The Last Battle:
Becoming Someone Else
By Thomas Mayhew
All rights reserved by the author until rights are sold.
This unpublished manuscript is provided for private reading and evaluation only. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.
Some names, locations, and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals. This is a memoir. It reflects the author’s recollections of events and experiences over time.
Contents
Numbers in chapter headings denote age
*Read Me First*
Part I: The Shear Line
1 – Fall From Grace (17-18)
2 – Ego Death (18)
3 – The Come-Up (18-21)
4 – Exile (21-23)
Part II: The Vortex
5 – The Ego Strikes Back (24-27)
6 – Honeymoon (27)
7 – Twin Lakes (27)
8 – Twin Pillars and a Hurricane (28)
9 – The Harp (28-29)
10 – A Soundless Symphony (29)
11 – Dissolution (29)
Part III: The Reckoning
12 – The Proposal (29)
13 – Death of a Different Kind (29)
14 – The Deal (29)
Epilogue
For the person who once believed he would never become me.
Read Me First
I lost every battle I ever fought to be here.
Except the last one.
Hope for better days vanished behind those losses. They vacated the halls of my once vibrant soul. Every new day brought a novel darkness.
On May 6, 2021, I was twenty-nine. That day, I took a photograph of myself, wondering, If I live to see thirty—which I won’t—how it would feel to see myself in this moment. I was certain it would be my last, and for good reason. I intended that photo as a goodbye note that said—by showing—everything I wanted my wife to hear, but words could never capture—I’m done. For years, I was. Considering the prior decade, it’s challenging to imagine how, on that day, I’d never been more defeated. You can see that photo and many others along the way when you see this symbol ♣[1] .
[1] 1 These symbols ♣ represent the real-life content that can be found on the official website (www.thelastbattle.live) – including photos, videos, text messages and documents. Navigate to the ♣ found on the website, and click the corresponding chapter to view real digital content directly related to the narrative.
For eleven years, I lived on an edge that spanned from the cinematic to the unsightly. That edge courted me down a hundred avenues. All of them led to the devil’s doorstep, where demons played dice games while patiently waiting for me to go cold.
This book is not about addiction. This book is about becoming someone else. Addiction was a symptom. Alcoholism was a catalyst. They are one and the same on these pages. The devil shaved my chest on the gurney of both. I am qualified to talk about it, my PhD is the kind they don’t print diplomas for.
Maybe you seek change in a small, simple way. Maybe you’re clinging to life for it. Maybe you love someone who is. If you crave inspiration, if you seek transformation, if you’re on death’s doorstep, or if you’re simply curious, you have come to the right place. What you seek, as you are reading this page, could evolve by the time you turn the last one. You might find what you didn’t realize you were looking for.
Whatever you are battling in life’s turbulent waters—what you seek is within reach—this true story is all the proof you will need to believe it.
Nearly nothing is guaranteed in this life, so I don’t make promises. But I’ll make you one, because I know the world can’t break it. My pursuit of this four-letter word felt like sparring with a ghost, as if written in invisible ink: Hope. No matter how cold, numb, or broken you may think you are, I promise you will feel it.
Remember that promise. As the page numbers grow with the soul’s descent, you will rely on it.
The Last Battle is the sum of a war. These are the real battles. All losses. They were not for nothing. They were for this, which is hope—which is everything.
I scoured the human experience searching for the universal truths within these pages. They are scars I earned along the way. You will not find them written elsewhere.
Every single granular detail of every moment told in this book is one hundred percent true. In order to remain faithful to that, it is even understated. Nothing is dramatized. If you are bothered by curse words, here’s a disclosure—this book is rated R-as-fuck.
Becoming someone else happens at the crumbling edge of where life drops off. My two-legged stool waits there.
You will sit in it.
These are not simple matters. These are matters of life and death. Parts of this story even bleed beyond those lines.
This is not a religious story. So to the agnostics—breathe. While I am not religious, I wouldn’t be alive to tell you this story if I wasn’t spiritual.
I dedicated my life to writing this book. Why that is, isn’t what you’d think. The true reason is a significant part of the story itself, and today I attempt to be a great storyteller, so I can’t tell you that yet.
It’s all for the person who was convinced that he would never become me. That person is who I’m writing for. Somewhere within, he or she is all of us. And I want to believe that someday, somewhere, someone will pick up this book and read it, and it will give them a little bit of hope. Sometimes, that’s enough to save a life. And years later, they’ll look back and think about this period of their life. Maybe they’ll forget about this book. That’ll be fine. At least it was there for them when they needed it.
Because it wasn’t there when I needed it.
I collided with Death in a passionate embrace a handful of times when I wasn’t looking for Her. When I went looking for Her, She wouldn’t have me. I defied Her, and She defied me. These close calls were far more perplexing than things like overdose; incredible events in such quantity, one can’t cite them all as coincidence. Despite my disbelief in spiritual or religious things at the time, I was forced to believe that something would not allow me to die.
You might not believe it all really happened. If so, that’s casually just fine. I endured far too much to be bothered by skeptics – that implies I have something to gain from them. And I don’t. I have gained somuch more than what good opinions, money, or fame can possibly give me. You see, I possess something of unspeakable value. Something that cannot be gifted or found, only earned: Inner-Peace—all the way to the core. It’s fed with serenity. And it is untouchable.
I only answer to the man in the glass. I didn’t write this book with my image in mind. I wrote it with the defeated in mind.
Part I: The Shear Line
By age eighteen, my inner-peace looked like the flag you’d tie at the center of a rope being used for tug-of-war. The fibers of my self-worth, at the cusp of a snap, revealed a truth only pain could show me. I compared myself to others—the feeling it gave, defined me. I muted my insecurities by pursuing validation. My self-perception came from everywhere except from within myself. The subconscious mind, with its invisible powers, chiseled my ego from the sarcophagus of identity. Reverie is coming to the one freed from its crypt.
1 – Fall from Grace (17-18)
Two in the morning. I was out of breath, panting under the Wisconsin summer moonlight. I wasn’t running anymore. This was simply adrenaline-based suffocation. The world as I knew it hours ago was gone. What made me special before, I just lost.
I looked to the stars, then intently focused on them. I hadn’t blinked in minutes. I rubbed my burning eyes, breaking my focus on the heavens. I cracked my neck, sat down, then stood up again, hunched over and placed my hands on my knees. I stood upright once more, ran my fingers through my hair and tried to pull it out, but it slipped through my grasp. As it did, I looked up again. Far out into the distance, above the trees and residential rooftops, a dark cloud overhead approached the moonlight,
I thought about career day as a six-year-old, when I dressed up like a special-ops soldier. Other kids wore white lab coats and police badges. I painted my face and wore camouflage. I detached those dreams and left them with the six-year-old—separating him from who I would soon become. I felt that burden lift—that liberation born out of loss. I thought about what the others will think of me now. It’s-the-end-of-the-worldpanic returns. I tried not to cry. I told myself there is more to life than this, so I smiled, but a tear falls as I do. The trees shifted in the wind. My shirtless body shivered, water dripping off the hem of my shorts. Nausea crept up my throat. I heard a car door close and thought about running again. I accepted my fate and denied my flight instincts. I turned around to face the street, where three friends stood, all shirtless and wet like me. The houses lining the neighborhood street glowed purple hues from the flashing blue and red lights. It’s just a memory now, but I still feel the fresh air of that night as if I were still there.
