…off the wagon
It was more
of a graceful Swan dive— a svelte leap off the gyrating wooden planks
oscillating around the interior hull of the wheel, the spokes of sobriety
churning faithfully for over a month in the fashion of a mill swiping across
the month of May, eking into the first six days of June like a vernal fuse, the
unfurling stem to an unknown punctuation mark beginning to sprout through a
cracked epoxy resin dash of dead-tooth asphalt in cuneiform fashion that is not
quite an interrogative wisp, not quite an exclamatory flare.
Not quite a dream.
There was the wagon fraught with a month of
narrative scrabble pieces and unflecked saluting dominos, the wheeled ambulatory tarp lugging dried-out dates and regenerated
organs, the whistling ocarina of my refreshed kidneys. My liver, a leftover
futon absconded behind fraternity row a week after graduation, now freshly upholstered
and free of bed bugs. My heart rate transitioning from a 24-7
turbo-throbbing RED BULL engineered
Trampoline (that somehow vibrates when you deposit quarters in a chrome slit)
into the sight of a stilled backyard kiddie pool in early June moments before pastel
shades of pink and blue slit into the eastern horizon heralding the arrival of
a summer dawn.
There was the wagon ferrying a load of personal shit
I have endeavored for years to jettison and recycle. The hobble of wheels
skittering over emotional speed bumps and romantic ridges for 38.2 days. The skirl of the wagon that John Steinbeck
just painstakingly poetically rendered in his short story Chrysanthemums as, “A squeak of wheels and plod of hoofs came
up the road. The country road ran along the dense bank of willows and
cottonwoods that boarded the river, and up this road came a curious vehicle,
curiously drawn. It was an old spring wagon with a round canvas top on it like
the cover to a prairie schooner. It was drawn by an old bay-horse and a
gray-and-white burro. A big stubble-bearded man sat between the cover flaps and
drove the crawling team. Underneath the wagon, between the hind wheels, a lean
and rangy mongrel dog walked sedately. Words were painted on the canvas in clumsy, crooked letters. “Pots,
pans Knives sisors, lawn Mores. Fixed.” Two rows of articles and the triumphantly
definitive, “Fixed” below. The black paint had run down in little sharp points
beneath each letter.”
The
proverbial white-shrouded wagon (sating my loose-loin Laura Ingles Wielder
fresh-from-the farm girl fetish), freed from the hedonistic hitching post of
daily drinking, blazing in precipitous Ox-fording Oregon Trail venturing
fashion across a prairie continent of calendar squares, riding alone, bartering
harness reins for a desk top keyboard and the HOMEROW familiarity of a freshly
mowed sentence, all the while, salivating for the promise of a frothy libation
after 40 days of respite which I hoped at the time would spiritual and
transformative; a covenant oriented towards giving and growth.
A Radio Flyer Wagon antiqued from the garage sale of
childhood filled with alcoholic ambrosia wheeled around the dotted lemonade stand
sidewalks of summertime in the 4th of July Parade.
And there was the 38.2 succulent slog into what I originally anticipated was the feral
wilderness of sobriety. The stories I felt compelled to spill into daily paragraphs
of alphabetical pints for the faceless reader to quaff while I remained
abstemious and alone and in search of something I wasn’t quite sure of,
straddling the stagecoach wagon driven by Clydesdales, the promise land reeling
into sight. The incumbent finish line. Game 7. The last chapter. The finale and
encore of 38.2 days a scattering of hours left before I voluntarily parachuted
from the helm of the wagon into a pitcher of beer below.
There was a smile on my face the entire time I dove.
***
As of June 19th, 13 days after I started drinking
again, the empty aluminum inventory in my apartment reads as follows:
86 empty 12 oz. seminally crushed cans of Pride of
P-town arctic-chilled Pabst Blue Ribbon (i.e., PBR)
24 various empty bottles of assorted Sam Adams
Summer Sampler
12 empty cans of Linnenkugels Summer Shandy.
8 empty 16 oz. cans of PBR.
8 empty Budweiser cans (which I drank en route to my
creative vagina mattheeisson park with a friend).
6 empty 12.oz. Old style.
6 empty bottles of straight-from-the-bottle Guinness
which I meditatively imbibed on Bloomsday while trying not to cry.
