Day Six: Boddington Brothers, Heeting that Sheet, and why oh why must life be so hard.....

 

 

 

 

 

Status: Six days. I’ve run out of both Roman numerals and geriatric chronicled Rocky movies to watch.

Physiology: For most of the day my shoulders, arms and fingers felt “pinched,” as if the vector below my neck was affixed by a clothespin strung out in a spring zephyr, literally hung out to dry. My entire anatomy is gradually beginning to feel lighter; my arms especially feel like chemistry set beakers filled with some sort of helium alloy.

Lots of listlessness again today. Lot of tedium. Paced around my apartment daisy chain smoking aimlessly walking between rooms like a lemming in search of a precipitous ledge.  

I was never bored when I was drinking beer.

A lot of the reason I drank all the time was because I was bored so I figured I might as well traipse down to one of the four taverns within balcony urinating distance from my apartment and squander all my hard-earned third-shift funds on cheaply union made watered down bottles of pilsner because, of course I’m a writer. I’m supposed to be poetically fucked up and deep all the time to ensure that my legacy will endure.

I wonder which is larger— the tome of my liver or the Norton Anthology of 17th century British Literature.

My wit feels like a bathroom air-fresher that ran out of mist three Christmases ago.

 When I’m not listless I feel antsy. Like there’s an ad hoc insect farm scurried beneath my flesh and all these insects with encyclopedia Britannica sounding names are chirping and mating and buzzing before feverishly skittering from one area code of my anatomy to another. Oh, the insects feel like they are wearing braces and are beginning to gnaw their way up and out but never quite make it.

Insomnia has also been a huge factor since when I was a daily drinker I would drink til I passed out and would then wake up and smile and pass out again. Since I instituted this fast of spiritual growth and development I have not slept for more than four hours a night except at my moms.

I realized today that I’ve had almost no friends commit to not drinking without being court ordered mandated to do so by either being manacled with a bracelet, a breathalyzer car starter, DUI, or jail time.

Oh why oh why must life be so hard?

 

 

Operation decimation of pending middle-aged beer gut: Ran to work tonight (about one mile). Ran home. 100 fetal-curved gut-annihilating crunches with fingers cradled behind back of neck capitulated in the universal stance cosigning surrender.  Also juiced for the first time in about a month.  Nothing beats a pulpy concoction of cucumbers, celery, green apple, garlic clove, carrot with just a splashed teardrop of squeezed lemon chugged into your system to reaffirm that you have been living way too much off of frozen boxed pizza and Budweiser the last three years. The concoction is yummy but it also kind of looks like something Bruce Banner deposited in a plastic vial for the annual Stan Lee superhero sperm drive, blowing his incredible-avenger oriented wad while thinking about a bikini-clad Betty Ross.

 Hulk Horny.

My goal eventually is to be a vegan on days I work but that’s way down the linoleum tiles of the organic produce aisle so to speak.

                                                                  ***
 

 

Monopolized the bulk of a balmy spring day cleaning out my apartment which, even though the majority of  beer cans have been picked up and recycled, still kind of resembles the aftermath of an expired kegger  at Barnes and Nobles—books and manuscript and heaps literati errata scattered everywhere in tsunami debris faltering fashion. Then went for a walk through downtown Peoria. It was hard traipsing past the Locker room with their daily six dollar build-your-own burger accompanied with a two dollar 24 oz. PBR or Hoops because everything on Hoops menu just hits the  heterosexual- hot sauce gourmand g-spot on the male palate. I felt no loss when I stared at the lost lacunae of saloon stationed buildings where Big AL’s and CLUB JAGER  previously resided but did feel a subtle ache of nostalgia as I ambled past Ulrich’s (which will always be Sullivan’s to me) and thought about all the British ales I usually quaff this time of year while reading Chaucer and Boccaccio in Spring. Beers like Samuel Smith and Old Speckled Hen and Old Peculiar and anything  stouty by Mackenson or Bitter by Fullers or ST. Peter’s which is served in a medicine bottle and is one of the crispest IPA’s my lips have ever had the privilege of making out with.

