[Denver, Colorado – 2002]
I stood inside the Denver airport train beside my friend Sal, unsteady on my feet while on a train that was taking us in the wrong direction, far away from our connecting flight to Portland.
The real trouble had started earlier in the morning, when the flirty male flight attendant brought Sal and I a Bloody Mary and then slipped me four or five extra vodka bottles and winked. “You just let me know when you want some more,” he’d said. And Sal and I did ask for more, which the sweet man with the tiny bottle supply was more than happy to drop into my lap. My god, what an angel he was. Nothing else would have helped to stave off the hangover that had begun spreading its tendrils and releasing its poison inside my brain during our frantic drive up Long Island to La Guardia airport. But I drank way more than I planned to before we landed, way more than I’d even wanted to, so we disembarked stinking drunk at brunch hour, drunk to the point that we needed so desperately to smoke that we beelined it to the airport bar instead of waiting to begin boarding our next flight, which we then missed.
That’s how we ended up back on the airport train. That’s how we ended up with over nine hours to kill until the next flight to Portland, where my brother had planned to pick us up for our first night back together in the Rose City. I blamed that friendly flight attendant for wrecking me with generosity, but Sal and I had been in much worse places than an airport bar, and for a lot longer than nine hours. Best of all, they had a lunchtime drink special in this bustling oasis full of bottles, and we could drink while facing the planes as they taxied along the tarmac.
The bartender said her name was Passion. I asked if she was serious and she answered yes. I believed her, not only because it suited her so perfectly, but I couldn’t imagine why an airport bartender would make up that specific name. Her hair was a black river that flowed to the small of her back. Her eyes emerald green. She’d served us a pint before we missed our flight, before we had to make the long locomotive loop back to her, and I’d fallen in love with her long before she even served us this second round. I must have downed at least eight little bottles of vodka on that first airplane, and now the clock hands on the wall still hadn’t quite aligned at noon, the pints were half price for another hour, and a heavy-pour of Captain Morgan’s could accompany each pint for a measly dollar.
With all these elements in place, it became obvious. The universe wanted us to fail.
At some point, Sal found a small couch in the corner of the spacious bar and lay down for a nap. Like I said, I was in love with Passion, so I would keep on drinking for as long as she kept pouring. I dimly recall asking her to marry me. I told her other things, like she was transcendently beautiful, and funny, and smart, and I’d never seen eyes as amazing as hers. I kept tipping my future wife as though I were a CEO or a Megachurch preacher or a sultan of some oil rich country. Money to burn. Here, Passion, have some more money. She smiled and continued serving me. Unbelievably, she continued serving me until her face took on a holographic effect, see-through and shifting from one eye to the other, an after-image of my dream woman tripping like a strobe along with the overhead lighting, an idea from a movie, her face and smile fading a bit more each time I blinked.
Then the room swirled for a moment, the edges of everything watery and shimmering but slowly coming back into focus. A scrap of time had gone missing. It could have been a few seconds, or it could have been hours. My eyelids were so heavy. I didn’t see Passion behind the bar anymore, but instead a new female bartender stood before me with arms folded. I sensed no love from her. The pint of beer and glass of brown liquor I’d been working on before my impromptu nap had been replaced by a glass of water and a plate of food that I’d managed to mash and scatter all around me. I had ketchup on my arm and French fries squished between the fingers of my right hand. As I did my best to wipe up the mess with a stack of napkins, the overweight, middle-aged man on the stool to my right who wore a pink tie and a blue suit just said something, which seemed to be in response to something I’d said to him.
We’d been having a conversation, I realized this now, but I had no idea what we’d been talking about. He paused, leaned a bit closer and asked, “Do you need some help?”
“Fine, thanks,” I said, suddenly uncomfortable in his tractor beam of concern, so I pushed my stool back from the bar, and then added something like, “Good talking with you. Sorry to have to go, but I have a plane to catch.”
