by David M
“So, what do you want me to do,” she asked.
“I’ll keep moving,” I said. “If I get drunk and let her catch me, I want you to punch me right in the head.”
Later that night several of my coworkers and I were sitting under our regular pavilion having a few drinks. It wasn’t long before my siren showed up. She immediately pulled a chair close to mine and propped her bare feet in my lap. I looked at my supervisor to insure her I would handle this. She said nothing.
A short time later I got up to grab another beer. Rather than return to my chair, however, I took a seat at the picnic table. The chase was on. This didn’t last long and the girl was once again at my side. Maybe she took my relocation as an invitation to play under the table, because her hand was immediately on my thigh.
With some effort, I reached down and gently removed her hand from my thigh and placed it on her leg. I looked to my guardian and received a slight nod of approval. My temptress on the other hand let out a barely audible pout. This was only a small victory though. She was still too close, and I could feel my desire building. I wanted her hand back on my thigh.
I didn’t want to be terribly obvious, so I endured the torture a little longer. Finally I stood up and went to the ashtray. I stood there smoking a cigarette and talking to a friend about work, but a few beers later; there she was. Damn, this girl was sexy. I ran through my mind the things I wanted to do to her, and then I ran away again.
I sat next to my boss at the picnic table and gave her a look that said, “See, I told you she was chasing me.”
It was getting late, but I wasn’t done drinking yet; and apparently my nemesis wasn’t ready to give up either. She managed to squeeze in next to me. Now I had my boss on one side of me and my downfall on the other. I managed to ignore the girl for a while and carry on a conversation with my boss, about what I don’t know. Eventually though, my defenses began to crumble.
The beer had caught up to me. Before I knew it there wasn’t enough room between us for a thought to pass. Her hand was back on my thigh, and I had totally forgotten about everyone else around us. Then I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turned to see who would interrupt such a perfect moment.
Apparently my boss was not inured to my frequent use of hyperbole, and before I knew what was happening she hauled off and punched me right between the eyes. I sat there stunned, and may have even seen a few stars. Suddenly, I was hot for two women. I knew it was time to go, so I excused myself, went back to my room and dove head-first into a bottle of gin in an attempt to extinguish my raging hormones.
The next day I went to the girl’s supervisor and asked him to keep her away from me. I didn’t want to be tempted into infidelity, and I certainly didn’t want to be punched in the head again. She was told not to come within fifty feet of me, and for the remainder of the year in Cuba she complied.
I made it through the rest of the year without getting arrested, demoted or cheating on Nikki. I felt pretty good. I returned home expecting life to be great, but it wasn’t long before I discovered Nikki had faced the same test I had. Unfortunately, she had failed.
PART TWO
The Crash
Chapter eleven:
Everything started to go downhill about two weeks before I left Cuba. Nikki began accusing me of things she couldn’t possibly believe were true. I had heard her lie a thousand times, but this went far beyond lying. This was pure insanity.
Nikki accused me of reenlisting and running off to Cuba without her knowledge. She claimed I had spent my reenlistment bonus on a Cuban girlfriend, and said all of our friends hated me for it. According to her, her father and brother were waiting for me to get home so they could beat the hell out of me for the horrible things I had put her through.
The stories and accusations were so convoluted and implausible that I finally stopped calling home. There just wasn’t enough gin in Guantanamo Bay to get me through a phone call with her. For the record, there were also no Cuban women at Guantanamo Bay.
I figured that when I got home I could sit down with Nikki’s family and try to get her some help. She was apparently not well. I knew they couldn’t possibly believe all of the things she was saying; after all, they were there when I left. Nikki and I had discussed the entire deployment and reenlistment with them. These weren’t stupid people.
Unfortunately, it seems they were a little more willing to believe Nikki than I thought possible. I don’t know exactly how much of Nikki’s bullshit they had bought into, but it was enough to make them hate me. Nikki’s stepmother was the worst. I could hear her bellowing through the phone, telling Nikki to dump the loser and find a real man.
The rule we had about drinking before 8 pm went out the window when I got home. I found myself drinking all throughout the day just to cope with the insanity. Nikki had turned everyone against me. Her family either wouldn’t talk to me or were outright insulting. Our friends wanted nothing to do with me; even my own children seemed to regard me with suspicion.
I finally lost it after being home for less than a week. We were taking the children to a park when Nikki unloaded on me. She said she hated me for abandoning her and the children and wanted a divorce. I told her to turn the car around and take me home; I didn’t want to do this in front of the boys.
When I got home I packed a bag with a change of clothing, a gun and a bottle of sleeping pills. I wasn’t planning on needing the change of clothing.
I called a friend and asked him to drop me off at a motel, but he convinced me to come back to his house, have a few beers and talk things over first. I didn’t want to go to his house but he insisted, and that’s what saved my life.
My memory of that day gets very fuzzy from this point, but I know he never took me to a motel. I had drunk what whiskey I had left and took the rest of my wife’s rum before leaving the house. I was drinking the rum straight and pounding beer at the same time. I was also sneaking out to my friend’s car every so often for a few sleeping pills. I don’t think suicide was my goal; I just wanted to be as far from myself as I could get, and if that meant death, then so-be-it.