Beers that bear obscure rugby team logos for their emblems. Beers like Abbots ale and Ruddles and even old Hobgoblin, which,  Wychwood brewry chided the White house when Obama stated that he would drink the gratis libation  gifted to him from the British Prime minister chilled and not room temperature as is the anglophile norm. Beers that are reminiscent of British countryside whose texture and hue Thomas Hardy described as, “the most beautiful colour that the eye of an artist in beer could desire; full in body, yet brisk as a volcano; piquant, yet without a twang; luminous as an autumn sunset; free from streakiness of taste; but, finally rather heady."       

But the beer I yearn for the most this time of year is Boddingtons. Boddingtons which looks like an albino Guinness when poured. Boddingtons with its buttery head of shaved froth, gas bubbles pinwheeling in expired orbs as it settles. Boddingtons which comes with a rattling widget and has a beseechingly smooth finish which beckons the patron to slap down a few pounds and buy another round. Boddingtins which I always imagined was what a ‘Butter beer’ looked like circa Harry Potter renown.

 

 

 

Boddington’s which was first served in Peoria at Jimmy’s on Farmington road in the late nineties if not before where I used to drink with my good friend Doug M’gnbu, where we were dubbed the ‘Boddington Brothers.’  

 I met Doug when I was working at Bradley University in 2003. Doug was from Ghana and was studying for a semester at BU. He was a long distance runner and I ran with him a couple of times. He had a beautiful lush baritone bassoon for a voice and a smile that looked like it was chiseled from pirated ivory illegally entering China.  When he pronounced my name it was “Dahv-veed.” When he said the word ‘look’ it sounded like the name Luc. ‘Hit,’ would idiomatically become ‘Heat.’ When he would curse  the word ‘shit,’ would become ‘sheet.’

You get what I’m saying.

Ten years ago Bradley students (mostly spoiled sunburnt suburbanly groomed 20 year olds with ersatz i.d.’s) would get dressed to kill sliding down Farmington Hill in roving party vans on Thursday nights hitting Crusen’s first if they could get in before dancing at the Lucky Lady which would serve anyone who looked old enough to play ski ball at Showbiz. The night would almost always conclude at Jimmy’s across the street where Doug and I would sit for hours, imbibing Boddingtons, talking about soccer, talking about international affairs, ogling the girls as they stumbled in short skirts from the Lady into the shamrock cigar box that is Jimmy’s Pub.

One night when Doug and I were sitting talking to Vince when the fine ladies of PHI BETA TAM PON stumbled in and my hormonally addled trenchant lips commented aloud that I  wanted to ‘hit that shit.’

Doug immediately got confused.

“Dah-veed,” He said, beautifully bruised deep voice. “Why you say you want to beet-up woman?”

What?” I ask, perplexed. Doug points at the girls.

“You say you want to heat that sheet. Why you say you want to heat?”

I get confused. I take a bewildered sip of my Boddingtons. I then realized that Doug was talking about my colloquial.

“Oh, that’s just something American guys say if they are horny and want to get with a girl.”

“Really?” Doug’s eyes bobble in his skull like beer pong balls.

“Yeah,” I say trying to explain the uncouth custom of the American male, taking another swig, “Instead of commenting to your guy friends prosaically stating that ‘ this girl is really hot and I would like to go home and fornicate with her,’ we summarize that statement by saying ‘I wanna hit that shit.”

 “Wow!” Doug says again, excited.

 Come here, I’ll show you how it’s done.”

 I order eight Jager bombs (God whatever happen to those) and we sit next to the girls. Twenty minutes in everyone is laughing and Doug begins to give one girl a foot massage. He then looks in my direction and, in front of the modest Ladies of PHI BETA TAM PON wildly proclaims, in his beautiful bassoon sounding  patois:

 

 “Dah-veed! Luc!! I am Heating that Sheet!!!”

