A Drinking Life: Lessons of My Two Fathers
July 1975. Marriage of Gene and Jo Alworth (their second), with my grandparents, Sadie and Ernie Metcalf
"A Drinking Life" is a slow, intermittent autobiographical sketch. Although I write about beer full-time these days, it hasn't always been central or even very important in my life. But it has always been a presence, even as my life passed through very different phases. In today's post, I follow its roots back to the beginning—and a little bit before. You can find the introductory post here.
I was born Suzan Gorostiza on a snowy Thursday morning in January 1968. My birth father was out of town on the night Mom’s contractions started, so she ignored them. She didn’t take orders from anyone—including a little being knocking at the door. She figured she’d just hold off until the morning, when her husband returned, and so, by the time she called a cab before dawn, it wasn’t clear she’d even make it to the hospital. She did, but they had to wheel her into an emergency room before I burst into the world, shortly after 8am.
“Let me see my little Susan!” Mom recalls saying. Before ultrasounds existed, predicting a baby’s sex was apparently a primitive exercise, and my mother’s doctor got it wrong. The nurse held me aloft, announcing instead the arrival of little “Johnny.” It hadn’t occurred to Mom to have a boy’s name at the ready, so for a week I was Baby Gorostiza. She has never been sure why she chose Jeff, and used to joke that with a bit more warning she’d have probably named me David.
I enjoy this story because it reveals a few essential details about my parents. Ignoring contractions because they don’t fit your schedule tells you something about Mom’s willfulness. That was a family trait she got from her parents, and which her sister shared. Her parents, Ernie and Sadie Metcalf, left Oklahoma in their twenties and drove to Vale, in the scrub desert of Eastern Oregon, to homestead in the middle of the depression. A story they told proudly involved an afternoon not long after they’d gotten to Oregon. They were literally down to their last quarter (about six bucks in today’s money), and Grandpa asked Grandma what she wanted to do one evening. “Let’s go to the show [movies]!” she told him, and they did.
For her part, Mom left Eastern Oregon and traveled to the “big” city to start her life. The Boise metro area was only about 50,000 people at the time, but if you wanted anything larger, you had to go all the way to Portland or Salt Lake. She attended business school and started working at the phone company, where she would spend over 25 years inching her way up a ladder that wasn’t built for high heels. They weren’t the kind of heroics that put Mom on a magazine cover, but in Mad Men-era America, it was pretty bold stuff. My Mom had an agenda, and nothing, certainly not the patriarchy, was going to stop her.
Richard Gorostiza’s role in the story is one of absence. Missing parents leave a hole, often a wound, but more than that, they leave a mysterious substance their children spend a lifetime trying to grasp. I know almost nothing about my birth father, yet he looks back at me from the mirror. My thin body, over six feet of it, is Gorostiza rather than stocky Metcalf. It’s a Basque body, or partly so, which isn’t uncommon in Boise, with the largest population outside Europe. In family photos, I am a gangly interloper a half a head taller than anyone else. I’m the only one with brown eyes, the only one who can go outside on a sunny day without worrying about immediate sunburn. In 2014 my wife Sally and I traveled to the Basque Lands for research on cider, and she said I looked like a local. A half a world away, I finally found people who looked like family.
My brain, wired to write, didn’t come from the Metcalfs, either. Mom said Richard was an artist, though that wasn’t his profession. Perhaps when I sketch images of brewers and breweries with words, it’s his brain holding the pen. (My Mom was the reader, though. Now in memory care, her life boiled down to its most immediate and durable essence, her bed and chairs are piled with books.) Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like had I been raised with this cultural background. With that name. Lives have turned on less.
He left me one more inheritance—an affection for booze. I certainly didn’t get that from the Metcalfs, who didn’t drink. Never once in my life did I see alcohol pass my grandparents’ lips. They weren’t religious, at least not until late middle-age; alcohol just didn’t seem to interest them. When we would visit my aunt’s house at Thanksgiving, the men would drink beer in front of the football games, but very little, perhaps a can before the feast and one after. If my family had a vice, it was pie, not booze.
The Gorostizas were drinkers. At large Gorostiza family gatherings, the wine and liquor flowed. Mom recalled them more with wonder than affection. The Metcalfs also had big family gatherings, even loud ones. But they were sedate, whereas the Gorostiza get-togethers were tinged with the chaos of drink.
