The Ramblings of an Inept Alcoholic

I was always destined to be an alcoholic. My father drank, my uncles drank, and their father drank too, and when he lost the ability to swallow, he drank through an IV. He was a good drinker.

I was never sure if my mother was an alcoholic. She was the sort who just slumped in her chair and watched the telly. She did that when she was sober, if she ever was sober, but for all I knew she was perpetually inebriated, which is a far better position to be in than a perpetual state of level. I hesitate to contemplate such a thing. I do not think my father would have married her if such was the case. On second thought, he most probably would have. From the lack of cohesion they share it is reasonable to suppose that the wedding happened quite by accident, and that the whole exchange had been a mishap; that some other woman had been designated as my fathers wife, and through a haze of drunk delirium they had, much to the misfortune of all, ended up together. To this day I believe that my father won her, or the woman she had replaced, in some drinking game.

My father is quite a drinker. Whether there is pride in my voice when I say this is up to further analysis. Pride is a thing that I have been taught to value only when it is there, and given that I lived my first however many years without it, I have quite forgotten its consistency. I recognize it in others, quite often. It is rather belittling.

He was always a good drinker. Born to it. From the age of three my father learnt to swim, finding himself in vats of wine. First flask at age four, preferring it to my grandmothers tits. He says that it was less concentrated; less fiery down the gullet.

He was the sort of drinker whose stories needed no exageration. That isn’t to say there was no exaggeration, were that the case people would think him a lightweight. You have to be tall, you see. Every man, woman and child knows that your tales must be at minimum twice magnified. It shows discipline.When he told of winning a town wide drinking contest, there was no lie told. So what does he do? He fabricates the elephant; his main contestant. A large one too. As he’d tell it: big as any building, and bigger still, greater than any tree of the forest, king of all elephants, it’s trunk larger than his wife, which is a trying task for any elephant and involves a certain lack of proportion, but I garnered that my father’s knowledge of elephants stopped at its ability to drink.

My father was always supportive of me. I resented him for it. He would nod at me; a greeting that said “How do you do? Are you well?” He’d crack open a beer for me once or twice, perhaps by accident, but deeds over words as they say. And I hated him for it.

His father beat him. His grandfather beat his father. And I was left, shame of the family, alone and unbeaten.

I suppose with the retrospect a clear mind can provide that the blame lay on me. I chose not to suck from my mother’s tit, I chose not to earn my father’s belt. I was born without nerves into a world no longer tumultuous; into an era with nothing to protest; no oppressor, no pressure, no point to prove. I was given everything, and for that I received nothing.

Eight: the age at which I first tried drink. Brown, and smelling of disease. I pinched my nose and poured a small dosage down the back of my throat. I noticed two things: that it tasted as it smelled, and that I was about to die. I had taken far too large a dose, and there were no ice cubes to dilute it. My throat was on fire, and I was going to asphyxiate. When I threw it up, my throat was burnt twice. Caught red-faced, so to speak, my father laughed. It was cheap. Neither his smile nor his eyes held disappointment, and I hated him for it. I didn’t touch the stuff again until the age of twelve.

Smoking started at age ten. Even at that age I knew sobriety to be shameful, and I was teased at every interval by my uncles and their friends; the same ever repeating lines, a result of alcohol induced brain damage, perhaps early onset dementia. I later strived to replicate such things. I never liked to smoke: it was an expense, it smelled bad, and I knew it to cause ulcerations of the stomach. But it hid the lack of alcohol on my breath, and that in itself was enough.

There were no kids my age, and by that I mean that there were two. One, a product of incest so I was told, but it may well have been foetal alcohol syndrome so I took a disliking to him. The other was female and fat, and that’s all I ever knew of her: Pregnant Penny was her nickname. Our teacher was a television and the front cover of a graffitied textbook. In front and in a state of mellow high, a convicted sex offender would sit. That he was registered were the only words he ever spoke to us. I suppose that we were a disappointment. And in later years, when pubescent Penny made her attempt at seduction, she was returned to her seat with the raise of two eyebrows.

At twelve I discovered the older kids, and in return for cigarettes I was allowed to remain and to laugh at their jokes, which were implied to be humoristic. Their class was large, with five, and so I went unnoticed. Through them I learnt much of the world. And I first tried beer; a bitter brown, reminiscent of piss. It went down easy, but went up just as easy. There was neither disappointment nor disdain in their eyes. To support them, and to support myself, I found a job.

Too few people read for a paper route. The pub, a family business. The coffee shop, distasteful of my manners. And the church did not pay. It was in the rundown library that I finally found employment. The pay was poor, but the work paltry; a one person job stretched to two, as to not stretch one’s legs. The owner much resembled her cat, slumped at the checkout, her eyes beady, whiskers not so much as a twitch. The cat, of course, was stuffed. I stacked, and stood, such that nothing was stolen. On occasion my advice was sought, and with no experience of such things, I would simply recommend the most nuanced titles. Whether they were in search of classical literature, a light read, or a comic, a short walk to the pornographic section would ensure returning customers. From this too, I learnt much of the world. As with tobacco, you grow accustomed to the aroma, and when a man with round glasses or a woman with a wrapped shawl crossed our entrance we would be shutting for lunch, and when they returned an hour later we would be shutting for the day. On a Wednesday afternoon, a couple of years later, I would go in to find the owner dead at her desk. A coronary apparently. Two hours it took to notice, and only then from a build up in flatulence.

