by David M
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” it said. “The dogs don’t like people wandering around the house when she’s in bed. “
I let my eyes adjust for a few seconds and finally saw a stranger lying in a chair across the room. She was in her early twenties, with short black hair and several large tattoos. Her skin was as pale as baby powder and she wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing. Where the hell did she come from?
I looked around the room but saw no sign of the dogs. I was leaving. As I stood up I heard a warning growl come from the top of the stairs. Oh, shit. I bolted for the front door and heard a loud crash and the sound of thunder coming down the steps. I turned the lock and pulled the door but nothing happened. Then I remembered that she didn’t lock her door. I had just locked myself in.
I turned the lock in the other direction as the shepherds rounded the corner into the dining room. Another ten feet and they would be on me. I uttered a prayer as I turned the knob and pulled the door open. I slid outside and slammed the door shut. The dogs crashed into the other side of the door like a freight train.
I walked a few feet off the porch, dropped to my knees and threw up what must have been pure alcohol. This wasn’t fun anymore. In fact, it was downright dangerous.
There were no bushes in the front yard so I emptied out the contents of my bladder on a potted plant. I couldn’t hear the dogs anymore, so either their mistress was awake or they had found their way out a back door and were coming to kill me. Either way, I needed to put some distance between myself and this house.
I half stumbled and half ran to my truck. I climbed in and turned the key. As I looked in the rearview mirror I saw something amazing. The back seat was piled high with cases of beer and bags from the liquor store. I had no idea where it came from, but I knew for sure that there was a God, and she loved me. I grabbed two bottles of beer from the case on top and hit the gas pedal.
I wasn’t sure where I was but I knew I needed to be somewhere else. This was the story of my life. I drove aimlessly until I saw a road sign I recognized. I was only about a half hour from the bar. I knew I couldn’t walk in like this, so I pulled into one of the many superstores which had popped up in the area.
I grabbed new jeans, a few t-shirts, socks and boxers. Then I picked up a new pair of sneakers, soap and a scrub brush. The cashier eyed me with a combination of sympathy and suspicion, and as she handed me my receipt she whispered the two words I had grown so accustom to hearing; seek help. I was starting to agree.
I pulled into the motel across from the bar and made up a story about volunteering at the Humane Society for the woman behind the counter. She had seen me many times before, and in worse condition. She simply handed me my room keys and didn’t ask any questions.
I fished a bottle of whiskey out of the liquor store bag and grabbed a case of beer. Then, just for good measure I grabbed a bottle of vodka as well. I filled a trash bag with my clothing, shoes and all, and put everything outside the door. Then I called the front desk and asked them to get the trash I had left outside.
I stood in the shower for a very long time watching the mixture of dirt and blood run down the drain. I was covered with crusted over cuts and scratches but had no idea where they came from. I could remember almost nothing from the night before, but scattered images would flash through my mind. Each one was more unsettling than the last.
I finally dressed and crossed the street to the bar. I walked in and sat next to a friend. Other than the bartender, we were the only people in the bar.
“Jesus Christ, Dave. What the fuck happened to you,” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It had something to do with a stripper, her friend, two German shepherds and a toaster oven. I really don’t want to talk about it.”
He began to laugh but quickly realized I was serious.
“Holy shit, boy. You really can pick ‘em.”
“It’s my fault for going to a strip joint on a Monday,” I said. “Who did I think I was going to meet there?”
“Monday,” he exclaimed. “You do know it’s Thursday, right?”
“Don’t fuck with me,” I said. “It’s been a rough night.”
“Rough night my ass,” he replied. “It’s been a rough week.”
The beer wasn’t making me feel any better. I still had a pounding headache and felt sick as a dog; pardon the pun. I just wanted to lie down. I finished my beer and stood up to leave. When the bartender came over to clean my spot and collect her tip, I asked her what day it was. She answered as though the question was nothing out of the ordinary. It was Thursday.
I took a long nap at the motel and drove home later that night. I wasn’t sure if it was just in my mind, but I could still smell that house. I needed another shower.
I decided that, as fun as wild women were, if I was going to control my drinking I needed a normal woman. I decided to give the gas station girl a call. In the past, I had either met women at bars or ended up at a bar with them. This time would be different. We would go on a date like regular people. The problem was I had no idea what normal people do, so I let her plan the date.
I picked her up and she directed me to a sandwich shop in the city. Then we drove to a park outside of town and had a picnic. So far, so good. After lunch we went for a long walk and enjoyed the beautiful weather. We found a nice spot overlooking the city and talked for about an hour while we watched the sunset.
Things seemed to be going well, but I could feel myself slipping. In the early part of the day my smile came naturally and I hung on my date’s every word with genuine interest. Now I was forcing a smile and only pretending to be interested in what she was saying. I was thinking about a drink.
I said that all of the walking had made me hungry again and asked how late her babysitter would stay with the children. She smiled and said she could stay out as late as she wanted. I liked where this was going.
