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I WAKE UP DROWNING IN A PUDDLE, my lungs filled with rainwater. Through the panic, only one thought is clear: I am going to die. This stark certainty is enhanced to a horrible degree when I attempt to raise my head and find resistance, something pushing back against my skull, keeping all but my eyes submerged. Someone is trying to kill me. In this moment, perhaps one of the few I have left, the nature of my enemy is irrelevant. It matters only that he is there standing over me, his boot against the back of my head pressing down, down, down, and that he will not relent until the life or the fight has left me.
✽✽✽
“You like to drink, huh?”
Melinda says it with no accusation in her voice. If anything, she looks amused, and that’s good. Too many of these dates have been wrecked by judgment.
Over my glass of bourbon, I shrug and offer her what you might call a “wry smile”, though I only employ it to avoid opening my mouth and letting the world see my teeth. The few remaining people in my life who still call themselves friends claim this doesn’t matter, that anyone who cares enough about me would be willing to disregard this aesthetic flaw. But I know this world. I see the celebrities beaming their pristine, expensive smiles at us mere mortals, and I’ve thwarted many an incumbent lover by admitting upfront that my dental state is not pretty. Even long-term lovers (back when long-term was a logical assumption) used it as ammunition during arguments because they know I’m self-conscious about it. They know it hurts, so it’s an easy play. You’re a waste of space, a goddamn drunk, and don’t get me started on those fucking teeth. Ugh! I want to say that if I had the money, I’d get them fixed, but that’s not true. I’ve had the money plenty of times, and it was then, as it is now, much easier to drink away the need to care. That the alcohol and the cigarettes are what destroyed my teeth in the first place is a truth that doesn’t hinder me at all.
“Sure, who doesn’t?” I say, in response to Melinda’s question. She plays with the swizzle stick in her own drink, a cocktail of some indeterminate origin. The glass is enormous and rimed with sugar, the liquid within the color of a sunrise. I’ve never understood pretty drinks. Lethality should come in a more obvious costume, don’t you think? The amount of alcohol in that rowboat-sized receptacle reinforces the hope that no lecture about abstinence is forthcoming, so I allow myself to relax a little.
“My parents,” she tells me, with a sigh, and to this I can relate.
“Yours too, huh. Religious?”
“Catholic.”
“Same.”
“To the lapsed.”
We raise our glasses and toast gently, with no real celebration, because the ugliness of the truth we just shared is something that deserves only to be buried, not commemorated. Then again, who I am these days is commemoration enough of that dark time in my life.
We’re seated at a moderately well-lit booth in a bar-restaurant hybrid, better known these days as a gastropub, a name which never fails to make me think of beer farts. This whole area of town is trying hard to be upscale and failing gradually. If the demand isn’t there, it doesn’t matter how glossy your business looks or how high you hike the real estate prices. Now when you walk this neighborhood, it’s not difficult to imagine what the big glass and brass frontages will look like with shutters.
At the bar, a line of businessmen and women flirt and talk shop much too loudly while spending too much money. Around them, as attendant as bees, harried looking waiters and bar staff with no money at all rush around them trying not to look miserable and annoyed. All of them are slightly blurred, and not only because my focus is directed at Melinda, but also because it’s been a long day, and I’ve marked three quarters of the hours I’ve been awake with either a cheap beer or a midrange bourbon.
I’m spending money I don’t have. Child support money I tell myself I can make back before it summons trouble. Sometimes this is even true.
“Am I losing you already?” Melinda asks, and despite the permanent fixture of her amused smile, I suspect it won’t be long before the phone comes out and she gets a “surprise” text and with it, the apology that she must get going to attend to some sudden and unavoidable event.
“No,” I tell her, and wonder if the dimming of the lights is actual or imagined. “Rough day, and I’m finding myself seduced by the ambience and the company.”
Her smile widens just enough to let me know she appreciates the compliment but recognizes its fragility. “Nothing at all to do with the three bourbons you’ve sunk since we sat down?”
Her math is wrong. I’ve been taking hits from my pocket flask in the men’s room. Part of it is whatever compels me to never get close enough to sobriety to feel the real tragedy of my existence. I know how pitiful that sounds, but it doesn’t change the reality of it. Another part of it is nerves, because the simple truth is this: I’ve had a lot of women. This is not a boast, just a fact. I’d make a list if I could recall half of them, but I can’t, so you’ll just have to take my word that we’re probably talking close to a hundred. Without drink, that number would be less than ten, because I’ve never known how to talk to women—or anyone else for that matter—unless I’m buzzed. Walk in on me in a bar halfway through the night and you’d think I was perfectly at ease, comfortable in my skin, and just the best damn company. Charming, if a little quiet, confident but not cocky, and you’d be right. Catch me in the morning and you’ll end up calling the suicide hotline on my behalf. Catch me in the company of women before I’ve had a shot and I look like a man afraid to address his own reflection. I don’t like that person. Truth to tell, I don’t much like either of them, but at least there’s something I can do about the lesser one. That confidence with women, forced or not, worked better back in the day, before my looks began to fade. That Melinda is sitting across from me now is nothing short of a miracle, though on such occasions I figure my idea of a miracle is closer to pity than I’d like to admit.
