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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... Down in the Dirt magazine (v118) (the July / August 2013 Issue) You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:

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Hello, my name is Dave.

E. Branden Hart

     “Hello, my name is Dave, and I’m an alcoholic.”
    “Hi Dave.”
    “I’ve never done this before. I guess I start at the beginning? Okay. Problem is, I don’t know where the beginning is anymore. Maybe it was the first time I took a drink. I was sixteen, and my parents weren’t home, and I just wanted to know if I could pound a shot without wincing. I could—it took some work, but I downed a shot of mescal without making a face. It didn’t do much—relaxed me a little is all–but I liked the feeling.
    “Or maybe it was the first time I got drunk. I was seventeen and asked one of my friends if I could hang out and drink with him. We’d been friends forever, but he’d started drinking with his older brother when we were freshmen, and I was all goody-two-shoes when it came to drinking. But I’d decided if I was going to start drinking, the summer before I left for college was as good a time as any. That night, I stayed up until five in the morning smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, made out with my friend’s girlfriend, and basically enjoyed the hell out of life. I’ve been chasing that high for almost fifteen years now.
    “Then again, I’m starting to wonder if it all began before that. I’m beginning to think I had a problem with alcohol before I ever had my first drink.
    “For a while, I didn’t think I had a problem. After all, people who have drinking problems end up in jail, drop out of school, things like that. In college, I was always that guy who got a little too tipsy too early in the night. But then I’d pass out before I made an ass out of myself. I did stupid shit, sure, but never as stupid as my friends who would get wasted and go wandering around the neighborhood at three in the morning, stealing lawn ornaments and trying to blow them up with firecrackers.
    “Once I graduated college, I got a job at a publishing company as a proofreader. A lot of younger people worked there, and we all enjoyed going out after work to get shitfaced—sometimes two or three times a week. I found out pretty quick that not everyone had trained like I had in college—I could have six beers and be on my way to catching a good buzz, but my coworkers would start slurring their words after two.
    “My coworkers would come into work the next morning, swearing that they would never drink again. Me? I was used to it—I had majored in being perpetually hungover in college. But one by one, people began to drop out of our drinking circle, until it was just me and one or two friends left—and we had all started to prefer drinking at our respective homes, alone, since it meant we didn’t have to drive anywhere.
    “Fast forward ten years: I’m married, with a daughter. Her name’s Katey, and she’s four. My drinking is under control—or so I think. I’m excelling at my job—I’ve been promoted five times in the past ten years, and am managing one of the largest accounts at my office. Been doing a damn good job of it too—there was talk of another promotion, and I won two different awards for superb client satisfaction within weeks of each other. People constantly complimented me on what a great manager I was—even my boss—and I was in a position to get a hell of a raise because of the work I’d been doing.
    “I was the epitome of organization and productivity, especially when it came to my drinking schedule. Every morning, I would wake up at 5 o’clock, about an hour before my wife and daughter. I would stand outside, smoke cigarettes, and chug beer—sometimes up to four of them—in that hour. In the meantime, and in between cigarettes, I would make the coffee, pull up some work on my laptop, organize laundry from the night before, do anything I could to make it look like I was living a normal life between the hours of 5 and 6 in the morning, rather than standing on the porch getting drunk.
    “I would spend the hour between 6 and 7 AM drinking coffee to cover my breath and eating Tums to fight back the bile that was always lingering in the back of my throat. I’d kiss my wife good morning, hug my daughter, and sit in the room with them while they were eating breakfast. They never knew how hard it was for me to do that—to sit, watching them eat peacefully, when my mind was racing through all I had to do at work and whether I would be able to have another few beers beforehand.
    “I’d kiss them goodbye, they would leave, and I’d sit by the door for five minutes, listening for them to come back. It happened more than you’d think—my daughter would forget her homework, or my wife would forget her cell phone, and on more than one occasion they came back in the house right as I was getting my next beer of the morning.
    “I would go into work at the last possible minute, chugging beer the entire time I was getting ready. Some mornings I would get so drunk that I couldn’t go into work at all, and I would spend the day drinking and listening in on conference calls where nobody ever asked me any questions or assigned me any work. I enjoyed those days—I could earn money while I was drinking, which made a lot of sense to me at the time.
    “About three months ago, I had a few days off around Christmas. I was trying to enjoy some time away from work with the family, but sneaking my drinking around my wife and daughter always put me on edge. In the evenings it wasn’t so bad—my wife always just considered me a heavy drinker and never thought I had a ‘problem,’ so she didn’t mind if I put back an eighteen pack of beer as long as I was sweet to her and paid attention to my daughter. But in the mornings, while they were home, I had to get up at five, drink beer for about an hour, then switch to coffee. The coffee, combined with the Tums, would mask my breath enough for the first kiss of the morning for them both. Then, I’d head upstairs to my study, where I would pour a little Amaretto in my coffee. Once I finished my coffee, I’d go downstairs, pour myself a glass of orange juice, and then go outside for a cigarette. I had a bottle of vodka hidden underneath my grill, and I’d repeat that cycle until it was finally three in the afternoon, which my wife thought was an acceptable time for normal people to start drinking.
