Dance of Drunkards

The Wicked Witch of the West

was but a patsy

for the evil goody two shoes Gilda

perpetrates in perpetuity

on munchkins blissfully unaware.

"It's not easy being green"

is not Kermit's lament alone

and the companionship of flying monkeys

are a cold comfort indeed.

Thoughts of the shifting moralities

of these Ozraelites

haunt me needlessly,

like all good hauntings should.

Meanwhile, the cold rain

of February

bleeds wet upon the overcoat

as I remember Father

and his perpetual legs-akimbo

dance of drunkards,

steps as ageless as cirrhosis

scarring time

like the wizard that he was.

"Ignore the man behind the curtain throwing up onto his slacks.

The great and powerful Chuck has spoken."

The Breathing End of Oblivion

For Brooke and her other aliases circa 1993.

Disarming not discerning, she softly cracks me wise.

I open melting repose in the corner, rising.

Fallen among the throng in this Passyunk go-go dive,

I drink away the dank and the military industrial blood on my hands.

Drowning out the shipyard with a chaser, warming.

She tends bar usually, though sometimes she dances;

always wry with her musing (bloody hands of her own, stained merely by her presence).

And with all that, her jukebox selection is singular, defining.

Wondering around her reflection in Absolut refraction,

a wide eyed drive toward desolation foregone, yet not begun.

I order another round silently, flying.

We share unlikely sensibilities: musical, political, magical, destructible;

cynicism burning us alive, aspirations chilled to the bone.

 She slides me one on the house, smiling.

We find we're both hiding from who we are, what we do to get by;

our ideals beyond reach, beyond our reason.

Reasoning it's for the best, swallowing.

She's post-modern Center City mostly: college and Revival, Khyber hipster friends;

in fear her South Philly ballet weeknights will come to light to them:

grunge-lit on-high disapproval.

She locks up for the evening, transposing personalities; shifting.

I live in her vicinity, in trepidation;

my workaday hypocrisy spilling into the rest of me.

I found her in one masquerade, she led me to the other, city weekends both wondrous and fleeting.

We were taut to tearing from the get-go, nervously.

It can't, doesn't last; turns to sand in my fingers, into dust.

Across the divide from Darien back to Monroe alone, empty; shivering.

Compromises personified, potential anesthetized;

she's at long last transcended these things, living.

I still languish within, haunted;

balancing off a bar stool on the breathing end of oblivion, waiting.

Waiting.

Stucco Green

Blue-black thoughts down the hallway,

stucco green bleeds to braided frayed through smoke and sunflower prints of the front room.

As decaying paternal, maternal afterthoughts meld into the yellowed fabric, smoldering drowned.

I walk through with my head bowed.

The dining room spins 78 revolutions of hard plastic music playing holiday meals while jig saw puzzle pieces cover the table almost done.

I walk through with my head bowed.

The kitchen coffee pot boils avocado on the burner percolating over meat loaf

dying in the oven while government cheese lies waiting on the counter near cookie dough raw for lunch.

I walk through with my head bowed.

Breakfast nook misnomer, dinner occasionally and beverages more often.

I walk past with my head bowed.

Through the telephone hallway ...

... Past the door to the basement stairs - pungent with jarred pickles, peaches, pears;

heavy with homemade beer and wine, vacuum packed fermenting foretells of drunken harvests to come and cub scout meetings gone by in back.

... Past the master bedroom - king sized cocoon of festering parental psyches and Johnny nightly through the walls.

... Past the bathroom - haunted by the ghosts of childhood croup humidification and stroke-forged handicapped baths for Mom.

Past all that and up the stairs to suffocating sanctuary.

Tangerine shag with Farrah Cheryl Clash plastering walls stained of summer heat.

Eight track punk salvation and Royal keystroke catharsis feed my aspirations a feast of anthemic illusions, hard bitten fidelity.


Carroll Bangs Thompson summer nights awake in bed devouring to bursting words come to life and love of language unbounded.


I lay down with my head unbowed at last.

