Greetings from the Vodka Sea Page 13

  THEORY II: A straight line is the shortest distance between two pints

  The last binge started like this. Plumber out for a walk, completely innocent. In fact, he’d left his apartment to get away from all the temptations it contained: the liquor cabinet (empty but inviting), the phone (Dad could be calling again at any minute to check up), and the general air of nothingness — that nameless boredom that Plumber could not stand. He was the kind of person who just couldn’t sit there alone with himself, with his thoughts, with his memories. It left him in a panic. He had to do something, and over time, through a process of trial and error,4 he’d found that booze filled the void quite nicely.5 So when Goldberg called Plumber to tell him he had six weeks to live, Plumber looked at the liquor cabinet, the phone and the void and decided that a stroll was in order, if not to deliver him from temptation, at least to delay it a little. Everything was fine until he took a wrong turn and passed a bar offering Glenmorangie eighteen-year-old high-land single malt for five bucks a shot. Obviously fate was interceding; he’d have been insane to pass it up.

  The first drink was no problem. He ordered it calmly, as a man only passing through for a single social single malt might do, and accepted it with such nonchalance that the waitress might have thought he’d changed his mind about a drink after all. Plumber tried to sip, God knows he did, but found himself gobbling the drink down, as much as any man can gobble a drink. The warm wave washed over him and covered him like a comfortable watery blanket, and Plumber was on to the next drink and the next before he knew what hit him. That’s when the camera shut off. The director in his head called cut, and his brain took five for who knows how long. Days? At least.6 The next thing he remembered was waking up in Goldberg’s guest bedroom, the door bolted from the outside, in a pair of pee-soaked pyjamas, in the clutch of a pee-soaked mattress, covered with a ragged pee-soaked quilt, feeling deeply, if not urgently, the need to pee.

  He’d made it to work, Goldberg had seen to that, and had apparently done quite well. All that was asked of him was that he lie in a bed looking hideous and fitful, but still, he pulled it off with unconscious aplomb. In fact Plumber’s popularity seemed to have soared. The phone lines had been jammed by viewers concerned with the state of his health. This was Plumber’s greatest fear. They didn’t want him to go. Maim him. Cripple him. Leave him a living vegetable. Just don’t kill him. The dying he could handle, it was the lingering he wasn’t keen on. He had a friend who’d played Blaise, the evil twin on Santa Clara Nights. The producers had him run over by a horse-drawn carriage; the doctors gave him two weeks to live. It was the longest two weeks of his life. He lingered for four full seasons before suddenly, miraculously regaining consciousness. Four years of dragging his hump to work, punching the clock, getting paid for pretending to be on death’s door five minutes a week. It was work. It paid the bills. But it wasn’t art and it wasn’t even craft. The poor bastard left the show the following year, depressed and disillusioned.7 In Plumber’s case the worst part was that the producers must have known it was coming. Levitz and Sherwood must have offered to renew his contract early because they wanted to lock him up on To the Ends of the Earth. They knew that other soaps were calling, and it’s a cinch Goldberg would have bolted in a second if he knew his client would be spending six weeks — an eternity, surely — unconscious and drooling, growing older and less marketable as each week-long second ticked past.

  Dad arrived mid-stream as Plumber was enjoying what might have been the most satisfyingly, bladder-soothing pee of his life. Dad had a stuffed duffel bag in one hand and a large bottle of Evian in the other. “Any blood?” Dad moved closer to inspect Plumber’s urine. “All clear.” He sounded upset. He was the kind of man who thrived on crisis, who in fact could barely function unless there was a crisis to react to, who in fact, not to stress the point too finely, would go out of his way to create chaos with almost biblical precision out of the day-to-day nothingness of existence. Simple example: Dad moved more often than some men8 changed relationships. On average, three times a year. He’d be in one apartment or another and then, without warning, give notice. A few weeks later, he’d be setting up house in a new place, subconsciously plotting his next foray into the void. On the one hand, Plumber understood this as a kind of quasi-spiritual quest, or rather, an anti-quasi-spiritual quest, an example of his father’s ongoing search to find peace of mind in his surroundings. But just as important, the moves ensured that Dad’s life was in constant flux. So the What, the chaos, was easy to figure, but the Why — the Why had Plumber puzzled. And there was no sense asking Dad about it. He was a walking recessive gene, emotionally speaking, who’d evolved past the alcoholism and then hit a brick wall.

