Adventures With My Father: Childhood Recollections of Divorce, Dysfunction and the Summer of Love

Adventures With My Father: Childhood Recollections of Divorce, Dysfunction and the Summer of Love Review

"Ladies and Gentlemen...This is Your Captain Drinking..."

When A.L. "Skip" Mahaffey's mom would send him off to visit his father, she'd slip a piece of paper in his hand and tell him, "If he tries to kidnap you, give this to a stranger."

Such was the dysfunctional existence growing up with one of the strangest, most bizarre people Mahaffey ever encountered-his dad. Adventures with My Father is a greatest-hits collection of incidents like those, leavened with the kind of humor only Mahaffey can muster.

A gifted commercial pilot who was also an alcoholic, Mahaffey's father abandons his family one day at a California motel to live with his girlfriend. But that doesn't end his troubled, complicated relationship with his children. On visits with his dad, young Mahaffey travels the country, stopping at nearly every dive bar along the way. He learns to grocery shop at liquor stores, rubs elbows with the Hollywood elite, wakes up on strange couches in strange countries and encounters the one person who could out-weird his dad: his stepmother. Through it all is a sense of terror, awe, disgust and curiosity at the events that remain vivid decades later.

At once profoundly moving and laugh-out-loud funny, Adventures with My Father is a soul-searching attempt to come to terms with one man's unique coming of age.