Dyan Cannon’s Liquor
by Michael Morey

My parents split the spring after the summer that my father spent fucking a semi-famous actress. My mother found out about this when we returned from Northern Michigan for the school year. We was me, my sister, brother, and of course mother.

This actress fucking was not in and of itself the reason for the split. I think my father was just an all around whore, and my mother had had it. We even had a gay guy living in the basement for a while, who I’m sure my dad was tapping. This guy wore a colostomy bag and always smelled like shit and cologne. Behind his back we called him Bag, or Bag Fag. When he moved out he took one of my mother’s pantsuits with him, and she freaked. I think being in theatre and all, my father had the occasion to fuck a guy here and there. I don’t think he was gay, just an all around whore.

The people in Illinois thought we were freaks. It was sort of a suburban enclave, and the first mistake we made was fencing in our property. Among our other crimes were not mowing often enough, (the lawn and our hair).

My dad hooked up with the actress while they were doing a play together, and apparently after the run of the play, she had stayed on. She left a fully stocked bar under the kitchen sink, and I got drunk for the first time sampling her liquor. I don’t remember what all was in there but I dumped a good bit of everything into a Tupper-Ware container, and my friend Bob and I went over to the cemetery to try it out. There was a big tombstone in the shape of an over-stuffed easy chair that we liked to hang out on and that’s where we got drunk. I woke up at the base of the monument, alone. My head hurt and crusty puke trailed out of my mouth and down the front of my t-shirt. I touched my head lightly where it hurt and felt a bump.

I got in before anyone was awake, and stayed home from school, I missed a lot of school, it was easy. I’d knock lightly on parents door and do some small bit of acting, saying I didn’t feel good. My mother would tell me to go back to bed.

Many mornings my parents never got up anyway. The plays ran late and they sometimes would party afterwards. I remember stepping over bodies to get to the kitchen to make breakfast. We had a big wicker chaise lounge, and a smaller one to match, child-sized for my little sister. One morning I came down and there was an old man passed out in it, his legs and arms hanging over the sides, I recognized him from old movies on TV. He always played ghouls.

My parents fought all the time, usually ending with my mother sobbing, something that came to her easily. I threw a beer bottle at him once for upsetting her and he made this exaggerated horror face. I laughed, it looked like bad acting, but whenever he brought it up after he referred to it as when you tried to kill me. I think my father was afraid of us kids, or just didn’t know what to do with us.

I was twelve and car obsessed, and before the split my father would occasionally take me out for driving lessons. We’d go to an abandoned airstrip, drive around and drink beer.

After I recovered from that first graveyard drunk, Bob and I would get trashed almost every weekend. We learned to ration it so we wouldn’t get so sick, plus we had more fun, or at least remembered it. We continued to use the graveyard until our occasional vandalism—tipping over headstones and defacing them with spray paint—brought in a night watchman.

The actress’s stock got depleted after awhile but that didn’t slow us down. We were resourceful and would hang out by the liquor store, getting adults to buy us Boones Farm. We’d each have our own bottle and would drink them in our new hangout, a gazebo in the park. We laughed a lot and I suppose Bob became my first romantic partner or whatever. We were pre-sex, but drunk, sometimes even in the light of day, we’d stroll through the park, our arms around each other’s waists, my head on his shoulder.

When the divorce was finalized we moved up to Michigan permanently. We got to start all over there. I had more friends and people didn’t think we were freaks. It was a couple years before I started drinking regularly again, but when I did, I always drove.

Dyan Cannon was the actress who my father had been fucking and who fueled my first drunk. Once in a while I see her on TV and get a taste of that foul brew in the plastic container.

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