“Thank you, fucking God,” I said, as I slid to a sit on the bus station floor.

In the busy station, desperate-looking travelers rushed to gates, driven by echoing loudspeakers. Bus terminals are not like airports or train depots, which tend to draw a moneyed clientele. Greyhound is the celestial ferry of the underclass, chariot of the poor. Those who ride the dog often don’t look well. But even among these, I stood out as a sorry case. Only by the power of my newly awakened spirit and the tickled humor of my smile could I claim a place among them. For I was arisen not from the dead but from the undead, and if some might question whether I even existed at all, well, without a drink in my hand, I wasn’t so sure myself.

And yet I felt a sense of newfound freedom. Previously, I had thought my life’s purpose was to write great literature and champion causes. Now I understood: my first duty was to live. The knife was at my throat. Here was proof of life: I had tried so hard to die. And the blade was not in any other hand but mine, turned on me. So I must do anything not to drink. I had my work cut out.

I supposed that now I knew enough, had faith enough, to make it safely overland for three days aboard the bus, a fast-moving silver bullet on wheels, painted on both sides with the emblem of a dog running for its life.

I felt so relieved not to have a hangover. And though, through sober eyes, the world looked severely businesslike, frantic, joyless even, now and then inside I felt flashes of causeless happiness, cosmic winks, that brought smiles to my lips. In the meetings, I had been promised that my shaking hands would soon be still. So, here in the terminal, there was nothing to do now but sit back with shaking hands and smoke a cigarette.

An old black woman in a wrinkled dress came along, dragging a garbage bag identical to mine. Hers, filled to bursting, seemed to weigh a ton. Hauling it strained the sinews of her neck. She stopped about ten feet away, slid to a sit against my wall. Her feet were shod in Carolina work boots, untied laces trailing on the ground, and hair done up in little braids tied with colored rubber bands.

She searched the floor around her feet and, with a pleasure that I well knew from gutter days, found a smoke and lit up, inhaled, exhaled, and spoke to herself. There is a kind of conversation with yourself that is sane and another sort that is with imaginaries—hers was the latter. When she noticed me looking her way, she gazed back with the disarming impudence of a child—mad for sure, but sweetly so. Older, too, than I imagined. Must have been in her late seventies, early eighties, perhaps. What a world, I thought, to leave one like her homeless and hungry. What social order could allow this? What political system supports this? What economic theories justify this? Greed and indifference permit the old and infirm to die neglected. Being sober did not mean that I should ever make accommodation with a world that says: She is none of our affair.

And, yet, here I was too—an Ivy league grad schooler with a published book, a writer, former museum program director, fundraising wheeler-dealer, Israeli soldier—and had as little as she, maybe less. We shared the same dirty bus terminal floor.

The old woman was crazy, but so was I, with my long secret history of hearing voices, PTSD delusions, the stabbing phobia—all undocumented because I was good at hiding. But, then, for twenty-two years, in full view of myself, I’d poured down my own throat a killing substance that drove me to ever-worsening depths of madness. I had, then, no cause to pity her. We were the same. Each hanging on by our fingernails. And realizing this, the strangest thing happened. I felt a sudden sense of warmth hatch and spread through me and heard a small faint whisper of a voiceless voice say: “Just smile.” Which I did, straight back at her; and in her face appeared the warmest, prettiest beaming little girl. And there we sat, on the terminal floor, two broken children, smiling at each other.

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Alan Kaufman is the author of Drunken Angel, the novel Matches, and a critically acclaimed memoir, Jew Boy. He is also an award-winning editor of several anthologies, most notably The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He lives in San Francisco.

A Reason to Smile is an excerpt from Drunken Angel, published by Viva Editions.

The first thing that hits you is a rush of fear as you realize you have no idea where you are or how you got there. This lost fumbling confusion is all too familiar. Countless mornings you have woken up hung over—head pounding, throat parched—and you have struggled through this very same panic, this very same mental reconstruction as you try to piece together the events of the night before.

But this is different. This doesn’t feel like those other mornings. This time, the movie replaying the night before doesn’t slowly start to materialize in your head.  This time, your mind is at a standstill. You’re swimming through waves of painkillers and sedatives, trying to work your way through the fog. Everything still seems like a dream, like you haven’t yet woken up.

You scan the room and all you see are walls so white the edges blur together in an infinite, all encompassing cave that seems to trap you, swallow you up. There are needles and tubes in your arms, your chest, all across your body, like needles poking into a voodoo doll. The sharp antiseptic scent of a doctor’s office tells you that you must be in a hospital, but you don’t know where, or what got you here. Now that you think about it, you don’t even remember who you are.

And then, your eyes settle on the one recognizable thing in the room—Michael. Michael with his wispy blonde hair, Michael with his clear blue eyes. And Michael is telling you something as he stands over you, his face going from triple to double finally down to just one. He is standing over you, or is he sitting, or are you sitting? No time to figure that out right now. His mouth is moving but you can’t make out words. You are trying desperately to make sense of what his words are telling you — answers to the questions that are buzzing like flies around your head.

Emergency room, you hear. Seizure, you vaguely make out. More words are tossed around to you as a nurse comes in to pull the tubes out from your arms, detach the IV, give you instructions on what to do in the next few days. But you blur her out, only hearing Michael, holding on to the one anchor keeping you tethered to the room. He is saying something about an electrolyte imbalance, the ecstasy you took. You barely remember meeting his parents for the first time the night before, but were rolling too hard to recall how it went. Michael trails on, the words floating up around your head and disappearing in a haze created by all the sedatives in your bloodstream.

