Mother American Night by John Perry Barlow & Robert Greenfield

Author:John Perry Barlow & Robert Greenfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

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My marriage to Elaine had many difficulties. One of them, as might already be evident, was that I was an alcoholic. I was not drinking every day. Like my father and like most ranchers and cowboys in Wyoming, I was a binge drinker. I would drink steadily for two or three days at a time. Although I would still be functional while I was drinking, Elaine became a full-on codependent, which I believe can be a worse affliction than alcoholism.

If you are an alcoholic, everybody says, “Oh, all you need is willpower. Pull yourself up and be a man and stop drinking.” But what they say about your wife is, “I don’t know how she does it. She’s a saint. She’s fantastic. How does she put up with him?” In truth, we were both into it up to our eyeballs.

Despite that, we were actually pretty happy until we began having children. I had reached a point where I was so determined to have kids that if we weren’t going to have them, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be married anymore. Partly because of my alcoholism and partly because the financial situation on the ranch was always precarious, Elaine was never sure about having kids.

As it turned out, Elaine gave birth to three daughters in six years, the first in 1982. I don’t know why but for some reason, Elaine and I were both convinced that our first child would be a boy. We hadn’t had an amniocentesis or anything like that done because we weren’t particularly interested in finding out what sex our child was until it happened. Our nickname for the baby was Bingo.

Our first daughter was actually goddamn near born on the road between Pinedale and Jackson Hole, which is a distance of about seventy miles. Elaine’s water broke and she went into labor and I was driving like Neal Cassady and just barely got to the hospital in time. At one point, it seemed that I was going to deliver the child myself in the parking lot.

We hadn’t prepared any names for a girl, and all of sudden we had to come up with one. I wanted to call her Liberty, and Elaine wanted to call her Jessica. So as you can see, the bargaining gap was not exactly small. Elaine finally accepted Leah as the name because in the Bible, Leah is a virtuous person who takes the rap for the wicked Rachel. I thought it would be good to give her a first name that would go with being a virtuous person and then back it up with a middle name that was not so virtuous. I picked her second name from the title of the first book of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. In fact, I named her after both Durrell’s Justine and the Marquis de Sade’s Justine.

The fact that Elaine would choose Jessica as our daughter’s name and that I wanted to call her Liberty made it clear to me

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