Doug continued to smile.  Judging by the scowling gloss dripping off their lips the sorority girls’ were far from amused.
 
                                                            ***

Midway through the composition of the paragraph directly north of this sentence I began to experience the worst withdrawal-related 'shakes' so far into this sojourn. It felt like my nervous system was trying to be jumpstarted only the jumper cables were conveniently connected to a surfeited outlet in Chernobyl. My arms seem to be involuntarily flapping even though I was unable to move. My entire body was Vesuvius only no lava would sporut.


I shook for twenty minutes. My chest became numb. I lied petrified in the center of my carpet.

I needed booze. One beer. I live fifty steps from the Owls Nest. I have plenty of money on me. One beer not as an aesthetic to get drunk. One beer as an antidote. A Pabst Blue ribbon panacea. One beer to stop all this shit. One beer to allow me to harness my limbs and get control of my body.

One fucking beer.

Without thinking I got up from my curled posture and headed towards my front door.

It was time to say the hell with this succulent sobriety shit and drink again.


                                                     ***

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the Strong, nor riches to men of understanding, yet time, fate happens to them all.

I refrained from walking across gutter Waverly avenue and slamming a quick beer for solace.

 Instead, I shook alone for another twenty minutes.

I sweated and was numb and was all alone.

And then it was gone.

And I went back to writing.

                                

                                                         ***

This blog has meant different things to a number of diff readers over the discourse of the past week, all of whom I'm grateful that they are escorting me on this journey. Some have suggested that the reason I chose sobriety was that I was just mining for topics to write about. A lot of my friends who have COMPLETELY changed their lives around by choosing sobriety have insinuated that this forty days is just a strip tease since, in all likelihood, I probably will get shitfaced off of all of those delectable beers mentioned above sometime in the next year. Conversely, my beer drinking buddies, bros who have my back no matter what, have been avoiding me since they know how serious I am about completing this trek. I even missed one of my best bros birthday's last week because he knew if I showed up the two of us would just drink like there is no tomorrow and all would be right in the world.


The reason I am giving up the sauce for forty days has nothing to do with sobriety. It has to  do with growth. Over the last nine years' I have drank more than anyone I know. I have squandered thousands of dollars a year. I have slept with everything. Have drank everything. Have worked countless hours of overtime. Have always tried to find peace and have always failed.  And if this fast will make me a more giving writer, a better partner to my future spouse someday, and a better human being--i.e, if this sojourn of leaving the substance that I love will lead me to the life I desire by transforming the beer guzzling creature that I am into the man I yearn to become than I say game on.

Bring on the fucking shakes.

Bring on Day 7.

Yes, Doug,

 Sobriety…I am heating that sheet.

I am hitting that shit.

At least for the next 34 days.  

  

 

                                                        

Day Five: Historic Landmark for my liver and (still) yer Sunshine...

-the author, clad in beer saturated maroon shirt, playing beer pong at Bradley University, May 2005

Status:  It has been 112 hours since I cracked open my last cold one, shot-gunning the libation into the corporeal essence of my anatomy with the finesse of William Tell plucking an apple-oriented bow.  Five whole geometric squares where I didn’t feel like I was imprisoned by the key-hole heralding date winking in the right hand corner of the monthly calendar frame.   Five whole days where I made the conscious choice (it was a choice, and yes, I struggled in herculean huffs) not be manacled to the glass neck of a daily twelve pack (+) while flagellating drunken sentences into the canvas of the computer screen in front of me. Five whole days where I wasn’t spotted ferrying a fifteen dollar cube of beer back from the liquor store every morning, as if a metaphysical pharaoh were dictating that I construct a pyramid to my dreams passed over by the angel of premature organ-failure.    

 This is the longest I have gone sans pouring an ablution of alcohol into my body since May of 2005. Eight years ago.

 In the last six years I have been administered to the hospital twice on alcohol related issues. 