  Plumber: So, Dad, I want to ask you about the chaos.

  Dad: What chaos is that, son?

  Plumber: You know, the overwhelming chaos wherein you live your life.

  Dad: I’m not sure I follow you.

  Plumber: Okay, let me put it this way. If you were to live your life in a constant state of chaos — theoretically speaking — do you think you’d be doing it out of a sense of comfort, because maybe you grew up in a chaotic home and longed to return to some kind of blissful, familiar disorder? Or do you think you’d be doing it as a kind of distraction, to take your mind off higher matters of philosophical importance — life, death, the meaning of existence and so forth? In other words, do you think you’d be trading one addiction, alcohol, for another, chaos? Or is it possible that you’d be extracting a certain sense of power from it, the desperate machismo of the self-generated messiah, leading yourself from the wilderness of complacency into a funhouse-mirror promised land? Or could it simply be that you wouldn’t know any better? This is how you’ve always lived your life — theoretically speaking — and this is how you will continue?

  Dad: Sorry. I’m still not sure I follow.

  Plumber: Then answer this: why did she leave?

  Dad: Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.9

  The purpose of the stuffed duffel bag was quickly explained. Dad was doing an “intervention” with Goldberg’s blessing and support.10 Dad had been to more than one intervention in his day11 and knew the drill. Confront the victim with his problem, give him the ol’ man in the mirror routine, offer an empathic word or two, hug (required), cry (optional), then hand the poor sod his bag12 and push him into an awaiting limousine. Failure — which in this case meant measured response and careful consideration — was not an option.

  Fast forward to Plumber, showered and dressed, strapped in the back of a stretch limo, packed bag in lap,13 Evian in hand, airport bound. He’d succumbed willingly, all things considered. Of course, he’d resisted, everybody does. Dad’s hugging and crying14 did little to undermine his resolve, and even Goldberg’s tough love (“I can’t spend all my time babysitting you, I have other clients” 15) failed to move Plumber. The young man wasn’t arguing with the facts. He knew he had a problem, although he did dispute how that problem was characterized and even maintained that, at this precise moment in his life, his problem was as much a solution. And maybe he never would have gotten in the limo if it hadn’t been for a timely phone call from Nancy, who said that if he got treatment maybe, just maybe, she’d talk to him. Isn’t love strange?

  THEORY III. The acceleration of an assumption is directly proportional to the force exerted on that assumption

  So, we go through life burdened by false assumptions. Plumber, for one, had some odd ideas. His unattractiveness. That’s a curious bit. Practically the entire world telling him how handsome he was, strange women16 stopping him on the street and offering to perform unsolicited and, in some cases, truly complex sex acts on him, and still nada on the self-perception scale. The child psychiatrist17 had pegged him early: low self esteem. Go figure. Practically the entire day-time-TV-watching country thinking Plumber was one of the finest pieces of man flesh ever to strut across the face of the earth, while inside he seeing himself as a repulsive smudge w
ith a seashell lip and asymmetrical eyes and ears too big for his too-small head. Maybe that’s why he drank, to mask the ugliness he felt inside. Or perhaps to wallpaper over the unresolved conflict of his parents’ divorce and his mother’s subsequent and o’er-hasty suicide. Of course, this is just another assumption, the belief that people — you and I, say — do things out of emotional need. Certainly Dr. Prock assumed as much when he treated the young David Plumber, years ago. Back then, alcohol wasn’t the problem. Back then, Plumber was addicted to school, or more precisely, Plumber was addicted to not going to school. Maybe it happened gradually, Plumber couldn’t remember exactly now, but he does remember a point when he was going to school and then a point when he wasn’t going to school, and nothing anyone said or did would make him go. The shrink pegged it as an emotional problem, which to David’s young mind was about as useful as saying the night sky was black. Dad had handled it all right, though. Dad had learned that while time didn’t necessarily heal all wounds (in fact, David Plumber Sr. would tell you the inverse was true), there was never a bad excuse for a holiday. He took young David on extensive bus trips, to folk festivals in the Ozarks and Newfoundland, to arctic-circle fish camps with nonsense names several dozen syllables long. Mostly, he took his son to the movies. Lots and lots of movies. Dad said he was studying. Dad said he was the luckiest man in the world because to learn his craft he didn’t need to study textbooks; it was all up there for him to learn, on the silver screen. So there Plumber the Younger sat, fifteen going on sixteen, inwardly ugly, unattended and unattending, diagnosed Paranoid Neurotic School Phobic with Underlying Depressive Tendencies, assumed by most everyone18 in his little town to be wildly fucking up, alone in the dark but surrounded, studying and learning too, and slowly working his way to becoming the most famous, handsomest man ever to come out of Bradenton, California.19 The irony was lost on everyone.

