Drunk Mom

by Jowita Bydlowska

  Aha. In my mind Godzilla is smashing a wall, a giant red telephone is answered by a bird in a dress. Then Godzilla is on his knees, praying. Then the bird flies away.

  THE COMMUNITY

  The counsellors refer to us addicts as a “community,” as in: “This community doesn’t have anyone with special needs, unlike the community three communities ago.” After a week, our community has more or less gelled. A couple of cliques form, based on different commonalities such as heritage, substance of choice, age or musical preference. The closest bond seems to form between the opiate users. The drunks and crackheads are all over the place.

  The Italians stick together too, even though they do divide themselves within their own group. There are three Neapolitans and one Sicilian. The Neapolitans call the Sicilian “dirty” behind his back.

  I don’t feel particularly close to anyone so sometimes I just tag along with my roommate, who has a lot of followers and enemies by the end of the first week.

  She moves constantly and is everywhere. She complains about being bored and in the beginning of week two pulls one of the Neapolitans, Donicio, into a bathroom where she shows him her breasts. She comes back to the room to report on his reaction—he was happy, upset, then begging—and says it makes her feel—she can’t think of the word.

  Powerful, I suggest.

  She loves the word. Forgets it the next minute. Remembers: Superior.

  During the second week, my roommate and Tina, the alcoholic who has liquor-store maps in her head just like I do, start working out. There’s a small, crappy gym with two treadmills, a rowing machine and a couple of yoga mats. It’s right beside the cafeteria and nobody pays attention to it until those two start going. They get up early, before breakfast, and every morning I get woken up by Sade singing at the top of her lungs in the shower when she gets back an hour later.

  It’s so much fun, she tells me as she runs around naked trying on different bra and panty combinations. I feel great. I feel so good, she bursts out laughing, so-o-o good.

  So I start going with them.

  It turns out my roommate mostly just lies on the yoga mat with her ass in the air, telling stories that make her laugh. If Donicio happens to be walking by—and I realize quickly that he happens to be walking by every morning—she asks him to help her stretch. This means that he gets to lean against her ass or leg as they grunt and giggle, making Tina shout at them to go get a room.

  Despite being hopelessly out of shape, I get right into working out. Most of the time, I sit on the rowing machine with the poster of the human muscular system in front of me on the wall, right beside a poster with a guy in a canoe with a slogan about pushing to your limits. We push to our limits together.

  After a couple of days, once I get used to the rhythm and the workings of the machine, I start to enjoy what I’m doing even more. I concentrate on feeling my muscles inside my body. I visualize them tensing up and expanding and moving as if I were a machine myself. It takes some amount of coordination and concentration to be able to execute all the moves properly, and I like that I don’t have to focus on anything else around me, especially all the action on the floor with Sade and Donicio.

  Rowing, I think of my future. I imagine myself becoming the sort of person who is disciplined enough to get up in the morning to go to the gym. The sort of person who, if she gets high at all, it’s from all the endorphins that kick in after working out.

  I’m the last person to leave the gym in the mornings. Sometimes the older Neapolitan, Marco, joins me near the end of my sessions. He doesn’t talk. Just runs silently and steadily, 6.0, no incline, twenty minutes a pop. Have a nice day, he says every time he leaves, as if he were actually going somewhere else from here instead of staying in this building with all the other addicts.

  One morning, near the end of the second week, Donicio is waiting outside the gym.

  I’m waiting for you, he says. He grabs me as I try to get by and presses himself against me. I’m so surprised that I don’t do anything to stop him. I like it. I enjoy his hard-on against my body, close my eyes when his face gets closer.

  He says something that sounds like, I knew it.

  I snap out of it. I open my eyes and tell him to get lost. For a moment I’m scared that he’s going to do something crazy, like hit me. He just stares at me for a bit and then walks away without saying anything.

  I say nothing to Sade. I’m not even sure it happened when I think about it later.

  The weekends are the worst. As the second weekend approaches I already know how badly they drag on. I borrow phone cards and talk to my boyfriend a few times. We talk briefly and don’t say much to each other. I tell him I want to go home. He tells me there’s not that much time left. I tell him everyone is crazy here. He says nothing. I tell him I want to go home. He says he loves me. He tells me there’s not that much time left …

  There’s one quiet guy whom everyone calls the Priest; he is calm and personable. It’s hard to believe that he drinks at home and rents hookers. He’s working on his master’s thesis in order to become a full-fledged minister. He may be going to jail for many years after getting out of rehab. He caused an accident while driving drunk—he killed a man. He never says any more about it, just that he killed a man while driving.

  In the cafeteria, on weekends, the Priest talks to people about God. He must miss being able to go to church, I suppose. The former inmates like him. Many of them have crosses or rosaries tattooed onto their bodies. They show them off to the Priest. I guess they want to impress, but he looks slightly alarmed when another biceps is flexed right underneath his nose in the name of Jesus.

  Because the group activities are fewer on weekends, there’s even more time to think. I spend most of it thinking about Frankie. Nothing specific, just recalling his smell and the way he sighs or babbles, and how his fat, pink body feels against mine.

