On the morning of my fourth day in the hospital, I ask for scissors and a razor. I haven't looked at myself in a mirror for weeks, but have gone unshaven at least that long. And I can feel it: the patches of wild, stringy whiskers covering my bone thin face. They itch something fierce.
It is quite a process making the ten foot trek from my bed to the room's toilet, me hunched over and footing unsure as I drag along the bulky IV stand with my hospital gowned ass flapping in the breeze. I've only made this journey once before, to piss last night. It has been two days since they determined I was no longer a threat to the staff or myself, removing my restraints and catheter.
My body is acutely weak, partly from the ravages of alcohol abuse but mostly from the subsequent and sudden withdrawal. With legs the consistency of rubber, the knees threaten to buckle at each step. It doesn't help that I am out of practice walking, having only attempted the feat twice in the past four days: once for the aforementioned trip to piss and once within the first twelve hours of my arrival into the ER, when I lashed out kicking and screaming at the hospital staff in the throes of the delirium tremens (and, as it turned out, breaking my foot in the bargain). But the cherry on top of this shit muffin is the damn IV contraption. Hooked up to refuel my depleted supply of potassium and electrolytes, it would have been a bitch to maneuver even if I'd been at full strength. The nurse later allows me to temporarily disconnect from the IV tether, making the potty trips so much easier. But that is still to come. As it is, I can barely fit my tubular companion into the tiny shitter with me. Still, I have to clean up or I'll go mad from the itch and smell.
The light in the bathroom is mercifully dim. I look up slowly into the mirror and am shocked at the thing staring back at me. My complexion is gray/yellow and skin clammy cold while the eyes follow suit in jaundiced exhaustion. I touch the top of my head and it comes back damp, the scalp is soaked and hair matted, curling over my ears and falling into my eyes. Perspiration seems to pour out of every orifice and the resulting stench rings of some unholy blending of BO, vomit, and gin. Clumps of long gray/black whiskers twist out at crazy angles along my jaw line and upper lip interspersed with the large barren patches that mark the reason I've never bothered trying to grow a proper beard. My hands are shaking violently as I crank the sink's faucet on hot and let the water warm up. I then soak a washcloth, soap it, and rake the rag across my face and hair. Rinse. I do the same up and down my body, at least to those places I can reach.
I next reach for the scissors with my right hand, gripping the back of the wrist with my left to steady it, and hunch over so as not to tear the IV out while I clip the whiskers down to shaving length. Midway through, the dry heaves take me away from this work. My intravenous ball-and-chain prevents me from the instinctive drop to hug the porcelain god, so I lean as far down into the sink as I can and spasm the yellowy clear into the faucet stream. Fuck. I rinse the bowl and resume clipping, shaky chills and start-stop nausea making it an arduous task. I eventually get the job done, my hands trembling a little less than they had been. I hurry up with a quick shave before the shakes catch me again, trying my best to work the cheap plastic razor with a minimum of cuts and snags. A quick look in the mirror after my clean up, sad and small.
And then it was time to slow dance the IV back to my bed, accompanied by the sounds of the hacking cough and gagging of my hospital roommate, an elderly guy whose ailment remained a mystery to me. Whatever his condition, it required him to release a lot of phlegm in myriad ways, loudly (in turn usually triggering my nausea; we're quite a pair). Once I lay down on the bed and get the IV stand situated back into its usual position, I kill the light and am bathed in the darkness of the evening with the faint flickering of the TV overhead.
The stench is still there, in the sweaty sheets sticking to my skin mixing with the pungent odor drifting over from my roomie across the curtain. But I'm essentially clean for the first time in weeks on a number of levels. Unfortunately, this deliberate act of cleansing the filth off my body seems to have awakened the mind's consciousness out of the foggy twilight slumber it's been mired in lo these many weeks. I now repeatedly replay my life unravelling over the past month, watching it slide down again and again into a hole from which there is no light. Indeed, it had been unravelling for years, but the rope had clearly since grown taut until it finally snapped in May. In fact, I see now that I'd been actively digging that metaphorical hole deeper, fervently hoping to come out the other end. Until I had no strength left to dig and with China still nowhere in sight.
