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A Sunday Walk

Joey Holland

    Morning didn’t just break; it pulverized. Trying to remember what my father used to say, I sat up on the edge of the broken down, puke-green sofa and tried to gain my bearings. “I feel sorry for people that don’t drink,” Dad would say, “because when they first wake up, that’s the best they’re gonna feel all day.” As I tried to think above the intense, staccato thrumming in my head, it occurred to me that if I didn’t soon feel better, I would be forced to once again revisit the suicide option that always lay just below the surface in those days, the dark uncertain days after Dad went to prison.
    “Get up, buddy,” Dave said. “We gotta get rolling.” As he checked the fridge for an eye-opener, I was once again struck by his jauntiness; he never complained about being hung-over, though I’m sure every morning he suffered.
    “We are once again fresh out of ice-cold Falstaff, my friend. It looks like we are rolling in dry,” Dave said as he shut the refrigerator door and sat down to pull on his combat boots, sans socks. I could never understand how he could tolerate heavy boots without socks, but he dug it. Freshly shod, he walked back to the kitchen and began making breakfast, which for him was a fried okra and stewed squash sandwich, liberally slathered with mustard. “You want one?” he asked, holding up the disgusting mess clenched in his dirty fist. My stomach did a slow barrel roll as I shook my head. “Your loss,” he said as he began heartily munching on his sandwich. I, unlike Dave, did not awaken to blithely greet a terrible hangover with good grace; I woke wanting to die, and to take others with me.
    I quickly realized I was too sick to brush my hair, so I found a ball cap and pushed as much of my long, greasy hair as I could get under it, grabbed the beer I’d hidden earlier that morning, and walked outside. The smell of Dave’s breakfast was lending an unfair advantage in the war I was waging with my innards; I was teetering on the vomit fence. If I started puking, I would not be able to stop and would be officially sprung. If I could keep it together long enough to drink my beer, however, I could ride the crest for one more day, maybe more.
    I stepped out into a gorgeous, late spring morning; I could almost hear the kudzu growing, slowly devouring the blackberry bushes and other vegetation in the front field. Wrecked vehicles dotted the landscape like tombstones, the engines long gone, and in their places, fountain grass and ragweed grew, stolid and abundant. Dandelions, proliferating or dying, spread like methamphetamine across the long field all the way to the highway, some two hundred yards away.
    Even at nineteen, I was a seasoned veteran of the morning after, so after a carefully ingested eye-opener, I was ready for work. I tossed the empty can into the enormous pile in the front yard just as Dave walked out, stuffing the last of his squash and okra sandwich into his maw. “Look what I found,” he said, holding up a pint bottle of Gibley’s gin with about three fingers remaining. “You want a hit?” Dave asked.
    “Does a fart in the wind matter?” I answered.
    “I’m not sure that fits here, numbnuts. Here; polish this off.”
    The alcohol was climbing into the driver’s seat of my brain, so my haughty response came effortlessly off the cuff, delivered as easily as shit from a baby. I noticed a good ounce of mustard clinging to Dave’s moustache and beard as he took a stout pull from the bottle, and my stomach lurched again, but by now I had gained full control of my gag reflex, and I easily swallowed my gore before accepting the poison on which I subsisted and pouring it gently down my throat.
    I tossed the bottle on top of the aforementioned heap, noticing with some despair at the ever-increasing enormity of this monument to our debauchery. The sheer size of the mound spoke volumes about the way we had been living since I had moved in with Dave, some three weeks before. The pile was there before I moved in, but tiny in comparison to the mound that stared back at me now. The cough syrup bottles added a hint of lawlessness we certainly didn’t need out in the open, for all and sundry to see. “I gotta do something about that,” I thought as we walked stiffly toward the truck.
    Dave’s brother’s truck stood waiting to usher us into our workday; Dave as a sewing machine mechanic and me as the janitor at the sewing plant where we worked. My buddy had been driving the old Ford since he wrecked his car the week before in a drunken bout of scallywaggery. Dave slid into the driver’s seat as I opened the passenger door, grateful that the inside of the car was still cool from the night before. The beer, coupled with the hefty slug of gin, lent an air of rebellion to my always unstable mean, and I tried to think of a reason we should lay out of work. I knew it was no use; Dave possessed a strong work ethic, albeit an inebriated one, so I ultimately decided not to waste my breath, and instead concentrated on enjoying the ride into town.