2 empty 24.5 oz. of Foster’s Special Bitter
1 empty FOSTERS oil can, the original OIL CAN which
always makes me feel like I am chugging cheap Canadian pilsner from the brim of
the Stanley cup
1 empty blue-willowish 22oz Bud Light Platinum looks
like something Jor-el used to send his progeny to planet earth in the first
Superman flick.
1 40 oz. of Mickey’s, the finest Malt lager a link
card can buy (bought for my friend Patrick McReynold’s to imbibe at my party, only he left the Tartan
early and got laid).
1 22 oz. ICEHOUSE
1
(inexplicable) empty can of BUSCH.
1 (even more inexplicable) empty can of Miller 64.
(????)
If you siphon the vacuous receptacles into separate
12 oz. containers, what constitutes a quote-unquote ‘beer’ it will equal close to 170 beers.
Factor the number of days since I fell off the wagon into 170 and you get an
avg of thirteen beers a day.
Thirteen beers a day.
I’m back to where I started from.
***
There’s a story on my mom’s side of the family
(sometimes authentically disputed)
centered around my great-grandfather who lived in prohibition Chicago and
owned a Coal and Ice business. He chauffeured a wagon fraught with coal and ice
up and down Michigan Avenue all day. I once heard a story where he worked for
Al Capone as a bootlegger, and, beneath the coal and ice, he stowed and peddled
Canadian Gin and Midwest moonshine to the finest covert Speakeasy’s the prairie
states had to offer. The story goes that the bulk of the money he made was
dutifully tithed to a Catholic Church that is still standing on Willow Springs
road. His son, my grandfather, struggled
with alcohol all his life and was a truculent louse. He ruined the lives of his
family and tried to kill my grandma and died bitter and all alone.
There is the clod of cantering hooves and there is the
wagon.
There are three etymological opinions where the
sobriquet ‘Falling off the Wagon,’ is culturally derived from in reference to
returning to drinking alcoholic beverages after voluntary intervals of sobriety. One story derives from colonial America where there were
several newly-convicted felons riding in the back of a police wagon en route to the compulsory temperance of
ensuing Prison-life when they were allowed off at a local pub for one final
drink hence, ‘falling off the proverbial wagon. Another story is attributed to
the Salvation Army, where, according to their website, “Former National
Commander Evangeline Booth — founder William Booth’s daughter — drove a hay
wagon through the streets of New York to encourage alcoholics on board for a
ride back to The Salvation Army. Hence, alcoholics in recovery were said to be
‘on the wagon’.
Perhaps the most salient image also arrives from
early 20th century dealing with ‘water-wagons.’ To be ‘On the
water-wagon,” meant to abstain from entering the sawdust-riddled saloons
riddling the horse-tottering unpaved
avenues; the downtown Manhattan of Edith
Wharton and Eugene O’Neil era. At the
time water wagons were used to hose down the streets in the summertime settling
arid dust that accumulated from thoroughly trampled hooves. If someone was ‘On
the water-wagon’ it meant that they were eschewing the demon liquor favoring
oxygen with a double-shot of hydrogen instead.
A couple of weeks ago I read a riveting article in
National Geographic about Austrian paratrooper Felix Baumgartner who ferried a
specialty crafted helium balloon into the ceiling tiles of the planet, the
galactic windshield tint where space and
atmosphere coalesce into a oracular sheath of eternity. From the stratosphere he launched his anatomy
out from the balloon and parachuted a record 22.6 miles into the crust of the
planet. His descent included a four and
a half minute free fall where he exceeded speeds of 843 miles per hour,
becoming the first human being to break the sound barrier simply by toppling.
By diving. By falling off a helium wagon, embracing aerie tufts of nothingness,
capitulating his body to the vagaries of gravity, a free fall plummet into the
arms of the earth below.
It had to do with social gravity.
It had to do with money.
WHAT HAPPENED WAS THIS…
I would point a finger but I’ve been too busy
chugging and double-fisting it the past three weeks to brandish any accusatory
limbs. If there was an impetus that
compelled me to succumb to my forty day quest less than 48 hours from crossing
the finish line it would have to do with the troika of fucked- up factors that
include Bradley University, Franz Kafka
and good ol’ Peoria Journal Star reporter Matt Buedel.