It was this during this act of making the turn back up toward the light that I realized I'd hit bottom, there in that hospital bed, clean on an evening in early June of 2006. Now those recent horrors had crystalized, becoming quite apparent. But so had a new sensation I had never before experienced: a steely eyed resolve not to relive the madness yet again.
Then I cried myself awake until the morning's sun rose.
Dipping one's toes into the murky waters of childhood memories is therapeutic, so I'm told. It's also pretty exhausting. Case in point, remembering life at Everett High School (that's it to the right). It was my first. It didn't take - neither did the second, Cascade High.
What's a family to do with an unmotivated 16 year old who'd rather play hooky ... at the public library reading every book he could get his hands on? Why, have him get a GED and on to Community College, of course! That's it to the left. Guess what? It didn't take any more than the high schools, so off to the Navy I went. Just after I had protested the recently mandated selective service registration by refusing to do so!
Story of my life with higher education, as I'd do that same dance at a number of institutions over the next 17 years trying to catch that elusive degree. And story of my life with sticking to my political principles. But my heart's in the right place.
I tell ya, it's kind of creepy being able to tool around your old neighborhood courtesy of Google maps street view. It's too bad the technology wasn't around 40 years ago. I'd like to be able to cruise the homestead over time, watching it morph from how it was to how it is. I imagine in 30 years that this'll be a handy feature for future headcases (ya know, the ones being fucked up right now) as well as anthropology/sociology or city planner/architecture buffs. Then again, that'll play havoc with revisionist history (at least with some of the visuals your defense system might have since re-purposed for sanity's sake).
My neighborhood has changed surprisingly little over the years. The biggest single difference seems to be the walling off of individual properties. Fences and landscaping were for backyards when I was a kid - now a good half of the homes on my old block have big ol' fences around the front along with trees, flowers and shrubs winding around and through the enclosures, all neatly trimmed and weirdly isolating. Everything was so open when I was young!
Other than that ... The same old plum trees still line the edges near the curb, the hospital and high school look pretty much frozen in time (okay, some minor nods to technology with the signage). Same corner stores and whatnot (well, they have new names and likely new owners, but look otherwise alike). More cafes and coffee shops, a vacant lot where we played pick-up ball kitty corner from our block is now a fancy little park.
It's easy to slip back in time. And out of the house, they were usually good times for me as a kid. Man, I can just see the Big Wheels riding down the street, the banana seat bikes with playing cards in the spokes, our Evil Knievel plywood jumping ramps over three(count 'em) trash cans (well, on their sides) in the alley, army forts built in the backyard thatch of bushes. Buying paper kites from the corner store and flying them all over the place. Building wooden hydroplane models. My best friend Brian lived with his grandparents and we'd use his grandpa's tools and paint to craft these hunks of wood into passable miniature replicas.
Hydroplane racing was HUGE in our neck of the woods, certainly back then anyway (this was '68 or '69). Miss Pay-n-Pak and Miss Budweiser were the Yankees and Red Sox of that particular universe. Remember, we didn't have professional football or baseball in our state back then. You had to go clear to Oakland, California to find such things and the A's were indeed my team as a kid (a great team to have in the early 1970s). But they could be only so much my team given their geographical distance. So we had Soccer (go, Sounders!) and Hydroplanes.
Brian was always the Budweiser and I was always Pay-n-Pak when we 'raced' each other on our bikes, dragging those hunks of wood we had lovingly crafted behind us, pretty much destroying them in the process. I hated the Miss Budweiser. When I started to drink, I always loathed Budweiser beer too. I'm pretty sure it was the red-neck image and awful after taste but there's something inside me that always harkens back to that rivalry. Turns out, the boat owners, drivers and crews were incestuous, with Miss Budweiser and Miss Pay-n-Pak pretty much interchangeable apart from the sponsor's name slapped on the sides. What did we know?
Any time you wanna race hydroplanes, Brian - give me a shout, if you're out there.