My friends and I had been chasing vodka and rum shots with Coca-Cola and stuffing cigar leaves with weed since nine that night. A large roll of industrial plastic-wrap stood idly in the corner of my friend’s basement. A teacher at our private Catholic high school lived a few streets away. We grabbed it before jumping in my car and going to a “haunted” dead-end road: Lovers Lane in Menomonee Falls, where a few couples were allegedly caught in a serial killer’s crosshairs, decades ago. We drove to the end of the road, parked, then got out of the car and waited for the ghost to reveal itself. It never did. Eventually, we walked to the teacher’s house, plastic wrap in-tow, and had a great time Saran-wrapping his parked car. It was almost as much fun as toilet-papering the dean’s house. The flat, unflinching water of a nearby backyard pool, glimmered with the moon’s reflection, tempting our unbridled impulses in the humid heat.
We crept over to the six-foot pickets, stashed our shirts and shoes, scaled the fence, jumped into the pool, then scaled the fence out, running to the next pool within eyeshot. This repeated five or six times within twenty minutes.
The red and blue police lights were in response to the homeowners that startled awake to the sounds of splashing water beneath their master bedroom windows. One light turned on after another as we fled around the corner, out of sight.
It was harmless, really. The joy of that memory still makes me smile. These kinds of things don’t warrant more than a call to the parents. But for me, it was life-changing. I was on my way to West Point in a few months, and this meant I was called to maintain a standard of baseline perfection. It was a call I could not answer. That night, escape from my childhood home, a life I resented, slipped between my fingers. That night, I got my fourth underage drinking ticket and the nail in my coffin.
The United States Military Academy (USMA), more commonly known as West Point or simply “Army” is one of, if not the most, elite institutions in America. Getting accepted into a place like this requires far more than academic perfection. Applicants must receive a hard-to-come-by nomination from a US Congressman or Senator. Candidates must hold valued leadership positions, play sports, pass a demanding fitness test, and have a markedly clean background. My academic and extra-curricular motivations revolved around checking those boxes. It was exhausting. So I partied my ass off. And I could party hard, as long as I got away with it.
My district’s US Congressman normally nominated ten candidates to West Point as his “general nominees.” When I applied and interviewed with his office, he excluded the other nine potential general nominees and delivered just one nomination, his “principal” nominee. This type of nomination is a golden ticket as it is the only avenue which guarantees acceptance. It’s a very rare accolade and honor.
I got “the call” on a Saturday morning over Christmas break. I returned home only hours prior after a long night of partying. That morning, my dad entered my bedroom, a phone in his hands and his eyes agape, a single tear in his eye.
“Son! Get up!” He said, handing me the phone with a whisper saying, “you got it!”
A United States Congressman was on the phone. “Thomas! Good morning, young man! Congratulations, I just reserved your place at the United States Military Academy at West Point, You’re a future Plebe, cadet! I am announcing you as my standalone principal nominee. That means you’ll be guaranteed acceptance. You deserve it. Make us proud! Just don’t go telling anybody yet, if you’d do me that kindness. Keep it between your family members at least until the newspaper announcements are published. We’ll let you know when you can share the news, okay?” ♣
I was pensive about my future and self-absorbed after that. It’s true what I think of myself, after all. I just wanted my heart to recognize me for who I really was, not to go to West Point. It was challenging to find the joy in it, because after I got that call, I didn’t care as much about going to West Point anymore.
You see, in my mind, I was special. Now, everyone around me would have no choice but to think the same. The concrete was mixing. I was on track to fulfilling my destiny as someone who will “change the world” as my mother often told me. Many battles will be waged—and lost—with this inner dialogue.
West Point can deny a U.S. Congressman’s golden nominee for only one reason: character risks. And above being perfect in every way, which was now my charge, I had to be good, or be good at it—I had to get away with my ‘risky’ behavior or get away from the edge; no trouble, no arrests, no drinking tickets. To me, that translated to no good times. And life should be shared and enjoyed in freedom—not spent following orders.
So I took the risks.
When I applied for the nomination, I told them about my three underage drinking tickets. They left me zero tolerance for error. The recent pool-hopping misadventure would be the dagger, I believed.
From time to time I wonder how would things have played out differently if not. But I don’t wish for it. I wouldn’t want to transcend any other past. Standing in the summer moonlight on a suburban street lit up with purple hues from blue and red police lights, I knew what I’d just lost.
A few weeks later, I called the West Point admissions team a dozen times, wondering why I hadn’t received my official appointment package yet. I hadn’t gotten a denial letter, either, which was great news. The heart knows things the mind doesn’t. My mom threw me into the car, and we drove through the night from Milwaukee to New York’s Hudson Valley, where we physically dropped in on the admissions board at West Point. I suppose there was reason to hope that something dramatic would help. I had nothing to lose.
They granted me a hearing for the next day. I walked into that fateful meeting at West Point, asked them to reconsider, shed a lot of genuine tears, and pleaded my case. I argued that having a good time and attending a party on occasion is good for mental health. They pretended to understand and said they would put it to a vote. In reality, they just didn’t have the heart to split me right there on the spot.
For four years, my singular motivation was to get into West Point and be among the elite. I didn’t want to be an officer in the army, my ego did. Every test I studied for, all the training I did to reach the maximums on the fitness test, the tutoring program I volunteered at twice per week, the leadership society I was a member of, the younger athletes I helped and worked out with—all of it came down to this.
I was blindly collecting trophies to prop up my high school resume. I failed to recognize the significance of anything I was doing. My tunnel vision had me chasing external validation. I couldn’t stop being the center of attention because I couldn’t stop whispering how special I was, because I sought validation from a family that would never give it to me. Blinded by the pursuit of becoming who I thought the world would admire, I wanted the pedestal. I wanted to look down on everyone. But only inwardly. I’d never show off my inflated self-worth, but nurtured and pursued it nonetheless.
When I was fourteen, my brother Lonnie graduated from West Point. I hear he’ll be promoted to general soon. He’s eight years older than me, my oldest living sibling and only living brother—the golden child who-could-do-no-wrong. I wanted my family to put me on the same pedestal. I spent twenty years in pursuit of a hope that, some day, they will adore me like they adored Lonnie. My desire to belong was born out of a void—one that shaped my identity into adulthood.
By the time I was fifteen, my three older siblings were finally out of the house. The peace and quiet that replaced years of dysfunction felt exotic. At that point, I was independent and raising myself, for better or worse. At fifteen, I didn’t mind it. But my parents did not nurture my development the same way as, for example, I had seen exhibited towards my older siblings. Emotional trauma branched off from the passive neglect. My lack of instruction forced me to learn everything I know through observation and punishment.
When people start a family, their first child is like a porcelain doll, so they bubble wrap it and take blood pressure medication every time they take it outside. By the time they have five children, that porcelain doll progressively morphs into a cloth teddy bear, one that can withstand the soles of feet, plunges into pool water and burn scars from being forgotten alongside scalding-hot stovetop burners.
In the novel, The Call of the Wild, Jack London writes, “There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life. And beyond which, life does not rise. And such is the paradox of living.” These words are tattooed down my right ribcage. ♣ It’s about the infamous wolfdog – Buck. His identity is torn between a desire for his master’s companionship—to be a dog – or to belong to the region’s wolfpack. Those words are written at a point in the story where, Buck is challenged by the alpha, a fight ensues, and Buck is victorious. As the new alpha, Buck’s soul didn’t relent, but grew increasingly restless, longing for human companionship that all dogs crave—conflicted by his insatiable need to be a wolf—to be one with the unbridled, open wilderness, where he could traverse its wild corners.
What I found in chasing an image of superiority, was its elusive illusion. After climbing to the summit of self-validation, it vanished beneath my feet. I awoke to find myself buried beneath the mountain. The world according to me was missing a fundamental component—it’s not about me.
2 – Ego Death (18)
Two weeks before my high school graduation, West Point called me. It was all over.
