Sponsor (Simon, but no Simony full version)

A WORD TO THE SPONSOR who is putting his first newcomer into a hospital or otherwise introducing him to this new way of life: You must assume full responsibility for this man. He trusts you, otherwise he would not submit to hospitalization. You must fulfill all pledges you make to him, either tangible or intangible. If you cannot fulfill a promise, do not make it.

–Dr. Bob Smith, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, 1938

Hannah leans over the counter and, proffering a demitasse, whispers conspiratorially: “Do you want an extra shot?” And not one to pass up on an opportunity for café collusion, the barista after all being a sweetheart and why not four shots of espresso in my Americano, I raise an eyebrow and say, “Certainly.” I drink coffee alcoholically these days as is, so Hannah is unknowingly being an enabler, but we enjoy a harmless relationship, me and the barista, and the coffeeshop is better a Friday hang than what could be a hangover. Hannah winks and places a finger to her lips while she pours the espresso. My sponsor waits outside.

The café still smells of Christmas, a sparsely decorated pine in the corner, and the gathered patrons are either stuck on 52 across or deleting e-mails. No music plays—this is not Starbucks—and music shouldn’t be played at a coffeeshop anyway.

I’m in a good mood, which a quadruple mathematically compounds, and my sponsor has picked a table in the sun because he, despite twenty years expatriated from Seattle, still chooses to wear shorts in forty-degree weather. Chris is my sponsor’s name, either short for Christopher or Christian, I don’t know; but were it the latter, it would be ironic, seeing as Chris has made a Jefferson’s Bible out of the Big Book, striking all miracles from its pages and replacing words like ‘spiritual’ and ‘God’ with agnostic lexis more appropriate to his skeptical bent. He has twenty-one years, so his sobriety is of drinking age, long enough, he professes, that were science to one day accomplish a cure for alcoholism, say some magic pabulum or pill, he’d forego the cure and stick to his monastic ways. He even uses the word ‘monastic’, which, again, is ironic, as deism is something he finds of nuisance—blah blah blah, he’ll say, with a dismissive flip of the hand—but monastic it is, fitting as he lives a caustral life with his cats in a studio apartment, as long without a lover near as long as he’s been without a drink. But ‘we are not a glum lot’ the saying goes, and Chris always exudes the air of a man at ease with himself, down to the ever-crossed arms behind the head and a chin tipped upward just enough to reveal when he’s been lazy with the razor. I don’t get the sense that he is lonely; regardless, I know I’m good company for him. We’re both happy with the red pens as evidenced by our respective Big Books, and both examine rhetoric as through a jeweler’s loupe, happy sometimes with a particular turn of phrase, other times not, this discernment necessary when wading through a text that less than coquettishly flirts with dogma. Bill W., after all, was not exactly a shrinking violet in the grand posy of things.

Despite similarities, Chris and I differ in one marked way: we are very dissimilar drinkers, and it shows in the manner that I veritably osmose my Americano while he takes his cup like a gentleman–he could very well extend a pinkie—and you wouldn’t have guessed that he’s the binger of our lot, whereas I’m the marathon imbiber; you also wouldn’t have guessed, though, by our disparate ages, that I’ve got ten years residence on him when it comes to dwelling at the bottom of a glass (albeit with occasional changes of address). This accounts for his impressive lack of relapses, also the fact that his disease never had the chance to graduate with honors to the so-called middle stages.

“I quit after only four months of nightly drinking,” he informs me, “So I never experienced withdrawals,” and he says this last part with a hint of reckoning, as if remarking, ‘can’t say that I have’ in response to a casual query. Withdrawals, of course, are as casual as a cotillion, which is to say they’re not: they’re what happens when alcohol stops making you sick, but the lack of it does.

“I’ve had a bit of PAWS the past few days,” I offer, “Sucks.” Except for today, I’m sure to add, because it’s a refreshingly crisp day even with the sun shining, the coffee is strong, and the sidewalk-goers outside the café are like Christmas ornaments on the tree inside, wrapped in Yule-colored sweaters and still merry despite the holiday passed.

“You know, I never heard of that until recently,” Chris confesses, “Came up in a meeting the other week. Like I said, I never had anything resembling withdrawals. What’re they like?”

PAWS is post-acute withdrawal syndrome, which is essentially the body collecting its dues for past and injurious behavior. Symptoms can show up in Whack-a-Mole fashion, a carnival of ugly heads playing popcorn in the body, ping-pong: hypoglycemia, malnutritive disorder, cortical atrophy, autonomic nervous system dysfunction, brain amine depletion—the laundry list which, though syllables long, and originating in the corpus, can best be described in simple emotive terms.

“Ennui, Chris. I get irritable. Depressed.” It’s a serotonin thing. My blood chemistries are within normal limits—it’s testament to how well the body heals–and I am fresh-faced just two months abstinent. But my head still resides in Purgatory, and there’s no indulgence for that–not even the errant dollar bills in the meeting collection plates impress the angel who guards entrance to Limbo.

“Ah.” Chris nods and looks at me sympathetically from behind wire-rimmed glasses. He never has to adjust his spectacles, they seem soldered in place, while I’m constantly punching at my nose bridge as if tapping out Morse code to some unseen—or unseeing—third eye.

“At least I know what it is I’m going through,” I concede. “I mean, if I didn’t…” and I trail off, because this is where physiology and psychology get confused, there being the intermittent phenomena of craving; what if this means there’s an insufficient adaptation on my part, on a symbolic level, to an otherwise alcohol-free life. The mind despairs while meantime the body repairs. Suddenly all the needlepoint samplers on the walls of the Alano clubs make sense: ‘Easy Does It. First Things First.’ I take a swig of coffee, in the abstainer’s version of a heady quaff and—“Excuse me, Chris—you’ll get used to this”—I excuse myself to the restroom for what’s probably the first of many times. I mean, four shots of espresso.

Hannah’s still at work behind the counter and, being a Friday, the gran turismo that is the espresso machine is at an idle, Hannah instead tending to the accumulated utensils her work necessitates, the portofilters and compressore tamps, whisks and muddlers, and it occurs to me how alike her job is to that of a mixologist’s, the Torani syrups with their quick pour spouts the virgin equivalent of varied liqueurs, espresso being the antemeridian workhorse spirit. How it is we begin every morning already under the influence. Hannah is party to this, she looking very much like a cocktail herself, with hair dyed a curious shade of curacao, and tattoos like vintner stamps. She smiles again, my caffeine conspirator, and the café with its distressed wood is instantly less distressed as I pass through the back hallway toward the restrooms.

A picture of Billie Holiday hangs just inside the door above a small decorative stool. It’s an old photograph, when Lady Day was still young and singing in nightclubs, this before the state of New York took away her cabaret card for heroin possession in 1947. Ms. Holiday was an alcoholic, too, hers a painful life which, many have remarked, is obvious in her voice, disillusioned yet still childlike in its intonation. Sad as her life was—and it included rape and prostitution, needles, drink, and the slammer–the saddest thing, and I think about this every time I see the coffeeshop photograph, is that she had her record player taken away from her when she died. Billie Holiday, singer of arguably the most important song of the twentieth century—‘Strange Fruit’—died in a hospital room cleared of all flowers and all well-wishes cards, her record player too, because when she was admitted to Metropolitan for liver and heart problems, she had heroin on her person. Authorities placed her under arrest on her death bed, drug possession charges, and she left this world by way of empty room, with empty veins, most likely in withdrawal, with no music to guide her home. She had forty-four cents in the bank, and another 750 dollars strapped to her leg.

The photograph at the coffeeshop shows her smiling, famous magnolia blossom pinned to her hair, when she was alive and vital in the nightclubs. It was said that when Billie sang, men stopped drinking, something she herself never did. Her addictions sadly, robbed her of her freedoms: when her cabaret card got taken away, she was disallowed from singing at the NY jazz joints and, although she was to later grace Carnegie Hall, it was the club scene that was her life blood, not the lavish venues. When her literal life blood was coursing its last, Billie victim to the ascites and edemas of late-stage cirrhosis, her liver a diseased orange from years of acetaldehyde abuse, there was an armed guard posted outside of her hospital room—an armed guard!—to insure her arrest was lawfully overseen and that every last iota of freedom Billie had belonged to the state of New York.

“It’s freeing,” I tell Chris upon returning outside, this time to a table in the shade where the glare is less and the traffic more subdued, “Despite.”

“What is?”

“Well there are a few words that show up from time to time in literature. One, ironically, is ‘arrest.’”

“Opposite of freeing.”

“Right, but it comes up in two manners.” Chris readjusts himself, interested, which always entails readjusting his Big Book too, turning it sideways, else flipping it upside down. Rubber-banded to his book—always—is the recent copy of the NYT crossword. He, to my satisfaction does the puzzle correctly, by which I mean in pen.

“Listen,” and I point to me and him. “We got this shit.” And I pause for a second, because that’s actually hard to admit.

“We got this shit, right?” I dip my finger in my drink and it’s tepid. Fuck, I want it hot; fuck I want it alcoholic.

People walk by on the sidewalk and there’s the sudden sense that we are not in a safe space, but that, really, any place can be one.

“We got this shit, Chris. And it’s arresting for one.”

This cannot be exactly new to Chris, were we to play with words, or review criminal files from one score and a month ago; Chris had a DUI, and through the magic of deferment came to realize he was arrested before the handcuffs had even been slapped on his wrists. A few months in the Program is what it what it takes, sometimes, to see that images in the rear view are truer than they appear.

“We’re arrested. Done-zo. Ka-fucking-put. It’s the most maddening disease on the planet: our livers can’t process what we deliver, the body likes the side effect, and our brain—oh our brains,” and I talk out of mine in defiance of my own—“Says wrist-cuff me, please.

“Just, dammit.”

My coffee is cold.

I look up. “I’m arrested, Chris. Even when I’m not drunk, I’ll always be under the influence.”

“…”

“…”

“What’s the second definition?”

“What?”

“The second definition?”

“Oh. Um. 61 Across is ‘sortie’ by the way,” I tap his crossword, pausing.

Chris smirks. “Smart ass.”

“Would you rather me dumb? That’s what people already think. Allow me to quote: “If hundreds of experiences have shown him that one drink means another debacle with all its attendant suffering blah de blah blah” I floof the air in fake nonplus.

“You bothered by that, Cowboy?”

“Who fucking wouldn’t be?”

“What’s your second definition? You were saying.”

I draw my coat in, and can’t imagine Chris is not cold, but he’s not, and Christ he actually left his apartment today which had a minor fire leaving him without heat and he still wears shorts.

“Restare,” and I say it with all the vowels.

“What’s that mean?”

“One thing you’re gonna learn about me—besides the fact that I go to the bathroom like every five minutes,” I say, “Is that I look up every word in the dictionary to see where it comes from. Restare. Rearrange the letters. It’s ‘arrest.’ Means either ‘to remain’ or ‘to stop’.

“Ok.”

“Not OK, perse. We’ve already acknowledged we have exactly 100% retention with regard to this disease and–yea!” I tap Chris on his shirt-sleeved shouder, “We win! We retained everything we learned!”

“So that’s ‘remain’…”

“Yeah. And the second definition is ‘to stop.’”

I sit back in my chair and fiddle with my scarf. “Yea,” I pretend cheer, “We stop.” I twirl the end of my scarf like a wet rally flag.

“We stop.”

“Yup.”

My coffee cup is empty, but I lift it to my lips out of habit anyway.

“We stop,” I say superfluously, “We stop we stop we stop.”

“Cheers,” I salud, “Aaaaand fuck this shit.”

61 across is ‘sortie’. 52 down is ‘sari’. ’Sari’ appears on most crosswords and so do other words that don’t have their fit in everyday life, as if life weren’t a puzzle already. ‘Fuck this shit,’ by the way, does not satisfy 4 down nor 14 across.

It’ll get better,” Chris says, and he rearranges his Book again. “Listen, you could go home, be by yourself,” he passes his hands over an exaggeratedly sad face, signing rain with his fingers, “Or. There are alternatives. I mean,” and he scratches his throat–he missed a patch with the razor again—“This Higher Power thing: me engaging with this book, me talking to you. Oh, people say God all the time, blah blah blah, and I have to say, ‘Listen, ‘God’ can’t be used as a placeholder term, because it’s pretty specific. But engage with something—anything—outside yourself—by definition, it’s a higher power because it’s ‘one plus whatever’ equaling something greater than—” and Chris passes his hand over his face again—“Just this.”

“What if I’m a negative number?” I counter.

“I don’t think you believe that.”

“I was just testing your math.”

“Nihilism doesn’t become you.”

I flick my coffee cup. “And here I was, being so clever.”

“You ok?”

“Oh, nothing. Pink cloud is gone.”

The door to the café opens and the smell of the Christmas tree drafts outward; where we are sitting, it is in view of a liquor store and a beer bar under construction. I could so easily seed my cloud, were I normal, but—no—I flick my coffee cup again. Hannah comes out to sweep.

“There’s this quote,” I clear my throat.

Chris has cats to tend to; he has pictures he’s sent me, and they are white little slips of things that like his feet, the fact of which entertains him, even today when he threw his laptop against the wall because an electrical fire scorched his kitchen and fucked up half his studio; and he’s at odds with his landlord about it, he could seed his cloud too, but he’s got twenty-one years and somehow—somehow—he’s found one+one all these lonely days.

