Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

by Wright Thompson

The homogenization of America has left people wandering the land in search of a place to belong. We are a tribeless nation hungry for tribes.

More and more today, we don’t want to do the work or take the chances required for greatness, and we try to fix all those shortcuts on the back end with marketing and branding—modern, fancy words that mean lie.

The monuments we erect—shouting into the wind that we were once alive and had hopes and dreams—often end up becoming a shrine to the fallacy and futility of that desire itself.

These ruins are shocking and yet clarifying. America is such a young country. We haven’t been through nearly the national life cycles of so many nations around the world. Other places have grown accustomed, even numb, to the way cultures rise and fall and then try to pick themselves back up again.

Perhaps no word sums up the death of truth in America better than the word brand.

WE MAKE FINE BOURBON AT A PROFIT IF WE CAN, AT A LOSS IF WE MUST, BUT ALWAYS FINE BOURBON.

JULIAN HAD BEEN FEELING NOSTALGIC, which I only recently learned comes from the Greek words for home and pain.

Close is always the only possible outcome when someone tries to make the present match up with his memory of the past. Home always seems warmer and safer than it really was. That’s where the pain comes from. We long for a fantasy that won’t ever come true and feel surprise at our inability to create it from force of will. That’s what Thomas Wolfe meant, I think. We can’t go home again because the home we remember never existed.

Families stay together because of active decisions, because of patterns that turn into rituals, and they are torn apart most often not by anger or feuds but by careless inertia.

JULIAN AND HIS DAD were men of different times. That’s how it is with fathers and sons. The act of spanning a generational divide is the single most important thing either person will do in their lifetime; the relationship depends on making that leap successfully.

It was the day before his fortieth birthday, I realized years later. I didn’t know then what that meant, but I do now—how a man is forced to examine his life and make an accounting of everything he wanted to be and everything he has actually become, to sort out dreams from failures, and to realize for the first time that the road he is on is the only road he’ll ever travel. At forty, reinvention is pretty much dead. You are the man you were always going to be.

Our fathers are often mysteries to us and therefore we are often mysteries to ourselves. Self-awareness only comes with time if it comes at all.

That kind of neighborly instinct is vanishing in a business run by brand managers, accountants, and private equity firms.

His entire adult life has been in the shadow of what his family built and lost.

You drink expensive bourbon and then you piss it out. No getting around that. It’s just passing through. While it’s in your system, if you don’t drink too much of it and try to start a fight or some shit, that’s where the brief, flickering magic happens. Whiskey warms your insides and not just literally. There didn’t seem like a lot of warming going on in San Francisco, just a pelt-hunting mad dash.

What became clear in Michigan was that Julian and Sissy have become the fully realized version of themselves through success. That’s actually rare. I profile famous and successful athletes for a living and almost no one understands that success is merely a currency to spend on one big purchase. Do you use it to try to get more success? To maintain the attention and bright lights? Or do you buy a life with it? The kind of life most people really want. I wanted what they have, wanted to organize the next act of my life, the one that moved finally past my youthful dreams and the rage and ambition that come shaped and fueled by my most broken and insecure self.

That’s writing, he said. Be simple, blunt, and profound.

He has said his goal with his own family was to avoid the pain inflicted on him by his father, to be, as he put it, an ancestor in their lives and not a ghost. He wanted to walk by their side and guide and protect, not grasp their ankles and pull them back down. That feels like a choice to me. You decide the story to tell about yourself—the myth that enables you to strive and hope to be your best self.

The mask eats the face.

“So this is what it means,” she said and I understood. We build a life to share, to pass on, so that some idea of us can live in our children and grandchildren, so that we might live forever and they might never be alone.

Always a pleaser, I have put satisfying bosses above myself or the needs of my family and friends. I have put worldly success at the top of my hierarchy of needs and lived accordingly, hoping that the people who loved me would love me enough to indulge and forgive. Even this walk felt illicit. It had been an embarrassingly long time since I just did something unplanned in the middle of a workday. Normally we are grinding.

I worry I won’t be worthy of this child, or of my wife, and that I won’t be able to find the version of myself who is called upon to stand up in this new act of life and be a man.

She will inherit the power to make our family into whatever she wants it to be.

Vodka is for the skinny and scotch is for the strivers and bourbon is for the homesick.