The Depositions

by Thomas Lynch

  Nor is there a cure. We can’t be fixed by any surgery or pill that will let us drink or drug like ordinary humans. Even when we are getting better, the disease is getting worse. We can get a lifelong remission, but once the drinking turns ugly there is no return. A pickle can’t become a cucumber again.

  And I hate that part sometimes—the way they’ve got these tidy little bromides like that one just now, about the pickle. There’s one for every possible contingency. “Fake it till you make it” someone will say, or “One day at a time,” or “Stay out of using places and using faces.” Give me a break. Here I am a goddamn published poet who has been ignored in several countries in the Western world and translated into Serbo-Croatian and left out of several of the best anthologies and I’ve got to listen to rhymes like these? “Walk the walk and talk the talk.” “The past is history, the future’s a mystery.” Or some quirky little alliterative like “Let Go Let God.” As if we ever let go of anything without leaving claw marks in it. And God? This Higher Power business? Why can’t they just settle on a name like any other bunch? Yahweh or Jehovah or Jesus or Steve? And what about these little acronyms, like KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), or don’t get HALT (Hungry Angry Lonely or Tired)! How is a guy who’s always been TBBTO (The Brains Behind the Operation) supposed to take such things seriously? Because even when they tell me it’s a simple program for complex people, I think there must be more to it than that; more to it than some old-timer grinning at a table and holding up his thumb, saying “Don’t take a drink,” and then, on his index finger, “Go to meetings.” Just two things? That’s it? Give me a break. What’s a guy who’s read Dante and Pushkin need with meetings and head cases, and what does it mean when these nuts begin to make sense to him? And why can’t it be like riding a bike—once you’ve got it you won’t ever forget it? Though I’ve quit drinking like a drunk, I’m still inclined to thinking like one. Hear that little rhyme in there? And there’s always this blathering idiot in my ear saying I can toss a few back like any normal guy, like eight out of ten of my fellow citizens, for whom enough is enough. What harm would it do? And the only thing between me and believing that voice and following its instructions are the men and women I meet with regularly who help me to remember the way I was.

  Which, godhelpus, maybe is the way my son is now—frightened and angry, stuck between egomania and inferiority complex, sick and tired, dead drunk. If his thirst is like mine he won’t be able to talk his way out of it, think his way out of it, read or write or run his way out of it, lie or cheat or buy his way out of it. The only victory is in an admission of defeat. The only weapon is surrender.

  Still, the father in me—the take-charge, I’ll handle it, you can count on me, master of our destiny fellow—wants to fix it for him. Protecting and providing, that’s what dads do. I’ve always been pretty good at scripts and I’ve got one for him with a happy ending if only he’ll just learn the lines by heart and do exactly what I tell him to do.

  Years back—it was the autumn of his freshman year in high school—when his grades went to hell and his smile disappeared and the music in our house got dark, I took him out of school one morning and said I was taking him to find out what the matter was. I said I thought there must be something very wrong to account for all the changes I could see. Maybe a tumor or a loose screw or maybe, because it ran in our family, drink and drugs and addictions. I told him we wouldn’t quit until we found out what accounted for the darkness that had descended on his life and times. No diagnostic stone would be unturned.

  So we started with the drug and alcohol assessment, which turned up, unremarkably, positive. He was fourteen and trying anything that came his way. So I explained how it was like diabetes or an allergy and he should know that he was in danger because of his family history. A beer for him, a joint, whatever pills or powders were going round, might do more damage than “experimenting”—which is what we parents tell ourselves our sons and daughters are always doing.

