The Eternal Party

by Kristina Hagman

  It was the best of times. It was the worst of times …

  —CHARLES DICKENS

  DAD WAS DIAGNOSED WITH CIRRHOSIS of the liver in 1992. By then, his daily pattern was to start the morning with a beer or a vodka and orange juice and continue on by drinking beer and wine all day. He liked to quote W. C. Fields’s line, “I don’t drink water. Fish fuck in it.”

  He had been drinking heavily since he was fourteen. At first, it was a rebellion from the strict upbringing he had experienced in his grandmother’s care and a reaction to the great pain of losing her and coming to live in a situation in which his stepfather made him feel unwelcome. Then, as a teenager in Texas, drinking was the way to get close to his father and stepmother. Next came his time in the service, putting on shows and going to all the clubs to find talent, where hard drinking was the norm. Returning to the United States in the late 1950s, he and Mom were on the fringe of Mary and Richard’s social circle, a crowd who drank martinis as if they were drinking water. Dad always said that when Jack Nicholson turned him on to marijuana, he was saved from becoming an alcoholic like his stepfather, but the truth is he just added pot to the alcohol. So it was no huge surprise that, at the age of sixty-one, he had to face the hard reality that if he kept drinking, he would probably be dead within six months. In interviews, he would always say that when he got this news, he stopped drinking … just like that. No problem. He’d point out that he had stopped smoking three packs of cigarettes a day and claimed that this was proof that he did not have an addictive personality; drinking was no different, right? But drinking was different. He tried not to drink, but all his life he had been a happy drunk. And though he did manage to cut down on his drinking just before his operation and for about a year after it, he was visibly uncomfortable without his booze. He was afraid that, without the booze, he would not be funny anymore.

  My mom did not stop drinking when Dad got his diagnosis, even though she knew it was poison for him. She was addicted too and must have been in denial about the effect her drinking might have on Dad. I suppose she didn’t want to drink alone, because she frequently told him how good the wine tasted with a meal, and then she’d say, “Why don’t you have just a little sip or two, just to taste it?” Mom was not a happy drunk; she got mean. Anyone who tried to get her to stop drinking saw just how mean she could be.

  * * *

  Liver disease is not pretty. As Dad’s liver began to fail, the whites of his eyes turned yellow, his skin became sallow and his body puffy; his normally prodigious energy was compromised. Dad had been a very healthy man most of his life, but at this stage, whenever he came to visit me in Santa Fe, he needed oxygen. He became resigned to his new diminished capacity and was becoming disengaged from everyone around him; he did not seem to care about anything anymore. His positive attitude used to change everything. He had always been the ringleader, the leader of the pack, the one who was funny and charismatic and cheerful and happy. Now there was a void in our lives, and no one to lift us out of the sadness in which we were becoming mired.

  Three years after his initial diagnosis, his doctor found a malignant tumor in his liver. The only way to save his life was a liver transplant. Before the operation, he became even more depressed and despondent. Maybe the detailed description of the liver transplant surgery was very scary for him. Maybe it was really hard not drinking, and he could not imagine living in a way that did not include a social life with drinking at its core. Maybe the disease had altered him so much that he no longer believed he could ever be his old happy self again. He almost didn’t care whether or not he had the transplant. He had given up.

  This was a time when I was more distant from my parents than I’d ever been before. And I was not the only person who had become alienated from them. In recent years, my mother had been so worried about Dad’s deteriorating health that she was mean to everyone. Dad, who usually countered any of her bad moods, had been so withdrawn and depressed leading up to the surgery that he didn’t seem to want anyone around, so I saw them just a few times a year.

