Status: 24 hours, one planetary barstool swivel
without chugging the amber stem of a beer, the longest I have gone in at least
the last two weeks. Actually the cruelest month of April (all of that poetry!
All that alchemical mixing of dull roots and spring rain!) was pretty much a
booze- goggled pasture of blur fraught
with seasonal showers, broken-hearted bracketologists, domestic terrorism, a
congress whose gun laws match their I-just-graduated-from Goosebumps-reading-caliber,
all beer-backed with the minty scent of a freshly plowed diamond on opening day
with my best bros in the Southside of Chicago at a ballpark which to me will
always be known as Comiskey.
Physiology: I only get sick when I don’t drink and I
normally don’t get the nerve-jilting rattling pinch known in rehab-detox
vernacular as the shakes until about 50 hours in. Last year I had a dear poet friend move into
my apartment for three months. When writers get together we like to party and
poetically pontificate about all things artistic in life (i.e., see Raymond
Carver and John Gardner in Iowa City/ I got accepted at the artists’ colony of
Yaddoo last year based on a sonogram of my liver alone) and while I pissed out
four hundred pages towards a novel and he wrote just some of the most ravishing
poems of his formidable and fledgling career we were both five times as
prolific in our drinking as we were in our daily elbow-grease work-ethic and,
after about six weeks, having flushed thousands of dollars away drinking every single moment of every single
moment, we started to compare “the shakes” when we woke up in the morning, our
fingers involuntarily twitching in a frenzied staccato as our bodies informed
us that if we don’t flood massive amounts of alcohol into our respective
systems sometime in the imminent future we were going, quite simply, to
explode.
So as if using GPS to navigate the battalion exodus
of alcohol exiting from my anatomy in molecular droves, ‘The shakes,’ are
scheduled to arrive sometimes in the next 20 hours and, except for all that
damn blood in my urine, I’m totally fine (that was a joke. There’s no blood in
my urine. My readers are as solicitous as they are intellectually sexy).
Today is the first day I have sat at my writing desk
without a faithful six pack dandling near the caps of my knees like a corgis in
Louis XIV court in just a long-ass time.
When I arrived home from work this morning I cleared
off the aluminum stubble and glass wicks
of previously drained beer receptacles off my writing desk and kitchen
counter. Since I took the garbage out last Thurs. I thought it would be fun to
pillage through the trash and count the number of bottles and cans once
containing beer which I had pithily consumed over the last couple o’ days. It
was early Tuesday morning which meant the beer cans I was counting stemmed from
last Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, when I executed my last swig before
embarking on this self-imposed forty day sojourn of sobriety.
What I found
is chronicled b’low:
11 empty PBR tallboys that kind of look like abandon
country silos in Mason county if you think about it. (16 oz.)
24 wriggled- countenance crushed cans of good ol’
fashioned Pride-of-Peoria Pabst Blue Ribbon (12 oz)
24 drained bottles of (succulent) selections from
previously consumed Sam Adam’s Summer Brew sampler pack including Belgian
Saisson, Little White Rye, Summer Ale,
my favorite, the citrusy melon of Front Porch Rocker, and some blue
berry oriented shit that looks like you would buy round after round if this
was senior walk and you were trying to get Smurfette to alight the hem of her
skirt in public (12.oz.)
12 bottles of hop-heaven ambrosia featuring various
assortment of bitchingly tasty Sam Adams
IPA including the Whiter Water IPA, Alpine IPA and the Noble pils (12 oz).
Now its time for lil’ Davey to make his former
trigonometry teacher Miss Unser proud and put his maladroit high-school math
skills to use: 11 +24+24+12 equals an imbibed total of 71. Divide 71 by the
four days since I last took the garbage out and I have the avg. of beers I’ve
been drinking a day.
71 divided by 4= 18.75
Which means that over the last week I have drunk a
swallow short of 19 beers per day.
!!!!!
I’m not an accountant but that just can’t be right.
Then I realized that I took the garbage out on Thurs. morning which means I had
to factor in drinking all day Thurs. as well, which intrinsically gave me
another day.
71 beers divided by 5 calendric days= 14.2 beers per
day.
A twelve pack plus a 24 oz. big boy in a typical 10
hour period while I thrash away at my keyboard trying to make images hatch off
the shell of the page and then somehow fly.