Both times after I was discharged I didn’t last this long.

Not even close. 

Physiology: Intermittent pastures of irritability.  Blood pressure seems to have detumesced as has my waist line. My heart no-longer feels like it’s vying for first place in the Brooklyn national double-dutch competition. Still have some sort of cyst cosigning tightness in my right jaw but maybe I just slept on it funny.  I went on to my moms on my day off to dry out and I think Cece the schizophrenic cat slept on my face (That explains all those hairballs I’ve been coughing up).  The right hand side of my ribs no longer feels punched or bruised. I haven’t felt the subtle-tingle that usually almost always seismically arpeggios into the full-blown shakes in about 12 hours.

Gradually the lethargy that becomes anxiety one minute and reverts back to languor the next is also starting to wane.

The most salient note is perhaps neurological and my thinking is somehow tinged with a lick of clarity. Before it felt like I had a corona (the halo, not the beer) of consciousness encircled around my brain composed of a basketball rim festooned with dorm-room Christmas lights sifting over the top of my head flickering in incendiary bursts of creativity before spawning a campus-wide blackout every time I sat down to write. Now it feels like the cortex-halo is composed of swaths of cotton.  Like horse blinders were placed over both sides of my skull occluding my thinking and have now somehow been completly removed.

Rungs scaled (i.e. conquering shit that could more aptly be classified as personal fear):  Today is the first day since I can remember that I didn’t hightail it to the liquor store the moment my paycheck was freshly deposited in the bank or head straight to a bar after work on a Friday morning (Country skillet Breakfast with a beer or five at either Last Chance Bar or the 801 club in Bartonville is the best) flushing away arable funds into the oak altar of the neighborhood tap, into emptied beer receptacles, into fruity shots that look like plastic Barbie pregnancy tests for incessant 140 character twittering trollops in a futile endeavor to get laid. 

Today was also the first day I was able to go inside a liquor store and buy a pack of smokes and not even think of about buying booze for myself even though I had more-than-sufficient funds in my pocket and for years’ having more-than-sufficient- funds in my pocket meant that I needed to imminently invest in as much booze as humanly possible.  The best way to avoid the temptation of purchasing  booze when you enter a liquor store en medias withdrawal is to reassert your concentration on something else. Since my dear friend Sunshine has been a diligent employee at the liquor store and since I have monopolized thousands of dollars in sales over the last year alone I decided to focus solely on Sunshine’s boobs.

“Focus on Sunshine’s boobs. Just focus on Sunshine’s boobs.” I repeated to myself over and over again, like I was trying to memorize scripture for a vacation bible school sticker. I didn’t purchase any beer, I bought four packs of my cheap cigars and my most benevolent Sunshine was kind enough to inquire if there was something on her chin that I kept unassumingly staring at.

(smile)

Apres ogling Sunshine’s cleavage (I also gave her  two tacos, ‘one for each, cup’ from that new kick ass Mexican restaurant on the corner of Heading and Western) today was also the first day that I ( kicking and screaming and kicking and screaming and hurling tampons) sucked up my pride and went to an AA meeting. I actually went to two meetings in a row since I got confused at what time a buddy of mine was chairing the meeting.

I have nothing against AA. I did not want to go and rationalized every excuse not to amble the three petty blocks down the street and attend the meeting. I'm glad I went. Nothing moves me more than being surrounded by individuals who want change in their lives and who desire nothing more than to grow and to somehow, seek to spiritually till that growth in the soil of others.

As I was walking out of AA I noticed a skeletal pamphlet stand that looks like it was left over from the late 70's. There was only a few pamphlets arrayed but on the bottom of the stand was the omnipotent masonary-traingle eye of the AA motto followed by the words, LET LITERATURE CARRY THE MESSAGE, TOO.

I simply smiled.