“There’s this quote, Chris. ‘Grass grows by the inch, dies by the foot.’

I pause when packing my bag.

“There’s no reason I actually said that, Chris,” reconsidering. “Sorry.”

I scratch my head.

He says: “Sure there wasn’t”, smiling.

This is a very critical time in his life. He looks to you for courage, hope, comfort and guidance. He fears the past. He is uncertain of the future. And he is in a frame of mind that the least neglect on your part will fill him with resentment and self-pity. You have in your hands the most valuable property in the world — the future of a fellow man. Treat his life as carefully as you would your own. You are literally responsible for his life.

–Dr. Bob, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, 1938

Hannah pours the coffee again, and I’m not telling Chris, but I’ve relapsed. I’ve ordered a sandwich—I always hold the lettuce, count the avocado as my greens—and the awning is dripping in that just post-rain way, and I’m not telling him. Which is anathemic to having a sponsor, a therapist, too, actually, this fact of not telling. But I couldn’t.

At the meeting, I lead, and offer up my sort of truth.

“My name is Thom. I’m your alcoholic leader for today,” in case you wanted to know how meetings start, and they end with the Serenity Prayer, which is better than the Lords’ one, really, and I begin.

I have a book with me, it is not AA-approved but what if that book were my Higher
Power I can sneak it in: “It’s called ‘A Trip to Echo Spring.’ Echo Spring is reference to Tennessee Williams, ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ and it means taking a trip to the liquor cabinet to ‘get the click.’ All my heroes were alcoholics or suicides, or both. I continue:

“My story is unremarkable. I’m a writer, I should have a fascinating drunkalogue.” A drunkalogue is that amusing term AA has come up with to replace a fisherman’s ‘Big Fish’ story. As in, “I started drinking in Florida; I came to in a Chicago hotel room—luggage intact, thankfully—but,” cue David Byrne, “How did I get here?”

“Yet I don’t,” I admit, to my lack of drunkalogue, “I don’t have one. I drank after-hours, on the couch, and bloody hell confessed everything on paper, my ambivalences about life. Depression: yes. Anxiety: yes. A child with special needs: check. It was REAL. And people responded to that.

 So that fueled my trips to Echo Spring, inevitably. Click, click, this is real. Click, click again to Echo Spring. Except I never confessed to my drinking, which was the unreal part. Alcohol is cunning, baffling, and powerful; and within its clutches, for those with the disease, one is grandiose, wings fucking out. Baby, we’ll be fine; I’ll charge my pockets with quarters, get a swig, and confess without having to thumb a Christ. Truth, Baby, truth! En vino fucking veritas!

Except what was once ‘En vino veritas’ now has to be ‘En veritas veritas’, no ABV allowed.

Thing is, in these Rooms, I DO confess my drinking now. I confess: it’s a goddamn bitch to be anhedonic, that you can’t feel when you stop and the click doesn’t happen and you can’t take a trip to Echo Spring and that you’re stuck, you’re fucking stuck in the morass of an incurable disease, this Styxian River, and all you’ve got to get to the other side is the 100% step, the first step: I’m an alcoholic. I’m an alcoholic I’m unmanageable but need to be.

I wrote about the last time I stopped and how I took a hike with my son: I said “You’re the love of my life.” I also wrote how I didn’t feel a God. Damn. Thing.

Berryman felt the wind in his beard the last time and threw himself off a bridge.

Hemingway went for a last fateful pigeon-shoot. Said he knew he would go like his father.

Let’s not talk about Zooey Fitzgerald and how she went, or F. Scott’s wet brain letters about the madness of insomnia.

Tennessee Williams choked on the cap of an eye-dropper, paranoid till the day he died.

Lady Day died veritably bankrupt sans music.

“I had a rough day yesterday,” I venture, “Maybe we can talk about ambivalence or something, or PAWS or just getting through.”

 You should be able to judge if a man is sincere in his desire to quit drinking. Use this judgment. Otherwise you will find yourself needlessly bumping your head into a stone wall and wondering why your “babies” don’t stay sober. Remember your own experience. You can remember many times when you would have done anything to get over that awful alcoholic sickness, although you had no desire in the world to give up drinking for good. It doesn’t take much good health to inspire an alcoholic to go back and repeat the acts that made him sick. Men who have had pneumonia don’t often wittingly expose themselves a second time. But an alcoholic will deliberately get sick over and over again with brief interludes of good health.

–Dr. Bob Smith, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, 1938

“Well,” Chris says, “First of all my name is Chris and I’m an alcoholic.” Chris is shaven today and, because the Alano club provides it, is eating popcorn. He has his ever-present Coca-Cola to complete this illusion that we are somehow in a movie theater, when in fact we are in The Rooms. I get a preemptory stirring that he is certainly dry, but not necessarily sober. The glasses soldered on his face suddenly seem plastered on, in the way that we are not plastered.

“I’m Chris and I’m an alcoholic and well WELL.”

DFW hanged himself; Sylvia Plath toasted her head; Bukowski, Amy Winehouse, Mickey Mantle, Ginsy, Kerouac, Veronica Lake.

“So,” Chris begins, and he outlays a palm as if he were he suddenly Episcopalian. He’s annoyingly eating popcorn.

“What if,” he pontificates, “Your cousin, perse, were to drown in two inches of water—drunk, I might add—“Chris shuffles his bag of kernels—“While deciding to be sober.” He smashes a few corns. “Let’s have a pizza.”

“What if,” he furthers, mouth full, “Your BROTHER stabs his girlfriend in the neck with a pencil while high. Let’s,” he flourishes, “Have a pizza.”

“What if your car breaks down, or gets wrecked, or let’s say you have an apartment fire. Pizza. Let’s have a pizza, Thom.”

And he says my name like an epithet and I’m taken aback and want to say ‘sorry’ when really ‘fuck you’ should pass my lips freely, like an exorcised spirit, but I get quiet and instead look at the clock. Rules are, there is no ‘crosstalk.’ I have been violated, and I have forty more minutes to lead. I adjust my jeans, tug at the unfilled crotch of my pants. People are rolling their eyes and cell-phones have surreptitiously been drawn. I black out, as if were still on substance; forty minutes later, after shares, Chris texts. I’m still at the table’s head, but sneak a look at my phone: “I’ve left,” Chris snorts, “I’m so over people misinterpreting what I had to say.” I look back to where Chris was sitting; he’s still there, eating popcorn.

The awning water is dripping on my sandwich, and there is the truth of my relapse, the truth of rain water on my sourdough. The weather is still crisp, like the absent lettuce on my sandwich, and Chris naturally wears shorts that expose his knees to the cold; we have coffee, which is the prescribed drug of AA. I smoke, he does not. The chairs are of the utilitarian variety, wire, and the simulacra of café seats from Rue de Montmarte, or that VanGogh painting of a coffeeshop. AA prescribes coffee and sweets because it was written in 1939, and doesn’t understand hypoglycemia. I didn’t relapse bad, so I’m avocado instead of agua dulce.

I don’t want to be by myself; I believe in Chris’ higher power, that to ‘restare’ one must not, essentially, be alone. One must not deal with these things by themselves. But we’re not having pizza. Fuck that.

NOW YOU ARE ALONE. When you go to the hospital with typhoid fever your one thought is to be cured. When you go to the hospital as a chronic alcoholic your only thought should be to conquer a disease that is just as deadly if not so quick to kill. And rest assured that the disease is deadly. The mental hospitals are filled with chronic alcoholics. The vital statistics files in every community are filled with deaths due to acute alcoholism.

–Dr. Bob Smith, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, 1938

“So.”

“So.”

“I’ve been thinking of ‘The Doctor’s Opinion’, I say. “We doctors have realized for a long time that some form of moral psychology was of urgent importance to alcoholics—but its application presented difficulties beyond our comprehension.”

Chris has a copy of the Big Book wherein he has scratched out ‘moral’ and replaced the word with ‘ethical’. Tomato, to-mah-to. He leans back in his seat and touches two hands to either side of his chest. He scratches his nose.

“The appendix to the Big Book talks about this being an educational experience, and not—blah blah blah—God-conscious whatever.

I flip to the appendix. “Educative, Chris. It says: ‘educative’.

‘Educational’ and ‘educative’ are different, though incredibly similar. Fools even the thesaurus.

I decide to not tell him.

There are confessional booths and they are dark, with veiled screens, slatted doors, etc. The priests have robes which are black, I guess, because they absorb the sins like sun-rays and are warmed by the attention.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“Go ahead.”

“I was really mad, Father, and depressed. I’m not sure what’s going on. I mean, I got my 60-day chip.”

“Go on.”

“I drank. I felt something again.”

“OK.”

“I wanted to feel.”

“…”

“Even though I know the grass dies by the foot, I know.”

“What…did your sponsor say?”

“He recommended pizza.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t fucking either, Father. Excuse my language.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Not entirely.”

“Well…”

“Thank you, Father. Hey Father?—

“Simon was the listener in the Bible and then there’s all that simony shit. What happens when Simon just doesn’t help with the cross?”

“My son…”

“Sorry—just angry, Father. He did, though, just have one job.”

Lady Day has this song called ‘Riffin the Scotch’ about jumping the frying pan into the fire, oh Lady, and your scotch; what pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization that you leapt into the fire, and what must have it been like on that hospital bed slipping immortal asking for a listen please, both to your absent turntable and to the person who never, properly, said, “I’m right here, baby. I’m right here.

Yes?”

Survivor’s Guilt and the Trenches

“Hey, Thom—whassup?”

I am in line for birria and a quesadilla at Pepe’s pop-up, and I at first don’t recognize him. It’s George, who was a steadfast attendee of meetings up in Hillcrest and South Park. Last time I saw him, he was fresh-faced and leading a girl by the hand, visibly happy.

“You’re close to a year, aren’t you?” he asked then. I don’t talk about days, don’t count days. I put an existential foot down. But I said, “Yes”, which was true.

Let me describe: George was always the one to respond to my shares. He was a back-alley drinker and juicer, smoking meth and generally fucking up his life. I talked about, as DFW said, do you suffer the fire or jump to your death? Powerful statement. George was hopeful: he said, “I jump, but with a bungee cord.” I liked him instantly.

He was so healthy. For a while. When I saw him at Pepe’s he remarked my shirt: Baron’s Marketplace, where I know work and sup up the stories from multitudes of customers and employees.

“You doing good?” he asked. I responded the affirmative. 

“How are you, George?” and he paused before responding: “I’ve been worse, but am doing better.”

Truth is, he looked like shit. Stringy hair, gaunt cheekbones, a noticeable loss of weight. If it makes sense, I instantly felt survivor’s guilt. Trenches have been dug for us, which could either be mass graves or fighting trenches. He looked like he had died in the crossfire.

“Good to see you, George,” I said though it was tough for me to say.

Went to a funeral today. I was heavy-hearted. One, because it was a remembrance of my best friend’s father—Alzheimer’s and cancer—and two, because I couldn’t stop thinking about George. The Lyft appropriately lifted my spirits (as my boss sometimes rolls his eyes and says: you’re ‘Talker, talker Betty Crocker); I chatted with Robert for the half-hour drive about Jimi, strats vs. Stratocasters, and how hard it is to play ‘Landslide’ on the guitar. He was security for Hall and Oates, and once escorted a notable MTV VJ past the leering truckdrivers on tour. “The truckdrivers were gonna kick my ass on the way back cuz she was strutting her stuff while holding my arm, but it was worth it”)

I arrived at the church, and—wouldn’t you know it—the dress shoes I was wearing split. BOTH soles came off. Guess I hadn’t worn them in some time. So I Mr. BoJangled it into the sanctuary, sock toes sticking out. At least I had a neat tie, and a four button blazer, and hair done up, though windblown from the cab drive.

I deeply hugged my friend as it has been a few weeks and I haven’t seen her since her dad passed. We have been friends since elementary school, and she was wearing classy spectacles and a lovely dress, not black. H

Her son, T, was the first one to greet me, flying into my hip, with a “Hello, Thom!” (He asked his mom later if that was okay, becuz COVID and he’s so tender to everyone’s feelings)

Of course, Honey” his mom said, smiling. I met some of my friend’s friends, all from our alma mater. I met a veteran—Purple Hearted—and we talked stories about Vietnam, my dad having been there as an OR Tech. He proudly wore a veteran t-shirt, in which I thanked him for his service. He also wore a ball cap that said ‘Purple Heart.’

Every now and then we deserve a medal for just surviving, like George, but I greatly respect anyone that suffers a bullet in well-intended and furious service. I liked this guy. He had a Jerry Garcia beard and was proud proud of his daughter. As with the Lyft driver, I liked him instantly.

Also hugged Tammey’s other child, nigh eighteen who was happy to see me. I think of him as a third child, maybe a she maybe a he. But s/he and I talked before the service began. I wanted to sit next to my friend and hold her hand, but that would have been a usurpation of family, despite how difficult her fam can be. I hid in a corner, cried at the moments my friend and kids spoke their pieces, then took an Irish exit out. (I’m allowed; Im comlauhder)

On the Lyft back, I chatted with the driver (remember: ‘Talker, Talker Betty Crocker), and we shared stories of road rage peppered with a lot of language and a healthy dose of laughter. It was antidote. I thought about Tammey, about George, and in closing the door and waving goodbye to my Lyfter, I simply said: “I’m gonna get a goddamn taco.” Which I did. And all for now is well.

