MORTALITY (INFINITY?) KNOCKS AGAIN

Let’s just say I was a very drunk alcoholic that night, and it was Halloween. My life was falling apart, had been for years. With a wife and two kids at home and me working at minimum wage in that shitty little machine shop I talked about a few posts back, I couldn't see a way out. As the song says, "Been down so long it looks like up to me." This moment of enlightenment followed not too much longer after having worked as a janitor at the very University I had five years ago graduated from with a B.A. in English with a respectable “B” average. A long fall of comeuppance.

A work acquaintance of mine, Bill, owned this bowling alley. He worked at the machine shop, where I worked, to help him make a go of his business. His alley was in a rundown neighborhood and still used pin boys because Bill couldn’t afford to put in the automatic pin setters the bigger alleys had all gone over to. He bowled for money too and had once played triple-A ball in the Boston Red Sox farm system. He pitched and claimed to have been a good junk ball pitcher, but his family came along and took first spot in his heart, so he gave it all up, he said.

I was a little in awe of his tall, dark-haired athleticism and competence which is sort of why I felt as I did when this particular encounter with mortality happened. As I said, I showed up drunk at Bill’s place after already drinking for a good part of the night. I ordered a beer and sat down at a table in the empty alley. I don’t know how many more beers I drank that night. May have been only one, and I can’t even recall why I went to Bill’s bowling alley that night.

Next thing I knew, I woke up face down on the table in a pool of spilled beer. Jerking upright, I saw Bill behind the counter, talking to a leggy woman who slouched on a tall stool on the other side of the counter. My head was spinning and I was, as usual in those days, ashamed to be caught “POWD”, that is "passed out while drinking". That was a sign of a man who couldn’t handle his booze. Not that I hadn’t been passing out since my early days of drinking in high school, but, still, passing out was always a shameful act which I promptly forgot next time I went drinking. Saying nothing, I staggered to my feet and headed out the door, hoping Bill and the woman didn’t notice me leaving. I hoped not to hear a voice calling after me. None did.

Outside in the dark, my head was splitting and I was sick to my stomach. Blinded by misery, I walked toward my car which was parked at the curb a few houses down the street from the alley. I always drank while driving. Using the bowling alley facade for support, I was holding down the vomit rising in my throat by swallowing wildly. When I reached the end of the building and came to an alley, I quickly ducked into it, rushed well back from the street and bent over to vomit. I knew this part of the drinking finale as well as I knew my own name, when I knew it, which was most of the time.

Vomiting helped the sickness temporarily and with some relief, except from the headache, I turned and slid down the wall into a sitting position beside my little pool of vomit. I thought I might sleep for awhile, and I had a moment to look around.

Above me on a pole, from the opposite side of the alley, hung a tall blue-hued yard light which illuminated a garage. The rest of the alley was in deep night shadow, and I suddenly became aware of myself, as a person separated from myself, watching me slumped in the alley under a blue light like a stage spotlight. I could often detach from myself like that in the throes of my drinking and morning hangovers. That night, I sensed myself illuminated by the yard light, in a pool of light, like a figure in a movie, I suppose and, then, back in my own body, I looked up into the narrow patch of starry sky revealed between the shadow buildings on both sides of the alley.

My sense of aloneness and alienation was total and overpowering. I knew, right then, at that sick moment, how alone I was in the universe. I knew that there was no god up there in that starry heaven and that there was no love anywhere in the universe for anyone to find, and I, specially, knew myself as loveless and incapable of loving. I recall thinking at that moment of the stranger in his prison cell at the end of Camus’s, The Stranger. That was me and it was awful and utterly demoralizing.

“There’s no god,” I thought. “And no love anywhere in the universe. No one loves me and I don’t love nobody!” O, god, it was a scary world for a little man/boy like me. My chest filled with a cold, dead absence of feeling as I repeated these words to myself.

I suddenly pictured my wife at home and the loveless marriage we were in. Only my consciousness was alive; the rest of my being was in cold storage, holding my mind, tilted up, in the darkness to the sky. Then, still staring at the sky, and in an angry challenging inner voice, I pulled all my non-feeling into a ball of despair and from it, issued a challenge to nothing, to myself, to my pain, to the whole Cosmos: “Yeah, and only I am tough enough to take this.” Stunned, I let the cold death of non-feeling ice my body up. I found little consolation in the thought.

Soon, I arose and, on rocky feet, stumbled to my car and drove home to swallow Alka Seltzer and soak my head in a shower until the headache eased up a bit so I could pass out and sleep.
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"A woman drove me to drink, and I never even had the courtesy to thank her." —W.C. Fields