This year my family and I placed bets on the death-date of my godfather Jack. Erik gave him less than a year, my mother, a survivor herself, gave him a little longer--maybe two. It sounds callous but we’re tired of looking back on the Jack who used to be.

It’s hard to recall the soft-spoken John Lennon look-alike with the Arkansas accent who used to heft me onto his shoulder and play Opera until I slept in his arms. In a quiet moment I can occasionally recall leafing through books on the sun-warmed, hardwood floor of Jack and Anita’s New York apartment, Jack regaling me with tales of his stint as a B-movie actor. “You can tell the bad guys,” he’d say, pointing at the television. “They always smack their lips.”

There was a time when Jack’s one-line assertions about the world made sense, when he could recite Shelley without slurring, when it was still funny that Jack and Anita used to make me repeat “I’m the bad one,” as a toddler for a laugh.

I regularly visited Jack and Anita’s new San Diego home on spring breaks as early as thirteen. Their way of life was hedonistic and laid back. Coke for breakfast, fried chicken and chocolate bars for lunch and I slept in my own room with a window to the ocean. Anita worked during the day and Jack kept me company.

When I turned fifteen, Anita bought me my first bikini. Jack and I went to the beach and I wore a tee shirt and boxer shorts over the suit. “You look like Nastassia Kinski,” he said, cajoling me out of the clothes. “Your body is perfect.” Despite that it was Paolo at school I wanted to hear these words from, I was flattered. I was fifteen after all.

That day, back from the beach, my nose gave me the first clue as to his behavioral differences from hour to hour, as I realized that what Jack added to his coffee wasn’t cream. He didn’t even give me time to change out of my bikini, but plunked a mammoth copy of the Collected Works of Shakespeare down on our laps, squeezed himself up against me, and demanded that I read the part of Desdemona. Our faces were centimeters apart. He pressed his sweaty thigh against mine, still ocean-damp. Fumes of alcohol escaped his mouth like diesel exhaust as he slurred and tripped words together in an accent created by vodka.I was afraid to get up, heft the gargantuan book off my aching thigh, and put a stop to something that felt like it had the potential to go wrong.

I was saved by the sound of Anita’s key turning in the lock. Jack scuttled off upstairs and I was left with the stench of his breath and a patch of my thigh that still prickled where his hairy leg had been.

Memories like that and the lusty crush he developed on my best friend Karen when I was sixteen, or the overly-friendly kisses he gave me two Christmases ago, stay with me like tumors. I’ve stopped seeking things to like about him, though I find it hard not to try and plow backwards through the fields of my memory collecting up the remaining good ones like late summer flowers.

I wrote my first novel because of Jack; each week he demanded more pages, each week I delivered. His only real complaint being: “You need a villain.” Then I picture him at my wedding four summers ago: the pallor of his skin gone green, his glazed eyes focused on some indefinite spot on the horizon, full of his favorite poison. When he missed his music cues and I walked down the grassy aisle in silence, I regretted assigning him the job of DJ. Later, I regretted his presence amongst all my favorite people.

Shortly after my wedding Anita sent Jack to stay in a motel without his keys "for the duration,” she claimed. “He can get sober or rot there.” As she tells it, they packed him a little knapsack, as if he were going to camp; perhaps she even wrote his name on his underwear with a felt-tipped pen, so someone could identify him later after he gave himself a concussion or choked on his own vomit. He carried the liter of Vodka-in its neat, spill-proof plastic bottle-as if he was cast in a remake of The Lost Weekend. With his Walkman, Swiss Army Knife and the liquid more precious than life, Anita dropped him off at the Holiday Inn. I imagine his mouth open like an old man who has forgotten something in a room he has just entered, his arm reaching toward home like a toddler at day-care, his remaining hair flapping slightly on top of his head in the wake left by my godmother’s car racing away.

To no one’s surprise, he was kicked out by the management for excessive noise-making, then stuck in jail for public drunkenness. Perhaps it was then I decided that to consider him as alive, as being a living person in my life, hurt too much.

Jack told me one spring break as I lounged on the couch under his feral gaze, “I chose to be an alcoholic, for its beauty.” I labored over that statement for years, eventually understanding that he admired some Bukowski-esque fecundity in the lost space of a good drunk.

He won’t admit that he’s an alcoholic now; it’s too trite, lacking the poetry he originally sought. Now, I can imagine Mister Genius-turned-Boozehound saying with his maddening, arrogant grin, “I’m living in a suspended state between nothingness and oblivion,” or something more pretentious. If it isn’t death, it’s worse.

The sicker Jack becomes now, the more he changes. The fine long handsome bones of his face have compressed and crimped and changed shape as if his face is being sucked in through his own nose. Less John Lennon, more Keith Richards.

Therapy may have failed to help Jack (though apparently so has the Bhagavad-Gita, Ouspensky, and Timothy Leary), but Anita seems to be finally making use of it. "I’m thinking of serving him with divorce papers," she told me. Which means cutting off the steady supply of money she’s provided for more than a decade that has assisted jobless Jack to stay beholden to the bottle and to her. "I always knew if I went to therapy, I’d have to leave him," she said. "That’s why I waited so long."

What keeps her from that final step might be what stops all of us from cutting him off completely. We don’t know how to break it to him that he’s dead already. That he’s as good as dead, anyway. We cut him off for a while, but then he lures us back in with a month or two of sobriety; a sixty-day chip from AA, a flashback to the lucid Jack who at once began to learn Mayan. Usually Anita calls my mom. "He drank again," she’ll say. Or sometimes, when she can’t bring herself to admit that much, "He’s been bad". Whose the bad one now?

With his behavior as dangerous and unpredictable as it's been, lately, I've imagined the details of Jack’s funeral. We all believe he isn’t going to make it farther than he can toss an empty bottle. I wonder who will miss him, and who will spit on his coffin. I wonder, will I cry? Will I feel guilty for not trying harder to help him, for not loving him properly? What would I say if asked to eulogize him: "Jack spent his life in pursuit of his own death?"

In my family we honor our dead by creating a photomontage of the person’s life. When my grandmother passed away six years ago we had a stunning display of the many stages she passed through in eighty-six years. (Ironically, it's at her funeral that Jack broke his longest window of sobriety with drink again). We loved her so much that we photographed her often. I realize that my photographs of Jack stop in the late nineteen seventies and hardly comprise a handful, and while I found this strange at first, it hit me as more proof of what I already know: You don’t photograph the dead.

§ § §

Jordan is a novelist first and radio host, literary salon curator and freelance journalist thereafter. She is an MFA student at Bennington College's low-residency program in Vermont but resides in California with her psychologist husband. Her writing will soon be featured in Skyline Magazine and the Anthologies: Food, Foibles & Family Traditions (Creative Arts), and Zebulon Nights (Word Riot Press). Visit www.thewritelife.com to find out about any and all of these parts of her life.

This piece was first published in INK POT #2 - 2003, a literary journal.