When I was a kid, I had a beer can collection. I forgot about that for a while, till I stumbled on my handwritten catalogue in a storage bin in my mom's basement. I don't know how I scored such a beautiful collector's notebook—in the late seventies and early eighties, many of my dearest possessions were frankly tacky—but even now this notebook delights me. Its hefty cover paper is an ideal dark red, with a little rectangular cut-out where I effortfully lettered my name. The rounded-off corners of the cover are softly worn to a texture like suede. Inside, the brass fasteners my father called brads are lightly rusted but still splay crisply open, keeping my papers in place. It is perfect.
The notebook conjures a familiar world I haven't thought of in years: the crayon-bright blue apron of the buxom, stein-wielding woman on the twelve-ounce can of St. Pauli Girl, the rearing red horse inside the golden horseshoe on the Colt 45, the elegant silver curve of Sapporo, its swelling top subtly wider than its base. My father pointed out what made these cans interesting and lovely. His own can collection had an element of cover, a legitimizing hobby that gave dignity to his drinking, but it was also a sincere expression of love: his for oddities, for color, for the beauty and weirdness of pop culture. Also his love for me, his firstborn. He probably thought it was important for a child to be in charge of a collection; to notice, account for, to sort and organize and record. He must have instructed me to work on my catalog in alphabetical order, giving each letter of the alphabet its own page. He invited me to sit next to him and pursue a shared pastime. He gave me his duplicates.
I open my old notebook to the R page. There are only five entries. The capital R at the top has been darkly penciled as if sprouting tousled black hair. It shares the upper margin of the notebook paper with a small, focused scribble which undulates toward the right-hand edge of the paper like an EEG readout. Below, a crooked X marks every other line: a novice writer’s reminder to skip lines for legibility. The letters are all capitals, except for a lowercase e and a few dotted i’s that are the same height as the other letters. I note a lack of roundness in the lobes of the capital B, and an entire word that is too large and crooked to fit within the lines. This is a very young child’s handwriting. There are no misspellings at all.
I probably wrote this with my dad in the narrow, cluttered room we called the office, working away at my task while he worked on his own. I can see his big raccoon-striped beard, his bristling eyebrows above square brown glasses, his belly rounding out a worn brown Thunderbird Tavern t-shirt. Did he tell me how to mark the lines with Xs, how to print my neatest? Did he stress the importance of copying every name exactly, setting each item down on the desk in front of me so I could get a good view?
RHeiNGOLD ROBiN HOOD ROBiN HOOD 16 oz ROLLiNG ROCK 12 oz and 8 oz ReDCAP
The S page is chaos: no Xs marking the lines on which to write, no keeping to a single column down the left-hand margin. Words sprawl all over the ruled sheet, some of them separated from each other with borders or boxes. The earliest entries are boldly written in blue ballpoint pen, and there is some crossing out of errors. An elaborate decorative scheme is in use: from the lowest point of each letter extends a straight line that ends in a scribbly circle—each letter dangling its own yo-yo. After the first four items catalogued, yo-yos give way to a more mature-looking handwriting: smaller, its curves more controlled, its brand names ending with carefully rounded apostrophes. The last entries are in competent cursive. I must have documented these twenty items over years. When I began, I had my baby teeth; I wore smocked dresses. During my collecting years I acquired eye-glasses, almost my full adult height, and an interest in paleontology. My work was sporadic, maybe including entire years of inactivity, but I kept returning to do more. I can’t remember why.
The T page shows very little effort at decoration. To the right of the heavily reinforced capital letter at the top of the page, a small flock of birdlike scribbles heads south. There are only three entries: Tecate, Tigerhead, and Tasmanian. Tecate is lettered in the most childish of capitals, but the older cursive hand has added to it: steel 12 oz, alum. 12 oz.
After my mother told my father he had to stop drinking or else their marriage was over, after he agreed and went to the three-day inpatient detox that was all our insurance would cover, after he went to some follow-up AA meetings and scoffed about how uneducated all the other alcoholics were, after he stayed sober for almost a year but then bagged it, unconvinced, Tecate was one of the three items from his collection that he opened and drank. He used a church key on the bottom of the can, leaving the top unblemished. It was empty and rinsed, displayed on a paper towel on the kitchen counter the morning after.
The feeling of seeing that can, with its shiny red background and gold lozenge, its black bird silhouette with a white T inside, was of falling without landing. I don't remember my parents arguing about this can, and certainly I didn't make a scene, but my body knew it was a disaster. I quietly fell forward into my day, into my life. At some point I must have annotated my notebook to reflect the presence of both aluminum and steel, no longer in mint condition.
My father is dead now, and I miss him, storing up, as we do, anecdotes I wish I could tell him. I still have the impulse to perform for him, to compose a joke that might make him crinkle his eyes behind his glasses, that might make him smile. For a couple months before his death, and for a full year after it, I kept a beer can on top of my refrigerator. It was a DC-area microbrew called Surrender Dorothy, whose label shows a stylized image of the Mormon temple that inspired a famous graffiti reference to the Emerald City of Oz. Dad loved that someone spray-painted a railroad bridge to poke fun at the grandiose white towers of the temple, and he would have delighted in a copper-colored ale packaged to continue the gag. I wish I'd emailed him a photo of that can. He was decades past his drinking days then, and the can would have been as close to a neutral object as something that harkened to our past could be. But I didn't reach out, as sometimes we don't. I don't know what stopped me.
To be fair, my father and I used to collect stamps together, too. Soaked them off their envelopes and then left them to dry on that same kitchen counter on those same clean white paper towels. We wrote together. When I was tiny he held me on his lap and let me bang the keys of his typewriter. To be fair, we gardened and recycled.
We flattened all those cans he emptied, the workaday cans not worth collecting, a dozen or more per day. We jumped on them on the sidewalk leading from the back porch. We loaded the flat cans, rinsed but still stinking, into black plastic garbage bags and drove them to the nearby state that paid the best rate for aluminum.
In the garden, we arranged old tuna cans at the base of each tomato plant. We were protecting our tender crop from slugs, who so loved the beer my father poured into the tuna cans that they would crawl in, slide down the smooth metal sides, and drown.
