by Mike Monson
During all of this, he constantly thought of drinking. Kept imagining a younger, thinner, better-dressed version of himself drinking Patron surrounded by the smiling faces of hip men and sexy women. He started going to AA meetings again, sitting in the back and never sharing. Many of the people he’d known from his first three years of sobriety were no longer there. His first sponsor was out drinking again, and his second sponsor was back as a newcomer after a six-month jail sentence for a DUI—he and Paul avoided each other and never made eye contact. He always felt a little better after a visit to the Hole-in-the-Wall, and his drinking urges always lessoned or temporarily vanished.
He lied to Tina and said the job was going great. She knew he was lying and he knew she knew. They started avoiding each other as much as possible. She made comments about his weight and that his clothes kept getting tighter and tighter. Most of the time when he was home, she was gone. He had no idea where she was and he didn’t ask. He fed dinner to Taylor and Tyler every night and made sure they bathed, did their homework, and went to bed at a decent hour. Tina usually walked in hours later looking disheveled in uncharacteristically tight and sexy clothes. He often slept on the couch because that was the only place he felt comfortable enough to relax. Tina didn’t protest.
One night after putting his step kids to bed, he snooped around Tina’s things. In one of her dresser drawers—not hidden at all—he found a large purple vibrator, a massive, flesh-colored, life-like dildo, and a thick, black butt plug. He stared at his finds, his face red with embarrassment and jealousy, not sure if she used the items alone or with some new partner or partners.
In another drawer, hidden way in the back behind some sweaters, he was surprised to see a plastic Ziploc bag crammed with about a dozen prescription medicine bottles. He pulled them out one-by-one and was shocked to see that they were full of Vicodin tablets of varying potency. The prescriptions were made out to Tina in her maiden name and her names from each of her four marriages, and they came from four different physicians. The dates on the labels were as recent as a few days previous and none were more than a month old. This find made him feel oddly satisfied, almost giddy.
The next day was Friday. It was just after the short Thanksgiving break. He was teaching a remedial composition class. It was after lunch and he really needed to go to the toilet. The class consisted of kids well-known for their rampant drug use, five or six football players, and several kids who were just slow and barely able to read and write. He had little control in any of his classes, but he still tried a little bit. For this class however, he had nearly given up.
Jake, one of the football players, loved to give Paul a hard time. He called him Mr. Dung.
“Hey, Mr. Dung,” he said that morning, just after the bell to start class, and while Paul, as usual, stared off into space trying to remember what he was supposed to do that day. “What’s it like to be a complete asshole? I was just wondering.”
The class laughed, even the slow kids.
Paul looked at Jake. Had no idea how to handle this. Got up from the chair behind his desk. He looked at the door, he looked back at Jake.
“What’s wrong, Mr. Dung?” Jake said, “Cat got your tongue? Oh, look, I rhymed. I should get an A today for writing a poem. Right Mr. Dung? Do I get an A?”
The class laughed again, then got quiet as Jake stood up and walked right up to Paul.
“I asked you a question Mr. Dung,” he said. “What kind of an educational professional are you that you cannot answer a simple question from one of your students?”
Paul felt like he was about to fart a big loud fart. He realized this would be a bad time to fart. He squeezed his butt checks together.
“Okay,” Paul said. “Yes, rhyming dung and tongue is certainly quite an accomplishment. I believe it has never been done before. So, yes, you will get an A for today, though I have no idea what that means since I don’t give out A’s for a particularly good performance on a given day.”
Jake looked back at the class with a big smile, a victory smile, then back at Paul.
“For your first question,” Paul said, “on what it is like to be a complete asshole? Now, that question surprises me, because, I think that is something you certainly know the answer to, since you are probably the most complete asshole I’ve ever seen.”
Paul looked beyond Jake at the rest of the class, hoping they would laugh and diffuse the situation, just as Jake slapped him, quite hard, on his left check.
“Fuck you, Mr. Dung,” Jake said.
Paul’s fart exploded. It was long and loud. The class was quiet and still.
Paul walked out the door, leaving it open. There was no hallway, just a sidewalk and some grass leading to the parking lot. He walked to his car. He thought about going back into class. He thought about reporting Jake for slapping him. All he saw in his mind were images of Assistant Principal Annie Pitt looking at him like he was pathetic, and all he felt was shame.
He got into his car and drove away. He immediately felt less stressed. His heartburn and gas diminished. He put on his current favorite old CD from an album made before CDs were invented—Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. Turned it up loud and sang along. He felt almost happy.
He went to The Hole in the Wall. The noon meeting was over and the next one wasn’t until six. Dozens of people milled around out front smoking, chatting, pacing. He drove downtown and looked at the fronts of different bars. Wondered if walking out of his disastrous teaching job was a good excuse to start drinking again. Decided that it probably was but he didn’t really feel like going through all that, at least not yet.