At some point my friends called 911. I struggled with the ambulance crew, and then with the police, but they finally got me to the hospital. At the hospital I got into a fight with a group of very large orderlies; again I came up on the losing end.
Though I don’t remember it, I know I had my stomach pumped and was force-fed charcoal. I was also strapped to a bed as a result of my scuffle with the orderlies. That part I do remember, and it’s something I hope I never have to endure again.
I don’t know whether I spent a day or a week in that hospital, but when I came home Nikki finally admitted she had cheated on me with another man. She said it was the reason she had invented all of the wild accusations, and she promised to set the record straight with our friends and family.
I forgave the infidelity immediately. She was only human, and after all, hadn’t I nearly committed the same offense. A year is a long time, especially for two alcoholics.
What I couldn’t get past was the insanity that ensued as a result of the affair, and it wasn’t over yet. What bothered me most is that her family and our friends had so easily believed the monstrous things they were being told about me. I was angry at everyone.
Before long, her infidelity was my fault as well. If I had called her every week on time she never would have cheated. If I had been more emotionally available, or had tried to get home more often; had I done this, that or the other thing she might have kept her pants on. It always came back to the same thing; it was my fault.
A few weeks later I ended up in the hospital again because of mixing pills and whiskey. This time I spent several days in the psychiatric ward. The doctor didn’t want to let me go at the end of the observation period, but he had no choice. As I was leaving, he threw those two little words at me that I had come to hate; seek help.
I decided the only way to stay out of the hospital was to stop taking pills. They didn’
t seem to mix well with whiskey, and I wasn’t giving that up. This didn’t solve anything though, and the insanity continued to mount.
After another trip to the hospital Nikki’s father gave her some good advice. He told her not to show any sympathy for me. Apparently, he had heard somewhere that showing sympathy is the worst thing you can do for someone who repeatedly attempts suicide.
What I couldn’t get anyone to understand is that I wasn’t mixing pills and whiskey in an attempt to kill myself. I was doing it because it was the quickest and easiest way to stop feeling. The reoccurring near-death experiences were simply an unfortunate side effect.
Nikki took the advice her father had given her, processed it and came up with a plan of action. Unfortunately, Nikki’s powers of reasoning were greatly hampered by rum at the time. She stumbled out to the smoking-room one night with my gun in her hand. She had taken it out of the safe in the bedroom and had apparently dropped the magazine out of it. She threw it on the couch next to me and sat down at the desk.
“If you want to kill yourself, now’s your chance,” she said. “My dad said I’m not supposed to show you any sympathy, so go ahead and shoot yourself.”
“Perhaps your father could have given you better instructions for not showing sympathy,” I said. “This is a little over the top, don’t you think.”
“You’re the one that keeps mixing pills and drinking,” she said. “I just think you should get it over with.”
I tried explaining that I didn’t want to kill myself, and that my trips to the hospital had been accidents. I said if I wanted to shoot myself I would have got the gun out of the safe myself, or more likely, just used the loaded shotgun by the bed. She argued that only women overdosed; men shot themselves. She accused me of being a coward, and even called me a pussy.
The argument went round and round as usual, and as usual not one intelligent point was raised. Watching two drunks have an argument must be a lot like watching a pair of monkeys fuck a football. At last the point came when I simply couldn’t take it anymore. There was no point in arguing with Nikki when she was drunk, so I cocked the hammer and raised the gun to my temple.
“Is this what you want? Would it make you happy? At the very least, would it shut you the fuck up?”
“Relax asshole,” she said. “The gun’s not loaded. I unloaded it myself. Besides, I knew you wouldn’t do it.”
I smiled because I now had the perfect chance to show her how stupid she was when she was drunk. I pointed the gun at the ceiling and pulled the trigger. The shot was deafening. Though I had shown her how to load and unload our guns a dozen times, I knew she had dropped the magazine and forgotten about the round in the chamber. It didn’t occur to me at the time that I was the bigger of the two drunken idiots for blowing a hole in the ceiling.
The next morning Nikki had no memory of the incident at all. It wasn’t until I showed her the hole in the ceiling and the empty shell case that she even believed me. This didn’t stop her from showing the hole in the ceiling to people after our separation and telling a wild story in which I tried to shoot her. Once again, the geniuses bought every word. Amazingly, none of our neighbors called the police that night. They may have been happy thinking one of the idiots next door was dead.
Years later, after our separation, I would get a call from Child Protective Services. There had been another shot fired at Nikki’s house. I knew about this shooting from friends of friends. The story I heard is that Nikki was flirting with a guy at a party she and her new boyfriend had thrown. He went to the bedroom and got the shotgun, they struggled, and the shotgun went off destroying half of his hand.
I have no Idea what story Nikki told her family, but the story she had told the police sunk to new depths of insanity. The woman on the phone read the police report to me word for word, and I could tell by the inflection of her voice she was having a hard time getting through it.
