Back in the waiting room, Steph’s mother looked over the booty and decided she didn’t want the doll and handed it to me, said I should take it. She did that, often; people would come in with food or gifts or flowers, and she’d thank them gratefully like fallen Southern gentry, and after they’d gone, she’d regift them to others or to me, and I was developing quite a pile of food at home that I’d never eat, lots of plastic Tupperware containers growing in my sink.
With my mother gone and everyone else seeing to their own responsibilities, I was left alone in dealing with her parents, and I was doing what I could to keep it together, but I was still suffering from some severe anxiety and guilt. I had seen a doctor while my mother was there and she had been astonished at my blood pressure at the intake. It was something like 190/110, and I hadn’t been taking anything or wasn’t even hungover. That was normal for me, during this time: That was my level of stress. With my mother in the room, I explained to the doctor that I was going through an incredibly stressful event and that I had people counting on me, and that I was also an alcoholic who binge drank in periods of stress. When I admitted to being an alcoholic, I caught my mother’s eyes, and she looked at me with a combination of sadness and mild disapproval, almost like she was saying, “You’re not supposed to talk about that,” or maybe even, “How did you end up so weak, like your father?” But mostly, it was sadness, I think. I hope.
The doctor listened to me, nodded, and then handed me a prescription for Xanax.
Great, I thought; I’d heard of these.
Although Dan and I had been talking again, I didn’t think of calling him and asking him about the Xanax, or how it could react with alcohol. Dan would always give me the real skinny on this sort of thing, but for some reason, I just didn’t think this one through, so I was taking the Xanax as prescribed, and then not.
Back at the hospital, Steph’s parents had developed a habit of moving from living situation to living situation in places across the city that were not amenable to easy public access to Harborview Hospital. I couldn’t understand their choices after I’d had Andrew’s wife, who developed websites for a travel agency, find them a number of low-cost options that were on bus lines or a ten-dollar cab fare away. I offered my own apartment. I pointed out the best and safest neighborhoods. I explained and pointed using maps. Harold loved maps. For reasons known only to them, they ended up in West Seattle, or Northgate, and a huge part of my responsibility became chauffeuring them from the hospital to home, usually at rush hour.
My routine basically settled into getting to the hospital around 8:00 a.m. bearing coffees, sitting with Steph’s mother and listening to the latest test results or procedures, seeing if I could do anything else, visiting with Steph for a while and telling her, jokingly, that I was going to force her to deal with my parents on her own when she woke up, then seeing if there were any developments otherwise, finding lunch, and sitting around discussing things in vaguely optimistic terms. Then around 3:00 or so, her parents would begin closing down for the day, and I’d drive them to whatever part of town they were staying in, then I’d drive by a liquor store and buy a quart of gin and go to my empty apartment and slowly come apart, watching something on Netflix. Shows on Netflix became my only constants, my television friends who were the furthest thing from the ICU at Harborview.
I’d come wide awake around 6:00 a.m., after sleeping about four hours, take a hot shower, and then do it again.
This is how I was keeping it together, and it wasn’t working.
One afternoon, I saw a tall, elegant priest making his way through the waiting room into the ICU and decided to ambush him on his way back. I stood in front of him and engaged him in conversation long enough that he had to sit down and talk to me, and out of the corner of my eye, I watched as both of Steph’s parent were stricken with a shocked look of disquiet (“How CATHOLIC!”) as I sat down to explain to the kneeler that I had long lost any sense of comfort from the church, that I didn’t agree with the institution and its practices for human management with reproductive issues and its subjugation of women, certainly had issues with its unwillingness to punish pederastic priests and its behavior through World War II, but right now, right here, this right here is where you are supposed to provide a place for me, as a Catholic, lapsed or not. Isn’t that what you Jesuits say? “Give us the boy until he’s eight, and I’ll show you the man?” Well, here’s the man, Padre. Show me what I paid for, show me what my parents bought for all those Sundays.
