When sleep finally came for me, I wished it hadn’t. My drinking sleep had been a negation, a thought bubble filled only with Z’s. Dreams had been such an infrequent occurrence that even pleasurable ones had been jarring. My sober sleeping life was crowded with deformed creatures, bizarre symbolism, and people from my past, rendering it more vivid, meaningful, and exhausting than my waking life. Everyone I had ever loved gathered on a street corner to throw a party in my honor when a tractor-trailer careened out of control and killed them all. My family turned evil, and I dismembered them in a grisly, methodical manner only to have their limbs stitch themselves together so they could rise up and attack me again and again.
Sobriety was relentless. Sobriety was life without eyelids. Sobriety was a bare white room with painfully bright fluorescent lights, buzzing constantly. I felt like I had braved some Herculean task equal parts agony, anxiety, and boredom—let’s say seventy-two hours of cramming for a certified public accountant exam, only to be rewarded with life as a CPA. Like I’d fought my way out of the ninth circle of hell only to be rewarded with the eighth circle of hell. Still, progress is progress.
I forced myself to tidy up, performing maybe two solid hours of work over an entire day. My life had become so small—my buzzing, overheating laptop, a desk I’d found on the street, an end table I’d found on the street, a rolling office chair I’d found on the street. The only piece of furniture I owned that hadn’t come from the garbage was my dresser. It was a nice, rugged piece, dovetail drawers, each front a broad, unbroken expanse of handsome blonde wood. Allison had bought it for me five years earlier off Craig’s List. She’d wanted me to have something nice. Three of the drawers now failed to close properly because I’d piled stuff on them when they were open—dirty clothes, guitar parts, jugs of wine, books, porno mags, plates of old food. The top was shellacked with gray matter, dust and lint that had stuck to the moisture left by cups and bottles. When I scrubbed that off, I found deep scratches in the wood from cutting lines with a Bowie knife.
When the cleaning was finished, my sunlit living room oppressed me. It felt like a crime scene after the broken bodies had been moved, the tape taken down, and the floor and walls scrubbed with bleach. Though there were no obvious signs of violence, pervasive bad mojo hovered in the air.
I refused to allow myself to hope that this was a new beginning. That always ended in heartbreak. If someone hadn’t already opened a dive bar called New Beginnings, then that was just another way in which humanity had disappointed itself. I couldn’t even put a name on this time. No wishing, no dreaming, and “Hope” was just an ironic name for a prostitute. Focus on the basics; just keep the body alive. Eat—good food, raw fruits and vegetables. Drink—water, just water, gallons and gallons of it. Get sunshine. Bathe. Sleep.
The best and worst thing about drinking was that it had paired so well with other vices. STD testing would have been pointless when I was drinking; I slept around enough that the results would be obsolete by the time they came back. But after three weeks of sobriety and solitude, I figured I should find out what diseases I was carrying. There wasn’t one specific encounter or potential affliction causing me anxiety, but I knew my lifestyle was what one might call a “risk factor.” I biked down to the free clinic on Atlantic Avenue and took a number.
While I waited, I was handed an alcohol questionnaire to fill out. I love New York, and I believe in social welfare, but I knew that in Great Recession—era Brooklyn, there was no way anyone was actually going to be reviewing these. Fuck it, why not be completely honest? God forbid you learn something about yourself.
The questions—“Have you blacked out?” “Has your drinking caused tension with your friends?”—applied to the previous thirty days. I hadn’t had a drink in three weeks, but if I was honest, I had to check the yes box, question after question. They didn’t provide an upside-down answer key like I’d seen at the end of quizzes in magazines, but I realized I didn’t need one as I double-checked my work: A plus! A gold star! What do I win?
I turned the questionnaire in with the rest of my paperwork and took a seat. Almost right away, my number was called. I got dirty looks from people who had gotten there before me and were still waiting. That’s kind of odd, I thought as I was ushered out of the waiting room.
I was led down a hallway and into a side office where a portly balding man sat behind a desk. He was holding my alcohol questionnaire.
Motherfuck.
I sat down.
