Smashed

A child of alcoholic parents will often sneak into the liquor cabinet while his parents are passed out in the lazy boy chair, bloated and red, not exactly snoring as much as wheezing, and take the bottles of liquor to the kitchen sink, where he will pour the contents down the drain. The look on his face, as he stands on a stool above the sink, is contorted in anger and hatred, tears fill his eyes and run down his cheek, dripping, mixing, swirling with whisky. The child is scarred for life. After all, children are the most delicate of creatures and should be surrounded with Care Bears and puppy dogs.

The first thing Dad is going to want when he wakes up and rolls his dry yellow tongue in his mouth, is a shot of Bourbon. He'll stumbles to the cabinet with his stout crystal glass in hand, a film of dried lip and rum smeared on the rim of the glass. To a drunk, washing dishes is pointless. Why worry about the external filth in one’s surroundings when one's insides are filled with disease? How surprised he'll be to find his medicine gone. Confusion first, then panic, not a panic of the mind, not rational at all, much worse, a panic of the body. Trillions of cells halting on the streets of the kingdom Body. Traffic accidents, workers abandoning their machines, all cellular citizens holding their breath with eyes in the sky--and then come the screams. A trillion angry citizens revolting, animating Dad into a seething maniac. "Where the hell is my god-damned Whisky?! Junior!!!"

Two strong possible outcomes follow: Junior will get beat within an inch of his life as an entire microscopic civilization launches weapons of massive emotional destruction: the belt, the fist, the dinning chair, or, the Kingdom Dad, looks to higher purpose, virtue, balance, an economy of H2O instead of yeast waste. In the second case, dad realizes his wasted life and the potential for positive pleasures in fathering his son. This scene would end with dad and junior embracing in tears, back lit in amber.

I would have liked to sneak the television out of my parents armoire and smash it to pieces in the street with a shovel this past weekend. We could have then all embraced and talked about real stuff. Stuff that isn’t from the TV.