A Hospital Remembrance

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.

Long Distance Breakdown

May, 1997. She looked at me quizzically, her face half hidden in the shadows. Then sadness, disappointment; finally, resignation. “I trusted you – and I can’t anymore.” We were sitting across from one another, lunch at Outback in Conshohocken a month and continent removed from my drunken, jealous explosion in San Diego on her birthday. A birthday ruined by a river of tequila overflowing my reservoir of self-loathing and suspicion, finally bursting the dam and fueling the outburst that precipitated our breakup.

So ended a torrid long distance relationship played out across six months of extended hotel sleep overs. We managed to manipulate things at work such that she’d travel to my city or I’d travel to hers on a nearly constant basis. It was easy enough to do: the company we worked for had us making the trek into each other's neck of the woods anyway; we just accelerated the frequency, stretched out each stay and coordinated travel schedules. It was hot and heavy and loaded with hysterics.

She started in the Philadelphia office right out of college while I had already been entrenched there for a decade by that time. I relocated to California just weeks after she came onboard so we didn't get to know one another until I traveled back east on business later that year. It was at an annual company outing during one such trip in September that we connected, when we were paired together as canoe partners on a little river run drunkfest. She made the first, second, and third moves and I didn’t recognize any of them. Finally she simply threw herself at me and that was that. Except "that" to her was something fun but to me it was something more.

My insecurities are always on the look-out for the acid rain lurking in puffy white clouds. The glass might very well be half full, but in my worldview it's probably half full of cyanide. All that to say I'm a bit pessimistic.

Due in no small part to a crippling shyness and social retardation, serious relationships seem to come along only every decade or two for me and tend to last not more than a few months, once it's clear we're operating at different speeds with divergent needs.

Usually the girl has to make sufficient moves to wake this idiot out of his emotional stupor and I don't exactly sport the Johnny Depp-caliber looks that might inspire such actions very often from the women I meet. But unless and until this occurs, my passionate side tends to go into a hibernation of sorts. To paraphrase George Costanza, "I'm a sexual camel." It takes a seismic event by a determined gal to jog me out of this slumber, but when it happens I awaken with force.

I identify in a sense - though not proudly - with the protagonist played by James Caan in the movie Thief. Caan's character gets out of prison after a lengthy stretch and methodically plots to romance and marry in very short order to make up for all the lost time. For me, the prison takes on a different form but the effect is the same. In brief, it doesn't work out all that well for him. In short, it doesn't work out all that great for me either. But this comparison isn't truly apt. Really I identify most completely with the 1970's Woody Allen persona: Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable... The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life ... The miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable ...

All of this whining background is meant to frame the emotional volatility seething under the surface on her birthday, six months into a relationship that had been on its last legs for at least the last two of them. It was a good crowd gathered at one of the cantinas we frequented for such revelry, the Old Town Saloon. Most of the group was on travel from our Philadelphia office save for me and a couple of others who were based on the west coast.

The margaritas flowed for all but they went down especially easy for me. As I got more intoxicated, I began to fixate on the fact she had seen some movie with another guy; it didn't matter what flick or dude, jealousy rained down on me like a tsunami. She caught that vibe and started peppering me with pin pricks through continued allusions to her boys back home. The long distance thing was really getting to me. She was on occasion dating other guys when back east and I couldn't handle the competition, figuring I'd lose out to whomever else might be around. It was a self fulfilling prophecy.

She was staying at the Best Western Hacienda Hotel across the street from our cantina and although I lived in San Diego, I was as usual staying with her. The rest of our crowd remained blissfully unaware of the tension between her and I; for the most part, they were unaware of the relationship itself. Unfortunately for those on travel staying at the hotel, they wouldn't be ignorant of it for long.

The tension between her and I during this birthday drink-fest grew as taut without snapping as could be, mixing the tequila-laced salt into unseen wounds in my psyche. She was largely unaware that the barbs thrown my way were being compounded and magnified in my mind through the booze; however, it seemed very much the opposite at the time to this soused and beaten clown. On the contrary, it seemed that each zinger thrown was more calculated than the last, calibrated with my intoxication to deliver maximum damage. Finally I could take no more and excused myself, stumbling out into the night with fear and rage burning my brain.