    “It was around noon on Christmas Eve, and I had been drinking more than usual. My wife was stressed out—we were having a party that night—and her being stressed out always stresses me out, so I was going a little heavy on the vodka and orange juice. After lunch, she asked me to drive to the convenience store for some butter, and asked if I could I take our daughter along. My wife wanted Katey to pick out her favorite dessert for after dinner that night.
    “I didn’t realize how drunk I was until I hit a curb on the way out of our neighborhood. In my defense, it was a really high curb, but I’d still navigated around it hundreds of times before without a problem. My daughter spoke up from the back seat and asked me if something was wrong; I mumbled something and laughed. I remember looking at her in the rearview mirror, seeing her hug her doll a little tighter.
    “At the convenience store, I set my daughter to the task of picking her favorite candy, and went to get the butter. I noticed that they had some new holiday beers in, so I went ahead and picked up a six pack—why not? When I got up to the counter, the clerk told me about the new scratch-off tickets they had, and I bought three of them, thinking, “Hell, it’s Christmas!” I paid and left, thinking about how awesome it would be to win the lottery and be able to quit work so I could concentrate on drinking. I got in the car, opened one of the beers, put it in the cupholder, and drove away.
    “As I was driving back home, I couldn’t help thinking I’d forgotten something in the store and chanced a glance in the back seat. Nope, the butter was there—that’s all I’d needed—and that’s when I heard a ‘crunch’ and felt something crash into the side of my head.
    “Two thoughts went through my head. One was, ‘Oh my god—Katey!’ and the other was ‘Shit—I spilled my beer!’ If I’m honest with myself, I’m not so sure the one about Katey came first.
    “It wasn’t a bad wreck and nobody else was involved—I’d swerved onto the sidewalk and crashed into a street lamp. But as I came to, I noticed that the windshield had been completely shattered, and most of what was in the car had been thrown onto the hood or the sidewalk in front of me. I took an account of everything, and that’s when I noticed the tiny arm splayed out on the sidewalk in front of the car.
    “I jumped out of the car, only then noticing that what had been an annoying stitch in my side had grown into a roaring pain that shot up my back and into the back of my head, and I remember thinking, without any irony whatsoever, ‘It’s going to take more than a six pack to get rid of this pain.’
    “The arm, it wasn’t Katey’s. It was her doll’s.
    “Relief flooded over me, and my first thought was, ‘I’m going to drink an entire twelve-pack when I get home, no questions asked. I deserve to celebrate the fact that Katey is safe and sound, sitting in the...’
    “I paused, not wanting to believe it. I jumped back into the car and looked in the backseat. Katey wasn’t there.
    “The car wouldn’t start.
    “I jumped out and started running back to the convenience store, remembering what I’d forgotten there.
    “My lungs screamed for me to slow down as I ran back to the store. Bile burned the back of my throat. I threw up twice on the way. I wanted a drink so bad.
    “It took me a full minute to get my story out to the clerk, who didn’t believe me at first. When I finally managed to put together a semi-accurate description of what Katey had been wearing that morning, he said that yes, he remembered her. He also remembered the nice man she’d left with—the man who wasn’t me. He remembered hearing the man saying something about ‘...finding her daddy, she shouldn’t worry at all,’ right before the two of them left in his van.
    “It’s been three months, and we still haven’t found Katey. The cops, they don’t know who the guy is. The license plate came back as unregistered, and the cameras at the convenience store never got a good shot of his face.
    “Part of me wants to find him, and wants to put him through hell for what he’s done to Katey. But after all of this, after everything that happened, my one reservation is that if I find this man, and kill him, I might go to jail. And alcohol isn’t easy to come by in jail.
    “I guess I won’t ever know when my problem with alcohol began. But I knew I had a problem one day not long after Katey was gone. I was sitting out on my porch at five in the morning, finishing my first beer of the day, about to open another. The morning silence was broken by screeching tires, followed by the crystalline crunch of metal on metal. And I know this should have sparked some kind of autonomic response in me—I know I should have totally freaked out, and thought about the crash that I had the day Katey was kidnapped—but honestly, the only thing I could think of at that moment was how nice it was to be getting drunk and not have to go into work for another three hours.
    “I guess I knew I had a problem when the possibility of being without a drink made me feel like I was choking. And I think I’ve been choking longer than I’d like to admit.
    “I guess I realized recently that, despite everything that’s happened, I have two choices: I can either keep using alcohol and die with it, or stop drinking and live without it. And in the end, I guess I knew for sure that I had a problem when I couldn’t figure out which of those choices was more appealing.
    “I guess I need help. But, I guess you already knew that. Thanks for listening.”
    “Thank you Dave.”

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