DRINKING AND DRIVING
CAN KILL A FRIENDSHIP
But I don’t find what I’m looking for.
Nate texts me back:
These kids lied to their parents about where they were going
And they instead went to some party and i think did coke
And i remember little lies playing
And i remember them getting into an accident and being under a sheet
And phil collins was playing
Which is what I remember, too, and I feel like I’m never going to find this video, so I get up to get a can of water. When I get frustrated, I get thirsty.
The lyrics for “In the Air Tonight,” Phil Collins’s 1981 hit from one of the literally countless records featuring his face, are the subject of enough speculation that the song has a Snopes.com page. Most of the song’s origin stories are lies, or, as Snopes.com says, “apocryphal.” It’s believed that Phil Collins witnessed a man drowning and didn’t help him because the man was either a rapist or was sleeping with Phil Collins’s wife. Or that Phil Collins witnessed a man drowning but was too drunk to save him. Or it wasn’t Phil Collins who saw the man drown, but a camp counselor haunted by his failure to save a camper. Here’s the Snopes-debunked claim I like best: “I heard that Phil Collins when he [was] small, witnessed an individual drowning another individual. Apparently that individual looked up and spotted Phil. To this day, at every concert, Phil starts out singing this song as an accusation aimed at this individual.”
According to Snopes.com, the song “In the Air Tonight” is about a failed romance.
I haven’t been on a date in three months, and that’s assuming I was on a date with Carl when we went out for deviled eggs this summer for a goodbye visit a few days before I moved from Seattle to Ohio. I would say it was a date because I had sex with him. Until that point, whether we were on a date was unclear, even as I pressed my knees against his skinny black jeans and he spoke haltingly, as if he were translating the words of a ghost.
Lately, I don’t date and the money I save goes toward making sure I always have at least a hundred cans of sparkling water. As soon as I stopped drinking alcohol two and a half years ago, I began carrying bricks of canned water into my apartment. I filled my mouth with carbonated jabs through every recovery meeting while people talked about drinking enough whiskey to drown a pancreas and I thought, God, that would really hit the spot. Now, canned water molecules form replacements for my dead, sloughed-off cells.
Washington State is a squatter polity knifed out from my ancestral homeland. I’m enrolled in the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, and I also have ancestry from the Cascade people, whose descendants belong to various tribes, including Yakama, Warm Springs, and Grand Ronde. In 1856, a year after my Cascade great-great-great-grandfather Tumulth signed a treaty through which he and other leaders ceded their Columbia River valley land to the United States, an ongoing war over settlers’ treaty violations came to the Cascades of the Columbia River.2 Yakamas and Klickitats attacked the Americans who occupied an important fishing site in order to guard an overland portage around the rapids. Some Cascade Indian men joined the fighting, but many, including Tumulth, did not.
Lawrence Coe, an American, recounted, “They did not attack us at night, but on the second morning commenced again as lively as ever. We had no water, but did have about two dozen of ale [sic] and a few bottles of whiskey. These gave out during the day.”
This past summer, in that parched land, wildfires spread so quickly it seemed they might devour every living and dead thing. I can’t picture Tumulth with the executioner’s rope around his neck when the US government murdered him at the end of that battle, but I can picture those bottles and feel the shudder of astringent-soaked organs on a hot day, no water anywhere, liquor mummifying the corpse even while it jangles its arms. That’s just day drinking.
Sometimes, when I’m gulping soda water, a date will ask, Do you ever miss it?
A student enters D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) by signing an oath to be drug-free. Not until I transferred to public school for eighth grade did D.A.R.E. introduce the drunk goggles and the box of fake drugs. In Catholic school, we had the cop and the video. I called the school years later to ask whether they had the VHS. They said to call the cop. But Google doesn’t know where he is.
The video, Nate and I determined, was birthed sometime between 1987 and 1991. Plot points include teen drunk driving, a car crash, and a funeral. The soundtrack is the strongest of any film ever made: when I hear “In the Air Tonight,” I still imagine the hush after the crash, viscera ripped by metal mangled into claws, and I feel I might die, too. “Little Lies,” we think, played while the teens pregamed in a kitchen before their lives changed forever, which is to say they died. If there weren’t menace ahead, there would be no video. In real life, without soundtrack cues, we have to find other ways of marking plot points if we want to believe this existence means anything.
The internet forgot that when I was a high school freshman, my friend Lacey’s crush, a popular kid with a porcelain-blond bowl cut, died. My recollection—unconfirmed, because even the newspaper archive searches turn up nothing—is that he died in a car wreck. Lacey, a liar, used to talk about the times they went to the club and got super fucked up, but I suspect they’d never spoken. The yearbook “In Memory” page is hardly helpful. A poem about heaven accompanies quotes from his friends:
“I will never forget him.”
“I will always remember the things we did together as long as I live.”
“His smile and laugh will be remembered and the memories that have been shared will last a lifetime.”
I only learn that we share a birthday and that he really was handsome enough for a sad teen to want to build an imaginary life with.
Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies” is not about underage drinking: it’s about a failed romance.