The next 72 hours are a blur. You are in a car, at a restaurant, at a house, in an airplane. You are going home to Atlanta, that much you understand. Time and places and people blur by. Your mom greets you at the airport and you hug her without feeling her. It is pouring raining and humid as ever in Atlanta but you barely feel the drops as they whip you across your face, barely feel the burst of Southern summer heat envelope you in an embrace as you step outside of the airport. Welcome home.

Your mom takes you to the doctor, the same one you used to visit in grade school who gave you tootsie pops after shots. He explains to you about brain scans and electrolyte imbalances and the dangers of drug use, spits out statistics that were foreign and two dimensional in health class but are now, very quickly, becoming enormously tangible. He is pointing at charts of what you are told is your brain. It is splotched with dark spots—spots that look eerily like the Swiss cheese analogies anti-Drug campaigns loved to drill into your head—and you wonder, why do you never listen until it’s too late?

The doctor tells you with apologetic eyes that it will be awhile before you feel normal again. He explains that as your sodium levels dropped dangerously low and your brain was flooded with water, your body shut down, taken over by the spasms of a seizure, and a sort of restart button was pushed in your head. He says you blew out a big serotonin fuse in your head, and in the weeks to come, you may feel like the wires in your brain aren’t connecting like they used to, that you might slip back into a depression. He uses mechanical, medical terms, talking about your brain like a machine, something that simply needs rewiring, a few pills to straighten out the kinks.

But he doesn’t tell you about how in the days to come you won’t be able to keep up a conversation without forgetting what you were saying, getting lost halfway in thoughts. That the sharp mind that got you straight A’s all through high school and college now dumbly strains to grab at easy words, how communicating is a struggle. How all of time is divided into before and after, normal and now.

And he doesn’t warn you about the nights of insomnia where you stay up thinking of suicide until the sun rises, about the way you sit in your room with the door closed while your friends and roommates laugh and party a room away, about the jail cell you build yourself in your brain. He doesn’t tell you about how your boyfriend can’t look at you anymore without flashing back to those moments of you seizing, your limp body shaking heavy in his arms, your eyes rolled back, you unresponsive. You not in there, you not quite you anymore.

He doesn’t tell you about the spider that lodges in your brain, building a web. About how you taste dust when you eat, see ghosts when you sleep, speak in a whisper when all you want to do is scream. You can’t feel the breath entering your lungs or a hot shower warming your bones. Every day all you feel is a desert in your veins. You constantly feel like you are standing one breath, one inch, one day away, reaching, fingers stretched, skin cracking, to go back to the person you used to be, the way you used to feel.

You are desperate to get rid of this. You try to write, the one way you used to be able to find relief. But the words paralyze you. The neat, crisp forms of words line up like rows of little blue pills you wash down in the morning with a glass of water. Words used to swirl around your head. Now, trying to put down words on a sheet of blank paper is like trying to talk to an old lover: you don’t know where to begin. Too much time has elapsed; all the words come out stale.

You grasp for identity. The person you were—outgoing, social, effervescent—has slipped away. Your friends tell you that you’ve changed, get upset with you for not going out on the weekends. You try to explain to them but can’t seem to find a way to articulate what you need to say.

Cheap wine that you buy by the box is the one thing keeping you together. The doctor told you if you ever took ecstasy again you’d end up back in the hospital, but sometimes at night when you lie in bed you can almost taste your craving for the E. It’s the one thing in life you still want, the only thing that triggers a surge of excitement: that little pill of sunshine that electrified your limbs and pulsed through your body. You know if you could go back and do it all over again you still would. You would lose it all again just for one more roll.

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Aimee E. Millwood is currently a literature student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work has been published in Spectrum Literary Journal, The Bottom Line,  The Raiders’ Digest, and WORD Magazine.

The valley’s not really magic. When I was a kid I thought it was, because when you drive north on the 405 there’s a moment when you come over the hill and you see the valley laid out beneath you. At night the lights on the buildings glitter red and white and yellow. Those San Fernando cities—Van Nuys, North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks—are indistinguishable at night, each square block a mirror image of the previous one, boundaries dissolved.

So first there were the lights against a black background as we crested, then descended. My daddy used to say: “Look at the sparkly jewels. We are going down into the Seven Dwarves’ Diamond Mine.” Maybe we sang.

Then later, after my dad had been dead for a couple of years and I had little reason to navigate those dusty valley streets, I returned for the dope. I didn’t know about downtown or Bonnie Brae in those days. But my friend had introduced me to his dealer in exchange for two hundred dollars cash and a twenty dollar balloon.

Dope made the valley magic again.

I would take the 405 north, but usually in the daytime. I still felt the sharp-edged pleasure of that nostalgia as I came over the hill. The dealer would tell me where to meet him: a Thrifty or Ralph’s parking lot, the alley behind a bar, some random residential corner. I would park and keep my eyes trained on the rear view mirror, the reflection of the street, heated air shimmering low over the asphalt.

Sometimes, after I copped, I would drive by my dad’s old house. From the outside, it looked the same: wooden fences with chipped white paint sagging under the weight of pine needles, the huge tree in the front yard, the cement stairs and porch under the living room windows. I always slowed and looked for signs of a child–a brightly colored ball, a big wheel, walnuts on the porch for the squirrels.

It was impossible to make it back over the hill without getting high. So I usually wouldn’t take the freeway back. I’d take Laurel or Coldwater so I could turn onto some quiet street, park, and get high. In those days I smoked it, so I always had aluminum foil in the car. Sometimes, if I wasn’t afraid of nodding off, I detoured onto Mulholland for the view. After I got high I wasn’t sick anymore, and I didn’t feel the nostalgia.