“My name is Brian. I wanted to go over some of your answers on the questionnaire we had you fill out.”
Good heavens, whatever on earth for?
“The input that you’ve given us here indicates a pattern of alcohol use that could lead to long-term health problems, including alcoholism or addiction to other substances.”
I brushed aside his mincing questions about my drinking. He had seen my hand. I wanted to see his.
If I would agree to sign a few papers, he said, he would enroll me in Project Link, an outreach program for drug and alcohol abusers. They would help me get on Medicaid and arrange for me to see an addiction counselor each week. I’d have to provide contact information for a friend so that, if I went AWOL, they could come track me down. After six months, I’d have one follow-up interview. Then I would be free to return to my wicked, wicked ways if I wanted.
My body filled with dread and resentment. Finally, finally, finally, I had been found out. I was hopelessly, irreversibly caught. And also, I faced a great opportunity.
Do or die, motherfucker, I thought, do or die. I signed up.
I was led back to the clinic waiting room to mull over the dark days ahead. When the room had emptied out, the receptionist asked me what my number was. She huffed when I told her.
“Where were you? We called and called, and you didn’t respond!” She didn’t wait for an answer, just led me back to the examination room.
A harried looking doctor with graying brown curly hair and wire-rimmed glasses came in. She introduced herself but didn’t offer her hand. She picked up my folder and briskly began asking me questions about my health, number of sexual partners, and drug and alcohol history. I forced myself to answer every question honestly. It felt terrible. It must have sounded even worse.
I listened to the rationalizations coming out of my mouth. “We looked and looked but we couldn’t find a condom.” “She didn’t seem like the kind of girl to sleep around.” “I knew that I was clean.” “She said she couldn’t get pregnant so . . . ” And my recent default response for every difficulty that had risen up in front of me: “Fuck it. At this point, what difference does it make?”
In each instance, in the moment, in the dark, I had let myself off the hook. But as I spoke to the doctor, a diagnosis became clear. I was, simply, an asshole. It was one thing to put myself at risk—my life was mine to throw away if I chose to do so—and another to put other people at risk, people who cared about me and people whom I purported to care about.
The doctor frowned at my paperwork, then looked closely at me.
“Are you feeling okay? You look tired.”
“Yeah, I just . . . I’ve just been here for a long time, and I haven’t had much to eat today.”
She nodded knowingly.
“I know we’ve had you answer a lot of questions today, but as long as it’s okay with you, I’m going to ask you two more.”
Hit me, I thought. There’s nothing you can ask me that’s going to make me feel worse than I already do.
She didn’t wait for a response before continuing.
“You have listed your occupation as ‘musician/unemployed/asshole.’ You have the rare distinction of achieving a perfect score on our drug and alcohol abuse questionnaire, checking ‘yes’ to every single question. Oh wait, you don’t inject drugs intravenously—yet.
“You engage in all manner of risky sex with multiple partners around the country, which makes you a very effective vector for spreading disease. You have enga
ged in and continue to engage in selfish, self-destructive behavior that will negatively impact not just your health but the health of those unfortunate enough to be intimate with you.
“At twenty-seven years of age, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and even Jim Morrison had each created a body of work that guys like you are still ripping off today. At thirty-two, you seem to have done nothing. Or at least I have no idea who you are.
“So my two questions for you are: What do you intend to do with your life? And what exactly is your fucking problem?”
The revelation several days later that I was clean brought me little comfort. I wanted to be punished for my hideous transgressions, my wasted years. A physical at St. Vincent’s, my first in ten years, brought similar results: my blood work was boringly normal. I sought bad news from a reliable source, the dentist. I’d last been to the dentist’s office a decade earlier, at my mother’s insistence and on her dime. I’d had a cavity but declined to have it filled—I knew better ways to spend $300. I braced myself for the news that the dentist was going to have to tear all my teeth out and start over again clean.
“No cavities,” the dentist stated flatly in his Russian accent.
Um . . . did you check the ones on top? The ones on the bottom? What about the ones in the back?
“See you in six months,” he said, wiping his hands on the paper bib his assistant had clipped around my neck.
