We went back down the mountain and drove to a nearby tow yard and took a big tug boat back up to our boat and towed it back to the ramp. It was the best thing that happened to me in that whole week, getting back on the boat." "That summer we also went camping for a week at Yellowstone National Park," Rocco continued. "We camped on top of a hillside, about halfway up the mountain, and in the morning we went down to the edge of the lake and went swimming. It was a huge lake, and you can't see across it very far, and at the bottom we saw a huge beaver lodge, like a castle with a moat around it. At night you could hear the beavers gnawing away at it, they were making new floors." "The best of all these memories for me was seeing our old friends," Rocco said. "We got invited to go camping with some old friends in North Carolina one summer, some of my ex-coworkers from our first job out of college. My buddy Pete asked me if I'd be up for that, and I said yes right away. I loved that job, and I really missed all the people there. We had a great time on that trip." Rocco paused. "I can't really tell you how good that was to be back at our old workplace, seeing people we loved again." And then he got a little teary-eyed. I thought that was a beautiful thing to hear. And I was glad he didn't want to get too carried away by remembering. Rocco had come to the right place. ## CHAPTER TEN I was in the kitchen, alone at our new home in Berkeley, putting together a lunch for Bill and me, when the phone rang. It was my father calling from New York. "How are you?" he asked me right away. "I need you to help me. I think I need help. What do you think? I don't know. Do you think I'm crazy? You're the only one who knows me like you do. You know I don't have anyone else. I don't have any friends who would understand this." It sounded like he had been drinking and was using, but not slurring, not too bad. Still, he was obviously drunk. I said, "Dad, you need to get some help. You know I can't help you with this stuff anymore. I wish you could get clean." "I've been clean," he said. "I've been dry for two months now. But you're right. I really need help. That is the one thing I know. All I do is think of how I can't get clean, I can't make enough money, I can't find good enough work, and I have no wife to help me do all these things. I have the best little girl in the world but I'm not good for her. I drink too much, I use, I can't stay clean. I really need to get some help. I don't know what to do." He went on and on and on. Finally I said, "It's just the same, you're stuck in the same place. You have to try, that's the only thing you can do. What is it? Are you talking to a book? Don't go near a book. You're just getting into more trouble." He had been reading in the bathtub a book by his favorite writer, Raymond Chandler. It is a crime book, no mystery, about a cop, with lots of sex in it. "I am trying to read this," he said, "but I can't get into it. Why do you want to get into that? I told him to not get into that book." He went into a long diatribe about how he knew nothing was going to change. "I'm stuck in the same place." It was hard for me to take him seriously and I was irritated by how he kept talking when there was no answer for him. "That's how you do it," I said. "You can't stop until it all comes crashing down on your head." He said something else, something about how I wouldn't understand, which made me say, "No, I don't want to hear this. I'm not going to deal with this again. I don't want to hear another word from you. You talk like this and it doesn't help, it's just going to make you feel more guilty and make me feel worse." That stopped him. That shut him up. He told me that he loved me, that he loved my mother, and we hung up. I sat in the kitchen for a while, still agitated by how he could just ignore what I said, how he could just keep on drinking. I had been drunk for so long and I always stayed high, I didn't know that my father would be such a different story, such a mystery to me. But he really didn't change. I did my book. I knew the phone was going to ring again. And sure enough it did, another time, two days later, it was my father on the phone. He had a different tone in his voice. He sounded like he was crying. "I got fired," he said. "I got fired today. I couldn't stay clean, the people who work for me were always talking behind my back, you know the kind of thing that goes on in this business, so I didn't know what to do. So I drank a bit and I used. I drank more than I should and then I used. I always said you can't be drunk and do this job, it's just not right. I know that now, I really know it." "I can't do anything about it," I told him. "I told you that. That's what they did when you left me with that woman, the ones who cared. And now you're going to have to figure this out yourself. Just like you did with Maureen." "She was an animal," he said. "She beat me, too, over and over. She beat the shit out of me and she made me a dope addict. You know it, I told you. You know I told you." It was just like him to twist things around and blame somebody else. There was no getting through to him. I told him this. "That's how it goes," he said. "I got drunk and I got fired. That's what happens. It's a hard thing for a man to lose his job, especially if he's been there a long time. He wants to be there forever, but it's not like that. You have to have the right people in place, because this job requires very strong people. You have to find good people to have the right kind of people around. You can't trust just anyone, you know. I was going to try to make it work, I was going to try to make a different life with her and then all of a sudden I wasn't. She was a piece of work. She was a crazy woman. I told you that. You were there." "This is exactly what happened to me when I first started," I said, and I told him about the old man in the garage and the people in the offices who would make sure that things went bad. "That is exactly what you are dealing with now, but it's worse, it's so much worse." "It was so hard to do that program. You know that." I told him again that he could not make this my fault, that it was not because of him, that this is how life is and it was only because of the way things went that he ended up the way he did. He went on and on about it. I didn't hear him. I had taken my head off the phone. There was no way I was going to listen to him. "I think I know who I want to work for again," he said. "I just don't want them to fire me, like they always do." When I hung up I could hear him crying, and I knew I had lost him. I was so sad. # By the time my father left Seattle, after a three-month stay with us, both he and my mother were miserable with how their lives were going. They hadn't gotten much help from the book she had given him, and there was little understanding of the other problems they had at the job. They had given in to drinking too much, and that only made the job more of a nightmare for her. My father was drinking more than ever, and not only when he was drinking with my mother. He was drinking after he got home, all day long, in the apartment. He was drunk almost all the time, and he slept almost all the time. He would wake up late in the morning and then pass out again and sleep until the afternoon. He started calling into his office, or my mother would call him from work and ask him to come home, to which he would respond by hanging up on her. "That woman doesn't want me there," he would tell her. He didn't do that very often. Most of the time, he did just what he wanted and no one tried to stop him. But on the weekend of one Fourth of July weekend, in 1980, he disappeared with