I know that you’ve seen it, for a very simple reason: they made me—just like you—a member of the human race, which really isn’t a good idea. What I should have been is Anselmo, if you want to know the truth. Here he is, having found a perfectly good use for the Costco bag that I had to buy for my cross addiction.
Shit—am I oversharing?
Let’s get back to Anselmo and that fuck-up that has ruined my life, if you want to know the truth. Whoever it was who handed out the sex assignments did just great—I’m gay, of course, but otherwise perfectly happy being a man. And even though I revere the courage of trans people, I’m happy to report that I will stay right here in the weaker sex, thanks. Being a woman takes serious balls, as we sort of say down here in Puerto Rico (una mujer con cojones, unless I’m making this up, as I probably am.)
So they didn’t do badly by me, and if I were a member of that organization mentioned in that thing that you and I both saw because somebody made the madcap decision to turn us into a human (Marc, who works his fingers to the bone making notebooks for YOU, and ‘tis sharper than a serpent’s tooth to have a thankless cat!) instead of a cat (Anselmo, and see last parenthesis) …
…well, I’d be damn grateful. In fact, I’d be ashamed of myself.
Anyway, let’s get both photos out of the way, before I tell you all about the organization that I’m not a part of.
Anselmo has it made, of course, or so I think. Rather, so I WOULD think if I were a member of that organization mentioned above. I am not, absolutely not, a member of AA because by definition I can’t be. Some things have their codes embedded, as it were, in their names: you can’t ask if a woman is a lady because…well, you’d never ask that question of a real lady. (This is part of my Victorian upbringing, about which later). You can’t know if you’re an alcoholic for the same reason: by definition a person suffering a disease of denial (drugs / booze / sex / being right / needing to tell you about it / but that’s another story) cannot diagnose him or herself. And I would never tell you that I’m in AA because that second “A” five words ago? It stands for Anonymous.
Of course I don’t go to AA.
The idea is preposterous.
It would be a good idea, I think we can all agree, if I did go to AA, because that would sure be the place for me, if you had seen me, that last weekend before I went into detox for the most recent (not the last, which would be very clear to me, were I a member of the program) time. I was a fucking mess—the booze had stopped working despite drinking as hard as I could. The deal I thought I made with the demon rum was off—in the past I had drunk sullenly to a state of stupor and passed out. That weekend I couldn’t pass out because I couldn’t get to “stupor”, which was followed by “coming to,” during which time I had to pretend that whatever I was doing in “coming to” was in fact “real life.” I had to pretend this because it was critically important to pretend that I was not in deep trouble—an alcoholic, in fact. I knew—at some level, of course—that I was fooling nobody but myself. The cashier at SuperMax asked me, a month or two after I stopped drinking, “Dewar’s?”
An organized, thoughtful alcoholic would spread the booze purchases across several stores, if only not to put the cashiers in the uncomfortable position of being accomplices.
So if you had asked that particular cashier whether the tall gringo sometimes seen carrying his cello on his back needed to go into Alcoholics Anonymous…well, she’d probably just have looked at you.
Yeah, dude, and he could get a haircut once in a while and start shaving before he puts the mug out into the shared public spaces—that’s what she’d tell you.
So I should have gone to AA, but I didn’t. I know why, of course, because I know a lot of people in AA, and they tell me stuff that’s pretty amazing. They sit in the rooms, as they say, and they tell the shit about themselves that they would never tell anybody else except another alcoholic. They do this because they can’t forget—number one. The problem with the program is that it works, but for it to keep working, you have to keep working the program. If this makes sense to you, congratulations. You are not an alcoholic.
I am an alcoholic, though I don’t go to AA (even though I should) because alcoholics are grandiose and delusional. That’s what they tell me, those guys who do go to Alcoholics Anonymous. By definition, I can’t diagnose myself as having a disease of denial (though haven’t I? shit…) and I also can’t plea delusional, since how can I know what’s real or not, if I’m delusional.
Anyway, the point, which I really want to grind home…
…the point, as I was saying…
…the point seems to be, if the booze has cleared my brain enough in the eight years that I haven’t been going to AA…
…oh yes, I get my AA through osmosis, since I happen to be an alcoholic too stupid or grandiose or delusional to go to a meeting, which I would never do, but which even if I did I would never tell you about. Because I believe what they tell me, about keeping my side of the street clean, and minding my own damn business, which is called “not taking someone’s inventory.” Which means that I can see, as I very often used to do, one of San Juan’s most esteemed artists stumbling home every morning at six AM, and I don’t call him a drunk. He was, of course, but who am I to talk?
Anyway, the guys tell me a lot about those meetings because I have figured out a really, really great solution to the problem of what to do, as an alcoholic, with your morning, since I haven’t been reaching down through the slats of my bed to that nether world where the “scotch” in the green plastic bottle lives and rules.
In Norse mythology, the troll—evil creature—lives under the bridge, and steals souls from those who pass above. (Little shout-out to Schubert, and the lied der Erklönig, which carries on this legend; also a shout out to Matthias Goerne, whom you can see below). The Dewars becomes, in the life of an alcoholic, not even marginally high-class: Dewars can pretend to be stuff that drinkers who are not drunks would drink, and keep with the crystal glasses in the Peruvian liquor cabinet, which he opens on occasion. That’s why the company keeps it running at 25 bucks a bottle, or so. They make a nice profit and those alcoholics who don’t go to AA (though they should, if I were to take their inventory, which of course I am not) can point out, with impeccable logic, that drunks get their booze out of green plastic bottles.