  Nothing we could say made him feel hopeful about the operation. Finally, what gave him the courage to go ahead with it was talking to someone who’d been there and done it. People on a list for a liver transplant were given sponsors, someone who had gone through the procedure and who could be supportive and answer any questions Dad might have. Dallas Taylor, the drummer for the band Crosby, Stills, and Nash, had had a liver transplant the year before. He and Dad began having long, serious conversations. Whoever picked Taylor for Dad was inspired. He was just the right person for the job because Dad’s considerable drug use was nothing compared to Taylor’s, and that gave Taylor street cred in Dad’s eyes. Taylor had gotten so caught up in drugs and alcohol that eventually his bandmates, no strangers to drugs themselves, would have nothing to do with him. He blew it. During the height of that drug-crazed era when everyone was doing a lot of drugs, he went too far. Taylor knew the depths of the destruction that substance abuse can cause and spent the rest of his life helping people beat addiction. He was compassionate with Dad in the way that only someone who truly knew how Dad was feeling could be, and he convinced Dad that he should have the transplant, assuring him that he could have a good, full life after the operation.

  Dad was sitting on one of the terraces in Ojai gazing out at the ocean when the buzzer went off on his mobile device, signaling they had found a liver for him. There was no time to drive the winding roads to the hospital, so a helicopter landed on the seldom-used heliport, and he was whisked away to begin the long operation that gave him back his life. Transplants are talked about very casually these days, but it is a very difficult and transformative operation. He would be on an amazingly long list of drugs for the rest of his life. As much as he loved Ojai, he could not live there right after the operation; it was too far from the hospital. So his good friend Carroll O’Connor, who owned several houses and preferred to stay at his home in Malibu, suggested that Dad stay in his house in Westwood while he was recovering. A nursing team was hired to attend to him night and day; a huge hospital bed was placed in the very center of that room. Dad was ensconced there for weeks. Suspended just above his body was a giant chandelier that struck me as a hybrid of elegance and hippie mystic crystal healing power. Only my mom and Aunt BB and a very select few friends were allowed to visit and attend to him.

  * * *

  Dad was prescribed antirejection drugs, which made him feel omnipotent. He watched the U.S. Open on TV and was convinced he was controlling every move the players made with the power of his mind. He told everyone that he could make the tennis pros win or lose, that he was in complete control of all the games being played. He ordered Mom and Aunt BB around. He designed a new bedside lamp and got my aunt, who had a furniture factory, to have a dozen lamps made to his specifications. He bought a magnificent penthouse condo in Santa Monica. He furiously dictated letters to his secretary and had Mom sew new clothes for him. His energy was back! More than back—the drugs had made him even more manic than he’d ever been.

  My mother waited on him every minute of the day. Having always been completely dedicated to him, she was even more so in those difficult months when he was recovering.

  When I went to his bedside, I was five months pregnant with my second child. There was still a lot of tension between my parents and me that had begun when my mother pushed me down those three stairs, and it had worsened when I did not invite them to be present at my first daughter’s birth. But I needed to see my dad, so, right after the operation, I asked politely if I could visit him with Kaya, my daughter who was then almost four years old. When we arrived, Dad was still very bruised, and much of his body was swollen to three times its normal size. Kaya was very brave and sensitive; she did not shy away from her grandfather, even though he was scary to look at. Instead, my tiny daughter courageously rubbed his distended ankles and sang to him soothingly. Her actions made me aware of her need to be connected with him and forced me to recogniz
e his mortality.

  The reality that Dad’s days were numbered made me feel the need to become closer to my parents again. After that, I made the effort to bring all their grandchildren to see Dad and Mom as often as I could.

  We were all having a new start. Dad had his new lease on life. Mom was happier and relieved that he was well. I had just moved with my family to Seattle in the hopes that Daniel, who was now my husband, would find good work, and I soon had my new baby in my arms, my lovely little Nora. Kaya was starting kindergarten. It was a good time to let old wounds heal and enjoy a new beginning.

  Even so, whenever I brought my daughters to visit, I knew that I had to be very careful about letting the kids be alone with my mother because she was drinking a lot. Mom adored her grandchildren, and I made sure that all of them, including my brother’s kids, spent a few weeks with them every year. But when the girls were visiting, I tried my best to not let them out of my sight. I did everything I could to make sure she did not drive them anywhere, but sensing and resenting the restrictions I’d put on her interaction with her granddaughters, Mom would find sneaky ways to take them in the car. Once when I was still in the shower, she loaded all the girls into her sports car. I could hear them yelling good-bye to me, so I ran out of the shower still dripping wet and wrapped in a towel. I yelled after Mom to bring them back, but my voice did not reach her, and I was left to watch and worry as they sped down the long, winding driveway to the main road.

