I. My Uncle Sam I’m slumped inside an idling Tacoma with my foot on the brake pedal. As I pan from right to left, a fire hydrant that does not channel water disappears from view. Across four lanes of empty roadway is Grassy Point Bar & Tavern, where I watch Jeopardy questions spiral around on a big-screen television. With my limited field, I see no one inside the barroom except for Alex Trebek and a couple of no-name contestants. I have no idea how many televisions they have holed up in there. Cars line up at a traffic light in the rearview. Every two or three minutes a handful stream by. They spread from double-file into whatever pattern exists before a toll booth gate before crystallizing into one single stroke to pass over the rising bridge, the Gil Hodges, which in wintertime enters the sky at the horizon line. The whole movement reminds me of something stretchy. The dusk comes from the direction of the ocean, toward me, and toll booth gates flap open like guffawing mouths spitting diced food in my face. The sight of it, even one hundred yards out, makes me anxious. I drive towards it. * On the screened-in porch I roll a big fat cigarette without a filter or a crutch. I like to spit loose tobacco out of my mouth when I sit out in my dead grandfather’s rocking chair. The humidity makes the hairy flies sheen like pitted olives.The neighbor’s teenage daughter comes out from the bungalow across from mine. She lifts the hood of her Uncle Louie G’s sweatshirt. It is pouring rain. “Aren’t you gonna get wet?” I ask.Tina says: “I’m not made of sugar.” Then from inside that bungalow comes the special shrillness that only Tina’s mother, Kathy, can conjure up. “Stay still,” she tells whatever is in front of her tonight. “Sit down on the fucking cushion and stay still. This is my show.” I consider the difference between intoxicating and intoxicated. It had been three days since my last drink: a Modelo that LaLa had poured down the sink. A man emerges from Kathy’s bungalow and falls off the three wooden steps that lead to her front door. It is apparent that the guests Kathy has over consistently fall off the same three steps into the concrete square of sidewalk below. It has become an ordinary occurrence. I tell myself that this is the reason why I sit out until dawn and chain smoke. Kathy’s sister is perhaps the best fall. Two weeks ago she tumbled over the side of the stairset—an unprecedented trajectory—and had collided with Kathy’s potted shrub. Kathy then bragged that the collision had increased her plant’s vitality. Adding to the melodrama in Kathy’s front yard is a stone statue of Cupid that leans forward with a kind of kissy “Ooo, that’s gotta hurt” face. It was genius theater. All of it. That’s what I thought. II. Chaw I guess the fifth grade is when it all started. That’s when I read my first Hemingway, when I borrowed Fear & Loathing from the middle school library, when I got smart enough to steal lighters from the Circle K and get away with it. This was rural Pennsylvania. Our biggest crop smelt like cowshit. We were kids in cornfields who smelt diesel gas and ran for the schoolbus. When the bus was late we’d put our ears on the pavement and wait for the road to tremor. At eleven years old we knew enough to know suburban condos had an extra refrigerator in the garage where the alcohol got kept. The older kids knew which mushrooms to pick and what a turbo blunt was. First time I got drunk up was at fourteen or fifteen off a bottle of blueberry port wine we stole from the creator of a popular home shopping network. To do this, one of the boys slept with the man’s daughter, who was overseeing the house while he was vacationing in Miami. The bottle was like one hundred years old. We broke the bottleneck on blacktop, went swig for swig, and charged on into the night with pubescent glee. Later in life, after I’d moved to New York to become an artist-type, I dated that same man’s other daughter. I dated her because I was addicted to uppers and she had a prescription for Adderall. At first I asked for the pills. Later I begged. All the while I was stealing them anyhow. Everybody called her mom “Boozin’ Susan.” She drank vodka martinis. One time she put a high heel in the freezer and forgot about it. When I met her in the capacity of her daughter’s boyfriend, she offered me some kind of low trans-fat chickpea snack and told me not to stay too late. Either before or after the breakup I went manic. I can’t say being manic was a bad thing. Actually I’d never been happier. I never needed to sleep. I was creative. I broke up with a long-term someone and moved from Park Slope to Bushwick. I kept no furniture in my room. I slept in a one-man tent outside my window. A lesbian woman used to climb the fire escape down from the fourth floor. When we slept together I worried the woman I was seeing on the third floor would hear us. I did a lot of cocaine and drew a lot of pictures during this period. I was twenty something. Twenty-three maybe. The floor I paid for was covered with rolls of newsprint. Like you couldn’t walk. You had to tip-toe around in socks like some kind of serial killer. Typically I had the cheapo newsprint plus a scattering of printer paper, about a thousand colored pencils, Dollar Tree ballpoints, and a sixty bag of low-grade, heavily-cut cocaine. I had found an oak stump somewhere. Oak is a very hard wood. I was carving it into a bust watching some Studio Ghibli film on silent, drinking boxed white wine, and crying uncontrollably when I decided to sell my Nintendo DS. I put this chisel down. I worked in a woodshop and my stepdad loved me so I owned a really nice chisel. A pawn shop gave me forty dollars for the Gameboy. I went to a thirty-day program for eleven days and left on foot AMA with a sock-full of quarters and a duffel bag of softcopy fiction. The quarters I’d used to buy bubblegum from the vending machine before the mandatory twice-daily meetings. The Amtrak ticket guy gave me a free