“Do you do this often?” she asks, waving a hand between us.
“Dating?”
She nods.
“On and off for the past year. Mostly off.”
“Only a year?”
“Considered trying it earlier but marriage got in the way.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah. Soon as the divorce hit, I signed right up to see what I’d been missing.”
“And did it meet your expectations?”
“Not until tonight.”
She rolls her eyes and sits back. She doesn’t blush or fawn. I can see she appreciates the compliment. I can also see it’s a line she’s heard a lot and which, consequently, has lost all value. Her green-eyed gaze is penetrating, as if she’s been asking me the real important questions all night long without ever opening her mouth. Her hair is long, dark, and wavy, her bare shoulders sprinkled with freckles. I like her. I think the sober me would adore her, but that’s a question destined to remain unanswered, not because I don’t plan to see her if all goes well, but because I’m unlikely to be sober when and if I do.
She sits forward again, takes a short sip from her cocktail and crosses her arms on the table. “So, tell me, what’s been your worst date so far?”
I scrunch up my face, and then remember the expression exposes my teeth, and switch instead to studious pondering, a forefinger to my lips to seal them. “Hmm.”
“Want me to go first?”
I nod, and she does.
“I won’t bore you with prefaces or qualifiers or buildup. I’ll just get straight to it. First off, the guy looked nothing like his profile picture, which is always the dread expectation.”
I resist the urge to interject that she doesn’t either. She looks better. But I’m already pushing my luck in the flattery regard, so I do what all good men are supposed to do, and just listen. It’s not easy though. As people are fond of telling me, one of the characteristics that emerge when I’m drinking is an inability to shut the fuck up, and I feel that now, the urgent and omnipresent bubbling of words in my throat. It’s almost like I sometimes think if I don’t make a sound, I’m not really there, or that I’m in imminent danger of being forgotten if I’m not part of the conversation.
“He was older, had less hair, and was considerably fatter than he appeared in his picture. I admit to being disappointed, but I’m also not superficial, so I can deal with disappointment in the looks arena if the personality compensates. Is that crass?”
“Not at all,” I tell her. “Unless you’re classifying me the same way.”
Another eyeroll. “Nooo. Anyway, with this guy, not only had he lied about his looks, he wasn’t even interested in a date.”
“Then why sign up for a dating site?”
“I know, right? Sometimes people baffle me.”
“So, what was his deal?”
“Religious crusade.”
“Christ.”
“Exactly. He spent twenty minutes lecturing me on my vices, said only godless whores put themselves out there on a public site with the intention—his words—of forcing men to compromise their spiritual beliefs through sexual perversion.”
I chuckle at this while noting my glass is somehow empty again. Without taking my eyes from Melinda, who is clearly enjoying recounting the story, I raise a hand to summon a waiter.
“So, what did you say?”
She shrugs. “Told him he was absolutely right, that had he not been good enough to call me out as a heathen, I’d have lured him home and let him do anything he wanted to me. Then I thanked him for saving me from myself and left him there with the check.”
The waiter appears. It might as well be a mannequin for all the life that’s in his eyes. I order another round and tell him to cheer up. His tight smile appears to be all that’s holding back a torrent of abuse. I can’t blame him. It’s a shit job for shit pay made worse when customers like me offer unsolicited advice.
“The best part?” Melinda says, tears of mirth in her eyes. “There was absolutely no victory on his face when I told him he was right. He looked crestfallen, like he regretted not getting to see what I’d have let him do to me. Fucking hypocrites, hiding behind judgment of others to protect themselves from their own impulses.” She grabs a napkin and delicately dabs the moisture from her eyes without ruining her makeup. “Who the fuck goes out on dates just to preach?”
“Amen, sister.”
“Okay, your turn.”
“Mine’s weird.”
“Oh goody. Tell me.”
“I’ll spare you the worst of it. The short version is I met a woman who looked like a supermodel. Thought I’d won the lottery because unlike your guy she showed up looking exactly like her profile picture.”
“Did she have a dick?”
“No, that I could have handled. Excuse the pun.”
Melinda snorts laughter. That and the slight glassy look in her eyes tells me the alcohol is settling in, and that’s good. I work better when people are, if not on my level, then at least in the same building.
“We have dinner, we connect. It all goes great. We end up back at her place.”
“Just like that, huh? Floozy.”
“I guess the chemistry was just there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Fiery.”
“Right.”
“Sooo...we get there, beautiful house, nice cars parked out front and I’m thinking she comes from money. It’s starting to look like I’ve hit the jackpot...”
“And...what?”
“And we get inside, and her parents are waiting for us.”
“Oh, no.” She raises her eyebrows, puts a hand over her mouth.