The childhood memories are mostly still distorted. But I do remember the squirrels coming right up to the welcome mat and picking up the nuts in their little hands. I watched them from inside, my face pressed against the window, trying hard to stay quiet so I wouldn’t scare them away.

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Allison McCabe writes about addiction, sex, and Los Angeles. Her work has been published in the Village Voice’s Naked City, Ramshackle Review, sexandthe405.com, and Main Street Journal (UK). She occasionally blogs at http://allison-mccabe.com/.

The symptoms are all too familiar.

Your calves are on fire. Muscles cramp. Lower back aches like dead weight. Fingers and toes feel numb. Head pounds, skin itches, sweat dries. You have a runny nose, watery eyes, stiff joints, ass rash, and bruises peppering your limbs. The pain will linger for days. The discomfort is so consuming, so inescapable that, despite your body odor, you haven’t bothered to shower or even change clothes in nearly a week.

Your doctor, if consulted by phone, might presume you fell off the wagon, that you’re lying in bed, that after going on a heroin binge you’re suffering through withdrawal. But at 4,587 feet, alone atop Wright Peak, you know such a diagnosis would be wrong.

For starters, cell reception is spotty at best this deep in the Adirondacks. And you’re far from flat. You’re standing. On a mountain. In snowshoes. At sunrise. By yourself. You’ve been winter hiking and ice climbing the entire vacation, which is why you’re so beat up, so ragged out. Your body feels like a bag of bones, yet you haven’t used junk in a decade. You’re not jonesing. Much to the contrary—at the moment, you’re pretty damn high.

You climbed more than a hundred mountains last year, soaking up alpine views from the Catskills to Colorado. Not much has changed. The substance may be different, but once again, you’re hooked. The wilderness still calls. You still walk through sketchy areas in the dark. Still disappear for days on end. Still push your luck. Still leave loved ones to worry. Still run around chasing dreams.

A friend wonders why you replaced heroin with mountains, failing to realize the question he’s asking is why anyone uses junk in the first place. “It seems so extreme. You put yourself through hell. And it’s dangerous.” You try to explain: it’s not easy, but once you’ve kicked dope a few times, climbing a mountain is no big deal. He asks what you’re looking for. In the heroin days, it wasn’t God, only heaven. Now, it’s about getting to higher ground.

People warn you about going solo. They say it’s risky, especially in winter. But if you’ve learned anything from smack, it’s how to push the envelope without bursting into flames. You still crave that out-of-body experience, to see yourself standing in snow on a summit—the same way you once, nodding from half a bundle, watched from above as you lay to waste on a bathroom floor. Addiction is peeking over the edge without going too far, scaling mountains without falling off them, if only so you’ll be able to climb another day.

You have faith. You believe in yourself.

And so do I.

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Grady Phelan is the pseudonym of a high school dropout who married a Harvard graduate. Much of his time is spent alone in wilderness areas. He has climbed mountains in the Rockies, the Appalachians, Africa, and Nepal.

Before I turned myself into a blackout drunk, and before Colby killed himself in some lonely room in a Holiday Inn near the I-70 on-ramp, we went to high school together. Scecina Memorial, on the eastside of Indianapolis. A Catholic high school in a blue-collar neighborhood behind a fire station and separated by a chain link fence from a bar called the Shi-Kay. The Shi-Kay was the kind of bar that was filled with the doomed and depressed, alcoholic and addict, and Colby and I would eventually find our ways into their ranks.

In high school, Colby was a brash, pudgy kid whose clothes and hair made it look like he had just come out of a J.C. Penney’s ad. I was constantly being told to tuck in my shirt, and was sent to the dean’s office to shave the two-day growth from my chin. I played sports and ran around with popular kids and drank and got high on the weekends and before school. Colby liked to brag about how expensive his shoes were and thought he could talk shit because his old man was a cop. In his mind, this gave him license. And in most cases, it led to him getting his ass kicked. Still, we got on well enough.

We both played golf at a burnt-out city course named Pleasant Run. And while Colby and I were never really friends, we occasionally played eighteen together. Sometimes it’s enough just to have another human being around. Sometimes you need to know that you’re not alone. We would see each other at parties and pass a joint back and forth and laugh about things that, at the time, seemed hilarious, but things that, now, I can’t remember.

But I do remember how, at that golf course, when nobody was looking, he would sneak into the shed where the concessions were kept and come out with a couple of warm cans of Budweiser. And once out of view from the clubhouse, we would crack them open and chug the beer down. I told him he was stupid for stealing the beer, but I never refused to drink it, no matter how warm.

After high school, I spent a year at two different universities, dropped out of both and came back home. One weekend, I ran into Colby at a party. He was a senior in high school and I was seeing a girl in his class. Everybody at that party was younger than me. Colby and I did shots of vodka in the kitchen until we could barely see, then he laughed and said, “I just want you to know, I’m not going to be like you.” Then he ran outside and threw up.

I understood what he meant: he wasn’t going to be what he considered a two-time loser, future alcoholic, who was maybe hanging on to the thrill of high school a little too long. So I left that party, left the girl, and took a string of nowhere jobs working on maintenance and construction crews, as a parking attendant, in retail, and finally landing at the Shi-Kay.

I began tending bar there in 1999. They needed someone to pick up the late shift a couple of nights a week, and I needed easy access to alcohol. I was twenty-one and my drinking, which had started in high school, had evolved into something like need—a routine like breathing or brushing your teeth.

