weekday episode
Another cruel weekday episode, rechecking into the ER- beneath somber mid-July clouds. I walked these arid neighborhood streets months prior, dolefully searching for work and finding none, just being released from county prison; a pale male in his early thirties, confounded and thirsty. Poor, tired, sick of myself and all I called my own. When you mess up in a town like this the district police aren't your friends, no matter how much clean time you had. I'd hold up my NA key tags and jangle them cowardly in front of long grim visages of local law-enforcement officers, pleading before being taken into custody, "uh, ya see now? at least I'm not on drugs."
Early vagrant afternoon, awaking past check-out time on dingy motel bedspread to Portuguese maid rapping vehemently on wooded door, bewailing four-letter words in vernacular Spanish. I arose that day hopelessly weary, fighting a prying headache brought on by strong drink and lustful hymns of incriminating deceit. A couple of nights and already turned the room upside down,
into a solemn pig-sty of throttling alcoholism. Balled-up paper towels and sordid beer tabs enmeshed upon maroon carpeting. A black and white television blaring out useless information on how to tighten my abs into a six-pack- then ambling to motel vestibule sink to purge my guts out.
The thing here is when somebody's in the grips of something like this, you can't see the way out, but there is a way in, entering a hospital emergency unit, into detox and eventually rehab. Nobody wants to do this again.
I hated my life, the social despondence acquired through reclusive indulgence; justified my past lifestyle by maintaining dead-end jobs as a convenience store clerk, or running food at an up-scale Japanese cuisine restaurant off route 309.
We all believe a thing like this can happen, nothing tying me down to life's struggles, situations or abnormalities.
2) feeble attempt at adult relationship
On Summer Tuesday evenings during happy-hour; I'd be seen pawning broken anecdotes to exiguous drink-pouring barkeep at familiar sawdust tavern, we drank for oblivion; every one of us.
Previously that day I worked a lunch-shift waiting tables at a casual city sidewalk restaurant, the owner- a middle-aged Jew entrepreneur who flirted with some of the younger waitresses; I didn't care about him, nothing was farther from my mind. I lived with a woman, a girlfriend whom I didn't love and probably never will, what I'd cling to and dearly love about her, were the things reminding me of my concupiscent self, the time we spent making love, frivolously romanticizing over 3.2 % beer and stale cigarettes on our apartment living room sofa-bed, perpetuating genuine names we'd of called our unborn children. I detested sharing a mattress with her due to unresolved abandonment issues brought on by a traumatic childhood. I'd be up every night sniffing amphetamine and recklessly pouring sour bourbon down my sallow throat, fulfilling a self-inflicted prophecy that would come true sooner than later, driving me inevitably to death by overdose,
but that is a different story,
Family and coworkers told me I needed help and they were usually right, urinating a couple times onto dirty piles of clothes in dark clefts of our bedroom, not a big deal to me cause I was aiming for the laundry basket. Amid climatic weeks at this place; I developed a mortifying habit of blasting The Best of Don Henley record, replaying all through the night on weekdays, flaring the already irate working-class tenants tempers.
Torture was waking up on that sticky hard-tiled floor every few hours in need of more, my girlfriend left weeks prior, this required a long time to grieve. When I'd awake in bed, for a few seconds laying supine and bewildered, playing an amusing tape of personal tragedy around in my aching cranium.
I pushed her away, mindlessly repeating similar buffoonery until one ordinary day she packed-up and left,
what was right for her and for me,
we'll never know together
one thing I know
getting sober is
never to treat a person
how I did her,
much unnecessary heartache
never-ending
I
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