What My Tattoo Means (Amor fati)

“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”

–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

 

I have Amor fati tattooed on my left wrist, prefaced with a semi-colon. The left wrist is where I once tested a chef’s knife to see what it would take to cut the ulnar artery. The nurses have always loved my veins; they are prominent and quick to bleed.

I was left with a scar for a few months, which has since faded. A semi-colon replaces the knife-mark. The semi-colon tattoo is reserved for those who have had suicidal ideation, or indeed, have attempted to quit their life altogether.

Two things stayed the blade. I thought of Ernest Hemingway, who eerily said, ‘I will go like my father’, he a son of a suicide. Both Hemingway and his father ultimately died during “hunting accidents”, the final flutter of dove wings and a gun’s report, but there was that one time Ernest tried to drown himself off the back of his beloved Pilar. He sank a few fathoms before thinking of his brood, and he exclaimed, “My sons!” through a mouthful of expired air. He swam to surface and gasped mightily, to live for a few more years.

Second, I thought of the Golden Gate jumper who, in a millionth of a chance, hit the water at the right angle so that his organs were saved rupture, and his lungs allowed the fortitude to breathe again. He speaks now against suicide on high school and college campuses. He is unfailingly asked, “What was your thought as you leapt?” He replies soberly: “This is a mistake.” I imagine him falling at 200mph with that his purported last thought.

I didn’t want to bleed out, close my eyes to the world weakened by a broken artery with a feeling of ultimate regret. I didn’t want to leave my sons with a father-sized hole. I chose to live.

I choose to live, amor fati.

From Marcus Aurelius: “A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.”

From Epicectus: “Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.”

From Friedrich Nietsche: “That one wants nothing to be different, not forwards, not backwards, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it…but love it.”

When the knife blade sliced into my arm, I was sure I was done living, that I couldn’t live with or without alcohol, that I was at the jumping-off point. I bled, but I didn’t bleed out. I wrapped my wrist: “This is a mistake.” I calmly stopped the flow and let the wound see air. I would later be in a hospital for a dual diagnosis of depression and alcoholism, receiving the help I desperately needed.

I am a migrating moon, a panoply of phases that come and go. “This, too, shall pass” is wisdom for my nomadic self, tugged as it is by the pulls of my head and heart. Even the New Moon, however invisible, is beautiful, as much as is the Full Moon; I am cycles of life and in my mortal cycling, love every minute.

I did a gratitude exercise: I visited my grandfathers in their respective mauseleum crypts, knelt down before the names on the walls, and whispered my thanks to them both, for my alcoholism. For my manic-depression. Through the passing of their genes, I am who I am, and having the wherewithal to accept what it is that afflicts me makes me a more intact human being. Intact comes from the French, integrite. Whole.

Amor fati. May you love your fate, too.

 

How Phil Got Sober

Spooty lost a tooth that day, and it was in the back of Phil’s head. A black Lincoln, leather interior, T-boned in an intersection. It wasn’t Phil’s fault, but he was drunk, so he’s the one that went off to jail. Spooty was a cocker-spaniel/dachshund mix, long-hair black and white, and she was thrown from the backseat into Phil’s skull and dislodged a canine. Phil was wearing a Nike T-shirt, swimming trunks, and flip-flops and was set on picking his wife up from work. Pilloried, he never made it, and Tammey bought pizzas that night; she cut the pizza slices in half, carefully, and stored them in the rented freezer. She would have pepperoni and sausage, September 7, 2001.

“Do you want to stay in my house?” Tammey’s friend asked, while Phil langoured in prison—a six month sentence—and Tammey agreed. This was in Ypsilanti, MI when the factories were closing, and dilapidation was relevant. The house was terrible, but Tammey had pizza.

On a phone call, trying to settle legal matters, Tammey was cut off because that’s when the second plane hit.

Phil had to move off of general pop because he was mouthy, a wordsmith and wordy. His fellow inmates couldn’t figure out his insults, in return threatened to just kill him instead.

Ypsilanti was a town populated by Muslims, and the mood was tense. Hate everywhere and accusing eyes. Tammey lived in a slum-house and when Phil kept calling her for cigarettes, dry-drunk, and demanding monies, Tammey just eventually unplugged the phone. Money had run out.

Spooty was ok, but minus a tooth.

Spartacus: And what does one dream of when he’s no longer a champion?

Phil was released when it was snowing, Christmas Eve, committed to a 90+90, and Tammey picked him up outside the walls; Phil was released in the clothes he came in.

1. A Nike t-shirt, hot pink.
2. Swimming trunks, drawstrung.
3. Flip-flops, black.

They ate at the Coffee Manor for X-mas Eve, and it was alright.

Mania

Venus is hanging off the crazy moon like a counterweight on a cuckoo clock; my sobriety is not perfect and I blame it on the stars.

This persistent dot, Venus, just hangs there, intense, and it is the sky I look at mostly, and not the ground.

4:45 in the morning, and I am out walking. Like Venus, I am a bright and shining pixel, alive and refusing to calm  down though the sun is due soon and I have only slept an hour. The plants are alive and the morning blossoms have not yet unfolded; I pass by a bookstore and the sign in the window says, ‘No Worries!’

And I have none, none at this moment, though I should; my sobriety is not perfect and I blame it on the stars.

There is a typewriter in the window of the curio shop, the keys are green, and it is the most gorgeous piece of machinery I’ve seen, so much potential and I am drawn to take a picture, this beautiful machine; I am manic, and I know it. Struck through with Stendahl’s, frightened by beauty.

Progress, not perfection, I assuage myself. Progress, and the moon proceeds to wane and Venus winks out as the sun rises.

I find a bin of free records outside a record shop, and I find a 78, the A side being ‘Girl of My Dreams’, the ‘B’ side ‘Man Comes Around’; it is too perfect and I I tuck a rose into the sleeve and promise to give it to Jenn. For I am coming around, and she is my dream girl. Coincidence is just God’s way of remaining anonymous.

I buy a cup of coffee from Jerry who, incongruously, wears a terrycloth kerchief about the mouth.

“You sick, Jerry?” I ask as he rings my brew, and he assure me he doesn’t wish this on anyone.  He is a good man, bivouacking himself among the chili dogs and cigarettes, and hiding behind a mask.

My sobriety is not perfect; I blame it on the stars.

“Thanks, Jerry,” and I sip coffee beneath the moon, which is cuckoo and half shining. There are stars, but they disappear with the sun, now rising, and I walk home past the canyon exchange and the trash cans I once memorized. Pissing in the dirt, tossing cans; my sobriquet could be etiquette, as in lack thereof, and I walk the mile home.

No Simony; But Simon

Hannah leans over the counter and, proffering a demitasse, whispers conspiratorially: “Do you want an extra shot?” And not one to pass up on an opportunity for café collusion, the barista after all being a sweetheart and why not four shots of espresso in my Americano, I raise an eyebrow and say, “Certainly.” I drink coffee alcoholically these days as is, so Hannah is unknowingly being an enabler, but we enjoy a harmless relationship, me and the barista, and the coffeeshop is better a Friday hang than what could be a hangover. Hannah winks and places a finger to her lips while she pours the espresso. My sponsor waits outside.

The café still smells of Christmas, a sparsely decorated pine in the corner, and the gathered patrons are either stuck on 52 across or deleting e-mails. No music plays—this is not Starbucks—and music shouldn’t be played at a coffeeshop anyway, James Taylor’s Greatest Hits being reserved for those simulacra of cafes, where Baudrillard could scribble busily in the corner.

I’m in a good mood, which a quadruple mathematically compounds, and my sponsor has picked a table in the sun because he, despite twenty years expatriated from Seattle, still chooses to wear shorts in forty-degree weather. Chris is my sponsor’s name, either short for Christopher or Christian, I don’t know; but were it the latter, it would be ironic, seeing as Chris has made a Jefferson’s Bible out of the Big Book, striking all miracles from its pages and replacing words like ‘spiritual’ and ‘God’ with agnostic lexis more appropriate to his skeptical bent. He has twenty-one years, so his sobriety is of drinking age, long enough, he professes, that were science to one day accomplish a cure for alcoholism, say some magic pabulum or pill, he’d forego the cure and stick to his monastic ways. He even uses the word ‘monastic’, which, again, is ironic, as deism is something he finds of nuisance—blah blah blah, he’ll say, with a dismissive flip of the hand—but monastic it is, fitting as he lives a caustral life with his cats in a studio apartment, as long without a lover near as long as he’s been without a drink. But ‘we are not a glum lot’ the saying goes, and Chris always exudes the air of a man at ease with himself, down to the ever-crossed arms behind the head and a chin tipped upward just enough to reveal when he’s been lazy with the razor. I don’t get the sense that he is lonely; regardless, I know I’m good company for him. We’re both happy with the red pens as evidenced by our respective Big Books, and both examine rhetoric as through a jeweler’s loupe, happy sometimes with a particular turn of phrase, other times not, this discernment necessary when wading through a text that less than coquettishly flirts with dogma. Bill W., after all, was not exactly a shrinking violet in the grand posy of things.

Despite similarities, Chris and I differ in one marked way: we are very dissimilar drinkers, and it shows in the manner that I veritably osmose my Americano while he takes his cup like a gentleman–he could very well extend a pinkie—and you wouldn’t have guessed that he’s the binger of our lot, whereas I’m the marathon imbiber; you also wouldn’t have guessed, though, by our disparate ages, that I’ve got ten years residence on him when it comes to dwelling at the bottom of a glass (albeit with occasional changes of address). This accounts for his impressive lack of relapses, also the fact that his disease never had the chance to graduate with honors to the so-called middle stages.

“I quit after only four months of nightly drinking,” he informs me, “So I never experienced withdrawals,” and he says this last part with a hint of reckoning, as if remarking, ‘can’t say that I have’ in response to a casual query. Withdrawals, of course, are as casual as a cotillion, which is to say they’re not: they’re what happens when alcohol stops making you sick, but the lack of it does.

“I’ve had a bit of PAWS the past few days,” I offer, “Sucks.” Except for today, I’m sure to add, because it’s a refreshingly crisp day even with the sun shining, the coffee is strong, and the sidewalk-goers outside the café are like Christmas ornaments on the tree inside, wrapped in Yule-colored sweaters and still merry despite the holiday passed.

“You know, I never heard of that until recently,” Chris confesses, “Came up in a meeting the other week. Like I said, I never had anything resembling withdrawals. What’re they like?”

PAWS is post-acute withdrawal syndrome, which is essentially the body collecting its dues for past and injurious behavior. Symptoms can show up in Whack-a-Mole fashion, a carnival of ugly heads playing popcorn in the body, ping-pong: hypoglycemia, malnutritive disorder, cortical atrophy, autonomic nervous system dysfunction, brain amine depletion—the laundry list which, though syllables long, and originating in the corpus, can best be described in simple emotive terms.

“Ennui, Chris. I get irritable. Depressed.” It’s a serotonin thing. My blood chemistries are within normal limits—it’s testament to how well the body heals–and I am fresh-faced just two months abstinent. But my head still resides in Purgatory, and there’s no simony for that–not even the errant dollar bills in the meeting collection plates impress the angel who guards entrance to Limbo.

“Ah.” Chris nods and looks at me sympathetically from behind wire-rimmed glasses. He never has to adjust his spectacles, they seem soldered in place, while I’m constantly punching at my nose bridge as if tapping out Morse code to some unseen—or unseeing—third eye.

“At least I know what it is I’m going through,” I concede. “I mean, if I didn’t…” and I trail off, because this is where physiology and psychology get confused, there being the intermittent phenomena of craving; what if this means there’s an insufficient adaptation on my part, on a symbolic level, to an otherwise alcohol-free life. The mind despairs while meantime the body repairs. Suddenly all the needlepoint samplers on the walls of the Alano clubs make sense: ‘Easy Does It. First Things First.’ I take a swig of coffee, in the abstainer’s version of a heady quaff and—“Excuse me, Chris—you’ll get used to this”—I excuse myself to the restroom for what’s probably the first of many times. I mean, four shots of espresso.

Hannah’s still at work behind the counter and, being a Friday, the gran turismo that is the espresso machine is at an idle, Hannah instead tending to the accumulated utensils her work necessitates, the portofilters and compressore tamps, whisks and muddlers, and it occurs to me how alike her job is to that of a mixologist’s, the Torani syrups with their quick pour spouts the virgin equivalent of varied liqueurs, espresso being the antemeridian workhorse spirit. How it is we begin every morning already under the influence. Hannah is party to this, she looking very much like a cocktail herself, with hair dyed a curious shade of curacao, and tattoos like vintner stamps. She smiles again, my caffeine conspirator, and the café with its distressed wood is instantly less distressed as I pass through the back hallway toward the restrooms.

A picture of Billie Holiday hangs just inside the door above a small decorative stool. It’s an old photograph, when Lady Day was still young and singing in nightclubs, this before the state of New York took away her cabaret card for heroin possession in 1947. Ms. Holiday was an alcoholic, too, hers a painful life which, many have remarked, is obvious in her voice, disillusioned yet still childlike in its intonation. Sad as her life was—and it included rape and prostitution, needles, drink, and the slammer–the saddest thing, and I think about this every time I see the coffeeshop photograph, is that she had her record player taken away from her when she died. Billie Holiday, singer of arguably the most important song of the twentieth century—‘Strange Fruit’—died in a hospital room cleared of all flowers and all well-wishes cards, her record player too, because when she was admitted to Metropolitan for liver and heart problems, she had heroin on her person. Authorities placed her under arrest on her death bed, drug possession charges, and she left this world by way of empty room, with empty veins, most likely in withdrawal, with no music to guide her home. She had forty-four cents in the bank, and another 750 dollars strapped to her leg.