Nikki had told the investigating officer, in explicit detail, how she and her boyfriend had been using the shotgun as a sexual toy, and that in the heat of ecstasy it had accidently gone off. Fortunately for her, neither discharging a shotgun indoors nor shoving one up your ass seem to be grounds for losing your children in Pennsylvania. On the bright side, it makes driving to bible study at eleven o’clock at night sound reasonable.
As our fighting escalated I began looking for reasons to get away. I found a job which provided that escape. The local Army recruiting office didn’t have a recruiter. The pay was low, but I got a government vehicle and my supervisors were at an office a half-hour away. My office became a home away from home.
For a while, the job was the answer to all of my problems. It kept me away from Nikki, and I rarely had to account for my time as long as I met my quota; which I always did. The worse things got at home, the more time I spent at the office. Eventually though, the small paychecks took their toll.
Nikki hadn’t worked in quite a while and no matter how much I tried to reason with her, she wouldn’t get a job. She insisted it would be impossible to work with two children. I argued that millions of women do it every day. She was adamant that she didn’t want to be a waitress; she wanted to tend bar. I countered that I didn’t want to be a recruiter; I wanted to be a rock star. As always, the arguments went round and round but always fell short of accomplishing anything.
I became frustrated with the long hours for peanuts routine in a very short time. After only a few months at the job I had stopped putting forward anything which even resembled an effort. Most mornings I would show up to the office, check the answering machine, and then crack open a beer. Fuck ‘em, I’d say to myself. If they’re not going to make working worth my time, I’m not going to work.
Eventually, I stopped checking the answering machine all together. Some mornings I wouldn’t even go into the office. I knew a bar that opened at 9 am and that’s where I began to spend my time. I would go back to the office when I was too drunk to sit at the bar anymore or when I ran out of money. I had a million excuses when my boss called, and thought they were buying every one of them. They weren’t.
One day my boss arrived at my office unannounced. He let himself in with a key I didn’t know he had, and found me passed out on the couch surrounded by empty beer cans and whiskey bottles. It was 10 am. To say he was pissed off would be the understatement of the century. After yelling at me in several languages for about a half an hour, he told me to go home and sober up, and to be in his office at 9 am the next morning.
We locked up the office and walked to the parking lot in silence. He started his government vehicle and watched as I got into my truck. When he was sure the company car I had been given was safe, he pulled out of the lot and down the road. As his car turned the corner out of sight, I climbed out of my truck and hopped into my government vehicle. My truck hadn’t run in months, and I needed to get to the bar.
Though I knew I was going to be fired, I walked into my boss’s office the next morning with an airtight, award-winning story. I said that I just needed a day off of work, but that my wife and I had gotten in an argument about my long hours and low pay. I said I really couldn’t afford to go anywhere else, so I had bought the booze and intended to hide out in the office until things blew over.
By the time I left his office, I had him thinking he was the asshole for causing my wife and I to argue, disturbing me on my day off and sending me back into the hornet’s nest. If there’s one thing all alcoholics are good at, it’s making sober people feel like our problems are there fault. I was a master of this skill, and rather than being fired I was given a small raise.
It still wasn’t enough to pay the bills though, and Nikki was still unwilling to work. I had been offered a better paying job in San Antonio, but Nikki also refused to relocate. I was running out of options. Then one day I got a call from my First Sergeant. There was a unit out of Pittsburgh going to Iraq and they had a seat reserved for me if I wanted it. I asked him to give me an hour to make a choice, and he agreed.
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I called Nikki and asked her to meet me at the bar. We needed to talk. I waited for her in the parking lot, and when she arrived I put the decision squarely on her. Option one was that I take the job in San Antonio and we all go to Texas as a family. Option two was Iraq. There was no option three; we would all starve.
As expected, Nikki’s first words were, “I’m not moving the boys to Texas.”
“Then option two it is,” I said.
Nikki just nodded. She almost looked sad as she got back in her car and drove away…almost. I walked back to the same barstool I had occupied since the place opened at nine that morning; a cold beer and a shot were waiting for me. I called my First Sergeant from the bar and gave him my answer. I would go to Iraq.
Chapter twelve:
All Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan fall under General Order Number-One. This is not to be confused with The First General Order, which states: I will guard everything within the limits of my post, and quit my post only when properly relieved. General Order Number-One has nothing to do with guard duty. This order revokes a Soldier’s right to drive his own car, own or look at porn, have sex or drink alcohol.
Essentially, G.O. No.1 takes away everything young men join the Army for. It also proves that in the Army number one is not always first. I guess this is true in all walks of life though.
This is not to say alcohol wasn’t available in Iraq. A well trained alcoholic can find alcohol at an ant-farm. It just meant I had to be more careful. Drinking alone became an art form, and drinking just enough to fend off the shakes became a science. Though I did not realize it at the time, I had entered a new stage of my disease commonly known as maintenance drinking.
I was no longer drinking because I enjoyed it or because it made me more social; I was drinking to survive. Unfortunately, I was a well-trained alcoholic at the time, not a well-educated one. Rather than see this form of drinking as the progression of a disease, I thought I had become a responsible drinker. I was finally like everyone else.