In the 1850s, in order to grab land along the coast and the Columbia River, the US government whipped up a batch of treaties built from stock language. The one Tumulth signed reads:
In order to prevent the evils of intemperance among said Indians, it is hereby provided that any one of them who shall drink liquor, or procure it for other Indians to drink, may have his or her proportion of the annuities withheld from him or her for such time as the President may determine.
One year after treaty signing, the white people had ales and whiskey in the blockhouse where they hunkered down during the skirmish at the Cascades; when they ran out, men axed down the saloon door in their haste to grab English porter, brandy, whiskey, wine, and oyster crackers. “We failed to get water,” wrote Sgt. Robert Williams, “but the articles mentioned satisfied every requirement except surgical aid until we would get relief, which we knew was close at hand by hearing the report of gallant Phil Sheridan’s guns firing upon the enemy at the Lower Cascades.”
Fifty-four years later, photographer Edward Curtis reported that Tumulth’s daughter Virginia told him, “The Indians, after the disturbance of 1855–56, were dying off in great numbers through the use of whiskey—so called—whole canoe-loads drowning.”
One hundred and five years after that, in the traditional territory of people who came to the river to trade with us, I woke with a man—not Carl, another one I met a year before meeting Carl—asleep in my bed, stinking cups on the nightstand, and my skin a husk that couldn’t stop my innards from evaporating. In the mirror, I saw I was dying.
In recovery, I was expected to tell my story over and over. At first, I didn’t know what to say, except that in the weeks prior, my underarms stank of what seemed like liver fumes. My face was papier-mâché over a balloon. No DUI, no court order, no intervention, just the swollen skull-case in the mirror. I could hardly see a story there because I was living out the dénouement.
“Little Lies” is a Christine McVie concoction. I’m enchanted only because of the D.A.R.E. video: I’m your typical Stevie Nicks witch. Christine, a homebody without an addicti
on crisis and redemptive journey, rarely even stars in her own profiles. Most of them focus on Stevie, who says, “All of us were drug addicts, but there was a point where I was the worst drug addict. I was a girl, I was fragile, and I was doing a lot of coke. And I had that hole in my nose.” This hole sounds like figurative kin to the metaphorical hole in my heart that, a sponsor used to tell me, I’d tried filling with whiskey, but Stevie’s was literally a hole, gouged by liquid aspirin and a million dollars’ worth of cocaine.
I know about Stevie’s nose because I like the celebrity gossip site updates on aged rock stars. That’s how I learned about Phil Collins’s recovery from alcoholism. In his tell-all, he recounts an addiction that can be developed on the cheap: the inciting incident is a divorce during a career lull, the rising action is a love affair with whiskey and vodka, the climax is a pool of blood and teeth marks on tile. I imagine Phil Collins sitting in a recovery meeting room folding chair, addressing his story to his clasped hands while I stick my tongue into an aluminum can across the room.
But it wasn’t alcoholism, he says: “I think it was just filling the hole.”
I never fell, never bled (except from the inside, during the weeks when I pissed red). I was a careful drunk, sleeping on the floor next to the toilet, mouth to ground. During my first months sober, I was ashamed I’d never almost died because I kept hearing I was supposed to have hit bottom.
The more I told my story in rooms full of drying-out people, the more my narrative arc shaped itself into that of a rock star’s rise and fall. Details became significant when they elicited gasps. I realized I was blessed with a garbage life full of narrative gems shinier than the diamonds studding the cocaine bottles that hung around Stevie Nicks’s neck. “You’re lucky your liver made it through that,” someone said after learning I used to chase cherry NyQuil and Gatorade with caffeine pills before homeroom. “And the Everclear. Girl, you weren’t fucking around.”
In high school, I was a little witch with Scotch tape binding spells, a rhinestone-studded reflective silver dress, platform sneakers, and wig-black dyed hair. Unless you count the day I accepted a bottle of Pepsi and vodka on the way to class, I didn’t drink until sophomore year of college. The NyQuil didn’t count because, except for the members of TREND (Turning Recreational Energies in New Directions), everyone Robotripped.
Native Americans aren’t genetically predisposed to alcoholism and drink about as much as whites. According to John W. Frank, MD, et al., in “Historical and Cultural Roots of Drinking Problems among American Indians,” whites brought hard-drinking habits with them as they settled, and depravity was facilitated by perceived freedom from the law (although the whites were encroaching upon lands where Indigenous legal systems were in place):
Our view is that the rise of native drinking cultures, which have obviously evolved further in the ensuing years, cannot be understood without reference to the extraordinary barrage of inducements to drink heavily in the early years after European contact. The harmful drinking patterns established during those years have largely persisted, despite many attempts by government and voluntary agencies to address the problem. In contrast to other explanatory factors, the role of history seems to have been underemphasized in the voluminous literature attempting to explain the phenomenon of problem drinking among Native Americans.
Binge drinking then developed in Native communities. From whites, Natives learned to drink, and whole canoe-loads learned to drown.
I, too, learned how to drink from white people, their desire and freedom preserved on magnetic tape, their readiness to die young written into every gesture. I tell writing students a good ending’s seed is in the essay’s opening. Those teens’ demise was sketched into every gesture: the lean against the counter, the gleeful opening of the passenger door, the hurtling down a dark road. I learned from D.A.R.E. to drink like I was dying.
