Draven’s father was something breakable.
He always tried to keep it on the down low, mostly because his father would throw a fit if he ever found out that Draven thought of him that way — but it was true. Benjamin Kondraki was already fracturing at the seams when Draven was born, already paranoid, already trigger happy, already waking up screaming in the night inconsolable, and many people looked at his father as someone who was stronger than them for these same reasons. They would say how he must be damn tough to keep working such a high stress job with such dysfunction, and Draven would nod but never really agree. He always had seen his father as someone close to the breaking point, and since his late teens had taken it upon himself to make sure he never hit that breaking point any more than was necessary, a constant mantra of take care of dad, take care of dad, you have to take care of dad. His father was loud laughter and notebook after notebook of solid writing and was also the smell of vodka and staying up too late for his own good, dad, dad, please go to bed, and his father would laugh and say not yet.
On a March Saturday when he was 15, Draven Kondraki woke up in his bedroom of his father’s Site apartment where he had lived all his life and realized that the sun was coming through the windows and ripped off the covers, ran out of the room, and threw open his father’s bedroom door where he found him slumped on the floor and for a second felt his stomach drop and terror seize him like he had never felt before in his life before noticing that he was breathing — just passed out, vodka in hand.
Draven had been through these kinds of steps too many times to count. With as much strength as his 15-year-old body can muster, he pulls his unconscious father into a semi-sitting position just enough so that he wouldn’t choke should he vomit, propping him against the footboard of his bed. So close yet so far, huh, dad? It was obvious he had at least made an attempt at getting from his desk to his bed — pen set aside from whatever thick manuscript he had been drunkenly scribbling, chair pushed back, one empty whisky bottle and a cigarette butt in an ashtray next to the battered lamp. Draven cast a bored glance at what his father had left in his hand, and was unsurprised that it was vodka, the hard, cheap kind with the grey label that always made him like this. His dad drank it when he wanted to pass out without dreaming.
He’d had a hard night. Draven didn’t feel bad for him. They did this a lot, and sometimes his father wouldn’t awake in the morning and he would deliberately leave him there, wander around instead of rushing to his side, not wanting to see for sure if he’d lost his only family in the night to a bottle of booze. At least then, he could put it off, pretend he was just sleeping and not in a hard, fast grip of a dangerously high BAC level. Just sleeping harder than normal.
Suddenly, his father’s chest lurches, and for a moment Draven shuffles back, expecting him to vomit; but instead Ben’s eyes fly open and he gasps sharply for air, reaching instinctively for the pistol he left loaded on his desk. Sometimes when they did this little dance the two of them did, his father would have it at his side and Draven’s only instinct — not being able to take on his bulky Polish father in the grips of a PTSD flashback — would simply run quickly and quietly from the room, let him get his bearings without his help. Ideal? No. Was it going to change soon? Also no.
This time, his father sees him and immediately lurches towards him, hands drunkenly grasping for him, and Draven slides backwards slightly and watches his father ungracefully fall onto the floor.
“Dad,” he says, just like he always says, at least a couple times a month. “You gotta stop binging like this.”
And at age 25, he’s in his father’s office, and they’re doing the same dance they always do except now his father has more silver in his hair and seems a little frailer, a little more breakable, and it’s the bourbon with the red label instead of the vodka with the silver one and Draven is in his full task force tactical gear and he’s kneeling next to his father without fear only because he has a bulletproof vest on and he’s saying, again, “Dad. You gotta stop binging like this.”
