Sixty Meters to Anywhere

by Brendan Leonard

  I don’t know how I mustered up the courage to drink enough beer to get drunk, but I remember how incredibly excited I was by the warmth, the slight dizziness, and the slowing of my senses.

  My curfew was 10 p.m., so I stayed over at a friend’s house as often as possible. A bunch of girls in our class were having a sleepover a few blocks away, so we made sure to stop by and show them how drunk we’d managed to get. I mean, after you’ve had your first six or eight beers, you’re pretty much an expert, even if you drank them all at once.

  I think they were pretty impressed, although I never came out and asked them. I hardly had hair in my armpits, and I was drunk.

  About six months passed before my peers started ribbing me about my ridiculously low tolerance to alcohol, and another six months passed before I got my driver’s license. That Soundgarden song “Black Hole Sun” was the theme song to my first summer of drinking, playing every other hour on every radio station we could pick up in rural Iowa. For the first time ever, I had something that felt like confidence. It was empowering, though it should have terrified me to know it only came from a twelve-pack of beer or a bottle of liquor.

  I rarely look people in the eye when I’m talking to them. My eyes dart around, looking at the ceiling, the floor, the table, the window, and only once in a while, the other person. I’d like to think this is because my brain moves too fast, that I can’t stop to stare at someone’s face.

  I’ve met guys who are very straightforward, who always look you in the eye and smile. I’ve always wanted to be just like them in that respect—I’d like people to feel like they can trust me. But I can only handle a second, maybe two, of direct eye contact.

  Similarly, ever since I was a kid, I haven’t known what to do with my hands in a public place. If I was in a park, at a baseball game, in a shopping mall, or crossing the street in front of a line of cars, I was worried people could tell I was uncomfortable.

  In fact, ever since I was old enough to recognize confidence in other people, like the kids who played quarterback in our third-grade touch football games out on the playground, I’ve been trying to look like I know what to do with my hands. I used to suck them up into my coat sleeves, but I quit that when I realized I was old enough that I needed to start acting like a man. Pants pockets were usually good but couldn’t be relied on too much. I bit my fingernails until I was in ninth grade, when I got braces and couldn’t squeeze my fingertips in between the metal. And then I started going through puberty.

  For two consecutive high school football seasons, my face exploded into what’s clinically known as “severe nodular acne.” Red bumps the size of BBs or a little bigger appeared on my cheeks, chin, nose, and neck at the rate of two or three per day. Health professionals tell you not to pop or pick at zits and pimples, and I tried, but most days I couldn’t stand to go to school with three or six pus-filled whiteheads sticking out of my face like spikes on a blowfish. I’d rub a bath towel across them after I got out of the shower, and the heads would rip off and bleed. I thought at least they looked a little flatter after that.

  My mother took me to a dermatologist shortly after I got my first pimples, my freshman year in high school. I took antibiotics to prevent acne for a couple of years and had the typical teenage pimples until my junior and senior football seasons. My face was a minefield of clogged pores—more red than flesh-colored, and bumpier than Mars. My face hurt. I wished I could skip school, but, hell, it wasn’t like the zits were going to go away the next day, so I went to school. I hated it when I had to talk to girls and they’d look me in the eye. I knew they were thinking I had never seen a bar of soap or had some horrible infection on my face, and I’d look away.

  When it was the worst, the dermatologist recommended Accutane, a drug that could cause such serious birth defects that women who took it had to be on two forms of birth control. It dried out the skin on my face so badly that I had to smear Vaseline on my cheeks and forehead every night before I went to bed, and sleep with an old towel over my pillow so I didn’t ruin it. I suffered night blindness the second time I took Accutane, during my senior football season.

  The dermatologist also gave me an oral steroid, prednisone, to take some of the inflammation out of the nodules in my face. After a while, he didn’t want to prescribe it anymore, so when I went in for my checkups, he’d inject cortisone into some of my zits with a small syringe. When a doctor sticks a hypodermic needle directly into your face and you’re not even worried if it will leave a mark, you don’t wonder if your acne is abnormal.

