drink

friday firesmith – drowning

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I haven’t seen my friend Tracy in over a decade, but I know he’s still alive out there, somewhere. Or maybe he isn’t. It’s hard to know, really.

The first time I knew his drinking problem had gotten to the point it was going to be a real problem was the time we went out to eat Mexican and he passed out in the bathroom with a cigarette in his hand, his pants down around his knees, and the door locked.

The manager asked me if my friend had heart problems, and we finally pounded on the door hard enough to wake him up.

I paid our tab, slipped waitstaff a twenty, and we got the hell out of there.
College educated and good with people, he invariably ruined each and every friendship by borrowing something and destroying it, losing a job due to not showing up, or by showing up, or even stealing money to buy booze. He drank a marriage to death.

He came over a long time ago, we drank for a while, I quit drinking so much, and he passed out on the porch. I left him there. The next day I had to go to work and I think he got his feelings hurt because I wouldn’t let him hang out at my house while I was gone to work.

Recently, a friend of mine in Florida I haven’t heard from in a while called me and wanted to know if I had seen Tracy. I hadn’t, and this guy, Bart, was livid. I saw it coming before he told me. Bart and his wife were friends with Tracy from way back, and they were trying to talk him into getting help. They let him have the spare bedroom, but they weren’t giving him any money or alcohol. What could go wrong?

Tracy rummaged around their house while they went out, and found a can with change in it on the dryer, and a couple of bucks here and there in the house. He took Tracy’s truck, went to the liquor store, and bought a pint but also stuck another in his boot. The clerk saw him so Tracy bolted without paying for the bootleg pint, so to speak.

So Tracy leaves and starts drinking from one of the pints. Tracy has nearly made it back but he sees a cop car do a U turn and does something bizarre. He stops the truck, parks it, and then walks off into somebody’s yard and keeps walking.

After that, no one knows what happened.

The cops got the truck, called Bart, showed up at his house, and Tracy was nowhere to be found. It cost Bart five hundred to get the truck back. An empty pint was on the floorboard. Bart called me and I assumed sooner or later Tracy would appear but he didn’t.

No one has seen him since.

Or at least no one has called me. I don’t think he will now. Not because I’ve stopped drinking but because I think those of us who knew Tracy, and really cared, are exhausted. We’re tapped out. And we’ve all tried.

Eventually, if you were once a party animal, you drift away from drinking, or you sink deeper into it. Or maybe not. I can’t speak for anyone else.

Take Care,

Mike

friday firesmith – Candy

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One day in 1979 my Senior Year in high school, I woke up in the driveway of my father’s home, in my father’s car. I yawned, looked around, and realized it was in the afternoon.

I gathered my books and stuff and went inside, and tried to remember what happened, and how I came to me in the car in the driveway. I had no clue. It was not time for school to be out yet, so how did I get home?

In a glorious mix of illicit drugs and alcohol, I had passed out in class. A semi-liquid in human form, I simply slipped out of my desk during math class and puddled on the floor. Two guys carried all one hundred and ten pounds of me to the car, a girl named Candy drove the car to my father’s house, and someone picked her up.

No one ever said a thing to me. Not a teacher, not a cop, not a coach, and coaches were like the Border Collies of high school, they got involved in things they shouldn’t because they could.

By that time, I think most adults in the school system realized there was a problem, but they also realized it was beyond their ability to solve the problem. I have no idea, really.

Over two decades later, because of the power of the internet, I reconnected with Candy who was stunned to discover I was still alive. She told me the first time I passed out in class there was a lot of debate as to what to do. Calling my father didn’t seem like a good idea because everyone knew he was part of the problem. Most of the alcohol I drank before I turned eighteen, which was the legal age for drinking back then, was stolen from my father. I was eighteen at the time, so legally I could drink, but not at school. They knew if I was expelled, I would just return the next year. I had served nearly four years in that prison, and they were as tired of me as I was of them.

So, Candy was my designated driver when either drugs or alcohol laid me low. The school’s solution was to allow me to self-medicate to the point of unconsciousness and graduate me out into a world where I would no longer be their problem.

Most people who I’ve seen since high school are surprised, I’m still alive. But I’m at an age now I’m beginning to outlive a lot of the straight A students who chose a life of follow the path of those who came before.

At the moment, this is being written, I haven’t had any alcohol in over five months. I haven’t missed it. I haven’t craved it. I haven’t been tempted.

Candy went on to marry an abusive man who beat the dream of being an attorney out of her. She got jobs as waitstaff and never resumed her college career. He was a serious drinker, as all men of that generation were told it was okay, and so drinking was passed on like farmland inheritance or the ugly chair no one really wanted.

At sixty-five, I can no longer afford the health costs of drinking. I can no longer afford the time it takes to stop functioning and the aftereffects of the hangover.

Right now, I belong to a social action group and no one in that group has ever seen me drunk and has never seen me drink. I can socialize and not be anaesthetized.

I was talking to a friend of mine who is in his forties and he quit drinking last year. His wife had quit a while back. Socially, younger people are more choosing to step away from alcohol now, and when they talk to people like me, they realize drinking is a lifelong commitment to doing things you’ll regret in the morning.

This, all of this I have written isn’t supposed to be a condemnation of those who drink, but rather a warning. Heed it or not, it is your choice, just as this is mine. And maybe you need to hear it. Maybe not. But the choice of staying or going is yours, too. Stay sober, go on drinking. I left five months ago.

Cheers,

Mike