  By midwinter things had gone from bad to worse. I tried my best to ignore the obvious—his lackluster grades, the long hours in his room, the distance he began to keep, the smell of alcohol that was always on him. One night he came home besotted and muddy. He had passed out in the park, in a puddle. How he kept from drowning, how he crawled home, remains a mystery. The next morning I took him to a treatment center that one of my brothers had been to before. They took him in for thirteen days, detoxed him, told him that he was alcoholic, and told us he should get long-term care, that his alcoholism was chronic, acute and full-blown. There would be no cure, but with treatment he might get into a pattern of recovery that would allow him to live without using in a using world. We all wept. Inquiries were made. An adolescent treatment center was found. It was at a hospital on the south side of Cleveland and was named for a saint I’d never heard of before. My son said if I made him go he’d kill himself. There was a calm in his voice that said he wasn’t bluffing. I said he was killing himself already. I said I’d buried lots of boys for lots of fathers. I said if I was going to have to be like those poor hollow men, standing in the funeral home with my darling son in a casket, while neighbors and friends and family gathered to say they wished there was something they could say or do, I told him, if he was going to be dead either way, at least he wouldn’t die of my denial, my ignorance, my unwillingness to deal with the way we are. I said if he killed himself I would miss him terribly, I would never forget him and always love him and I’d hate to outlive him but I’d survive. And I’d call someone before I’d drink about it.

  Calling this bet broke something inside.

  Every Friday for three months I’d drive down and get him, bring him home for two nights and take him back Sunday in the afternoon. The turkey vultures and red-tailed hawks hovering over the Ohio Turnpike are all I remember of those travels now. It was a summer lost to our disease. Everywhere I looked was the shadow of death. But he survived it and came home and got a sponsor and started going to AA meetings and the darkness seemed to lift from him. His grades were good, his music improved, he was painting, writing, smiling again. He started dating. For all of a year he went on like this and I got to thinking it had all been worth it, the driving and the money and all the madness, because he was fixed, better, thriving again. He was living the life he was supposed to live. So when the old signs started up again I didn’t see them. I didn’t want to see them. I’d quit looking. I kept wanting to see him according to the script I’d written in which all these demons were behind him, before he had anything more to lose.

  It was halfway through his third year of high school when I told him I couldn’t ignore the obvious anymore. I couldn’t live with a using alcoholic. It was making me crazy, all the pretense and worry. I asked him to go back into treatment, or take up an outpatient program, or return to his AA meetings, anything besides relapsing again. He refused. I told him I couldn’t live with him. He called his mother. She came and got him.

  In the best of all cases, he would have had to move to her side of the state, lose his drinking buddies, find a new school and new buyers and suppliers, pay the price for his drinking on demand. Instead, his mother got him an apartment here in town so he could stay in the same school, hang out at the old haunts and have fewer of the parental hoops to jump through.

  It is nearly impossible for any divorced parent to bypass the opportunity to save a child from the other parent. Rescue is what parents are good at. And if a son or daughter needs rescuing from the same asshole that you couldn’t live with, well, who’s to blame them? Of course, the children pay dearly for such second opinions, in discipline avoided, diluted rules, old wars and old divisions redeclared. By the time most parents have evolved beyond such temptations, their children are married and parents on their own.

  One night in midwinter I found him passed out in a snowbank on Main Street. He was drunk, frozen, full of remorse, mumbling things like “You shouldn’t have to see me like this.” I called his mother and said she could come and
get him. She took him to the hospital because we didn’t know what he might have taken. Or if he had frostbite. Or if his shivering was a seizure. When the emergency room pronounced him out of danger, she called the number my wife had given her. It was another treatment center. She buckled on her courage and took him there.

  He spent twelve days in that drunk tank. He came out and returned more or less immediately to his relapse, only this time he tried to “manage” it better. His mother, wanting to be helpful, hopeful, trusting, because she loves him, signed for his driver’s license and bought him a car. He got picked up for stealing wine from the grocer’s, busted for possession of beer in the park, lost one job and then another, dented the car in a parking lot. Otherwise we saw little of him. The high school gave him a diploma. He lost his driver’s license and got a year’s probation.

  On the strength of his portfolio he got admitted to a posh art school, and because I wanted badly to believe, because I wanted badly to say, in spite of everything I knew to the contrary, maybe talent and promise and art could overcome disease, maybe he had outgrown it, I paid his tuition, room and board, and watched and waited and said my prayers. One weekend he got picked up for driving drunk without a valid license and spent the night in jail. His grades at first were not great and then they disappeared. He spent another weekend in jail for his crimes and got another year’s probation.

  When he asked to move home this summer from the dormitory at the art school I said I would not live with a using drunk. He said he understood. That’s the way we talk. I couldn’t say I wouldn’t live with him. He couldn’t say he wouldn’t drink again.