In a twist of fate, the officer in charge of my file, the one who called me, Major Penny, was diagnosed with terminal cancer a few days before calling me, a week after meeting in person.
“It could be worse.” He said. I never heard those four words the same way again, after he told me that. I learned a lot in those ten minutes. He died less than a year later.
Years of what I saw in myself, dissolved. The funnel clouds formed overhead. They said that I should try again next year. They won’t even recognize me next year.
I was a popular jock, but not the arrogant and self-centered kind who deserved a crushing downfall. I was atypical, in that way. I paid attention to the invisible. I defended the outcasts. I was nicest to those most in need of it—the friendless. My girlfriend of two years, Lauren, captained the dance squad, and I was a handsome, charismatic football player—one of the few whose name you hear through the loudspeakers over and over for hours. My high school ran on a block schedule like most universities, giving students plenty of free time to ‘study.’ I walked around and into other more interesting classrooms with impunity, played pickup games of basketball, and gathered in free classrooms with friends. What I lacked in the willingness to follow the rules, I made up for with charm and wit.
I was in my assigned gym class when a front-office assistant entered, her business-casual garb standing out from the pack of students with authority. She whispered to my teacher, and then, my teacher looked directly at me. What did I do now? He beckoned me with an index finger. The dean wanted to see me.
Our dean, Ms. Late, was not on anyone’s shortlist of favorite people. She had a job that gave her authority and as the master of discipline, she wasn’t giving out any awards, which kept her stuck in a hard place, a hard place where she thrived. She browsed photos and text messages on confiscated phones that weren’t password-protected for no reason other than to find dirt—an illegal practice that bore no consequence because the school wasn’t going to stop her. There’s no doubt her mind is a stockpile of dick pics and nudes of non-consenting minors. If she found a message that alluded to drug use or drug-seeking behavior at the school, that student was almost always expelled, because the school had an infectious drug problem and she was the antibiotics.
My name was mentioned in a text message thread between two classmates, only one of whom I actually knew. One of them got caught texting in class, and his phone—without a password—confiscated, which was immediately left with the dean and could be picked up at the end of the school day. I never found out what the messages said. I only knew that, the messages alleged that I, an unwitting third party, knew of a guy who might have some kind of prescription pills. In the days of 2010, half of the high school knew someone along those lines. The opioid epidemic was in full bloom.
They permanently suspended me, more or less, and gave me the remaining two weeks off and my diploma would come in the mail. The explanation was vague and arbitrary, but they didn’t want to risk that I was actually the one selling the drugs. Hell, what if I was the guy? I was not the guy, but it is ironic looking back. What made that my last day of my high school career—was my innocence, of all things. By default, they branded me with the guilt of the allegation. The judgement of the community and my peers—among whom I was once so highly esteemed—bore down on my glass castle with three-hundred-mile-per-hour winds.
The heartbreak amplified as my friends appeared to desert me. Because I didn’t get a single text message or phone call from a single person after that day—except from Lyle, someone you’ll meet soon. My reputation became the inverse of what it was, just like that. Someone saw me at the Wisconsin State Fair and asked, “Is it true they found bags of ecstasy and weed in your locker?” The rumors ran wild.
When I was pulled out of gym class and summoned to the dean’s office, they sent me to the locker room to retrieve my clothes, backpack, and cell phone. Everyone knew about the dean’s borderline illegal cell phone searches. Of the half-dozen times I was summoned to the principal’s office in four years, I rarely brought my phone with me, it was like an unwritten rule among students. I thought about the dean, swiping through one nude photo after another, Lauren’s innocence shattering. I thought about Lauren’s conservative and religious parents—revered benefactors who sat on the school board. Someone close to them, perhaps the principal herself, would almost certainly inform them; their daughter is not saving her virginity for marriage, unfortunately, she’s having sex with that boyfriend of hers.
I’m not catholic, I went to that school to play sports. But even in 2010, many people viewed premarital sex as a deeply sinful, even immoral. This view was force-fed by the same ego-driven institutions that force-fed fear-mongering via eternal damnation. This whole situation would be a repeat of the situation with Lauren’s older sister who, at the same age, was caught defiling her sacrosanct purity and was forcibly separated from her first love—by Lauren’s parents. Lauren told me many times, “If they find out, they’ll make us break up”—referring to the sex.
When I arrived at the dean’s office, she asked for my phone. I told the dean that I didn’t have my phone—a covert lie to mask the overt truth that I slipped it into a trash can. Since I didn’t have my phone, I couldn’t prove my own innocence, while also protecting Lauren’s innocence, and thus, associative guilt from the third-party text messages pinned me to the canvas. Everything I held dear, slipping from my clammy palms, one by one. The flag on the tug-of-war rope for my inner peace was not on my side, where it would stay for many years.
Lauren, my girlfriend of two years, was now in the crosshairs of the spinning vortex. To an eighteen-year-old, two years can feel like half a lifetime. We were in love, and we were good together. What I will always remember about the time we shared, is the laughter. It didn’t matter if we were in my living room, making gnocchi with her mother, skipping a party to watch The Notebook, or in a Maggiano’s, stuffing our faces with her favorite spaghetti—we were always laughing. Lauren’s parents were rigid Irish and Italian Catholics, and they were good people to me—a non-Catholic. They helped to pay my senior year tuition by hiring me to do landscaping and other household jobs for them. When the news of how the West Point-bound senior got expelled for drug-related conspiracy, they were the only ones who cared enough to find out my side of the story, because it didn’t add up.
Later that night, Lauren’s parents called my home phone. My dad answered. It was a beautiful night, full of moonlight, no clouds. As they exchanged pleasantries, I quietly picked up one of the wireless landline phones and listened in from the front porch swing. They quickly asked my dad the question everyone wanted the answer to: “Why didn’t Thomas give them his cell phone?”
He obliged, ignorant of the stakes, he said, “He was trying to hide the nude photos of Lauren on his phone.” To my dad, this detail painted me as the hero of the situation. And he was right. But Lauren’s parents didn’t see it that way. And I didn’t understand, until years later, that’s what my Dad was trying to point out. Because at the time, I didn’t see it that way either.
Winds of change circled me. In that moment, I threw everything I could at my dad through the phone, with Lauren’s parents on the line. “You fucking idiot, Dad! Fuck!” I yelled, then thought I hung up, and then yelled again unintelligibly, this time loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear. Then I threw the phone onto the driveway, shattering it, which is when Lauren’s parents knew I had left the call.
After hanging up and throwing the phone, I put my fist through a thin wooden wall in the garage and then two nearby windows. Then, I walked out onto the driveway, where I saw my dad through the kitchen window, putting dishes in the dishwasher. I grabbed the first rock I saw, which was a piece of asphalt from our crumbling driveway – a perfect metaphor for the dysfunction within the home that raised me. I held the rock in my hand for almost a minute, stopping to confirm that I wasn’t being impetuous. I didn’t want to hit him in the head. I didn’t want to hurt him physically. I just wanted him to know what he’d done and how mad I was. I wanted to send a message. I waited for him to walk out of sight from the kitchen and into the living room, then I threw the asphalt rock as hard as my eighty mile-per-hour fastball. It traveled across the yard, through a kitchen window, through the kitchen and into the living room, where it collided with a white support column as he sat down on the couch with a bowl of ice cream. It detonated like a grenade. I wanted to be seen. Like somewhere outside of the ball field or in the newspapers. I wanted shock. I wanted my actions to speak for my inequality, to reach out from the box I was dropped into and then left behind.
***
In my family, I was the ‘tag-along.’ Everybody has their role—angles of the identity polygon. These things can’t be avoided. Because humans can’t circumvent their human condition.
