the nightcap and the fan mail: solitary drinking
he sometimes liked to read out loud at night in the living room, loudly and dramatically, sitting up with a nightcap and fan mail long after my mother and I had gone to bed.
Context
The private register of the father's drinking, apart from the family. After the household sleeps, the Man from Glad sits alone "with a nightcap," performing his disturbing fan mail to an empty room — the solitary, theatrical, after-hours drinking that the daytime "tomato juice beverage" only prefaces. The theme notes the pattern the son will repeat: the performing father (a broadcast image even at home, in wig and makeup) can only be fully himself, expansive and "loudly and dramatically" alive, alone with a drink — exactly the intoxication-as-only-channel-of-openness that will define JOI's own weight-room confessionals. The nightcap is where the family's disease goes to be by itself.