From the Introduction
One Saturday afternoon, my elder boy, then 10, came into the living room holding a chapter book they were reading in middle school. The Great Horned Spoon, it was; about the California gold rush days. One chapter features a brawl in a saloon. With the air of a boy looking for help with homework, wanting a vocabulary word explained, he spoke to me:
“Dad, you’re a ‘drunkard,’ aren’t you?”
I had no shields for that word, coming from him. The missile went straight into my heart. I was blowing the Daddy act. […]
Lots of good people have grown up without fathers. But I wanted my kids to have it better. Now I was blowing it. I pondered whether a kid who has a drunkard for a dad is worse off than a kid who has no dad at all. Instead of making a better life for my kids than I had, maybe I was making it worse.
That brief conversation with my eldest boy left me changed inside, at least temporarily. The balance between the “me” that wanted to get free of drinking, and the “me” that wanted to die drunk, had tipped.
Within a few days, while the impact of my son’s one-child, one-word intervention still burned inside of me, I telephoned the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Program of the Kaiser Permanente HMO, to which the family belonged. It seemed like hours before someone answered the ring. My hands shaking, voice straining to sound casual, I made an appointment.