The photograph at the coffeeshop shows her smiling, famous magnolia blossom pinned to her hair, when she was alive and vital in the nightclubs. It was said that when Billie sang, men stopped drinking, something she herself never did. Her addictions sadly, robbed her of her freedoms: when her cabaret card got taken away, she was disallowed from singing at the NY jazz joints and, although she was to later grace Carnegie Hall, it was the club scene that was her life blood, not the lavish venues. When her literal life blood was coursing its last, Billie victim to the ascites and edemas of late-stage cirrhosis, her liver a diseased orange from years of acetaldehyde abuse, there was an armed guard posted outside of her hospital room—an armed guard!—to insure her arrest was lawfully overseen and that every last iota of freedom Billie had belonged to the state of New York.

“It’s freeing,” I tell Chris upon returning outside, this time to a table in the shade where the glare is less and the traffic more subdued, “Despite.”

“What is?”

“Well there are a few words that show up from time to time in literature. One, ironically, is ‘arrest.’”

“Opposite of freeing.”

“Right, but it comes up in two manners.” Chris readjusts himself, interested, which always entails readjusting his Big Book too, turning it sideways, else flipping it upside down. Rubber-banded to his book—always—is the recent copy of the NYT crossword. He, to my satisfaction does the puzzle correctly, by which I mean in pen.

“Listen,” and I point to me and him. “We got this shit.” And I pause for a second, because that’s actually hard to admit.

“We got this shit, right?” I dip my finger in my drink and it’s tepid. Fuck, I want it hot; fuck I want it alcoholic.

People walk by on the sidewalk and there’s the sudden sense that we are not in a safe space, but that, really, any place can be one.

“We got this shit, Chris. And it’s arresting for one.”

This cannot be exactly new to Chris, were we to play with words, or review criminal files from one score and a month ago; Chris had a DUI, and through the magic of deferment came to realize he was arrested before the handcuffs had even been slapped on his wrists. A few months in the Program is what it what it takes, sometimes, to see that images in the rear view are truer than they appear.

“We’re arrested. Done-zo. Ka-fucking-put. It’s the most maddening disease on the planet: our livers can’t process what we deliver, the body likes the side effect, and our brain—oh our brains,” and I talk out of mine in defiance of my own—“Says wrist-cuff me, please.

“Just, dammit.”

My coffee is cold.

I look up. “I’m arrested, Chris. Even when I’m not drunk, I’ll always be under the influence.”

“…”

“…”

“What’s the second definition?”

“What?”

“The second definition?”

“Oh. Um. 61 Across is ‘sortie’ by the way,” I tap his crossword, pausing.

Chris smirks. “Smart ass.”

“Would you rather me dumb? That’s what people already think. Allow me to quote: “If hundreds of experiences have shown him that one drink means another debacle with all its attendant suffering blah de blah blah” I floof the air in fake nonplus.

“You bothered by that, Cowboy?”

“Who fucking wouldn’t be?”

“What’s your second definition? You were saying.”

I draw my coat in, and can’t imagine Chris is not cold, but he’s not, and Christ he actually left his apartment today which had a minor fire leaving him without heat and he still wears shorts.

“Restare,” and I say it with all the vowels.

“What’s that mean?”

“One thing you’re gonna learn about me—besides the fact that I go to the bathroom like every five minutes,” I say, “Is that I look up every word in the dictionary to see where it comes from. Restare. Rearrange the letters. It’s ‘arrest.’ Means either ‘to remain’ or ‘to stop’.

“Ok.”

“Not OK, perse. We’ve already acknowledged we have exactly 100% retention with regard to this disease and–yea!” I tap Chris on his shirt-sleeved shouder, “We win! We retained everything we learned!”

“So that’s ‘remain’…”

“Yeah. And the second definition is ‘to stop.’”

I sit back in my chair and fiddle with my scarf. “Yea,” I pretend cheer, “We stop.” I twirl the end of my scarf like a wet rally flag.

“We stop.”

“Yup.”

My coffee cup is empty, but I lift it to my lips out of habit anyway.

“We stop,” I say superfluously, “We stop we stop we stop.”

“Cheers,” I salud, “Aaaaand fuck this shit.”

61 across is ‘sortie’. 52 down is ‘sari’. ’Sari’ appears on most crosswords and so do other words that don’t have their fit in everyday life, as if life weren’t a puzzle already. ‘Fuck this shit,’ by the way, does not satisfy 4 down nor 14 across.

“It’ll get better,” Chris says, and he rearranges his Book again. “Listen, you could go home, be by yourself,” he passes his hands over an exaggeratedly sad face, signing rain with his fingers, “Or. There are alternatives. I mean,” and he scratches his throat–he missed a patch with the razor again—“This Higher Power thing: me engaging with this book, me talking to you. Oh, people say God all the time, blah blah blah, and I have to say, ‘Listen, ‘God’ can’t be used as a placeholder term, because it’s pretty specific. But engage with something—anything—outside yourself—by definition, it’s a higher power because it’s ‘one plus whatever’ equaling something greater than—” and Chris passes his hand over his face again—“Just this.”

“What if I’m a negative number?” I counter.

“I don’t think you believe that.”

“I was just testing your math.”

“Nihilism doesn’t become you.”

I flick my coffee cup. “And here I was, being so clever.”

“You ok?”

“Oh, nothing. Pink cloud is gone.”

The door to the café opens and the smell of the Christmas tree drafts outward; where we are sitting, it is in view of a liquor store and a beer bar under construction. I could so easily seed my cloud, were I normal, but—no—I flick my coffee cup again. Hannah comes out to sweep.

“There’s this quote,” I clear my throat.

Chris has cats to tend to; he has pictures he’s sent me, and they are white little slips of things that like his feet, the fact of which entertains him, even today when he threw his laptop against the wall because an electrical fire scorched his kitchen and fucked up half his studio; and he’s at odds with his landlord about it, he could seed his cloud too, but he’s got twenty-one years and somehow—somehow—he’s found one+one all these lonely days.

“There’s this quote, Chris. ‘Grass grows by the inch, dies by the foot.’

I pause when packing my bag.

“There’s no reason I actually said that, Chris,” reconsidering. “Sorry.”

I scratch my head.

He says: “Sure there wasn’t”, smiling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sing This With Me, This is Forty

Some days, it’d take me an airplane to get off the ground, though I’m not usually lying down. I just feel prone, as if my body’s debated the ground and found its position at once immutable and irrelevant, the ground fast becoming something of metaphor instead: a nethermost, a bellwether, some other fancy word that hints at bottom. Regardless, my two feet are still of rough employ, and my head still meets the sky at the same six-foot mark, so I’m upright at least, standing outside the Twiggs’ coffee shop in University Heights, five p.m. on a Sunday evening.

I get bored sometimes, and this is the main distraction, ladies and gentlemen, of my particular three-ring circus. Would that the boredom cease itself without me having to act its opposite, that would be ideal—just indolent.  I, after all, tell Cayde that ‘only boring people are bored’, so to continue as such, to languor in ennui, makes me not only terrifically dull right now, but also resolutely lazy. I should listen to myself. Stop being boring.

The intersection outside of Twiggs, I remark while cradling an Americano, is far from being boring. I take a seat at one of the patio tables to watch the simple crossway present itself as a Bermuda Triangle of sorts, one of its eerie if ephemeral powers being the ability to erase the right of way from all users’ minds. Sedans start and stop, horns blare (generally two seconds longer than is necessary), pedestrians leap back on curbs with middle fingers on point. There is a bar across the street, but its doors aren’t open yet for business, so imbibition can’t be blamed for this otherwise normal intersection gone punch-drunk. It’s just a University Heights phenomenon, a neighborhood cock-up on constant repeat, and I watch while my coffee cools and while the neighbors to the left of me discuss Norman Mailer, a white dog sitting resignedly at their feet.

It’s 5 p.m., which means most the morning papers are now overflowing the recycling cans. It’s enough to make me fidgety again, as if the news has expired for the day and that it’s now the unexceptional slouch toward bedtime, nothing more to report while the presses sleep. This of course is nonsense, as news is always happening and while a billion screens phosphor with electronic updates. The day just sometimes seems neatly divided, like a smartly creased morning tribune, there being daybreak done up in newsprint and evening set marked by its discard.

I open my laptop—the intersection has since corrected to an agreeable flow—and scan my feed. There are updates from two hours ago, twenty minutes ago, iterations and imprints of the morning’s headlines. The only important news is old news: that Bertolt Brecht has once again been proven correct when he said, “What times are these when a talk of trees is almost a crime because it implies silence about so many horrors?”   But I read, regardless—my cup of coffee is at a perfect temperature—and assign boredom away to be manhandled by the Fourth Estate gangsters, my guys in the press pool.

The news unreported: it’s been forty days since I’ve had a drink. I glance up from my laptop and catch sight of that bar under construction again. It’s going to be a New Zealand themed eatery with a selection of taps, and were I not presently sober, I’d be excited about its opening. Now it’s just another establishment with questionable parking, a door I won’t frequent, and an unrung tab for unpoured drinks.

Forty days is automatically biblical. For forty days, it rained while Noah’s Ark weathered the Flood. For forty days, Moses’ spies surveyed the Land of Milk and Honey for its eventual conquest by the Israelites. For forty days, Jesus walked the desert before the Ascension. And, most relevant to the recovering alcoholic, for forty days Jesus was tempted in the Wilderness.

The evocation of forty appears in Deuteronomy as well, when after forty years in the desert, Moses reiterates God’s code for his chosen people before they are to enter into the Promised Land. Moses, of course, isn’t allowed entrance—that’s another story involving drawing water from a stone and Moses showing a rare display of intemperance in the face of a miracle. God only allows Moses a glimpse into the Promised Land from a hillside vista, Moses’ reward? punishment? for four decades of messianic governance in the wasted and wanting desert. Moses got a raw deal.

My deal is not so raw. Aside from periods of crashing boredom, where my coffee grows cold before I realize that my hands have disappeared their proprioception, before I am left with phantom fingers around my mug, I enjoy a certain if uneventful relief. I’m free of the mornings where my vista was the broken-toothed back-alley fencing, green like the green of a faded pine freshener, me Lazarus puking himself back uncertainly into life amid the leaf litter and spent cigarette butts. Five o’clock every morning, the pre-echo of Jenn’s alarm in my head though it wasn’t set to go off for another half hour, I would hear stupid and repetitive chimes, a savant orchestra in my head. It was seeing inside my eyes, hearing inside my skull, a world reduced to the interior, acetaldehydes sluicing the brain and making perverse golems of chemistry. I was animate mud:  isoquinoline-addicted, amine-addled mud, shocked through with pathos and desirous of dirt.

Forty days. The lights click on outside Twiggs and the cars, in deference to the approaching dark, follow suit, their headlamps suddenly an orderly display at the intersection, the drivers only nocturnally amenable it seems, much like my chemistries these days. I feel a wash of relief, feel my lights click on, too. I’m still a synaptic mess, so I’m like the urban cliché of a streetlamp that buzzes on in three blinking attempts. Sometimes I fail to light, remaining extinguished instead, and it’s the aforementioned nethermost of being without stimulation, a kind of nothing where I am simultaneously grounded and groundless.

I close my laptop, finish my coffee. This could all be regarded as serenity, were I to reframe it as such, my chemistries at last resting after a years-long St. Vitus dance. I’ve a thirty-day token and some change weighing my pocket, a brain lightened of its toxic payload, and a sober lack of abandon marked by a quotidian diet of coffee and newspapers. Not that I’m entirely comfortable with this equanimity, though, for equanimity has its creeping cousin in dissociation and if anything I’m hyper-associative. Hell, they throw pills my way to mitigate my more Icarus tendencies. To wit, last year I wrote:

 “I fell asleep on the roof last night. And some people count sheep, but I was thinking of Chagall; I saw goat-things pass the moon and I climbed the side of the house so that I could better see the illumined clouds. I was on the roof, and I tucked myself in next to the attic and the moon was something within reach, the ground unreachable, and I fell asleep with the moon on my chest. I looked at the sky all dotted with things and smiled, smiled; these things that generally rest on closed eyes, just some eyes not.”

Oh where my head has been, and my body its malfunctioning retainer, servile to the point of near oblivion; it is time to rest. I gather my things from my coffeeshop station and shrug on my satchel. It is a quiet night and I toss my coffee cup among the discarded newspapers, the waste-bin signifier that the day, too, is done, extincting itself as I extinct part of me. I walk to my car and goat-things—they pass the moon. I have to squint, but they are there, and with dull movement that is not, I am encouraged.

Surrender, Pt. 1

I stare at the Kandinsky print on the wall rather than Paul, a subtle maneuver upward, for I’m used to losing myself in the damask carpet, wanting to be part of its pattern, when I speak. The Kandinsky is a pastel Rorschach, a benign something, hung there because it is a benign something, and the office is designed to be inoffensive, non-representational, so that sitting on the couch is to be in some mode of bas relief, not entirely there and therefore not entirely, three-dimensionally, petrified. A cup of coffee cools on the glass table and Paul sits quietly, a blank canvas.