I’m the fifth born, the youngest—the unplanned one. When I was ten, I figured that out, after counting the spaces between my sibling’s ages and mine: two-years, two-years, three-years—“Mom, why is everyone two-years apart and I’m three?” My mom, Catherine, cried tears of torment when she found out she was unexpectedly pregnant with me. She was terrified I’d be as difficult as my two older sisters. She did her best not to let the torment she felt at the time, translate into the life she gave me. My mom would make your great aunt Margaret Christmas Dinner with everything she wanted. Don’t know who Margaret is, or you, and it might come on New Year’s Day instead, but she’d do it since you asked nicely. Both of my parents always gave us four children everything they had the capacity to give us.
Growing up, I was an outlier in my family. I’ve always known it because, I was treated like that. Sometimes, I still think this will eventually change. In my heart, I know it won’t, even if I became president or saved all of the world’s dogs. Any accomplishment would always be minimized because it was just me. The role passively assigned to me became bedrock beneath my developing identity. It’s a role I’ve worked tirelessly to eradicate from my psychological makeup, the one built out of physical and emotional trauma.
My mom’s childhood dream was pretty simple, she just wanted to be a mother. And break the cycle of abuse and neglect passed down by her own mother, who was diagnosed as bipolar with borderline personality disorder, and traumatized her and her three sisters with most forms of abuse. In her mid-twenties, Catherine was elected as a city councilwoman and also brought my parent’s first-born, Jonathan, into the world. Three months after her lifelong dream came true with Jonathan, she was at city hall—a councilwoman ahead of her years. From the conference room windows of her meeting, she saw multiple police cruisers speeding into the busy intersection below, blocking traffic. She heard the emergency sirens crescendo from a whisper to a sonic riot, sirens and lights blazing through the vacant intersection toward the adjacent hospital. She’d never seen the intersection get totally blocked off like that, and she thought, How sad. It must be awfully serious. Seconds later, a secretary interrupted the meeting, and called my mom out of the room. She walked into her office, picked up the phone, and on the line, a voice faded her sights and sounds—to black. Jonathan was in that ambulance. Paramedics valiantly fought to resuscitate her infant first-born—but failed. I never met Jonathan. Forty years later, his life’s effect on all of us still ripples through our timelines. Losing a child is a momentary flash in the big picture—one that changes a person as quick as lightning. You become someone else in an instant—everyone you affect, too. That’s the byproduct of incomprehensible pain.
The babysitter my mom hired was a neonatal ICU nurse, of all things. While Jonathan was napping, she ran to the bank. Her husband became the babysitter for fifteen minutes. While my esoteric brother stirred, he managed to press the top of his head against the non-breathable, mesh side-walls of the playpen where he slept. The drop-side mesh playpen gently collapsed, and folded over his face. He silently suffocated. He never made a sound. When the husband went to check up on him minutes after his wife left the house, Jonathan’s face was blue. That young couple’s marriage did not survive the year. In 1980, Gerber refused to acknowledge the dangers posed by their products, until Jonathan was joined by six others. As the lawsuits piled up, and settlements kept the public in the dark, while warning labels were silently printed onto the products in Jonathan’s wake. ♣ My parents refused to settle for years, until the products were eventually recalled.
Talk about a fall from grace—yet here we are, paths colliding; circumstances of unintended trauma rendered in-kind, but trauma nonetheless. My parents’ unconditional participation as subjects of the human condition, were the catalysts to my upbringing, created my role, yielded my behavior, and influenced my decisions.
Sometimes, though rarely, they’d talk about Jonathan. It left me grateful for having a family at all, since my parents barely recovered and part of them never will, naturally. I searched far and wide for the answers to processing through my own childhood trauma. My parents, they did their best but fell short many times, like any parent, like any human.
During the many battles I waged in the coming years, I worked with a counselor who helped me put a name to all the components of my identity and trace their origins back to a handful of nearly forgotten early childhood memories. At one point, this counselor asked me to remember the very first time I could recall being upset and to write it down in as much detail as I could. I thought for a long time, then wrote down one memory. Then, I remembered an earlier one and wrote that down, too. And then, an even earlier one. This continued until a particularly painful memory surfaced.
I must have been three, maybe four. There was an argument in the front foyer of our house. My three siblings were there with my mom. I was standing on the stairs at the back of the foyer. I opened my mouth and said something to contribute to the argument. I don’t recall what I said, only that my statement was harmless. My eight-year-old sister, Carrie, recoiled aggressively at me and gave me a verbal lashing in front of everyone.
“Thomas, you shut your mouth! You need to learn your place in this family!” It was a form of communication I’d never seen before, and it was directed toward me. I was instantaneously crushed. I sobbed for hours. I don’t know how she did it, but her words cut right through me.
Memories can play tricks on us, especially our earliest ones. For a long time, I couldn’t recall any negative memories of my early childhood. But they were there. This memory at three years old and many others came back to the surface after I dug deep to find them, because my inner child, the one who threw the piece of driveway asphalt through the window, was deeply damaged.
Many things came together to create my mind as it was when I was eighteen. The challenges of my childhood. The circumstances of neglect. The way you grow up thinking your trauma is normal. The role that I was assigned at the age of my earliest memory. By the time I was a teenager, my identity was grounded in overcompensation for the neglect and inferiority I felt within my family hierarchy. The events of my early youth taught me that I should never depend on anyone—the tag-along, lone-wolf-alpha.
***
The night I threw a rock through the kitchen window after my dad, my mom put me in her car and called my sister. I was being relocated. She packed me a bag and told me to “get in.” I actually never even went back inside of my house after Lauren’s parents called our landline. The next day, Lauren called and broke up with me.
I’d lost West Point and my childhood dreams on Monday. The next Thursday, I lost my first love, all of my friends, my home, the pedestal of my high school glory and also my identity.
For the next eleven years through material wealth, fortune and misfortune, addiction, legal trouble, close-calls, traumatic brain injuries and intimacy with death, doors progressively closed in my face until eventually, the only doors that remained open wanted to kill me. I lost too much of who I was and when the lights went dark a door cracked open with blinding light where, lying in wait was a gift that didn’t come looking like a gift.
Getting me away from my dad was in everyone’s best interest. The only place I could go was my sister Heather’s four-hundred-square-foot duplex apartment in Madison at the University of Wisconsin, where she lived with Josh, her roommate and now husband.
I was disfigured inside. I hated everyone and everything. I lived an independent life there. I was angry, quiet, withdrawn. I thought the world owed me something. I sat and smoked blunts alone, something I never did before. I started plotting. My life became a mission to validate my self-worth again. I confronted losing everything I knew and having everything I didn’t know at the same time, ready to embrace the next adventure.
The melancholy in loss of self transcends the self entirely: it’s like the raw ascension of identity. Part of the self dies—a refinement process.
Most of my waking hours that summer were spent on the third and fourth floors of College Library overlooking Lake Mendota. There, I studied myself; how to be better at being me. I wrote manically through the night and day, a catharsis for me. That Word document became a 130,000-word novel about self-dissolution and self-reconstruction. It was crap that only I could understand. Nonetheless, it helped me heal. ♣
At the end of the summer, I went to Beloit College, a small private college that I chose for a terrible reason: it was the only one I applied to that wasn’t West Point, and by all accounts is the polar opposite of West Point.
I overcame the tragic demise of my image, my version of it anyways. I learned how to put my pain to use. I walked in with an ego that I’d learned to compartmentalize. On the outside, I seemed humble. In my heart, I just wanted peace. But my ego’s version of peace was very different than my heart’s.