    As we pulled onto the worn, two lane blacktop, I glanced at Dave. As usual at this time of day, he was sort of vibrating, shivering like a dog shitting razor blades, but his eyes were fixed straight ahead, and his countenance was one of determination. By God, he was going to get through this day and make it to The Hop, our after-work hangout, where the Budweiser flowed like water and the darkness seeped from our souls and soaked into the filthy concrete floor. I admired Dave, so his determination aided my waning wherewithal, and I metaphorically hitched up my pants, cinched my belt, and sat up a little straighter; I could also do this.
    The kinship Dave and I shared was born of one thing: our absolute certainty that enough alcohol would mend whatever was broken. Our lives consisted of getting through the workday so we could drink as much beer and liquor as possible before passing out, only to awaken the next morning, greeted by a continuum of the same hangover.
    We lived to drink. Other drugs were sometimes hard to attain and often proved to be less than promised; heroin turned out to be baby laxative or MDA exposed itself as BC brand headache powders. Alcohol kept its promise.
    One of the benefits of heavy drinking late on a work night coupled with early morning imbibing is that the hangover doesn’t start to creep in until early afternoon, so I didn’t feel like killing myself until about three o’clock, and by then we only had two hours left to work. From about three until quitting time at five, I coasted on alcohol fumes which smelled of formaldehyde and lost hope.
    Both Dave and I forgot that Lem, Dave’s brother, was picking up the truck, so we were both momentarily perplexed when we limped out to the parking lot at five to find the truck gone, but after the nauseating realization that we were going to be forced to walk to the Hop, we bowed our backs, sniffed back hot, rueful tears, and began our march.
    The Hop was only about a quarter of a mile from work, so we were there, sweating bullets, in about fifteen minutes. Normal people could have arrived much quicker, but we were nearly dead before we started, so we were literally reeling by the time we saw the façade of the squat, concrete building. Dave cocked his head and listened as we neared the little block building, and I’m fairly certain he heard the same angels I did, singing a Hallelujah (or maybe devils humming a requiem) as we slowed and feasted our eyes on the oasis in the distance; the Hop seductively beckoned.
    Stepping over the threshold, I was once again certain that a benevolent God ruled the universe, and I was one of his favorite humans. Moments before, I was just as sure that I was under the thumb of St. Lucifer and would forever writhe in torment- funny how cool air, dank surroundings, and the promise of an ice-cold Budweiser could change a drunk’s perspective.
    “Well if it ain’t Cap’m Greene” and then, after a moment, “How ‘bout ya, Fishhook,” Skin, the proprietor of the joint, said. “We got y’all a cold Bud right here.” Skin was always glad to see Dave, but had only recently warmed up to me. Before then, I didn’t have a nickname, but after Skin learned that I was called “Fishhook” at work, he latched onto the moniker with a frightening fervor, sometimes shortening it to simply “Fish.” Having a nickname deemed me worthy to Skin; he was a man who needed a casual handle for his real friends, and though he had no idea how I had earned the title, “Fish” suited him just fine. Actually, I hadn’t “earned” the name at all; I was christened first as “Joe Fishhook’s boy” by a fellow employee who heard a story I was telling Dave about a problem my father was having with his rectum. “Yeah, the doctor says he has fissures or fistulas or something like that in his rectum. I can’t remember what they’re called, but he is having surgery next week.” James walked over and said, “Did you say your old man has fishhooks in his asshole?” I knew he was yanking my chain so I ignored him. About a week later, I walked into the bathroom to find James on the toilet. He sounded like he was giving birth. “James? You okay, buddy?” I asked.
    “Turd cutter’s dull,” was his response. After a horrifying moment, he added, “Hey, ain’t you Joe Fishhook’s boy?”
    Skin popped a couple of Buds and passed them to us, and we were once again alive and headed toward freedom. As we got comfortable on the bar stools, the door opened and two college boys walked in. “Do you have St. Pauli Girl?” one of them asked.
    “This ain’t a goddamn lemonade stand, asshole. We sell Bud in the can; if you don’t like it you can kiss my ass,” Skin snarled; the academic crowd rubbed him the wrong way.

    After the college boys beat a hasty retreat, we were the only patrons in the joint, but by the time we were halfway through our third beer, about five minutes later, we saw Danny lurching across the street, heading in our general direction, staggering a bit as he neared. I felt my shoulders sag a bit; Danny was an ignorant redneck who talked nonsense when he was drunk, which was about ninety-five percent of the time. Honestly, I’m not sure I’d ever seen him when he wasn’t at least mostly drunk. He was clad in his normal costume: dark blue work pants, matching shirt, hard black church shoes, and white dress socks. Danny’s hair was severely combed back from his face, with what looked like axle grease liberally combed in. As he entered, I noticed a dark red ring around the middle of his mouth, as if he’d been drinking Kool-Aid out of a small necked bottle. After he pulled a pint of sloe gin from his front pocket and took a huge slug, the mystery was solved.