“And it’s not because I believe in it,” I said to him, “but because I want something to believe in. There should be a safe place, shouldn’t there?”
He agreed, began unpacking the Hail Mary for me like it was the Talmud, told me how it was a story about two women, one of them shunned for her choices to be an unmarried mother, the other not understanding she’s been the vehicle for the largest social change in human history. He told me about their spiritual choices, broke the stanzas into smaller metaphysical meditations like something from John Donne while I told him that this was what I missed, this was what I needed: I needed somewhere to go, somewhere safe, and I didn’t have anyplace like that, not any longer. There were no safe places, and could could could the Church give me that, now?
He said, “Listen, I’m right over here, at St. James Cathedral. Here’s my card. When you’re having these crises, come to the chapel and I’ll talk to you; we can discuss this renewed desire you have to return to Mother Church.”
“Great,” I said, “thank you,” and for the first time in a long while I felt like maybe I had someplace to go, someplace to feel safe and protected from the anxiety, the craziness, the pain and agony swirling in hurricane formation around me, settling on me like a season.
Junebug vs. hurricane.
I e-mailed the priest three times and never received a response. I visited the cathedral, and each time I went, it was locked, and I was left outside in the rain to look onto the baroque and Gothic spires, the worn faces of saints in the nooks overlooking the doors, and I had to keep my pain and anguish to myself, carry it back to my car because I couldn’t leave it at their door as had been our deal, and I took another Xanax and went home to find a moment of quiet in a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin and another Netflix series.
Many days ended with something like, “Oh, no! The doctors have overlooked something and it looks like she’ll never speak again,” so I’d go home that night and try to incorporate that new idea into my tapestry of fears. Or they would say, “We just had these new results! She’s developed a new hypothalamus and she’ll be ready to go home in a week!” and I’d drive home that night higher than happiness, listening to Burt Bacharach and yelling out the window with joy: “It’s over, it’s over, and she’s going to be all right!”
At this point, Steph had been removed from the harness and she was lying in her bed, braces and medieval medical devices forcing her limbs and feet to heal back into their proper shape after being crushed.
Much earlier, it had been revealed that she had very little of her anti-seizure medication in her bloodwork, and everyone had been puzzled and cautious about saying anything that might have led to some sense of responsibility or litigation, I could tell, but I was able to say it quite clearly: Steph had stopped taking her full script because she felt the Lamictal made her thinking fuzzy, and she was more than three weeks behind on her work, so she was working long, late days and playing a dangerous game of chance, which she wound up losing that night.
A photo of the wreck appeared in the local news blogs, and it was deeply painful to see, astonishing as to how she had survived such a catastrophic impact. Her Jeep had plummeted nearly twenty feet, onto its rooftop. Our camping equipment littered I-5, as flares lit up the site and cars drove cautiously around our detritus, my favorite pillow, out on the icy interstate. It was horrible to imagine, horrible to think what she’d endured that night, under there, awaiting rescue.
Meanwhile, both her parents were still going th
rough their own medical procedures, recovering from their accidents, in which they’d each lost an eye. Steph’s mother needed some preparation for her ocular cavity before she flew back east to see her optometrist, who was supplying her with a false eye, and in the meantime she still walked around like Yoko Ono, wearing sunglasses indoors. Her dad still had his own physical therapy to cope with his healing ribs, and some other procedures to do with the eye in which he lost vision. So it was a family in a number of stressful situations, and they weren’t easy to navigate, and still, I didn’t understand my role, why I remained by her side, an intruder into their family’s pain.
As the days wore on and our better natures began to crumble under the stress, I came to feel like a reprobate, or a scoundrel, around them, not a scoundrel like Rhett Butler or Han Solo, but more like Peter Lorre in Casablanca. And after spending all that time with them, I realized that this had been a part of Steph’s plan all along: I represented further discomfort for her parents, making them squirm at the Mexican, whom they now had to depend upon. She’d put them through the lesbian relationships, now it was time for the nonwhites, and Catholics, male though they might be, subverting a deep prejudice with a lighter one.