  Even without the problems my mother posed, it was hard keeping such young girls safe in that big house that was not childproofed in any way and had so many pools and towers. And, given all the lavish decorations and antiques, I had to protect the house from the kids too. One day, I was doing a painting project with them. We were working in the only room that was easy to clean up, at the very top of one of the towers. It had floors that would not be damaged by art materials. While we were working, one of the girls needed to go to the bathroom, and I was so distracted showing another of them how to draw a cat that I did not notice how much paint she had accumulated on her hands. She ran down the stairs to use my mother’s private bathroom. She was gone a long time, and by the time I found her, she had wiped her paint-covered hands all over the red silk damask walls of the room.

  She knew she had done something wrong and was so worried that Grandma would get mad at her. She was trying desperately to clean it off but was only making it worse. Fortunately, it was water-based paint, and I calmed her down as I cleaned the walls. We were away from the other girls for quite a while, and when I got back to them, they had piled up a bunch of the terrace furniture so they could climb over the railing to get into the top of a nearby tree. They were three stories up! I nearly had a heart attack. On that same visit, one of the girls was walking from the living room toward the indoor pool and saw a snake. Thank god she ran to Grandma Maj for help. When Mom came back with her and saw the rattler by the stairs, she got the little one out of the way. Though I often worried what she would do with so many glasses of wine in her system, I was glad that she acted without hesitation to protect the girls. She quickly found a machete in Dad’s den and then swiftly returned to where the snake was and cut off its head.

  All this convinced me that it was impossible to be with all the girls every minute, so the next time I visited with them, I brought a nanny. She was a sweet woman who had babysat for me in Seattle. I thought I could relax, but one morning as I was drinking my tea, I looked down the hallway to where the girls were playing on the decorative silver saddle that was on a stand by the entryway. The nanny was with them, and I smiled at them, but just then, the girl on the saddle reached into the gun holster that was slung over the horn of the saddle and pulled out the pistol and pointed it at my youngest! I screamed and ran down to where they were and gave the same lecture that I had repeated so many times before: “All the guns in this house are loaded. You never point a gun at anyone!”

  The nanny was so shaken up by the experience that she took a Valium and went to bed. It was getting harder and harder to visit, and for a while, I did not let my girls sleep over anymore. Mom never stopped drinking until all her choices were taken away from her due to advanced vascular dementia, which could have been caused by her habit of drinking three or four bottles of wine a day and topping it off with a couple of vodkas before going to bed.

  After Dad’s operation, my mother continued to drink, but Dad stopped drinking entirely for a while. This was the first time in my life that I knew him sober. These months of his sobriety were very important to me. As loving and cuddly as he’d always been, for the first time I felt that he was actually listening to me and that he would remember what we had been talking about. More than at any other time before, I felt that he was genuinely interested in what I said. We had many in-depth conversations, but we seldom had personal talks. Even in his sobriety, that sort of intimacy was never going to happen; it made him squirm. Still, there was so much for us to discuss together: Dad was a voracious reader who subscribed to dozens of magazines, and through analyzing books, articles, and movies, we became closer. We talked about politics and global warming. He was always sending me books with titles like The End of Oil. While reading several of these books, we all bought Geo Metros, the smallest, most fuel-efficient cars on the market at the time. We also read novels together—Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible—and we discussed the authors and the time in history when the novels took place. We talked about the philosophical issues that emerged when we read these books: what happens to someone who lives in a country he or she did not grow up in, how the clash of cultures changes him or her, how you define culture, and on and on. He wanted to know what publications I read, and when I cited The Utne Reader, The New York Review of Books, and The Nation, he subscribed to all of them.