“I’m thinking: shit, she’s younger than she looked and now I’m in Dutch. But that wasn’t it. Her parents were just really nice, open, understanding people. They invited me in, and we all sat down for drinks. The father, real congenial sort, tells me about his fiscal year at the law firm. The mother, a little drunk, throws flirty eyes at me and quizzes me on my background. And then, when the conversation ebbs, they apologize for getting in the way and leave us to, as the father put it: ‘Consummate our night.’”
“Oh God, and...did you?”
“Are you kidding me? The cab couldn’t get there fast enough.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, but the worst part is she stalked me for like a month. I had to delete my Facebook page.” I raise my hand to grab the waiter’s attention again. He looks at me somewhat witheringly. “Then her father started calling and leaving me voicemails, apologizing for scaring me off and asking if I’d give his daughter another chance.”
Melinda loses it, her laugh so loud everyone at the bar looks in our direction.
✽✽✽
Somehow, I manage to turn my head so that half my face is out of the water, but only for a moment. I have time to see the shadowy shapes of darkened houses backlit by the sickly glow of streetlights before the pressure returns and slams my face back down into the muddy water.
And those teeth, such a source of shame for so long, shatter against the asphalt.
✽✽✽
“This is the weird part,” Melinda says.
“Like the rest of the night hasn’t been?”
She stops on the pavement outside the restaurant and appraises me with as much seriousness as her condition will allow. She’s weaving slightly on her feet, one hand clamped on my shoulder for support, which, given my own state, is like leaning two ladders against each other on an ice rink. “Is that criticism? Did it go bad? Badly? Whatever it is?”
I feel a swell of affection for her, and it’s far from the first. She’s beautiful: curvy, smart, bubbly, funny, she’s everything a guy could want. And most importantly, she drinks. And while I can handle people who don’t, I prefer that they do. Sober people see straight through me much too quickly.
“I think it went great. And I think you’re amazing.”
Now that the alcohol has softened her filter, she blushes and draws close. I can smell the strawberry vodka on her breath, and it’s wonderful. Her eyes are like shot glasses full of crème du menthe. Her smile is uneven, uncertain, and tinged with mischief. “I don’t date alcoholics.”
A shrug. “Me neither.”
She snorts laughter again and appraises me as if for the first time. The people on the street around us become a blur. “I’m not an alcoholic.”
I believe this to be true. “But you’re an addict.”
She considers this, staggers a little and puts her free hand on my other shoulder for support. It looks like we’re about to dance. “I’ve been too fond of many things in my lifetime: booze, painkillers, pot, but the only thing I’ve ever really developed an incurable and destructive addiction to is men. Pricks like you who come along out of nowhere to make me feel good about myself for a while, even if it’s all just so much bullshit in the end, and even if the effect is only ever temporary and leaves me feeling even more empty and depressed afterward.”
I don’t protest her classification of me, because I don’t know that she’s wrong. I’d love to purport to have noble motives in this instance, but really it would all be so much self-delusion and deception. I’m here with her because I’m lonely. I need someone to talk to, to drink with, and, all going well, to sleep with. If I could choose only one option, it would be the second one, because ultimately that’s the only constant, the only requirement my soul needs when the darkness is at its worst. The only real need. But even so, loneliness can, like everything else, be drowned. The date was just a feeble attempt to make it look to myself like I’m trying to rebuild a normal life, and yet I contacted Melinda because I knew from her profile that she wasn’t ready for that. Something about the forced confidence in her sales pitch. Even if she decided to take the chance, she certainly wasn’t ready for me and my unruly shadow.
Maybe I was wrong and she’s not an addict, at least not in any traditional sense, but she’s here with me because she needs something she’s not getting, and it’s more than just sex or the casual company of another. Perhaps it’s nothing more complicated than validation, the very ordinary need to be appreciated, but isn’t that an addiction, too?
“Come back to me,” she says, and follows it with the same sound one makes when trying to summon a cat. “Did I blow it?”
I offer her a sly smile. “No.”
“Good.”
“But you can if you want to.”
“Jesus, is that a line that ever actually works?”
“Not really,” I tell her and join her in laughing.
But this time, it does.
✽✽✽
I don’t know how I ended up here, shivering from the cold, wearing nothing but my boxers as someone tries to drown me in a brackish puddle. I can taste the rainwater, the blood, the grainy pieces of my broken teeth on my tongue. My thoughts spin in a mad vortex of self-preservation.
Finally, the pressure relents. I roll over on my back, sobbing from the pain, the humiliation, the confusion, and see the dark figure looming over me. He is backlit by the streetlights, which makes his face a mystery, but I know who he is, and dread squeezes my heart so tightly I fear it may stop.
“Please...don’t,” I beg him.
“Get up,” he says.
I start to sob and bring my hands to my face to cover my eyes.
I pray I’m dreaming, and know that I’m not.
He found me again.
