by David M
I was good at my job and began to accumulate a stack of awards. I was the go-to-guy in the field, and had found my way onto the short-lists of several unit commanders. If Public Affairs was needed outside the wire; I got a call. I began to feel normal. As long as I only drank a little bit throughout the day, and had a few to help me sleep at night; I was the golden child.
All I had to do was continue on this path when I got home and everything would be alright. There would be no more parties or beer cans all over the house. I would keep a bottle under the sink and sneak a few throughout the day the way my grandmother did. She had lived a quiet, normal life. That was all I had ever wanted.
Things kept getting better until it was time to go home on leave. Nikki and I had come up with a plan to get our lives on track, and by six months into my tour we should have been on easy street. But when I got home I was horribly disappointed. We were still behind on bills and had no money saved.
We fought about our financial situation bitterly. Nikki simply said life was expensive, and wouldn’t account for where our money had gone. If there would have been a new television or bedroom furniture I would have been upset, but at least there would have been an explanation. She had done hard drugs in the past, and by the looks of her I suspected the old habit may have resurfaced.
To add insult to injury, there were rampant rumors of continued infidelity. I still had some drinking buddies at the local watering hole, and over a few beers several of them told their stories. Most of the stories started with Nikki being invited to a party and ended with her and a stranger vanishing against the advice of the story teller.
In every case the person telling the story offered their apologies for inviting Nikki to the party in the first place and swore she had never been invited back. I may have taken these rumors more lightly had Nikki not refused to go to the bar with me, and then told me not to talk to our friends because they were all liars.
The last straw came several days before I was set to return to Iraq. We were taking our boys to karate practice and I had volunteered to drive. The boys were in their seats and I had the car running when Nikki climbed in the passenger seat. The stench of rum was overwhelming. All throughout our children’s practice I could see the looks of sympathy, anger and disgust on the faces of the other parents.
I assumed at the time this had been going on for a while, and it was only since I had become a responsible drinker that it had become obvious to me. Now, years later I wonder if the whiskey on my breath was also apparent to the others in the room.
By the time I returned to Iraq my mind was made up; I wanted a divorce. I was never a fan of dear-John, or dear-Jane letters, so I decided I would call home as little as possible and be nothing more than cordial when I did. When I got home I would walk in the door, state my intentions and leave. With my mind made up, I didn’t feel even the least bit guilty when another young girl developed a crush on me. This time I gave in immediately. I wasn’t making the same mistake I made in Cuba.
For the first time in years, I enjoyed spending time with a woman. Despite being only twenty three years old, this girl was smart, funny, sweet and thoughtful. I began cutting my work hours back to a reasonable level just so I could spend more time with her. Every day when I woke up she was the first thought to cross my mind, and that thought never failed to bring a smile to my face.
I enjoyed work more than ever before, because I knew she would be waiting for me when the day was done. We were like a couple of teenagers in love, and it just kept getting better. There were never any arguments or head games. It was simply bliss.
Then one night the time came for me to go. We knew from the first kiss that our affair had an expiration date, and it had been set by the Army. My tour was over. I climbed out of bed in the middle of the night and dressed in silence. I kissed her gently on the cheek and left the room. She slept peacefully as I climbed aboard a plane and left Iraq. I knew I would never see her again, and the thought broke my heart.
When I got home I put my bags down without unpacking them. If Nikki knew something was wrong she kept it to herself. I played with the boys for a bit before it was time to put them to bed. Once their story was read and they were tucked in, I grabbed a bottle of whisky and made my way to the smoking room. On the way, I told Nikki to mix herself a drink; and make it a good one.
The conversation started the way it had a hundred times before. I told her about the problems in our relationship that I could no longer accept. As always, she promised things would change. She promised she would get a job and that we would no longer struggle for money. She promised we would go back to drinking only when the children were asleep. She promised she would be faithful. Around and around we went.
Nikki had a favorite threat she would brandish when she was drunk in the past. She liked to use our children to hold me hostage. If I ever left her, she would say, I would never see our children again. If I ever cheated, I’d never see them again. If I ever left the toilet seat up, I would never see them again. She would always apologize later for the threat, but days later it would come out again. I didn’t know if she could actually keep me from seeing my children, but the threat alone was enough to keep me in check.
Despite the threat of losing my children; I had to get out of this marriage. There was another problem which had been troubling me for a long time, and it was getting very serious. As well as being clumsy, Nikki was a fall down drunk. On several occasions I would help her to bed only to hear a loud crash in the kitchen or living room a short time later. I would come in from the smoking room to find her passed out on the living room floor, in the kitchen, the hallway; I just never knew where she would end up.
She was rarely hurt, but often wore the bumps and bruises you would expect to see on a battered woman. Though I never actually thought she would accuse me of such atrocities, I was often worried about being seen with her in public.
On one occasion, I was with a new recruit when Nikki called. She said she had smashed her face and needed to go to the hospital. Given her propensity for exaggeration, I wasn’t too worried.