    “Want a drank?” Danny slurred as a greeting; we all demurred. Totally trashed, he fell into a chair beside one of the two tables in the bar and laid down his incredibly greasy head, slowly shaking it, depositing a shallow pool of lard on the table top.
    “Ain’t he sexy?” Skin drawled.
    Before either of us could answer, Danny lifted his head and looked wildly around. His hair had fallen into his eyes as he recognized his surroundings and said, “Sexy? I’ll tell you what’s sexy: fourteen pounds of pussy.” He slowly pulled the bottle out of his pocket and took a short pull before adding, “Each jaw’d weigh seven pounds.” He allowed his empty head to fall back onto the table, where he slept the remainder of the evening.
    “He’s a romantic bastard too,” Dave added as we turned our attention back to the task at hand. We sat, saying little, drinking steadily. It was a quiet night; I couple of mill hill boys came in to shoot pool around eight and a couple of other regulars stopped by for a couple before heading home, but mostly Skin, Dave, and I held down the fort. Little conversation was needed; the ease of the alcohol buzz caused my mind to slow down and I began to think about what brought me to live with Dave in the first place.
    After Dad had gone away, my two older sisters, my mother, and I moved out of the big house on the hill and into my grandmother’s little house on Musgrove Street, where we all began slowly falling apart, and we all relied heavily on drugs to facilitate our escape from reality. We each took our preferred poison. After getting home from work each day, Mom sat in her chair and slowly drank beer until bedtime. Cindy, the oldest of the children, had been in a tumultuous relationship with heroin for a couple of years already; she simply dove deeper when the shit hit the fan. Nan, the middle child, discovered Quaaludes and never even glanced back. Being the youngest, I was still trying to figure out what best suited me as the flood waters rose. I liked it all, but alcohol seemed to be the best fit. After all, alcohol was legal, inexpensive, and socially acceptable. Now, driving drunk and wrecking cars, starting fist fights, and other such behavior is not accepted behavior, so there were a few issues that needed to be addressed.
    After a long decline, Cindy and her new boyfriend abruptly left town, heading to Tampa for a little rest and relaxation. Even in her dance with opiates, Cindy sort of kept things from totally falling apart, so when she left, things got exponentially worse. Mom started drinking about twice as much and Nan began throwing back the ‘ludes with renewed passion. The house fell into worse disrepair. The roaches proliferated. Granted, I could have taken the initiative and cleaned the place up, called the exterminator- tried to act like an adult- but I didn’t. A strange fugue enveloped the family; we all sought escape through drugs. Getting wasted was the same as being set free, at least for a while, so I just drank, staying away from the house as much as possible.
    I was lying on the couch late one night, watching television and feeling sorry for myself, something that had become my favorite pastime, when I decided to get a snack. I walked into the kitchen, turning on the light as I entered. Roaches scampered everywhere, finding crevasses in which to hide. The stark realization of the way things had devolved shook me. I decided to at least try to combat the sorriness, so I found an aerosol can of roach killer and liberally sprayed along the baseboards and under the fridge and stove. Deciding against a snack, I returned to the small living room to vegetate. A few minutes later I noticed that the carpet appeared to be moving. Turning on the overhead light, I nearly screamed when I saw the profusion of roaches making their exodus from the spray in the kitchen. Something broke inside me, and I got dressed and walked out. Momentary guilt stayed me; I should warn Nan and Mom. I stood on the porch, slowly shaking my head, trying to grasp a coherent thought, but none came. I turned and walked into the night.
    A scant sliver of silver moon accompanied me as I walked away from the house. Fighting the urge to turn around and return to familiar woe, I resolutely trudged toward the outskirts of town, no destination in mind. Porous clouds intermittently obscured the night sky and a soft wind was blowing, producing a low moaning through the trees. As the sky darkened, I looked for gratitude and found none. Somehow, the ominous night helped magnify the circumstances in which I found myself, and I knew I had to re-locate, find another place to hang my hat; the house on Musgrove was eating souls, treating the lost like a baby treats a diaper.