So I worked from eight p.m. to three a.m. slinging booze to a population that included factory workers coming off a shift, looking to unwind the only way they knew how; ex-athletes gone fat in middle age and unable to let go of the glory days; kids a year or two out of high school wanting to check the place out; in the shadows were drug dealers and the women who were willing to perform blow jobs out back behind the dumpster for one more snort of cocaine; and middle class men from the neighborhood who were slowly being dissolved by alcoholism. We all sat there in a kind of communion, and sometimes, Colby sat there with us.

A year after I started working there, Colby walked into the Kay with a group of buddies during one of my shifts behind the u-shaped bar. “What the hell,” he said. “I didn’t know you were working here.” We shook hands and I asked him how school was going and he told me that he was taking a semester off. “I’m working at a bank right now,” he said. “It’s a good job, I’m making good money, there’s opportunity for advancement.” I nodded and asked him what he wanted to drink. He ordered four Millers and slipped a five into the palm of my hand like he was doing me a favor.

Colby’s semester off turned into a year. And his visits to the Shi-Kay became more frequent—sitting on the same bar stool, ordering the same rum and Coke on a nightly basis. In that same year, I had twice been arrested and gone through as many useless attempts at getting clean. Some nights Colby and I would shoot pool or sit and talk over a beer. But we didn’t talk about my arrests or that he hadn’t gone back to school yet. We didn’t talk about anything. It was all filler: sports, people we went to high school with, women. Mostly we just drank.

Over the next couple of years, Colby got a promotion at the bank, bought a shiny new black car and started to keep his tie on at the bar. Even though I had quit the Shi-Kay, I continued to go downhill. I got a job on the night sort at UPS, working my way up to part-time supervisor, lording over a group of men loading boxes into tractor-trailers. I was half-drunk most nights trying to make sure your packages got to the right place and on time. But really, I didn’t give a shit. I slept all day then stopped at the Kay for a couple of quick pops to steady my hands before heading to work. But when the weekends came I drank until one of two things happened: I passed out or I ran out of money.

One Saturday a group of seven or eight of us were at the Shi-Kay ordering buckets of beer and shots of Jack Daniels like it was the last Saturday we would ever know. And Colby was there buying round after round, trying to impress a bunch of low-rent drinkers who didn’t care where the booze was coming from as long as it kept coming. And somebody had a little baggie of coke and we started to talk faster and louder—the more we sniffed, the more we drank. We sang the wrong lyrics to the wrong songs that were playing on the jukebox, and none of us wanted to go home. So when the bar closed, we bought a few cases of beer from the bartender and moved our party somewhere else.

By six-thirty in the morning the beer was all gone, my nose kept running on account of all the blow I had done, and I was tired of playing Euchre. I stood up and said I was leaving. Colby, who had been playing cards, too, said he would give me a ride. I told him to fuck off. I was going to walk even though I had no idea where I was or which direction to go. I got about a block away before he pulled up next to me in his car and told me to get in, that I was stumbling around and if any cops saw me they were going to arrest my ass again. I closed the door and passed out.

When he pulled up in front of my house, Colby shook me awake, told me I was home. I opened the door, and instead of saying thanks for the ride, vomit splashed my shoes. “Jesus,” Colby said. “You need to get your shit together.” I was twenty-four years old.

Four years later, something clicked and I finally got sober—white knuckling it through each day doing whatever it took not to have a drink. I had moved out of Indianapolis, gone to Ohio, away from the Shi-Kay and the people I used to drink with. I had gone back to school and, a couple months shy of my thirtieth birthday, earned my college degree. I was on my way to graduate school, and hadn’t thought about Colby since that night he’d given me a ride home, when my mother called and told me he was dead. And this might sound crass, but it’s honest: I didn’t know how to feel, so I took the news with a matter-of-factness I thought appropriate.

I learned second hand from a former teacher that Colby had finally graduated from Southern Indiana University. After graduation he got a job as a construction superintendent supervising the building of apartment complexes and warehouses. He got married to a girl I didn’t know, and, together, they bought a house. He volunteered at St. Mary’s Children Center, helping at-risk kids in Indianapolis. I wonder if there were discussions between Colby and his wife about having children of their own. His life seemed to be on an upward trajectory. And then one day he decided he had had enough. His friends said he was depressed, that they should have seen the signs, should have done something. Friends always say that. And when they say it, it’s always too late.

He went out that day and shot the best round of golf in his life—a 66. Then he checked into the Holiday Inn and swallowed fistfuls of pills, washed down with booze, until he fell asleep and didn’t wake up. At least I think it was pills. Still, in my imagination, whenever I think of his suicide, he uses a gun—a big, blue-black gun. Sticks it in his mouth and pulls the trigger so that the last thing he knows is the taste of an old penny.

The pills and booze seem weak, unsure; the gun romantic, decisive. There is no slow fade into oblivion, no fading chance to reach for the phone and maybe make one last desperate attempt to call for help. Just a quick bang and that’s it, blackness and blood splatter. If I’m honest with myself, that’s how I would do it.

I think about Colby’s life and, on paper, at least, it seems like he had it all figured out: a good job, volunteer work, a wife, a house, a regular foursome. But he didn’t. Something was missing. Something was off. And my guess is he couldn’t figure out how to silence that voice that lived somewhere just behind his right ear—the one that kept telling him that he didn’t deserve the house or the wife, that he would never measure up as a man, how no one really loved him and no matter what anyone else said, his whole life was shit. So he stopped it the only way he knew how. He was twenty-nine years old.