  In the space between what we didn’t say, my stupid hope and his sickness flourished. I wanted to remember him the way he was. And wanting it so bad, I welcomed him, half-hoping some of the lost months of his lost years would return. But they are gone and the summer has gone from bad to worse. He’s tried so hard to keep from being a bother. He tries to come home after we’ve gone to bed. Some nights he calls and says he’s staying with friends and some nights he falls asleep on the couch downstairs. He holds his breath and kisses us. He says he loves us. He really doesn’t want me to worry. He doesn’t want to bother me with his drinking. He doesn’t want to disturb my remembrances and I want to remember the way he was and I know he wouldn’t want people seeing him like this because really that’s not him anymore, there on the couch, at four-thirty in the early morning, neither sleeping nor dead but somewhere in between with no clear indication of which way he’s going.

  Putting him out of my house is like sending a child to chemotherapy. It hurts so bad to think I cannot save him, protect him, keep him out of harm’s way, shield him from pain. What good are fathers if not for these things? Why can’t he be a boy again, safe from these perils and disasters? Lately I’m always on the brink of breaking. But remembering the way he was begins by dealing with the way he is, which is sick, sick to death, with something that tells him he’s “not so bad”—that jail and joblessness and loneliness and blackouts are all within the “normal” range. His thirst puts him utterly beyond my protection but never outside the loop of my love. If he is going to die on a couch some night, of alcohol poisoning or from choking on his own puke, or burned up from a cigarette he passed out smoking; or if he drives his car into a bridge abutment or over some edge from which there is no return; or if he gets so crazy with pain and fear he puts a pistol in his mouth, Oh my God, the best I can manage is not my couch, not my car, not my pistol, Oh my God. If I cannot save him, I will not help him die, or welcome his killer in my home.

  What I’ve learned from my sobriety, from the men and women who keep me sober, is how to pray. Blind drunks who get sober get a kind of blind faith—not so much a vision of who God is, but who God isn’t, namely me.

  When I was a child all of my prayers sounded like “Gimme, Gimme.” I wanted a Jerry Mahoney puppet, to fly like Superman, and for my brothers and sisters to be adopted by other kindly parents and leave me and my mother and father alone. I got none of these things. These prayers were never answered.

  When I was my son’s age, I’d always begin with “Show me, Lord.” I wanted a sign. I wanted God to prove Himself or Herself or Itself to me. In this I was a typical youth, full of outrage and arrogance and bravado. Nothing ever happened. I never saw a statue move or lightning strike or heard any voices that I couldn’t account for. The ones I prayed to be blighted thrived. The proofs I prayed for never appeared. None of these prayers were ever answered.

  For years, twenty of them anyway, as a new husband, new parent, new funeral director in town, as a social drinker and a working poet, I’d pray, albeit infrequently, “Why me, God?” The more I drank, the more I prayed it. Why do I have to work harder, longer, for less thanks or wages? Why does that magazine publish only brunettes or professors or free verse or the famous? Why can’t I sleep in or get a break or win the lotto? Why would any woman leave a man like me? And when my inventory of “why me’s” was exhausted, I would ask on behalf of my fellow man. Why did cars crash, planes fall out of the sky, bad things happen to good people? Why, if Anyone’s in charge, did children die? Or folks go homeless? Or others get away with murder? I was carping daily, a victim of my all too often self-inflicted wounds. The silence out of heaven to these questions was real. Why wasn’t God listening? I wanted to know. And before I’d agree to step one foot in heaven, I had a list of things I wanted explanations for.

  There’s a reason we are given two ears and one mouth.

  Someone told me that I should just say “Thanks,” and that all my prayers should begin that way and never stray far from the notion that life was a gift to be grateful for. I began by giving thanks for my family, for the blessings to my household, the gifts of my children. Then the daylight and the nightfall and the weather. Then the kindness you could see in humankind, their foibles and their tender mercies. I could even be grateful for the ex-wife, the tax man, the gobshites who run the world and ruin everything. The more I mouthed my thanks for them, the less they bothered me. There’s another thing to be thankful for. I could be thankful even for this awful illness—cunning, baffling and powerful—that has taught me to weep and laugh out loud and better and for real. And thankful that, of all the fatal diseases my son might have gotten, he got one for which there is this little sliver of a hope that if he surrenders, he’ll survive. Whatever happens, God will take care of him.

