He rolled off the bed onto the floor, a surprisingly smooth move, and lay looking at the ceiling. “Checkout time, checkin’ it out,” he said. Sang actually, some tune I almost recognized.
“Serious, man. I’m going.”
He raised his head off the floor and frowned at me in a fuddled way, like some zoo animal had subbed in as roommate while he was napping. Anteater, sawfish. His head dropped back to the floor. “Going where?”
“To be determined. Not really figured it out yet.”
“Then don’t figure. Saves wear and tear on the haggard brain cells.”
“Nope. Can’t stay here.”
He sat up, drew his knees to his chest, and hugged them with his long arms. Lots of weird jewelry on the hands as well as the face, and still into black, but the Goth vibe was scaled way back. Probably more negligence than fashion choice. He oftentimes didn’t smell that great.
“Nothing personal,” I said. “You’re the easiest person I probably ever cohabited with. Other than the snoring.”
He rubbed his face with the back of his hand and watched me stuff underwear in a plastic bag. The black ring that hung down from his septum pierce gave the permanent impression of booger. “Not my fault. It’s adenoids, brother. I was born this way.”
I plopped the underwear bag into a cardboard box, and that was me, over and out on the Peggots. “I have to get out of here before I break something. It’s this family. They’re so goddamn nice, you end up feeling like you owe them. And then I get really pissed off, because there’s no way I can ever get it right or pay it back. You know?”
He gave me a woeful look. He didn’t. He wouldn’t, ever.
What surprised me was the rage. That it kept coming, in waves. Why? Out on my ass was the normal for me. I’d never yet met the people that could keep me. June was not my mother, regardless the ten or so minutes I almost laid claim to her. She just wanted the better version, not the broken boy I was. Nothing new here under my sun, and yet here was this car and me at the wheel, taking all the curves too fast, hating everything I saw. The kudzu hanging off the trees, the ignorant caboose car in front of Pennington Middle, the bric-a-brac mammaw houses with flamingo birds in their yards. I’d have rammed my car into any one of them, but that would have stopped me, and I needed to keep moving. For the whole afternoon I leaned on my pissed-off heavy foot, because going nowhere fast is a kind of juice.
Then the energy started going out of me and I felt new kind of bad coming on. I stopped on a godforsaken road around Fleenortown to run inventory on Mr. Peg’s leather bag and the emergency supplies I kept in the glove box, and took what I needed to stave off the pressure in my chest. That ache was an old, old story and it wasn’t ending. In Jonesville I stopped to fill up the tank. If I kept driving I might stay ahead of the monsters. Back in the car, pointed west, I tried to think of one place on the planet of earth where I would feel happy to be. Came up bust. Then tried to settle on someplace I could stand to be. Nothing again. No house or vehicle or yard or pasture came to mind. No place. A guy could take this to mean he ought to be dead.
I was in and out, as far as paying any attention to the road. Which can run you into trouble as far as stop signs or speed traps, but we’re not big on those here. I ended up way the hell out past Ewing, with no idea I’d gone that far till I noticed the white cliffs on my right side, lining the ridgetop, catching light. I kept on going and there they still were, laughing. Up here asshole, we’re up, you’re down. Those cliffs run on for a hundred miles. My car found the park where Miss Barks brought me, on that fateful day where my brain ran away with itself, thinking of being up there and jumping off to see if I’d fall or fly. And I mean really seeing it in my mind, because that’s the troublesome brain I have, it’s got excellent eyes. Look at him up there. The boy on the edge of the cliff, the widespread arms and piked legs, the crash-dive or the sail. Even before I watched the end of Fast Forward, I don’t know how many times my brain had put me up there on those white cliffs, easily a thousand. To ask that question. Which, let’s face it, is not a real-world question.
There was nobody around in the gravel lot where the trail started up. The sign said Sand Cave, White Rocks, so many miles. I didn’t register details. I’d heard of people hiking up there to that cave, those white rocks. It was doable. I had nothing in mind that would pass for a plan, only the need to move. I left my keys in the car.
Not sure why I thought walking would be any better than driving. It comes down to velocity. This was a business of outrunning ghosts, and there was no end to my dead. Not even counting parents or Mr. Peg. Death of your olders is natural. I was losing people right out from under my living days. My doll baby, that I couldn’t love well enough to make her stay. My childhood hero that was a dangerous animal. Hammer that finished last. Maggot that would surely die if they put him in prison, and Mariah on the outside, of heartbreak. I connected my worn-out rubber soles to the dirt of the trail, again, again, again. Knee bones grinding, heart pumping, unthinkable matters battering the skull door. My dad. For him I’d gone to that waterhole of hell, maybe finally to tell the man to go fuck himself, thanks for abandoning me and Mom. Or to prove something. Fast Forward dared me and I went, took the devil’s bath and came out with blood on my hands. Where do you go after that? All I knew to do was keep putting my feet to the rocky ground, waiting to register something in the body instead of the brain.