I didn’t go to the funeral, didn’t send flowers or a card or my condolences. Maybe I should have. Still, the reason I didn’t go is because I couldn’t handle seeing myself in that casket. Thinking how it could have been me in that hotel room—how our roles could have easily been reversed. The only thing I did was print out the obituary from the Indianapolis Star’s website and read it over and over again. Wondering, if it were mine, would it have been any longer than the four or five lines telling me about Colby’s survivors, his church, his job, and where I should go to pay my last respects.

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Brock Kingsley recently earned an MFA in creative writing from the Ohio State University. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Brooklyn Rail, Pleiades, Waccamaw, and elsewhere.

I notice in pretty restaurants,
Erotic games and children’s toys;
The flakes of my disease.

For I am often baroque with my verbiage,
Stacking too many too high,
Too little too low.

My pulse lives in words,
Though my spirits rise with wine,
Because I am weak and lack in wealth
Come from a quiet family,
And have not suffered enough.

Often before an altar of electric light,
Working upon plastic papyrus,
I wonder if I tug as hard at the seams of others
As I do my own.

When stung by their sadness,
When retching at their ruptures,
I touch bruises, or scrape
The inner rawness
Of women and men
Who I love from afar,
But detest in intimacy

Then alone in their pain;
I find I am a stranger to my own.

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Ryan Hilary  recently graduated from Union Theological Seminary in New York. His cherished but impractical M.A. is in ethics and theodicy—defending divinity from accusations of malice. In other words, the problem of Evil, or more subtly put: making sense of suffering. These issues inform his writing. Although not a Christian, Ryan is sometimes honest. He was born in Belfast, raised in London, and put through the wringer in New York. He received his B.A. from Vassar College, despises writing about himself in the third person and thinks that if we take anything too seriously we shall all go mad.

The problem was finding a place to shoot up. I’d tried everything. Public buses, public bathrooms, people’s front stoops, in the parks, in parking lots where needles were hidden safely under the bumper of an immobilized car, it was a constant problem that needed constant solving.

One of the safest, most private places I could think of was the video arcade porno booths. The kind of joint that a guy went into with a roll of quarters in one hand and a hard-on in the other.

I’d done it before. There was a XXX porno shop beside the methadone clinic with the pay by the minute video booths hidden in back. I’d gone in and cooked up, and hit up by the light of thirty-six channels of endless sex.

It was maybe my third visit to the video arcade. I went into the booth, and started to set up shop. This included grabbing some newspaper from my bag and stuffing the glory hole to ensure complete privacy.

This time the paper popped back out. I stuffed it right back in. Again, it popped back out.

“Oh.”

There was someone on the other side pushing it out. I was so focused on finally having solitude that it didn’t even occur tome that that was what the fucking glory hole was there for in the first place. I had a needle in one hand, a spoon in the other. It was worse than being caught masturbating.

“No thanks!”  I said, replacing the paper. Loudly, I thought, but I guess not loudly enough, because the newspaper popped right back out. Goddamn it. I was pissed, I didn’t have all day. They made you buy a minimum three dollars in tokens and each of the tokens lasted only seconds it seemed. I had only so much light to unpack this shit, cook it up, and trickiest of all: find a vein.

At any moment I feared a big hard cock being shoved though the hole. Or a terrified voice shouting, “Hey what are you doing in there? That’s not beating off!”

I leaned over and shouted at the hole.

“Try another fuckin’ booth.” I shoved the paper back at the hole, and added, “Not interested.” An unnecessary appeasement in case I’d hurt the pervert’s feelings. I think he had figured out I’d be doing something other than what he was doing.

I went about my business quick.  My tiny bottle of water, the little rat-shit sized piece of black tar heroin, a shed of filter from my cigarette to draw it up through, and the reason for my urgency, a quarter gram of cocaine, ready to slide in once the junk was heated and dissolved.

I’d pump a few more tokens into the machine and look around for some fucking going on in a white room.  When I thought the light was the best, I’d take the spoon and twist it up into my sleeve, creating a tourniquet, and start poking around till I got something.

Afterward I’d try to stay in there, use up my tokens, check out the movies, but I never could. I’d flip around the channels, rubbing myself a little, but I had no interest, I was already satisfied. Then, the paranoia would set in, and I’d have to move on the next place, the next comfort zone.

*

It took a month or so before I felt like I had to go back to the booths again. It was late, the public pay toilets on Market Street were being serviced and it was too dangerous in the Tenderloin to just plunk down in a doorway and start fixing. The place beside the methadone clinic was too far away. It would only take a few minutes by bus, but that would require waiting for a bus, something I could not bear to do.

The closest places were the seediest joints in town. Turk and Taylor. The corner was widely known as the place you could buy any drug you could think of. I’d never think of buying there. It was a sure fire burn. It was crack dealers and people selling heavy duty meds. It’s where the homeless went to shop when they needed to self-medicate.

My presence down there was an exercise in self-denial. But I wasn’t gonna linger, I was gonna get this hit and then a bus ride wouldn’t seem so agonizing. After all, I hoped the next bus ride would take all night long.

The shop I picked was at 45 Taylor. It was next door to a halfway house a friend of mine stayed at when he got out of the pen. I walked in and browsed a few moments. It was the same stuff as the other joint. Dildos and DVDs. Same shit, different hole. I walked up to the counter and asked for tokens for the booths in back.

“Minimum three dollars,” said the clerk. Same as the other place. I didn’t say a word; I just forked over the three dollars and made my way toward the back. Once inside, I went through the same ritual as before. Only this time I noticed that the tokens didn’t give me as much time.

I was tearing cellophane with my teeth and drawing up water when I heard a knock. I froze. Fearful like a deer. Who would knock? Is that management? What do they want?  They’d have to assume I was jerking off and want privacy so I decided to ignore them and keep moving.