I chose a restaurant with a bar next door. We were seated and asked what we would like to drink. I ordered bourbon on the rocks, but then remembered I was attempting to be civilized, so I asked for a splash of water. The gas station girl followed suite. She ordered a Long Island iced tea.
I played with my food while my date devoured hers. Apparently all the walking made her hungry; it made me thirsty. When dinner was over I had barely touched my food, but I was on my fourth drink. I paid the bill and we moved to the bar. By the end of the night we were in a motel.
I hadn’t planned for the evening to end this way, but who was I to complain. I lay in bed, sipped a beer and smoked a cigarette while my date took a shower. She emerged from the bathroom sometime later, and I could see she intended to leave.
“What’s the rush,” I asked. “It’s not even midnight yet. I thought you had a babysitter for the night.”
“My husband is with the children,” she replied.
“I thought you were separated.”
“I am separated, but my husband watches the girls when I’m at work.”
“And does he think you’re at work now,” I asked.
“Well, I couldn’t tell him I was on a date. He wouldn’t have watched the girls.”
I began to fit the pieces together in my mind, and I didn’t like the picture they were forming.
“Where does your husband live,” I asked
She stared at her feet as she replied, “We still live together, but he sleeps on the couch most of the time.”
“And when he’s not on the couch where does he sleep, in the back yard?”
“I have to go,” she said as she walked out the door.
“God damn it,” I yelled as the door closed behind her. “Are all women fucked up, or just the ones that will give me the time of day?”
I already knew the answer to my question. I was a mess, and that’s all I would attract. No decent woman would be caught dead with me. I lay in bed with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I was alone, and knew I would stay alone for a long time to come.
I believe it was Groucho Marks who said he would never join a club that would have him for a member. This would become my new philosophy on relationships. Any woman who would date a train wreck like me simply couldn’t be trusted.
My plan of finding a woman to help me control my drinking had failed spectacularly. I needed a new plan. The idea of going back to Iraq started to form in my mind but I pushed it aside. I hadn’t come to that point yet. I would kick the idea around, but in the meantime I would do what I did best. I would get drunk.
Chapter seventeen:
It wasn’t long at all before my drinking, and my life spiraled out of control. My morning binges were getting worse and my blackouts were lasting longer than ever before. Time was moving too fast for me to keep up. It felt like the same bills were coming at me all the time and there was never enough money to pay them. All of my money was going to the bar and the liquor store.
I could tell the drinking was effecting my health, but it didn’t concern me nearly as much as it worried everyone else. Even the bartenders at my center of the universe started trying to monitor how much I was drinking, and would try to force me to eat something at least once throughout the day. At best I would force down half a grilled cheese sandwich, but usually no more than a few potato chips.
I would occasionally hear them compare notes when shifts changed. The day bartender would report to the night shift what time I showed up, how much I’d had to drink and if I had eaten anything. I was really getting tired of the unwelcomed attention. Every now and then they would even call the motel across the street and reserve a room for me so I wouldn’t attempt the long trip home.
I would go to the motel, drink a few beers and fall asleep for a couple of hours, but I would always leave in the middle of the night. Sometimes I would remember leaving, sometimes I wouldn’t. Sometimes I would make it home, sometimes I wouldn’t.
The simple act of driving from point A to point B became a risk. If I was awake I was drunk, and I was not a very good drunk driver. I started spending more time at home as my truck spent more time in the garage. None of my accidents were serious, but most of the time they required minor repairs.
I became accustomed to not leaving the house for days at a time. I would keep several half gallons of whiskey in my room and try to leave a half empty fifth on the kitchen counter so my roommate wouldn’t suspect I was drinking too much. I wasn’t fooling anyone, least of all myself.
It was also around this time that I started seeing things that I knew couldn’t possibly be there. There were no pink elephants, but I once watched a car drive off a front porch, across a sidewalk and across the road in front of me. When I got to where I had seen the car there was nothing there.
I saw people occasionally as well. It was easy to tell that they were out of place by the way they were dressed, or because I was seeing them in black and white. I talked to a friend with a background in the mental health field but he didn’t seem too concerned. I’m not even sure he believed me. I, on the other hand, was worried sick.
What if the hallucinations became more life-like? What if the black and white people started showing up in color? What if the car pulling out in front of me came from an ally rather than a porch, or the child standing in the road dressed in a petticoat was really there.
The idea of going back to Iraq started to sound like the logical way out. I knew if I stayed where I was something bad was going to happen. I could picture myself being hauled away to jail for killing someone in a drunk driving accident and not even remembering it.
On previous tours I had broken general order number one any chance I could. This time things would be different. From the time I set foot in Iraq I would not touch a drop. I thought of it like rebooting a computer. The programs in my head were all fucked up, but this would fix things; I was sure of it.
I made a few phone calls and was reassigned to a unit in Arkansas. We would spend a few months in training and then spend a year in Iraq. This would be the answer to all of my problems. I half drove, half pushed my truck in to the garage to have the latest series of mishaps corrected and caught a plane to my new unit. I would pick the truck up when I took leave before leaving the country.
