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 in other people, I feel them. It doesn’t matter if I know the person or not. I feel the pain people often hide from the rest of us. 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. With enough pain, part of the 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 began as a pretty song. 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.
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 a future of pain and nothing else. 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. 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. 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.