✽✽✽
Time has a way of contracting when you’re drinking. I met Melinda at eight, and by midnight we’re back at her place, but it feels like an hour has passed between us. Her house is small but spotless aside from a few dishes in the sink and a scattering of dry cat food around a bowl on the kitchen floor. The cat itself is nowhere to be seen, and for this I’m grateful. I used to be a cat person until my daughter’s tabby was mauled by the neighbor’s dog and I had to put it out of its misery. Sitting beside the small mound of dirt in the backyard that night, I drank myself into a stupor and cried, not for the cat, not even for my daughter, but for memories of things that had happened to me as a child, things I had buried deeper than poor Chuckles the cat and were thus much harder to exhume. But I felt them, mourned the loss of who I might have been, and when my wife, eyes narrowed by sleep, came out to check on me, I attacked her for reasons unknown.
That was the only time she had to call the cops on me, and because incarceration came to mean sobriety, and a terrifying, disorientating, nightmarish kind of hangover, just the threat of it kept me in line for the future. If you’ve ever gone out for a few beers and woken up startled to find yourself in a jail cell surrounded by mad, violent, and similarly confused people, you know what I mean. I had no desire to go back. That’s when I learned the trick to secret drinking and the benefits of false sobriety.
“You’re a deep one,” Melinda says, pulling me back out of myself for the umpteenth time since we met. We’re sitting on her comfy sofa before a dark TV, close enough that our knees are touching. Before me, on the low glass and mahogany coffee table, is a glass of white wine. I’m not a big fan of wine. It tends to make me nauseous if I mix it with bourbon, but that won’t keep me from drinking it. Right now, wine is as good a poison as anything else.
“I’m out of practice,” I explain with a sheepish look. “I’ve forgotten how much fun this can be, and I think I’m being distant out of some silly fear that I’ll do or say the wrong thing, y’know?”
God, if she only knew.
Since returning from the bathroom, she has touched up her hair and makeup and taken drops to remove the redness from her eyes. She looks as good as she has all night. I wonder how I look and dismiss the question almost immediately. It will do me no favors to ponder it.
“Just relax and be yourself. You’ve managed to lure me back to my place and thus far I haven’t screamed or called the police. You’ve scored. Chill.” Grinning, she raises her glass. I grab mine and we toast.
Looking into her eyes, I feel a transient calm. I’m happy to be here, with her. There’s no future in it and I think we both know that. But for the moment I feel, dare I say it, human. Normal.
Safe.
✽✽✽
He grabs me by the hair and lifts me bodily off the street until I’m forced to stand. My legs are shaking from the cold and the terror. I silently will someone, anyone in that darkened row of houses behind us to wake and come out to see what the commotion is, to call the police, to run to my aid, something, anything. The houses have nothing to say.
But I know, deep inside where the truth hides, that even if someone did come to my aid, it would do no good.
“This is a dream,” I manage to gasp, and my attacker responds by driving a fist into my stomach. It feels like he is wearing a glove made of concrete. My knees buckle, and I blurt vomit onto my feet, but I can’t fall because now he has me by the throat.
“I could kill you,” he says, and I know he’s telling the truth, because once upon a time he tried to save me, and it killed him instead.
✽✽✽
I am lying naked on her bed, stripes of shadow across my chest from the light through her bedroom blinds. I have one hand behind my head, the other in her hair as she attends to me. My eyes are closed, and I am wincing, not from desire but embarrassment, because in my mind I am hard as a rock, a shockingly becocked paragon of virility, but in reality, she has been trying to evoke a reaction from that treacherously flaccid member for what seems like forever. If I possessed any residue of male pride, I would claim, if only to myself, that this was an aberration, but it isn’t. Sometimes I’m lucky and whatever blend of alcohol I have imbibed on a given night quite literally throws me a bone, but more often than not, I’m left dead from the waist down despite the will to perform. It is an eventuality I frequently forget. Eventually, she gives up and I await her judgment. But when her face resolves from the dark, she is smiling, my useless cock lying dead in the shadowed valley between her pendulous breasts.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I guess I had one too many.”
She kisses her way up my chest to my neck and then rolls over on her back beside me. “It happens,” she says, and spreads her legs, knees drawn up. “Maybe you’ll have better luck.”
Relieved that my failure to rise to the occasion has not killed the moment or become something to be taken as a personal affront to her sex appeal, I shimmy down and kneel at the end of the bed. The smell of her sex is almost as intoxicating as the finest bourbon. Her fingers find my hair and force my lips to hers. I slide my tongue inside her. I drink deep of the salty sweet taste as she bucks against me, moaning low in her throat. My hands knead her buttocks, pulling her tighter against my mouth. I miss the intimacy, the closeness, the warmth, and the sheer giving involved in such acts. It is one of the few things I can offer anymore. When Melinda comes, she throws her head back against the pillow, mouth wide, hands flying up to grab the rails of the headboard. Her body shudders once, twice, and again, and she utters a single staggered “Ohhhh,” and grows still. I am aware that as aroused as she makes me in my head and my soul, my cock still refuses to obey.
Thankfully, it doesn’t appear to be an issue.
“Cuddle with me, loverboy.” With a contented smile on her face, Melinda reaches for me. I climb atop her, my face buried in those voluminous breasts with their incongruently tiny nipples, and within minutes, we are both asleep.
But my mouth tastes like salt, and I am thirsty.
So thirsty now.