She would often call me at work to tell me about a gash, slash or gouge one of our boys had incurred, and I would rush home to find only a scuffed knee. I had heard the story of the boy who cried wolf, but Nikki could have been the girl who cried sunshine in Florida and I would have had my doubts.
Unfortunately, when I got home that day, I found that Nikki hadn’t exaggerated at all this time. As the story went, she had been mopping the kitchen floor. She was putting everything back where it went when she slipped on the wet floor. The two-foot high, wooden birdhouse she was carrying flew straight up in the air when she fell, and landed squarely on her face. She looked like she had called Mike Tyson a bitch.
Initially, I was only worried about her. She looked awful, and I knew she must be in considerable pain. Before long, however, I was more worried about my own reputation. Even the doctor, who we had known for years, said that if he didn’t know us as well as he did, and if the story of the birdhouse wouldn’t have been so outlandish, he would have reported the incident to the police himself.
So, the night I returned home from Iraq, I knew I had to put a halt to it once and for all. Nikki was a liability, and had been for a long time. Everything had built to this point and I couldn’t cave in this time. I was tired of hating the woman I was married to. I was tired of the lies and the cheating. I was tired of working my ass off and having nothing to show for it. I was just tired; in every sense of the word, I was exhausted.
I hadn’t intended to tell Nikki about the affair. It would only cause her undue pain, and I knew she would think I was motivated by revenge. I also knew she would never forgive me, and I was right. The promises stopped when I told her I had been with another woman. She wanted me out immediately. It was finally over.
Several months after our separation, I was sitting at the bar when I noticed a young punk giving me dirty looks and mumbling under his breath. I assumed he was
just drunk and didn’t pay much attention to him. Soon I realized that his friends were trying to talk him out of confronting me, so I finally asked him what the hell his problem was. I had never seen this little hairball before and couldn’t imagine why he had singled me out.
He didn’t answer, but kept talking to himself under his breath. I finally had enough. I told him to step up or get the hell out. His friends decided to drag him out of the bar while he still had all of his teeth.
When he was gone, the bartender came over and said the kid was friends with Nikki’s new boyfriend. I didn’t understand why this would make the jackass want a piece of me, until the bartender explained that the kid had heard I used to slap Nikki around. I wondered out loud where he would have heard a thing like that. The bartender confirmed what I already knew. He had heard it from Nikki.
It finally made sense that none of our friends would talk to me, and that Nikki’s family wanted my blood. She had lied to them and they had bought it hook, line and sinker. I couldn’t understand why she would be so spiteful, or how people I had known for years could believe I was capable of something so terrible.
I suddenly wished the mumbling little asshole would grow some balls and come back. Though I had never laid a hand on Nikki; I suddenly wanted to beat the life out of someone.
Lucky Chapter Thirteen:
I moved into a motel room across the street from the bar and began my routine of drinking day and night. I don’t know what it was about that little bar by the turnpike that attracted me, but it was the center of my universe. Everything and everyone I needed seemed to be there. The bartender was my psychologist and the other barflies were my lawyers, doctors, financial advisors and clergymen, all dressed in flannel and greasy-baseball caps.
I would wake up every morning around 5:30 am. I told myself I was still on an Iraqi time schedule, when in fact I had no set schedule in Iraq, and rarely started my day at 5:30 am. Looking back now, I understand the reason I woke up after only two or three hours of sleep. I needed a drink.
I didn’t have a refrigerator or a cooler in the motel, so there was no ice or cold beer. I found a breakfast formula that seemed to work well though. I had somehow ended up with a 16oz beer glass from the center of the universe. When I woke up in the morning, I would pour three fingers of whiskey into the glass followed by three fingers of tap water. When the glass was half empty I would refill with whiskey, never adding more water.
After the third or fourth drink the water content of my glass was almost nonexistent. I liked to call this stepping into a drink.
From the outside looking in, almost anyone would call this alcoholic behavior. I didn’t see it that way at all. I believed that I was forcing my body out of its normal routine. After all; who in their right mind gets up at 5:30 am when they don’t have to. I was simply drinking myself back to sleep. I honestly believed this was the sane, intelligent thing to do.
I never considered waking up with the shakes or nausea as out of the ordinary either. It only made sense to feel this way after drinking all night the evening prior. I assumed I was waking up every morning with a hangover, and everyone knows the best remedy for a hangover is the hair of the dog that bit you. It never crossed my mind that I was waking up every morning in withdraw.
I would sit in my motel room in the early morning hours letting my mind race through the first few drinks. It was never anything important that occupied my mind, but the thoughts came and went at lightning speed. One moment I would be thinking about putting air in my front tire, and the next moment I would be thinking about the next presidential election.
After a few drinks my brain would slow to a crawl. I felt as though I could put things in perspective, and I would mentally solve all the world’s problems. From famine to pestilence; I had the answer. By 9 am I would be passed out again, only to wake up at eleven, shower and head out to the bar. In retrospect, I never really slept. I just passed out for two hours at a time.
My money started to run out before long and I ended up sleeping on a friend’s couch. That was fine for a while, until I started rearranging his furniture in the middle of the night.