    A plan began formulating in my head, almost against my will. Part of me wanted to live in the early morning darkness, walking aimlessly, forever. During that time, I often found wildly impractical solutions to real world problems. After recounting a visit from a friend a while back, I decided to head to Dave’s house. He was a friend of Cindy’s who later became a friend of the family. He’d come over to our house a few days before to ask if Cindy or Nan was interested in doing some housecleaning for him. His mother was in the hospital and Dave wasn’t much of a domestic engineer. Cindy was Tampa bound and Nan was bound to the Quaaludes, so my friend decided to look elsewhere. If he was still in the market, maybe he would let me stay with him and keep the place clean in lieu of rent, since I had no money or job. Dave agreed to the terms and we began our own desolation together, him hoping his mom would miraculously get better and me betting on a family-saving miracle.
    “You want to get in on this, Fish?” Skin asked, drawing me from my retrospection.
    “Hmmm?”
    Dave and Skin were pulling wads of crumpled ones and fives from their pockets, haranguing over odds.
    “Skin says he can stand flat-footed and throw a raw egg over that building across the railroad tracks,” Dave said, and just like that, I was brought back to the present.
    Skin could throw a raw egg over the building across the railroad tracks, though it seemed impossible. He had many obscure talents: he knew a bunch of cards tricks, could play pool better than anybody I’d ever seen, run incredibly fast, and he played poker like Doc Holliday; always chiding, a sore loser. Skin’s myriad abilities often proved vastly entertaining in the wee hours of the morning at the Hop.
    Tonight was not as entertaining as many at our watering hole, however, so Skin closed down about ten thirty, giving Dave and me a lift to the beer store before driving us home. Dave bought a case, and we drank three at a time each, poured in large jars so we could drink more, faster. The shank of the evening was saved for furious drinking, intended mostly to knock us out so we wouldn’t have to consider ... things. As bedtime approached, we greeted it with drunken declarations of love for one another, brothers to the end. Often, arm wrestling or chest punching contests ensued, so the next morning we would awaken sore and hungover. These were strange times, only understood by the players, and we only understood the core concept; the nuances eluded even us.
    Friday morning finally teetered around, finding us broke, broken and twisted, barely hanging on to the last vestiges of responsibility. We needed the weekend to recuperate from the work week, not that we facilitated the time off for that purpose; we just pushed the limits of endurance ever further. Today, though, we had a new plan for the weekend. Instead of buying mass quantities of beer, we were going to buy one big bottle of tequila and a couple dozen valium, a combination bound to satisfy. The untarnished fact that imbibing in both the liquor and the pills simultaneously could easily result in fist fights, car wrecks, or even death completely escaped us; we thought this was a good idea.
    After work, we walked to the Hop to settle up with Skin; we needed to pay our tabs. My check was for $119.00 and I owed him $89. At the time, this was not disheartening at all; the road was now clear for uninterrupted drinking at the Hop for the coming week. As long as I paid my tab on Friday, my AAA rating endured. Ten of the remaining dollars were reserved for the valium, so I had a twenty-spot to do me for cigarettes and other essentials. Dave and I ate from the well-stocked freezer and pantry; Dave’s mom had tons of home-grown fruits and vegetables preserved from the previous summer.
    Our old friend Ronnie Quint was to swing by the Hop and bring the valium. I was looking forward to seeing the old rogue; he always left me with wonderful bits of discourse to savor afterwards. Ronnie was famous in our little drug-riddled community for many of his legendary snippets of dialogue: addressing his dog upon calling him in for the night- “Come on in, Red; you can get that pussy tomorrow, Cain’t you, buddy!” patting him furiously on the head. “Yeah, cain’t you get that pussy, Red? Yes you can! That’s my boy! Get that pussy, Red!”- or when trying to seduce my sister, a thick coat of slimy sweat on his upper lip, “You black-eyed beauty!”- Ronnie was rife with unmitigated repartee.
    After settling up with Skin, I took my fresh Budweiser and leaned against the doorway, happy to be alive. Friday afternoon traffic slowly moved along Main Street, the fierce sunshine twinkling on the windshields. I could hear a train coming in the distance, a certain harbinger of a traffic snarl. The honeysuckle growing madly on the fence alongside the Hop released its glorious aroma, mingling with the honkey tonk smell of the Hop and providing a stark juxtaposition. I lazily glanced down toward the mill hill and saw a lone silhouette in the distance, reeling slowly toward the bar. Ronnie was approaching, stage left. Internally shaking myself, I readied for his presence.