  And every time I say it, the prayer gets answered. Someone, out of the blue, every day—maybe my wife or someone at the office or the guy in the line at the airport or something in a letter that came in the mail, or something in the lives of my sons or daughter—someone gives out with a sign or wonder in the voice of God, in some other voice than mine, to answer my prayer. Every day, every time, never fails, if I just say “Thanks,” I’ll get the answer, before the darkness comes—“You’re welcome,” it says. “You’re welcome.”

  RENO

  So I’m sitting in the casino of the Reno Hilton on the twenty-first of June, 1999. It is the summer solstice, the end of the age. And I’ve lengthened the light of the longest day by boarding a jet and flying westward from Michigan, where this morning I woke up at four o’clock. I’ve seen the sunup in Milford in Eastern Daylight Time and the sundown from my room on the twenty-fourth floor, dipping below the mountains into the Pacific—nearly twenty hours of blessed light.

  Maybe it was the catnap in coach class, or maybe it’s the accumulated lag from too many jets, or maybe the certain knowledge that the days will indeed be getting shorter—solstice and equinox, time and light—or maybe it’s the coffee. I don’t know.

  Whatever the reasons, here I am nearing midnight in Reno mindlessly playing the dollar slots in a room full of conventioneers and crazies and insomniacs: strangely expressionless people, neither happy nor sad but more or less numb. And we’re, all of us, basking in the manufactured lights of PAYDAY and JACKPOT and MEGABUCKS blinking wildly from the banks of machines, the space beaming wit
h chandeliers, neon icons and images everywhere. And there is some nonspecific late-century pop music coming out of the ceiling and the occasional voice-over informing us of the “All-you-can-eat crab-and-shrimp buffet served nightly for only 10.99,” and an underdin of oddly comforting bells and whistles and electrical signals all mixing together in a kind of babel. I’m pressing the buttons, the way I’m supposed to, watching the sevens and cherries and double and triple bars twirling round and round, giving and taking away the money. And everything is blinking and blurring and buzzing with bright assurances, like there’s no tomorrow, and I should let it ride, and I’m wondering if everyone here is wondering the way I’m wondering now—what exactly are we doing here?

  THE DAYS ARE getting shorter. It is later than we think.

  I’M HERE AT the invite of the California Funeral Directors Association, which has convened its annual meeting here. There’s something for everyone in the family. While Dad is doing committee work and inspecting caskets at the exhibit hall, the kids can play downstairs in the nickel arcade and Mom can play blackjack for big bucks or browse in the mall. There are side trips to Tahoe and Virginia City, a golf outing and other organized events. I’m here to deliver the keynote speech in the morning—to tell them what it is exactly that we’re doing here.

  Last week I was in Rotterdam for the thirtieth annual Poetry International—poets, translators, editors, publishers, from every corner of the spoken word, invited to the Low Countries for a weeklong festival.

  And the week before that it was Kentucky for the undertakers, and the week before that, Scotland and Ireland on the poetry biz, and the month before that, a kind of midwestern, Buddy Holly tour of mortuary conventions—five states in six days—and the week before that one, some poetry jobs at Eau Claire and Winona and Williamsburg, Virginia. All of it’s a litany now of literary and mortuary confabs that stretch back through the winter and fall of last year—Belfast and Barcelona; Galway and Boston; Glasgow, Manhattan and Amsterdam; Ocean City; Rapid City; Seattle; Atlantic City; Edinburgh; San Francisco; Denver and Atlanta; London and Dundee and Cornwall and Dublin and Portland and Chicago and Philly and D.C.; and Bozeman, Montana; Indianapolis; Minneapolis; Wichita, Kansas; godhelpus—blather and racket until I’m all but struck dumb with it and these blinking lights that are all beginning to blend together now into a kind of blindness. The more of the planet I see, the less I see it.