The good life, in Florida (the story of my grandfather, part III)

At 63, Dick Winans finally got the fraternity party he always wanted.

Away from the office at Greystone Psychiatric Hospital, free from a troubled marriage just months after his wife's 1975 death, he let it go.

Instead of wearing his ever-present necktie and suit, the same he kind his father made him wear when he attended an exclusive private high school in Hightstown, N.J., Dick spent much of the Florida trip he took with us wearing black swimming trunks and showing his hairy chest.

Normally lean, he started to show a belly that hung over the waist band of the trunks.

He dated, and the more he dated, the more he drank. He missed Dorothy, his wife, and he cried at the mention of her name.

But in another breath, he'd call her "bitch" and moan that she left him nothing in inheritance.

We took him on this April 1976 as an act of mercy. We were afraid that, if we left him home, he'd get smashed, hop in the car again, drive the hour drive from Morristown to Asbury Park, N.J. and drink some more.

Just a few years before, he disappeared for a whole day, until he was found in his car in Ocean Grove, plastered.

Another time, he drank all morning before he and Dorothy went out for a drive. They ended up in Asbury Park, where Dick pulled out his camera, and snapped beautiful women.

My sister and I fretted. "What if he goes blind?" we thought. What we should have worried about was Dick pitching back Budweisers and getting behind the wheel.

On a warm day in April, Dick arrived at our house, in Point Pleasant, N.J., wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a bag packed with a storefull of underwear, socks and Vick's VapoRub that he rubbed on the lining of his nose to clear his aching sinuses.

I talked to him at night as he slept on a mattress on the floor of our living room. He tickled me and laughed, and traded knock-knock jokes with me.

I remember feeling surprised. I had heard about him, and always saw him as a straight arrows. I saw him in the photos with the thick eyebrows, and thin grin.

But then I also saw him in photos with my mother, pulling on her pigtails, and smiling. He was devoting the kind of attention that my mother used to give me. In Point Pleasant, I saw that man that I had heard about, but thought was a legend.

We borrowed a station wagon from one of my father’s friends, just so we could fit him. My brother and I switched sitting in the wagon, while my grandfather and Carolyn sat in the back seat.

The man who tickled me at home fell silent. He struggled to engage in even simple chit-chat. When he did try to join in on conversations between my parents, he often got a stare, if not a leer from my mother.

One time she got so upset by his interjection that she pulled off her sunglasses and slammed them in between the seats. Dick leaned back, and returned to saying nothing.

Much like the California trips, the ride was too long. Interstate 95 wasn’t fully built yet, so we found ourselves taking alternate routes in North Carolina and Georgia. Signs for steakhouses would get my mother going. “Please, dear, can we go out to eat?” “Please?”

At every stop, my grandfather drank, sucking down beer after beer. By the end of the meal, he’d be sloshed, and his breath would smell like rubbing alcohol.

Then he would want dessert, so he’d take his knife and bang an empty glass like a bell. “Waitress!” he’d shout. We all wanted to slump in our seats and disappear.

At first, he was like a walking comedy act, quite the reverse of what we once thought about him. By the time we reached Miami Beach, however, he was draining us.

We also knew all the words to the song. Arriving at the LaGorce hotel, finally, we had the same thoughts we had in Los Angeles the previous year. Should we turn back?

Once there, Dick put on a display, unleashing and revealing himself in a way that even surprised his daughter. He traded in his well-pressed-suit look for that of a 63-year-old man trying to reliving his frat-boy years.

He drank all day, and into the night, and by the time we ate with him at dinner, he was sloshed, banging glasses and angrily demanding waitress service.

At night, he’d disappear again; one time, he was supposed to babysit me in his room. He didn’t show up until 2 a.m., slumping into his room where he confront my mother, who was sitting on the bed next to me, waiting, “Where have you been?” she said. “I was out on a date,” he said.

Another night, he recaptured the Greystone look, wearing a jacket and tie. Only he decided to go for a jog – with the suit on.

I remember my brother and I going to a neighboring park to look for him, looking behind the trees that were spread out in a grassy field near the beach. He was found, but I’m not sure how.

Several days later, we went to pick him up for dinner and, again, couldn’t find him. We sat in the car while my mother went in to investigate. She walked out of the lobby, looking steamed. “He was passed out on the couch!” she said. “He woke up and he said, ‘Where am I?’”

When he walked out to the parking lot, he looked like he could barely stand, and his shirt was pulled out of his pants.

The afternoon before we left, he drank nearly a case of beer while babysitting my brother and me. He gave us a watch to look at while he made repeated trips into the kitchen. Every 15 minutes or so, he reached into the refrigerator and pulled out cans of “Ale.” With each can, he chugged the contents down his throat and then slammed the empties into the trash can.

By the end of the trip, my parents had had it with him. My mother confronted him one day about his behavior. “I’m 62 and you’re 38 but that doesn’t give you the right to talk to me that way,” he said.

My mother stormed away from him, cursing and yelling out loud to my father. She never looked so angry.

The next day, we went home, and the car was largely silent the whole way. Occasionally, Dick would launch into his “Off we go” song, but his look was pained as we hustled back to New Jersey, only stopping once along the way.

I said a few things to him, but he mumbled back. The boyish enthusiasm was gone. I wanted to reignite the spark we had at the beginning of the trip, but Dick seemed to be intimidated by my mother, and too embarrassed about his behavior to respond.

Dick never went on another trip with the whole family again.