“Guess all those years of drinking mouthwash paid off.”
Not even a smile. Maybe the “cavity search” joke I’d made on the way into his office had pissed him off. Well, no offense, dude, but if I went ten years without a cavity, no way I’m going to endure this every six months. Put me down for sometime in eight years.
At home, I stared at my boyish face in the mirror. Big feminine eyes. Long eyelashes. A bump on my nose from the second time I broke it, in the fight with Zack and Ben White. My skin was no longer gray, the whites of my eyes no longer yellow, and I’d lost a roll of bloat under my chin. I was still raccoon-eyed, but I’d been like that since I was a kid. For all my egregious, repeated mistakes, my aggressive self-abuse, I appeared unscathed. No kidney damage, no liver disease, blood pressure and heart rate good, no root canal necessary, no painful, humiliating STD, not even a single cavity. What a sham.
I had only ever wanted to live to be seventeen. Turning twenty-one had been a dark relief—I no longer required a responsible adult’s consent to get blitzed. Turning thirty had brought a different kind of satisfaction. “Thirty?” a friend had scoffed at me that day. “We didn’t think you’d make eighteen.”
Surviving past thirty had been not just an accident but a mistake. I’d reached an age where my friends didn’t just die in tragedies—murder, suicide, overdose, drowning—but also from cancer. I had far exceeded my own life expectancy, and, worse, there appeared to be a lot more ahead of me. It seemed bleakly ironic to me that someone who had craved, deserved, and worked so hard to achieve a tragic, early death appeared doomed to live forever.
“You’re not indestructible,” my mother had warned me, Jesus, millions of times. I had assented throughout the years, but now I had a final, undeniable rebuttal: there was now actually more evidence against her thesis than for it.
All I had wanted was to be erased. I had been such a self-destructive failure that I had even failed to self-destruct. So where do we go now, Sweet Child o’ Mine? There is no Google Maps for your life. There is no clearly marked destination—a red dot—with an illuminated blue line showing where you should go and how you should get there and when you have deviated from the correct path. There is no owner’s manual for your life, no Idiot’s Guide, not even a shitty map scrawled on a cocktail napkin with nearly illegible directions. And that really sucks.
My anxiety, not especially low in the absence of my various beloved medications, went through the roof. It’s much easier to accede to the grim fact of an early death than it is to deal with the long, fumbling open question of what to do with your life.
Tracy Helsing, a bartender who moonlighted as a personal trainer, dragged me to the gym where she worked once or twice a week. She never asked me, just texted me where to meet her and when. At the end of each session, she didn’t ask me if I wanted to work out again. She didn’t ask me when I was available. She didn’t ask me if a specific day or time worked for me.
“Thursday at four.”
“I can’t do four. I have . . . a thing.”
“Thursday at two.”
“I . . . Fuck it. Okay.”
“You stand me up, I’ll kick your fucking ass.”
Some days she worked out with me. One day, I looked over and saw that she was doing shoulder presses with the same weights I was. My heart jumped. I could lift as much as my trainer! Yes, Mishka, congratulations, you swarthy, macho man, you. With all your hard-won progress, you are now as strong as a girl.
The boys in Freshkills were supportive. Perhaps too supportive. While we were setting up for practice one day, Johnny tuned his guitar, then eyed me.
“Looking real good, Shubaly.”
“Right,” I said.
“No, seriously. Color in your cheeks. Less like a corpse dragged up from the bottom of a reservoir.”
“You trying to fuck me?”
“Maybe later. No, I mean . . . it’s really good, what you’re doing.” He glanced down at his Pabst Blue Ribbon, then put it down behind his amp. “Should we not drink around you?”
Suddenly, everyone was listening.
“Naw. You didn’t create this problem. I did. It’s not fair of me to ask you to change what you do. Just don’t, you know, offer me a drink or anything.”
Zack shot me a look and grinned.
“Mishka, I haven’t offered you a drink in years.”
By that summer, my odd jobs and various dead-end gigs had almost totally dried up. I’d pissed away the ten grand I’d saved from my construction gig. I had $70,000 in college debt. I had to do something to make a buck.
