So my mother dies, and my dad gets remarried. Now he is the playboy of Atwater. He gets married, and they invite Jay and me to their wedding in Reno. They were going to get married at the Pepper Mill. We are the only ones invited because we happened to be in Tahoe at the time. So we go to the Pepper Mill and they get married. We go to a chapel and they never pronounced my father’s name right.

I realize now that they were wasted, drunk. I had not grown up with that experience. My parents drink one every night but they sat in a chair watching TV and I never saw them drunk. As a teenager I never abused alcohol. At that time it was marijuana.

Then we went to dinner at this five star restaurant. Half way through the dinner, his new wife, whose name I can’t remember, does a face-plant into her food. She literally fell over into her pasta. I had to pull her head back by the hair, and look at her. Her face was covered with red pasta sauce. Then she started to cry and rubbed her eyes. My dad became outraged. He started screaming, so I said to Jay “we got to get them out of here!”

Jay took her under his arm and literally carried her like a rag doll, with her toes dragging on the floor through the restaurant. This was a very high-class restaurant. My Dad is saying “I’m gonna get her, I’m gonna get her.” I tried to hold my father back, and then we all get into the elevator.

We get them up to the room, and my Dad is trying to get at her. We tell the bride’s friend Helen to take my father into another room. We had to keep them separated. We’re trying to get her settled and she goes into the bathroom to put on her nightgown. It a nightgown with a low-cut back and she puts it on backwards! It’s a red and lacey thing that was backless but now it was frontless! She throws herself on the bed. Jay and I say “we’re going to leave now, you just rest.” There she is, tits-up on the bed.

We walk out the door make a turn and we’re heading to the elevator when we hear this blood-curdling scream. Jay and I go “uh-oh.”

We’re running back to the room, open up the door, and my dad has gotten into the room and is trying to stuff her out the window. The window only opened part-way because they don’t want you to commit suicide when you’ve lost all your money at the tables. And this woman is part-way out.

My dad is yelling “I’m going to get her. I’m going to get her.”

It was chaos! My father’s on the floor sobbing; she’s on the floor sobbing.

I’m looking at Helen: “why the hell did you let him back in the room?”

Then my dad sits up and says: “OK, let’s go down and have a drink!”

I’ve looked at him and said: “I’m not going anywhere with you. I can’t believe you put me through this. You’re supposed to be my father. You’re supposed to protect me from this kind of stuff.”

We said “we’re leaving. We don’t care what you guys do to one another.”

We left. The next day they called us and told us how happy they were; how they wanted to come by and see the house.

We said “we haven’t gotten over this experience yet. We need time to forget about this. Why don’t you just go home to Atwater and we’ll have you over some other time.”