✽✽✽
I am struggling in vain to be free of him as he carries me back toward the house I now realize is Melinda’s. His hand around my throat is like a tourniquet keeping the scream from bleeding free. I try to kick him and it is like kicking a brick wall. Any moment now I might die. I am already seeing stars.
But how did I get from the bed to the street outside?
“Blackout, you fucking loser,” he tells me, his voice like someone rattling bottlecaps in a wool pocket. “You woke, you walked, and you ended up in the middle of the street with your dick out, trying to take a piss.”
I want to think he’s wrong, but I know he isn’t. In life, he never misled me. In death, there’s even less of a motive to lie. And it’s not like this isn’t a regular event. Most nights I can’t remember how I ended up wherever I find myself, and the panic and confusion debilitates me.
I can move only my eyes, and I see the small wrought iron gate leading to the driveway of Melinda’s house. Her car comes into view, then fills my vision entirely as my face is slammed into the side of it, a move which has the instantaneous effect of setting off the alarm. It screeches and squawks into the night as I am thrown against it, an alcoholic wretch in his underwear covered in rain and blood and gasping for air.
A few moments later the front door flies open and through rapidly swelling eyes, I see Melinda standing there, hair tousled, tugging a robe closed to hide her nakedness, her face jaundiced by the flashes of amber light from her car.
“What the fuck?” she asks and disappears back inside the house. A second later, long enough for me to see that my attacker has vanished, she reappears, points her keys at the car and hits a button. The car shrieks once more and falls silent.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Abby. I was thirsty. I got lost. I’m sorry.”
“Abby?” Melinda says, but she doesn’t look annoyed, merely concerned. I’ve seen that look too many times before to trust in it. It never lasts. Instead it mutates over time into frustration, hatred and resentment. Most people are not equipped to deal with my problems. People like me. People like my ex-wife Abby, or my poor kids. Or Melinda.
Why am I here?
What the fuck was I thinking?
Certainly not about the cat, the cutest cat you ever did see, who I killed with the shovel to end his pain.
Certainly not my friends, none of whom will answer the phone.
Certainly not about my sponsor, who is dead, and won’t leave me alone.
“I’m sorry,” I say again, and then I am weeping openly, hopelessly into my hands. The cuts on my face and mouth sting, sobering me, bringing me, however temporarily, back to the wasteland I have made for myself. My gums ache as if someone has tied strings around them and is trying to pull them down my throat.
A soft touch. An arm around my shoulders. A body seated next to me on the cold ground, in the rain, pressing against me. Fingers stroking my hair, a cheek pressed against the top of my head. Comfort.
My God, how I wish so desperately I could escape into love, into her, and hide inside her warmth forever. But I am my own anchor, and it always pulls me back into the cold reality of a world with no solid edges save one: the bottom.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“It’s okay,” Melinda says. I wonder why that’s so. What has happened to her? What other monsters has she endured to bring her to a place where a broken wretch like me is okay under any circumstances?
I raise my head and she looks at me, those eyes green even in the dark. Her mouth is a tight line of worry. “Why don’t you come back inside and get cleaned up? I can make us some coffee.”
“Is there any wine left?” I ask, as panic begins to weave outward from its spindle at the center of my chest. I won’t look, but I can see the man standing behind her now, a blockade between us and the open front door. The rain passes through him, but he is too real to be a ghost.
“I need a drink, Melinda,” I tell her, because that’s what the presence of that raging figure means. It’s what it has always meant.
“I know, but I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”
The figure, too tall, too thin, too disproportionate, moves closer without moving at all. Even in the light from the streetlamps, he has no features, and that is a mercy. But I remember what he looks like all too clearly. No amount of drink can erase that from my beleaguered mind.
“Please take me inside.”
She does, helping me up as if I’m a ninety-year-old man with no flesh left on his bones. She leads me back inside the house and closes the door on the rain.
And on him.
✽✽✽
She makes us coffee. While she’s busy in the kitchen, I drain the last dregs of wine from the bottle we left on the coffee table, then from our wineglasses. I wish I’d left some for just this occasion, an occasion I should have known would come. Nowadays it nearly always does. I drink to forget what drinking has done and that only seems to make it worse, summoning specters I can never outrun.
Namely, the sponsor.
“You might need stitches,” Melinda says, setting the coffee down before me. The smell of it activates my gag reflex. “And, my God, what happened to your teeth?”
I pull away from her attempt at an oral examination, no less ashamed of my teeth now despite the absence of three of the worst offenders.
“I need a drink.” The desperation in my voice is terrifying.
“We finished it,” she says. “And nothing’s likely to be open at this hour.”
“Something must be.”
I have already searched my coat and found the flask empty. I can’t remember when I finished it off, but that hardly matters now.
“I’m here for you,” she says, and I know she means it. “Talk to me.”