She stayed awhile longer at the cantina while I stewed and seethed pacing her hotel room. By the time she left the bar and I heard her keycard in the door, I was at the apex of my anger. Little of this was about movies and boys back home. It was all about expectations and reality annihilating one another. But there was no clear-headed analysis going on, just six months of frustration about to pour over her and then back over me again.

We ended up in a yelling match that spilled out of the room. I said some things that I couldn't take back, that made taking back beside the point. I spoke them again, I screamed them. Taking them back was beside the point. She threw my things out the door, over the balcony and onto the ground outside. So I did the same to her things. The bar was clearing out and the others arrived on this scene, her and I both in fits and tears.

One of the guys led me back to his room - I couldn't go back to hers. It quickly became clear that my words were a one way ticket out of the relationship and the plane was already in flight. But I needed to make things right in my delirium, so I tried to call her. No dice. I managed to slip out of my new prison, reel up the stairs and began knocking on her door. "Get out of here!" She called my new roommate/guard to walk me back down. I slept in his bathtub until I sobered up and then drove jittery/sobbing home the next morning to an apartment I had grown used to not living in. An apartment that would now become my prison once more.

I didn't go into work the next day. It was hell on Earth. It was the worst day of my life. I was hung over, I'd lost it and I'd lost her. I paced my apartment/prison. I threw up. I made calls to colleagues to try and figure out a way to fix it. Perhaps now that she's slept on it, things might be okay? Perhaps not. I met with the others that evening. She did not accompany them. They'd been at work with her, they knew her fury. I was truly fucked.

When I saw her the next day at work we talked quietly in a corner. Her deadpan tone and lost eyes destroyed me and I lost it, dissolving in this dissolution. It was over.

I ended the evenings for the balance of that spring screaming into my pillow until the noise quieted the silence of being alone again. Until the anticipated emotional hibernation took hold. The winter once more of my discontent had arrived and it's with me still to this day.

A winter of my own making, to be sure. I'd like to think I've grown some in the twelve and a half years since this meltdown in SoCal. I moved back to Pennsylvania only a few months thereafter and we became friends again even before then, in fact not long after our lunch at Outbacks where she finally aired her feelings at our breakup (my breakdown). Where she finally aired her feelings all along.

Friends and no more. That's where we kept it, likely it should have never become more. After all, we had nothing in common except misguided passion in the dark, fumbling at cross purposes and rubbing vulnerabilities raw.

1992 Heartbeats a Second

August, 1992. I lay on the couch with my heart pounding like a jackhammer.  The last of the coke gone and no alcohol in my hovel, panic had me in its grip. Boom, boom, boom.  Teeth chattering, freezing cold sweat, eyes all pupil. Boom, boom, boom.  Where were my car keys?  My eyes darted around the room, out of focus.  It was Sunday night, I needed to find a bar with alcohol somewhere, take-out beer to slow my heart down.  Boom, boom, boom.  I was living just north of Wilmington in Delaware but had just moved into this apartment from Media, Pennsylvania 30 miles to the North.  I wasn't familiar with what might be open on a Sunday in the immediate surroundings - my mind could only conjure up the Media establishments.  Boom, boom, boom.

I drove shaking, sweating, jittering raw nerves up I-95 and I-476 to Media.  Jack's bar, open every Sunday.  All pupil and sweating, jittery I pulled into the bar's parking lot and looked in the rear view mirror.  Jesus!  Like something out of Night of the Living Dead.  Thank God Jack's interior is good and dark.  Still, I needed to clean myself up a bit, comb the hair, get my squinting down pat to hide the wild eyes.  Slow the heart palpitations.  God, did I really drive here?  It's drizzling rain and I'm so wired out of my skin I can barely see let alone operate heavy machinery.  The force multipliers adrenaline and fear bring to the table are nothing short of amazing.