It took about a month but I finally had to call Sarah once more, one afternoon, when I could no longer endure their bickering, exclusion, and target for attack, and feeling like I still had to be “the good guy.” I dialed Sarah around 2:00 p.m., as I knew her to be the only person with a schedule as open as mine was usually, and said, “Can I please just come over and climb into your bed to sleep? I can’t go home and be alone anymore. I need Jack County. I need to be around dogs and listen to people,” and she said, “Absolutely. Come right over.”
She didn’t have to say a word when I arrived, just led me up to her bedroom and pulled the shades, and I stripped to my underclothes and climbed into bed. Then some moments later she climbed in as well and we made love in the most manic, silent way possible in that afternoon daylight. When it was over, she slipped away and locked the door after the dog came in and lay down next to me, curled up like a croissant at my legs, and slept with his large head on my knees and his big bear paw on my hip, reassuring both of us that the other was there. I finally slept, slept like a pack member—and the wolf, for the first time in weeks, was left outside the door.
That was what it took for me to realize that Sarah was not someone to defend against, that there was safety in our pack of two. Sarah’s own situation had been in fast dissolution after her husband had asked her for a divorce, and in my condition and general state, there was really no way a woman of Sarah’s estimation would ever look my way as a potential mate, unless she wanted a tawdry affair to get her girlfriends talking or rouse her ex-husband’s ire, which was what I was accustomed to. But in her own current typhoon of her life’s deconstruction and how I was walking the earth now, looking haunted and broken, it triggered something in her, and we were actually a viable commodity, began seeing each other almost every day after this. I would come over after my shift at the hospital and bring wine, and she’d make dinner and feed us these wonderful home-cooked meals, while I sat at the counter in that kitchen and recounted the day’s events, explained how matters were now dire, or were now looking up, and she’d tell me what she could about her divorce, and how it was profoundly affecting her life, her kid, her family.
I’d slump on a stool at her counter and try to reconnect to humanity.
I’d bring a bottle or two and she’d make pork chops or salmon or something nourishing, and we’d talk and eat, listen to music, and take care of one another as best we could.
Sometimes, when she cooked, it was something as simple as toast, twelve-grain bread from the Essential Bakery with a slab of butter. I couldn’t remember toast being so goddamned delicious and fulfilling. It made me stop one afternoon, as I sat there and marveled at the simple transformation.
“Sarah,” I asked her as she was getting out our favorite goblets for the ten-dollar bottle of red grocery store wine.
“Yeah?” she responded.
“Darling, don’t make fun of me for asking this, but what’s the difference between bread and toast? I mean, it’s just heat, right?”
She thought about this for a moment, understood what I was really asking.
“It’s the caramelization of sugars,” she said, and we were both quiet for a moment, taken by the kitchen metaphor. “It’s like the William James philosophy of the ‘once born’ and the ‘twice born.’ ”
It also reminded me of the myth of Martin Luther, when he visited Rome and was astonished at the corruption, the wholesale consumption of indulgences. When he took too long doing his transfiguration ceremony, some cynical, veteran Roman priest whispered in his ear, “Bread thou art, bread thou shalt remain.” Hence the splintering.
Somehow, it all fell into place for me, that simplicity.
What it takes to transform a person into actualization.
Those recondite nights are my only fond memories of this time, how we’d stretch out on her bed, in the dark, after making love, and she’d nod off right away, from the exhaustion of the sex, the life we were living, and the red wine, perhaps, and I’d stay awake, sitting up in her bed, watching movies on her laptop and taking Benadryl after Benadryl so that I could sleep, but they would never work, not even with the red wine.
She’d come awake sometimes, rest her hand on my back.
“Have you slept?” she’d ask.
“I can’t,” I’d say.
“Why don’t you take a shower?” she’d suggest, and at first I’d disagree, demure and pass, but then eventually I would nod my head and follow through, stand under the burning water, my hand resting against the black-and-white tile in her shower, and just allow the water to change the feeling of my skin.
