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    Jack's Boy: An Alcoholic Childhood
    Jack's Boy: An Alcoholic Childhood
    Jack's Boy: An Alcoholic Childhood
    Ebook107 pages2 hours

    Jack's Boy: An Alcoholic Childhood

    By Gaylord Dold

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    About this ebook

    This harrowing memoir traces the arc of one young child's love for his dad and family from innocence to the devastating reality of the father's profound alcoholism. In short, frank and unsentimental chapters, Dold captures the stark emotional ruin of a life gone off the tracks, innocent people held in nightly bondage, and a beautiful world gone haywire.

    Beyond the immediacy of this physical and emotional turmoil, Jack's Boy paints
    a vivid picture of America in the 1950s, where families were assumed to be happy and nobody talked about their problems. Jack's Boy is a disturbing portrait that will move readers with its revelation of broader truths about life lived in the shadow of alcoholism, leaving room for hope.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGaylord Dold
    Release dateApr 30, 2015
    ISBN9781311848055
    Jack's Boy: An Alcoholic Childhood
    Author

    Gaylord Dold

    Gaylord Dold is the author of fifteen works of fiction including the highly acclaimed private detective series featuring Mitch Roberts, a well as numerous contemporary crime thrillers. Many of his novels have been singled out for awards and praise by a number of critics and writer’s organizations. As one of the founders of Watermark Press, Dold edited and published a number of distinguished literary works, including the novel Leaving Las Vegas by John O’Brien, which was made into a movie starring Nicholas Cage and Elizabeth Shue. Dold lives on the prairie of southern Kansas.

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      Book preview

      Jack's Boy - Gaylord Dold

      1

      He is their blue-eyed boy, their joy and their inspiration. That’s the way it feels, the way it should be. Call him Adam.

      When Jack looks at his new son, he sees a ballplayer, a pilot, a hero. His boy is skinny, with skinny arms that have a fine golden down, and skinny legs with knobby knees. Jack’s boy has a big wide smile, and he is curious. He gets into everything. But when Ellen looks at her son, she sees only Adam. Her boy’s health is her greatest happiness on earth.

      Now…this boy is in his room, lying on his bed while a warm wind rises outside and blows over him, through an open window. White curtains fill and flutter. Outside, the green grass is fragrant as hay. Lilacs border the green grass and there is a great expanse of clear blue sky. This boy’s dreams are of cowboys and lariats and running horses.

      The window is his boy’s world. The boy has all he needs, his mom and dad to keep him safe, his erector set to play with, his plastic record player and a pile of yellow plastic records that talk and sing to him, Davy Crockett and Woody Woodpecker and Mickey Mouse. He has Golden Books to read, his first baseball bat, and warm mittens for winter, and his swimming suit for summer, and the white shoes his mother bought him just last week.

      Adam gallops, he does not walk, not really. Adam laughs and calls attention to himself. He sleeps and wakes up and plays with a stout yellow cat that licks his toes and tickles him and purrs very loud in his ear.

      In Adam’s backyard, trees groan in the wind. The curtains move and float. Now…Adam is the captain of a ship that sails a vast blue sea. The trees are his rigging, the curtains his sail. He’s sailing, on and on.

      Adam loves himself, and he loves his mom and his dad, and he loves his yellow cat, and he loves his grandmothers and his grandfathers. He loves his coonskin cap, and he loves loud thunderstorms in summer, and frosty snowstorms in winter. He loves the bees that buzz around the flowers.

      And Jack loves his son Adam. Ellen loves her son Adam, and she loves her husband Jack, and Jack loves his wife, Ellen.

      Adam is a luminous boy.

      Isn’t this how all happy stories begin?

      2

      Adam is having a great adventure. He is traveling in outer space, just like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. Now he rockets past stars and planets, which he has learned about from radio, and in his Golden Books. He wonders if his mom knows what he is doing out here on the porch, all summer long?

      Jack brings Adam old radios, broken watches, clocks that don’t tick, tools, spare car parts covered with grease, things that have knobs and dials, things that glow or go bang, or just sit still and look interesting, stuff with coils and wires. One by one, Adam lines up his stuff on the porch rail, or on the floor, or on boxes, or on the windowsill, until he has the complete cockpit of a space ship, a crowded place where he can play with all the little friends who come over to his house. The porch is so crammed with things that his mom complains that she can hardly get through the front door, but she doesn’t make Adam move anything, or clean it up at all. When Jack brings Adam an old steering wheel one day, Adam is very happy, and even happier when Jack brings him a tractor seat to sit on.

      But Jack has an even better idea. One evening just before dark, Jack comes home from work with many glass jars. While Adam watches, Jack goes around the yard, filling the jars, one by one, with fireflies. When he’s finished, Jack walks slowly onto the porch and gives Adam the jars that are now filled with wiggling, flying fireflies. Now, Adam’s spaceship is constantly blinking and winking and Adam’s little friends have to laugh and giggle at the sight. Every night, Jack comes home from work and fills the jars before dinner, then gives them to Adam.

      Then one night in fall, when the leaves are falling off the trees, and it is too cool to play in his spaceship, Adam feels sick. He lies in his bed and can’t sleep, and tosses and turns and feels hot. In the middle of the night, Adam coughs and coughs and can’t stop coughing. Jack and Ellen come and sit with him and give him some medicine to help him stop coughing, but Adam can’t, no matter how hard he tries. He coughs so much and for so long that he begins to cry.

      For days and days, Adam is sick. He is too sick to go outside and play. Then one night, Jack comes home with a needle and more medicine, and sticks the needle in Adam’s rear end, which hurts. After that, Jack comes home every night and makes Adam turn over in bed, then gives him a shot. Even though the shot hurts, Adam can sleep for a while, but he always wakes up and begins coughing again. Adam begins to fear his dad coming home from work, because it means he will be getting his shot. Adam misses his little friends and his spaceship and he is tired all the time, from coughing and not being able to sleep. Adam is also tired of seeing his dad walk into his bedroom with a needle in his hand.

      Then one evening Jack comes home from work without the needle in hand. Blankets and all, Jack picks up Adam and carries him to the living room and puts him, blankets and all, on the red fuzzy couch next to the radio. Adam lies on the fuzzy couch, listening to the Lone Ranger and Big John and Sparky, and then he gets drowsy. Adam thinks he sees Jack carrying out all the pillows that were on his bed, but he isn’t sure. All he knows is that when Jack carries him back to his room and puts him in bed, he is able to sleep, and sleeps for a long time.

      When Adam wakes the next morning, he isn’t coughing. The red blotches on his hands and face are gone, and his skin feels cool.

      That day, Jack comes home early from work. It is a warm sunny afternoon in late fall. Jack carries Adam out to the front porch. His spaceship is still there, exactly as he left it. Every watch, dial and cog. Adam plays and plays and enjoys his little friends, and gives the yellow cat a ride to Mars. The next day, when Jack comes home from work again, he tells Adam that he was allergic. Adam doesn’t know what that means, but he knows his dad took away the pain.

      3

      Adam lives in a nice white house on a hill, in a neighborhood where there are lots of nice white houses, and many trees, and places to hide. Adam knows that he lived somewhere else once, but he can’t remember it exactly. All he can remember are some snowy winter days when the sky was gray, and that he had a dog with black fur and brown patches over its eyes. Late at night, when he is alone in his bed and his parents are in the living room, Adam tries to remember his other house, the room he lived in before. He thinks it was made of concrete blocks, and was on a dark wide street where there weren’t many trees. He is

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