Down City by Leah Carroll

Author:Leah Carroll
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Women
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2017-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

WHEN HE GETS back from the VA hospital, he has a new diagnosis: manic depression. This is why he sleeps so much and disappears for days. He can’t drink now, because he’s on a drug called Antabuse that makes him really sick if he does. For years now, Dad hasn’t had a drink in front of us. We don’t keep alcohol in the house, though once poking around in the basement, I’d opened a case for one of his big telephoto lenses and found a half-empty bottle of Jameson’s inside.

But now he’s on a cocktail of new medications and some of them make him seem drunk. He shows us his prescriptions lined up on the windowsill above the kitchen sink looking out onto Carpenter Avenue. He shakes the brown prescription bottles, rattling the pills inside, and explains, “These are Klonopin, these are Xanax, this is lithium, this is Prozac. All of these are prescribed for a big two-hundred-pound guy, and if you or Derek tried to take one to see what it was like, you could die.”

I have no interest in taking Dad’s pills, but I watch his consumption of them closely. That summer he takes me and a friend to see Batman Returns at the Showcase Cinemas in Seekonk and lingers behind us in the car, shaking a pill from the bottle and swallowing it dry. He jumps triumphantly out of the car and squeezes my shoulders, shaking me back and forth. “Ready?” he asks. “This one won’t be as good as the last one because there’s no Joker in this one.” Then he does his imitation of Jack Nicholson dancing to the Prince song all the way up to the doors of the theater. My friend giggles.

During the movie, Dad gets up to go to the bathroom twice and takes another pill in the theater. He’s right. The sequel is not as good as the first Batman movie. As we walk back to the car he staggers a bit. From the front seat of the car he does his Joker impression again, but this time it’s in slow motion. I watch the road as we pull onto the Wampanoag Trail, the short freeway that connects Barrington to Seekonk and Providence. Dad swerves to his left and nearly swipes a mini van at one point. I seem to be the only one who notices. Dad turns up the music on the car radio and sings along and my friend laughs in the backseat and puffs on her inhaler. She always has a brown paper bag with at least two inhalers for her chronic asthma, and normally I would be both jealous of her affliction and annoyed by the puffing and the attention it gets her, but I’m too busy keeping track of Dad’s driving. I pretend to listen intently to the radio, all the while aware of Dad’s physical presence in the car, and monitor how close he is to me, where he’s looking, or if he’s looking at all.

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