I don’t know how Ernie did that night on the court. I never made it to the game. It was the only high school game of Ernie’s I missed. I spent much of the night leaning against my Falcon, struggling to remain upright. Then the car tilted as if struck by a rogue wave, and I landed on the pavement. Luckily, I used my face to break my fall. Beyond that, I don’t remember anything. I later came to learn that I was thrown into the Falcon, and after much debate about what to do with me, one of my less inebriated classmates drove the Falcon with a second car following. I assume they obtained my address from my driver’s license. The problem, of course, was how to deliver me. I remained passed out, with bloodstains down the front of my shirt and a welt on my forehead the size of an egg. With limited options, my new drinking buddies did what any eighteen-year-olds would have done. They propped me up against the front door, rang the bell, and ran.
Like I said, I don’t remember any of this, mind you, and there isn’t any account of it in any of my mother’s scrapbooks comprising my high school years, but my companions provided a detailed accounting the following Monday at school. My father didn’t wait that long. He rousted me at seven Saturday morning by throwing a glass of cold water in my face. Then he sat in a lawn chair reading the newspaper while I pushed the lawn mower around the yard in a cold sweat, throwing up just about every three feet. With my head pounding, he sat me down to talk. My mother came out to join us, but my father suggested she get breakfast ready. She departed without a word, which was really unlike her.
“You made quite an entrance,” he said. My father explained how, when he opened the door, I entered the house face-first, just missing the staircase banister, my fall broken only by my mother’s potted fern. “Your mother loved that fern.”
“I’ll pay for a new one,” I said, though I knew this wasn’t about flora.
“Your mother wanted to rush you to the emergency room to have your stomach pumped. I wanted to leave you on the floor.” My father handed me a glass of iced tea. “I went to high school, Sam, and I went to college. I have no desire to do it again. I can’t be in the car with you or live in your dorm next year. You’ve reached an age to make your own decisions. I hope you make those decisions because you feel they are the right thing to do, not because of peer pressure or because you’re trying to fit in. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I nodded.
“Don’t ever think of yourself as being something less than the person you are because of your eyes, Sam. If you do, people will take advantage of it, and you’ll find yourself doing things you don’t want to do.”
“I understand. But why did you make me mow the lawn?”
“Being a man means having to live with the consequences of our decisions, like getting up and going to work with a hangover. That was your lesson today.”
I waited for my punishment, hoping it wasn’t something severe. My father would certainly suspend my driving privileges and likely ground me.
“Take a shower and try to get something into your stomach,” he said. Then he stood and left me sitting alone in the backyard.
My mother had not agreed with my father’s decision to appeal to my sense of responsibility. Had it been left to her, I would have been enrolled in the local chapter of AA and never allowed to leave the house again. But that moment in the backyard, when my father called me a man, had been my rite of passage. He was telling me that I needed to make my own decisions in life, and I needed to decide for myself what type of person I intended to become, independent of what others thought of me.
6
My father didn’t ground me, but, feeling guilty, I decided to lie low and spend Saturday night at home. Ernie had a date, so going out wasn’t really an issue. Mickie, surprisingly, didn’t have a date and joined me downstairs to play pool. I heard the doorbell ring and voices upstairs.
“Sounds like Ernie,” Mickie said.
“Can’t be. He’s got a date.”