                                                                  

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Day Four: Operation Rumi and the month that is May

The fifth month of the calendar year arrives zipping on the back of one's neck like a gentle breath of hope, with the clovery taste of mint-juleps mingled with the rainbow sight of roses lassoed around the necks of oblivious thoroughbreds. It arrives with the lobed sight of limp-eared hostas and greek-sounding perennials for sale in the doorway of local retailers. It arrives with the spiked lavender shock of hyacinths inching like troops as if saluting the heralding arrival of tepid temperatures leading up to my front porch. May arrives with track meets and with baseball standings. With overtly caffeinated college students living in the university library for days on end teeming with nerve-clattering anxiety. With hormonally-addled high school lads delicately unearthing the frosty plastic cube of a corsage as if it were some kind of big mac made out of their grandmothers’ wedding china, manacling it sport-watch fashion around the tube of her wrist while lost in the frizz of her hair and the scent of her body and the wild conjecture of what has the possibility of transpiring later that night as he brandishes his elbow in front of her eyelashes like a boomerang for her to grope, escorting his date out the front door of her parents’ house after posing in front of the customary fusillade of camera snaps, the perfect spring evening, his senses lost in the pulsating almost floral scent of the creature waltzing next to him who somehow smells brand new.

Who smells like spring.

May arrives with the sight of a single pink helix-ribbon pinned to the blouse of survivors, cantering as if treading water around midtown in a billowing glob of awareness and of, intrinsically, hope.

May is the month of transitions--of solemn almost pastoral garb and geometric hats bearing limp tassels bobbing as if in lost unison at the rhetoric and ramble of a commencement speech. It arrives with playoffs and barbecues. With seasonal hoppy pilsners on draft. With time off requests and looming summer itineraries. With dreams of packing everything that aches with longing inside your chest in a carry-on bag and leaving and then coming back somehow changed.

May is the month where every kitchen I walk into seems to noticeably reek of windex. The month of people wearing shorts who blatantly just shouldn’t go there. The month of twenty dollar bills unassumingly slipped into graduation cards by relatives you hardly know. The month where the morning sun begins to ricochet off the planet in a canopy of pre-dawn tint around six a.m., and set even later, casting out a neon-pink sail bejeweled with a rusty patina, dappled with slight splotches of copper and blue into the horizontal balcony of the overhead west.

And dangling in the background like wished for white noise the intermittent nasal buzz of a stuttering lawn mower followed almost always in tandem by middle-aged curses.

Perhaps it is all just a lazy-hammock filled dream.

Or perhaps it is the month of May.

                                                                        ***

Status: Entering 80 hours. Longest alcoholic abeyance since the first week of March, circa sixty calendar squares ago.

Shit.

Physiology: My liver feels like a molested beehive that a college male was coerced into sodomizing for some arcane fraternity hazing ritual. At times it feels like my lower right side is almost sneezing. Most of the time I feel fine.  At fifty hours in my heart resembled a piñata full of whirring sex toys at Mexican bachelorette party. At about three days exactly it slowed down which is weird considering I’ve pretty much been turned into Cronus when it comes to devouring all things caffeine-related in heavily ground mytho-poetic slurps. My palms, thighs, forearms and bottom of feet continue to itch. Lots of tingling around various vectors of my body, as if my entire anatomy were Parker-brothers pinned to a board game of OPERATION being played by tweezer-brandishing orangutans taking a furlough from randomly typing out Hamlet, apishly gaggling every time my nose turns red. Also (and this is interesting) for about two hours last night my jowls swelled to the size of tulip bulbs and ached incessantly until I took an IBUPROFON and massaged my facial flanges with the tips of my still-tittering immobilized alcoholic fingers.  I have no clue what might have spawned this impediment of my viscera but it feels just like when you spend 24 hours madly making out with someone you love dearly and how afterwards all the muscles in your face are just contorted and sore for days on end and you think about how her mouth just attacked your ears and your cheekbones and your lips every time you smile.

Day five is t'morrow...cradling my liver, thinking about the girl I kissed last month behind Champs West, how her entire body opened and closed the way a garage door opens and closes and how the mornint after, I traipsed back in the pastel peach of the spring sunrise and saw her cingartte butts and looked down and simply smiled.....

