Your trips to the health food store and the Grand Canyon were motivated by a visit with a liver specialist called Eloise, working from a strip-mall office in the dead-hilled community of Agoura, deep in the San Fernando Valley. She came recommended by the child actor, who called her Magic Fingers and said she could repair the bloodied organs of decrepit winos, but you were nervous about the visit because people often died around doctors and you had not seen one in years and the pain in your side had increased so that you sometimes doubled over in hissing pain.
Eloise was forty-five years old, with ornately decorated chopsticks crisscrossed through a bun of black and gray hair. She led you to the examination room and asked that you take off your clothes for your colonic and you froze and said, but I'm not having a colonic, and she slowly turned and her expression was severe and she said that just by looking at your eye coloring she could tell you were poisoned with alcohol and hepatitis and that there had to be a prompt and total change in your life or your liver would turn to charcoal and you would die, and that you had to begin treatment right away even though she did not have time for the procedure, and she made a stab at bedside humor, saying she would make time by eating her lunch throughout.
Her lecture frightened you — it was what you had been dreading, to the word — so much so that you surprised yourself by agreeing to the colonic, which was as you suspected it would be, humiliating and disgusting, and when she said you would have to go through this many times before your body was completely cleansed you wondered if death was not the more dignified route to take. Also you were shocked when you learned she had not been joking about her lunch: She put away a large bowl of rice with steamed eggplant and zucchini, all the while gesturing with her plastic fork at the running tube, alive with bouncing excrement.
You are thinking of all this as you walk from your truck to the health food store entrance. Eloise was unhappy when you canceled today's appointment (you called on a pay phone from the car rental agency) but when you told a lie about a family emergency she said she understood and that you were a good boy when you promised you would not think of drinking alcohol or taking drugs or aspirin during your absence. Wrenching a shopping cart free from the corral you decide you will not see her again and will try not to think of the colonic again and you will not tell anyone about the colonic and are glad to have ventured all the way to Agoura, where you will never in your life return and so never by chance bump into anyone who had seen you in the office, and you think of the stories you have heard of those who die only after they stop drinking and of the doctors who raise their hands up and say, "What a shame the man didn't come to me sooner." You decide Eloise is one of these, and feel a heavy burden lifted the moment you divorce yourself from her.
That you have wasted a portion of your pill-high thinking of such things as doctors and corkscrewed tubing is madness, and you strike them from your mind and relax your hands on the grip of the cart and stretch your neck to test your high and you feel that it is still with you and you enter the health food store and are contented to find it smells just as you hoped it would, like a giant, wheat-filled pill. There is soft music piped in from the ceiling and you browse the aisles for forty-five minutes, putting things in and taking them out of your cart and speaking with the store employees, telling them you contracted hepatitis C through a blood transfusion (lie) and are now in need of advice, and in their scrambling sympathy they refer to magazine articles and websites and they give you bottles of every sort, pills and muddy-looking juices, and also a pound of trail mix and a large container of blueberries, evidently a strong antioxidant. The manager offers to loan you a few books and she pulls these inspirational texts from a tasseled suede bag and fans them out on the counter for you to look over but you graciously decline and wish her a good morning and she responds in kind as do her coworkers, pimply, pretend hippies, tugging on their smocks and waving.
Sitting in your truck you open the bottles and take some of the good-for-you pills and then some more of your special white pills and you open a can of beer — you had stopped at a gas station and bought a single can of Budweiser — and stick this between your legs before setting out on your trip in earnest. There is traffic heading into but not away from the city and you stare at the disappointed faces stuck in their cars and lives and you feel the next wave of pills coming on and are certain you have made the prudent choice in planning this vacation and you drink your beer in one long gulp, breathing with your nostrils as you had been taught as a boy, with your eyes watching the road at a painful downward angle that makes you laugh (at the thought of the cricket-legged muscles on the backs of your eyeballs), and you toss the empty beer can out the window, or rather let go of it and it is sucked out the window (also funny), and you pull off the freeway to stop at a gas station for another can of beer and a phone card.
The truth is that you had not planned to drink on this trip and in fact this was its grand if overly dramatic purpose: To travel and see the world without any alcohol and to think of what was broken in your life and wonder clearheaded about the mending of these broken things. This was the plan and it was a fine plan, only midway through your previous night of work you were offered the bottle of white pills at a price so low you were morally unable to turn it down. You took these pills home and thought to leave them untouched in the cupboard as a present for your homecoming when it occurred to you to bring a few along in case of any emergencies — certainly they would offset your desire for whiskey — and you were happy with your realistic point of view and you took four pills to celebrate this and also to test their strength and you were happy again to find the pills were stronger than you had hoped and when you entered gas station number one your only idea was to purchase a phone card but your high made you dull-minded and there you were in the aisles, looking and pretending not to look at the coolers and at last giving in and purchasing the one can of beer, and later when you realized you forgot to buy a phone card you stopped at another gas station and again you forgot the phone card (you remembered the beer) but took comfort in the thought of the next gas station, and you wondered where it would be, and would the cashier be friendly or unfriendly, and you felt an uncommon patriotic shiver as you considered the country's innumerable gas stations and markets and rest stops, small businesses thriving or going under, the owners gambling their very lives on customers like yourself, travelers in need of single cans of beer and forgettable phone cards, and you looked forward to the next gas station, gas station number three, and you drank your beer down so that you might meet up with it sooner.
Traffic thickens in Covina and you exit the freeway looking around for gas station number seven. You drive past an old bowling alley and decide to wait out rush hour at the bar, swearing to yourself you will not drink a drop of whiskey, and you say it aloud: "I will not drink a drop of whiskey at the bar in the old bowling alley in Covina." You do not drink any whiskey but you want to terribly and you pour out two more white pills and lay these on your curling tongue (you shudder at their taste and fill your cheeks with beer). Time passes, an hour, and when you do not feel the pills coming on you know there are too many blocking up your bloodstream and that by taking any more you are wasting them, and so for the time being you cancel them from your mind and focus instead on your surroundings.