I digress, though it’s also quite possible that the grandiosity has made me need to explain all this to you, even though it should be perfectly clear to you…
Anyway, the point is that I couldn’t go to AA, for the reasons wearily explained above, but I did have to do something, if only to keep the cashiers at SuperMax happy. I had to get up, in fact, and get out of the house, because even though the Erlkönig no longer lurked beneath my mattress in the green plastic bottle…
…well, he might come back, if I don’t do something about it.
Working that program that you gotta keep working, you know…
So I have to get out of the house and I have to go somewhere and I have to take care of the first order of business, which in my case is to get somehow into tomorrow without a hangover. Any person not in denial can see that.
Even I, a drunk.
It’s more than that.
If I get out of the house, I will force myself to say, in my best gringo Spanish (or español, since I am giving it my all for Bunny!), Buenos días!
Oh, let’s piss them off. I say…
…¡Buenos Días!
If you say it in a Newhouse voice, it will command respect and reply from the five strangers who are trying to get through their morning and then through their day. They won’t want to be bothered, of course, but they’ll hear the inverted exclamation marks the gringo is trying to say, and they’ll grin. As I have grinned, since it’s pretty silly, a gringo speaking español (note that tilda above the “n”—ah, that’ll really drive the conservatives crazy!)
Anyway, by the time I get to the bus station, I will have gotten out of the house (no.1) and gotten away from the Erlkönig that will creep under my bed if I don’t leave the house in the morning and do something about him (no.2). I will have gotten five smiles from five strangers (no. 3). I will have greeted my bus driver, since I am an alcoholic who does not go to AA but who knows that he, like every other entitled drunk, is the piece of shit at the center of the universe. So my bus driver very naturally acknowledges that I am, in fact, the center of the universe. That’s why he stops right in front of where I am going, even though my destination (as the airlines say) is smack in between bus stops, and it’s strictly prohibited to make special stops for people who are just passengers, not alcoholics, with that lingering smell of shit.
My bus driver stops in front of my club, which is called Caribbean Twelve Steps, and which I might photograph since it is not anonymous, as some of the recovery groups that work in the space (work, not meet) are. My club is very nice, since it was made for me, of course.
And I dig seeing those alcoholics, who are usually out there smoking by the front door, since that’s what they do. I like these guys, even the ones who piss me off, or would if I went to their meetings.
I don’t, in case you need me on page six of this damn post to tell you.
Anyway, I am totally down with their laughing at me alighting from my conveyance (think Cinderella and that golden slipper!) since I have just amused five Puerto Ricans by pretending to speak Spanish (we’ll drop the español shit). I might as well let the alcoholics—God bless them—laugh at me for having trained my bus driver (one has to think of the little people who do so much for us entitled folk) to deposit me just where my delicate little feet want to go.
They laugh at me, and one of the drunks even tried to speak to the driver in his bad Spanish to commend him for shepherding his lost sheep over the bridge where Erklönig lives in the green plastic bottle pretending to be scotch.
We can all see this, of course.
So all of that business with the bus driver and the alcoholics hanging out smoking their cigarettes and the grace with which the bus driver has accommodated my entitlement and fended off the Erlkönig in the GPB (green plastic bottle), amuses the little alcoholics, bless them.
It’s entirely coincidental that I am arriving just as they are going into their meeting.
They do, and then they come out and they tell me about it.
Because I have serious stuff to do, which is to write this blog, and to make sure that Anselmo retains his most-favored-species status since they made me into a human and him into a cat.
Which is the whole point of this post.
I’m human, which is why I’m not a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, though God knows I should be. I’m human, so I haven’t told you about the other voice from the void, which is what this post is titled, and which you might reasonably feel entitled to read about. I’m human, which is the reason I knew that you had jumped down and looked at the picture of Anselmo and the fake headline before you had trudged up and began reading the text.
I’m human, and also an alcoholic, though I have to get my recovery second-hand, as it were. You might say that I get my recovery from the alcoholics just the way I get their nicotine—secondhand.
I’m down with that.
And the alcoholics tell me that I have typed 2190 words spread out over seven pages.
Shit—2199!
And—bingo, that “and” put me over the 2200 mark, and even Anthony Trollope didn’t pull that off, with his measly 250 words for every 15 minutes he wrote. It’s now three hours since I started writing after the meeting I didn’t go to in this very nice club where I write this important stuff. Let’s see, three hours is twelve fifteen-minute segments, and twelve times 250 words is only…
Shit, 3000.
Well, I’m human, which means that I am made lesser than the Trollopes (Anthony’s mother was just as disciplined, and considerably more caustic). It doesn’t make me a bad person, to be human.
That makes sense, doesn’t it?
Guess I’ll have to wait until tomorrow, when there are some of the guys from the meeting out smoking their cigarettes.
I’ll get back to you on that.
(If you have to, Erklönig starts at 24:00 in the video, and I get it if you just want to hear that lied. But you'll probably circle back to listen to the whole thing, if you have a pulse...)