  My friend Dan asked me in the locker room once why I had so many zits.

  “I think it’s because of my football helmet,” I said.

  He said he wore a helmet too, and he didn’t have any. “Do you wash your face?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know why my face looks like this. I guess God hates me, Dan.”

  One time I was working at the concession stand during a girls’ basketball game, and a ten-year-old kid asked me what was wrong with my face. I didn’t know what to tell him. I hoped his zits would be twice as bad as mine when he was seventeen. Or that he would get his nose bitten off by a Rottweiler.

  It hurt my mom that my face was so ugly, I think. She pitied me. I was sad because girls didn’t like me. I didn’t have a date to the homecoming dance my senior year.

  A few years later, I found out that Accutane caused depression, and in a few cases, suicide. And of course, you’re not supposed to drink on Accutane, which I knew the entire time I was taking it. How was I supposed to not drink? I was seventeen, girls didn’t like me, I had a face that looked like a pepperoni pizza, and all this happened during the dark, dead Iowa winter, arguably pretty depressing even when you’re not taking little yellow pills that make you want to kill yourself.

  I got drunk whenever I could get a night off from my dishwashing job and could score beer. I learned how to drive drunk along the gravel roads at thirty-five miles per hour, with a couple of friends in the car, listening to Pearl Jam cassettes and stopping to pee in ditches as the freezing wind screamed across the dormant cornfields. Sometimes we’d clip cans of warm beer under the windshield wipers to cool them down as we drove. Maybe we weren’t the most popular guys in school, but we were friends, and I wasn’t lonely.

  During my first semester at the University of Montana, I got back to my empty apartment early on Fridays, with nothing to do. Sometimes I’d stop at the store in the University Center and pick up a thirty-two-ounce fountain soda to last me through six or eight cigarettes. I always felt like I should stay on campus and study, but on Fridays, no one was around, and I couldn’t make myself stay somewhere as deserted as the university library.

  On Friday afternoons, the hikers and campers and mountain bikers and their dogs were on their way out of town on I-90, Highway 93, or Highway 200. The partiers were back at home smoking a bowl or drinking a few beers, and others were at happy hour at the downtown bars. Whatever anyone was doing, they were doing with other people. I was headed home by myself.

  Back at my apartment, I would lie on the floor with my head between my stereo speakers and try to nap for about twenty minutes, or I’d check my email, or I’d start downloading another album. Every hour, I’d smoke a cigarette on the second-floor balcony outside my front door, and I’d put it out in my “ashtray,” an empty four-pound Jif peanut butter container with old coffee grounds in the bottom. It filled up monthly. I wished it didn’t.

  Around seven, activity would pick up around the apartment complex. Loud music started to play and people carrying six-packs or twelve-packs came and went, some in cars and some on foot, since downtown was only four blocks away. Besides the music coming out of my stereo, my apartment stayed quiet.

  Every hour, another cigarette. Sometimes the people walking by saw me up on the balcony. It was awkward. I felt like I had to say hi to the people below. They were dressed in their going-out clothes, and the girls always looked great. I remembered a time when
I used to be able to talk to college girls like that. I tried to act like I was looking at something else when they passed me, but I knew they could tell I was avoiding them.

  Not so long ago, after I’d gotten through the bad-acne stage, I was them: good-looking, lightly buzzed, telling jokes, confident, smiling, laughing. But now I was a sad, nervous loner who wished I could just smoke inside his goddamn apartment instead of having to go outside, where the entire world could see me.

  At least early in the evening, no one was drunk enough to talk shit to me. But even if they weren’t trying to be mean, people yelling an intoxicated “Hey, man. How’s it going?” or “What’s up, man?” made me wish I was invisible. I could only muster a feeble, sober “Hey, man,” back, the first hoarse words I’d spoken to anyone in seven hours. I was like the freshman geek trying to reply to the hottest senior girl in school the first and only time she asked me how I was. It never came out right.