9 – The Harp (28-29)
When I was four years old, I walked into the garage and grabbed a wrench from my dad’s toolbox. I then walked over to my bicycle and figured out how to use that wrench to remove my bicycle’s training wheels. I then walked it down the driveway and into the street, which had a slight decline. I sat down, pushed off, picked up my feet and started pedaling like I’d done it for years.
My entire life, I have never encountered something I couldn’t figure out. Where there was a will, I couldn’t be stopped. Cars and their engines, home remodeling, construction, golf, investment and financial expertise, human psychology, even neuroscience to the extent I wanted to know. So, I continued to be mystified by the one thing that I couldn’t seem to figure out. Overcoming my inability to stop drinking brought fresh determination to battle after battle, despite getting my ass kicked in a brand-new way every time. It was this radical notion that I can do anything I set my mind to – including stay sober. Desire for a good life drove me to keep showing up to those battles. I wondered what my life would look like without alcohol, what my family’s lives would look like. I wanted to give that life a chance. I didn’t know what that life would look like, but if I gave up, I’d never know.
Pain is universal. Death is universal. But there are certain depths of pain, that even to this point in my story, I couldn’t even fathom. Just five years prior to this point, things weren’t bad for me, not even close. I hardly had a problem. I was full of myself, on the opposite side of severe. I didn’t think I belonged in that room with these old alcoholics. I wasn’t like them. Now, five years later, I was too far gone for them to relate to me. People said they related. I believed them, but only up to a point. Beyond that point, I knew they couldn’t stretch their own truth far enough, and say they relate to me, and it not be a lie.
The people who tried to help me talked about me like I was a lost cause. And they were not wrong.
***
My house is positioned at a wooded dead-end. One of my bad habits was disposing of my vodka bottles in the woods. After I finished a bottle, either from the mouth of it or after distributing it into empty Gatorade and Desani bottles, I would walk over to my six-foot-high privacy fence, which I built myself, and threw the empty bottle as far as I could. I stopped throwing them into the woods when I noticed the plastic bottles were rebounding off the trees and back towards my house, within proximity of Katerina’s prying eyes. And the glass bottles, those would shatter against tree trunks, causing a raucous of noise which drew unwanted attention. So instead, I started throwing bottles into the area next to the woods, which was the treeless ravine beneath the powerlines and property that belonged to the power company. When the time came to fight another battle, we had a little tradition, Katerina and I. We got out a couple of black contractor bags and cleaned up the graveyard of empty vodka bottles. After this incident with the twin pillars, that’s what we did.
The tradition was born years ago after I admitted to Katerina that on occasion when I was out of liquor, overcome with the obsession, I would enter the woods and scavenge for drops of vodka from yellowed, oxidized, year-old plastic bottles. Those woods bore all the hallmarks of the lonely, desperate alcoholic that I was, littered with my ego’s unscratchable itching.
There is a power substation just up the hill on the other side of my woods. The power company’s property borders my property. Every year, they send contractors out to mow down the overgrowth around the woods, directly under the powerlines. The pilot of a low-flying helicopter could hear the squeals of their massive blades getting jammed with plastic bottles and shattering the glass ones.
After the incident between twin-pillars and a hurricane, I went without a drink for a week. I stumbled through average alcohol withdrawal; it was comparatively just as bad as my worst heroin withdrawal. It was the first time in my life that I actually believed in a higher power. I had no choice but to believe in it – didn’t know what it was, what to call it or why it refused to give me what I deserved, which was both my recovery and my death.
Four or five days later, after my withdrawals cleared up. I felt hopeful in a way that was different, because I knew what I was missing before, and now I had it – a belief in something bigger than me. I slowly allowed hope back in. I saw what life could look like, having overcoming my affliction for alcohol, once and for all.
My parents had recently moved down to Georgia from Milwaukee. As my birthday approached, and Katerina asked them to join us for a casual birthday dinner at a renowned Italian restaurant in the area called La Grotta. Katerina asked my parents to dress nicely. The dinner was exceptional. But that’s not the part that sticks in my mind.
I’ll never forget the feeling of getting dressed up for something normal, like my own birthday dinner, and for the first time in a long time I was excited to celebrate my birthday. It felt like how I imagined it would feel, to live one day in a simple life where I was finally free from the tug and pull of fighting through a perpetual crisis. It felt like a curse had been lifted and the simple pleasures of life glittered like diamonds – like getting dressed up nice for my own birthday dinner, like being loved enough by a few people to make it an occasion. Underneath the way that evening made me feel, was how it felt to love myself.
Several days later, I found myself at the end of a bottle again, thinking about that moment between the twin pillars. I was captive to something beyond myself—possessed by a spell.
I prayed in a nasty way. My prayer was abhorrent toward it. I condemned every new day that was coming. I sat in my car in a desolate post-Covid movie theatre parking lot, trying to be invisible against the tree line. Upon opening my second or third ‘water’ bottle on the day, I took a gulp of vodka, and without speaking, I spoke. I know you’re here… I thought about the snapshot image of waking up, my headlights like an old camera’s flash against the twin pillars.
“Here I am drinking again. So next time, don’t save me. Just let me go. Just fuck off. Thanks.”
Years ago, I would’ve shed a few tears over this, but I had no tears left to give. The old tree of hope that had rooted my esteem and happiness withered above the eroding bedrock of lost battles. I felt nothing but pain. I looked at the bottle in my hand, thinking, it’s never gonna end. This is no life. My illusions of better days to come felt like promises nobody could keep, not even God. I was detaching from my humanity with every battle. I wanted to know what my life could look like without alcohol. I imagined it was something precious, something beautiful, something to treasure. But my will to find out frayed as a beautiful instrument stopped playing a sad song.
I wasn’t hellbent on destroying myself, my life, at any point. Every attempt to get back on the wagon and stay for good was done with earnest conviction and a heart full of humility. I searched for my higher power so I could get on with my life; they told me to find something beyond myself to be the shot-caller, the puppet-master, the man running the show. If I could believe in one thing at least, I wasn’t the master of the show. The twin-pillars incident moved me to believe something else was out there besides myself after all.
There is a lot of dogma within the twelve steps. My blood boiled against the lack of a practical twenty-first century solution to my problems being “spiritual in nature.” Because I tried and tried. It didn’t work. I demanded better than a one-hundred year old book’s explanation to a physiological problem.
They say a grateful alcoholic is a sober alcoholic and I didn’t drink on any given day because I was grateful. When I was drinking, I was grateful for my life, our home, our two dogs whose worlds revolved around me. I was loved and I knew it. Lack of gratitude was not causing my problem either.
Appreciation for what I had rushed to the surface in the form of remorse every time I confessed to my wife that I’d been drinking again. It struck with a hot iron—the dull, red-hot heat cut through her heart every time I came clean. My remorse turned to disdain for the inexplicable juxtaposition behind my own actions. My soul shattered in pieces I’ll never find again, it left my body as the tears hit the hardwood floor. My efforts amounted to nothing. After the dogged work I put into reading, the steps, the meetings, the other books on recovery – none of it mattered in the end. I didn’t have a spiritual malady, if I did, I would not have told the higher power that made a miracle out of me between twin-pillars and a hurricane to fuck-right-on-off. I recognized it for everything that it was – a wasted miracle. I had a heart that was pure and wanted to make the world a better place my entire life, even while all of this was going on. But I was struck with a terminal disease that had no cure. When I was writing the figurative book about how to ship weed across the country, I never lost who I was underneath. I’d do a hell of a lot to help just about anybody. When I see strong emotions, I can feel them too. It didn’t matter if I knew the person, if I loved them, or if they just threw a rock through my windshield. I feel the emotional pain of other people. I learned, over time, how to disable being an empath. So why now? There is not one person who knew me that’d say, ‘he was spiritually divergent and that’s why he drank himself to death.’ The spiritual malady—the generalized AA diagnosis of all alcoholics – I wasn’t going to continue supporting those theories. It just wasn’t true.