On my dad’s side of the family, generations of men mined anthracite coal. Every workday, caked in the black dust that would kill them, men took elevators out of the earth and stepped into the sunshine before leaving it behind for dark bars. My great-grandfather, a Polish immigrant, died at fifty-one from, according to the death certificate, general anasarca, extreme edema caused by liver failure. His last day outside was like most others: he went to the mines, then to the bar, then home. He wobbled, steered by the little boy who would become my grandpa, toward the house where he’d spend the last few days of his life.
My grandpa didn’t teach his children to drink that way. Throughout his career as a pilot, he bought duty-free liquor that he stuffed into cabinets, never to be opened. When I was a teenager, my dad held on to four bottles from a six-pack for years after buying beer for a guest. My parents asked me, after I came of age, whether beer goes bad. I had no idea. I drank everything in the house and brought in more.
According to a 2016 interview I found via Genius.com, Phil Collins said of “In the Air Tonight,” “The more people say to me what it’s about, I just say, I can promise you it isn’t about whatever you think it is, ’cause I don’t know what it’s about.”
For the purposes of this essay, the D.A.R.E. video will be the source of the thrill-seeking that sent me to the basement where I joined a circle around a bottle ready to spin, the living room where I stared at switchblades on a coffee table while white boys with oven mitts inhaled opium smoke off a butter knife, the hotel-adjacent bar where I met a man I hoped wouldn’t kill me, the rug-mold-stinking apartment littered with both kinds of roaches where I’d been tasked with picking something up for a guy I was dating—he’d get me back but see the thing was he wasn’t driving right then—and after I emerged, a man drove up and asked me how much money he had to give me to get me in.
None of that seems as alarming as the drunk times.
The time a near stranger called me bitch and told me what I was going to do and I did it before running out of his apartment, my bladder emptying itself onto the sidewalk, trying to empty me.
The time a man I was dating pulled a knife on me while my ex-boyfriend pounded on my apartment window, yelling that he knew I wasn’t alone.
The time a man slipped something into my drink after I decided to stay at the bar for one more beer after my friend left, and I locked myself in my car, covered myself in Goodwill-bound clothes, and passed out.
The time a man my friend thought I’d hit it off with opened my legs on the couch while I kept saying not to.
The time, the last night I ever drank alcohol, a man choked me, like I knew he would, even after I said, You’re going to leave a mark, and he told me he loved me.
The other times. Don’t bother trying to keep track of these men. They’re not even characters. They’re just plot points within the falling action—or the rising action, I can’t remember—populating scenes that come before the point of no return, or after.
A wrecked car appeared on my high school’s front lawn one day. People left class and returned dressed like the grim reaper. They wouldn’t speak. I felt left out. I wanted to walk around dead, too, but nobody invited me. I realized I might be dead already.
The veil is getting thinner, says an Instagram witch. Samhain is approaching. Halloween is the witches’ new year. October is the season of black clothes making more sense than they did in the everything-combusting Ohio summer sun. Fake skeletons are propped up among the real ones walking around with skin on.
Around this time six years ago, I realized my unseen body parts were dying. I went to the emergency room with stomach pain so intense my vision went gray. Waiting in the bed, I thought about whether I was a healthy person. Then the doctor mentioned morphine, and I thought about that instead. I turned down Dilaudid, feeling as if I should say no but wanting it more than anything. That possibility of dripping viscous bliss into my veins and replacing my dread with uncomplicated warmth still feels like the one that got away.
The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me, but when I saw my general practitioner the next day, s
he said, “You will stop your drinking. Now.”
I would not.
In 1831, physician James Gregory presented the postmortem examination of a coal miner who had died at age fifty-nine:
When cut into, both lungs presented one uniform black carbonaceous colour, pervading every part of their substance. The right lung was much disorganized, and exhibited in its upper and middle lobes, several large irregular cavities, communicating with one another and traversed by numerous bands of pulmonary substance and vessels. These cavities contained a good deal of fluid, which, as well as the walls of the cavities, partook of the same black colour.
In the 1870s, journalist Henry Sheafer wrote of coal miners, “The wonder is not that men die of clogged-up lungs, but that they manage to exist so long in an atmosphere which seems to contain at least fifty per cent of solid matter.”
In 1881, Dr. H. A. Lemen presented a paper on the chronic health problems of coal miners. A patient was known to cough up more than a pint of “decidedly inky” black liquid per day. “The sentence I am reading,” Lemen said, “was written with this fluid. The pen used has never been in ink.”
Miners would drink rock-candy-sweetened, herb-laced whiskey elixirs to stimulate morning coughing. After work, they took shots of whiskey with beer backs to bring up dust. In the early 1900s, autopsied lung sections of career miners in Pennsylvania were found to sink in water. Normal lungs float.
Until the 1950s, black lung wasn’t understood as deadly. I collect digital images of death certificates for the coal miners who came before me. Cause of death, over and over, is listed as arteriosclerosis, the arteries hardening, no mention of the lungs. The men were drowned deep underneath dry land.
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