The red digits on the seconds counter fell as I hurried to assemble the hit. Dope, water, flame, coke, cotton.

Knock, knock, knock.

I had just drawn up the hit, I couldn’t have somebody pounding on the door when I had a needle in my vein, I had to answer.

“Fuckoff.” I called out. No sense in beating around the bush.

The knock came again, a little lighter this time.

“Fuckoff.” I repeated. A little louder this time.

But the knock came back, this time with a voice.

“Open up.” It was tough to make out, but it was a voice.

“Busy.” I answered. I wanted to kick the door open and scream What the fuck!, but I wanted that hit.

“Come on, man. Open up.” The voice was barely above a whisper. I knew it wasn’t management or the cops. It was almost pleading.

“What?” I said, as sharply as possible. I still didn’t want to open that door. Then I heard the voice say something I couldn’t make out.  It was a question, I could tell, but who knew what?

The voice repeated the question.

Jesus Christ, I wasn’t gonna get rid of this guy. I didn’t know if he needed a light or if he was hitting me up for change, but I was going to have to open up that door.  I held the needle behind my back and cracked it open just a bit.

There was no one there.

Then, the voice repeated the question. Even with the door cracked, I still couldn’t understand the question. I open the door further to see where the person owning that voice went.

It was then I saw something move in the blackness in front of me.  I looked down and saw two yellowy eyes and a set of grinning teeth looking up. I recognized him immediately; it was as though I’d already seen him in my nightmares. He was a tiny black man,only about 4 and a half feet tall.  I’d seen him many times on Market Street handing out photocopied poetry to uninterested commuters. He was dreadlocked and dirty. His head was too big for his body and his yellow glassy eyes bulged out of that enormous head.

“What?” I repeated, in shock from seeing him there in the first place.  He asked the question again. “Can you what?” It still made no sense to me.

He slowed down.

“When you are done . . . can I eat your wad?”

I blinked, astonished. This is what he wanted? This stranger? Is this what this guy did all night? I was nauseated, disgusted, but most of all pissed off that he interrupted me for . . . this.

I held up the needle in front of his face.

“I’m trying to fix. Fuck off.”

But he just stood there expecting me to change my mind. Grinning, waiting.

After a pause he said, “I mean, after.”

“I’m fixing, I don’t have any . . . wads,” I said and slammed the door.

I went back to work. Wham. Slam. Pack up and get out. I was trying not to think about that little troll at the door, about what kind of death wish one must have to go and beg to gulp a stranger’s semen in a porno booth in the Tenderloin.

As soon as I opened the door, there he was. Still hoping I was going to change my mind, or maybe waiting for the next guy.

I thought to bitch to the clerk, but decided against it. Better to keep moving. Next time, I’d take the excruciating bus ride down to the train station and take my chances with the hobos in the public restrooms; anything to avoid suicidal deviants.

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Tom Pitts was born in Calgary, Canada, and relocated to San Francisco in 1984. After making two critically-acclaimed albums on Rough Trade Records, and the disintegration of his band, Short Dogs Grow, Tom got an education in street life first-hand while enduring a near-fatal bout with heroin. Today, he lives in San Francisco with his wife and three kids, working and writing.

The video is Tom performing Turk and Taylor at Lip Service West, August 13, 2010.

Crossing First Avenue in lower Manhattan I hear over my shoulder a wheezy voice long associated with the Bowery. “Hey you. Ya ever been married? You?”

I turned. “Oh. Yeah. I am. Happily.”

“Nah. Not me. Never. You’ll never see me tied down!”

With that he eased himself across Fifth Street with a gait resembling a careful child on his first bicycle. Tempered, quasi-confident, scared to death. In the few moments I saw his face, all that registered were the clichés of a drunk: the bulbous, mottled red nose; craggy, deep-set lines; watery, vacant eyes.

Like many of us, I’m rarely as pleased as when a second drink has been placed before me.

Here’s a dream: I wake up bathed in vulgar red light, stretched out on a narrow bench in the back room of The Union, my favorite bar in Athens, Ohio. Rather than feel dissolute, or depraved, or hungover, I’m warmed and cocooned, content. There is no back room with a bench in this bar, at least that I’ve seen. In the dream I awake blessed in the clearly identifiable mood of being placed, rooted, surrounded in the air by comfort and safety. I’m in a bar in a dream and I’m home.

*

I stand across the street and watch as Kevin skulks down Union Street, ducks into the smokes shop to grab a newspaper, and disappears into the Union. It’s noon, or earlier, maybe it’s eleven. He is walking, then he vanishes into the lunch gloom of the bar. I want to follow him in, to begin the slow, glad dissolve of an afternoon, to welcome the warm, gold mirage, but I have somewhere more important to go. I stand on the street for a minute, feeling vaguely dumb, watching the door. In retrospect, I was a cousin to Paul in Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case,” who wanted to be involved in the theatre in some urgent but undefined way and after a performance followed the singer to her hotel where he simply stood, across the street, and watched her go in and then imagined what her room was like, how it was appointed, the splendors behind closed doors, the riches bestowed upon a star. I’m standing and watching, too, as a local drunk-star walks his beat.