Unlike her parents and sister, Mom liked to drink, too. And she liked drinking with Richard Gorostiza; it was something they did together. I think that was one reason she married him—he was older, had this strange family, and loved to go out at night. Mom loved getting all dressed up, selecting one of the wigs from the collection she kept on Styrofoam heads in her bedroom, do her nails, and go to someplace dark and swanky. She was enjoying the world the way young people do, by experimenting with new places, a new job, new people, and new, adult activities. She didn’t go into great detail about this time in her life, but I think it was perhaps a little racier than parents usually admit to their children.
Mom’s will would exert itself again a few weeks after my birth, when she precipitously announced to Richard that she was divorcing him. Something shifted radically and irrevocably as a consequence of my birth—and she gave no warning it was coming. Indeed, I know that they went to a roaring New Year’s Eve party less than three weeks before I was born (it was the 1960s). The second I entered the scene, her party life ended. Richard’s apparently didn’t, and that was the end of that.
I have only two memories of Richard Gorostiza, and one was listening to him try to pull the air conditioner from the window in an ill-conceived, booze-fueled effort to win Mom back. It was late at night, or seemed so to me, and it was scary. Mom could tell through the door he was drunk and told him to go home. She wasn’t scared, even when he rattled the air conditioner in its perch. She seemed mostly mad at him and his incapacity to control himself. With my birth, Mom had completely reoriented her life around her child. That meant a totally new, domestic life. No carousing, no late nights. No pulling the air conditioner out of the window. Get on board or get out of the way.
Gene Alworth was managing the Royal Restaurant in Boise when he met my Mom. The Royal was the one truly posh establishment in Boise, the restaurant people like the Governor went to dine. My future father knew everyone of importance in the city and for a brief time in his life he was a dashing, glamorous figure. He dressed well, lived like a high roller, and drove a cinnamon-metallic Cadillac. Mom had three years of single-parenthood under her belt when they started dating, but she was just 29. That would have made Dad 41—and he must have seemed like quite the catch.
Of course, Gene drank, and heavily. This would have been an obligation of his job, but that was mere coincidence—he drank as a Marine in Korea and every stop thereafter. All the Alworths drank. Dad’s eldest brother Jack was a full-blown alcoholic, dead from drink by middle age. After the Royal, Dad stayed in hospitality, first opening his own restaurant, and then a very cool bar underneath an old hotel downtown. It was dark and smoky, had a speakeasy vibe, and seemed like the kind of place Jim Croce was describing when he came on the radio there. Neither business made it, and Dad ended up becoming a struggling roofer during the abysmal housing years of the 1970s and ‘80s.
Dad’s relationship with alcohol might have raised flags for Mom—after all, it had ended her first marriage—but there was something different in the way Dad drank. He stopped drinking liquor for the years he was married to mom. But he drank beer, a lot of it. In every vehicle he owned—after the Cadillac they were all trucks—he placed a small cooler behind the driver’s seat, and fished beers out as he drove. After they’d been dating a while, Mom started taking him to church, which to my surprise he loved, and that was about the only place you wouldn’t see a can of beer in his hand. Although he drank through much of his free time, though, Dad didn’t get drunk, and this was the big difference in his drinking. There was no chaos to his habit.
In my child’s memory, beer had a ritual quality. I grew up fishing with Dad, and fetching him a beer became part of the mystique of the endeavor. Fish only seemed to bite when he had a freshly-lighted Winston or just-opened can of beer beading in the heat. Cracking a beer was a way of aligning the circumstances within the universe. The fish would strike, and he’d spill his beer or awkwardly try to convey it to the ground. Opening the beer was an incantation and an invitation.
I was the designated beer retriever, and there was a sense that, in delivering Dad a beer, the world was, for a brief moment, perfectly ordered. He’d thank me and sigh theatrically as he had a sip. I believe Idaho still had it’s “three-two” law in effect (beer could be a max of 3.2% ABW or 4% ABV), and Dad drank slowly. He’d nurse the beers long enough that, in the summer, the liquid in the can would turn room temperature.
The first time I tasted beer, he handed me the can. I think we both felt like I should understand this important substance. It tasted much as it smelled, pleasant and malty, which is also how my father smelled. It was the taste of adulthood, and I enjoyed it.
Looking back with my adult mind, I am given pause by the amount he drank. I don’t have the data to adjudicate whether it was within normal bounds for the 1970s. Society was going through at least three massive changes as women entered the workforce, divorce became accessible, and birth control sparked a sexual revolution. It was an explosion of social freedom. If you watch movies or television from the ‘70s, people are drinking and smoking in a way that shocks our modern sensibilities.
Whether it was an excessive amount or not, Mom was comfortable with it. It seemed safe. It seemed safe to me, too, and at a subconscious level, I think I understood some lesson there. Alcohol doesn’t carry moral weight, but the behaviors it causes do. Drink, but keep it together.