Because I wasn’t. Fifteen or so football fields up the trail I understood I wasn’t feeling. Not just drug-numb to moods or heartaches, I mean heat, cold. Tasting. That deadness of tongue and skin and eyes that doesn’t technically blind you, but you’re not seeing. Like the man said, the day I ran out of the pharmacy with my first ticket to oxy-nowhere: Blind blind blind. It grows on you till you’re darked out and don’t care. Something in me was wanting to grind my bones against this mountain till the body picked a side. Give up the ghost, or get back in here.
Eyes on the trail, deer tracks, moss, nothing. I chewed on my age-old grudges. The body is the original asshole, it can put you on detention away from all pleasures, but still makes you write out the list of its needs, one hundred times. I will piss and shit. I will go hungry. Thirsty was the one killing me at the moment. That parch like a bandanna pulled tight around your throat. It got so bad that the sight of water, a little creek, made me get down on my belly and drink like a dog. The water had taste, sweet. A little piney. People say you’ll get a dread disease from doing that, due to all the animals that have pissed in it. I wondered: Do I give a fuck here about dread diseases? I polled the mostly dead players—skin, tongue, eyes—on the subject of checking out on all future days: What if anything would you miss? Came to no real conclusion.
I sat there on the fence about it. On a rock actually. One of those buzzy tiny hummer birds bombed in close. Not to be ignored, this guy. The air from his wings blew the weeds all around under him, like the choppers in the war movies, tiny version. He didn’t land, just dipped around sticking his pointy nose into the flowers. The ones he liked were orange and dangly like ornaments, but shaped like little vaginas, lips and all. Go, tiny guy, I said. Eat your fill.
Touch-me-nots. That name popped into my head from another age. They grew all over the banks where we used to go fishing. Mr. Peg showed us how to touch the green pods and make them explode, throwing tiny shrapnel. Damn. Mr. Peg was there, sitting up the bank and a little behind me, out of my line of sight. Sorry for everything, I told him. And he said, Is that so hard to do? His voice, his words. My ears. I’m not suggesting any of this makes sense.
I got up and moved on. Yes sir, it is. Hard to live, and hard to watch the opposite coming down the road at you. I left out the f-bombs, not being sure if he was still with me or not. I looked at the trail and the dirt and the moss. The woods were their own show, with mushrooms for jokes. Mushrooms like orange ears that looked like they’d glow in the dark. I was delirious, given the no fuel in my tank, other than painkillers. But I felt some things. The deer family that left their tracks in the muddy trail. As much venison as I’d eaten in my life, I felt I was some percentage of deer. I felt the kindliness of the moss, which is all over everywhere once you get out of the made world. God’s flooring. All the kinds, pillowy, pin-cushiony, shag carpet. Gray sticks of moss with red heads like matchsticks. Some tiny dead part of me woke up to the moss and said, Man. Where you been. This is the fucking wonderful world of color.
After another hour I sat on a big old mossy log to catch my breath, and remembered the joint in my pocket, a going-away present from Maggot. I hadn’t smoked much weed since Dori died, just not feeling it. Hard to explain the various levels of doping hell, but there’s a dark territory past the pleasures that weed is made for. I fished it out and admired it before lighting it up. Maggot’s perfectly rolled white twig, pointed as a pencil on both ends. I actually had a hankering to draw its portrait. Another itch I hadn’t felt in an age.
I set no land speed records. The sun got low, running me up against the wire on to-be-decided. I wasn’t getting to the top of the cliffs. Not this day. That original asshole, the body, took over then, harping on getting me through a night. Not even asking, did I want to do that. Just the gripes, no water or food or roof over my head. In dire need of a piss. The last was easily taken care of. The rest was yet to kill me. I’d known sketchy shelter, and had logged enough hours hungry to be licensed as a professional. Ain’t no hill for a climber, I thought, trudging up an ass-kick of switchbacks that knocked the wind out of me. The trail wound above the trees to a gravel slope, and then the Sand Cave. Dark and cool under a wide arch, seriously big. You could set a single-wide in there. Evidence of previous escapades here and yonder littered the sandy floor.