I had, at most, ten-percent of my usual sense of balance when I grabbed my bag and exited the bar and went stumbling out into the echoes of the airport hall, aware that gravity was a much more powerful force than it had been a few hours ago. Oh, and I’d forgotten to look for Sal, but I couldn’t bear to go back into the bar. No way. Instead, I focused on standing somewhat upright while a sea of people surrounded me, every one of them with harsh, bulging eyes as they rushed past from all directions and side-stepped me like agitated fish. Electronic voices of ticket agents announcing upcoming departures mingled with the echoes of footsteps and the clicking of luggage wheels along the tile floor, the sounds all layering to foster the illusion that I was now walking underwater.
Next thing I knew, I was on an escalator. Who knows how many minutes or hours had been lost by then. But at least I saw Sal a step ahead of me, both of us gliding up to a higher floor.
As men in cowboy hats passed on their escalator down, I yelled to Sal, “We’re in cowboy country now, boy! Woohoo!”
Faces of the passengers on the downward escalator told me I was an alien. Two young kids smiled up at me while their parents scowled. The outline of each and every passing face blazed into my consciousness. As pathetically drunk as I was at the time, and despite how hazy the entire day had been until then, I knew I would never forget the expressions of those kids and their parents. They’d obviously never seen anyone quite like me. The kids saw me as an out-of-costume clown. The parents and the cowboys and all the other tight faces told me another truth—that I was radioactive, a dirt-bag derelict who had no business inhabiting space with normal humans.
Amen. The truth had set me free. I was an alien to them, but then again, all those people were freaks in their own right to me.
I must have looked like a madman, laughing like that in the airport, pressing both hands on the moving handrails and pushing myself up in the quick movement of a gymnast on parallel bars, then making it so much worse when I threw my boots up onto Sal’s shoulders while yelling again about the presence of cowboys.
He pushed me off as we reached the top of the escalator and whisper-shouted, “Dude, stop it! There’s airport cops everywhere!”
I understood his reasons for concern but I had no say in the matter. The flirty male flight attendant with all those free vodka bottles had started me down this path to hell. Passion had made it so much worse, fanning the flames while supplying me with so many Molotov cocktails. She’d mesmerized me with her beauty and convinced me I was invincible. She’d sung me songs until I crashed on the rocks. She’d been a surrogate for the devil, or at least for some kind of demon, and the demon had purchased passage within me while Passion generously poured my poison to the meniscus. I was possessed, no denying it, and my trip through the purgatory of the Denver airport would only get worse.
Static was my reality, both in the sonic sense and the visual, as I faced the blur of numbered buttons on a beige phone mounted on the wall. I heard myself slurring badly into the receiver, pleading for someone to help me find my friend. A woman on the other end sounded annoyed but said she would page him again. Again? I thanked her so much. “Thank you… so… much.”
A second later her voice boomed down from the loudspeakers, and she asked for Sal to: “Please meet your party at Gate B7,” which I saw with a confused squint was the gate right in front of me. Then I felt a hand grab my shoulder, Sal’s hand.
Hey, I thought. There’s Sal.
“What the hell, man, you have to stop paging me!”
“Where were you?”
“I’ve been right here,” he said, pointing at the seats a few feet away. “You were just sitting right next to me.”
“Sally-boy,” I said. “Good ole’ Sal.” My vision was going fuzzy, and then it seemed someone else had begun speaking through me, as though a ventriloquist stood behind me, manipulating my dummy mouth to dribble out a series of stupid puns, but somehow it was still my voice I heard, saying, “Sal-amander… Sal-ad dressing… Sal-ami sandwich.” For the first time all day, I worried about myself. About my sanity. About incarceration. Why hadn’t someone from security dragged me off long before then? I’d devolved into an idiot, squinting to get a clear view of my friend’s face. He looked mad. I wondered how long I’d been blacked-out. I wondered what I’d been doing while my body had operated on autopilot, and then I asked him, “How many times have I paged you?”