Inside, Jack's is dead on a mid-summer Sunday evening.  I manage to maneuver to the take-out case, grab several six-packs of brew and pay for it with minimal social interaction: head down, pass the barkeep sufficient cash, let him bag the beer and keep the change and motor on out into the night.  A half hour of terrifying action southbound behind the wheel of my shitty little black Mazda 323 with heart beating wildly caught in my throat and I'm back into Delaware, to my apartment.  I didn't kill myself or anyone else on the road this time only through undeserved dumb luck.  Boom. Boom. Boom.  But relief from the pounding and palpitations is at hand, thanks to Adolf Coors - at least that''s how it's always worked in the past.

But this time the booze did not keep up its end of the bargain.  This time, no matter how much I drink my pulse just keeps racing.  Did my heart skip a beat?  Two beats?  Boom. Boom. Boom.  I pace my apartment, gulp for air.  Fuck!  The alcohol has no effect.  I lay down on the couch, stare up at the ceiling fan, sweating/dizzy.  How long have I been up?  Two days, three?  Shit.  Boom. Boom. Boom.  My heartbeat echoes through my sinuses, up into the frontal lobe.   Looking around the apartment - torn drapes, faded carpet, TV unwatched on some random channel, blue walls into the white light of the kitchen.  My toes feel tingly, numb.  Boom, boom, boom.  My heart is - if anything - racing faster.

I make the decision: I need to go to an emergency room.  Shaky / dizzy, I jump back in the car and head down south to Wilmington Memorial.   At this point I'm gasping for breath.  Perhaps this addiction thing isn't all it's cracked up to be?  Are we having fun yet?  Then it's twenty minutes of chilly sweats and my ticker doing double-time at the pump station before I'm finally led in to see a doctor.

I describe my symptoms and beat around the bush to the ER resident for just a few minutes before letting on that - funny coincidence - I just might have ingested a very small amount of cocaine that evening.  Think it's related?   The doctor in fact is pretty sure there's a strong causal relationship between my heart nearly exploding and the Bolivian Marching Powder coursing through my veins.  You see, it's a stimulant.  Condescending smirk.  But isn't alcohol a depressant? I deadpan, ignoring his snide bedside manner.  Booze didn't work this time, doc!   Long story short, the rest of the conversation boiled down to a variation on Doc, it hurts when I do this!  Well then - don't do that!

The doctor gives me some valium and sends me home with written instructions to "stay away from cocaine."  Of course I will, Herr Doktor.   I follow those instructions to the letter just a bit more than two years later.  After all, I'm a bit slow.  But Deja Vu is a bitch in this context and even the slowest among us eventually grow wise to the weary.  Or we simply grow weary and die.

A Snow Blind Samurai (Tracking Hell through Aramingo on the Road to Oblivion)

1989. Summer.

My mind is screaming but my body is quiet, stomach churning.

And my brain is baking.

Parked and conspicuous on the side street of a neighborhood decimated by poverty, drugs and crime, menacing shadows seem to surround me as they pass by, turn/look, and finally, thankfully, move on.

I'm trying my best to blend into the driver's seat, scrunching down, wishing I could vanish. And fervently hoping it won't be too long even while logic and reason clue me into the futility of that. Then again, if logic and reason were my guides I wouldn't be here now. Somewhere west of Aramingo, a handful of blocks east of 3rd and Indiana. West Kensington. The Badlands. Waiting. Visions of the Velvet Underground's Waiting for the Man buzzing through my mind's eye.

My little Suzuki Samurai jeep is a bright blue beacon floating in the sea of the dirty gray that permeates the streets up here. Christ, I might as well have a big spot light shooting up from the vehicle into the sky, spelling out my intentions to the thieves and the cops alike.

Unlike the other bubble-gummers who dare to swing up into this area for their recreational party favors, I haven't arrived here as an outsider. I have my Sherpa, my guide. So no waiting in a line of cars at one of the outdoor drug bazaars catering to Joe and Jane Suburbanite for me. Those traffic jams are further east, closer to I-95. Instead, we pull into a dilapidated side street, kill the engine and lights, I give my Tenzing Norgay the money fresh from an ATM withdrawal, and he disappears into the hood while I sit there, alone.

