out of him, and he consented to a game of badminton with me, graciously accepting the lousier of the two racquets and winning by the thinnest of margins.

And during this three-hour visit he also drank four Bourbon and Bitters from the heavy bottomed glasses our father only kept for the purpose of drinking whiskey. Our father was a Kentucky man, born and raised. When whiskey was served it was always bourbon, and when bourbon was poured it was always in a heavy glass with two or three ice cubes added, making it look as refined as the drinks in the photographs of the Ritz Carlton’s book of the 100 Best Cocktails in the World.

The underlying elegance of my father’s home state drink was attractive enough to catch even my 11-year-old attention, so you can well imagine what this same drink might look like through Miles’ eyes. For Miles was drawn to alcohol like the moon draws water, in a steady, unceasing cycle.

A glass of Bourbon - I would discover much later in life, when the sweetish smell and bitter fire of the taste no longer repelled me - contains 100 different colors, ranging from the lightest, cherry red to a deep, rich brown. All these colors can be seen when the light shines directly through the liquid, as it does in a bar. Bars are low-lit for specific reasons, one of them being that the consumption of alcohol is much more attractive, sexier, when the drink is backlit with dim light to pinpoint the high colors.

I suppose that, somewhere, Miles had seen this reflected light, and became obsessed with it, pursuing the infinite through glass after glass, though I cannot say for certain. All I know is that I knew him well for the year he spent in frequent calls to our house, and in that year - though I didn’t know until later - I never once saw him sober.

It presented eventual problems, which we heard only in unspecified snippets: Miles showing up late to the set and forgetting to call; Miles botching a location scouting by ignoring the paperwork, resulting in deposits lost and irate phone calls from one department head to another.

My sister and I had only a vague understanding of the importance of all of this. We knew only that an atmospheric change was upon us when Miles’ bi-monthly arrivals to the house slowed to a trickle, then stopped altogether. When I asked my father about it, he replied in regretful tones, “I fired him off the movie, Kiddo.” When I asked why, he replied, “Because he did something dangerous.”

To a kid my age, possessing no understanding of the larger picture, I took my father’s answer to mean that I had lost my badminton partner, which, in the scheme of things, was heartbreaking enough. I mourned Miles for a week, then promptly forgot about him. It was summer, I was within striking distance of 12, and the world appeared acceptably static.

Mid-July in Los Angeles is brutally hot; step barefoot on concrete and your foot will feel as though the sidewalk is performing a ritual branding. Children learn to toughen their feet by going barefoot in March, otherwise you suffer the consequences. It was on a day such as this that my father left for a party, leaving me and my sister with a teenage sitter who came to sit in a trance in front of the television.

“Play with me,” my sister demanded.

“Play what?” I asked, reluctantly.

“Dolls,” my sister said, a wagonful of stuffed animals, Barbies, and miscellaneous critters at her side.

Dolls were beneath me, and I said so. I would, however, consent to build her a fort in the backyard, utilizing every available couch cushion and quilt in the house. An elaborate castle was conceived. My sister dictated location and specifics like a battlefield general, while I labored to move most of the living room and the linen closet to a corner of the garden. The sitter - rummaging for snacks - took one look out the window at our project, and retreated to the living room.

In the midst of constructing a huge throne for my sister to sit - for which my father surely would not have approved the use of his amplifier - I heard the telephone ring. Messages were my job. I sprinted for the house, leaving my sister in a tangle of sheets and toys.

The phone, an old fashioned rotary telephone of which my father was fond, was an entire lawn away from where I had run from, yet less then 20 feet from where our babysitter sat, sucking on a lollypop, her eyes never leaving the screen. The unfairness of this fact settled into my brain as I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

There was a long pause. A voice, one I could almost place, said, “Tommy?”

At 11 and female, I did not remotely sound like my father, which suggested a less-than-coherent state of mind for the caller.

“This is Winnie,” I said politely, between deep breaths. “Who’s calling?”

“This is Miles Alcorn, Winnie,” He said, and his voice was suddenly real again. “You remember me?”

“I sure do,” I said. “How are you doing, Miles?”

“Ah,” he said, and there was a pause, in which I felt things go terribly wrong.

“Ah,” he said again, “I need to talk to your Dad.”

I relayed the message that Dad wasn’t home just then, but I’d be glad to pass along that he’d called.

“Oh … OK,” Miles said. His voice was high and strained, trembling. If he had been a pair of trousers he would have been coming apart at the seams. He started to give me his phone number, and fumbled the area code.

I had never thought to ask an adult his feelings. The goings-on of older people were of little interest to me. I was 11 and dreamed of horses; I was 11 and saw homework and piano exercises. I was 11 and had no conception of politics, wars or adults, with their adult conversations. Foreign to me were the words I said next: “Is something wrong, Miles? Are you all right?”

There was an exhalation, and something clicked. Not a literal click, which would have signaled the end of the phone call, but an inaudible click, the sound of forces higher than myself fitting pieces into place. Unbeknownst to me, I had just given Miles permission.

And now his voice was calm. “No, I’m not all right,” he said softly. “I’m an alcoholic, Winnie. An alcoholic. And I need help.”

The explosion of this bombshell was diffused somewhat in the limitations of my ability to understand it. Alcoholic. The word rolled in my head, over my tongue, and down my throat; I had to swallow to fully grasp the meaning. Only after I could feel it hit my stomach and sit there did I begin to feel afraid. It was fear not of the word itself, but rather the images conjured up with it: images of big, black things which towered over you, and came out of the walls to eat you alive.