Paul resembles Richard Milhous Nixon, just handsomer, with a broad face and carefully slicked-back bangs that, were they to fall in his face, would reach the tip of his Richard Milhous nose. I imagine he drives a Prius. I imagine his morning breakfast is beige.

“I can’t seem to surrender, Paul. My ambivalence holds me in place. I’d like to, but.” My eyes settle on the bookcase. Paul has the DSM-IV. I know there’s a fifth edition, but I don’t hold it against him. “How does one surrender anyway?”

Paul doesn’t uncross his legs or shift in the wing chair that dominates his side of the office.

“In this case, you have to think of yourself as being in a burning building,” he says levelly, “With the only option for appreciable change being to just jump.”

I am quiet. Paul is quiet.

“You have a safety net. You’ll know you’re safe once you’re caught, but it requires an act of will.”

Incongruously, I say: “I don’t want to leave a Thom-sized hole.” This is an aside mantra, a stopgap, a gambit against erasure. It’s something I say all the time. It sounds right to say, and how we all need our summonses.

“You know David Foster Wallace talked about a burning building, too,” I change the subject while keeping with the metaphor. “He said a man jumps from a burning building not because he is suddenly comfortable with falling, but just because the alternative is so much worse.”

I’m not parrying Paul. I ponder that I may be agreeing with him. I think suddenly of that iconic photo, the Richard Drew one, the North Tower still intact but shedding souls and the idea of freefall is dizzying.

I had said, ‘I surrender’ before, at Casa Palmera, to the admissions director who pulled my file with an almost alacrity.

“We figured you’d be back.” He had a self-righteous air, which matched his overall mien; it also matched his car vaingloriously parked in front of the building, all lacquer and gleam. I hated him. While he detailed the terms of my surrender, he fingered a six-year sobriety token between pudgy fingers—seemingly for effect—and I hated him a second time.

“I’m serious now,” I said meekly. I blew a 0.16. I got a bed.

Fear:   Face Everything And Recover. It’s what they teach you there. Else Fuck Everything And Run. Two types of surrender.

“I’m serious now,” I repeated three days later as the nurse tried to convince me to stay. “I’m leaving.”

“Where you gonna go,” the admissions director asked, with a sneersome face worn to resemble tough love. “I mean, you’ve essentially lost your family,” he lied.

“I have places I can go,” I lied right back.

The director was annoyed—this was going to be a ding on the recidivism record, a spot of tarnish on Casa’s otherwise brass finish. The halls were shiny. The food was Mediterranean and served on actual dinnerware. There were salad forks, masseuses, biofeedback options, yoga and meditation. To leave this place was to leave recovery, period, the alternative being no alternative in the director’s mind as evidenced by the waiver I had to sign upon my exit.

‘Against medical advice, the undersigned faces the potential consequence of: Relapse. Death.’

I affixed my signature, then took a black Mercedes up and out of the Del Mar hinterlands, a fine death cab if there were one, and stared out the window as we passed the well-arbored equestrian farms, the gated manors, the eventual coastline. The moon of my breath appeared on the blue window, disappeared, then appeared again. Down the highway there was the fact of a burning building; I folded my hands in wait.

Lyndon

Lyndon was born in the year of our Lord, 1965, so was named after LBJ though he’d later bear no resemblance to the cantankerous Texan, neither by disposition nor mien, but would instead be soft-spoken with a tousle of blonde hair, eyes rendered sightless by a rugby accident that also—in his words—rendered him hopelessly, haplessly, and alcoholically senseless.

The rule was: you couldn’t touch Moses—or say his name even—when Moses was on harness, Moses being the seeing-eye dog that dutifully guided Lyndon through the corridors of the hospital. He was a dark-haired German Shepard who, like his namesake, led his people through the proverbial desert toward whatever milk and honey was appropriate to the moment: a freshly made bed; the cafeteria queue; the chair by the window, which was reserved for Lyndon though his eyes registered nothing of the light that streamed through its glass; the penniless fountain across from the koi pond.

Lyndon’s eyes had recessed in his sightlessness. He bore a look reserved for either the blind or the haunted, maybe both, and he spoke from the seemingly same recess, laconically, with his hands always resting on his knees, palms up.

“I can tell you are kind,” he’d say, with regard to most everyone, and he’d say this while staring straight ahead, rarely turning his head in the direction of his addressee. He wore a large wooden cross round his neck, red, and so seemed an aged pope bestowing anonymous benediction upon the rooms. “You are kind. I can tell that.”

Lyndon, with your unseeing eyes, which for half a lifetime knew sight, with your unseeing eyes and your papal frailty, I wonder I wonder: do you still dream in color?

Bridge Over Dry Waters

It’s early, the marine layer still a curtaining veneer over the city, when we park the car just shy of the suspension bridge. The day promises to be hot but, at this hour, the sun hasn’t gained full expression yet. It remains a suggestion of itself, a lazy and featureless chariot, arcing somewhere low and behind us.

Cayde is dressed like an 8 year old wholly unaccustomed to hiking. It’s my urban failing, and arrears are still owed to the campfire gods for Cayde’s lack of trailhead savvy. To this day, kindling is less tinder to him than it is tablet play: Amazon Fire, Amazon Kindle. There are levels unlocked on Minecraft but nothing of greater Promethean practicality. Fires remain unthieved.

Although Cayden’s green, he’s earnest in his preparations. He’s packed some trail mix for the morning outing, which he figures as necessity. The road—the idea of it, at least—is stamped on the cellophane packet. He also carries a thermos of water, heavier than is wieldy. Cayde’s chosen a nylon drawstring knapsack to carry his all collected wares. It’s emblazoned with a smiling Pooh decal and Cayde gets tangled in Winnie’s ropes stumbling out of the car.

“The suspension bridge—awesome, Daddy!” He pokes at the nosepiece of his specs.

The suspension bridge is a hidden urban treasure, off the beaten path only in the sense that it’s hidden over Banker’s Hill dried-up arroyos. It’s nothing out of town, but rather in town, surrounded by established trees and near-century old buildings on Balboa Park’s left-hand side. I thought Cayde may’ve been disappointed, but an adventure’s an adventure and I’m only five days out of the hospital.

Cayde looks like my wife Jenn, more and more, but he presents as me. He wears falsies to approximate my thick-rimmed spectacles, grows his bangs long; he speaks nervously in the dark sometimes wanting only Daddy, Daddy, to share the sheets and talk down the fear.

The current light, the muted heat, is a consequence of the low-lying but evaporative clouds that overhang the mesas. The neighborhood is quiet both here and across the canyon, and the morning jetliners are rare. The skyway commute has not yet gained momentum.

Cayde slams the door of the car, and the jacaranda tree we’ve parked beneath releases a lavender sepal in seeming response. There’s no breeze so it falls both sun-struck and leaded, a straight drop to the hood of the car, where it skates to the asphalt, one flutter before settling among the already accumulated leaf-litter, the purpling of the sidewalk.

“Let’s go, Daddy!”

Light lingers behind us and, with foot-traffic at a minimum this time of morning, the suspension bridge is relatively staid. It can be known as the ‘Wiggly Bridge’, an unfortunate though accurate moniker: it’s a 375-foot span suspended by only two steel wires and two concrete piers. The fewer the pediments, the more and uncertain the movement. It’s 70 feet to the bottom of the arroyo. The eucalyptus grows 30 feet above it to either side.

Cayde stops at its base, turns to smile at me. I’m open-carrying a cup of coffee, having not fooled myself with trail-mix. I smile back.

Crossing eastbound are freshly-caffeinated dog-walkers, youth implied in their cotton and nylon ensembles: sweatshirts emblazoned with collegiate block letters, and tear-away pants. They sport unlikely-colored trainers, sockless.

A terrier pulls at the leash. It’s dog-walkers’ first kid, surely, all sorts of big-pawed rambunctiousness and over-eager nose. As with all first kids, it’s unruly, but then again, no one knows how to parent the first time around. The terrier tries to navigate the bridge, stamping its forepaws on the wooden planks, straining against the straps and making the bridge sway slightly. The dog-walkers walk by discussing either HOAs or DAs; I’m projecting acronyms. The terrier pushes a wet nose against my hand and wiggles in presage of the bridge.

Cayden runs to the first pier and instinctively looks down. On a bridge no one glances up to see how close they are to the overhead; instead they look to see how far they are from the ground.

Below, the arroyo basin is an unwelcome sight, littered with green and amber bottles, spent cigarette packs around a sign that proclaims it’s against the law to litter. Should’ve told the kid to look up. Regardless, the litter is like a bed of needles so far as Cayde is concerned. He’s used to alleyways and manicured parks; whatever wild is simply wild, shards of glass like broken dragonflies.

A silver-haired gentleman walks by, westward, and doesn’t even displace the air in passing. He is wispy, shin bones in sharp relief south of his gym shorts, tibial and saphenous veins coursing rice paper legs. The man’s shirt advertises some 5K—he’s sponsored by vitamins—and the shirt is designed to wick moisture away from his body.

Sad Bill wore similar shirts in the hospital, most his time spent in bed half-dressed. The athletic tunics he wore stretched across broad shoulders and suggested an oarsman’s past, these lycra shirts made to expand with both swollen chest and biceps that were the size and approximation of mangoes. His wife had left him after forty years, his house half-evacuated in a slow and figurative fire.

Sad Bill’s Librium sleep moved in catch, drive, and release; blades feathering the water with constancy; dreams in lurch, the relentless slapping of water against the rigger, the repetitive sound of oarlocks carrying him through a sea of troublesome delta waves. Always asleep, always sad, sad Sad Bill.

The silver-haired man brushes past, out on his morning constitution. He’s most likely a resident of the deep canyon, where the houses are singular and identifiable, trophies of successful careers hidden in the groves of mellaleuca. The canyon is called Arroyo Canyon, a near redundancy when translated, a dry riverbed so dry as to feature only drought-tolerant plants, lantana and buddleia, woody things shot through with bright flashes of color.

Cayden runs a spell, then hopscotches the bridge’s planks.

Silver Man disappears into the neighborhood behind us having crossed the bridge opposite the dog-walkers. His house is maybe a concrete and stucco construct, an Irving Gill affair; I imagine a pea gravel driveway, cabinets full of Heath ceramic; pantries of wheat germ and wormy quinoa; a labial orchid in every room.

His nylon breaker swishes and his knees knock in determined retreat.

“Hold up, Kid.”

Cayde sways on the newly vacant bridge and looks back.

“There’s a trail down there, Daddy.”

“We have to get across the bridge, first.”

There are actually bridges beyond bridges. The closest one, within our vista, is a steel-trussed affair with an ellipsis of arches. And, from its concrete deck, girded with both wrought and cast iron rails, there is promise of yet more views, more bridges, most prominently the sinuous arc of Coronado floating atop massive concrete pylons over the bay. We can’t see that far, however, since the mesas overlap in a shingled manner and perspective is lost in the avenues.

“We can get down there from across the bridge, right?” Cayde looks at me with a face that belies his age. His forehead, like his mother’s, is unfurrowed, stretched tight on his skull, his eyes the expressive things, brown, with the irises inordinately large and almost aqueous.

I figure the Silver Man emerged from somewhere up the gully, and certainly the accumulated litter at bridge’s bottom didn’t create itself. Also, in the distance down below is the antemeredial sound of a landscaper’s hedge-trimmer, a morning mosquito in its persistent nuisance. There has to be a way down.

“Sure, Kid. I’m sure there is.”

Cayde jabs at his glasses again and rearranges his knapsack straps into greater knotsbefore happily trouncing down the bridge.

In repudiation of the Boy Scout motto, meaning preparedness is not my strong suit, my coffee cup has no lid, and my shoes are new and suede. I just wanted to take the kid to the bridge and wasn’t expecting a tromp into the underbrush. ‘Hike’ was a term to get us both out of bed. I never could sleep like Sad Bill, but I’m expert at staying under the covers.

“Here’s some Temezepam,” the nurse said at midnight, ripping the Velcro of the sphegnometer loose from my bicep. “You’re a bit tense—blood pressure’s a little high.”

I was in jeans, no shirt, restless and clammy. Didn’t anyone else notice that the clock hummed, that if you concentrated on it’s incessant buzz, you could tell its batteries were most likely awry, that there was a wasteful arc of electricity seeking a bent contact point somewhere? Blackened copper, blue spark–anyone could hear this.

I accepted the pill, a small thing in a corrugated paper cup. Temezepam, benzodiazepine, Prozac: all these ‘Z’s but no sleep. The hospital was, despite the buzzing clock, quiet.

It used to be that I dreamt of insomnia, that I would wake up tired, not having ever crossed bridge into meaningful slumber. Eventually insomnia dispensed with the subterfuge, and it was no longer that I dreamt of sleeplessness; I was instead wide-awake, never dreaming.instead. How often I’d hear the birds change shifts, the pauraque and mockingbirds’ din fading into the crepuscular murmur of dove-song, the morning never a new thing, but rather an insistent malcontent repeating its tiresome complaint of the night, again and again and again, glaring the windows, never satisfied.

I pressed my eyes to see stars. The door clicked shut quietly, Sad Bill oared magnificently to somewhere far and away from shore, flipping his pillow and resettling into the bedsheets.