    By the time he was about a block away, I could see he was about five fourths wasted, probably due to a deadly (but pleasant) combination of the valium and some type of alcohol, probably Ezra Brooks bourbon whiskey, his preferred poison. At first, I worried that he would stagger into traffic, but then I reminded myself that, like me, Ronnie’s current condition was one to which he was more than just accustomed; this was more or less his default state of being. Besides, if he got run down in traffic, I could safely pilfer all the pills from his pockets. Hobbling up the parking lot directly into my personal space, Ronnie greeted me with a sardonic, “Hey, man. You got snot in your eye!” As I removed the offensive matter, my buddy continued. “You know how good pills make your mouth dry? These blue boys is fresh, man! I cain’t even hardly swaller and it feels like my mouth is full of glue; check this out!” He then spit what looked like a dollop of meringue onto the parking lot, looking up at me afterwards and tipping me a wink, as if he’d solved the riddle of the Sphinx. Then he carefully sunk to his knees and laid his face against the scalding asphalt right beside the offensive mess. By now he had my interest piqued. “Watch,” he instructed as he blew a lungful of fetid air at the spittle. “Look, man; that shit don’t even move!”
    He blew onto the mess several times to prove his point. At first, I hoped he realized he was preaching to the choir. I would have bought the damn pills even if they were the cheap, bootleg Valium, the kind made from PCP and goat tranquilizer, but I was impressed by his salesmanship, so I let the demonstration roll on. Alas, it was all but over.
    Ronnie struggled back to his feet, leaning precipitously forward, then stumbling a couple of steps, all the while looking at me like he’d successfully explained Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
    “Ooookay,” I said while I attempted to regain my composure. “You’ve convinced me, buddy. I want ten and Dave wants some too, I think,” I said, reaching for my wallet. “Dollar each, right?”
    “SSSSHHHHHH!” Ronnie hissed, blowing a bunch more of that meringue spit all over me.
    “we gotta do this on the down low; I don’t want nobody knowin’ I got these thangs and I ain’t ‘bout to get busted.” He affected a clandestine pose- shoulders hunched, head down- and continued, very loudly. “I ain’t plannin’ on spendin’ my fuckin’ weekend locked up!”
    “Well, I don’t want that either, buddy,” I returned, trying to soothe him with my calm, reassuring voice, “So why don’t you quit screaming and hand me the pills.”
    “Nah, man,” he whispered huskily, “We need to be careful. Go on in there and rack a game of nine ball and I’ll be in there in a minute.” As I started back inside, he screamed, “How many did you want, man?”
    I turned around and held up ten fingers. Somehow, this confused him for a good half minute, but he eventually nodded and tipped me a wink. “Let’s shoot some pool,” he croaked, effectively setting up our covert operation. After racking the balls, I didn’t yet see Ronnie, so I broke. I dropped the six ball and lined up my next shot. I felt someone behind me just as ole Ronnie screamed in my ear, “You gonna have to cut that motherfucker sharp, slick! Here, cut it right here.” He was drawing the attention of everyone in the bar as he began showing me where the ball should be struck. Pushing his closed fist on the far side of the one ball, Ronnie looked up at me, winked, and loudly said, “Cut it right here, ace!” and, opening his hand, released the Valium onto the table. I still don’t know what his intention was (perhaps he thought the shadow of the ball would hide the pills), but the tablets rolled all over the table. By now, a bunch of people were watching, and those who weren’t were being poked in the side to be made aware of the unfolding lunacy over on the nearby pool table. The whole charade was utterly pointless; we both knew pretty much everybody in there. Hell, Ronnie sold pills to most of them and they’d either already gotten some of the Valium or weren’t interested. They were interested in this Keystone Kops version of a surreptitious drug deal, though.
    Honestly, unless a couple of the people watching wanted to buy or steal Ronnie’s stash, nobody gave a shit what we were doing. The whole ordeal was like a poorly directed, unattended play, and I was more than happy to scoop the pills up off the pool table and put an end to the whole affair. Ronnie gave me a sly grin, tacitly informing me that I’d behaved admirably, our covert operation deemed a success. In full view of whoever cared to watch- nobody did- I chewed two of the little blue pills and washed them down with a massive gulp from my beer. It was time to party.
    I vaguely remembered that Dave and I were poised for a weekend of tequila, not beer, but plans had a way of being snorted away, much like the cocaine we did later that night, so I just bowed my back to the metaphoric wind and trudged forward, into the abyss again.