To me, the word was the goblin Little Orphan Annie told of in her witch tales: “And the Gob-i-lins’ll git you, eff you don’ watch, out!” The rhyme had always sent me deep under the covers, afraid to set foot outside the bed after the light was turned off, afraid of being gitted. That was the Word’s power, and I was terrified. Cotton mouth, knock knees, pit-of-the-stomach scared, because suddenly a barrier had been lifted.

Gaps between child and adult were appearing, and suddenly it was no longer clear where one stopped and the other began. Suddenly I was no longer assured of being 11 years old and blissfully ignorant of words like “alcoholic,” I was aware of an uninvited force aging me faster then I cared to go.

And yet underneath it, underneath the fear, existed something stronger. Below the Word, the gigantic, yawning Word, lay Miles the human, calling from what I pictured was the corner of his dirty couch in a small apartment, the phone cradled in his hand. The word was a gigantic, looming entity; Miles was not. And all of a sudden I recognized the stronger feeling as being deep, agonizing sorrow, sorrow that Miles had nobody better than myself with whom to share his secret, and that the climax of a 20-or-more-year plot development now hinged on the actions of a child.

The more immediate problem, I realized, when I snapped back to earth, was that of my father’s whereabouts. Miles had handed me a responsibility; it was now my duty to fulfill it. “Well, Miles,” I said carefully, “I’m going to get off the phone and call my Dad. And he’ll call you right away. If I can’t get hold of him, I’ll call you back and we can talk until he comes home. All right?”

The universe had shifted. The child dictated terms, the adult surrendered meekly. “OK,” Miles said in the same soft voice. “Thank you.”

I promised again to call him, and hung up the phone. I dialed the number of the party from the pad my father had scrawled it on that morning.

“Who’re you calling?” the sitter asked, not quite managing to sound as though she cared.

“My mother,” I answered. The phone began to ring somewhere across town. It was answered by an adult who laid the phone in a bowl of potato chips while she hunted up my father.

“Daddy,” I burbled, panicked, “you’ve gotta call Miles Alcorn, right now. He’s not doin’ good, he’s a, a alcoholic, he said, and he needs your help. He called you just now to tell you.” Having accepted the responsibility, I was now frantic to see it through to its completion. “I got his number here, so call him now.”

My father spoke in brisk, precise tones that were nevertheless comforting. “Slow down, kiddo. He said what? Take a deep breath and tell me slowly.”

I relayed the message again, slower this time, but with no less urgency. A panicked brain is capable of anything; my mind’s eye was painting a dismal picture of Miles sobbing in a ball on the floor, a gun to his head, or hanging by his toes from a ledge on the forty-fourth floor, phone in his hand.

“What do I do, Dad?” I asked.

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You did great. I’ll take it from here,” my father said, and hung up.

I breathed for a moment, no hitch in my breath, no tears standing in my eyes, just a quiver in my chest that, as I waited, settled to the bottom of my stomach and disappeared altogether. Something washed over me. I would eventually understand that there was a phrase that accompanied the feelings I had right then, the phrase, “I need a drink.” I had heard it said and thought it clever, too young to understand its actual meaning.

Was that how it began for him? Was it as easy as one day in his childhood he stumbled upon something so overwhelming, so demanding of a different kind of perception that he thought, “I’ll have a drink now. I’ve just seen my mother kiss a man who isn’t my father. I’ve just seen my dog get hit by a car. My best friend is in the hospital and oh lookey here, I’m not in Neverland, I have to grow up today, and I’ll need the accessories. Yessiree, thank you, Ma’am, I’ll take myself a little nip or two of that red, red wine.” Maybe. Maybe it happened like this.

Or maybe it was simpler than that, it was a slow, steady discovery, first a beer more than the rest of the guys in the frat house, then a social drink or two, or four, then a nightcap, and a sleep aid, then, “Oh what the hell, it’s five o’ clock somewhere,” one time too many. A drink to console yourself when you’re sad, a drink to celebrate when you’re happy. And finally a drink alone, telling yourself, “It’s Saturday night, gotta do something special on Saturday,” except that it’s actually Wednesday morning and it’s right before he’s got to go to work. Maybe it was like that. The versions are endless.

I told myself none of this then; rather, I wondered only if Miles was going to go to a doctor for his problem, or if he could solve it himself, with Pepto-Bismol and an aspirin. The urgency was fading somewhat. My father had seen to that.

I returned to the backyard where my sister was waiting impatiently. She had managed to turn on the amplifier - still doubling as a throne - and was moodily twisting the knobs back and forth. “Where were you?” she asked peevishly. “I’ve been waiting.” She thrust a battered rabbit doll in my direction. “Dress Bunny,” she said. “I can’t get his tail through his pants.”

At that precise moment the only possible action in the world that I could make tangible sense of would be to pick up the stuffed rabbit and poke its tail through the seat of its overalls. Yes, I would dress the stuffed rabbit in his clothes, yes, I would spend the next hour playing with my sister in the garage. Later I would stuff myself with supper and watch reruns of Mr. Belvedere on TV while the memory of what had occurred earlier faded into the background. By the time my father came home that night, I would have forgotten the incident altogether, never imagining how deeply it had been imprinted into my brain.

What this exposure had done would, in the fullness of time, be revealed. I would shy from alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes for years to come. I would keep at arms length those who indulged in them. I would find myself unable to tear myself away from those in need of a sympathetic ear, and feel helpless terror when I could not immediately find solutions to their problems. But these things would remain quiet for a time, and so I was allowed - if only for the moment - to go back to being 11.

Winifred Wallace is a native of Los Angeles currently residing in the Bay Area. A graduate of Mills College, she has previously authored several stage plays and screenplays.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, May 11th, 2007 | Email This Post

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