“What are these locks, Daddy?” The bridge cables are decorated with promise locks, initialed locks left there by young lovers symbolically fastening their love into place. The bridge, precipitous and suspended, becomes a place where names linger defiantly in the air over threat of canyon-fall.

“There’s a bridge in France, Cayde…,” I begin explaining. I think of elaborating on the Ponts de Arts, the story of the locks. Then I remember all the promise locks had been removed from the Ponts after its parapet had fallen beneath the collective weight of symbology. I say simply, “The locks mean people love each other. They’re like wedding rings you don’t wear.”

 

This is a sufficient explanantion. Cayde jumps twice on the planks.

“You almost kissed Mommy here.”

“You’re right, Cayde. Good memory.” It’s part of our family’s history, the long ago tender nights and places.

It had been our first date and someone’s lips grazed someone’s neck. I forget who breathed in whose pulse, just that there were warm coats and upturned collars and the same eucalyptus trees Cayde and I were currently regarding, only moon-illumined. The skyway had been empty and fingers brushed shyly; Jenn and I, we froze warmly in suspense.

“If you didn’t have a wife, would you fuck me in that supply closet?” Janet whispered, and she pointed with her eyes to an auxiliary room just left of Group Conference. The front desk nurses were bored at their station, and the vitals monitors were white and plastic and parked in current disuse in the hallway. It was a time of night marked by infrequent speech, the dry-erase board featuring a dead and alcoholic idiom, the coffee table littered with crosswords and stupid coloring books, the NY Times.

There was a water dispenser with floating lemon slices.

I looked straight ahead, and gaped, once, grunion-like and stupefied, then exhaled. I pulled Janet into my shoulder and kissed the part of her hair, then rested my temple against the crown of her head.

“That’s not allowed,” said the nurse, shaking her head. “Not allowed,” while the vitals machines sat continually plastic.

“Janet, you go to your room, I’ll go to mine. Walk slow.” We excused ourselves from the Common Room and this was not a romance. We were due for pills in an hour, it couldn’t have been a romance, though I liked, intensely, the smell of her hair, her particular and Roman nose.

Cayde jumps two more paces and the bridge obligingly swings. Winnie the Pooh is so confused on Cayde’s back; the one decaled eye is almost pleading help. Cayde sits and swings his legs over the gully, as if debating a playground slide.

“Love you, Daddy,” which is what Cayde says when fine and perfect and otherwise excited. He wears Adidas, actively untangles himself from his bag and takes from the thermos, pumping his legs over the arroyo.

“Love you, too, Kid,” my coffee going cold.

The marine layer is burning off, and there are mosquitoes in the evaporation, not just the mosquitoes of leaf-blowers down below, but real and annoying things. I sit down next to Cayde and pick a gnat out of my coffee.

“We can go down there, if you want,” I say.

Cayden takes a draw from the thermos, hands it to me, and wipes his mouth.

“Yes.”

The doctor palpated my lower left. He nodded approvingly.

“Yes, yes.” He adjusted my covering, examined my collar.

“Some spidering—this should fade,” he remarked, peering down through bifocals while tracing the angiomas, like brachia, which branched upward out the sternum.

He patted my shoulder.

“You’re good.” I readjusted on the crinkly paper.

“I’m good?”

He nodded.

I’m in fucking detox.

He said again, “You’re good, enzymes are fine.”

Enzymes break down things, so my negatives are in a positive.

“Ok…,” I said, readjusting the neckline of my gown.

“It’s early—go have breakfast,” and the physician’s face is a cherubic and pink marshmallow, a Hostess cake. There were the floating wafts of sweetened coffee which informed the otherwise aspirin hallways; bitterness faded, like the scent of disinfectants, and I held my gown in place while leaving the examination room.

Cayde is already halfway down the hill, scooting on his bottom. Poor Winnie is getting dust in his eye, and goddamn why did I wear my new shoes. I follow suit, holding my coffee cup overhead and displacing the dirt with my heels on a slide to the river floor. I land on my feet and look up. The bridge is above us, a now silhouetted thing, sun shining through the slats. We’re among the broken glass and trailers of volunteer grass. ‘No Littering’ the signs says again, just closer, and there are Pall Malls in the crabweeds.

“Where, to, Kid?” I point with my deftly unspilt coffee: “Left?” Cayde has dirt all up his back.

He turns and smiles at me, aware that, with his dusty seat, we are now a plurality of messes. I cock an eyebrow.

“No,” he says. “Right,” with undue emphasis; and he scrambles off to the nearest and felled log to pretend Lord of the Flies.

“You think of trying sobriety instead?” Dr. Morrow asked, sighing over my petition for antidepressants, the line he may or may not fill out on Box 2. His key fob sports a BMW insignia and why didn’t he put the keys into his pocket. You put the keys in your pocket. It’s six a.m. You put the keys in your pocket at 6 a.m. when wresting patients from their beds, fuck you and please.

“…”

He double-clicked his pen.

“It’s a long-standing joke, Dr. In my family runs anxiety, depression, OCD, manic depression, dementia…”

He double clicked again.

“Rimshot, Dr.,” and I take comedic pause, “Longevity, too.” I’m very funny.

He sighed and puts an ‘X’ in the box. The morning’s too short for long suffering, especially if you have a tee time and no gallows sense of humor.

“They’ll start you on Lexapro by the afternoon.” He has a bad haircut considering his means, and he gathered his keys in a fashioned swipe.

Replay: he grabs his keys between middle and (un-ringed) ring finger, the BMW pendant scraping the desk like a dog dragging its piles; I say, “Have a good one,” before he can. My nicety is non-tax reductible, and Dr. Morrow clicked before saying anything, words taken out of his mouth. He finally nodded agreement, and left.

“Yes, yes. Uhh. Just try not drinking so much.” Click-click. It’s so easy. Like a Par 3.

And he walked out, 6:07 before coffee was available, and I rejoin Sad Bill back in the room.

The hedge-trimmer, it turns out, is manned by someone in orange and apiarist gear, white netting draped over the face as protection. The plumbago is innocent, but gets the Jacobin treatment anyway, blue-lavender blossoms falling away in spent heads, and there’s pea-gravel as expected.

A Prius replaces the Saab and I’m envious of carports. Such a nice house.

The squared hedges release buggy things, paper and triangular moths, chartreuse grasshoppers. The moths are yellow-white and choppy fliers in the mid-morning sun.

Cayde picks up sticks and beats at things, his knapsack sagging beneath the weight of the thermos. There’s an enviable bounce to his step, incongruent like the exodus of moths. He is growing up too fast, still the child in him is on full display; were that I could reclaim that myself, the noontime of youth, this could all be different.

 

It is now officially hot. Didn’t take long. Cayden readjusts the knapsack for show and I instinctively know I’ll soon be handed the thermos. Kids are easy and too quick to release their burdens.

“How would you describe this?” Peg asked from her therapist’s chair.

I rotated my cup of coffee counter-clockwise, sitting in a pantomime of ease while looking down at the carpet. The carpet had Thracian design, burgundy and blue, the colors—and I remember this from my art school days—you layer to create depth and shadow. There were curlicues of flowers and forest-colored accents

“This?” I asked. She nodded.

Behind her are books. I don’t remember how the room was lit, what light source, if there was an overhead fixture or a lamp; the room was always half-illumined with a peek of sunshine and garden shining through a partially-drawn curtain.

“This,” I sighed. I tap the rim of my mug. “This, this, this,” I trailed off.

I chose to describe a clock, which was mounted in my parents’ peach-colored kitchen. It was a kitsch owl-themed thing, a plastic owl with a clock-belly and orange glinty eyes. There were plastic owlets on a plastic branch, the whole chotchke shaped much like the state of Kentucky, with unreliable clock hands and a yellowed clock face.

“I remember these things, suddenly. And then think how long ago that was.” I readjusted my posture, and resumed talking with my hands.

“I remember these things, or else get suddenly aware of how fast the boys are growing up, and everything I think of becomes painful. Like I’m tearing off calendar pages and they instantly burst into flames and fly past me and I can’t stop it.

“I get nostalgic.”

“But nostalgia’s sweet, right?” Peg said, nodding assuagingly, smiling.

“No. The Latin. Means: pain of remembrance. Nostalgia’s being fucking homesick in your head and I feel it all the goddamn time. I get nostalgic for an hour ago.”

 

As expected, Cayden hands me the big orange thermos.

“Hold this, Daddy.”

I am a purse. We pause in front of a wooden sign that welcomes us to the neighborhood—Arroyo Canyon. Again that tautology—and we’re just as quickly unwelcomed by the list of rules regarding trespassing, parking, where you’re not supposed to walk. A butterfly lights on the sign, a six-legged postcard of an insect. The wooden sign is carved in bas relief and the butterfly navigates its surfaces effortlessly with flitting wings. Butterflies have it easy. The hedge-trimmer is busy manicuring the hedges in shallow cuts and the sun is increasingly warm.

“Can I ask you something?” I say leaning over the front desk, meeting eyes with the head nurse before looking conspiratorially sideways. I had just helped my Roberto with his paperwork and was getting used to this place. There were coins of cucumber in the water dispenser, and—in bare feet—this was feeling more and more like a hotel.

She looked up, smiling, and tilted her head to the left, a suggested ‘yes’.

“Do you have my bloodwork on file?” She looked behind her at the other attendants working their stations, then returned to her keyboard. She held up a finger and clicked through a few screens. She adjusted the monitor toward me.

Proteins, globulins, Hg, potassium, sugars, Fe. I scanned the list. Not great on the pancreatic numbers, but I hadn’t eaten for two days when the phlebotomist stuck me. Good proteins ok, inflammatory proteins as expected, iron fine. Cholesterol alright, lipids normal.

“Thanks, Sister,” I said, and she turned the monitor back to its appropriate position, tucked a tendril of hair behind her ear and continued working.

What the hell am I doing here? What the fuck am I doing here? I just called the nurse Sister.

I padded off in bare feet and, expectedly, Sad Bill was asleep in bed, his running shoes inexplicably on, and the curtains drawn.

I sat upright in bed and crossed my arms, glanced at the clock and watched only the second hand click; I tapped the flesh of my upper left arm with the fingers of my right hand, re-crossed my ankles and looked to the ceiling. I imagined my lipids unemulsified in the blood, yellow capsules like iu’s of Vitamin E swimming in capillaries, amoeboid and moving, moving in circulation, my heart a fleshy muscle flapping stupidly and sending beads of amber down their uncertain avenues. This is how you go to sleep.

Roberto had said I looked smart as he proffered me a pen; I helped him with his information, the triplicate forms, while I wore glasses and we manned the Group Table. There were pink papers, yellow ones, and white ones.

“Sign this here,” I pointed.

“And here.”

“Your initials in this box. There—finito.”

We sat up simultaneously when all paperwork was done.

“Thanks, Man!” Roberto beamed as we shuffled the rainbow of paper into a neat pile.

I didn’t know what to do—I gave him a hug. He had briefly died on Fentanyl and needed a halfway-house.

‘It’s hard coming back to life,’ either one of us could’ve said as I took off my glasses.

“Really, thanks, Man.” I waved a whatever wrist, squeezed the bridge of my nose and pushed back my chair.

“’S cool, my friend,” and we bumped fists as I went to go find Janet.

The second house Cayde and I come across has a running and penniless fountain, three peach and stuccoed stories, and plotted lavender surrounding the perimeter. Burgundy dracaenas mark the doorways where alabaster lions could easily have perched.

“Wow!” Cayden remarks, and he pauses with his stick because the lavender is full of bees. There’s an actual arcade running the side of the house, porticoes and flying buttresses; I point and explain the buttresses—the physics in the exposed wood—and any minute I expect a hipsome Lady Godiva to walk out the house, stretching yawningly, long and red hair shielding crème-colored breasts, in desperate need of a horse. This is a house where you recline naked, a Titian half-shell existence, no need for clothes. The house is sealed off, and the fountain runs its circulated course.

“The bees, Daddy.”

“What about them, Dude?”

He prods a lavender bush, and the bees buzz their discontent.

I feel sorry for the bees. Cayden just shortened their lives. Bees lack regenerative protein, so their lives are measured by distance, not days. They die skinny and used up. The more they fly, the faster they die.

“Don’t bother them, Cayde. Flowers.”

This is a strange sentence; I’m connecting dots in my head while voicing nothing of a bridge. Lady Godiva never makes an appearance, and the hollow porticoes speak of absence. Three stories, all peach-stuccoed.

 

Nervous Luke had his own horse—an aluminum one—which he was mandated to use when navigating the hallways. He’s a ‘fall risk.’ On the nurse’s charts this is signified by an ‘F’ and a circle. Nervous Luke would sit in the Group Room when most everyone had gone to bed. He hated his walker—embarassed by it—but he had passed out violently drunk before being admitted, ingloriously smacking the soft of his neck on the porcelain lip of the tub. He bruised the tender spot where his brain stem was busy that night being drowned. Double blackout. The doctors, being cautious, gave him a walker. They worried that he might experience delayed seizures else throw an undetected clot. It can be a long way to the floor, after all, or, when brains are involved, a short journey. Better safe than dead.

He hated being here, hated having to scoot around manacled to something so convalescent, so beyond his obviously young age. He only came out at night, outside of watching eyes, always in socked feet. He shuffled past the nurses with his aluminum horse, but then dragged it clatteringly behind him when corners were turned, hitching it, always, to his post-meridian post in the Group Room. 