He went home at the usual time. Taylor and Tyler were alone. He fed them Rice Krispies with banana slices. He supervised their baths and homework. He let them watch their favorite movie, Overboard, starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. They were asleep before it ended.
He decided to get drunk. He left the children asleep on the floor of the living room and drove to Nino’s, a bar just outside of town on McHenry. It was an old building on the edge of a vineyard. It used to be a notorious dive but new owners had taken over and turned it into a lively spot that attracted an older crowd. There was live rock and roll and country music on Friday and Saturday nights. Paul heard that it could be pretty wild, with divorced or wayward MILFs and cougars acting out, trying to relive their lost youth. Maybe he could drink some tequila and dozens of beers, get lucky and wake up in some strange bed with an even stranger woman.
He walked in at about ten. He saw Tina on the dance floor. Her pants were so tight. She was wearing sexy, knee-high, leather high-heeled boots. The kind that lace up. He’d never seen the boots before. She looked insanely giddy as she whipped her long hair around and danced.
She was with a man he recognized. The guy had sold them Paul’s Honda the year before. He remembered the two of them flirting that day—and feeling jealous, humiliated. He hated that guy—Mark Pisko. He remembered because at the time he felt it was a perfect name for such an asshole.
Pisko was a very good-looking man, just the kind of person Paul couldn’t stand. He resembled Brad Pitt a little, except with muscles. He was tall and very lean with a tiny waist and broad shoulders. He had this arrogant smile and his eyes always looked half closed like he was stoned. When they were at his car lot, Tina giggled at everything Mark said.
He watched them for a while. After the song ended, they walked together back to a table. On the table were two full shot glasses and two bottles of Bud. Tina and Mark clinked the glasses and drank down the shots. Tina howled and they both chugged their beer. Paul had never seen her drink before. He lost interest in getting drunk. He went home, put the kids in their beds, and fell asleep on the couch. When he heard Tina come in the front door he looked at his watch: 4:19 a.m.
He left each morning for the next several weeks as if he still had a job. He went home after he knew Tina had left for work and stayed until just before the kids came from school. Then he came home at his usual time to ta
ke care of the two while Tina went out. Each spouse timed their comings and goings so that they were rarely in the same place at the same time.
He monitored the contents of Tina’s drawers during the day. The vibrator was always there but the dildo and the butt plug came and went. She was taking about twelve to eighteen Vicodin a day.
He got calls from the high school at first but let them all go to voicemail. He received notice of his termination two weeks later. Luckily, he’d checked the mail while Tina was at work.
After his last paycheck was deposited into their joint account, he put on a suit and drove into San Francisco and, over a three-day period, signed up with nine temp agencies. He needed to keep their mortgage payments up and he still had child support and alimony for Martie. His spelling and grammar skills were excellent and his typing and data entry skills were above average. He was decent at math and in the tests to assess his ability to accurately file he showed a perfect knowledge of the order of the alphabet. He managed to appear eager and pleasant during the interviews because he imagined what an ideal office temp would do and say and acted accordingly. He received offers for short- and long-terms jobs in San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Palo Alto, and Emeryville.
He took a temp to perm job with a high tech company in San Jose set to start the following Monday. That Friday he made sure to be home when Tina got off work.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I’m not teaching anymore,” he said. “I quit.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“I have a job in San Jose at some company called Safeco. It’s temp to perm. I start Monday.”
Tina looked at him briefly.
“Whatever,” she said, and went into the bedroom. Paul left and went to the movies. At nine he drove by Nino’s and saw her car in the lot. He went inside and she was dancing with Pisko—AC/DC t-shirt and the sexy boots. Their hands were all over each other and they kept kissing. He went home and looked in her drawer. Next to the bag of pills was a new Ziploc that contained a lighter, a package of hypodermic needles, and a small spoon.
Safeco was located in a large all-glass building just off of the 101 Freeway. It looked light blue from the road, but from close up, the glass walls were like mirrors. The company did something related to computers, or computer chips or circuit boards. What, exactly, Paul could never figure out. No one talked to him about anything. All the managers wore baby blue static-resistant lab coats. They reminded Paul of ministers who sometimes wore robes over casual clothes or bathing suits while baptizing the converted. He sat in a high-walled dark cubicle in the middle of a warehouse-sized room full of other cubicles and desks. His job was to look at thousands of pages of computer printouts of numbers and letters spread across a page in five columns. When he found a certain specified combination of letters and numbers in a column, he’d mark it with a yellow highlighter, type it into a database.
That was it. He had no idea what the numbers meant, where they came from or why they needed to be located and entered into the new database. He didn’t know how the database he was creating would be used—and he knew that if he asked it was unlikely anyone would have taken the time to explain such things to a temp. He asked someone about the perm part of the “temp-to-perm” and found out he’d been told wrong—the job was temporary and could and would end at any time.