When I worked at Bradley University I had what I called a Glossaria tacked above my office
desk. It was an outline of my first long novel which was 702 pages when I gave
it to Doc Palakeel as my senior project in 2005 and then somehow sprouted to
about 1200 single-space pages two years later. The Glossaria is a delineation
of each scene and a haiku-terse synopsis of what is transpiring narratively
speaking. On top of the Glossaria I posted a picture of NBA Coach Scott Skiles.
Scott Skiles coached the Chicago Bulls for a couple
of years in the mid-2000s. He was known as a no-non shit Coach. There were no
frills. There was no fucking around. There were no egos. In his inaugural season as coach he took a
bevy of mediocre mid-level NBA players at best who started out with an 0-11
record and ended up atop of their respective division, leading the Bulls into
the NBA playoffs for the first time since the Jordan Dynasty.
The first
short story I sold for five-hundred dollars in 2005 and I bought (not quite but
close to court side) Bulls tickets for myself and my best bro John Dainis.
Watching Scott Skiles’ strategically coach the team from the sidelines was like
watching a Russian chess master decimate a game of Tetris on Gameboy. His
face looked like somebody just detonated a gram of dynamite in a pot belly
stove. He cursed incessantly at his players from the sidelines. He limbs orchestrated
as if conducting a four hour Wagnerian opus. He was always yelling. Always
rowing back and forth but when his players’ did something right, he would
applaud, offer exactly three stolid claps while assenting his chin in a gruff
nod.
I used to hear Skiles’ voice in my head all the time
when I was writing. I used to hear him cuss me out. I used to hear him inform
me to quit fucking around on the page. To get to work boy.
I haven’t heard Scott’s voice in a about five years
until yesterday, after being clean for 24 hours plucking up dead beer bottles
in my apartment like molted feathers, I heard Scott Skiles, in echoing New York
Times magazine ethicist guise, just flat
out cussing me out. Asking me why I felt the need to drink all the fucking time.
Asking me why I am prostituting my talent. Telling me that there are innocent
little kids losing their hair because they were born with a genetic
modification that causes cancer and here I am blessed with a perfectly healthy
body and while the bulk of inhabitants on this planet don’t even have
access to clean drinking water here I am drinking the phuck out of everything
even remotely alcoholic just to keep my eternal buzz going.
And of course, divulged in the interior dialogue
inside my head, I pathetically justified my choices. Stating that I drink all the time because I
went to a shitty high school ( note: what kid outside of the New Yorker’s
forty-writers under forty a couple years ago doesn’t have high school
histrionics?) I drink all the time because I watched my father die and I still
have dreams about unearthing his coffin and there being nothing inside (note:
everyone besotted on the scalp of this planet experiences death and loss), I
drink because the three women in the past five years that I have wanted to spend my life with all used my
heart as a crinkled sanitary tissue to splotch their vaginas (note: maybe they
would have stayed with you if you didn’t smell like the yeasty interior of
Shotz brewery all the time) I drink because I was sexually molested (note: quit being a
victim by drinking everyday. You have the opportunity be a voice to those who
have none).
I drink because, getting drunk everyday is just flat
out fun.
(note:…………)
But I’m willing to take the next forty days to stop and find
out.
As I was finishing bagging up the fallen remnants of
last week’s swill I came across a half-empty bottle of Sam Adam’s Noble Pils.
The beer was tepid and had been sitting out on my kitchen counter the entire
night while I was at work. Like a teenage girl learning how to give head for
the first time, I held the bottle up to my lips and tilted my chin back. Before
the lukewarm fluid hit my palate I removed the bottle from my lips and poured
what was left of the flat nectar into the sink
Looks like the gauntlet has been thrown.
Let the journey begin.
As a non-alcohlic addendum (and since it’s going on
thirty hours of sobriety and “the shakes” are pending and since (as I tell my
sexy-Italian Routledge published liteary scholar Barbara Antoniazzi, We’re in
this together) here’s my ex-girlfriend Debbie Gibson…
Come everyone, LET’ALL
SHAKE OUR WAY INTO SOBRIETY!!!
Awesome Bud! Im pulling for ya! wish I woulda found your blog sooner instead of spending my day at work so late in your journey reading it for the first time...
ReplyDeleteTHANX BRO!!!!!!! Can't wait to hang out with all my immortal brothers at the TARTAN!!!!!!!!!!
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