“So long as I keep it near me,” he shrugged, gesturing to his walker while Janet, Luke, and I alone inhabited the Group Room. It was Nighttime Teatime, packets of decaffeinated oolong and mint fanned out on the table, a carafe of hot water at easy reach. Cottonballs soaked in essential oils sat in Dixie cups as some semblance of potpourri, and I’d taken to dabbing my moustache with the puffs, chloroforming some relaxation. A tinted window partitioned off the Nurse’s Station and silhouettes behind the amber glass moved in shadowy motion, the blue of computer screens occasionally eclipsed by the shuffling of files and clipboards.

I was elbows with Janet and we were trying to convince Nervous Luke to come down for meals, at least. He still had sandwiches routinely dropped of at his door, room service of sorts else something more akin to a thrice-daily delivery of bread and water. His room had no view, so he was inclined to think the latter; nurses have keys like jailors and, considering his sheepish view of himself, his nocturnal walks of shame, I didn’t blame him.

“We’re all in here for the same reason,” Janet said. She’d occasionally rouche the cuffs of her three-quarter sleeved cardigan, yellow, and replace her arm casually against mine. I was busy scratching away at some writings. The head nurse had allowed me earlier access to the counselor’s office, locking me in surreptitiously so I could print out some pieces I’d been working on. This wasn’t allowed, and she made sure to usher me out before the doctors hit the floor for rounds. I was beginning to think of her more like a concierge than an RN.

“’S true, Friend,” I said, marking up some margins, Janet and I suddenly Good Cop and Good Cop. None of us were having tea.

Luke fingered the fuzz of his upper lip, a blond and anemic moustache, and explained the extent of his champagne evenings.

“It got to where I couldn’t eat,” he said. In the medical manuals, it’s said that alcoholism is eventually a nutritional disease. I glanced up over my bifocals.

“I’ve written about that, Luke.” I shuffled my papers and found a piece I’d penned about being only occasionally hungry, this while always maintaining a constant thirst. I began reading.

Janet was acting funny. She had received permission to lotion this evening, these permissions and substances that must be granted, and she was fastidiously applying her ablutions. I read to Luke and Janet rouched her sleeves again to the elbows, quietly laughing to herself. She dabbed my exposed knee with a dot of moisturizer and began rubbing it clockwise into my skin with one finger. I kept reading, trying hard to keep eyes trained on Luke else the computer printout.

“These meds are making me feel weird,” Janet announced, and she excused herself momentarily to punch at the Group Room console. “What are we on again?” she called out from the keyboard.

“Librium, Lady. Unless you’re on Atavan, but that’s more for the DT cases.”

Luke ran his fingers through his hair and he reminded me very much of my good friend Dennis. I at once felt fraternal.

“Come to lunch tomorrow, Luke. Please.”

Luke turned his head to the side, then looked down at his hands.

“How do you spell librium?” Janet queried from across the room, pecking at the keys.

“L-i-b-r-i-u-m. Librium,” I repeated, as if winning the Sharp Mesa Verde Spelling Bee.

“Maybe I will,” Luke finally said. “I just gotta bring this goddamn thing with me,” he cursed, nodding sidelong to his walker. “Else the nurses will have a fit.”

Janet returned to the chair next to me.

“I knew it,” she announced.

I wasn’t completely done reading, so set to finish while Janet slid a paper from my portfolio, silently turning it over. She stole my pen, wrote something, then pushed it back into my stack.

Luke decided to go to bed. Tea Time was almost over anyway, the carafe now lukewarm. I glanced over at Janet with a smirk.

“I think I know what you found out?” I nervously laughed, feeling suddenly flush.

Side effects may include altered sex drive.

 I shuffled my writings back into their binder. The one turned-over paper read, “I’m pierced” and it was signed with a heart.

Chemicals do strange, sometimes libidinal, things. Janet had been right. We were all in here for the same reason. Chemicals had a definite way with us.

The third house is maybe where Silver Man lives. It’s a Cubist affair with punched up windows, minimal, without the Villa plantings. A lone palm tree acts as sundial, its shadow having a broad canvas to work on: a white and near-featureless wall, west-facing. There are low-lying shrubs otherwise, flowerless and empty of bees. I am more impressed with this house than Cayden is. I appreciate its restraint, the hedges of Japanese boxwood and the asymmetrical slats for windows. The light inside must be focused and well thought out, why I imagine Silver Man has a collection of orchids punctuating his living spaces, phaelenopses on small tables. I further imagine there is a wristwatch perpendicular to bedside reading material, and a water-rower machine on the second-floor. Surely there are soya granules in the larder, and blueberries next to plums next to celery root in the crisper.

He practices self-Tantra in front of a full-length mirror, cleanses his septal chakras. His expired wedding ring sits in a lower drawer and his cutlery has bamboo handles.

“What are you thinking, Daddy?”

“Oh, nothing, Kid.”

I wonder what Cayde thinks; I wonder what anyone thinks. It’s not every day you suddenly disappear. Cayde bustles down the path, Winnie the Pooh still sagging beneath the beltline. I had checked out, checked myself in. It was one bridge crossed, but there were multiplicities of them stringing canyons. It was Luke embarrassed by his aluminum horse and wanting two legs back. It was Sad Bill sad trying to row his skiff to shore. It was me drinking six pints in quick succession at ten o’clock in the morning hoping that at least one would hit its mark; that one would banish this oppressive and governing mortality; that one would finally correct the misaligned chemicals and quell the constant feeling of simultaneous explosion and implosion.

“What happens if you feel you can’t make it another day?” Peg asked from her leather chair.

“I’ll still be there the next day.”

“So, what if there are five days?”

“I hate to think.”

“But you can get through this.”

“Yes.”

“Then get through it first.” 

On the last day before I disappeared, I hunkered behind the mini-van parked in the driveway while waiting for my wife to get off a conference call. I was done. Done done done. And Cayde, from his couch-perch inside—I didn’t think he knew I was there—hit the panic button on the van’s key, driving me, startled, from my roost.

I met him at the back door. “Why’d you do that, Dude?” my voice quavering. He just shrugged and walked away while I guiltily retreated into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I gripped the washbasin sink and shook, first a tremor, then a full on body-quake.

“No, no, no. Please no.” I slipped my perch and had to sit on the tiles. I held up my hands, palms down, and assessed their inability to quit a bird-like shaking. I sat shivering for ten minutes, my foot planted against the door to bar all entry. I tried not to hyperventilate, but was breathing quick, shallow breaths.

“You okay, Thom?” my wife asked from behind the door.

“Fine,” I managed. “I’m fine.”

Fine, however, is not exploding into pieces, pieces hastening to the floor in leaded condense.

“I’m fine.”

Sometimes you become a shell of yourself. Sometimes that shell, once husked quickly fossilizes into weight before having completely separated from the soft parts. You are left swimming in rock, stuck to an unshed skeleton.

“Rock bottom,” I said when the check-in nurse prodded at my various edemas, my swollen feet. She registered my blood pressure as concerning. I was ashamed. I couldn’t get through it; I couldn’t get through the five days; it hurt too much, and no one likes having fat ankles. I swam in rock. 

We crunch through another pea gravel driveway in the dry gulley, me and Cayde, and Cayde stops in front of a lantana hedge to look at bees again. He’s giddy having this adventure with his dad.

He peers like a scientist at a worker deftly navigating the petals of lantana’s impossibly small flowers, collecting pollen on the hair of its legs. Cayde’s bangs fall into his right eye, which he closes instinctively. Makes him look more studious, as if scrutinizing the world through a magnifying glass. He grips the drawstrings of his Winnie the Pooh rucksack at the shoulders, feet planted firmly in the gravel. He follows the bee’s peripatetic buzzing with the whole of his head, neck swiveling comically as the bee dances flower to flower.

“It’s amazing to think, Daddy, that something so small is helping the world a million.” I’m not sure what Cayde means by ‘million’, but I get his drift, this boyhood satori of his. He looks skyward as the bee floats off, pollen-laden and hive-bound.

Cayden’s neck is long like mine, and, with head tilted back, he looks somehow more adult. I remember when he was two, when I explained the Children’s Moon to him from our shared vantage point in the backyard fort. It was the only moon he was awake to see then, a white and limnal disc in chambray sky. I offered him this, the proxy moon, when he was two, its nighttime counterpart a year later; I gave him the moon done up in chalk and silver.

Cayde loses the bee in the burgeoning sun and squints up at me. His right eye is still closed, bangs insouciantly caught in his lashes. He’s the love of my life, there among the bees and pea gravel, in front of a house with unknown residents.

He’s the love of my life. I feel nothing.

My bridge is only halfway crossed at this point, toxins having evacuated enough room for the nothingness to otherwise settle in. It’s to be expected. The serotonin is gone from my system, a string of chemical pearls unstrung. There will be thirty more days of this leadenness, time to write everything down in absence of feeling, words as proxy for actual emotion. There will be thirty more days, minimum, before the silver light comes back on.

Sad Bill greeted me when I threw my hastily packed rucksack on the hospital bed. The room was Antarctic cold. I espied the thin blankets and sighed. It was going to be a long night. I wanted pills, pabulums of sleep.

“Was just napping,” Sad Bill remarked with a yawn.

“Sorry,” I offered, an apology that he waved off with one hand while stifling his yawn with the other.

“No, no, no. ‘S almost dinner anyways.” Sad Bill cleared his throat of sleep and rubbed the back of his close-cropped head. He widened his eyes to rid them of slumber. “You’re fine.”

I looked around, taking inventory of the drawers and cabinets. I felt a supreme need to put everything away. It was the only measure of control I had remaining.

Sad Bill pushed himself off his bed—he had been sleeping atop the blanket—and arched his back. He was maybe sixty, sixty-five, but still exuded a young man’s athleticism, a purposeful manner of movement. I wondered what was locked into his muscle memory and decided he had been a rower, crew. Probably the coxswain.

“What’re you in for?” he asked slow, a Southern accent detectable, emphasis on the ‘h’: ‘hwut’re you in for?’

I searched for an answer.

He waved again. “I’m kidding. People round here want your diagnosis like it’s a jail sentence. You don’t have to answer.”

“I’m depressed.”

Sad Bill looked at me. You don’t check into detox because you’re sad, no matter the barrel you’re scraping.

Sad Bill started toward the door, turned and said, “Me? I was married.”

He closed the door behind him quietly.

“Daddy, I’m hungry,” Cayde says. I sweep the bangs out of his eyes and cup the back of his head.

“I’m sure, Kid.” I point up the path. “This’ll take us back into the neighborhood. We can get some breakfast at Jimmy Carter’s, then get home to Mama. Sound good?”

Cayde nods in agreement and skips up the gully. I follow behind with my erstwhile cup of coffee. I’m drinking coffee these days alcoholically, cup after cup as if searching for something at mug’s bottom. There are these free-floating cravings, which find traction behind my eyeballs, between my shoulder blades. I hold hot coffee in my mouth to quell the keening sensation at the back of my throat. More, more, more; more of something. eyeballs to palate to shoulder blades is a straight line, vague and Vagus. My gut communicates incessantly—naggingly—with my brain, and I wish for a disconnect, a dropped call. I resignedly finish my coffee and follow Cayde up the trail.

We empty out into Mission Hills, a new neighborhood west of the bridge. The avenues here have the same names as the avenues east of the arroyo, back in Banker’s Hill—they just lie differently with slightly different orientation. The imaginary lines connecting Third from Third, Redwood from Redwood, are crooked things, some civil engineer’s ricochet. It confuses Cayden. He doesn’t know where he is in space and harbors, meanwhile, a growing mistrust of street signs.

“Are we lost, Daddy?”

I point left and up a hill. “Not exactly. We have to go that way. We went downhill, now we have to go back up.”

Before he can complain, I offer Cayden the thermos and he takes a long draw. Wiping his mouth, he plunks down on someone’s front lawn and roots through Winnie the Pooh in search of the trail mix. A cat twitches its tail from the nearby porch: absolute suburban reproach.

“Don’t set up base camp, Kid. This ain’t Everest.” Still I allow him a few minutes to finish his snack. I wish I had a canteen to offer, make Cayde feel more the scout. I could maybe give him a merit badge, lend him a neckerchief slide emblazoned with our initials. We are our own little troupe.

When finished, Cayde crinkles the cellophane packet and jams it back into his bag. He throws the last raisin at the cat, hoists himself up, and dusts errant grass off the seat of his pants.

“Ok, Daddy. Ready.” We begin our uphill march.

The nurse began to draw an ‘F’ on my chart.

“What’s that mean?” I asked while the blood pressure cuff mechanically constricted my left bicep. The vitals machine ran through a series of numbers, looking to land on my particular metrics.

Nurse Richard paused. “Fall risk,” he said, meeting my eyes. “You said you was falling.”

“No, no—I said I felt like I was falling upwards,” I corrected. “Upwards—I mean the Librium has me floaty. I’m fine.” My fault for having used picturesque language. There’s no room for poetry in the detox ward.

Nurse Richard looked down, slowly scratching the ‘F’ off the clipboard, then looked up, double-checking my eyes before setting the pen down.

“Alright, Brother. Just tell me if you get too dizzy, a’ight?” He shifted in his stool, ripping the cuff off my arm once the vitals machine had finished its lottery.

“154 over 89.” He punched the numbers into the machine’s computer.

“What do I win?”