It's plain to me that addiction does at least as fine a job eradicating judgement as it does dignity, money, a life, and the rest of what it takes. Even with all that, what it provides me, sitting here in 1989, is singular and compelling: glimpses of happiness or at least escape from my head for a few hours. In 2009, fifteen years clean of that particular indulgence, I've yet to find its equal. So, I sit there alone. Waiting.

Ten, fifteen minutes. Shadows and staring, aggression and hatred. Clearly, I'm not welcome.

Then suddenly Norgay emerges from the shadows, stupid smile and stoned shimmer virtually radiating from his being, already high on a large chunk of what should be mine. But that's the price I pay for his guidance up the mountain. I fire the ignition and we head out. Now comes perhaps the most terrifying part of this adventure through the looking glass: snaking my way through the burned out buildings and numerous patrol cars, an out-of-phase vehicle with an out-of-place driver and right-at-home junky sidekick nodding out beside him, a couple of bags of felonious powder in their pockets. Not a recipe for a happy ending. One slip and it's down the icy ravine, into the abyss.

Yet I always slip the noose and make it back down from the treacherous summit into base camp again, back to the comfort of suburbia. I drop off my guide, head back to my hovel, and drift off into sweet dreams of wide-eyed wired wakefulness. Fleeting happiness and escape. Only to repeat the cycle ad nausem, addicted as much perhaps to the russian roulette surrounding the hunt as I am to the consumption.

My tunnel vision eventually closes in on the fading point of light at the other end so completely that normalcy warps into the strange and this kind of shit into the norm. I even rope others into these kamikaze missions, keeping them blind to the destination and purpose until past the point of no return. A friend I hadn't seen in years arrives from out of town to catch up, hit the bars, have a few drinks and reminisce about the old days in the Navy together. I meet him at the airport with my Sherpa in tow, explaining we need to first take "a short road trip" before hitting the town. Great to see ya! It's been awhile! This'll just take "a few minutes." He's pretty shaken after the 20 minute Badlands park-and-sit scene. Afterward, I drop him off at the apartment and he's left to fend for himself while I drift off to wired island. When I get up the next afternoon, he is gone. And I haven't talked to him since.

Good times.

What tips the scale back to the land of the living for me? Enough mornings after. Enough afternoons after. Enough three days after. When the wired dreams morph into jittery, heart-palpatating waking nightmares. When the ATM is empty and the Sherpa goes missing in action. When the bills come due and the collection calls start at work. When the Samurai is repossessed. When my credit becomes truly fucked. When the blood from my nose turns my white pillowcase red, when it soaks through and covers my mattress in blotchy maroon patches. When my phone is turned off for non-payment. When booze no longer calms the shaking coming down. Coming down. Finally, the coming down. Finally, the coming down is simply that much more painful than the wired dreams are freeing. When all this comes to a head, I finally come to my senses. Four years after it comes to a head, anyway. After all, I'm slow to learn and a great procrastinator (I'll completely upend my world in the fight against any change to it, wise and at the same time oblivious to the irony of it all).

Then a year of living clean, 14 months, dissolves into a week back into the wood chipper when I spy my Sherpa "by chance" one weekend just prior to my 32nd birthday. But that week was my last, over 15 years gone by now. To be clear, that week busy getting my nose dirty included plunging my liver back into the briny deep as well. After all, it was the only way I knew to come down, slow the pulse to sleep. And keeping my nose clean thereafter didn't translate to pulling the liver back out of the river. In fact booze became a ready-made substitute for escaping the bonds of myself and I dove ever deeper across the span of the next nearly one dozen years. Time spent on the high seas before I nearly drowned making it to shore.