There are two kinds of concern, I’ve found. The first is closer to pity, with no commitment for the sympathizer to make any active effort to change the circumstances of the afflicted. It’s a passing concern, you might say, and makes the observer feel better just for feeling it. And then there are people like Melinda, who are not repulsed by tragedy but perversely attracted to it, less out of any legitimate philanthropy and more because it makes them feel needed, necessary, a consequence of their own affliction: an inability to accurately gauge their own self-worth, which makes it directly proportionate to the well-being of another. Next to me is a beautiful woman who has and maybe never will believe that she is a wonderful person because she will spend her life courting people and situations designed to hurt her. It explains her patience, the look of recognition and lack of alarm when she found me outside. She has seen, if not this, then something comparable before. Maybe even something worse. But she doesn’t quite yet know how bad this is.
“Please find me something. Nail polish remover. Cleaning fluid. I don’t care. I just...I can’t be sober. Not right now. Not for a while. Please.” I’m aware that I sound like a child, but I can’t afford to care. I feel hollow inside, dangerously close to exploding into panic and who knows what else if I don’t pacify the demon.
“Just calm down,” she says, moving closer.
I look at her and wince at a bolt of pain. This one is not from my injuries, but from my liver and kidneys, where it feels as if my shadowy attacker has buried his hands in me.
“Are you all right?” Her warm hand on the nape of my neck is like the hand of God.
“No. No I’m not. The sponsor found me.”
“The what?”
“The man I killed.”
I feel her stiffen, but she doesn’t yet move away. “Tell me,” she says.
“I will, but please, find me something to drink.”
At first, she resists, but as I sit there dabbing the blood from my ruptured gums, my eyes full of tears, I see the pity take over and, with a shake of her head, she begins a cursory search of the house. It doesn’t take long before she returns with a bottle of rubbing alcohol.
“Tell me,” she says again, “And after that, I’m taking you to the hospital.”
I do not argue.
“And you need to sip. Small sips or it’ll kill you.”
Ignoring her, I take a gulp from the bottle. It’s hell on my wounds, burns its way like molten lava down my throat, and curdles in my stomach. But it works, if only to pacify the panic that courses through my veins like a living, lunatic thing. After exhaling the fumes on a noxious sigh, I tell Melinda about Stephen Carver.
✽✽✽
The first time my wife threatened to leave me and take our kids away, I pacified her by promising to quit drinking. It was not an empty promise, or at least, not consciously empty. I was willing to try whatever it took to get better, so I stripped the house of alcohol, shocked as I did so by how many secret stashes I uncovered. It began to bring it home to me just how far gone I was. And yes, I’m aware how fucked up it sounds that after all the arguments and embarrassments, the violence and the arrest, it was the discovery of those bottles that delivered to me the message that all was not well.
So, out they went, and I altered my mental routine in an effort to stay dry.
I lasted three months before I dropped my phone while in bed and found the cheap plastic bottle of vodka stashed behind the nightstand. I left it there, waited for my wife to fall asleep, and then took the bottle down to the garage. There, in the dark, after a struggle I like to mischaracterize as titanic and torturous, when it was pretty brief and insincere, I drank the whole fucking thing. Though I’d anticipated it, there was no guilt, no shame, no disappointment in myself. Instead, I felt right, like I’d allowed myself to be me again. Things changed after that. I made some concessions for the sake of my marriage. I kept regular hours, drank at work instead of at bars, made sure I smelled good, and behaved like a good husband and father. I also took to staying awake and drinking in my garage.
Which is where Abby found me one night in late summer, choking on my own vomit.
Hospital. Stomach pump. Detox. AA.
I went to counseling, and even found a sponsor. He was an old grizzled guy, eighteen years dry, who liked to spout philosophies and share Buddhist wisdoms while sitting too close to me and touching me far too often. His teeth were too big, his eyes too small. His name was Stephen Carver and he knew what I was going through, understood it, had been there himself and vowed to be there and guide me through my darkest hours when I needed him. Only, I didn’t want to get better, and ultimately that’s what undid me then and undoes me still. I don’t want to be better. I want to just ride this train in the safety of numbness until it goes right off the edge of a cliff and takes me with it. What I don’t like and can’t seem to stop from happening, is hurting other people along the way. People like my wife, who quit on me once she’d admitted me to the hospital, and my kids, who still don’t really understand when and how and why I became a monster. People like you, Melinda, who try so very, very hard to be there and to heal me and to listen, when really there’s nothing to say that’s worth hearing. And people like Stephen Carver, a man I hated with a passion just for forcing me to be perpetually aware of my disease. And it is a disease. This, I know. It’s a maddening thirst that never goes away and it cares little about the source as long as it, and I, am sustained.
Christmas Eve of last year. My first Christmas alone, without the kids. Abby allowed me to see them for an hour. I’d lost my job and could only afford to get them gifts from the dollar store, which they were too young to be able to fake appreciating. Abby stood in the corner, watching, making no attempt to hide her distaste for my apartment, which was admittedly a fleapit. On her face, I saw no regret, no love, no wishful thinking that things had worked out differently. I saw only condemnation and disgust and anger, all of which I deserved. The whole affair was awkward, and forced, and I knew when my kids left with Abby, I would never see them again.
That night I went out and bought a bottle of whiskey.