Allow me to elucidate.
Thirteen years’ ago I was mistakenly arrested and
quarantined for three hours in a small room below city hall all because the
Peoria Police thought that I was Matt Buedel. We were both students’ at Bradley
University at the time. We both had pony-tails and sauntered around campus with
sort of an awkward gait. I was mutual friends with Matt and he had some sort of
warrant out for his arrest that had to do with petty vandalism.
In the spring of 2000 I went into city hall to pay a speeding ticket
and was immediately swarmed by a cadre of overweight law enforcement officials
who looked slightly reminiscent of the olfactory -snouted swine learning how to
walk on bipedal-stilts in the closing paragraphs of George Orwell’s Animal
Farm. I was escorted down into the basement of City Hall, led through this
labyrinth that felt evocative of a bomb shelter. It was my first ticket and I
was cooperative and had no clue what the fuck was going on and for the first
fifteen minutes of the interrogation process naively thought it was standard
and routine protocol for everyone paying a traffic fine to be escorted into the
bowels of City Hall and grilled with reproachful queries.
When I finally came to my senses and discerned that,
in the voice-over of the A-Team, I was being tried for Crimes I didn’t commit,
the only word I readily could think of to convey my disdain was the word
Kafkaesque.
Where I should have said this is total Bullshit I
crossed my legs and pontificated that this, "whole ordeal seemed rather Kafkaesque."
Kafkaesque.
Peoria’s finest told me that I was being a smartass
while they informed me that they had no clue what that word, ‘Kafkaesque’
meant. I then found myself teaching a crash course in Lit 110, delineating to
the COPS that there was this existential Czech writer whose name is Franz Kafka whose
view of the human condition was just uncannily bleak and distraught with
anxiety-poxed peril and that Kafka has this one story entitled THE TRIAL where
the protagonist named Josef K is arrested, imprisoned, sentenced, convicted and
eventually hung for a dubious crime he not only did not commit but whose very
nature remains ambiguous from the outset.
Rather than looking intrigued Peoria’s Finest looked at me like I was
botching my audition for JEOPARDY! deemed
me a self-made smart-ass and relentlessly continued to grill on, letting me go
two hours later discerning I was not the verdict they were looking for after my
finger-prints didn’t correlate with the inky swirls they were so dutifully
seeking. The police looked down and
chuckled when I politely asked if they could assuage the 70 dollar fine on my
speeding ticket in exchange for usurping three hours of my unbridled time.
A few weeks
later I sauntered into Matt Buedel at an off-campus party. When I told him that
I was interrogated and quartered in a fascist manner for three hours in the
dungeon-like catacombs of city hall because they thought I was him he
apologized in a laconic manner by shrugging like a sophisticated muppet and that was that.
Matt went on to cut his hair and write journalism. I grew my honey- flavored tresses
even longer, listened to a lot of Norwegian death metal and continued to write
something not dissimilar to fiction. I
had about three months where I was sociologically shell shocked and just
acutely paranoid every time a police car hushed past. My suggestion that the Illinois
Police Academy inculcate the selections from the corpus of Franz Kafka into
their standard training regime went unheeded indeed.
Thirteen
years later, as if chasing me through the painfully pellet-strewn
Atari-illuminated labyrinth of time, the poetic Pac-Man ghost of Franz Kafka
haunted me again.
I have a weird rapport with my addled Alma Matta
Bradley University. I went to Bradley, graduated with honors, worked for
Bradley for ten years, lovingly gave my balls on a platter to that University
before I was asked to resign after some bullshit went down (when the Lesbian
Treasure Troll looking H.R. Nazi reads selections of your unpublished writing
culled from your personal desktop at work during your dismissal hearing perhaps
you are destined for literary greatness after all).