  THEORY IV. All objects are accelerated equally by the force of authority

  The Mardi Gras Detox Centre had three rules etched in a bullet-proof, shatter-proof window that separated the guest foyer from the clinic per se.

  1. Everyone gets out alive.

  2. To forgive is holy; to forgive yourself, divine.

  3. One day at a time.

  This last rule had achieved corporate sponsor status at the clinic. The counsellors (jeans, sneakers and, as a rule, earthtone sweaters) and nurses (jeans, sensible shoes and, as a rule, pastel smocks) used the expression compulsively, leaving Plumber to wonder if they weren’t all part of some complicated royalty sharing scheme. Within the first hour after admission, Plumber heard the phrase used to admonish a teenaged girl who was refusing to make her bed20 (“Someone’s not feeling very one-day-at-a-time today, is she?”), calm two prepubescent dotcom billionaires arguing over a disputed line call in table tennis (“You can’t respect your one-day-at-a-time unless you respect other people’s one-day-at-a-time”) and praise an old bum21 who’d successfully swallowed his medication (“See? One pill at a time and one day at a time. It’s that simple”). Plumber was a quick study.

  Counsellor A: We treat a lot of celebrities here. I just want you to know that you can’t expect to be treated differently from the other patients.

  Plumber: I understand. I just want to take things one day at a time.

  Counsellor A: That’s the right approach. You’ve got your work cut out for you, but if you just take it one day at a time, it’ll go a lot easier.

  Plumber: One day at a time?

  Counsellor A: Yes. One day at a time.

  The first days of treatment were not bad. Plumber was put on a strict diet — lots of water and fresh fruit — and confined to his room and the exercise yard. The sudden abstinence didn’t hit him, a career binger, as hard as it might some. He’d glimpsed the worst of the lot,22 those patients in the cheap seats, the semi-private rooms and wards in the east wing of the centre, strapped to their real aluminum hospital beds, frothing and howling and crying like the worst Emmy-conscious hack in the cheesiest made-for-TV MOTW. Plumber was amazed to see real drunks act this way. They must have been the hard core, the superdrunks, who’d transcended ordinary drunkenness and addiction and landed on a higher lower plane, the mythic realm of the DTs. Plumber silently applauded their tenacity. In a world organized to help them, a culture which in fact orbited the diseased and miserable like an obedient, dependent satellite, these drunks had persevered. Kudos all round.

  THEORY V. For every inaction there is an equal and opposite contraction

  One the third day, the nurse stood with arms folded, blocking Plumber’s exit. She’d just appeared, an uncouth vision. It had been his refusal to go to group that seemed to summon her from the depths of the darkest nurses’ station. Group was mandatory, she informed Plumber. Option was not an option.

  She stared for a long time without speaking. Plumber couldn’t tell if she was really angry or simply reaching into her patient-motivation bag of tricks. It was effective in either case; Plumber enjoyed watching a professional at work.

  “I’m not going to pick you up and carry you there.”