If I were a Boy Scout, I’d have known how to make a campfire. I’d have thought to bring a can of beans for dinner. And a can opener. Water. Being an ignorant juvenile delinquent with little or no will to live, I had none of the above. The person I felt watching me now was Angus. Not like Mr. Peg, earlier, I knew she wasn’t really there. But I told her to shut up, and she laughed some more. That was it, the one place I’d like to be: talking to Angus. Dopey, tougher than hide, generally if not always one to improve a situation. Always saying I had to start trusting the ride at some point, because life was not a total and complete dumpster fire, which she was wrong about. She said my messed-up childhood made me a better person, also wrong. She’d believed I would go far, regardless my drawbacks galore and unsavory habits.
I found a good rock and watched the sun melt into the Cumberlands. Layers of orange like a buttermilk pie cooling on the horizon. Clouds scooting past, throwing spots of light and dark over the mountainheads. The light looked drinkable. It poured on a mountain so I saw the curve of every treetop edged in gold, like the scales of a fish. Then poured off, easing them back into shadow. I got all caught up in the show, waking up from my long cold swim underwater. Breaking the surface is a shock, the white is so white, the blue so blue. The air that’s your breath.
I shifted and felt the lighter in my hip pocket, and laughed at myself for forgetting it. Stand back Boy Scouts, I told Angus. Oh my Lord. I’d have paid money for a little bump of her. Angus that was solid while all the shiny objects I craved came and went. She was going away at the end of summer, to real college. She’d gotten an offer she couldn’t refuse. I was pissed as hornets. Vander-something the hell, Nashville T-N. Who knew they could make country hits and brainiacs in the one convenient location.
Okay, my friend. I rifled around the mess inside me and found what I needed to wish her happiness. Fly away and don’t fall back into the slime I’m trying to crawl out of here, and also drinking on the sly, calling it my life’s blood. Too scared to leave the last place where people looked at me and saw their son or blood brother or their shot at a winning season. I knew what she’d say about that. Trust the road. Because nobody stays, in the long run you’re on your own with your ghosts. You’re the ship, they’re the bottle.
I spent the night curled up on the sandy floor with my back pressed against cold rock, thirsty and hungry and in the end not
sufficiently doped. Every cricket that inched along the cave face was a copperhead, every squirrel rustling dry leaves was
a bear. If I lived till morning, I would walk down the mountain, find June, and tell her I was ready to fly.
61
A year was not a long enough time to stay away. Even three years might not be, I would find out. One of the many things June got right.
Is it the hardest thing I’ve ever done? No. Just the hardest one I had any choice about. Getting clean is like taking care of a sick person, versus being the sick person. They get all the points for bravery, but they’re locked in. You have to get up every morning and decide again, in the cold lonely light of day, am I brave enough to stick this out?
Rehab is like being married to sickness in a lot of ways, really. Disgust comes into it. You try to deny that, swapping it out for a kindness you may not feel. You fake it till you make it. You watch other people being smug, because they made better matches than you did. You let them say all the stupid things, God never gives you more than you can handle, etc. You get comfortable with vomit.
So I had a head start, being well used to the no-toucher lifestyle before I started into the program. Dalit, is the word he was saying all that time. The untouchables of Mr. Golly’s childhood are for real. I’ve read all about them now. It’s amazing how much time you may find on your hands, once you’re freed up from tracking down your next fix, chasing the means for your next fix, bootlegging scrips, dipping out, ganking, pheeming, chewing chains, raving with Jesus, trying to find a new dope boy, and steering clear of the old ones that would eat your liver with gravy if they could be bothered. The perks of sobriety.
The Halley Library branch on the north end of Knoxville was the other half of my halfway life, after I graduated from detox-and-therapy boot camp, learned respect for properly dosed Suboxone under the tongue, and settled into my residency situation. Sober living home is the preferred term of professionals, hard-knocksville among the natives. My roommates came and went to some distressing degree. Triggers are seeded into the dirt of your every day: a song on the radio, a taste in the mouth, the cherry-soda smell of methadone that can be injected straight from the bottle. Drug tests are easier to fail at than any other subject. We weren’t even allowed to have mouthwash in that house. I thought a lot about my mom’s months- and years-sober chips I used to screw around with like play money instead of the damn gold doubloons they were. I thought of Maggot, how dutifully he would apply himself to fucking this up. June and Mrs. Peggot were right, getting him sober would take a higher power than Maggot had in his list of personal contacts. Would and did. Juvenile detention was his worst nightmare and best shot. After two years he was out, living with Mariah now in Bristol, Tennessee. Outcome to be determined.