  Saturdays, I’d wake up late and call friends back in Iowa. I never had much to report. I did my laundry. I killed a few hours by walking over to campus to work on an assignment in the computer lab or at the library, where I figured maybe an attractive girl might spontaneously start talking to me. A long shot, but my chances were better there than inside my apartment. Or I could go downtown and get a cup of coffee at the Raven Cafe. They had two tables for smokers out on the sidewalk. If one of them wasn’t open, I’d usually just keep walking. Unfairly, I didn’t like one of the girls who worked there, because I sometimes heard her talking about trips to South America. She represented everyone in Missoula who was more worldly than me, which was pretty much everyone.

  Sooner or later, the sun would go down and I could go back and hide in my apartment. I felt lonely when I went out at night, bumping into all the guys who could drink or had enough money to go to the movies or take girls out to dinner. The people who had friends. So instead, I’d smoke cigarettes and wish I were invisible, watching old movies on my VCR. If I was lucky, my classmate Tim would come over and smoke some of my cigarettes and watch a movie or two with me.

  Sundays, I woke up late again. I’d walk the three-quarters of a mile to the grocery store, wearing my empty backpack, with a mental list of things I’d like to buy. I could fill up only one basket, because if I went over that, there was no way I could carry everything home. A full basket would mean a couple, if not three, plastic sacks from Albertsons on each hand, squeezing all the blood out of my fingers and knocking against my knees as I walked. Besides, I always got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as the cashier rang it up, wondering if I’d have enough money to make it to the end of the month.

  In the afternoon, I’d call my parents. In Missoula, calling my mom felt good, because I was being honest with her for the first time in a long time. Some Sundays, my parents were the only people I’d talked to since I left class on Friday.

  I wonder if everyone has a period in their life when they’re at least a little lost about what it is they’re supposed to do. You tread water until the boat marked New Identity comes by to pick you up. Sometimes it takes years. You’re never in danger of drowning; you’re just listless, maybe frustrated enough to feel like screaming How fucking long do I have to do this? For me, it was when I lived at the apartment in Missoula.

  Eight years after I’d left Montana for good, after I’d climbed all over the West and started to get some momentum in my writing career, I laughed at how well thirty-two-year-old me would have fit in as a grad student at UM, and how out of place I was when I’d lived there.

  Weekends in Iowa during my senior year in college had gone more like this: On Friday afternoons, I’d get out of class early and begin nursing my hangover from Thursday night with a couple of Bloody Marys at the Other Place, one of my favorite bars. Or I’d grab a few beers with my neighbors across the street—or anyone else who happened to be around and thirsty. Some days, I’d meet a friend at two for a late lunch at the OP, and we wouldn’t leave until eleven thirty p.m. or so. I’d always be too drunk to remember to pay my tab, and I’d have to go back on Saturday and have them run my credit card for the $120 I could barely cover. Some Saturday mornings, if I didn’t have to work, I’d sit down, pay my tab from the night before, and start drinking again.

  I’d drink all afternoon and return home at five or six to shower before I went out that night. I felt more alive than I ever had in my entire life. Anything could happen—I could get in a fight, get arrested, go home with a girl, or all three—hopefully in a strip club. The more crazy elements, the better the story the next day.

  During college, I felt finally accepted. Because I was a regular, I always knew at least ten people, who would introduce me to ten more. Sometimes girls recognized my face from the column I wrote for the campus paper, the Northern Iowan. I was on a first-name basis with many of the bartenders, so I rarely had to wait long for drinks. I also tipped like I could actually afford my habit. If my friends and I couldn’t get in, I’d slip the guy at the door a twenty.

  We hoped to meet girls, we lit things on fire, we bought drinks for people we didn’t know, we did shots with the bartenders, we took over parties, and we got thrown out of bars, but we looked good doing it and everyone loved us. I belonged somewhere for the first time ever. Or that’s what it felt like.