That was the moment I gave up. It was two days after my twenty-ninth birthday.
In doing so, I learned something I did not expect to find. There is a secret hidden underneath the idealism of tenacity, determination, resiliency, whatever you want to call it. It’s fallacious. We hear about how the greats fall down seven times and get back up eight, how they never stop fighting the noble fight. MJ. Abe Lincoln. Then there is me. I wasn’t getting up for eight. I’m staying down on the ground with my vodka, for now. A wisdom I discovered down there on the ground is this:
It’s okay to give up sometimes. In fact, sometimes, it was the most honest thing I could do in order to change. But this is only known in hindsight. Because in giving up, you find something you didn’t know existed—where was nothing. You allow a part of yourself to die. The part that was telling you “get back up” was, all along, the part knocking you back down and getting you repeatedly run over on the tracks. If you’re lucky, part of your ego doesn’t die, the whole thing dies.
For me, this moment came at a time so dark, I accepted that the harp was playing a swan song, harmonizing behind my life’s attenuating value. It was a pretty song, at first. The butter knife swiped and swiped, as alcohol’s vitriolic power over my resolve frayed away at my—until now—unbreakable tenacity. In that moment, I accepted that my harp had played the last of the beautiful songs of resolve. Tumbleweeds of strings rolled past me and across the barren, abandoned movie theatre parking lot as I finished the bottle in my hand.
The paradigm of the hero’s journey suggests the warrior of any story turns his back on the call to greatness and those who believe in him, when he gives up, says fuck it all, walks alone into the woods and becomes a hermit—his existence becomes an enigma. Sooner or later, he returns as a different person with new motives and intentions. He’s not interested in selfish things; rather, he’s interested in his fellows, the things that make the world around him great, not what makes him great. Only then can he accept the call. That’s generalized ego death: it is every pain that is not physical pain—complete self-abandonment. It is a state in which such internal pain is felt at all times, a state of being that hooks its talons for far longer than days or weeks. It is the most brutal thing the soul can endure. There are tiers to its severity. There is no escaping the suffering behind this kind of pain – that is, after all, the point.
Who I thought I was, was an illusion. I accepted that. I had become the opposite of everything I thought I was going to be as a four-year-old, and there was nothing left for me to do to change that. My perseverance failed to generate results. I failed to change. I hated myself. I hated hope. And without hope, the significance of living ceases to exist, leaving me with nothing. So I gave up. Ego Death had been trying to pull me under for eleven years—finally on my last breaths as I entered the darkest known existence—Ultra Ego Death. Ego Death rarely touches this morbid black hole of existence.
The few who escaped this black hole had their souls displaced, atom by atom. They do not return to us with the same posture they departed with. This world of hellscapes extended far beyond what the mind’s eye can see—existential dread all day, every day, on and off for many years. As some kind of otherworldly force prevented my death, swung and missed with its miracle, hope was vacated too. My physical trauma soon followed.
In December of 2020, contemplating where the end of the road lies. I thought about the things that used to bring me joy and what that was like—to experience joy. I used to love playing catching with the football or baseball. I missed that. So, I signed up for flag football. Directed by my ego, I signed up for League A, the highest competition level. My team, all strangers to me, started playing in the second week of January, 2021. By then, I polished a liter of vodka every day, if it had been a light day. If it was a heavy day, nearly two liters. There were several days I drank over two liters. My liver was swollen to the point where, if you poked my right abdomen with tip of your finger, I quivered in pain.
On January ninth of that year, in the late evening after a long day of drinking, I was carelessly opening a box with a boxcutter that I’d just put a brand new blade into. It slipped from the box and the entire blade vanished into my left palm. Fortunately, it sunk into the meat of my thumb muscle, missing tendons. It was two inches deep and two inches wide. I played flag football with six stitches in my palm. The stitches tore. The wound opened constantly. It got infected three times causing pain far worse actual injury.
Later that month, I took my gas-powered chainsaw to a bush of poison ivy growing over a dead Leland Cyprus. I sat down on my ass under the bush of thorns to cut the base of the tree and clipped my leg with the edge of the rotating chainsaw. There were only a few drops of blood but the gash was deep. I was lucky to not have cut a few inches through my leg or worse.
During the second match of our flag football season, I injured my ankle badly. I didn’t roll the outside ankle; I rolled the inside ankle. I felt an abnormal pop in there. The pain was worse than when I tore my ACL and meniscus. Actually, the pain wasn’t even close; the ankle won by a landslide. In a half-drunken stupor, I tried to go back out and play like I was in the final minutes of the Texas high school five-A state championship playing for the 1988 Permian Panthers. I never walked the same way again.
Over the next few months, I fell down the flight of seven stairs going down to my bedroom two-dozen times—literally every other day. I didn’t tumble head-over-toes. I slid backward, my heels kicked up into my Achilles tendon, which pointed my toes down to the ground—the exact angle my ankle writhed in pain over. After the injury, I wore an ankle brace every day – the lace-up, very serious kind. It was the only way I could put one foot in front of the other under my own weight, which I had to do—so I could continue to go out and make a little bit of money exerting myself with more physical labor, which contributed to finding a new threshold of what my body could endure. It felt like selling my body.
Every night, I came home and took those ankle braces off, got in the shower, made a shitty dinner for myself and passed out. On the best nights, Katerina made me dinner. Those were the best nights. Around that time in mid-January, I began to wake up at two or three in the morning every night with sweats and shakes – my body’s way of telling me that it needs liquor. From the couch upstairs, I had a few drinks, where I fell back asleep for four more hours before waking again with the same condition. Katerina would wake me as she was leaving for work in the morning. Thus, I began another day of isolated dejection for life as reality quickly set in: another day, a brand new darkness.
At some point in early February, my roof started leaking. Water trickled down the furnace vent pipe from the attic, dropping rainwater through the attic and kitchen ceiling, then onto our kitchen floor. After trying several quick patches, I decided to properly fix it. I bought a new attic vent and some roof shingles and went up there for a few hours. I needed to disconnect a section of the vent pipe that connected to the roof. The joint I needed to disconnect was four or five feet below the surface of the roof, and the only way to access it was through the roof’s surface1`. After cutting most of the roof vent out, I exposed the original builder’s hole in the wood boards of the roof. My enlarged liver and I could fit through the hole head-first, while my legs kept me anchored to the roof while upside down inside the attic.
I needed to twist the pipe off with two hands, like twisting a spray nozzle off a water hose. To do that, I had to get a firm grip on both sides of the joint and twist. The problem was, the joint was four feet below the surface of the roof, suspended in the attic. The only way to get a grip on it like I needed to, was to physically be in there with my bare hands. I carefully lowered myself head-first into the attic. My shoulders, torso, and hips followed as I inched my way into the attic. Meanwhile my thighs, knees, and toes held me up on the roof. For what felt like hours, I tried and tried to twist that joint off. Eventually, I brought my Milwaukee Tools hacksaw in there with me. That hacksaw was like Aragorn’s sword from TheLord of the Rings: a big, heavy, two-handed motherfucker.
Every five minutes or so, I hung the saw on an exposed nail and pulled myself upright again before passing out unconscious, reverse crawling my way out to take a breath of fresh air, and then go back down there. Sometimes, I’d take a swig of vodka in between.
