“Peachy.” I wandered off and went into the formal room. I sat down in an armchair in the corner, and left the lights off. It was dark and quiet, and seemed to fit my mood.
There are many different types of drinking. There’s binge drinking, party drinking, social drinking, happy drinking, sad drinking, and all sorts of other types of drinking. The most dangerous type of drinking is thinking drinking. It’s deliberate, slow, relentless, dark, and depressing. You think, and then you have a drink, and then you think some more, and then you drink some more. You keep this up until you either run out of thinks or run out of drinks. I was doing some serious thinking drinking.
I had really fucked up this time. You could always trust me to do and say the exact worst thing. It was bad enough that I got into it with Mark and Big Bob. No, I couldn’t let the assholes slip by, I had to go after them. I had to react to them, let them call the tune. I couldn’t act like a grownup. I had to act like a spoiled little boy. I had left Marilyn. She’d never want to see me again. Now what was I going to do? The only thing I cared about in the whole damned world was gone. I had already destroyed my own family, now I was working on Marilyn’s. I sat there and slowly sipped shots of Black Velvet in the dark.
After a bit, I heard the back door open. Somebody else must have come in. There weren’t any other guys staying in the main house, but there were about three over in Grogans’, I thought. Whoever it was climbed the back steps and went upstairs, and I poured myself another shot. A minute later, as I stared at my shot glass, I heard somebody coming down the front stairs. For some reason I thought it sounded like a woman’s walk.
“Is he here? I saw his car in the parking lot.” It sounded almost like Marilyn. I swallowed the whisky and pondered that thought. Now I was hearing things.
Marty answered. “He’s in the formal room. What happened? He said his visit didn’t go well.” I heard the creak of the old couch, like somebody was getting up. I eyed the bottle and contemplated pouring another shot.
“No, not very. My brother Mark thought he would be funny and see how far he could push Carl, and my father decided to let him. They pushed him awfully far. He just left and came back.” The voices were sounding like they were getting closer. I thought about looking around for them, but decided not to. I looked at the bottle instead.
“He said something like that. I told him he should have decked your brother.”
“I kept on him to behave. I should have let him deck him, too. The last time this sort of thing happened, he broke his own brother’s jaw.” The voices were getting closer. “Oh, shit. We need to get him to bed.”
“Why do you think I was hanging out down here? I wanted to keep an eye on him until he passed out.” Before I could make a response, somebody took the bottle away from me, and then hands grabbed my arms and pulled me upright. “Jesus Christ! Put this asshole on a diet, will you?” complained Marty.
The room started to swirl around me, and then things seemed to go very dark.
Chapter 38: Aftermath
I woke up on top of my bed the next morning, with the sunlight making achingly bright patterns on my eyeballs. My head was pounding and my stomach was churning and I felt like I was about to pee my pants. I was still dressed. I stumbled downstairs and made it to the bathroom, where I got my pants down in time to sit down and piss out a river. There are actually two toilets parked next to each other in the main bath, which was a good thing, since my stomach kept churning and I was able to simply bend over from where I was sitting and puke into the other toilet until I had nothing left but dry heaves.
I didn’t think I had ever felt this crappy on my first go-around! This was even worse than the bout of dysentery I once had. To prove it, my guts cut loose and I had the runs. I sat there until that stopped and I prayed to die. God must have really had a wild sense of humor that day, since he let me live. I eventually was pissed, puked, and shit dry and empty. I got up slowly, my head throbbing, and looked in the mirror. I looked even worse than I felt. I stumbled over to the shower and turned the water on, and then stuck my head underneath it. I was still dressed, and my shirt ended up soaked, but I didn’t care. Now, semi-clean, I wandered back to the third floor.
I wasn’t sure how I had gotten there. I must have left the bottle downstairs last night. I felt too crappy to want another drink, so I dug out my bottle of Tylenol and dry gulped a handful. Oh, how I missed Advil! That wouldn’t be legal for another ten years! I stripped off my wet shirt and thought about going back to bed, but I wasn’t sleepy enough at the moment. Besides, my room and my bed stunk of stale sweat and booze. Despite the chill, I opened a window to air out the joint. At first it was bracing and refreshing, but then it just was cold. I grabbed some clean clothes and my toilet kit and headed down to the bathroom again.
It was about half an hour later, after a very long and hot shower, and another round of shitting, puking, and pissing, that I was alive and dressed and back upstairs. I did some more Tylenol; it might kill my liver, but after last night it was probably dying anyway. I closed the window to the room and grabbed my dirty laundry and headed downstairs. There, in the living room, as I turned the corner to head to the basement, I found Marilyn. I stopped dead in my tracks. “Hey, what are you doing here?”
She was sitting on the couch playing solitaire and watching Marty, Swayzack, and Ghormley play three handed poker. The three guys looked up and grumbled out various greetings, and Marilyn rolled her eyes. “I’ve been here since last night. How do you think you got up to your room?”
I gave her a very perplexed look at that. I looked towards the formal room, which was the last location I remembered clearly, and then back, to find Marty smirking at me. “You know, I have no idea. I was wondering about that. What happened?”
Marilyn flung the deck of cards at me, which didn’t hit me since they fluttered all over the room. “You asshole!” she yelled, which earned her a lot of laughs from the others. She got to her feet and came over to me, and wrapped her arms around me. “Sometimes you make me so mad I want to scream!” She grabbed my laundry and said, “Come on, let’s get the laundry going. Then we can clean up your pigsty.”
I followed along mutely. I didn’t know what to say, but I knew I wanted to say it alone with her. We went down to the basement and on towards the back where the washing machines were. Once we got there, I asked her, “So what happened after I left? I didn’t expect you here.”
“I left about an hour and a half after you did, maybe two hours. Just long enough for you to get drunk! You don’t remember me and Marty carrying you upstairs last night?”
I gave her a wry look. “Not really. I thought I heard you two talking, but I thought I was just hearing things.”
“The next time you get drunk like that, you’ll hear me kicking you in the balls! Asshole!”
The washing machine was making an uncommonly loud sound as it started to cycle, so I took her hand and led her back towards the front of the basement. There we sat down on an old couch. “I’m sorry about that. I had no idea you would come here. I would never do that with you around.”
That mollified her slightly, but only slightly, and I let her rag on me for a few minutes more. When I finally got a word in edgewise, I asked, “So why are you here? What happened after I left?”
She gave me one last “Asshole!” before settling down. She looked at me and shrugged. “It got crazy for a while. Most of the kids and Aunt Lynette took off, but Mom, Dad, Mark, and I went at it for over an hour. I don’t think anybody has ever stood up to my father like that before, and he didn’t know whether to respect you for it or banish you for life. He did try to ground me, and I told him I’d move out first. Mark did get grounded, and Dad even smacked him on the head, and I’ve never seen him do that before.”