“Klonopin. Maybe Ativan. I’ll hafta check with Dr. Morrow in the morning.” Replacing the cuff, he said, “Meantime, Dude, I get you some more Librium. It’s your first night—you gonna need it.” I liked Nurse Richard. Almost as much as the Librium.

“Cool. Thanks.”

Nurse Richard weightily pushed himself off the stool and offered me knucks. He was a good 250, thick in the paunch.

“You’re good, Brother. I take care of you. I’ll getchoo that Librium.”

Librium is a benzodiazepine, cousin to Xanax. It’s an anti-anxiety med and straight avenue to Nod. It’s used clinically to curb acute alcohol withdrawal, sometimes paradoxically. Librium, after all, doesn’t agree with all chemistries—it can induce seizures, amnesia, paranoia as readily can two fifths of vodka given the right conditions. Librium’s also addictive, further paradox of detox. You have to hook yourself on a drug to get off another.

Michael in 324 was on suboxone to taper his fentanyl addiction. Nurse Richard had the unpleasantry of both catheterizing and irrigating Michael at 2 a.m. one night when Michael strained impotently at the toilet, unable to rid his body of junk. Nurse Richard dubbed him ‘Elvis’, the sardonic kind of shit he came up with when pinching off colostomy bags.

Sandy in 332 was on Lorezapam to calm the shakes; her chart dictated QID electrolytes and Nurse Richard meanwhile played Gunga Dinn throughout the day dropping off pitchers of water at her bedside. ‘Gotta get them numbers up, Sister.’ Sandy’s low blood pressure had earned her an ‘F’.

I was on a slow taper of chlordiazepoxide, an elevator forever creeping upward through an unspecified tower of floors. I never quite touched the ceiling, and the doors never opened to any penthouse; but for my entire stay, it was as if my ghost was in perpetual levitation, hovering always two inches above my skin. I gave Nurse Richard nothing to worry about. I was complacently high in the rerouting of my lows, the paradox of regaining sea level.

 

Cayde and I crest the uphill. We have the momentary elation of having made our suburban summit, and the ocean is visible in between buildings far and to the south. The Coronado Bridge gleams its particular shade of blue while curving out of view, its girders bolted to massive caissons, which, like concrete islands, rise defiantly out of the Bay.

“Are we there yet?” Cayde asks, the eternal question.

“Almost, Kid.”

The novelty of the hike is wearing off for Cayden and, despite medications to the contrary, I feel a slight rise in anxiety. Things are wearing off for the both of us. I’d like to be home, but I’m hoping Cayde doesn’t. Not yet at least.

I’d planned this urban hike in anhedonic flatness, the Librium having ceased its effect upon Odysseal return home. There were nights I lied awake next to Jenny in bed, my hand resting on the small of her back. I could almost sense through my fingertips the chemicals that coursed correct and aligned beneath her bedclothes, beneath her skin, the rivers carrying in their current the necessary salts and lymph. I’d told Jenn in the hospital I didn’t want to fucking be sober—those words—though I’d willingly checked myself in. Truth is I didn’t want to feel the anhedonia upon my return home, that unbearable joylessness sure to replace whatever numbness I could otherwise muster imbibing, lotus-eating, sleeping chemical sleep.

I was a practiced lotus-eater. The flowers had just become toxic.

Cayden had to have noticed. He’s Daddy’s Boy. I was the first to hold him in the hospital; I’m always the last to kiss him goodnight. I spent every waking day with him until, suddenly, I didn’t. I disappeared. I promised return in a few days, but disappeared regardless. Upon my return Cayde held me tight round the waist and I stooped to bury my nose in his boyish tangles. He cried, assuring me it was because he was so happy to see me. I believed him to a certain degree while I kissed his head and held him close, but not every spirit is a blithe spirit—there’s always a measure of disquiet when seeing a ghost. I imagined, in the doorway of our house, that Cayde hugged me, and right through me.

“We’ll cross over the bridge to get back to the car,” I tell Cayde. It’s lucky we left early. It’s now burgeoning on insufferably hot and neither one of us does well in the heat.

“Ok, Daddy.” He readjusts his knapsack and punches the nosepiece of his glasses with his thumb. He hasn’t complained about the sun, which has since burned through the marine layer, but I still anxiously await his first grumbles, any proof that this hike was a failure, that I’d somehow lost a piece of my dadness in the hospital. I worry my exit papers bear incomplete signature, that in between Sad Bill’s melancholic contagions and Janet’s Librium-fueled advances, I’m in some way permanently checked into Mesa Verde, the now ghost of room 323.

Cayde doesn’t complain, though. On level ground he takes to skipping again, his shadow stuck to blue sneakers. I relish his joy best I can, try to muster my own. I’m at least more comfortable in this neighborhood with its more homogenous dwellings. Unlike the vanity homes that island the arroyo, the neighborhood bungalows are predictable; they most likely contain predictable people as well.

The houses are ranch-style, Mission, Craftsman—early century affairs like our own back home. Most have gables else awnings overhanging the front doors. This pleases me: I’ve always like recessed entries. They provide once-remove from the street and its peripatetic traffic. How better to hide from the outside world then to lengthen the distance to one’s front door? It’s the same as pouring a pint, same as lengthening the distance between two people through practiced placement of a bottle. It’s akin to opening the hatch while closing a door.

I study Cayden as he trounces ahead of me, legs having to work twice as quick as mine in traversing the cross-streets. He has a boyish flounce still, though his limbs are coming into their own and will soon slow to match mine. Meanwhile, Winnie the Pooh comically vanguards Cayde’s youth, bearishly keeping his innocence though—of recent—Cayde’s questions have taken a different timbre, more mature. I can handle the questions. I can even bear the clumsy advancement of his thickening limbs, the pre-adolescent curling of his hair, but—more and more—I wish to suspend Cayde’s boyhood as if in amber. I’d like to to keep him golden, shining like his bangs today in the mid-morning sun.

I sat in my hospital bed regretting what I’d said to Jenn that morning. That I didn’t want to fucking be sober. We had sat in the courtyard on a bench next to the penniless fountain, the geometric fountain with its recycled water and white noise. It was a hands folded visit, though secretly we were both pawing the air as if testing the elements, deciphering the wind’s direction and the air’s particular viscosity. Still, we had a practiced geometry, and our bodies were touching in align, shoulder to knee, and again recombining at the feet. ‘I don’t want to fucking be sober’ was my way of saying, ‘I can handle this.’ The fountain with its lack of currency, the plastic wristband I wore, said otherwise. But it’s like the song says, before I die I want to make one lie come true.”

Jenn may have looked crestfallen as I expressed my great ambivalence; I didn’t check to see. I instead felt our bodies touch as once they did the night we almost kissed on the suspension bridge. I’ve since securely fastened my padlock to the bridge’s cable, figuratively stenciled our initials, but bridgefall is always the threat. Cables can snap and pediments can fall.

Sad Bill was asleep. Before retiring to his pillow he had the recited the means of his divorce, a hollow story really, nothing more than a verbal shrug. Marriages are sometimes broken with an insipid snap, and his had bowed like a wet twig well before its impotent surrender. His wife had simply moved out, no explanation. Forty years of marriage, more than half spent speaking the language of ghosts. No wonder he was practiced at sleeping.

Bill never snored, so reading was easy. I had a copy of Cheever’s Falconer cracked, the side lamp on. The curtains were always closed out of respect for Sad Bill’s ceaseless slumber, which seemed somehow fitting besides. Junk up in the dark, get clean in the dark. Emerge in the morning, walk out those doors, shiny and new.

I stopped at a passage on page twenty-five: “I find it difficult to imagine cleanliness. I can claim to imagine this, but it would be false. It would be as though I had claimed to reinstall myself in some afternoon of youth.”

 Christ. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to fucking be sober, I thought—it was maybe that I couldn’t. Sobriety seemed an imaginary thing, now that I had adolesced well beyond my first drink and into aquarial middle age. Here I was, birthdate on a hospital wristband, four decades distant from the cradle, and three decades separate from Cayden. At every pill distribution, I was asked my name, my birthdate, and every distribution wound up being a small exercise in arithmetic, reminder of my age. My afternoon was already half-spent. What lunch had I missed while languoring at the cocktail bar, and could I ever rejoin the table?

Cayden pauses in the half-shade, the crossroads of Third and Spruce, and there are jacarandas in full flower outside a concrete tenement. Spruce trees are non-existent. The street is not even named as such en requiem for what the asphalt and curb had replaced; there are groves of eucalyptus, always have been, and jacarandas purpling the property lines. Spruce is just another street in a north-south line of arboreal-themed avenues. All the tree streets are ordered alphabetically—Palm, Quince, Redwood, &c.—and most have their interruptions in canyons. The bridge, though, connects the west end of Spruce to its eastern counterpart—it makes for one of the few true thoroughfares west of Balboa Park. I explain as such to Cayde, and for a second time, but he’s only interested that we’ve come full circle, that the bridge is magical conduit to the other side. This is why jungle gym bridges are forever teeming with kids: they make a to b different.

“Can we go down into the canyon again?” Cayde asks as we walk through the sodden carpet of jacaranda flowers and toward the bridge.

“I thought you were hungry. Also it’s getting warm.”

The sun shines through the trees and, not yet afternoon, it’s still bordering on hot. I glance sidelong at Cayden—we’re now walking side by side—and he remains agreeable.

“Alright, Daddy. Let’s go eat.”

I’m concerned that his sudden agreeability is, at heart, some manifestation of worry—that he’s being placative to avoid upsetting me. Kids are divining rods to tension, their antennae always on point. ‘Yes, Daddy’, ‘Sure, Daddy’. I try to readjust my face to mirror his agreeability, but joylessness is already a mask, and it’s hard staring through two sets of eyeholes at once.

“AnhedooOOonia,”Peg said from her therapist’s chair. “Feels like it sounds.”

It’s actually the state of unfeeling, but at the heart of a ghost story is a simple, apparitional fact: ghosts don’t exist in the afternoon and, without haunt, their number is up. 

“Jimmy’s has great huevos rancheros—what do you want?” I ask.

Cayden ponders for a second: “Mexican waffles.” He says this resolutely.

I crack a smile. “Alright—try fooling the waitress with that one.”

Cayde kicks at a heap of spent trumpet flowers, purple, and we walk through leaf litter, less eggshells, toward the bridge.

Cayde suddenly grabs my hand and I start. Christ. I worry the gesture is placative. I want to say, ‘It’s not your fault.’

‘Iloveyou’, Cayde tells me, fast and softly. It’s all one word. I relax. This is his tell. ‘Iloveyou’ is the word he summons both as verb and adjective. ‘Iloveyou’ means he’s enjoying the afternoon, the afternoon I’m trying to return to. It’s a word I taught him in the delivery room; subject, verb and object combined; there is no breath in between.

Two weeks clean. Cayde places the polish.

I knucked Nurse Richard on the way out. He was grunting a juggernaut of water up the hallway, elevator doors slid closed behind him.

“Don’t come back now, y’hear?’ he joked, Southern-fried Gunga Dinn. The head nurse acquiesced a smile, having heard this joke a thousand times, most her keep having come back in some capacity. ‘She must get tired of the faces’, I thought. I kissed her on the cheek in apology as she cut my wristband.

“Thank you.”

She smiled and adjusted her glasses. The elevator door yawned open, didn’t turn its panels like a revolving door.

“Go write,” she said.

I exited left. The cabin of the elevator featured posters reminding its travellers to eat: faded photos of tomatos and spinach on white plates. The ceiling of the cabin was embossed with fleur d’lis damask, water-stains regardless of symbology; it was a short route down.

I left a book with Janet; I left Sad Bill alone, asleep at the coxswain. I left.

“Take me home,” I told Jenn, the car idling. “Please.”

Cayde runs half the length of the suspension bridge to its middle. On either side of the bridge is old-growth eucalyptus but, underneath the lowest sag of the bridge, there are only freeway shrubs, acacia and cigarette flowers. Admonishing signs repeat: ‘Don’t.’ Don’t trespass, don’t litter. The ground beneath is a depressing thing, parched and mud-cracked. Scales of earth peel back from the gully floor.

“How do you want your eggs?” I ask Cayden as we take a seat, legs dangling over the bridge’s edge. I still have my bounty of travellers’ cups, the thermos and the coffee mug, and set them down empty. Jimmy’s is just down the block.

Cayden kicks his legs over the gulf, deflated Winnie like a lackluster cape.

“Mmm..what’s it called when they’re a circle and runny?”

“Poached. Those’re poached eggs.”

The airways course their first traffic and I pick at my fingernails.

“You ok, Kid?”

“Fine.”

I tousle his hair and look back to the gray tenement up the street, the dog-walkers surely home by now and maybe frying up sweetbreads for their pup. Silver Man is having his soya; Godiva is enjoying her porticoes.

I look up, measuring the sky’s distance, and the bridge sways slightly. Cayde kicks his legs.

“Let’s go, Kid,” I say, hoisting myself up. “Trail done.”

Cayde agrees. The eucalyptus do their first sway, noontime’s first push of relief; and though I feel nothing, nothing, upon crossing the bridge, the asphalt is assuring; and Cayden walks ahead of me. The marine layer is evaporative, the bridge is unreasonably steady, and, on the way back to the car, I shed a face, smooth my hair, and watch as Cayde plucks open the car door, the <click> of re-entry, re-entry and a jangle as, digging into my pocket, I remember myself the pilot and ready my keys.