The bachelor party last night was a success, I think. I cooked steak and potatoes on the grill, and while I cooked, we sat on the back porch, talking and drinking. Later, after dinner, we played Madden 10 and made frequent trips to the toilet to relieve ourselves of beer. It was a tame party, if judged by college boy standards, but pretty exciting for a guy in his mid-thirties. Between the two of us, myself and the groom killed a 12-can box of Bud Light plus a couple Coronas and a Heineken I found in the back of the fridge.
It’s been a few years since I drank that much. It felt pretty good.
I have some memories of the night, but in the end, I don’t remember things all that well, particularly after the other men left. I remember stumbling around outside, trying to walk the dog, afraid she would pull me down if she saw a cat. I was pretty unsteady. I remember trying to play World of Warcraft, but the required finger-eye coordination was a little beyond me. I remember taking a shower. I remember lying on the bedroom floor, laughing so loudly and for so long that it scared the dog. Somehow I ended up in bed. I don’t remember my wife coming home and getting in bed beside me. I woke up at around a quarter to three, mouth dry as a desert and calf muscles aching as if I’d run a marathon. I got up for a drink of water and haven’t been back to bed.
Other than my achy legs and dehydration, I don’t feel too bad. This is how my body has responded, every time I’ve gotten drunk in my life. I wake up early after a night of binge drinking, and I feel energized. No headache or hangover, just wakefulness, clarity.
In my sleep, just before I woke, I had a dream that for whatever reason motivated me to get up and write a little. Lying there awake for about twenty minutes, going over the dream in my mind, I imagined myself telling it to my therapist.
It’s a very brief dream. In the dream, my grandpa and I and some other men, no faces or names to any of them, are being judged on our singing. The other men have vague identities as “friends” of grandpa’s. The person doing the judging comes around to each of us with a device that measures whether we would be an alto, a soprano, a tenor, etc., when you sing a note into it. Grandpa makes some self-deprecatory noises, saying he has never sang in his life and doesn’t expect any great result from this. But I know he’s really just setting the men up. He will sing impressively. Grandpa sings the “la” note and registers as a very low bass on the tone measuring device, and the other men clap and hoot, clearly impressed.
When it is my turn, I sing “la” and measure as a rather flat tenor. The men don’t respond positively or negatively. Grandpa says nothing, but looks away, either embarrassed of me or still preoccupied with his own success.
That is the entire dream. When I imagine myself talking about this to my therapist, he latches on to the symbolism of a competition between grandpa and I. And this isn’t a competition he ought, by nature, to win. It’s a creative competition. Creativity is my field, although singing isn’t my specialty. Still, why would a man whose interests were in active, athletic endeavors, best me at singing?
Even so, my feelings in the dream aren’t jealousy, or anger, or shame. I feel proud that my grandfather is such an impressive man. He can excel in so many fields. Growing up in his shadow, that was (usually) how I felt, as well.
I remember in the late ’80′s, when grandpa would have been only in his mid to late fifties, he got in a fist fight with a man named Don. Don was the boyfriend of my uncle Mike’s ex-wife, Debbie, and Don and Debbie had come to grandpa’s to pick up the kids. Uncle Mike was living with grandpa and grandma at the time, while he found somewhere else to live. I was there, but don’t even remember what started the fight. My memory of what I’ve been told suggests that Don and Mike started arguing and grandpa joined in. He bloodied Don pretty good and sent him running for his car. Grandpa followed up by throwing a brick that struck the car on the hood as it pulled out, just missing the windshield.
My own Dad used to tell that story with pride. Pride that the “old man” had sent a guy in his thirties fleeing for his life. When Dad told it, the story would usually go something like this:
“It was like a fight between two girls until Dad joined in. Don saw him coming around the corner of the house and he knew the real man had arrived. He was headed for the car, but Dad grabbed him by the hair and yanked him back, and he laid one on that fella that busted his nose like an overripe tomato. Don couldn’t get away fast enough after that. Not a bad showing for a 56 year-old man.”
Now in his seventies, Grandpa remains a large man, with large hands that no one would want to feel hitting their nose or mouth. But when I was a kid, he was so much larger.