At one point, in my frustration and blood-displacement, I leaned all the way in and stretched my arms out as far as I could for the hacksaw. I picked it up quickly and knocked it on a rafter, slapping it out of my hands. In the excitement, I tried to catch the saw mid-flight, extending my body beyond the roof’s threshold and into the void below. Down I went—crashing through the attic floor, then the kitchen ceiling, freefalling head-first through the nine-foot airspace of the kitchen, directly onto the corner of the granite bar-top with my right ribcage absorbing the weight of my body in free-fall, then to the floor. ♣
In the immediate aftermath, I sent my wife a voice message saying, “I fell through the roof.” ♣After experiencing a broken rib, you pray it never happens again. The pain is grueling; you’re reminded of it with every breath you take. That constant expanding and deflating of the ribcage extends the healing process. It takes three-to-nine months to heal, if ever. There’s no fix for broken ribs. My breathing was already labored, and it required a parilous effort from that day on.
My short-term memory was added to the list of things alcohol stole from me. A half-dozen times per day, I walked into a room and forgot why I went there. The same thing happened when I walked into the grocery store, or hardware store. I had little memory of the prior day’s events. When I spoke to clients, I nodded and acted like I knew what they were talking about. My numerous bodily injuries stacked up and refused to heal. My internal organs were on the cusp of failing, unable to continue supporting my life.
By late February 2021, four months had passed since the incident between the twin pillars and the hurricane. My nightly routine had become the following:
After three hours of sleep, I wake up on my back. I have no choice – my liver is too swollen to sleep any other way. The time is between two and three in the morning. My sinuses are bloody and too inflamed to nose-breathe, so I mouth-breathe. When I wake, I have cotton-mouth. I am overcome with the shakes, the sweats, the chills, the hallmarks of the flu. I am decomposing by the moment. I am incomprehensibly dehydrated, but I’m not even thirsty. It’s been four hours without alcohol, and that’s what my body woke me up for.
From my back, I don’t bother making an attempt at my bedside water standing two feet from my right shoulder. I can’t check my blind spots to change lanes when I’m driving—my liver is too swollen to rotate like that. I am six foot tall, and weigh a buck seventy-five. I’m not fat. I can’t get my water. I don’t even care about the water anymore. My awareness comes together, focusing on how fast my heart is beating. It’s beating fast – real fast, pounding through my ears; so fast, I fear a heart attack could happen any second. The thought of that possibility makes it beat even faster.
My blood pressure is high, so high that I can feel how high it is, even on my back in bed. I barrel-roll off the edge of my one-foot platform bed, clumsily falling to the floor, landing on my knees with clenched fists, gritting my teeth in silent agony, hoping not to wake my wife.
I use my arms to get up on one knee like my childhood baseball coach used to do when he’d talk to the team. I move like an old woman in the crosswalk holding up traffic. But I was far worse off.
I use my forearms to push up off my thigh to assist in standing. The blood pressure problem creates other problems. My head pounds with my heartbeat. The tension headache never goes away until I lay back down, but I don’t, I can’t. I am lightheaded and more dizzy than I was when I fell asleep. Acetaldehyde still floats through my brain’s neurochemistry. My liver is unable to break it down and get it out of my body like it used to. The twenty-four hour hangover I live with, is barely perceptible anymore—this has become my normal.
I take my water bottle after a few slow, shallow breaths. I don’t bother to drink it, I just take it. I move forward a step and my injured ankle cracks so loudly I see the dogs’ ears go up in the shadows. I wobble to the right and place my hand against the wall to keep myself up. My ankle continues to pop loudly with every stair.
Waiting for me upstairs is a plastic water bottle filled with warm shitty vodka, one of three or four that I refill every day—without fail. It was a chore. Now it was a ritual, like pouring a circle of salt to keep the demons out, and the demons I’d come to know—locked in. It’d been years since I bothered with a chaser. It’s a few big gulps of vodka and swig of ice-water these days. But not today. Today, I won’t be having either.
I make it to the couch with the room-temp vodka and cold water, where I turn on the television and spend the next hour attempting to get comfortable. I turn on a program I wouldn’t watch when I regarded my future as a long one: poorly made science fiction movies like The Day Birds Fell From the Sky, quality animated movies like Minions. But tonight was different. I decided to turn on something that might make me laugh. I chose Parks and Recreation—a lifeline that will always have my affection, because I’m looking for a reason not to end my pain today—a thought that infested my mind for months. You never know when something as simple as one laugh might save someone’s life. I watched every episode during the devil’s hour, holding me back from the edge I was falling over.
This is the nightly melancholy of my body, mind, and condition. I drink my sweats, shakes, fear, self-hatred and longing for better days, knowing they won’t come—away.
On that day in late February 2021, I woke up around two in the morning with the shakes and withdrawals, as I had for several months. I stumbled upstairs for jet-fuel, walked to the couch with it, and turned on Parks and Recreation.
I twisted the orange plastic top of the repurposed Gatorade bottle and opened it. The smell burned my dried-out eyes but I put it to my burned up lips and drank. I needed to cure my withdrawal sickness. All was normal for about two minutes. Then, extreme nausea overtook me. I drank some ice water. The nausea intensified. Feeling my stomach start to recoil, I jumped up and ran to the kitchen sink twenty feet away. I didn’t make it. Vodka, water, and stomach acid soaked the floor and kitchen cabinets. I took a sip of milk directly from the carton to wash away the putrid taste of vomit. As I started to clean everything quickly and quietly, I threw up the milk as well—this time, into the kitchen sink. That was followed by several minutes of dry heaving, also known as retching. This wasn’t normal. It confused me. My body was making a last stand, a physiological coup to overthrow the tyrant destroying my body—ego-driven me.
Usually when you throw up, nausea dissipates with the stomach’s contents. The nausea didn’t subside, but intensified. I grabbed an empty champagne bucket, wiped the water from my eyes and nose, walked to the couch, sipped some water, and lay down. Less than a minute later, I threw up those few swigs of water into the ice bucket, and dry-heaved for another minute or two. I couldn’t tell if I was shaking and sweating from the withdrawal or exhaustion from the vomiting episodes. After I laid back down for a few minutes, catching my breath, I stood up again to walk upstairs and pee – sitting down of course. I became so nauseous that I stopped peeing. I turned around, grabbed the teal-colored bathroom wastebin, and vomited into that. After drinking a minimum of a hundred liters of vodka in four months, my body was no longer letting me make decisions. I was scared, just like every dictator before me who gets unseated from power. What scared me the most was not being able to keep water down, I was already critically dehydrated. The small bathroom wastebin was a single piece of molded plastic, teal in color, and perfect for vomiting. With the wastebin in hand, I headed back down to the couch. My legs shook and wobbled beneath me the entire way.
Ten minutes later, I tried the water again. I snuck in a splash of vodka in with it. I tried this and several other methods to hide the vodka from my stomach. It was no use since, my body was flat out rejecting everything that entered it, including water. Every time, it was ejected with such increasing force. an uncontrollable, loud squawking sound came out of my mouth—far louder than the normal ones. I recall trying desperately to quiet the sounds, so I didn’t wake Katerina, but there was no stopping it. Eventually, I grabbed the comforter from the guest bed and used it like a cloak in order to muffle the sounds. After many episodes of that violentupheaval, I wondered how my stomach hadn’t turned inside out and squeezed up through my esophagus.
My stomach-lining had begun melting away from months of gastritis. To protect it, my body refused anything and everything that tried to enter it. The consequence of no alcohol, precipitated. The nuclear meltdown of my brain’s neuromodulators, even the ones in the background and vital to sustain my life, had begun.
