The Art of Hiding

A guest essay by Elissa Altman.

The night that I saw him pour a fifth of Jim Beam into the punch bowl at my Sweet Sixteen party, I was getting ready to leave for a month at tennis camp near Boston. We were standing in our crowded Queens apartment foyer, and out of the corner of my eye, I caught my father taking the bottle out of a bag and unscrewing the cap; he winked at me like it was our secret, out of view of my grandmother who was in the kitchen sticking pink and yellow candles into my Carvel birthday cake, and my mother, who had recently divorced him and spent most of the party locked in her bedroom. On that late June night in 1979, I couldn’t taste the whiskey in the punch, and neither could my friends; grainy Polaroid photos show us milling around in our living room and acting like normal teenagers. I left for camp a few days later, too young to officially drink beyond the furtive sips of sacramental wine that my father gave me during the Jewish holidays, and at formal dinners in Manhattan restaurants, but it didn’t matter: I packed into a can of yellow Slazenger tennis balls a small stash of the Percocet I’d hoarded from the foot surgery I’d had a few weeks earlier. I never took them—I hated pills then and I still do--but I wanted options, and at sixteen, I already understood the art of hiding.

By the end of July, camp was over, and I was sent by my father to work for an upstate New York hotel for the rest of the summer until it was time to go back to school. It was owned by a friend of his and located in the gentile part of the Catskills – not the borscht belt, where bottles of cloyingly sweet Manischewitz sat unopened on every table during lunch and dinner – and the proximity of two white clapboard Methodist churches that flanked the dining room prohibited the serving of any alcoholic beverages at mealtime. The guests, many of them repeats who had been coming for decades with their families, figured out how to easily skirt the rules: they poured their vodka into Styrofoam coffee cups and their red wine into empty Welch’s grape juice bottles, and the hotel owners looked the other way. The actual hotel bar, where drinking was allowed, was on the ground floor of the dining room, and opened up to a landscaped stone patio that faced the pool where I was the lifeguard; it was here where I found my father sitting every Friday evening that August, drinking the first of three nightly gin Gibsons after he made the long drive upstate from his office in Manhattan. Newly single, he was dating a woman named Judy, who was the hotel’s front desk manager; thirty years his junior, she lived in the staff quarters down the hall from my room, which contained a tiny, sulfuric corner sink and a buggy cotton ticking single mattress perched on a Depression-era iron bed frame just big enough for me to share with a local teenager named Richard, who brought a half gallon of Almaden Mountain Rhine and a package of condoms with him whenever he came to stay with me after his nightly shift in the hotel snack bar was over.

I never want to see you hiding anything, my father said to me one Friday night at the bar, when I told him about the guests siphoning grape juice out of their Welch’s bottles in their cottages where no one could see them. If you want a taste of alcohol, come to me and ask, and I’ll teach you how to drink safely. Promise me.

I promise, I said, sipping my Genesee Cream Ale out of a tall juice glass as I sat next to him, my feet dangling off the black vinyl bar stool.

—because, he added quietly, Jews don’t drink.