And I’m wondering, poised between theory and practice. It’s a useless place, in many ways. I tend to romanticize from theoretical positions, a dangerous and solipsistic behavior. In the Old French, romanz meant a verse narrative, a story told of love affairs. By the mid-seventeenth century, the word romance came to mean, in literary terms, “characteristic of an ideal love affair.” My love affair with drinking was consummated mutely, without the passion and totality that I craved. Most people regret having not attempted something grand—do I regret not being a barfly? The question feels silly as I write it, and yet the question lingers. Had I a doppelganger on friendly terms, I might have struck a bargain: you go into that bar and drink yourself into oblivion; I’ll go the other way; we’ll meet up. One night—we’d been drinking—Amy and I talked about trying a kind of liquored-up immersion journalism, dropping out of the academic life, hitting the road, finding a comfortable saloon, and becoming committed, open-to-last-call barflies for a year or so; our angle was to write about the experience, burdened as we were with the pressure (and the desire) to find a marketable book idea. Soon enough Amy demurred out of fear that a year of hard drinking might re-wire her body toward full-on alcoholism. Fair enough. I didn’t give in so easily.

*

Romance, early beers, early clichés. Cheap Red White And Blue beers in rural Maryland, on the Eastern Shore. My friend Marty’s uncle’s family owned Genesar, a small brick home built in the eighteenth century, and acres of surrounding farmland buttressing the bay. The house had been added to the National Register of Historic Places fifteen years before Marty and I arrived in a beat-up/patched-together ’66 Travelall, giggling on our way to spending a week on the beach at Assateague State Park, near Ocean City. We camped for the night and plugged in to the ageless and heady vibe of the land. Early beers: the horizon lengthening, softening toward dark sweetness; the buzz of cicadas tuned to a new key singing songs of dusk landscapes that I knew the words to; strangers-now-friends leaping from corners, or materializing next to you, magically; tunes from the boom box duetting with breezes over corn and bean fields, the far-near Atlantic Ocean. I was 17 or 18. I remember this night as an especially wonderful night of drinking . . . what followed were years of ebb and flow between reason and excess, between logically counting the plastic cups in my hand at the bar and waking up afraid to look in my wallet, between not tonight and not enough, between chasing beers with water like clockwork and tumbling down the stairs.

When I was twenty-two I was arrested for drunk driving in Washington D.C. Marty and I’d pulled out of a pizza place in Adams Morgan and I’d neglected to turn on the headlights; a few minutes later the Park Police pulled me over. Is this luck, I asked myself when the first breathalyzer didn’t operate properly and I was driven to a park sub-station across the Anacostia River to try and blow again. By this time my blood-alcohol levels were lower, and I was arraigned on a lesser DUI. My car sat forlorn in the park overnight, a red ribbon of ignominy hanging from the front door. After a visit to the D.C. courts I opted to enter a diversion program that would expunge my record. I was deeply embarrassed, and wanted a kind of civic cloth to wipe it all away. I’d been arrested in December; in January I was back at graduate school at Ohio University in Athens, where I’d been living at the Union Bar from Thursday to Sunday. I was required to make weekly visits for one month with a university-appointed drug and alcohol counselor, a large man with an open, pleasant face who seemed to regard me, professionally and politely, as the obligation I was. He swiftly administered an alcoholic diagnostic test (I passed) and suggested that for the duration of our sessions I cease drinking. I of course agreed, though I found the prospect galling: I was in grad school with a growing troop of drinking buddies, living in a small town with an absurdly high bar-per-capita ratio. For a month I drank ice water standing next to juke boxes, pool tables, and pinball machines, and drank tea and Coke at home, and awoke clear-headed.

The sessions with my counselor continued unremarkably. Within a few sessions he’d decided that I wasn’t a problem drinker, that I’d been reckless and stupid; I’d fucked up and was now paying for it. We discussed addictions, social drinking, pressures of all sorts. Eventually he had his feet up on the desk and we were laughing about other things, sports, living in Appalachia. He is an alcoholic, and like many who’ve quit drinking has applied his new-found energies not only to staying sober but to help others stay sober, and what stuck with me was a story he told me early in our sessions. His low-point as an addict—which he related to me with an effective blend of fire-and-brimstone and contrition—came on a blizzardy night. He found himself desperate and out of his mind in a strange town, running without shoes for miles to the nearest liquor store, bounding through snow drifts risking frostbite and worse to get to a bottle. His long climb out of this hole, he told me, had been arduous and painful, the place where he now stood sorely welcome.

Though the image of my counselor in the snow, lunging against health and reason, was vivid, I resumed social drinking as soon as I could, balancing his addiction woes against my internal rudder. Parties, bars, home, years. My worst hangover came nearly a decade ago in Manhattan; I was drinking at the International on First Avenue with Bill Millhizer of the Fleshtones, and the bartender was pouring four-fingers of Wild Turkey, on the house; hours later Bill and I ended up around the corner at the Grassroots Tavern on St. Mark’s Place. I remember that we couldn’t bring ourselves to finish the last pitcher of beer, I remember weaving as I stood outside on the street—I don’t remember making it from the East Village to the subway at 14^th Street to Brooklyn, where I was staying at the YMCA in Greenpoint. I was sick in my room, and woke up the next morning in misery, an axe in my head, feeling dissolute, steeped in remorse, gagging toward a day and night of holding down little more than water and toast. I was in my mid-thirties, and I resolved never to drink to such excess again.

*

I’m curious and a little embarrassed by way the hardcore miseries of my experience are deflected away by the tendency to romanticize bars and heavy drinking. Note my passive voice. I’m doing the sentimentalizing here. My counselor’s tale of desperate addiction is only one of many, and I’ve seen enough depravity and self-indulgence, misery and self-deception in my decades in the bars, and among some of my unfortunate friends and acquaintances, to recognize that a barfly’s life is vexed, unhappy, and sad, nothing to preciously elevate. There’s a nice-looking dive bar near the intersection of Belmont and Clark, in Chicago. Every time Amy and I drive by I say, I’d like to go in there. I haven’t yet. I think I’d rather be on the outside looking in, setting the scene, emotionally sloppy on my own movie set, buffing my slumming credentials. Perhaps I have to accept an aspect of myself that is childish. I should just name it: my name is Joe, I’m an addict, and I’m addicted to romancing debauchery.