I called my shrink because I thought I was going crazy. I didn’t tell the doctor I had been mixing the sleeping pills he had prescribed with alcohol, but asked if there were any common side effects. He asked if I had been binge eating in the middle of the night. I said no. Then he asked if I had been rearranging furniture.
I was a little stunned by the question, but said that I had. He said it was more common than one might expect, but that it’s usually not much of an issue. I would have agreed if it would have been my own furniture I had been rearranging. I thought it was sort of funny, but my friend wasn’t quite as entertained.
Eventually, I found an apartment and a roommate to help with the bills. She worked the night shift and slept all day, so we rarely saw each other. Even so, it took no time at all for me to destroy any chance we had of becoming friends.
On our first morning at the new apartment my roommate asked me what I was doing in the kitchen closet the night before. I told her I had no idea what she was talking about. She said I walked out of my room in a pair of boxer shorts, went into the closet and closed the door. Then I went back into my room, put on pants and went outside for a cigarette. I didn’t want to admit it, but apparently I had pissed in the trashcan.
Pissing in strange places seems to be another common alcoholic trait, and a trashcan doesn’t even make my top-ten list. I see no need to go into the entire list, but the number one location was a candy machine when I was stationed in Panama. I’m not talking about pissing on the machine, or behind the machine; I’m talking about taking a leak right in the fucking machine. Now that takes talent.
Here’s a tip for the reader; if you have a top ten list of strange places you’ve taken a piss, you may want to put this book down and call the AA hotline right now. We’ll save a seat for you.
I had been living at the apartment for several months when I noticed I was in a rut. I had done nothing since I moved in but drink and go to the bar.
Every morning I would get up at the crack of dawn, mix a drink and sit out on the fire escape. I would drink my whiskey and watch all of the normal people getting in their cars and going to work. Then I would watch the mothers in the neighborhood put their kids on school busses. I felt sad for everyone else. What a boring life.
I tried to leave the same half bottle of whiskey in the kitchen, and keep the rest in my room. Even though my new roommate and I didn’t get along; I didn’t want her to know how much I was drinking. I didn’t recycle for the same reason. I could almost picture my neighbors rooting through my recycling bin counting empty whiskey bottles.
I wasn’t happy when I was at home, and I didn’t like the little town I had moved into very much either. I was becoming suspicious of everyone. Worst of all, it was a half hour drive to my favorite bar. In a way though, this was a good thing. Not because I didn’t go to the bar as often, but because I didn’t want my neighbors keeping tabs on me.
The bar was the only place I could find peace. There was something comforting about the dimly lit, smoke-filled room. The other people around the bar always seemed happy and were always interested in what I had to say. And no matter what was going wrong in my life, they were on my side; as long as the drinks kept coming.
Every now and then an outsider would wander into our little world. If they were friendly we would welcome them: and if they were not, we would drum them out. There was safety in numbers and bravery in the beer. I felt untouchable when I was at the center of my universe.
Getting to the bar was never a problem, even though it was a long drive. I would throw a six-pack in the truck and take the scenic route. I had been driving the back roads for years to avoid the police. That was one great thing about Central Pennsylvania. As long as you aren’t in a rush, you can get almost anywhere via back roads. Sometimes it’s even faster that way.
Getting home, on the other ha
nd, was becoming a problem. Most nights I wouldn’t remember the drive, but since my truck was out front in the morning I would assume I had done alright. Other mornings; I would have to look for the truck. Luckily, it was a small town and the truck was usually within a few blocks.
One morning I found the truck about two blocks from my apartment. The back tire was on the curb and the front bumper was damn near out in the street. When I walked around to the driver-side door to straighten the truck out I found a pile of beer cans on the ground. As I picked the cans up and threw them back in the open window I noticed a woman standing on her porch, shaking her head.
“Hey lady,” I yelled, “the next time your husband borrows my truck to go see his girlfriend in the middle of the night; tell him to at least clean up his beer cans.”
She just flicked her cigarette in my direction and stormed back into the house. I was making friends quick in this little town.
I wasn’t even in the truck when I had my first accident. I was almost home from the bar when my bladder reached its limit. My only choice was to pull over before I pissed myself…again.
I found a field that looked nice and dark and flew off the road without even slowing down. I jerked the wheel and slammed the breaks while bumping the floor shifter into neutral. Before the truck was even at a full stop I was out watering the farmer’s field. Suddenly I heard the sound of dirt crunching under tires. I turned to see my truck rolling down a gentle slope without me. In my haste, I had forgotten the emergency break.
I knew there was no time to finish what I was doing. I would have to multitask. I ran across the dark field, dick-in-hand, trying to catch my runaway truck. Luckily, the truck hit a small dip. It didn’t stop the truck, but did slow it down enough that I could jump into the cab. I slammed on the breaks and slid to a halt.
The truck had rolled about two-hundred yards, and stopped about fifty yards shy of the farm. I had managed to avert disaster once again. Sadly though, I had also pissed all over myself…once again.