The Last Drink

Trigger warning: contains themes of alcoholism/addiction.

It’s following me again. I walk from the kitchen to the living room and hide. Jaded doesn’t even begin to describe it. I hate the world and the idea of the world. I loathe people and places and work and free time. I can’t stand Netflix bingeing or walking in the park. I don’t enjoy eating, not even Mexican food, which used to be the end of all things. As Rob Thomas would say, “My reason for reason.” No, I have one obsession. It’s with me when I wake up and carries my carcass through the day. It laughs at me in a cajoling way, sweet-talks me until I can’t feign resistance. It consumes my every thought, whim, desire, and impulse.

It wants me.

I throw the empty beer bottle across the room and watch it smash into fragmented pieces, akin to how I feel, broken and scattered. I have lost everything to this madness. My wife, our dogs, our beautiful house that perched on the hill, perfect in its sturdy position before the slant, the slide into nothingness. I rue how I lost that six-figure paying job, the one that ate up my soul but afforded me luxuries. The luxury of not having to cut my grass, wash my car, or even clean the inside of my toilets, that ability to slight some stranger into doing the filthy, tedious work. It’s okay to slight people if your aim is for their betterment.

You probably think I’m narcissistic and self-centered. Maybe I am. Spoiled, at the very minimum. I went to the best Ivy League school. I mean the very best, the one that you want your kids to attend. I had every advantage known to humankind, the crème de la crème of clothes, trips, cars, nannies, tutors, and personal trainers. You envy me when we pass each other, when you longingly follow me with your eyes into that fancy restaurant, the one that doesn’t fit into your meager budget. I give you a deferential look, the one that hollows you out with an unspoken sadness. What you don’t know is that I’ve already been hollowed out, worn, abused, stifled, emptied to the point that I rely on this false projection. The snobbery is a crutch.

I can laugh loudly with a hugeness that is commanding. I laughed at Sophie when she had endured her limit. I don’t know why she was surprised. I told her from the beginning that I would choose the beer over her. It might be a reflexive choice, but a choice nonetheless. How much more brutally honest could I have been, really? I hear she’s re-married with twins. Twins! Talk about wanting to suffer. She’s the hypocrite, shunning her maternal instincts when we were together only to do an about face and have multiples. I think that’s what they call twins. Heard she dived headfirst into that IVF game. What a farce, and she’s going to call me out when I was upfront and transparent.

“Be careful what you wish for, Sophie. Be very careful.”

I don’t drink that cheap lite beer. No, I go for the gusto, the dark, heavy stuff - the craft, specialty brews that are a balm to the hollowness. The first sip of the day, whether it comes at 9 am or 9 pm, has the soothing effect of entering heaven, a familiarity of lost love, the embrace of everything you have ever wanted. It’s a taste, but reminiscent of a scent, something that you want to get all up in with a revelry. I swish it around in my mouth and it takes its hold. Remember that saying, “First a man takes a drink; then the drink takes a drink; then the drink takes a man.” Brilliant. I could be friends with the guy clever enough to write that succinct phrase. Thanks, Hemingway, or was it Fitzgerald? Who knows? But I could drink with the best or worst of them.

So, you ask, “What is it that I want?”

I go to grab another beer out of my stainless-steel refrigerator, the one that set me back fifteen grand, the same one where every shelf holds a stock of nothing but rows of carefully lined beer bottles and a tomato. Now that I think about it, I don’t know that you’re supposed to refrigerate tomatoes. It’s probably gone bad like everything else in this twisted, sordid, messed-up version of a life. To answer your question, what I want is to feel whole. I can handle a squishy, mushy sense of wholeness like the rotting tomato. I just don’t want to bleed out everywhere, every day for the remainder of what is left.

Walking back to the living room, I try to sidestep and then hop over the glass shards, my anger that is resplendent on the floor. In doing so, I lose my balance, my foot catching the slippery pieces that send me into a sudden freefall. I land with a harsh thud, a searing pain that portends a bruised tailbone. My single thought is a gratefulness that I didn’t drop my beer, and I take a long, hard drink, feeling the liquid numb my existence. It’s dulling and life-giving. I sink into its stealthy grip.

I want to do the right thing. I want to be better than this moment and all the ones that preceded it. I wanted to choose Sophie, but I still don’t know how. I lose my balance because I can’t feel my feet. It’s not just my spirit that is voided; the nerve endings are dead. The alcohol has stripped me of dexterity. I step gingerly through hallways and memories because I have no sense of connection. I am gone.

It wants me.

It owns me.

Don’t do that pitiful gaze. I’ve brought myself to this state. I can manage the rest of the way. Not that you were thinking of helping me. I see you look away with disgust for all the things I wasted. I finish the beer in my hand, wondering if this will be my last drink, like the one that almost was the final toast, the one that precipitated the stroke I had three months ago. The more likely question is will this be the last drink for today?

I look inward by closing my eyes, on the verge of blackout, sorrowful and contrite. Darkness is my faulty reprieve. A tear slides to nowhere on my cheek. It is the only thing I feel.