  Who knows how it really was. By midnight most nights, I was so intoxicated that I would stumble around with a glass of whiskey in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other, accidentally burning people and mumbling, seeing the world out of my one half-open eye. No college student should be able to rack up a hundred-dollar bar tab in a place that sells domestic beers for a dollar seventy-five. But I did, frequently. And sometimes, at the end of it, women I wasn’t in love with would take me home.

  Remembering those times made me feel even worse when I stood outside my apartment in Missoula two years later, with no friends, no good-looking women, and no whiskey to drown my sorrows, even by myself. I hated Missoula, but just because I hated myself.

  Loneliness made me want to drink, to go inside bars and find a seat and somebody—hell, anybody—to talk to. But everything made me want to drink. Including but not limited to: being by myself, oldies music, being around other people who were drinking, being around other people who were drunk, lawn furniture, sunsets, being anywhere in Iowa or the Midwest or just driving past a cornfield or a soybean field, Saint Patrick’s Day, Saint Patrick’s Day parades, New Year’s Eve, my birthday, the ten minutes every day after I got off my work-study job at the business school, the smell of fresh-cut grass or a barbecue, looking in the front window of a bar as I walked past, the smell of cigarettes and/or fried food, the Doobie Brothers, Creedence Clearwater Revival, any Southern rock album, Bob Marley’s Live! album, the smell of dust off a gravel road, dashboard lights, the smell of beer, the smell of stale spilled beer in a bar, seeing college-age kids dressed up to go out, eating dinner at any restaurant that served alcohol, wedding receptions, work Christmas parties, bonfires or campfires, golf courses, and the sound of the crowd at a college football or professional baseball game on television. And other people asking me if I want to go have a drink with them.

  When meeting someone for the first time, an alcoholic must make it clear that he or she will not be joining that person and/or anyone else for drinks, beers, or happy hour. This can be accomplished by politely declining the very first invitation and explaining that he/she is a recovering alcoholic. At least that was my strategy. I don’t know if anyone ever wanted an explanation, but I always felt like I had to give them one. On my 173rd sober day, I walked the seven blocks to the basement of the First Baptist Church in Missoula, where about twenty people sat and drank the watery coffee that they serve at AA meetings. This was my second AA meeting ever; the first had been required for me to graduate from treatment. I thought this one might help, since I was having a hard time meeting people.

  I wanted so badly for it to be good for me, like rehab had been. I wanted to walk out the door and smile
when I was sure no one was looking and get a little lump in my throat because I was proud of myself. But it wasn’t like that.

  Most of the people there were kids who had been ordered to go to AA by some juvenile court. They sat in the back and picked at their fingernails, waiting for someone to sign the form for their probation officer. The real alcoholics opened up their hearts and lives to each other and desperately tried to find the answer that would make them okay again.

  I didn’t speak up at the meeting, since it was my first. When it was over, the organizer asked everyone who was new to the group to come up to the front. She handed me a flyer with a list of the eighty-three other AA meetings in the area and with five handwritten phone numbers next to the names of people listed under the heading My New Friends. I told her next Saturday was my six-month mark, and she excitedly said I should come back so I could get my six-month chip. I said I would.

  I walked up the steps, back onto the sidewalk, and down Pine Street, and hurried across Higgins Avenue, where all the normal people in the world were enjoying themselves at Stockman’s, The Top Hat, Feruqi’s, The Rhino, Sean Kelly’s, and a dozen other places within six blocks of each other. All those people had friends and laughs and good times and good conversations, and all I had was a cigarette on the way home.

  I didn’t want to go back to the AA meeting the next Saturday. It didn’t make me feel much like being a recovering alcoholic, and my first meeting in Missoula would be the last AA meeting I ever went to. There was probably a better one somewhere else in town, or a better weekend to go to the one at First Baptist, but I just never went back. I started to find something else instead.