  It’s perhaps because of these constant thoughts that I end up milking myself all the time; my travel mug is never used for coffee.

  When I get sick of thinking about Frankie I go to the gym again and again. I become obsessed with feeling my body move and I go back to the gym throughout the day, not only to kill time but also because this is the first thing in months that has made me feel somewhat alive.

  When I get sick of the gym, I try to read. But mostly I just end up staring at Frankie’s pictures until I feel sleepy enough to pass out.

  I sleep a lot.

  The roommate bounces in and out. She continues to feed me tidbits of her colourful bio—the number of men in her life grows exponentially—and also alters previous details. The sugar daddy turns out to be one of many. There are big, terrifying parts of her story too that make her face scrunch up a little, like the time when she tried to cut her ex’s throat.

  On weekends, we watch a lot of TV. We watch Celebrity Rehab. On Celebrity Rehab, the addicts watch TV. It’s a little bit like watching yourself on TV watching TV.

  The long, stretchy days seem to be the worst for Alex, who doesn’t seem to get better. She cries almost all the time. When she’s not upstairs talking to guys about music, she sits in the women’s lounge the entire time, in the same spot, knees under her chin, balled-up Kleenex all around her. We try to talk to her but she doesn’t reply, so we leave her alone, just let her sit there and cry in peace.

  When we’re completely sick of each other, we go up to the cafeteria or the rooms upstairs where there are men. The men are not allowed in our section of the building, but we can go where we please.

  There are twice as many men as women. Eventually every woman in here gets a follower or two or three. It’s not a big surprise—we’re a bunch of bored animals. We’re horny animals. We’re sober animals.

  My followers change day to day, with the exception of a guy named Sebastian who makes sure to sit beside me at every meal and bring me cutlery, salt, pepper and napkins. He has a small face, bunched up in the middle of a small head. His hair is a strange shade of blond, almo
st yellow. Maybe he dyes it. I can’t tell his age. He seems young, younger than me. He says that I’m gorgeous and I say thank you and we leave it at that. Sometimes he asks me if I think he’s sexy and I say yes and we leave it at that.

  Besides some half-assed flirting, I try to keep to myself.

  But there are women here who seem to have come to find life partners. Once in a while you walk in on someone just turning their face away from a kiss, or a whisper, or fingertips brushing against fingertips one last time before letting go.

  Besides Sade, Donicio is also involved with one of the older alcoholics, the elementary-school teacher, Charlotte, who drives drunk. She follows him around. She’s got a beautiful face but a shapeless, sloppy body that she drags along instead of walking it.

  The more Donicio ignores her, the more she talks about her dilemma—to leave her fiancé for him or not. As if someone—Donicio presumably—actually gave her this choice.

  She talks about this in all of our women’s group meetings. She says, “He’s always doing this” and “He’s like this all the time,” or “That’s so like him,” as if they’ve spent a lifetime together, not just a week and a bit. She says he’s a great kisser. She sits beside him during every meal, getting up to fetch him condiments or drinks whenever he grunts at her.

  My roommate calls her the Wife. In the next breath, she says that Donicio’s penis tastes a little like pee but she doesn’t mind. She says this late, at night, after we go through the things that we’ve done over the weekend. She asks me if I think she’s a total slut.

  REHAB HOCUS-POCUS

  Besides acupuncture and meditation, we’re introduced to other magical practices that are supposed to help set us straight. In the beginning of week three—our last week here—in mixed group, we’re told to tap around our eyes and on our knuckles, with our fingers, saying things like: Even though I have a sore foot, I completely and utterly accept myself. Besides tapping, we also have to hum and count out loud to five. We are concentrating our energies so that we can help someone with whatever is ailing him or her.

  We tap for one of the alcoholic men with a sore foot, for the Priest’s twisted shoulder and for Donicio’s burnt tongue.

  The tapping facilitator wants to know if there’s anyone else we need to gather our tapping forces for. I’ve had a mild toothache for a few days now but I don’t say anything about it. When it comes to teeth, I prefer to stick to dentistry, rather than magic.

  The practice is called Emotional Freedom Technique Tapping Therapy, and the facilitator is wild with enthusiasm. She tells us stories—fragments of stories, really, as she’s too hyper to finish them—and she jumps from one anecdote to another like a crazed butterfly, trying to convince us that tapping will cure anything from cancer to addiction to a bad mood or a sore toe.

  She says things like, This guy, he was a scientist and his wife dragged him to an EFT workshop and there was no way he was going to believe and on their way home—God, I still feel goosebumps when I tell you this story—he touched his neck where the lump was and it was gone. And my friend Helen, she met a man who used it to help her get over her anxiety—

  For the next two days, people are talking about tapping away their cravings, then someone makes a joke about tapping away judges and dealers. By the end of day two, most of us forget the order of the tapping sequence and nobody mentions it again.

  At the beginning of week three, I get a letter from my boyfriend. He writes about Frankie, how he’s doing. He doesn’t write about himself at all. It’s so kind of him to write me here, I think, and what a wonderful partner he is. He’s going to make some lucky woman very happy.

