"Everything the Hard Way"

Asleep and alone, my face had lost it's color. Rest had come as much through the tears as it had from the alcohol. In the south east corner of my cell sized room, I had placed an empty wire spool to use as a table. There, I often left my candles burning in a wooden cigar box given to me by a "lost love". She had inscribed "Jason's God Box" on the inside of the lid with a wood burning tool so that when you opened it, the words read right side up. Like her memory, this is where I kept items I couldn't let go of. Piled around the base of each candle were polished pieces of Tiger's Eye, old jewelry, including an old flat back labret stud with stripped threads, and a few folded poems of desperation that reminded me of certain people.

If you've ever lived the life of an addict, you understand. Ambiance is important for relieving the guilt of intoxication. I had carefully collected each memento in that "God Box" to shelter me from the suicide inducing regrets that might find their way into my soul while I was getting high. This is why bright lights and open spaces seldom were part of that world for me. Back then, I felt safer sleeping under a bridge than walking through a shopping mall. Like an old tv with the contrast turned too far one way or the other, the difference between me and the outside world was too painful for me to bear. The only way to survive was to stay amongst the deeper shadows where the shades of grey could blur my sharper edges.

This sublet room was my shadow. It had four walls and two windows through which the morning sun did not shine. Even if the giant sycamore outside my east window had let the rising day through the glass, I would have pulled the eight foot polyester curtains shut so tight their first two folds would have locked out armageddon. Tall curtains, wooden floors, and plaster walls have been the death of many a beautiful son or daughter. Peace can so easily be washed away by the pains of isolation. Yet, loneliness drives us all into hiding.

It was summer and the sun had gone down around nine. I bought a liter of Southern Comfort around seven pm with my last few dollars. It was to be my psychiatrist for the evening. I walked home talking to the bottle like it knew exactly who I was and what I was going to do with it. It told me what I wanted to hear without any argument whatsoever, save a few protestant crackling noises from the brown paper dress it wore. I used to love the way the ridges on top of a Comfort bottle felt in the palm of my hand. They also made it less likely to drop a full bottle while tipping it heavy side up to one's mouth. I must have looked like an escaped mental patient clamoring down the street with an invisible friend. I however, imagined myself like some eccentric Toymaker with and evil plan to take over the world. In those aphotic minutes just before I put chemicals in my body, I always felt so disturbingly powerful. I gave that point of no return a name; "putting on the mask" I called it.

Back to the shadows, I set the mood to music, lit the "God Box" candles, and locked the door. I was so intensely glad to be home alone. I drank and drank and cried and cried. Onward, pale and whining, I passed out. I dreamed I was in my grandmother's trailer out in Pflugerville Texas. It used to sit in a park called "Three Points" just outside of town. It was a small (single wide), aluminum sided trailer with a kitchen window unit. Her best friend "Flossy" lived next door. They were two of a kind. I could see all this as I slept. She was cooking me bacon on her sixties green electric stove. She would always keep bacon for us to eat. All you had to do was ask and she'd pull out the whole pound and cook it in the recycled grease she kept in a Folger's coffee can on the back of the stove. With blue grey hair and a Virginia Slim trading time with her left hand and mouth, she'd spit thin drifts of smoke above the stove into the vent while she flipped the bacon with a fork. I remember chuckling to myself in the dream because I've always flipped bacon with a fork like she did. She placed one of those thin white corningware plates with the butterfly and flower designs around the edge in front of me. On it were two sunny side up eggs, a crisscross of bacon, and one oven toasted piece of Mrs.Bairds white bread placed precariously on the side just far enough away from any grease to keep it from getting soggy. Just as I was about to eat my breakfast, she leaned over me and pointed her finger with her thumb up like she was pretending her hand was a pistol. She exclaimed "You don't have time to eat, it's time to wake up!" As she spoke, her kitchen got very hot. I could feel the heat on my face, so much so it started to burn. She took a step back, turned to the stove and became as inanimate as a wax figure. I asked her to explain but she neither moved nor spoke in response. She seemed to be gone but her body was frozen in place. This woke me up.