    Saturday morning found me somehow back at Dave’s house. I came to with the mid- morning sun shining in my face through a crack in the curtains. Squinting brought blinding pain to my head, so I rolled over only to find myself face to face with a woman of unknown origin. Deciding to tempt fate, I raised my head and looked around because I simply could not stare any longer into the puffy eyes of the strange woman looking at me with unabashed adoration. I noticed clothes thrown about the room, some on the foot of the bed but mostly spread about the floor. My mind did a spit take as I noticed enough clothes for at least three people, maybe more.
    “Hey, baby,” a raspy voice croaked into my ear, scaring the shit out of me. I turned to see my company, who was actually very pretty if the gobs of smeared makeup had been removed. She started licking me behind the ear, and I nearly lost my shit right then and there. Garnering every shred of willpower I hadn’t already misplaced the night before, I refrained from shuddering, but I knew right away that she had to quickly vacate the premises, or I would be compelled to kill her.
    “Hey, doll,” I said, sliding out of bed, looking for my jeans. “I had a ball last night, but I got some shit to do, so...” The silence hung like mildewed clothes, stinking up the bedroom.
    “Goddamn, Joey! You ain’t gotta beat me over the head. I’ll leave right now, but you told me we was going to the river today. Don’t you remember stopping by my house so I could get my bikini? Anyway, Sherry is gonna be pissed! Don’t you remember all the fun we had last night?” she winked, lasciviously. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to know what happened last night. Sadly, I found only darkness where my short term memory usually resided.
    Lurid noises coming from Dave’s room, guttural moaning and rhythmic banging told me that Dave was in his usual jaunty mood in the throes of what I surmised was a hangover similar to mine.
    “Sounds like they’re having fun,” my girl, who I was beginning to think might be named Sheila, said. She pulled my arm as I was pulling on my jeans. “Come back to bed,” she said. After a second’s thought, I decided to give it a go. After all, I couldn’t think of anything more appropriate to do.
    After a quick romp, I got up and went to the kitchen. Hoping against hope, I opened the refrigerator door to find a veritable treasure trove of alcohol. I was expecting maybe three or four beers at the most, but I was greeted by about a case of Bud long necks along with a bunch of Natural Lite and two bottles of liquor: a bottle of Evan Williams bourbon along with the tequila we planned on drinking in lieu of the massive drunk we’d obviously decided upon. Butterflies rustled in my stomach as I viewed the stockpile; things were quickly becoming interesting again.
    .After returning to Sheila, the morning took on a sepia tone before I blacked out. The rest of the day was spent doing God knows what. Though later I pieced together a few snippets of terrible behavior in lurid places, most of my memory of that day is lost forever.
    Like so many mornings before and after, I woke by degrees. As consciousness stirred, I was met with a pervasive sense of foreboding, like I’d done something terrible and the piper would soon come calling for payment. This abysmal gloom was accompanied by the worst physical pain I could remember; my body was screaming, inside and out. My left eye was swollen nearly shut and my ears buzzed. I couldn’t raise my head, and my stomach felt like it was full of something alive, but dying.
    “Dave?” I croaked, wondering if he was alive, and if so, if he could enlighten me about the previous day’s events. After hearing only palpable, ominous silence, I slowly rose to my feet and carefully walked into Dave’s room, not worried that I would find another raunchy sex scene. The air itself was slick with despair; demons were abounding but love was conspicuously absent. I found Dave lying on the floor beside his bed, naked. “Damn,” I thought, “I gotta quit seeing this shit; it’s doing something bad to my psyche.”
    I poked Dave with my foot. “Wake up, man,” I said. He snorted loudly and opened one eye but he didn’t seem to be seeing out of it. Had he gone blind? I grabbed his shoulder, shaking him. “Come on, buddy; wake up!”
    “Okay,” he said quietly. He managed to prop himself on an elbow before swooning and falling back down. “I think I’m broke,” he whispered. He looked exactly how I felt; broke. Indeed.
    “Come in the living room when you get dressed. I can’t remember a damn thing about last night ... I don’t remember any of yesterday much either. I need some help, buddy,” I said.
    “Do I appear to be in any shape to help anybody?” Good point.
    I hobbled into the living room, noting the frightening state of disrepair of the furnishings as I went. The room reeked of used booze and choking bewilderment; bottles and cans were strewn everywhere; broken furniture sat on sopping carpet. The front window was broken and a hot, harsh breeze blew through the curtains, which were parted slightly, one torn partially off the rod. Realizing with some chagrin that I was looking at a beautifully constructed representation of how I felt, I nearly swooned with crystallized irony. It was all I could do to keep from crying.