Day Three: Irish eyes are a smilin' and the ballad of ol' Cliff...

 

 

Status: somebody better call NBC Dateline since I’ve been clean for just over 48 hours. I have not gone two days w/out succumbing to a frothy cold one since about a week before St. Patrick’s Day in early March, about fifty days ago. What I wouldn’t give for ten pints of green beer and a bowl of Lucky charms being spoon-fed to me in slow motion by a buxom red-haired trollop wearing nothing but a Notre Dame jersey and panties, a lil’ U2 playing in the background. Irish –eyes collectively smilin’ across the emerald scalp of the planet. 

Physiology: It feels like I just slept on a nest of voodoo dolls. I’m having heart palpations. I’m tampon-wielding petulant. Since my body is flushing out all these toxins my urine is the color of a neon-glow stick at an underground afterhours RAVE. My flesh is also starting to itch; the epidermis is the largest excretory organ, my skin a slovenly wrapped bowling bin intermittently refusing to topple. I’m irritable. This imposed fast is stupid. When I taught junior high English a decade ago for some reason the word of the day was, ‘asinine,’  and the whole week the students’ went around the elementary schoolyard stating, “Man, you so asinine. This shit is so phucking asinine.’ Since it was an inner-city school and I had a pony-tail for some inexplicable reason I thought I would be the hip Stand and Deliver ‘YO! MTV Raps’  English teacher of the year changing formative lives by using Eminem lyrics to teach the parts of speech, asking the students’ to find the  conjunction in the following phrase, “With my mind on my money AND my money on my mind.”   
Every time without fail they would say the word money.

I decided then that I would rather be a failed writer than a failed English teacher.

So freaking tired. The interior of my palms and the bottom of my feet have been itching-crazy like something is ready to peck out of my flesh brandishing a beak and strewn with damp feathers. For a couple o’ hours yesterday it felt like my ribcage located on the right-hand side of my body was sacked by a defensive nose tackle (my liver is all eli eli lama sabachthani on me), but after sleeping for 16 hours straight (having a dream where I was in charge of my mentor Garrison Keillor only he died, because I wasn’t paying attention) it seems to be fine.

Even though for several hours yesterday all I could think about was that this incumbent forty days of clean-living was nothin’ short of asinine.

 

                                                                          ***

 

 

It’s a couple of hours later and I’m less prickly, still sweating abacus beads of Hennessey. Went to my mom’s house yesterday and mowed and then compost-heaped and then cleaned out the garage. Normally when I crash ay mom’s I stop at the liquor store in the plaza on Garfield and buy twin six packs (usually what I call cheap canoe beer—Hamms’ or Schlitz or Old Style—Beers I remember being in grandma’s garage when I was the size of a good year tire) and walk home via Alpha Park where the nature trails harbor a rather ‘British Moor’ favorable appeal. There’s a part of the trail that wends into a fallow-dun flavored field, corn husks resembling shattered relay batons, soil tilled in capillary rows awaiting the incubating fertility of yet another harvest.  There’s a spot where I would waylay my dreams, sip cheap beer, smoke cheap cigars and wait as the cue-ball moon arcs and lumbers across the blanketing tarp of the East before scattering home (beer in paw) beneath a cosmic freckle of stars.

It has been three days since I last bought beer.

Tomorrow will (shit-you-not here) be the first time I will receive a paycheck deposited into my bank account and not imminently celebrate the arrival of my income without stopping at a bar or a nearby gas station to pick up a six pack since I turned 21.