This was his life then—that desk, that chair, that cubicle, that screen—that yellow highlighter, that keyboard. Included in his life as well—those smarmy clipboard-clutching supervisors who were so superior because they had an actual J.O.B. with benefits and decent pay and who were invited to the “team meetings,” at which they got served free coffee, juice, and pastries. He’d walked by one of these meetings on his way to the restroom and saw huge, shiny muffins, cheese Danishes, bowls of fruit, pitchers of OJ, urns of coffee, and quart containers of real half and half. They acted as if they would rather please please please not know anything about who Paul was or thought or felt. Ever.
One day he had a slight cold. The employee break room had an extensive array of symptom-reducing equipment—aspirin, acetaminophen, cold compress. Bandages of every shape and size. Ointments. Even a defibrillator.
And, something, something fucking wonderful, called “extra strength cold remedy.”
God, that shit worked. It worked very well.
Paul had lost most of the weight he’d gained while teaching, but he was still about 245. He’d taken a pharmacology class in college and the professor said that “recommended” dosages were figured for the average person and that a larger person could take a little bit more, so Paul took six of these wonderful “extra strength cold remedy” pills.
Oh man.
After about twenty minutes, Paul felt a significant lack of pain and stress and a pleasant tingling in his scalp.
He’d taken six more of the pills by mid-afternoon and by 4:30, another six. Over the next several weeks, he took all the “extra strength cold remedy” in the break room on his floor. The entire act of grabbing as much of the little square envelopes of white pills as possible and getting them opened and swallowed without anyone noticing what he was doing became an obsessive activity of compulsion, paranoia, and dread. He began going to the break rooms on the other fourteen floors of the building and taking all the pills there, and often, by the time he would empty out the stash on one floor, another floor had a new supply.
His work life was no longer about the charts, the yellow highlighter, and the database. It was all about getting more of those pills, making sure he wasn’t caught hoarding all of them in the building, finding a way to just enjoy the effect, and trying not to deal with the fact that he was a compulsive, sneaky, shameful thief of employee first aid supplies. He spent much of the day just sitting in his chair in such a way that for anyone walking by, it would look like he was intently studying his columns of numbers and letters while he was completely frozen and doing nothing. He was engaged in zero activity aside from letting the warm, gentle feeling of the pills seep into more and more of his brain until there was nothing else.
Nothing.
The temp agency called one Friday while he was on the nearly three-hour drive back to Modesto and told him not to return to the big blue building on Monday. The job was over. This was a surprise.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “There are a lot of numbers left to go through. Stacks and stacks.”
“We’re sure,” Pamela, from NumberOne Staffing, said. “Do not go back. Remember to mail us your last pay sheets.”
“What about Monday? Do you have anything else?”
“We’ll let you know,” Pamela said.
He spent the weekend going to AA meetings, snooping around town following Tina and Mark, searching through Tina’s drawers, and taking care of Taylor and Tyler.
On Monday he called NumberOne Staffing: still no jobs for Paul Dunn. He called all the other agencies he’d signed up for to say he was available for anything and everything. They had nothing for him as well. “Let us know each day if you’re available,” they all said.
He spent the week acting like he was still working at Safeco to avoid any unpleasant conversations with Tina. He had a few little packages of “extra strength cold medicine” left. For the first time, he looked closely at the ingredients and found that it was Guaifenesin, caffeine, acetaminophen, and dextromethorphan. Fascinated, he googled the fuck out of that shit, and found out all about DM. Turned out there were dozens of websites devoted to the recreational uses of that drug. And that there were many ways to get plenty of it into one’s system just by shopping at the local grocery or drug store. He also found out that acetaminophen was highly toxic to the liver, and overdoses could prove fatal. The amounts that Paul had been taking could’ve damaged him irrevocably. Luckily, there was no acetaminophen in Robitussin, a product that he quickly found to be a much better delivery system of DM than the little white pills—and one that delivered him to an entirely new and wonderful place.
They both went out the door and neither came back for several minutes. Then, Tina walked in the door and stood over Paul. He opened his eyes.
“Moving out?” he said.
“I wanted to say goodbye.”
“You going with that smarmy used car salesman?”
“I’m moving in with Mark, yes.”
“What about Tyler and Taylor?”
“They’re going to stay with my mom for a while.”
“No shit? They can stay here with me.”
“Uh, I don’t think so. Anyway …”
“Will I be able to see them? They’d probably want to, don’t you think? They call me Dad for crissakes.”
“No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“That sucks. Shit.” Paul sat up. “That Pisko dude is shady as hell, you know.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine.”
“I think you’re making a big mistake. Sure, leave me, but don’t go with him. I’ve been asking around, I know his partner is an ex-con. He’s a very violent guy.”