    Since Dave had yet to make an appearance, I decided to check our store of alcohol. I mean, I desperately needed to get a little something down or face the very real possibility of shaking apart. I’d somehow crashed through the ceiling of being drunk from the night before into some unknown new realm, one that was too cruel to fathom; I was seeing too clearly, and the view was horrendous. I opened the refrigerator door slowly, hoping to be greeted by another pleasant surprise like yesterday, a treasure of cold beer to nurse my Sunday morning meltdown. Two cans of Falstaff greeted me, both already opened. I grabbed at one and had it nearly to my mouth before the lightness of the can registered; it was empty. I found about an ounce in the other. Now, quietly crying, I closed the refrigerator door.
    Now was the time for crippling introspection, a wound-licking realization of blind alley awareness. I could not keep doing this. “It’s just too hard,” I whispered aloud. Before I could think further, Dave oozed into the room and collapsed on the couch, then looking up at me, imploring. “We got any beer?”
    “Not a drop, buddy. I feel so bad, Dave. I’m gonna die, I think.”
    “Yeah, but not today,” Dave said. “Isn’t today Sunday?’
    “’Fraid so,” I said. “Who can we call? There must be somebody who’ll help us. This is bad.”
    A loud humming filled the room, as if we were on the verge of crossing over into some other world. I vaguely hoped maybe this would be the case; any other world would suck less than the one in which we were currently mired. I’d been through many bad mornings, times of deep regret and shame, but this morning positively cloaked any sense of good or light or even a chance of escape, no matter how deplorable.
    “Joey, everybody is sick of us. There’s nobody to call. The Fina station is at the crossroads, but you know how far away that is,” said Dave. A long, unbearable silence ensued. I sat, looking at Dave, my lower lip quivering, a runnel of snot slowly oozing down my lip. I could not seem to catch my breath. Finally, after ages of chest-bursting indecision, Dave said, “I’m walking, and so are you. We have to do this; it’s our quest. If it kills us, we need to be dead.”
    I wiped my nose, trying to decide if I would rather die alongside the road leading to Utopia, boiling slowly in the unrelenting sun, or just go ahead and slit my own throat right now. I knew I couldn’t kill myself, and by the look on Dave’s beet red, glowering mug, I was just as certain that I couldn’t talk him into bringing something home for me.
    “Well, goddammit; let me find a shirt ... and a good hat,” I said. “By God, I know I can’t make it; it’s seven miles out there. Hmm, and seven miles back.”
    “Getting back won’t be a problem, Joey. Then, we’ll have the beer. We should probably get some Wild Irish Rose too.”
    I hopped back on the fence, but this time I wasn’t weighing my options; I was nearly overcome with the clarity of the situation. Remembering the summer before, when Nan and I set out on a ten mile hike for Quaaludes. That situation was dire but some levity intermingled with the despair. I had no idea things had progressed so much in less than a year. I was shaking like a Chihuahua having a panic attack, my back and legs ached badly, and I kept drifting into a strange fugue, not sure of ... anything. The trance-state alone was very alarming; I couldn’t focus on the task at hand. Maybe it, like the idea of eating an elephant, was just too momentous.
    I recalled my Boy Scout days, when a seven mile hike in the mountains with a forty pound pack sent shivers of anticipation up my youthful spine. Reeling with the recognition that those days were only four years past, I internally slammed the door on my reminiscing and tried to jump into the moment. Though successful, my quantum leap deposited me right back in the neck-deep shit that was today, the task still at hand.
    “I’m not waiting any longer, buddy,” Dave said, walking toward the door. I grabbed a hat, strapped on my shoes, and followed my friend through the gates of hell.
    What followed was a death march. Though I felt like I should be waiting on an ambulance, I was stumbling behind the ever intrepid Dave, who doggedly strode along, about ten feet in front of me. He was keeping a pretty slow pace, but as time oozed by, I began to realize that he was not in the mood for breaks; no, this was going to take more persistence than I possessed, at least on this day. I recognized a loop of thought, a mantra of doom. I saw the hollowness of our quest, but at the same time, I saw vast quantities of alcohol directly underneath a burnished halo, the answer to all of my questions. “I’m killing myself for nothing” flickered ceaselessly as we continued our desperate hike.
    The sun wasn’t moving; it sat atop my shoulders and head, charring my flesh. Dave was sweating like a pig in front of me, but somehow I remained dry. I seemed to be boiling inside, my skin seared to lock the fetid juices inside, poisoning me. My eyes remained locked on Dave’s boot heels, and I somehow stumbled on.