  “Try again tomorrow. I’m, like, too one-day-at-a-time today.” Plumber smiled and shifted on his bed. It was basic physics at work. An irresistible force coming up against an immovable object.23 The nurse stood in place, breathing deeply, trying, Plumber supposed, to calm herself. She was taking her role much too seriously. What were her options? Would she kick him out? No. The clinic needed high profile cases like Plumber to keep the cheap seats full. Would she cut off his privileges? Not likely, since it was the privileges that kept his cute butt in the centre, helping to drum up business. A vicious circle.

  “I don’t want to have to call the orderlies.” She spoke with the empty authority of someone who had survived a lifetime of assertiveness training seminars.

  “Good. I don’t want you to have to call them.” He wasn’t being cheeky,24 although it no doubt sounded that way. He really didn’t want her to call the orderlies.25 Almost as soon as he said the words, though, he regretted them. He’d painted both of them into a corner. You learn this kind of thing at theatre school,26 how to pace a scene to move toward an end-point. The key was listening, always listening. If you weren’t listening, truly listening, to the other actors, if you were only paying attention to your own lines, then you wouldn’t react properly. That was the key, reactions, because despite the name — acting — the craft was really all about reacting. Clearly, then, Plumber hadn’t been listening; he’d been too I-focused and not eye-focused.27 He’d been acting, not reacting, and now he was nine-tenths through a scene without an ending in sight. He wanted to start again, but life, as the counsellors were wont to tell him, was not a dress rehearsal. So there they sat, neither giving an inch, the nurse growing angrier as each second sauntered past, and Plumber — Plumber even more handsome than usual, noticeable more thirsty, wishing that he’d begun better so he could end well, but most of all impatient. When was Nancy coming? She should have been there by now.

  THEORY VI. Beauty is skin deep, but ugly goes right to the bone

  They called her Mrs. Charles Bukowski, Plumber and Roy.28 Not to her face. That would have been rude. Plumber and Roy were not rude. Roy29 was an actor too, and he’d sort of latched onto Plumber in the way that less successful actors (lawyers, dentists, writers) tended to latch on to more successful actors (lawyers, dentists, writers).30 Maybe they hoped that some of the magic would rub off, or that they might catch the financial and emotional drips? In any case, Plumber didn’t mind. Roy was okay to talk to, just one of the guys. Maybe a little too skinny to be trusted, with bit player features: big head, small black eyes, thin lips. Not too handsome. A good side-kick. Plus, he’d somehow31 smuggled some smoke into the centre and was disposed to sharing it in the exercise yard.32 That’s where and how they first met, in the exercise yard over a joint. They soon had the giggles. And then they spotted her, seated in a folding lawn chair by the fountain. She wore a pink housecoat with pink pyjama
s underneath and pink furry slippers like the ones Plumber’s mother, God rest her soul, might have worn. They giggled some more. Who said it first? Plumber was not sure. Maybe they both said it at the same time — certainly they both thought it at the same time. Mrs. Charles Bukowski.

  The resemblance was breathtaking, which only made it funnier. Not that she was ugly. Just that she was the kind of woman who’d never once been beautiful in her life, not even for a second.33 Halt. Maybe once. Maybe for a moment some days after birth, after the ugly-inducing trauma of that event had washed off and before the dissymmetry of her young life had begun to weigh on her face, pulling it apart, separating her countenance forever from the land mass of beauty. It wasn’t so much that she’d never been beautiful, there were entire English villages which shared that burden without apparent ill effect, but more that she’d never felt beautiful. Every woman on earth deserved that, if only for a moment. Every woman on earth deserved to feel beautiful, which means, Plumber supposed, feel themselves an object of beauty, feel themselves gazed upon — by a parent, a friend, a lover — with adoration and, where appropriate, stylized lust. Even in the least relative terms, beauty was fleeting, and eventually every woman34 was reduced to mourning lost youth, lost beauty. This woman — she would never know that sad charm. Never, never quite ugly, never beautiful. An entire life on a folding lawn chair, in pink slippers, by a fountain.