I knew nothing of real jobs. I had been fired from all but one of the jobs I’d held in the last six years. I was capable of getting out of bed in the morning now, so, Christ, back to the temp agency? I was proficient in core office skills such as passing the buck, ALTTABing, and looking busy. No, functional alcoholism was the only way to face a forty-hour workweek. Nine-to-fiving it in some soulless cubicle with a Dilbert cartoon over my desk would undo me. Surely I had one marketable skill. I had a master’s in fiction . . . so that qualified me to pump gas or squeegee windshields on the corner or round up the shopping carts at Target.
I was getting desperate when I got a call from Mike Stewart, an old friend and bar owner. They were looking for a manager at Beauty Bar on 14th Street. Was I interested?
I had extensive experience in the internal workings of bars . . . and had even worked at a few. I’d been fired from every bar job in the same way—a meeting with the bosses in which I was informed that there were no bad feelings on their end, and in fact everyone really liked me, but then there was always the same gesture, a shrug with the arms out: What do you want me to do? I understood. My role was to echo the gesture—What do you want me to do?—then put the keys on the desk and go out and get truly bombed.
But I was a new man, a guy who didn’t drink and didn’t sleep around and even did the occasional push-up or walked around the park. I knew, too, that if I were to drink, it would be catastrophic, not just a beer at the end of the shift with the Sunday hardcore matinee veteran doorman. How I longed for one drink. Only one drink, any drink, even something banal and milquetoast, like a vodka cranberry. Sure, just one magical, simple concoction of vodka, juice, ice, and lime to the brim of a cold highball wider than the Pacific Ocean, deeper than the Mariana Trench. Soon I’d be limping through my shifts, having been up till noon the night before, sweating bug spray and trying not to shit my pants, too woozy to stand, obsessively checking the clock until I allowed myself my first drink, and then struggling not to get blitzed until after
the money had been counted.
And the temptation while working at a bar . . . wow. Bottle after bottle of top-shelf liquor, the shit I only drank when someone else was buying, Belvedere and Grey Goose, Bombay Sapphire, Glenlivet, Patrón. Working in a bar, alcohol is part of your salary: a gratis nightly sousing is your employee meal. I had rage-drunk my way through more than one $50 bottle on a slow night, then stumbled home, feeling like I’d been paid well. Sure, I had walked out with $19 after tipping out the barback, but I must have drank up at least $150 worth of profits! Even the mid-level scotches, Dewar’s and J&B, smelled enchanting. J&B was my mom’s drink—old lady scotch. I drank an entire bottle of J&B alone one night, bringing that green glass to my lips and tilting my head back, the scotch careening down my throat like golden fire.
I wouldn’t just lose the job if I drank, I would lose Mike as a friend. Having alienated all family, except for my mom, and every girl I’d dated (and a few that I hadn’t), my few friends were all I had. Taking the job wasn’t just a bad idea. It was the worst idea possible, a Rachael Ray–worthy recipe for disaster, apocalyptic and catastrophic and ready in thirty minutes or less.
I took the job.
The training I received was basically “Wear a blazer and keep an eye on what’s going on.” I hadn’t worked in bars, at odd jobs, and on construction sites for twenty years just so I could go out and buy a blazer now, and to work in a bar, no less. I wore plain black T-shirts, which I felt was enough of a concession. I placated stumbling, slurring girls, irate because the doorman had maligned their honor by presupposing they were too drunk to come in, and dudes baffled that their assemblage of flip-flops, khakis, wife beater, backward baseball hat, gold tusk medallion, and liberal dousing of Axe Body Spray didn’t meet our dress code. I chased off the creeps, pin-balling hopelessly from girl to girl to girl, their desperation growing. I even pitched in behind the bar when it was busy. That was incredibly bizarre, the foam from an overfilled pint of Blue Moon sliding tantalizingly over the back of my hand like the touch of a dead lover, my nose, eyes, hands, and brain full of Corona, red wine, Jameson, vodka, vodka, VODKA, everything I wasn’t allowed to have. I held fast.
I Swear I'll Make It Up to You Page 20
