Let’s go back in time…forty years or so.  To a neighborhood in upstate New York.  Think starter homes and station wagons with wood paneling.  Almost all the men work in white-collar jobs for the same large employer.  The women are stay-at-home mothers.  A kind of company town.  On summer nights, the kids go outside and play hide-and-seek or kick-the-can.

If you’re a Dateline fan (like I am), you’ll know that this is the point in the story when Keith Morrison would say “Nothing bad could ever happen here, could it?”

Anyway…

It’s Saturday…late afternoon.  Come inside my house; what do you see?

My father sits on the couch in the family room.  The curtains are drawn.  A cigarette burns in an ashtray on the coffee table. 

From the record player:  country music.   

Maybe The Statler Brothers — “Counting flowers on the wall, that don’t bother me at all…”

Or Marty Robbins – “Ribbon of darkness over me.  Since my true love walked out the door…”   

Or, most likely, Hank Williams – “I’m so lonesome I could cry…”

My father is on his fourth beer (Ballentine Ale).  Will he kill the six-pack before dinner?  Probably.  Don’t worry, there’s more in the refrigerator.

My stepmother is in the kitchen making dinner…always hamburgers on Saturday.  My father likes his rare, with onions.

My sister, brothers, and I are in our bedrooms waiting to be called downstairs, like subjects about to be summoned to dine with the mad king.

By the time we sit down to eat, he’s drunk.  Belligerent, nasty drunk.  Not beat-the-shit-out-of-you drunk (that stopped after my mother died).  We eat our hamburgers while my father raves. 

At some point, my stepmother objects to some obscenity or makes some feeble protest as he gets another beer.  They’ve been married for several years, but she still hasn’t learned to keep her mouth shut.  There’s no arguing with him; his power is absolute. He pounds the table and yells, “Fist, fight, fuck, fart, push a barrel, wheel a cart”.  That’s his favorite little ditty; he likes it more than anything by Hank Williams or The Statler Brothers.   

If we’re lucky, he’ll keep us prisoner there for only a few hours before we’ll be allowed to go back up to our rooms.  What might happen during those hours? 

Maybe we’ll be forced to arm-wrestle him or compete in some other feat of strength. 

He gets a real kick out of mocking the Catholic church.  I can picture him standing in the kitchen, making the sign of the cross and chanting “In nominee Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”

I remember one night that ended with him pouring a glass of water over my brother’s head and calling him “Numbnuts”. 

When I think about those Saturday nights, I don’t really feel any emotion at all.  It’s kind of like watching a bad made-for-TV movie.  But the other day as I was driving to the supermarket, John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads came on the radio, and I started to cry.