Like a lot of
kids I know who decided to study English because they had an epiphany reading
LEAVES OF GRASS in high school, I had no clue how poor I would be after garnering a degree in liberal arts. Like most kids I took out gratuitous student
loans that equate to suburban house mortgages. Like a lot of kids I had jobs
where I was always working full-time for shit pay while balancing a heavy class
schedule. Like a lot of kids I partied hard on the weekends, drank a lot of
cheap beer from aluminum kegs and slept with women whose names have long since
been effaced from the shoreline of my cerebral cortex. Like a lot of kids I periodically dropped
classes when I felt overwhelmed by the overtaxed alchemical burden of balancing
work and school and (vitally of course) whatever social life I could muster to
endow meaning to my twin decades of breath exhausted on this planet.
I have college loans coming out the ass (i.e., literary break down the word ‘arrears’). About a third of my yearly income goes back to paying off educational backwash. When you brachiate from the glens of paycheck to paycheck you will almost always invariably slip and fall. I usually do a pretty good job making payments for my student loans on time, but of course, when annually forking back so much it becomes arduous and hard. I missed a few payments and when I called the student loan representative they refused to accept my thousand dollar payment.
The reason being this: They said I didn’t know my own birthday. The over-the-phone student loan representative claimed that the date of birth I was giving him for my over the phone check didn’t correlate with the date of birth they had listed in their computer.
”I know my own birthday, brother” I tell the student loan representative. I’m born on the same date as Nancy Reagan. Plus freaking George W. Bush (ugh!). One doesn’t forget that. One doesn’t forget one’s own birthday”
The student loan representative chuckles three times in a row in a manner which almost connotes that we are old drinking buddies. He then addresses me sternly in Eagle Scout fashion stating that he cannot accept any future payments until he receives a faxed copy of my birth certificate, sir.
He addresses me as sir.
“I’ve never had a problem paying you guys over the phone before.” I tell him, adding that if he is aggrieved that I share the same calendar date of birth with noisome thoroughly beryl-creamed members of the republican party that I also share a birthday with Frieda Kahlo. That I also share a birthday with his eminence the Dali Lama (adding that if he’s a Beastie Boy’s fan, he should harbor no qualms and believe me).
He tells me again that he is sorry but there is nothing he can do. I keep cool. I try not to think about the fact that I am thirty-four years of age and that the thousand dollars I placed aside to succinctly make this payment is literally all I have.
Thirty-four straddling the elliptical tug of the planet and all I have is going back to an education. It’s all I am worth. It’s everything I have.
The Student Loan Phuck says he is sorry and says that he still cannot accept my payment.
“Come on man. My birthday is even the same date as Sylvester Stallone. One doesn’t forget ones own birthday.” I state, trumpeting out the heralded theme song to ROCKY in a chorus of little da-da-duhs while simultaneously punching the jigsaw silhouette of my shadow splattered against the wall in a peachy haze of morning light.
Again the Student Loan Phuck apologizes and tells me that he is sorry but that there is really nothing he can do.
Again I make the mistake of using the word Kafkaesque.
Again, the person I am addressing tells me that he has no clue what that word means.
Again I tell the Student Loan Phuck the story about how there was this existentially-riddled Czech author named Franz Kafka and how his stories all deal with the stuttering Hollywood neon molted-flamingo No Vacancy motel sign that is the human condition. Again he tells me that he has no clue what I am talking about. Again I tell him about the novel Kafka wrote called the TRIAL. About a hazy-faced protagonist named Josef K who is accused, arrested, tried, sentenced to death all because of a crime he purportedly committed that does not exist.
The Student Loan Phuck tells me that the TRIAL sounds like a Grisham novel he was once coerced into reading for a junior high reading assignment.
Part of me is beginning to erupt. Part of me reflects for a moment that the people on the opposite end of whatever constitutes a cellular-phone wire invariably have difficult lives too and a job I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
“Listen. Please. You have my account number and it is valid. You have my social security number. Please, just take the money.”
Again he tells me that there is nothing he can do, sir. That my student loans will continue to accumulate interest until I can make a payment and that I cannot make a payment until I fax them a copy of my birth certificate since obviously my mortgaged-out-the-ass education raped me of the innate ability to remember the date of my birth.
Slowly whatever emotional magma left in my anatomy is beginning to fester like mixing vinegar and baking soda in a botched sixth-grade science fair volcano fashion.
I feel like snapping.
“Let me talk to your supervisor,” I bark as the SLP places me on hold courtesy of sappy-elevator chimes.
Somewhere Franz Kafka is laughing his ass off.