    Dave finally turned away from the road and collapsed on the shoulder. Though neither of us wore a watch, I thought the time to be around two. I slowly made my way to the ground beside my supine buddy. I wondered if I looked as bad as he did. His face was beet red and he seemed to be having trouble breathing.
    “We’re over halfway there,” he wheezed. “How long do you think we’ve been walking?”“I have no idea, buddy. It seems like about a month. If we’ve gone halfway, there’s sure as shit no point in turning back,” I said.
    “Oh no, Mr. Holland; that was never an option. We probably should have brought some water, though.”
    We looked at each other for another moment, and without another word, rested. Though shade would have helped, the respite lent me a second wind. After a couple more minutes, we glanced at each other, rose, and began our trek again.
    I lost hope a couple of times during the rest of the walk, but mostly I held on. The facts were simple: if I actually fainted, I wouldn’t have to walk and Dave could flag down a car or something and the cruel death march would be over. If I didn’t faint, I would continue to walk. The truth of the walk became a metaphor for my current aimlessness. I was walking, sick, in the blistering heat, seven miles, just for beer. The most disturbing component of the excursion was that it made perfect sense. Inebriation was the panacea of the time; forget opiates, amphetamines, barbiturates, (or at least put them on the back burner); I needed to be obliterated from the effects of King Alcohol. I was a loyal subject, and my liver, quickly approaching irreparable damage, was my medal, my sacrifice to my king. I would somehow make the last of the hike and things would be better, exponentially.
    The service station remained around the next corner, seemingly forever. My mind wandered; and I thought of times when my aspirations were more pure. I saw myself on the tennis court where I spent endless hours just a couple of years before, back when I was still in school. My aim then was to obtain a tennis scholarship to Presbyterian College in Clinton. With hard work and dedication, I probably could have done it. Non-stop drug use and mass quantities of alcohol proved less productive, and as time passed, the hope of a future in tennis sluffed off, leaving me ... well, leaving me walking up the side of the road in the blistering heat in the hopes of corralling beer.
    I reminisced about my time in the band, when I was sure my buddies and I were going to be famous. The same derailment, the desire to build a better head, squashed those dreams as well. Everywhere my thoughts landed, they pointed, finally, to this particular walk, and it saddened me. The road I walked was the only road, and the beer at the end of the trek, the only reward. On we trudged. Time bounded and stopped simultaneously; I began to suspect I’d died and gone to hell.
    The slow meandering turn finally revealed the façade of the Fina station. Dave and I slowed and stopped as we gazed at our oasis. I don’t know how Dave felt, but my senses were so frayed that I just stood, mouth agape, staring dully at the small, dirty building. We both knew better than to sully the ephemeral moment with words, so we just stood there another few seconds before slowly crossing the road with which we’d become so intimate and walking across the parking lot and into the store.
    In stark reality, I heard no trumpets or other hearkening of our arrival. We’d beat the odds, somehow traversing a two land blacktop for seven fucking miles in the boiling heat; we did it in the direst of circumstances; shriveled, weak, aching from a three-day drunk. Sure, we did it because we had to, but that made little difference in the face of the sheer determination the event evoked. Nevertheless, I didn’t feel any sense of accomplishment, no realization that my savior was near at hand; I just felt ... numb.
    Sunday beer sales were still illegal in South Carolina, so we had to perform the old nod and wink to procure our libation, but after about five minutes, we walked out with two twelve packs apiece. Walking around the back of the store, we found the perfect tree to sit under and hoist a few, to re-invigorate our souls. Without having to discuss it, we both knew we wouldn’t need to carry all that beer back to the house, and not because we planned on drinking a good portion of it before we left our tree. No, with the alcohol now pulsing through our bloodstreams, we knew a ride would appear; after all, God takes care of babies and drunks.
    We sat drinking, our death march all but forgotten. Like the pebble in the shoe once found and discarded, almost instantly is totally lost to conscious thought, so was the dangerous trek we just experienced. Life took on new meaning; we weren’t faced with problems, but interesting puzzles to solve. The day would essentially take care of itself, and all of the second guessing about the worth of my life during our hike seemed silly; ludicrous, really. Now was the time. Now I had plenty of beer and a good friend with whom to share it. Our conversation soon turned to recounts of the weekend, the escapades of Ronnie and the other guys from the Hop, our dangerous trysts with the mystery women who suddenly appeared only to disappear in the same alcoholic fog that produced them. I felt the muscles in my face relax and my crooked smile returned; I was home. And though frail, I was also golden, at least for now.

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