Before long, not only water caused the retching episodes, but movement of any kind sent me into a three-minute retching episode. Since waking up at two in the morning like I do every day, hallmarks of the flu setting in— I’d been throwing up absolutely nothing but nasty things that should never see the light of day. I was in a tailspin. Because I couldn’t stop drinking. Now I had nothing, not even the ability to do that—all because of that. I knew something cataclysmic might come for my health. The manifestation of the coup sounded off in a sonic riot: warring factions of screaming barn owls who had invaded a community of mating peacocks, all being ambushed by a pack of wild African dogs on the run from twenty hyenas spread along the perimeter.
And a bobcat heckling alongside my ego from a perch up on the hill.
Death kept speaking to me in strange tongues that I somehow understood. Come here and lie down. My only company ushered me like a guest to the worn-out planks on a wooden deck in front of a black darkness where the front door should be. Get comfortable. Lay down. Be still, there’s no hope now. Be still while I empty the light, vibrated in my deafening ears as I lay down in the guest bedroom, attached to the upstairs bathroom.
It was midday when I woke up again with immense nausea, dehydration and worsened withdrawal symptoms. Whenever I woke, I relived the extent of my unhealed injuries, the alcohol withdrawal even more severe. I reached for my water bottle and knocked it to the ground. Picking it up required strenuous movement, which would surely send me toward my teal-colored wastebin. I needed it, though, even if just to wet my mouth. I took a sip. I threw it up and retched for a solid minute. I lay back down. I took a few big sips but this time, then spit it out. After a few minutes, I swallowed a small sip and it stayed down, so I drank a few mouthfuls and it also stayed down. Maybe this is all over. I needed to refill my water flask to wash my mouth of bile and gastric acid when I start retching again.
See, I also developed acute pancreatitis alongside gastritis – a hundred and fifty liters of vodka in four months did not do this, alcohol did not do this—I did this. When you eat, the pancreas sends enzymes into the stomach to break down the food before it travels to the colon. Pancreatitis is a malfunction of that process—those enzymes are released into the stomach whether you ate food or not. They are microscopic warheads with one mission—destroy and dissolve. And if you didn’t consume food, those enzymes will find something to feed on—usually the stomach lining.
I slowly headed to the kitchen with my waste bin in one hand and water-flask in the other. The mere movement from the guest bedroom was surely enough to send me into another retching episode. I stood at the fridge’s water dispenser and filled up. I was okay for a moment, but untrusting of the momentary peace, and I also had the fleeting thought that, since I just swallowed some water, maybe I can swallow a bit of chilled vodka, too. And right then with the onset of a simple thought—it hit me. Not slowly but instantaneously—lower belly cramps overcame me with such force it bent me over, the kind so painful, you tiptoe in heaping steps to the bathroom while still bent over. New heights of all the symptoms I’d experienced enveloped me. The distance from the fridge to the bathroom was not far. I needed to travel twenty feet in total: six steps up, two left turns, and a couple half-steps. I bolted, grabbing my wastebin in-stride with the water flask—now filled to the brim. There was no time to screw on the lid. I took the stairs in twos, spewed into my bucket mid-way, but didn’t stop moving. Before nearly shitting myself—I cut around the corner to the left at the top of the stairs, vomit dripping down my nose, eye-water blurring my vision, one-step-sprint toward the bathroom door, cracked open and the toilet just behind the door.
The next eighteen things happened in five seconds:
1 – I kicked the bathroom door open as fast as I could using only my left ring-toe.
2 – That toe fractured, taking on the full force of the door, while the rest of my foot curled around the edge of the door.
3 – The door flew open fast. So fast that…
4 – The door rebounded against the hinged doorstop,
5 – The door broke off its hinges, cracked down the spine vertically, and across the middle.
6 – Connected into my nose, the puke bin, and the water bottle.
7 – I dropped: A) the completely full, stainless water flask, which did not have a top, and B) the half-full wastebin of putrid vomit-water.
8 – The contents of A+B splashed across the tile floor, walls, bathtub, and toilet.
9 – My forward-sprinting momentum abruptly halted.
10 – I leaned forward aggressively onto the tile, into a one-step-sprint.
11 – I slipped on A+B.
12 – I fell to the tile floor onto A+B.
13 – I crawled through A+B to the toilet.
14 – As I crawled, my new supersoaker-superpower sprayed B-type contents all over the floor and onto the toilet bowl.
15 – The spewing stopped, just as I leaned over the toilet bowl.
16 – I rest my arms on the toilet seat, gasping.
17 – I laughed out loud at the pathetic situation in which I found myself.
18 – A trickle of blood dropped from my nose into the perfectly clean toilet-bowl water.
♣
Afterward, I cleaned up the bathroom very poorly. As I did, the despair set in, upon fully grasping that if I can’t drink water, I can’t drink vodka—I’ll soon be catapulted into truly incomprehensible withdrawal. This was new territory, even for me.
I thought I’d seen everything that withdrawal could throw at me, the very worst of it from opiates, heroin, fentanyl, and alcohol. I knew alcohol withdrawal can be dangerous; I’ve detoxed myself dozens of times, cold turkey. It’s brutal. But this was coming on the heels of most quantity I’d ever drank in any period of time. After drinking more than one liter of vodka per day for over four months, my own body was forcing me to stop, out of the blue. No taper—just old fashioned cold turkey.
Severe alcohol withdrawal kills people who are old, young, weak, strong, happy, sad, rich, poor, men, women, and everything in between. It has a mortality rate of fifteen percent—nearly fifteen times more deadly than Covid. Even with professional oversight, it’s only safe via a weaning process, titrating the alcohol away from the body over a week or longer – meaning in a professional medical setting, they will prescribe a daily dose of alcohol that I must drink, reducing the daily amount slowly. After that, the alcohol can be withdrawn completely, and then, the alcoholic gets a strong round of benzodiazapenes for a week to mimic the effects of alcohol on the body. If the body’s supply of alcohol abruptly stops, the body implodes on itself, and death by alcohol withdrawal becomes a real possibility. I was opening a door to the real possibility that as the compounding effects of my injuries and general physical state worsen, my predictable fate might be closer than I realized.
I was the type of alcoholic who needed an entire pint of vodka just to appear normal and sober. I got pulled over by the police several times after drinking an entire pint – they had no clue because that was my normal.
Soon, I’d be soaked in sweat with layers of clothing on, because I’d also be shivering with goosebumps. I would be speaking in a quivering voice, and my eyes would look yellowed, stuck half-closed, and bloodshot. I could already see myself with a bloody tissue in my left hand and the puke basket in my right, shrugging my shoulders as I said, “I’m fine. I just have a cold or something. I’ll be okay.”
The lie would fall flat. Katerina, I imagined, would see the edges of my tongue covered with white ulcers and dead skin as I yawned and blew more blood out of my nose. She’d watch me turn around and trip on the blanket wrapped around my shoulders, knowing that was withdrawing. I had to come up with something. Sitting there on the toilet with the wastebin in my lap, I came up with a halfway decent idea, so I went with it. I told her that I have Covid. It was the only thing that might reasonably explain why I was dry-heaving and throwing up all night long, assuming she heard me at some point, which she did. When I told her, it worked, and now I had phantom Covid.
I could get through the worst of the health complications without the weight of trying to cover it up and hide it from my wife. I could even spend a few more days considering whether I would let alcohol kill me, do it myself, or if there was a spark within me that was ready to keep fighting for my sobriety, presumably just to keep losing. I suspected the answer to the latter was probably no, and if the answer was truly no, all I had to look forward to was more of this – standing in the cold at Daisy Death’s bus stop, waiting and wondering when she will show up. I surely wasn’t too far away. Regardless, I chose isolation. I wanted to stew in that.