I drank half of it before I thought of calling my sponsor.
He was disappointed, obviously, and concerned, but also as good as his word. He promised to come see me and we’d talk. On Christmas Eve! What a guy!
But he never made it. The lowered blade of a fucking snowplow sideswiped his Toyota a mile and a half from my house. He spun the wheel and slammed into a streetlight. Went straight out through the windshield. He didn’t die instantly. They hospitalized him. I got a call from Todd Nolan, the irritant who kept us all in line at our AA meetings and spoke to everyone like a priest. He filled me in, said he knew Stephen had been on his way to see me. Thought I should know Stephen was in the hospital. He gave me a breakdown of the injuries, but the gist of it was that he had hit the pole headfirst, shattered his neck and spine, blinded himself, ruptured his spleen, brain damage, internal bleeding....and so on and so forth. It wasn’t looking good. He asked me to come see Steven. I said I would. I didn’t. Instead I shut myself up in the apartment and sat beside my pitiful wretch of a Christmas tree and drank myself into oblivion.
The next day the phone rang again and again and again. I ignored it but saw the text from Todd.
Steven has passed.
And with it, all last lingering shreds of my sobriety.
The twist in the tale, the truly funny thing about it all, is that any guilt I might have felt or feel still is mitigated by something else Todd texted me, a week or so later.
Did you know Steven had been drinking that night?
All his wisdom, all his promises, and the fucking guy was on the sauce, still. No wonder he was so secure in his pontificating. It was all bullshit. So, now I tell myself he shouldn’t have been driving, and that he was on his way to share a drink with me, not berate me for lapsing, when he had the accident. I tell myself he swerved into the path of that snowplow, maybe because very secretly, behind that smarmy façade, he wanted to die. Just like I do.
He’s dead, Melinda. Dead deep down in the drunken dirt.
And I saw him tonight. I see him almost every time I black out.
But when it’s bad, when I’m truly lost, only then does he make me suffer.
✽✽✽
I emerge from my bitter reverie and open my eyes. My throat is dry from talking and I am startled to find myself alone in the dark. I am still on the sofa, though I have switched sides. I’m sitting where Melinda sat only moments before, though I can’t be sure it was moments and not hours. The scent of her fills my nose. Her perfume and a metallic, coppery smell. I am cold and shivering and there is something wet on my chest. I must have spilled the rubbing alcohol while I was telling my tale.
I need a drink.
“Melinda?”
I stand on shaky legs, bracing my hand on the arm of the couch for support and try to blink the room into focus. Sinister shapes hunched over in the dark reveal themselves to be nothing but the furniture.
“Where are you?”
Something soft brushes against my shin and I scream.
The cat bolts from me with a hiss, its claws skittering against the hardwood, and I stagger back against the wall, barely preventing a lamp from falling to the floor.
A few moments to catch my breath. It’s all right, I counsel myself. It’s okay. You just fell asleep. Wandered. It’s all right.
The house is dead and dark.
Clumsily, unsteadily, I make my way to the stairs. Feel the agony of drink-starved limbs and organs tightening in protest and practically climb the steps on all fours. I so often awake consumed with dread and confusion and the stark certainty that everything is horribly wrong that more than once I have considered finding something sharp and cutting my throat before I am forced to confront whatever it is. My days have become a reel of badly edited scenes. Cut together, they make little sense. I am afraid to sleep, afraid to be awake. I don’t even know if the people I meet are real anymore. I’m the product of some ill-advised experiment to monitor the body’s reaction to obscene quantities of alcohol, to see the emotional cost and the time it takes to go insane.
Upstairs and the halls are drenched in shadow and moonlight. Gingerly, I navigate the chiaroscuro, afraid those crooked bars of darkness might snap shut and cut me into pieces. The floorboards creak beneath my feet. I hear the clicking of the cat’s claws on the stairs behind me.
“Melinda?”
Her bedroom door, slightly ajar, is at the end of the hall. For a moment, it appears to move away from me, obviating my progress, as if in mockery. I will it to stand still. I need Melinda now as much as I have needed her all night and feel a pang of guilt that I have burdened her with this. I need her eyes, her warmth, her understanding and patience. I need her to be the anchor that keeps the tide from casting me back into the current just for a little while longer.
I open the door. It makes no sound.
The sponsor is standing in the corner. He lights a cigarette, it lights up his face, or rather, where his face used to be before the windshield glass sheared it away. His voice, when he speaks, is the sound of a rusty saw through a stubborn stump.
“Welcome back.”
I look at the shape on the bed. Melinda is half-naked and lying on her back, the sheets covering her lower body. Both arms are by her sides. I approach, my heart beating so violently it is as if the sponsor is punching a rhythm into my back.
“What...what did you do to her?” I ask, and almost fall over on top of Melinda as my thighs meet the mattress.
Her skin is pale as alabaster, except where the blood has run and pooled. The sheets are dark beneath her.
“What did you do?” I scream at the shape in the corner.
He chuckles. “I did nothing.”
My hands flutter over her body like butterflies. I want to touch. I’m afraid to touch, but I don’t see any wounds and her hair is covering her face. Could the blood be mine?
