Martinelli’s Apple Juice

In my eight months of my sobriety, sparkling water has become something I look forward to in the evenings. (This reminds me of a line from the hilarious TV show Difficult People, spoken by the amazing Andrea Martin: “I deserve a treat: I think I’ll have a couple ice cubes.”) There is a sparkling Irish spring water our local natural food store carries that is exceptional. I’ll pour a glass of it with some fresh lemon or lime juice, drop in a couple ice cubes (ice cubes ARE actually kind of a treat if you live in Europe—harder to find than you might think) and I am living large.

It was when I was fixing myself a lemon sparkling water the other day that a memory came bubbling to the surface: my father and his cases of Martinelli’s apple juice.

I remember the first time my father brought home a case of Martinelli’s apple juice from Costco. I was puzzled when I saw it sitting on top of a couple cases of champagne in our laundry room. The champagne was cheap, Cooks, and was something I was used to seeing in large quantities in our home. Martinelli’s, however, was an anomaly: my brother and I were teenagers by then, and not regular juice drinkers. When I asked Dad why he bought it, he told me he was going to try and drink apple juice instead of drinking alcohol.

At the time, I didn’t give this much thought, although Dad drank plenty of booze. At least two to four drinks a day during the week and six to eight drinks on a weekend evening. A couple beers after work, splitting one bottle of wine with my mother at dinner – maybe two bottles. Perhaps a margarita before lunch on a Saturday or a glass of scotch as the sun went down on Sunday. In other words, way too much.

But I never thought of my dad’s drinking as a problem: without my mother around to start a fight, he was an easy-going drunk. I don’t remember ever thinking he should quit. I even found it charming: when I was in high school and college, I thought imbibing Coronas and Pacificos was cool, because those were my dad’s beers of choice. When I moved to LA, I would call my dad and have him walk me through how to make a proper margarita. If he hadn’t died when I was 22, I imagine we would have done quite a bit of drinking together. We had already talked about future trips to Sonoma wineries and bars at the New Orleans Jazz Festival, not realising these journeys would never move out of the planning phase.

Now, I go to Café RE meetings and listen to people share their stories about their path into sobriety. I hear folks, some of them parents, who are struggling with “a lot of day ones,” who are trying different methods to “stack some days.” Realising my dad might have said the same thing, if he had ever been fortunate enough to make it to Café RE, has made me profoundly sad.

The Martinelli’s would work for a couple of days. They were small apple-shaped glass bottles, only ten ounces of juice in each. I was surprised how many Dad would drink when he was trying to substitute them for booze: five or six a night, which makes my blood sugar spike just thinking about it. The first time, he went through about two-thirds of the case over a few days. And then the number of bottles in the case stayed the same for months, because he had quit quitting.

I realise now that because I was 16, had not yet been addicted to anything, and thought my dad kicked ass, I had no idea how hard it must have been for him to choose the Martinelli’s over alcohol. My mother never made an effort to quit drinking while my father was alive and would have never even considered moderating her alcohol intake in solidarity. At that point, they had been drinking a lot together every night for at least twenty-five years. The sheer inertia he was going against is more than I can fathom.

If I had known how hard of a thing he was trying to do, I would have drank apple juice with him. I would have filled the fridge and every cabinet in the house with apple juice. I would have gone to the restaurants we were fortunate enough to frequent as a family and demand they have Martinelli’s at the ready for Dad.

But I didn’t know how hard of a thing he was trying to do. I was just a kid. I wish I had known so I could have acknowledged how awesome it was every time he managed to choose a juice instead of a beer. It was not my job to solve my father’s problems, but I would have done anything to help him anyway if I had known the struggle he was facing.

Over what would be the next six remaining years of his life, I saw him buy a few more cases of Martinelli’s. They would show up in a Costco haul, alongside sheet cakes to eat for breakfast and huge bottles of Tanqueray for my mother’s gin and tonics.

He would stack some days. But not very many.

I have wondered what joys a sober life would have brought him. My immediate first few months of being alcohol free served up a lot of anger and grief, but as time has progressed, I have been amazed at the gifts all these back-to-back days of not drinking have bestowed upon me. Would his writing have gotten even better? He loved to swim competitively in the Master’s League. I bet he would have felt so much lighter, swimming lap after lap of butterfly stroke without having to fight through the negative impacts of flooding his body with poison every day. Food would have tasted better. I have to stop myself from imagining the other silver linings that would have gilded Dad’s every day, or my heart might break in half.

Sometimes my sobriety doesn’t seem like a big deal to me. I grew up around a lot of Mormon folks, most all of whom abstained from drink. My beloved husband has never been fond of alcohol and doesn’t give it a second thought. Maybe it is not such a big achievement that I have stayed sober, I say to myself. Lots of people don’t drink alcohol.

But since remembering the Martinelli’s this week, I think about how my biggest hero never got to do what I am doing. Suddenly being able to not drink seems a lot more monumental.