“Three,” he said, seemingly without opening his mouth. “You’ve paged me three times.” His jaw had ratcheted closed, the rear corners flexing from the strain. He’d already walked me over to our seats in the waiting area and I felt relieved to sit. But then I sank underwater again. The ambient sounds all magically dimmed down to a dull hum, and even before my eyelids fell yet again, I went blind to everything and everyone around me. Even the hours vanished.
I didn’t remember boarding the plane to Portland. I didn’t remember exactly what I said to the flight attendant, only that she’d needed some convincing to serve me those drinks before I passed out in my seat. I did remember waking up on the plane after most of the passengers had already disembarked, waking up to the flight attendant shaking me, she and Sal teamed up as they shook me and said I needed to get up and exit the plane.
I couldn’t possibly predict that Sal would buy a bag of heroin tomorrow, something he’d avoided for the past couple years while he’d been on Methadone or maintaining with alcohol and weed. His relapse during this trip wouldn’t surprise me all that much when I found out, but years later, when he and I were living in different parts of Portland and only in contact once in a while, a series of events that he and my younger brother shared as a mammoth secret would finally come to light, and then I would choose to cut him out of my life, completely, forever. But for now, Sal and I were still the best of friends, and he’d held me somewhat upright throughout so much of this horribly drunken day.
The craziest part? The party hadn’t even started yet. The night out west had just begun.
One aspect of alcoholism I don’t hear mentioned much is how exhausting it is, both physically and existentially exhausting, and how much endurance it takes to drag oneself along the ocean floor and to surface just often enough to catch a quick wisp of oxygen, how much effort it takes simply to continue breathing.
I had no idea I was in the midst of running a marathon that day, one that had started with my first drink when I was twelve, or that I’d been running for all that time even when sitting perfectly still. I’d been running the same labyrinthine loops for more than fifteen years by then, fully ignorant to the fact that the race was rigged and I’d been living within the warped laws of an M.C. Escher world, my existence one big glitch in the time-space-continuum, an ongoing exercise of going up one escalator only to go back down another.
Sure, I made deals with myself from time to time, to stop drinking for a day or two, sometimes for a week or a bit beyond, but always while clinging to the belief that I could do it better after a break. Like a gambler who cleaves to those rare times when he won big, I had a knack for filtering out the history of losses and the low-bottom moments that had led me to stop in the first place.
I was far from winning by the time Sal and I arrived in Portland and met up with Jess and some mutual friends and we all stumbled from one bar to the next, but I had a faint recollection of feeling I had succeeded at some point in the past, that the good times had been real, and so I held onto the baseless faith that I might win again, believing that I might feel something like happiness someday. I’d spent my life worrying about my brother, but the consequences of my own path of self-destruction had been accumulating with such intensity, forcing me to finally begin worrying in earnest for myself. And yet, I should have worried a lot more.
Like so many other times over so many years, I was too drunk to realize I was dying, or to know that there were all sorts of ways a person could die aside from a flatline that can be measured by a machine. I had no inkling that this day that began in Denver—which had now finally fizzled down to ashes in a low-lit bar at last call—would repeat itself hundreds more times.
But if the past truly was prologue, of course it would repeat. It would all be exactly the same on the level of soul deterioration, even if the details of the drunkenness played out completely different. Maybe I needed that ridiculous day in the airport, along with every other one of the innumerable low-bottom moments since taking my first drink as a little kid, maybe my conscience needed to finally amplify to a scream in order to be heard, and for my thoroughly punished and sedated mind to finally have the epiphany some years later.
One thing I know for sure: hitting bottom hurts, it has to, and I’m grateful now for having felt that indescribable pain. If it hadn’t hurt all the way down to my core, if I hadn’t felt like I’d been suffocating for years by the morning of day one, I might not have feel such a desperate desire to live; I might not have admitted I needed help; I might never have quit. And all these years later, I’m goddamned glad I did.