“You were thirsty,” the sponsor says, expelling blue smoke. “So, you drank.”
I bend over and move Melinda’s hair away from her face. Her mouth is slightly open. So are her eyes. I tap her cheek gently. “Melinda?” She does not respond, and her skin is cold. I withdraw in horror, but not before I see her breasts, how big the nipples are when I know they weren’t before.
It’s because they’re gone.
In their place, ragged wounds. Dark, bloody holes.
Bile floods my mouth.
“You uncorked her like a fucking bottle of Chardonnay,” the sponsor says, chuckling.
I fall to the floor in a quivering heap and the vomit rushes out of me in a torrent. Even in the poor light, I can see how dark it is, how thick. I can taste the copper. I can taste the blood.
“Her blood was the only place left to get alcohol at this late hour,” the sponsor says, and I jerk away from him. He is standing beside me now, looming over me. I can’t run. The strength has left me. I am overcome with horror, with shame. He pats my head like a master will a loyal hound. “You drank it all, drained the bottle. Just like always.”
I start to shake my head, the tears rushing in to blind me against what I have done, what he, what we have done, and he grabs my hair.
“Closing time,” says the sponsor, and rams my face into the locker beside the bed hard enough to shatter the door.
✽✽✽
“Hey, buddy, I said we’re closing. Time to get gone.”
I raise my head from the bar and open my eyes. Only one of them obeys. The other is swollen shut. A fight, probably. My face is all cuts and bruises. My face is a rubber mask that has tightened in the heat. My skull feels as if someone has filled it with broken glass.
“Hey,” I say to the bartender, waving a hand to get his attention. He’s at the far end of the bar, sweeping up, a big man, all hair and gut and attitude. “What happened to me?” I indicate my face and the bloodstains on my shirt.
“Fucked if I know,” he says gruffly. “You came in here like that. Now, I’d appreciate it if you’d make your exit.”
“Bottle for the road?”
He sighs. “You got no money, remember? Spotted you your last round because you looked like you had a bad night, but I’m all out of charity and I’d like to get home sometime tonight, so, if you please, vaminos.”
I push away from the bar and all the sites of pain register in my brain at once, as if I’m a human Christmas tree. I’ve gotta stop. I don’t know where I am. I barely know who I am, and this has happened once too often. Tomorrow. A familiar chorus, comforting it its bold insincerity. Tomorrow I’ll make the change.
“What time is it?” I ask the barkeep.
“Almost three.”
“Okay.” I slide off the stool and almost collapse in a heap. “Sorry, sorry.”
My path to the door is uneven, as if the tavern is aboard a listing ship. Outside, the air is cold, and I shiver, squint against the emptiness of the night. The stars look like glints in the eyes of predators. My chest aches. My stomach is full of acid. My mouth tastes as if I have been sucking on pennies. I look at my watch and find only a pale band of skin where it used to be. Must have lost it, or, more likely, sold it. Doesn’t matter because time doesn’t matter.
On an otherwise deserted street, a cab cruises by, and I raise an arm and give it a limp wave. I’m surprised when he stops, and hurry into the car, glad to be in out of the cold, which has sobered me, but not nearly enough, and not for long. The leather seat is cold on the backs of my legs. My head throbs.
“Where you going?” asks the driver. He’s of ethnic descent and seems tired of me already. That’s okay. He can join the fucking club.
“Nearest open bar.”
The driver gives me a sigh and a shrug. “Sunday morning. No place open now.”
I sit back and appraise him. I can smell his aftershave. It is not unpleasant. He turns around to look at me, thick eyebrows raised questioningly.
“Liquor store then.”
“Buddy, no liquor store open now.”
I glance longingly back at the bar. The outside lights go off, plunging us into darkness, but not before I catch sight of the figuring standing there on the sidewalk. He doesn’t want me to get out of the cab. Doesn’t want me to leave. For him, for us, the night has just begun. I feel a flutter of panic in my stomach. Or is it excitement?
“Do you have anything to drink?” I ask the cab driver and he looks at me as if I’m mad.
Of course he won’t have anything, but it never hurts to check.
“Sir, I must ask you to leave now. I have to make money, ok?”
The driver is growing restless, cautious.
I don’t move.
Can’t.
The cab driver has no drink, but he has money. And that will do for now, because I need to find somewhere to be, need to find a part of the city that lives after dark, just like I do. And that kind of living comes with a price. Sometimes it’s cash, sometimes a watch, sometimes it’s blood. Whatever it takes to satisfy the need.
“Mister, please? I need to go now, you understand?”
I am hit with the sudden urge to ask the driver to bring me home, but I don’t know where that is. I know where it should be, where I belong and with whom, but that life seems so very far away, so unattainable. For now, at least. The sponsor promises it is something we can work up to.
Outside the car, the sponsor lights a cigarette, and rotates his free hand, indicating his impatience. Get on with it.
“I understand.”
There is plenty of darkness still left and we are still alive.
And so
goddamn
thirsty.
