Status:
Eleven days. I have not had a beer for eleven days, the dual sight of twin
exclamatory towers unassumingly nestled in panoramic pre-dawn mist on a perfect
autumnal morning.
Physiology:
The withdrawal symptoms are no longer a factor and shouldn’t be for the
remaining 29 days of this sojourn of what I hope will be self-discovery. Since
the skin is the largest excretory organ I’m riddled with acne and blemishes. My
countenance has not been this oily and besmirched since I was thirteen and
salivating over a stack of late-80’s Playboy that we found trussed and
abandon in an alley behind my friend
Patrick Mcreynold’s house. While our eyes transitioned into the size of
billiard balls and we continued to ogle and leer the glossed centerfold sheath in front of us all the while making little high-pitched
falsettos like a classically trained hyena capable of cooing various sonatas by
Bach, Patrick’s father somehow walked into
the room unnoticed and sternly asked us boys’ just what the hell it was we
thought we were looking at and Patrick
(I’ll never forget this) looked back at his old man and without missing a
pubescent teenage beat staidly replied, “Nintendo Power.”
To which his old man replied that he thought it
high-time that we put ‘Nintendo Power’ away so to speak and if he ever catches
us reading ‘Nintendo Power’ again he
will stick it some place the sun does not shine, and by that I don’t think he
meant one of those pipe-sewers Mario is always chuting down to evade the
nefarious flounce of winged turtles.
Spent the
last two days drying out at my mom’s house in Bartontucky, (Bartonville, for
those of you trying to find the geographical g-spot of this county hamlet via
GPS). Bartontucky is kinda reminiscent of what I always imagined living in Lake
Woebegone would be like only everyone is thirty pounds overweight and the hard
right-wing conservative to laid back liberal ratio is staggering. Still, I love
everything about this little country villa. Love stopping in a diner and
falling in love with the sight of tight jean waitress who you can tell listens
to country music who refills my coffee cup eight times w/out asking before my entrée,
slathered in vats of gravy and graze cheese, arrives. I love traipsing through the linoleum
labyrinth of Krogers in Bartontucky how
people keep looking at me and tilt their head and say hi. Love sitting hunched
over like a human-shaped question mark amidst the locals at Jim Dandy and
occasionally bumping in to Jim Thome’s dad. Love going to the 801 club while
eating chicken and slamming baptismal fount sized Schooners of draught Busch served
so cold it comes replete with flecks of ice buoyed in the swill, the working class
elixir of Keystone employees across the street.
Love going
down Smithville rd. to Hammers’ and getting ( uhm,well) just plain hammered.
Yesterday
I walked via the Alpha Park moors to the liquor store on Garfield to get smokes and got
caught in the rain. I have been sober now for eleven days. If this were twelve
days ago I would have gone in McDonalds and got a large cup of coffee and then
gone to the liquor store, purchased a few 24 oz. of PBR, find some place
discreet to dump the coffee out before
cracking open the beer and, after a quick rinse, feeding the libation into the
Mcmarketed receptacle, taking intermittent swigs while riding out the
storm.
Drying out
during the deluge yesterday, sheets of rain kept coming down in drapes of
static, like trying to discern a nipple on late-night porn televised porn fuzz, I
thought about eleven years ago when my father died.
He was healthy one day, diagnosed the next and two weeks later he was dead.
The
morning he died we arrived back from the hospital and the wheel chair my father
used the last week of life was overturned in the center of the living room and
my mother understandably burst down in a Vesuvius hail of tears and I grabbed the
Wheelchair and took it down to the basement and found my little league
Louisville slugger and, like a young kid and a Cinco de Mayo piñata, started
pummeling the hell out of the overturned wheelchair with the baseball bat,
screaming out a freeway of vulgarities, screaming out fuck, thinking that the
harder I hit the wheelchair with the baseball bat somehow my father would be
resuscitated. Finally my sister came downstairs and told me that mom was in
enough emotional tumult as it was and that if I felt the need to vent I needed
to go somewhere else cause I wasn’t helping matters so, instead of being the
solicitous son, the son my father needed me to be at that moment to hold and comfort
my mom, I just decided to get up and leave.
And that's what I did. I left and
just took off and start walking.
It was
early February 2002 and the dirty snow on the ground was the color of grade
school trash bags. I trudged the Alpha Park, stopped at the liquor store on
Garfield, bought a forty of Icehouse, walked down the slope of Garfield Hill
taking sloppy swigs of the forty from the brown paper bag as if nursing a
newborn calf.
At the
time my oldest childhood friend David Hale (i.e. Big Dave) lived on
McKinley and I remember somehow finding
his house and passing out on his front porch with Big Dave literally picking me
up and four hours later waking up on his couch with splotches of dried rivulets of
tears staining my face. Trying to apprehend what just happen. Trying to think
where my father went.
My father
who I was just beginning to know as an adult.
My father
who I had seen drink maybe five beers in his entire life.
***
I thought
about all this yesterday while I was riding out the spring tempest outside the
liquor store in Bartontucky. I wonder what my dad would say about my
self-imposed exile from the sauce. My
father with his gentle nature and his nightly devotions and his love of Jesus.
When I was in high school dad found a bottle of Vodka in my closet and the only
thing he said was, “David, don’t get hooked on that stuff because, “that’s what
those Russian guys drink.” When I went
out on my 21st birthday dad
told me that I shouldn’t drink that much because, “I would be playing tricks on
my brain,” When I got into a car accident after I walked in on my ex-girlfriend
fucking her now husband my father told me that I just had to take some time
away from all the coffee, beer and
smokes because everytime he saw me I was juggling all three.
And of
course, I didn’t.
But I like
to think that maybe my dad would be proud. Everytime I cracked open a beer I
wanted to experience life in a new way and in a weird way, I wanted to grow. By
giving the booze up for forty days I’m eneadeavoring to grow as well.
Maybe my
dad would understand that.
And maybe
he would smile.
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