  I reread the letter a dozen times. He writes that Frankie has outgrown some of his clothes as if it’s been months instead of days, and they had to do a big shopping trip, Frankie and him. Frankie’s head is almost as big as a grown-up’s and he gets cuter and teethier with every day, he writes, again, as if months have passed.

  My roommate sits on the edge of my plastic mattress—it finally occurs to me that it’s plastic so that it’ll be easier to wash off all of the addict sweat—and she waits for me to stop talking, first time she actually lets me say something.

  You’ll get him back, don’t worry, she says, and I don’t know who she means.

  It worked out with my babydaddy to get my son back. And as soon as I find a job I can talk to CeeEss again to see if I can get custody back.

  I need six months clean and a real job.

  CeeEss?

  Child Services.

  I realize that she means Frankie, that she thinks he’s been taken away from me by my boyfriend. I don’t know why but I don’t correct her.

  On the wall behind her there’s a whole slew of photos of Sade with different women—girlfriends and sisters—in bikinis, holding drinks with umbrellas in them. Then there are various photographs of Sade posing with different children.

  Which one is Jamal? I ask.

  She points to a little boy with a lazy eye holding hands with a skinny teenager dressed up as a Christmas elf, and a picture of the same boy sitting stiffly on a fat Santa knee, looking directly into the camera, not smiling, this time his eyes are perfectly aligned.

  He’s really special, my little boy. He is not into sports but he can do anything. It’s amazing. We bought him a Transformer for Christmas and it was supposed to be for nine-year-olds but he begged us so I said let’s get it, and he just put it together in minutes.

  Sade’s face glows at me and I shake my head as if I can’t believe it and she nods oh yes, yes, yes, and I decide I love my roommate a little bit right then even though I’m too lazy to correct her about my life.

  Sometimes I force myself to write about things that I’m going through right now. My hand, so used to typing, is frustratingly slow, never really catching up with my thoughts. So I try to just write about what I can filter through and catch, barely—bits and pieces of conversations, scraps of behaviours, the way faces look when being lectured about tobacco instead of being allowed to sleep in.

  The lack of things to do and the co-ed setup affects even the cool-headed alcoholic Tina, who starts flirting, aggressively, with Kevin, one of the night counsellors.

  Like me, she hadn’t brought any makeup with her, so she makes a long list for the delivery services to get lipliners and eyeliners from the local pharmacy. I order packs of gum, which I chew all the time, ruining my broken teeth even more.

  During our last week, Tina paints her face every evening before Kevin comes down to the women’s lounge to remind us of the ten o’clock curfew.

  She lies stretched out on the couch, staring at him and asking him to reveal to us whether he used to be an addict. She asks for gossip about other counsellors.

  Her face is no longer swollen from booze and her eyes are bright and blue in the forest of thick mascara that actually suits her.

  She lisps a little when she talks. She never lisps to us but she lisps to him.

  She says he’s so cute.

  Kevin is polite and laughs politely. He says nothing back to the cute comment. He says very little at all. His arms are tattooed just like the former inmates’—raw ink with thick, sometimes shaky lines.

  Tina tells Kevin that she loves him and he wishes us a good night and reminds us that we’ve only a few minutes left before bedtime.

  We watch him one afternoon twist and hold the arms of one of the heavily tattooed guys behind his back. The guy has been caught giving Tylenol 4s to his roommate, Dad Pants, who’s never done drugs before. Both get kicked out. I never knew that Tylenol even went above 3.

  ALEX

  Alex, the teenage anorexic escort, gets kicked out three days before rehab is over.

  We’re not supposed to go to each other’s rooms but I go into hers when I find out about it.

  She’s packing. Just throwing her things into a large suitcase and crying. Boxes of diuretic tea and Sweet’N Low, which I’m not sure how she managed to smuggle in. They could be
full of drugs, those sachets, packets and packets of powdered shit in them.

  They’ve found cigarettes on her, she says, and now she has to go back to the fucking detox and this one, it’s the worst place on ear-r-r-rth, she bawls.

  It’s just detox, I say.

  On the night table beside her bed there’s a picture of a man in a coffin.

  What the hell?

  She says it’s her dad. Dead dad. She says he used to smack her but he was her idol and she started shooting up and eating pills when he died.

  And this detox is fucking hell, she says, that’s all you need to know. The men there are fucking insane.

  I imagine her tiny frame getting gang raped there or worse. I’m not sure what’s worse.

  To distract myself and her, I think about asking her about her dad dying and her shooting up, but then I snap out of it—what am I trying to do anyway, fix her?

  I take crumpled clothes out of her suitcase and fold them and put them back into the suitcase as she paces the room alternating between crying and cursing.

  I find out later that during this time, upstairs in the cafeteria, her biggest fan, the older Neapolitan, Marco, is pulling paintings off the walls and throwing chairs around. Downstairs, my counsellor says that outbursts like that are a normal part of recovery.

  Later, after they’re both gone, everyone is saying that they will most likely use together.

  Alex being kicked out starts a strange three-day chaos, with the sexual frenzy upstairs, in the common room, at an all-time high now, with people suddenly smelling of tobacco and no longer trying to hide it.