How did that play out in my life? Growing up Gen X meant being a child in an era when kids were on their own. As early as first grade, I roamed completely unsupervised in a pack with the neighborhood kids. I walked three-quarters of a mile to school with a friend and returned in the afternoon to a house that would remain empty for hours before my parents got home from work. It was long before the internet existed, so it was a tactile, outdoors childhood of tree-climbing, game-playing, and exploration.
It also meant we grew up pretty fast. As adolescences dawned, we turned our idle time to more dangerous activities. In the absence of supervision, kids started experimenting with drugs and alcohol, sex, and other behaviors we thought we were adult enough to handle. (Youth is characterized by the hubris of naïveté). I’ve always appreciated the trial by fire I got growing up. It made me self-sufficient and daring in life. Unfortunately, that wasn’t true for a lot of my contemporaries, whose experiments, and lives, turned sour.
The next time I drank beer I was still a child, but now wearing an adult-sized body. The attitude of permissiveness dominating the era extended into public space, so I just wandered into a grocery store and bought my first six-pack. I hit six feet before high school and the checker didn’t look too closely at my 16-year-old face when I placed the beer along with a few other items on the counter (teenage subterfuge). She rang me up, and I was the owner of a six-pack of Budweiser.
I don’t recall drinking the beer, honestly, except that we did it surreptitiously, in our basement, as befitted our under-supervised lifestyle. I do know that we only drank three of the beers, because one afternoon in the following days I found my father in the house after I got home from school. This was unprecedented, both because of that latchkey-kid thing, and also because my parents were already divorced by then. Presumably Mom had discovered the poorly-hidden beer and decided it fit more inside Dad’s parental wheelhouse.
The three remaining Buds were dangling in their clear-plastic holder from my father’s finger as he sat at the kitchen table. “Well,” he said by way of greeting. “I always got caught; I don’t know why you thought you’d be any different.” This was one of the more memorable events of my early life because despite this obvious transgression I wasn’t actually in trouble—not really. For my parents, it was a point of transition, and they wanted to prepare me. I was probably grounded for a week, but the incident underscored the lesson percolating in my subconscious from youth: alcohol isn’t innately bad, but you have to be responsible and accept the consequences when you choose to drink it.
As I look back on this, juxtaposed with my Mom’s first two husbands (she did have a third, and that one stuck), I see some explanatory power in it. My Mom divorced her first husband for his relationship to alcohol, and overlooked her second husband for his. They both drank, and probably more than she would have liked. But the second one, older and more established in life, kept his drinking in bounds. That was the right relationship to have with alcohol. At least at a subconscious level, these are the lessons I drew, and they have guided me since.
I drank my first full beer in Salt Lake City in one of my unhappiest periods of life. (We had moved from Boise after my Mom’s second divorce to follow a job.) Full of discontent and adolescent hormones, I experimented with alcohol as a private rebellion against the dominant culture. At 18, that all changed with a move to Portland, and the joyful experience of college. Alcohol became one part of an explosion of experimentation.
Those formative years deserve their own consideration, but I introduce them here by way of saying that even in the most beer-soaked days of my late adolescence, the experiences of childhood had become behavioral muscle memory. I felt the very real threat alcohol posed. Had I overlooked it, the two roommates I had freshman year were there to remind me. The first, to this day one of the loveliest, most humane people I’ve ever known, ended up crashing out of college due to drug and alcohol abuse. The second did, too, and his case was even more painful because he used drinking to address mental health problems. By the last few weeks of the year, he wasn’t even attending class.
By contrast, I was indulging in the freedom of pretend-adulthood and the safety net college offered the temporary lush. It wasn’t just beer, either—I was indulging in so many extraordinary new experiences, all shot-through with that youthful feeling of expansion. Drugs, sex, art, radical new ideas, new people from different backgrounds. I was plunging deeply into what I recognized at the time was a delicious but fleeting moment.
I am so grateful I did, too. Those periods don’t pass without risk—a mistake or accident might have derailed me. Alcohol becoming a habit, though—that wasn’t in the cards.
My drinking life was just beginning, but by sophomore year everything had changed. I was one of the youngest people living in a large house in Southeast Portland filled with vice and distraction. The house was awash in beer, a band roared in the basement, people I’d never seen before would wander down from one of the bedrooms in the morning. We pooled our change, returned bottles for their nickel deposit, and bought the cheapest beer by the case.
My life had already changed, though. I turned to school, began to apply my intellectual curiosity, and buckled down. We drank and we had fun, but my freshman year of experimentation was over.
My life of drinking continued, but it was time to get it together.