For those of us missing whatever it is we're missing, finding it even for a moment, and especially in concentrated bursts of what we imagine happiness feels like, is pretty fucking compelling. It carries with it a lot of weight, requiring that much more on the down side for us to run in the other direction, moving the scale back again toward the breathing end of life.

Many of us never get it righted and just keep going, going, going into oblivion.

The Experiment

June, 2006. White coats, bright lights, devilish laughter. Everything is distorted. Clear liquid instruments blend into metal running through IV tubes out of my arm onto the tray. My body rises slightly; reacting, rough callused fingers pat my wrist, then push down on the syringe, the big fade. My head falls to the side hard on the pillow, nylon straps gripping me to the gurney. Whispers blue black, silence blood red. And always: white coats, bright lights, devilish laughter.

I'd been in the ER a few hours at this point, but if you told me I'd been here five minutes or three days, I wouldn't have been surprised.

Mike found me at my house at noon in hallucinatory madness, raving about my walking travels through Mexico the night before as though I'd strolled out of my home in Philadelphia through a wormhole into Tijuana.

I also regaled him with the exploits of a female basketball team living mostly in my attic the past week. The racket was grating on me, what with the bouncing of the basketball echoing through the ceiling and their laughter trailing after it. Except for their center, a very tall Asian player who stands motionless and silent next to my skis in the spare room the whole time. Mike took a peek and of course found nothing, no one but me in the house.

And the dog-size rats! With razor tipped teeth flashing yellowy eyes, shit they were flowing like a river of bubonic gray through my house and out the front door yesterday! The pro-rat crowd was out in force down the street, a spontaneous rally aimed squarely against yours truly, upset that I'd dialed up Pest Control. Man, you should have been here, Mike! They had a big parade with those same rats as Grand Marshall. Then the Pest Control folks arrived and the whole parade/rally exploded into a riot in the church parking lot! I went and hid in the church until the smoke cleared. Wicked!

Just the usual small talk between old friends.

Mike looked around and then at me, quizzically. I had red slits for eyes and jaundiced pallor, pouring sweat. Unshaven in weeks, matted hair uncut in months. Shower? Who needs those? Clearly something was very wrong, and I knew it too on some level, but not in a way I could communicate to myself, certainly not to others. Things were fine!

After an uncomfortable few minutes Mike quietly said, "You need to go to the emergency room, I think something isn't right. You're making no sense." I was agreeable, though I didn't know why. It was like an out of body experience, I was just sitting back in the darkened theater crunching popcorn and watching the show with the rest, wondering what was next for our intrepid anti-hero.

The next thing I 'remember' are the white coats, bright lights, devilish laughter.

You see, I was at the tail end of my own special experiment: let's take a medical leave from work and see what happens when you polish off the better part of two 70cl bottles of Tanqueray each day for the long end of four weeks and then .. just ... stop ... cold. Slow motion suicide. A month long gunshot to the head.

The first four weeks were easy enough - well, the first two and half weeks were anyway.

Gradually the challenge of making it to the state store in the morning without dry heaving on the guy at the register became a massively complicated effort, the hardest I think I've ever worked in my life. Trying to look as normal as I could, trying to walk, then actually drive. Man, I was soaked with sweat like I'd been hiking in an Ecuadorian jungle for a week dressed to scale Mt. Everest. And that's after I managed to make it from the bed all the way to ... the chair by the bed. Puts on pants. Slugs down a gin and orange juice, throws up, another, throws up, another, keeps it down - no, throws up. One more. Puts on shirt. Brush teeth. Slugs down another, back up, down, up, down, down. And so on it went. At least on those happy days when I had a little liquid normal left in the bottle. Some days, I wasn't so lucky.

The drives to the state store were the worst - two miles or so, shaking so uncontrollably I could barely grip the steering wheel, big beach towel in the passenger seat to wipe the pools of chilled sweat pouring down my face and arms. Yellow/clear sickness sticking to black leather upholstery and dripping down the driver's side window when I turned the wrong way.