Things went well in Arkansas, for the most part. My new unit liked to drink, and although I typically went above and beyond in that regard; I rarely even got an ass chewing. The best part was that I never had to drive. We had several soldiers under the age of twenty-one, so they drove.
By the time our training was over I was back in reasonably good health. I was eating several times a day and exercising, and above all drinking less often. It wasn’t that I wanted to drink less often; there were just fewer chances and much more supervision.
We were finally cut loose for two weeks of R&R before shipping out. I got a ride to the garage and picked up my truck. After a quick shower I was off to the bar. On my way home that night I wrecked my truck again. You may remember the record breaking slide across the black ice mentioned earlier; this was the one.
I walked about five miles back to the motel across from the bar and checked in. The weather that night was a combination of snow and freezing rain. I was freezing by the time I got to the motel and felt like the skin was going to peel off of the top of my head.
When I mentioned this to the girl behind the counter she gave me an odd look. Then she asked why I hadn’t just put my hood up. I turned to look in the lobby mirror, and sure enough there hung my hood. I looked like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining. I felt like such an asshole.
I spent the first week of my leave in a motel, and made daily trips across the street to the bar. Most soldiers spend this time saying goodbye to friends and family. I was too embarrassed to spend much time with my family and didn’t have many real friends. I just wanted to go on one last world-class bender before I left.
I decided during my time at the hotel that I would not only quit drinking in Iraq, but I would take every risk I could. If there was a dangerous assignment, I would take it. I had been riding this rollercoaster long enough. It would be better to die a war hero than be found dead from alcohol poisoning in a dingy motel room.
I finally got my truck back from the shop and limped through my last few days of freedom. Saying goodbye to my children was always the hardest part. I wanted desperately to be sober for them, but leaving them always made me want to get hopelessly drunk. I could feel every cell in my body screaming for a drink the moment I left them in the rearview mirror.
I had already decided it was my truck’s fault I wouldn’t stop drinking and driving, so I didn’t see any point in keeping it. I asked a friend to pick me up at the bar by the turnpike so we could drive to New Jersey together. From there we would catch our flight to Iraq.
I drove to the bar, said goodbye to my old truck, apologized for all the pain it had suffered at my hands, and wished it better luck with its next owner. Then I went inside and asked if anyone wanted a truck. A bar-friend of mine was in the car business and his wife was a notary. I told him to buy me a shot and to get her ass to the bar.
For the next several hours I drank as much as I could, as fast as I could; and I never paid for a drink. I don’t remember leaving the bar that day or getting to New Jersey. I’m not sure if I managed to keep drinking when I got to New Jersey or if I had managed to seriously damage part of my brain, but the next thing I remember is waking up on a plane bound for the Middle East.
Chapter eighteen:
We got held up in Kuwait for almost a week on the way to Iraq. Under normal circumstances this would have been a nuisance, but in this case it was a gift from God. There’s not much to do in Kuwait, so most soldiers spend all of their time catching up on sleep. No one paid much attention when I barely got out of bed for four days.
I felt like I was dying. It felt as though my body was going to stop at nothing to purge the alcohol from my system. I couldn’t sleep, and I could barely move. The only time I left the air-conditioned tent was to go to the bathroom or
smoke an occasional cigarette. When people asked if I was alright I would blame my condition on a case of the New Jersey crud. The crud was common enough and everyone accepted the explanation without question.
I was as good as new, at least physically, after the first week. When we got to Iraq it felt like I was at the top of my game. I was in charge of a section of Army photojournalists and we put out a daily news letter. There was a lot of stress, but I had an outstanding crew working for me. My managing editor, assignment editor, layout and design team, and writers were among the best in the military.
The unit we worked for was also top notch. As part of a public affairs detachment, my kind never works independently. We are always attached to a higher command. In this case it was the 10th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, New York. These guys had their ducks in a row.
I worked long days and barely had time to think about a drink, but at night the obsession would hit me. I would toss and turn at night thinking about a cold beer or a glass of whiskey, and it wasn’t long before I resorted to sleeping pills to get me through the night. I knew it would be easy enough to get drunk if I wanted to, and I wanted to, but I had made myself a promise. I was going to prove to myself that I could quit any time I wanted to.
Things got progressively better over the first few months. I would occasionally blow up at someone for a minor infraction, but that was the Army way. Minor mistakes in a war zone cost people their lives. I was not being an asshole; I was protecting my flock.
Eventually, I was chosen from a field of qualified leaders to take over a public affairs section in Kalsu while the public affairs officer was on leave. This was a major feather in my cap. I was a staff sergeant doing the job of an Army Major.
It was a full month before the public affairs officer returned to his post. When the brigade executive officer came to bid me farewell, he told his PAO he now had the task of living up to the new standard I had set. He turned to shake my hand and said that I had truly ‘raised the bar.’ I felt like a god.