THE DRUNK OUT OF NOWHERE or
IF THERE WERE A GOD, HE’D WORK IN STRANGE WAYS.

You are standing on the small concrete porch in front of Sutton Hall on the campus of Eastern Washington University in the state of Washington. The sun’s low in the western sky, a wonderful end to a gently warm day when out of nowhere he walks up the front walk, freshly shaved, newly washed short sleeve shirt and khaki pants. The low sun shining in his face hi-lights his thin features. There’s an aura of scrubbed newness about him that is quite strange. Something’s not quite right. He approaches close and in a timid voice says, “Is there some club here I heard about? An AA club?”

Immediately you know what he’s all about. You’re one too, but you’re sober, have been for a few years, and you think it’s wildly coincidental that out of all the people in this small Washington town and on this campus he’s walked right up to you to ask. AA members have a tendency to conflate coincidence with the will of a power greater than themselves, and you’re no different.

In a small town like Cheney, of course there’s no club, just a living room that a religious group lets drying out drunks use to meet once a week. The Konoinia House. He tells you he’s fresh out of detox, just released, and he’s thumbing his way to Seattle, all the way across the state. He tells you a lame story about someone over there who’ll put him up, if he can just get over there. His plan sounds desperate and unsound. Nothing about the story makes sense. Nothing’s clear or firm or quite put together right. You expect him to hit you up for a couple of bucks. You’ve heard stories of wet drunks who go from club to club only to finance their drinking binges.

He hasn’t eaten all day he tells you, and so you make some calls to scrape a little money together from friends of Bill (all poor because they’re going to college), and then you take him down to a local restaurant to buy him dinner. He only want’s soup and coffee. He tells you he can’t keep anything else down. Up close beside him... now you see how bad off he is. The soup spoon shakes so badly that most of the chicken noodle spills before he gets it to his mouth. Coffee splatters into the saucer when he tries to lift the cup to his lips.

This guy is barely detoxed. He’s just been sobered up and put back on the street. He’s sober less than a couple of days, you guess. He won’t be specific about anything. You can only guess.

You take everything in and you mention “fear”. He says, “Yeah.” You ask him what he’s afraid of. He says, and his voice breaks with trembling, “Everything.” Coffee shakes out of his cup all over the counter. You recognize the feeling.

You’re not sure how you can help this man. There’re no facilities for drunks in Cheney, you're pretty broke, and he seems to be so far gone that he needs care, so you offer to get him a room overnight at Sutton Hall if you can get permission. You plan to look for advice from other recovering drunks the next day.

Fortunately, veterans rent Sutton Hall from the school (it’s shortly after Vietnam) and manage their own affairs. Some of this is because the school really is glad to keep the vets separate from the youngsters, specially the hot bodied young women. Marijuana and alcohol float freely around Sutton so there’s tolerance for this one more forlorn drunk for just one night. There are lots of empty rooms... you can get him a room for a few bucks, no trouble.

You drop some singles through the office door slot and lead him upstairs three flights to a small, dirty room in the old building. Your footsteps echo in the wood stairwell and squeak on the linoleum. You get him a set of sheets from your room and make a bed for him. You notice how uneasy he is. In fact you guess he doesn’t want to stay, but he sits down on a leatherette chair and glumly watches you make his bed which is actually a spring supported bunk bed like you might find on a military base. He’s getting ever more silent. A bad sign, you think. He’s lost. About like a five or six year old away from home for the first time.

“Come on.” You lead him from the room and walk him down and around the corner to show him your room, very close to his. You say, “I’ll be right here all night. If you want anything come see me. I don’t care what time it is.” You’re trying to put his mind at ease, stop the terror you know he feels. “I’ll leave my door ajar.”

Then you lead him back to the room you’ve given him. His silence increases. You imagine he’s not even hearing you anymore. He’s somewhere lost inside himself and standing in the middle of the small room, staring defensively at the bunk as you leave the room.