  Sobriety changed him in other positive ways. He became even more attentive to his granddaughters, the Blondies, who had always been his playmates. Being sober did not stop him from being a lot of fun. He would go out and buy them all sorts of playful things. One day it would be big, red, bulbous clown noses, and he would set an example by wearing his out in public in an effort to encourage us all to put the red clown noses on too, which we did. Another time, he bought a bunch of big jellylike rings that had a battery inside that made the ring light up, flashing multicolored lights. He distributed these rings to the girls, and when he drove his electric car around Santa Monica, he used his ring to get the attention of other drivers when he made turn signals by hand.

  * * *

  Both my parents loved getting pictures that my kids drew and, later, the cards and letters they wrote as well as copies of their school report cards. I talked to them a lot about how important it was to get the best education that we could find for their grandchildren because the world had changed so much since they were young. Traveling to be on location with Dad had been disruptive to my own education, and my learning disability had made studying on my own very hard for me. I wanted more stability and a better education for my children, but I was embarrassed to ask for tuition for private school from my folks. They had already given me money to buy my home and helped me continue to be an artist and a stay-at-home mom, so it was extremely uncomfortable to ask them to pay for schools on top of everything else. But ultimately, I did ask, and they gave me the money for a year’s tuition for both of my girls. They never gave me any guarantee from one year to the next that my kids could stay in their school. I had to ask every year, and doing so was always unnerving. I suppose I should have been more relaxed and confident that they would support the education plan year after year, but I had seen them change their minds about so many things on so many occasions, as when Dad had threatened to stop paying for my private high school when I was a teenager. More recently, both Mom and Dad had threatened to stop paying college tuition for my niece Noel, when her grades were not up to their expectations. In both cases, I advocated for them to prioritize education. In the latter case, I
visited my folks in Ojai armed with books on the challenges students face in the first years of college. I convinced them that taking away funding was not a good way to encourage any student. They paid for my niece to finish college, and while Dad was alive, he paid for my daughter to go to college too.

  Some of the framework I employed to set priorities for how I wanted to raise my children came from a documentary I had seen with my parents in Malibu when I was fourteen. The film was a part of Michael Apted’s Up series. He had screened it for us. It was quite an achievement. He had interviewed fourteen kids from different socioeconomic backgrounds. The premise was built on a quote attributed to the Jesuit Saint Francis Xavier, though others say it is from Aristotle: “Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man.” In other words, the experiences a child has at an early age will shape the adult he or she becomes.

  The fourteen subjects in the film were almost exactly my age. They were interviewed every seven years, and Apted filmed most of them from the time they were kids until they entered into their fifties. I eagerly awaited the release of each new installment. One year, one of the now grown children said something like, “I want to give my children a good education, because no matter what happens to them, no one can ever take that away from them.”

  The other lesson I learned from this documentary was that if you do not live in the same town as your parents, you will have a limited number of times to see them before they die, and you should be grateful for each visit. We were all very grateful to have Dad for the extra eighteen years that his new liver gave us.

  Dad’s transplant definitely saved his life, but a few years after having it, his drinking had become so excessive again that several people, including one of the nurses who had cared for him after the operation, asked me to say something to him. I needed to try one more time. I chose my moment carefully. I thought that if I talked with him right after he had gone on an especially big binge, his hangover might be severe enough that my words might resonate with him. It did not take long to find an occasion. I was staying with him at his estate in Ojai while my mother was on a trip to London with my daughter Kaya. Without Mom around, Dad threw a party his way; there was no fancy table setting or carefully chosen guest list. It was a really big party for the people he rode motorcycles with. This group consisted of a hundred or so of his buddies and their extended families. There were people everywhere. Many of the men had long beards; some of these guys had threaded lots of rubber bands into them, which created a kind of beard sculpture. The people drank and cavorted around in the multiple pools on the property wearing nothing but their bathing suits so that their bodies, resplendent with tattoos, made an amazing display. It was the wildest party I ever saw. Interestingly, my mom’s mother, ninety-year-old Grandma Helga, who did not speak any English, was fascinated by every minute of it. She asked one of my aunts to get a man to explain what all his tattoos meant and to translate the stories into Swedish for her. Dad stayed up drinking, drugging, and partying long after I went to bed with my youngest daughter, Nora, close by my side.