I rolled over on the sheetless mattress, straight onto my hip, and spun my feet to the floor. I could still feel the heat on my face from my granny's kitchen. On the spool, I see flames creeping across the lid of my "God Box", the entirety of the spool's surface, up the wall, and onto the polyester curtains. Near horizontal like a ship in a bottle, I see my Southern Comfort tipped over on top of my box of burning candles. The corner of my room was on fire! A part of me felt resigned to just lay down and smirk while I watched the polyester melt like tar against the window frame. The was fire beautiful, beautiful like sadness to a broken heart. It shivered so delicately in the trail of alcohol, the flames merging to pull their fuel from the bottle. I once saw an entire house burn to the ground in five minutes. I thought to myself, if I can stand the pain of burning for a short five minutes, I'll at least leave knowing I finally finished something. Or, maybe I would pass away and wake up back in my grandmother's kitchen to the smell of bacon on the stove. This time I'd ask her for a glass of milk just so I could watch her close her airstream like refrigerator with her hip. I missed seeing her do that. It had a vertical latch that never quite clicked. She'd hit the door with her hip to make sure the ice box wouldn't thaw out from the door being ajar. Over the years she'd worn a bare spot in the green paint right down to the metal from leaning into it with the rivets on her blue jeans. It was the thought of her faded jeans that moved me to save myself. She worked her whole life just to get by. She outlived the tragic death of her husband and all her siblings. Beyond the cluttered kitsch of her simple home was the bones of a survivor. All this reminded me who she was, who I was. She had survived alcoholism as well and so could I.

I stumbled to the corner and reached for the unburned portion of the curtain closest to the spool. I jerked it from the rod straight to the floor and stomped it out. I clenched the long edge of the polyester seam and flung a reams worth over the spool. At first, the flames would not go out due to the presence of the alcohol so I used a corner of the drape to grab the neck of the bottle. I plucked it out of the fire and ran it to the opposite corner of the room. Back to the fire I flew grabbing the fabric knuckles up along its edge and spun it like a cast net over the spool. I pushed the air out from underneath and the fire went out. You would think a man that just saved his own life might be full of sunshine and roses. An alcoholic thinks only in black and white, especially when drunk... and still drunk I was. So the demons came.

In dead silence my poor disheveled soul sat tussling with the approaching dawn. It spun around my thoughts like the stars in a planetarium. That night, upon my axis the universe turned, beating me black and blue with all I had suppressed. Surviving seals the seams that crack the wanderers, stitch, stitch, stitching at one end, unraveling at the other. That which pulls the thread is the weight of resiliency. People carry this weight unnecessarily alone. Yet, in the hardest moment, just before giving up, there exists a small and graceful silence. In its subtlety we miss it, like the hushing sound snow makes. In this instant comes the promise of new hope and a life less lived in vain. In the early hours after the fire, as the Grackles warned of dawn, I heard that silence for the first time. All the sudden I knew what my grandmother meant. In my dream when she said "It's time to wake up". It was time to live again, no more time or words wasted, no more denial and unnecessary suffering. I tumbled to my knees so I could feel the cool pine floor on my cheek and begged the deafening peace of my new found silence to save me. I haven't had a drink since.

I have often wondered, if there is a god, what stories would he, she, or it tell about out us? I imagine god like an omniscient voice in a novel, looking down on us with quizzical mercy, not intervening but narrating what he sees. As we live and and die without the benefit of this bird's eye view, we could perhaps be unknowingly changing our fate moment to moment. Seen in this light, every second in life holds the possibility of fame, poverty, death, triumph, love, or loneliness. If this is true, this is not fate at all but the constant presence of second chances.

"Back from That Place"

So cynical the way I have become; so pitiless with myself. I shelter my own child from the world and the way people's words can steal the dignity from a day. Yet, I have learned to shrink from their biting sarcasms. Am I satisfied with empowering myself in morning soliloquies, like some foolish boy whistling in the dark? When did my dreams become second rate shadows of the beliefs of my youth? But do not pity me, my story might just be unending. Inside me holds fast the widening gaze of a sturdy adventurer. I feel his hat beginning to tip against the wind of a foreign coast. When this fast a goodbye comes, only sweet freedom sets the sails.