The Holdover

“Grief is like living two lives. One, you pretend that everything is all right, and the other is where your heart silently screams in pain.” — Unknown

I can’t escape this dream of grief. Is life like a child throwing a mitten into a river and then silently watching it float through the ages of time? Until a walleye eats it somewhere downstream? And that walleye is Paul Giamatti gnawing on a small stale Christmas cookie in the shape of a mitten? I need more elastic assessments. I need to dream a whole dream, and not just a half of one. 

I’ve spent the last few months avoiding writing about death and grief. I did that through most of the spring, all of the summer and some of the fall. Now here it is winter, snowless and brown. I’m done talking about it, yet it seeps into my life like cold joyless tentacles. It tickles my ribs to confuse me, then plunges it’s black tincture into my soul and spreads to every extremity. James Beam won’t help it, neither will Cat Stevens nor Marcus Aurelius.

I saw Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw a few days ago, it wiped me out. Complications between brothers and their various relationships with their father. I’ve been everyone of those guys, I’ve written from all of their points of view, so I chose not to write. I watched Bradley Cooper’s Maestro the other day, even though the scenes of his wife dying from cancer ripped out my heart and showed it to me, I chose not to write that story again either. I’d rather focus on other things. I’ve grown weary of this topic. Enter Paul Hunham, Mary Lamb and Angus Tully. Three people I absolutely did not want in my life, but sorely needed during the drifting wasteland that is the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. 

Alexander Payne is a true craftsman and purveyor of moods. It’s ok to be a lazy, vulgar rancid philistine in his movies. It’s the core memory he’s going for and probably why he gets swept under the carpet when talking about the greatest working directors today. I almost always discount him, then he punches me in the gut, yells “shape up!“, makes me laugh and then hands me a lollipop for the ride home. About Schmidt, Nebraska, Sideways, hell even parts of The Descendants say things about the human condition that no other person on earth is capable of concocting in front of a camera. Every line in The Holdovers holds either great humor or vast pathos. Some of this is done through cliché, some of it is inventive, some of it just pure crystallized sadness through the wandering glass eye of Paul Giamatti’s character. The hairdos, mustaches, lunchrooms and dive bars all reek of desperation in this town. Everything stinks, but in its stench lies an inherent sweetness that is earned through striking early 1970’s period realism. 

Just as I was reveling in the all-world acting chops of Giamatti and thanking all that is sacred and holy that he had taken leave from his lucrative career as a Verizon mobile pitchman, there arose a troublesome clatter from my own Verizon mobile device. A number I didn’t recognize appeared to my wondering eyes and I promptly sent it to voicemail… twice. Then a text appeared that said “Hi, this is Bella’s mom. Someone brought edibles to Bella’s birthday party so we’re shutting it down.” So at approximately 10:47pm central standard time, I stopped The Holdovers almost exactly halfway through and with the moon on the breast on the new fallen…brown…I dashed away to pick up my daughter in the sleigh. I had no earthly idea what kind of “Bonnie situation” I was to be confronted with. My daughter is turning 13 on Friday, I know she hangs out with girls a few years older than her (she is on the High School JV Dance team), but good Christ she’s in 7th grade and I didn’t even know what a damn edible was until I was in my late teens or early 20s. 

Shortly before I paused The Holdovers, there was an epic grief meltdown from the spectacular Da’Vine Joy Randolph which in turns spurs on a meltdown from the boy playing Tully about being ripped away from a potential female acquaintance at a party, which in turn dominoes into a CLASSIC Giamatti tirade, and then the whole thing ends with the young Tully flatly saying “My father’s dead.” I honestly think these late season awards films are getting right on top of me like the acid taken by Benecio Del Toro’s version of Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. You know the scene when he’s fucked up on LSD and attempts to pull a tape player into the bathtub so he can hear it better? I can’t watch another sad film or listen to another god forsaken sad song like Labi Siffre’s “Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying” ever again. 

Then a funny thing happens. I am overtaken by an extremely entrenched sense memory of my father as I drive to pick up my (probably) messed up 12 year old daughter. My father is standing over me – a confused look of concern plastered on his face. I don’t think I saw that face more than a handful of times in my entire life. I lay drunk and stoned out of my mind on the floor of my basement bedroom. I must of been in high school, maybe 17 or 18 years old. Earlier in the evening I had been to a “keg party” for the first time in my life put on by a guy that I had been on the 6th grade basketball team with. This dude had dropped out, left his parents house, got his own apartment and was throwing parties almost every single night (btw, this guy is currently in jail somewhere in Wisconsin for murdering his girlfriend). Long story short, I had puked all over my buddy’s “like new” 1989 Mustang with red interior next to a gas pump at Kwik Trip. I was barely coherent as my friends screamed at me and the driver of the vehicle was trying to use a windshield squeegee on the stinking beer vomit. They told me I couldn’t get back in the car, so I walked home to the room that was hastily thrown together by my father (when I wanted to come live with him instead of my mother) with some drywall in the basement of a 100+ year old house.

 In my memory I’m totally and completely fucked up, but my dad’s hazy face in the dark is completely clear. I see his face mouthing the same words over and over again as I drive to retrieve my daughter. Instead of his voice coming out of his mouth, it’s my brother’s voice doing the hilariously bad impression of my dad’s voice that we did throughout the entirety of our lives (and he hated with a passion). “What were you doing Annnnday? Drinking? Smoking WEED?” “No“, I say back to him. Then I barf all over the periwinkle blue carpet of my room. 

As I drive, it feels like he is tapping me on the shoulder over and over again relishing it and saying “See, not so funny now is it?” When I pull into the driveway of Bella’s mom’s house my wife has awoken and is calling me after hearing one of Bella’s mom’s voice messages. She is frantic, telling me I need to talk to the parents and that the message sounds like my daughter was the one who tried to give the other girls some kind of weed gummy. I laugh at that one, but when I shut my sleigh’s engine off my mind runs through every ludicrous scenario I can think of where she could get her hands on such a thing. Once inside, Bella’s mom tells me it’s HER daughter who had the contraband in her makeup kit and that my daughter refused to take any. I am relieved, angry, proud, scared and laughing on the inside. What an incredibly odd sensation. 

On the way home I talked to my daughter about why I got sober for the first time. I told her that not only was it bad for her for a variety of reasons (kicked off the team, suspended from school, etc), but just what a complete waste of time it was for me. Decades of it. All that time gone, and for what? What could I have been? Who could I have met? What could I have written? Where could I have gone in the world? Or as my brother’s hero Dave Matthews once said: “Could I have been…Parking lot attendant?” 

After some tense moments at home with mom, I finished The Holdovers and was moved beyond measure. I’m not afraid to admit it. I’m not afraid of “the sadness” anymore. They say the first holiday after a parent dies is the worst. I’m sure it’s all gravy after that. But hey, it’s still the most wonderful time of the year, and no one is his own father.