I’d come back to bed and she’d be awake, yawning.
“I feel better,” I’d report, and she would say, “I wonder if any other animal has learned to stand under water for reassurance,” as she yawned and fell back asleep, leaving me there to wonder at that thought, and at her, and I would maybe then be able to sleep.
We were like two POWs, holding one another up during a death march,knowing we were smack-dab in the middle of the march and uncertain as to exactly how long it was going to be or whether it was ever going to end,but at the very least, in the immediate future, we had to hold each other up: That was the first principle. And the sex began to reflect that: We’d close down for the night and lock ourselves up in her guest bedroom with very little light coming through the shutters on the closet door, and we would go at each other like karate students, in the dark, these shapeless shadows,legs and arms and borderless lands, perspiration and fingers and hair, with all the ferocity of fear and animal mind. That was the only place throughout all this insanity, in that dark bedroom and in the velocity of our lovemaking, where we would entirely lose sight of one another and leave our bodies to become these patterns of sensations and images of sensuality and exertion bordering on physical threat, would lose each other and ourselves in something so primitive and, really, the only resource left to us, which was this trigger of desperation and passion, could finally lose identity and all that marked us, all that defined us in that obscurity, and the wolf would finally know that there was one boundary it couldn’t breach, would have to instead cross its paws and sleep that moment while Sarah and I blended into one another with physicality, until we each woke up the next morning and dressed and returned to our duties in keeping the wolf sated, keeping our lives from really breaking apart. I would put my other mask back on and drive downtown to see what Steph’s parents needed that next day, then pull out my last emotional equities so that I could get it for them.
The days I couldn’t see Sarah, I’d go home and drink alone. More naughty water. Spending time in isolation wasn’t good for me, but I didn’t know how to ask anyone for help, felt that I needed the alone time, which was idiotic. I called my family, spoke to my mother and sisters and s
ometimes Dan, but their concern could reach only so far.
I decided I needed to see a psychiatrist and get on some sort of anti-depressant or mood stabilizer, and Sarah recommended someone who did God’s work, since I was losing my health insurance, which I’d had through Steph. I met with the guy one afternoon and recounted the recent traumatic events, said I was in near constant hysteria and I wasn’t sure how I could endure it much longer. Not a problem, he said, and he prescribed Wellbutrin, one of the many scripts Steph’s friend, Lisa, was on. Fantastic, I thought.
It was about here that I started going crazy.
The Wellbutrin combined with the Xanax and the gin kept me awake for days on end.
I could get it together to drive to the hospital every morning by 8:00 a.m., listen to Steph’s mother and father discuss any updates, sit with Steph for a while and stroke her hand, let her know I was there, then talk with her parents in order to figure out what the next steps were and where she was headed. I would pick up any visiting friends or relatives from the airport and bring them to the hospital, and then at about 3:00 p.m., I’d see if anyone needed any rides anywhere, needed anything further, and then I’d head home, with a stop by the liquor store en route.
I had managed to move Cleo from Sarah’s house to the home of a friend who ran the karate school and was a veterinarian, along with her husband, and had a pack of three rescue dogs where Cleo would feel right at home. Couldn’t have been more perfect for her.
This was a great solution, since the only time I was left alone with her, while I was house-sitting at Andrew’s for Christmas, a few weeks after Steph’s accident, I managed to lose her. Fucking dog took off through the side door and it was twenty degrees outside, and I’d been drunk for two days and had forgotten that Andy didn’t have the end of his yard secured. The dog took off and started running around a busy street, and I lost my shit and chased after her in the dark and cold, ran around the neighborhood for an hour before I gave up, thinking, Fuck, now I’ve done it, now I’ve lost the fucking dog, when she showed up at the door with a stupid smile, asking to be let back in. I was so upset with her, I put one of Andrew’s daughter’s fake mustaches on the dog and took humiliating photos of her and put them on Facebook, as retribution. See if she does THAT again.
My Heart Is a Drunken Compass Page 22