In your room you try to watch TV on the small black and white set you bought at Goodwill, but you’re uneasy about leaving the man alone. After less than twenty minutes, you walk back to his room on the squeaky linoleum floor. His door’s open. He’s gone. In the middle of his clean white sheet is a tiny puddle that looks like coffee grounds. Is it vomit? Has he crapped his pants, bleeding from his asshole? Blood coming out of an asshole looks like coffee grounds, you think you’ve heard.

You go in search of your man. Outside first, and up and down the street in the dark outside the building, but you know you aren’t going to drive all the streets of Cheney, looking for him. If he’s gone he’s gone. He could be anywhere. He might even be crashed in the bushes around the admin. building across the street.

Back in the vet’s dorm, in the TV room on the first floor, you ask a few vets if they’ve seen him. “Nope!” Okay, you’ve done your duty, you tell yourself as you trudge the stairs back up to your room.

At the top of the stairs on the third floor, you hear a door slam, and out of a corner room comes your man on crazily lurching legs. He’s shoeless and supports himself against the wall. The linoleum’s slippery under his stockinged feet. He’s drunk as a skunk, and he’s only been out of your sight for thirty or forty minutes. You’ve heard of this phenomenon. A “low bottom” drunk loses all capacity to resist the effects of alcohol. It’s one more of the long term effects of alcoholism, like a wet brain. One drink can get an alcoholic madly drunk.

“Hey, what happened to you?” you ask.

“I’m fuckin’ drunk,” he slurs.

“I can see that.” You make a broad joke which passes over his head. He’s definitely one of us, you tell yourself.

Okay, that’s that. Like a good alcoholic your man has reconnoitered and achieved his mission to find a drink in strange territory. You lead him back to the room you got for him. You suggest he go to bed and sleep it off as you take a seat on a chair near the door.

Suddenly, he’s on his knees before you and, with hands in folded prayer position, pleading with you. “Please. Please. I don’ wanna stay here. Please. Please.” He’s terrified of being inside this room, terrified! You don’t know why.

He continues begging, and you give in real quick. His insanity is scaring even you. He’s loud. You can hear his voice echoing along the corridors of the third floor. This is worse and more irrational than you’ve encountered in your brief sobriety on any twelve step call to a drunk in distress.

He can’t put on his own shoes so you sit him on the bed while you put on and tie his shoes for him, then you take him down the stairs, supporting his stumbling steps all the way down. He can’t walk, really, on his own.

You get him into your Pinto around the corner from the front door of Sutton Hall, and ask him where he wants to go, what he wants to do. He says take him to the Interstate. He’s got to thumb. He’s got to get to Seattle. Got to.

Interstate 90 is about five miles from Cheney at Four Lakes, Washington, so you drive him there and pull off to the side of the road. It’s dark, the westbound entrance to the interchange is a few yards ahead. At a distance, somewhat below your line of sight, an occasional headlight flashes by on the interstate.

“You can’t thumb tonight. You won’t get a ride.”

He tells you he’ll sleep by the highway tonight and start in the morning.

“In the weeds? By the road?”

He mumbles something. Finally, you let go. You release the drunk and let him go. You turn him over to whatever fate has in store for him. You pull out your last bill, a fiver, and hand it to him. “Here. This’s all I got.”

He mumbles again. You imagine it’s a thank you. He opens the Pinto door and staggers out. He’s already standing better. You wonder why so quick. Was everything an act? Does he know he’s acting or is it all real terror and fundamental demoralization?

Anyhow... your man, your mark for good deeds, staggers away into the weed fields beside the highway. In the dark his form disappears fast, like a ghost, leaving you there with your thoughts. You can’t quite believe he’d rather sleep under the stars in the weeds beside the road than in a secure room, but you don’t know what has happened to him in small rooms in his life, in his youth, in his childhood. You don’t know anything at all, you decide, about his life. You U-turn your blue Pinto and head back to Cheney. You watch a little black and white TV then, on your knees, thank your lucky stars you’ve come this far before flying toward a sober sleep. As consciousness slips away, you hear yourself think you hope your own luck continues. They tell you that what you’ve just done helps towards staying lucky when it comes to alcohol.