But I managed to do it - not only the state store but a stop off at the Wawa Deli for a quart or two of orange juice on the way back. Then, finally, home. I made it! I had my supplies and life could go on. Well, not quite. After another round of drink, vomit, drink, vomit, drink, drink, drink ... (Three and a half years later, I still can't stomach the smell of orange juice.)

Finally I was straight enough to turn on the TV, check email, veg out and channel surf. Looking for anything that would divert my attention from the 800 pound gorilla sitting on my chest clawing at my stomach. And drink, TV and drink. Until I passed out. And then the daily cycle repeated itself.

Good times!

My trash cans were filling with empty gin bottles, I was truly the Tanqueray poster child for May 2006, though I imagine I wouldn't be their first choice as spokesperson. Sipping on Gin and Juice, laid back. Not quite, Snoop.

The final week was especially miserable, to the point where I couldn't move, open my eyes, or make a sound without heaving. The slightest smell, however innocuous, would kick off a chain reaction of nausea. Only an ever growing intake of booze would temporarily dull this effect, put the genie back in the bottle for a few hours, but less and less for shorter and shorter periods. Eventually almost all the booze ended up in the toilet as sick.

My stomach, never strong and already prone to severe bouts of acid reflux, finally said "no more." It just wouldn't accept anything. So it was time for phase two: stopping. It was a tough road for a day or so - shaking violent upheavals, icy hot chills. And then it seemingly got better, dreamy. In fact the most vivid waking dreams of phantom visitors, parades down my little street, trips around the globe, rats and razors, and human/rodent riots, all from the 'comfort' of the bathroom floor, eye level with the buttons on the bottom of the shower curtain, night and day gleaned from the indirect light reflected off the mirror above me.

Mike found me on day three of withdrawal and by that point, to paraphrase John Lennon, cold turkey already had me on the run.  And the race seemed over. I was pretty much resigned to death, even giddy about the prospect (no more technicolor yawns). Maybe the joviality was simply an outbreak of the delirium tremens, the DTs. In fact I know now that it almost certainly was, but at the time I thought the DTs meant pink elephants or giant imaginary bugs crawling up the walls and such. The Hollywood interpretation.

But I had gotten myself dressed and called Mike to see if he wanted to grab lunch. I thought I had come out the other side at some level. My masochistic experiment over, I kept telling myself. Fat lot I knew. The slight horror on Mike's face when I opened the door should have been a clue I couldn't gauge my condition properly. Then I opened my mouth and uttered the most nonsensical things. It was clear to him that I was off the deep end and plunging into the icy depths.

My delirium fantasies hit full stride in the ER. The staff there - sometimes doctors, occasionally nurses - hooked me up to a diuretic IV drip for what seemed like hours, force feeding me chocolate and corn. But they wouldn't let me go to the shitter. I tried to speak to them, pleading with them to stop but it seemed they didn't understand a word I said. They looked at me, laughed, and responded always with same two word non sequitur: "Kill Kirk." Never anything but that. "Kill Kirk"

What did it mean?

I wasn't particularly fond of the 60s Star Trek franchise, certainly no Trekkie. But I knew of no other 'Kirk'. I didn't actually hear this, so it came from somewhere within me. Maybe I misheard some critical care/medical jargon/phrase.

So, "Kill Kirk" and then he or she would invariably scribble something on a notepad, chuckle devilishly, and furiously hustle away, bent over doing the Groucho Marx walk with the hand out, fingers gripping the invisible Groucho cigar. Except for the last time.

The last visit I received from the ER staff was when they opened the curtain around my gurney and descended on me en masse. This time there was no "Kill Kirk" or scribbled notes. This time, they stripped me naked, pinned a big clear plastic diaper on me and carried me out into the middle of the street in front of the hospital, depositing me there to quite literally shit myself into oncoming traffic. Fade to black.

I awoke in a hospital room, arms and faces melting like wax around me, pricking and poking, talking loud, screaming. I was dying, I swore I heard that. I glanced out the window and saw palm trees. Quickly to the right, there - a motion camera with crew behind it. I was in Hollywood, on a movie set. Or TV. ER? Grey's Anatomy?