The last beer I consumed was at 10 pm on Mon, April 29^th. Earlier that morning I purchased a six pack of hopfusion plus a four pack PBR tallboys. I was walking down Barker avenue and, from a distance of three blocks, could see the liquor store I so-devoutly stop in on a daily basis reel its aluminum gate open like a giant eyelid rousing from a wished-for sleep. Josh was working (josh wears this cool necklace that contains ashes of his late-mother around his neck) and I always ask him How mom is doing today and he always pats of above his heart pledge-of-allegiance style and says fine.   After purchasing my libations I see ol’ alcoholic Cliff and discreetly turned the other corner. Cliff is toothless, a wiry spume of long hair that looks like he just stuck his guitar pick into an outlet at a Led Zeppelin reunion concert.  In the summer time he walks around with his shirt off, past my house, towards his bank off of Madison Golf course.  He looks emaciated, like a half-gnawed on tootsie-roll that’s been left in the sun all day to rotisserie. There is something about the semblance of his anatomy that looks like he would be featured on a from USA to Africa vignette about world hunger. His torso is about the size of a number pencil. When you look at his face the concavity of his sinuses are sunken and visible.

He looks just like a corpse.  

And yet he still drinks everyday.

He is also brilliant and he has always been exceedingly kind to me.

When I first moved back to West Peoria two years ago I was smitten with this single-mom who lived across the street and three houses down from Cliff. She would check up on him every couple of days to make sure Cliff didn’t pass out and choke on his vomit. Cliff’s house is about the size of my mother’s garage. It looks like an ice fishing shed. Aluminum shards of cans sprinkled everywhere. He has drums and guitars and albums from the seventies piled in pagoda heaps. You can’t move when you walk inside. He sleeps on his couch. There’s a bathroom with no running water and beer cans in the sink so occasionally, if you walk down the alley between West Bluff Christian church and Calendar ave. you’ll see Cliff popping a squat outside and then walking with drunken yet calculative steps afterwards.

And he is brilliant. He’s always getting drunk and constructing shit. One time it was thruster. One time it was this drag-racing car. One time (shit you not) it was a helicopter with functioning propellers. The helicopter wouldn’t fly but he would invite all his beer drinking buddies into the cock pit,  switch on the propellers and just drink beer smiling, cackling like they had box car seats at a NASCAR event.

Cliff does blueprints for all his projects and I’ve never seen anyone sketch blueprints as eloquently as Cliff. They look like something foisted from a private Da Vinci collection in Milan.

I used to stop by Cliff’s house every week and hang out with him. For a long time I would bring him beer until I realized that I contributing to his suicide. I offered to bring him food but he said he got, “one of them there LINK card.” One day he was standing outside waiting for his mom (Cliff is 53, his mom is in her 70’s). I asked him what was going on and he said that he was waiting for his  mom to take him to the hospital. I asked him what was wrong and he confessed that he had been “pissing blood there for the last couple of weeks now.”  When later that week I asked him how his tests went he told me that he didn’t go. That he went to get a 32 pack of Milwaukee’s Best and by the time his mom arrived he was already passed out.

I stopped seeing ol’ Cliff for a long time because I didn’t want to watch him die then I realized one day that I was drinking three times more per week than what he was drinking per week. That I had some talent too and that if I didn’t cut all this partying shit out/his daily drinking come twin decades of what is perceived of time I would be in a house with no plumbing and lots of beer and stalled dreams.

I had one can of PBR left. I went Cliff’s ice shack house for the first time since Feb ’12 and placed it in front of his doorstep like I was placing aluminum flowers on a grave.

I wonder if I will ever speak with Cliff again.

 

 

Day 2: Winsome withdrawals, alcoholic arithmetic, Literary criticism featuring former Bulls’ Coach Scott Skiles, making love to Debbie Gibson while reading Wittgenstein and how very Noble (pils) of you…

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:…………)

            Early in Wittgenstein’s poetic polemic Tractatus-Logicus philosophicus there’s a quote that reads: “The single thing proves over and over again to be unimportant, but the possibilty of every single thing shows us something about the nature of the world.” I thought about this quote while I was having my vicarious arguement with Scott Skiles. I thought about how, I really don’t know why I feel the need to drink so much all the time.

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!!!