I’d like to think that I’m in recovery, but I’m not so sure. Addiction to romanticizing, addiction to sentimentalizing, can be dangerous lifetime habits. As an addict is wary of his next sip, her next pain pill, so am I wary of the next indulgent slip into idealizing, because it could be fatal to what I might call the Mature Life. While an addiction to romancing debauchery is certainly better for my physical and mental health than actual debauchery, it poisons in a different way: I can place a dive bar on a pedestal high enough that all I really see is its appealing shape, its blurring borders in Ideal Land, the pretty wink of neon signs. Romanticizing a bar is like falling for the Platonic promise of model homes at new housing developments, or the house façades on a movie set. The crisp front walk and neat green hedges, the clean white paint and trim, the shimmering bay windows present the family within as cast by Woods-Were-Once-Here Corporation. When we walk into a stranger’s home we know the odd smells and psychological histories, the muttering corners and emotionally weighted heirlooms, actual realities, the flawed families inside not reading from scripts, but improvising daily.

*

In Manhattan over several summers I’d embark on dive bar crawls, hitting Rudy’s, Siberia, and Bellevue near Port Authority and fading Times Square, and Mars Bar, Mona’s, and Sophie’s, among many others, in the East Village. Only Mona’s took; I still drop in to this dark, comfortable hole when I’m in the city. Some of the other bars felt to me like anthropological sites, environments where I could enjoy myself, certainly, but where I didn’t really belong, not because I didn’t live in the city, or because the prospect of an afternoon bender isn’t appealing to me, or because I’m frightened of the unhappiness that drifts over me at certain joints after a couple hours, or because I can’t humanely imagine the desire to drink oneself into oblivion and erase what needs erasing. In the imagination it’s easier to mitigate the addictions of men and women who don’t have the luxury of pretending that to dissolve, to vanish, to crumble is romantic. Living too long in the imagination is tempting, and dangerous—I remove myself from tangible reality and create a false comfort. My drift toward romance and sentimentality is analogous to addiction as it divorces me from the world, creates a reality in the mind that’s always hospitable, always heartening, never too dark to acknowledge, where the story ends before the sad denouement. Perhaps writing “sad denouement” is too tender a way to describe the brutal reality of some addicts. This is part of my problem. Like all addictions, mine tells lies.

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Joe Bonomo is the author of AC DC’s Highway To Hell (33 1/3 Series), Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, Installations (National Poetry Series), and Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band and numerous essays and prose poems. He teaches at Northern Illinois University, and appears online at No Such Thing As Was  (nosuchthingaswas.com).

(Click image for full size)

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Jeffrey Brown is a Chicago cartoonist known for his autobiographical comics such as Clumsy and Funny Misshapen Body as well as humorous comics like Cats Are Weird and Incredible Change-Bots. He is currently working on his next graphic memoir for Top Shelf, and despite quitting for a few months in early 2006, he continues to bite his nails.

“Yaaaay, Bite Your Nails!” was originally published in the collection Miniature Sulk.  Find out more about Jeffery Brown at Top Shelf Productions here: http://www.topshelfcomix.com/jeffreybrown.

I didn’t expect a crowd at my brother’s memorial service. His drug and alcohol addictions had mowed a wide swath through family and friends in the course of his 52 years, leaving casualties and severed connections strewn behind him. I thought that it would mostly be family attending. What I witnessed instead, was a packed house.

Part of the service was reserved for people to speak about Alan if they wanted to. Person after person stood up to tell how he helped them: plumbing and car repairs, rides to work, and listening with love—sometimes tough love. Several people mentioned that they thought he was goofy at first (the word came up many times) but grew to love his playfulness.

One pastor said Alan was a mystery to her. She didn’t know him and yet every Sunday he helped one of the church attendees set up for services and then he would leave. She asked him if he was going to attend and he’d say yes and then not show. One day she asked and he said “I’m going to be straight with you. I won’t be coming to services. You can quit asking.” Still he came Sunday after Sunday to help. She said when she looked at his face, she saw a very sad man. I could see it in every photo of him in his later years.

The real miracle, the gift of grace, was the children who spoke. From two of his grandchildren (five years old) to the young adults who grew up in his neighborhood, they came to the podium one at a time or in small groups. A cluster of four girls, around 11 or 12, passed the microphone among themselves reciting the times when he sprayed them with a hose on hot days, gave them popsicles, listened to their young woes, and sang the “Ice Cream and Cake” song. A 10-year-old boy came up with his mom because he wanted to speak but was crying too hard to say much more than, “I loved him.” His mother expressed the common litany of that day: the helping hand, the goofy cheerfulness, the sympathetic ear. A young man, who was stabbed when he was eleven, spoke of Alan’s anger and support around this trauma and Alan’s kindnesses as he was growing up. Child after tearful child spoke of their love for him.

For the three of us sisters and our families, this was a revelation. I’d seen Alan caring tenderly for my mother during her hospital stays and during my father’s final days. I knew his potential. But for most of our family history, we experienced another side. I think the difference was that, although we loved him, we didn’t need him. These people–his neighbors, his wife’s church community–needed him and it brought out the best he could be. He was offering service. It turns out he was the man I always hoped he would become. I just didn’t know it.

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Laurie Woodum is a feral writer with published articles, essays, poetry, and a memoir called Goodnight Sweet Pea. To dip your toes into her waters, go to www.iseeparadise.net.