I'm not an actor, though, I'm dying!

Was I taking the Stanislavski Method to it's logical extreme? Or part of a documentary on the terminally ill? Somehow they both made sense. How did I get out of the street? Did I crawl back in? How did I make it to Hollywood? Do the ER staff know? They'll find me and fix my wagon for good. But that was in Philadelphia. If I was in Hollywood on a film set, those ER goons couldn't find me. Unless the film crew ARE the ER goons, making ER. This Philadelphia area 'hospital' I'm in was in Hollywood, always had been. The two worlds were one in my mind.

The faces huddled across from my bed, whispering. What is that they are saying? Liver failure? Renal Failure? Don't lie to me! Motherfucking liars! I wanted to go home to die, tried to break free. I jumped up and kicked at the face blocking the door but missed, slamming my foot into a metal cabinet, breaking two toes and collapsing on the floor. Fade to blur.

Dreams, I'm driving a car with a large sack of potatoes next to me, it goes on and on. I'm still running from death but it's embodied as a car full of doctors now, and they're gaining on me with humongous hypodermics sticking out of the roof.

Finally, lucidity begins to regain its footing in my psyche. Slowly I awaken, but in Philadelphia, in a hospital. Hollywood's gone. And I'm not dying, not immediately, anyway. I am securely strapped down to the hospital bed. For my own safety as well as that of the staff, a nurse tells me.

Confused, disoriented, I'd remain that way for the next several days, perhaps forever. But I knew where I was. Arms immobile in the makeshift straight jacket that binds me to a bed in a hospital with IVs coming out of my arm, sharp pain shooting through my foot and a dull, throbbing hurt all around my eyes. Deep black spots speckle my field of vision, an old man in the bed next to me gags, coughs behind the partition. A TV plays overhead - some soap opera I can make out through the bad reception. A doctor on rounds stands over me. What day is it? Monday. When did I get here? Saturday. Your sister is flying in. What happened? You very nearly drank yourself to death.

Ahh, yes.

I knew where I was. But not a clue as to where I might be going.

The Cook

The blue white glow of the gas burner is central to the Cook's world. A world wholly crafted within the confines of his mother's house, narrower even than that: the back room, the kitchen.

The other denizens of this world - guests - huddle round the kitchen table covered in plastic baggies, lighters, spoons, pipes. A smokey stench permeates down into the foundation of the old row home. The fraying early 70s furnishings have long since given in to the activities of the kitchen, as has the ceiling and walls peeling paper, sweat and smoke. It can't be deodorized, fumigated, but there will be no such attempt: this ambiance is essential to the mood.

The Cook does his work at the burner alone. Bag to spoon over burner, powder bubbling to rock. His otherwise trembling hands steady in this endeavor, nimble fingers gingerly raising, then lowering the utensil over the heat. The others fixate on his mastery from the table, no one questions his craft, intervenes in his preparation. He is Emeril Lagasse, Wolfgang Puck. He is The Cook.

Beyond the burner's glow, the house remains bathed only in midnight's colors. Deep blue black shadows illuminate - quickly, a pulse - with flashes of the lighter, a flare of the pipe - rock softly crackling to smoke, inhaling: wwwoooowwww. Euphoria. Murmurs. One minute, two. Gone. Sad Shadows. Flash/flare, wow. Wonderment. Gone. Again. The Cook gently instructing his young charges: slow, slow down - never chase the flame. Disapproving glance, knowing mumble. The 'meal' is ruined with hasty consumption - savor, taste, let the flame chase you.

From the alley the kitchen window takes on the look of a lighthouse, the burner's steady glow punctuated by the table's periodic sweeping flashes. Wow, euphoria. Leading lost ships to its port for a price, fine dining on the edge of a rough sea. Cash or the raw ingredients gladly accepted. Absolutely no checks, cards or credit.

Sitting on the backyard trash can, a stray cat looks into the window transfixed, confused. Then jumps off and toward the Burger King parking lot down the way, more potential there for an understandable meal.