It was that same year that my father caught me skipping class. At the park sharing a pack, brown paper bottle in hand, hearing of the excavation of a second cousin from Wisconsin in Canada. And out of a bush, a prickled bush with thorns like knives, he emerged: distinguished in dishelvery. It took several seconds for his eyes to adjust, several more for surroundings, several more still to observe my presence, and several more that I was his son. Faint and faded smile, and he was gone. That was the last time that I hung with the older kids.

On turning sixteen I was faced with a decision. Uncertain of expectations, I buckled under the pressure and remained in education. Fueled by an alcoholic bulimia, I sought professional aid, and through the writings of Hemingway and S. Thompson, found a certain peace, only for it to be blown away with the setting sun. Life polarized to the neon saturates and the drab muddy monochrome. Like any opiate, addiction was to happen in several well defined stages, and in recovery there were recurring thoughts of ending it: myself and the pain that came with unrequiting aspirations. All of this and more, I quickly forgot in encountering Becky. A sightly slap to the face, overshadowed by its all too physical manifestation. She was the kind of abuse I had yearned for. Young love, I supposed. All things come to an end, this too I supposed, witnessing her take a long and shafted suppository in the school parking lot.

Aged eighteen school ended. It was an unceremonious affair. On Monday it was there, and Tuesday it wasn’t. No one seemed to notice, no one cared; an ashen debris, with arson suspected. And I left for the city.

I became a writer, for they knew how to drink, to smoke, to revel in the ravellings of their own ineptitude. And I did just that, though drinking limited. Insomnia came and went; its passing a side effect of the caffeine and sedatives. I became a writer and did not write: my take on modern literature. My time occupied itself with music and movies, and I learnt that taste was subjective; pubs and clubs and bathroom stalls, with women most often whiskeyed. And then there came a time when my card was declined and there became need for a real occupation. And so, two weeks into the life of a writer, I found myself as an accountant, with expectations, responsibilities, a thin black tie and a station of free coffee. The money was good, and I became a whore to the constitutional stability. It was only as I mused over the monthly and annual gym membership rates that my subliminal sufferings became sentient.

The doctors offered sanctuary. A place to list my concerns: that I was twenty and recycling, that I listened to pop music, that this winter I was to ski in Aspen, and that I ate fair-trade, free-range, organic. And he listened, eyes sagged, and asked what I wanted.

I responded ‘to drink, to be depressed, to have direction’. I was given a prescription of sugar pills and told to get married. A liver transplant simply would not have been enough.

It was while in pursuit of a wife that my mother passed. Mistook the highway for the couch. No funeral, no coffin, no cremation, just a hole in a field. Sitting atop her, I wondered whether pissing or weeping was more appropriate. In any case, my bladder was barren and there were no onions at hand.

My uncles, at forty, were put in a home; their minds bent and broken, unable to recall which twin they were, unable to finish their own sentences, all culminating in an altercation in which one brother mistook the other for a mirror, eliciting two broken noses and enough blood for several large scale transfusions.

We had neither the money nor the sentiment to pay. Instead, we performed an exchange of prisoners. We took two men, ages unknown, providing them a bench in a park, a wholemeal loaf, and the company of half fledged pigeons: the neighbouring ducks being an indecent bunch. A homeless shelter stood not half a mile away: a better life.

My uncles were left dry but for miniatures: a sip a day. In a purgatory, self-made and self-deserved. Anticipating response, our contact numbers were left in sharpie, stamped upon their wrists. In hindsight, a tattoo might have lasted longer. This was the last we saw of our uncles.

My father’s time would come decades later. He clung to life as a tick, yet to drink his fill. I would visit sporadically, mainly for demotivation - a reminder of wasted potential. At a certain point he was moved, with great force out of his residency. Henceforth his habitation of the local bar became in perpetuity. Had a squatter maintained his rights the pub would be under new management, but a squatter has no rights, my father neither, and he found himself a gravitational force for tourists who would gawp in reticent inertia. During one such display of excessive drinking he self-ignited, gaining for himself a sizeable applause. I thought it in poor taste, combustion being the leading cause of climate change and all.

His death hit national news, with a civil lawsuit being filed against the liquor distributor. International news came next, through which I garnered an appearance on a talk show. The whole run-up was rather insidious as I prepared to defile my father’s name. A publicist prepped me on dress and on what could be said, which was very little and was ninety percent made up by a would-be screenplay writer assistant of hers. I had a publicist working for a group of lawyers, whose representation I never solicited, in a trial I never sought, to which end I struggled to discern; but the amenities were above par, and for that I went along supposing it a potential anecdote.

His name... I misremember, but it was American and smooth like coffee. His temperament too: coffee or cocaine, perhaps the two. And his laugh was almost natural, and his hair shone as a Sub-Saharan sun and was moulded in such a way that I was reminded of Marie Antoinette. My spiel was made less dry by a tangential discussion on the legalisation of cannabis, my view being that it was detrimental to the youths of tomorrow: fewer laws to violate. They thought it British sarcasm, I thought them sheep to the hypocrisy of liberalisation.

I went from being an accountant to having an accountant, and an attempt at being sophisticated and civil. With wines red, not rough, conversations loaded in undertone, and orchestras and operas and an all female rendition of Othello. But sociability did not stick. It bore far too much resemblance to emphatic boredom, so I left it all behind.

And that was my life, at least that which was worth reading about and which was not too explicit. That most moments were in relation to another person is either the defining characteristic of the human condition, or evidence of my position as a bystander to my own undefined life.