The pillars of my sanity in hard-knocksville were three guys named Viking, Gizmo, and Chartrain. Gizmo and Viking were from two different Kentucky counties, Bell and Harlan, both closer to Lee County than the nearest outlet mall, similar broke-ass localities up to their ears in oxy fiends with no place to go. The Knoxville treatment enterprise draws from a wide watershed of humanity. These two were not much older than me, and an unmatched set. Viking being this big, blond specimen, foulmouthed as they come, and Gizmo a little guy with funny teeth and a mild stutter, polite as a live-in aunt. They both shared my life’s crushed ambition of never living in a city. Our house, as June predicted, was on the outskirts, in a neighborhood of folks that didn’t mind junkie has-beens in their midst. Not rich. Houses were small and close-set, fences were chain link, dogs had outside voices, and none of this was the problem. What set us on edge were all the human eyes that wouldn’t look at us, out on the city streets. The continual sirens, the pinkish light shellacking the windows all night long. We were wonderstruck at the idea of anyone at all, let alone ourselves, staying sober in such a place.
Chartrain would be our savior. A Knoxville man born and bred, street genius, guiding light. We would not be aware of any of this for some while. Don you go no mofuckin Beaumont, boi, my bruh got kilt dae, fa real dey gone show you what dey got, Chartrain would tell us, and we would nod our heads as one. If at’n up air don make ye wood burn, ain’t naught will, we would say to him. At some point around six months in, we made contact. All good after that.
Chartrain explained that city people don’t look each other in the eye because they’re saving their juice. A person has only so much juice, and it’s ideally kept for your homeboys, not all pissed away on strangers before three in the day. Simple as that sounds, it was a game changer for me. I taught myself to save the juice. It’s a skill, like weight training, you do reps. Tell yourself ten times each night, don’t spend your juice on those sirens, worrying about the life screaming past on its way to getting tanked. Don’t spend it on the customers around you at Walmart Supercenter, just do your job without feeling the madness or sadness, the moms on the brink of snatching their kids bald-headed. The carts loaded with cases of PBR and Pampers. The carts with nothing but off-brand beans and marked-down stale bread. Not even on the guy I watched once while I rounded up carts, outside in the parking lot, trying to stuff his huge armload of pink birthday balloons into his hatchback, damning them to goddamn hell as they kept bobbing back out in his face, finally pulling a coping blade out of his pocket and stabbing every balloon but one. He slammed the hatch and drove off with it, home to some sad, one-balloon birthday girl, and I confess to spending some juice on her. Rehab possibly in her future.
Chartrain didn’t fully follow his own advice, he gave of himself freely, but it worked out because he had more juice than any normal human. He’d been a star athlete in his formative years, and it’s not something I’d planned to talk about again, but we ended up bonding over high school sports. Chartrain was basketball, already the A-team shooting guard as a freshman, averaging twenty or more points per game. A meteor, to hear him tell it, Division 1 scouts with eyes on him. But no college offers were good enough to keep him from a quick tour of Afghanistan, and he came home without his legs. The shuttle van that took us to our jobs and our meetings also rolled Chartrain twice a week to the East City Y to play wheelchair basketball, and once again he slayed. I went pretty often to see him play. As a guy that played football only until I lost my natural advantage, I had great respect for a guy with no legs that still played basketball. In my new life of feeling all the feels, the cesspool of self-disgust felt like a deal breaker. The whole existence of Chartrain shouted: Watch and learn, my brother. In addition to juice, he had front teeth incomprehensibly edged in gold, and calloused hands like vulcanized tires from charging and pivoting his chair around the court. None of this did he owe to the Veterans Administration that was paying his way.
One thing about sober living facilities. You come in thinking you’ve lost all there is to lose, then find out there are things you never knew were on the table. Chartrain still had his mother alive out there thinking Chartrain hung the moon, but he was otherwise nearly my equal as far as dead dad, dead brother, dead baby mama, and had seen a whole lot of guys shot dead in front of his eyes, not just overseas. Plus the no-legs. Gizmo, for his part, had been in a car that wrapped itself around a family of five, turning them into a family of one. Gizmo’s girlfriend, the only girl he’d ever dated and hoped to marry, left her good looks on the windshield and was doing time. She was driving because they had a fight and he’d deliberately crunked out, so. Lots to live with there. And Viking had lost something still more unexpected, his ears. He was tall and broad as a tree trunk and about that deaf. Thanks to oxy. He said it starts as a ringing, then one day you wake up to find the ringing is all you’ve got left. We all had the ringing. This fact was sobering in every regard. Viking wore hearing aids the color of dirty pink crayons and was impressive in that he still talked pretty well, just way too loud, and caught a lot of what you said if you spoke to him face-on. Doctors had told him it might come back if he stayed sober, and this was his higher power. He had a baby back in Bell County. He’d never heard her say “Daddy.”