ride to New York, where I failed with great poise to get back with my ex-girlfriend. III. Easy come, easy go I started wearing an all-blue Dickies worksuit, re-enrolled, and became a yoga teacher. I didn’t drink for sixty-six days. I fasted. Yoga made me cry. I played on a mat and felt like the person I was born as. The boy who lied on the floor with dogs. The boy who climbed pine trees and didn’t wash the sap off for weeks. The boy who found arrowheads in the dirt and hated cowboys. The boy who had long-term friendships and got good sleep. The boy who felt the Seasons and cried real cries. The boy with time on his hands. The boy blessed with boredom. The boy who dealt with divorce with paper airplanes and actual pain. I honored my body, and thus honored the transience of shit. Honored the heartache of being a human. I didn’t hide. I was sad in a real way. I didn’t pass time chain-smoking. I passed it staring at a ceiling or screaming into a pillow. It was hard but pure. It rained, but there was not a cloud in the sky. IV. Under the BQE For me consistent practice and sobriety are hard because I miss the ne’er-do-wells. I miss the community you can only belong to by understanding its absurd rationalizations, its sensical chaos, its pain and self-hatred. And the only way you can really understand it is by being inside of it. Knowing how it used to be isn’t enough. Knowing you used to be an addict don’t cut it. Sober, you can’t sleep in your truck under the BQE and pretend there is beauty in it. V. Nth Relapse I prepare a can of tuna fish for consumption by adding mayonnaise, salt, and a spoonful of relish. I use plain white salt because pink is for paintings. I eat out of the can with wooden take-out chopsticks, quickly and without ceremony. The taste is neutral, non-offensive. I eat alone over the sink, staring at the headless shovel that has not moved in the two years I’ve been living in Rockaway Park, keeping every single one of my thoughts to myself. Wearing only a JAWS t-shirt, I exit the bungalow. I am slightly agitated by the direct sunlight and all of the teeming life it represents. Finding a seat on an old fish-box, I chain smoke four mentholated Midnight Special cigarettes, trying to appreciate the sculpture I’ve made from Edgemere landfill flotsam and boat-grade epoxy. Feeling nothing from these, I return inside and masturbate skillfully and without joy on a corduroy sofa that an ex-girlfriend had carefully selected for the former us. I think about her. The woman who chose this couch. I pick up my diary and turn back to when we were still together. I read: “A lopsided red onion sits upright on a chunk of scrap lumber. One handful of Rosensweig white pencils lean rough-sharpened in a La Morena’s chipotle pepper can. A racing form which has been read only for the names of the horses lies placidly, getting heavier. It is past 1am and Kathy is out grilling a specialty of Yugoslavia she has tried twice to teach me the name of. LaLa, inside, works with a scanner. She eats a croissant by tearing off pieces from its biggest section until she is left with two small pieces. I try to decide if the keyboard taps on the upstroke or the downstroke. The fresh tobacco is not yet dry. We are happy in this moment.” Pity pity! Put on the Henry Thomas record! Here comes the relapse! VII. It is black and white simple. I do yoga and I feel good. I do yoga and I can call my father back. Or I get on a bender, speak to no one, and sleep until 9pm. But knowing that is not enough. My body is physically addicted to alcohol. I’m not dumb. When the cravings come, I become a master of self-deception. It is called ten years of practice. After like a month sober, when the physical cravings have become less urgent, the justifications I create to abuse myself become more complex and deeply personal. What at first was nettle becomes asymmetrical cobweb. Drinking is what makes you the boy from the cornfields, I say, the man who loves gas stations and Green Mountain Coffee. I have lists and lists of rules, which are always approximately the same set of rules: You can drink today, but not more than twice a week (or three times at most). So I’ll break down on a Wednesday, drink through Thursday, and then change the list to say: ONLY DRINK ON WEEKENDS. Or: you can only drink when somebody dies or you break up with someone or you get fired. Then I’ll break up with a girlfriend, or quit my job. When I was in rehab a young woman told me about her father and how they found his body. Mostly she talked about the way his corpse smelled, sitting there on the couch. Ironically, she had said, his last bottle was half full. To know that yoga and self-care can and will change my life . . . to know the solution but still be unable to solve the problem is painful and frustrating. I know what I have to do, and yet I cannot do it. At the date of this writing I am not some enlightened yogi with his happy ending. I have stopped following yogi heroes on Instagram because it gives me physical pain to see the lives they lead. When I practice, I cannot vocalize Om. But to be a human in this world and to keep a consistent practice, to be here in this age and to care for yourself in all the right ways, it is beautiful. Please don’t change, and please be there for me when I become strong enough to join you. It was late Summer in Rockaway and S.R. was taking his thirty-foot sailboat, Second Time Around, for its last whirl of the season. K.F. was there. L.C. was there. S.R. was high on mushrooms and hash and chain-smoking cigarettes—all of which he bummed, somehow—and everybody except me and the Siberian Husky was drunk or on drugs. It was the night of the Super Moon, 2016, if you remember. It was the first night I met T.M.G., if it matters. To alert the men on the Gil Hodges that the drawbridge needed to be raised because we were coming through, S.R. sounded an actual bullhorn. S.R. suggested that we not return. Many of us thought that this was a joke.
