Usually I get the Navy Dream once or twice a year, but lately it’s coming a lot more fast and furious. I know the reason why. I think Hunter Thompson simply called it The Fear, that feeling of utter dread all writers get when they face that blank screen or empty page. If you write, you already know what I’m talking about: there’s a tightness in your throat from the pressure of having to sit down to work on a project. You wonder if today will be the day nothing comes out. When you’re writing for a deadline, multiply that pressure by ten.

And if you happen to be writing a sequel for a deadline, well, just go ahead and multiply it by a hundred. Take it from me: I’m working on a sequel right now, and it might be the most terrifying writing project I’ve ever taken on.

Now this might sound strange, but I’ll say it anyway: I think that terror is a good thing.

Today I’m on the road, driving along a two-lane blacktop called Highway 13, heading north into the upper reaches of Wisconsin. The radio only has two kinds of stations: new country, and old country. I’m on sabbatical — which is academic-speak for being temporarily unemployed — and I’m out here researching my novel Apostle Islands, which will be the follow-up to Nazareth, North Dakota, published by Atticus Books. Nazareth, North Dakota was the story of the young Messiah as he grows up on the rural prairie of North Dakota beginning in the 1980s. That book ends when the Messiah character walks out into the desert (in this case, the Badlands) to challenge Satan for forty days and nights. So, Apostle Islands starts there and takes us all the way to the end of the New Testament story. The sequel takes its name from the lonely chain of islands off the north coast of Wisconsin in Lake Superior. Which is where I’m heading right now, in a Toyota Camry packed with the essentials: camping gear, laptop, cooler, and a good stash of Nutter Butters.

When I tell my writer friends about the sequel, they all seem impressed. Honestly, it almost feels embarrassing to say out loud, “I’m writing a sequel,” because some people might actually hear, “My writing is so good it requires two books.” I hope they don’t. A sequel is a pretty rare thing in literary fiction, I guess: unless you’re writing a big series about wizards or zombies or mystery-solving housewives, fiction usually doesn’t get a sequel. Which might explain the Navy Dream last night. (At least I was sleeping alone this time, in my cozy hiker tent in an off-the-map state park. Trust me, when you wake up from the Navy Dream and you’re sleeping next to someone else, you have a lot of explaining to do.)

Like most writers, deep inside I know my fears are mostly unfounded. We all have deadlines, and we know that we’ll probably meet them one way or another. But in the meantime, we fret about it on a daily basis. Writers, you know the drill: you wake up, turn on the computer, and take your sweet time making coffee, checking e-mail, cleaning the sink. Anything but actually sitting down in front of that screen and facing judgment. Usually that fear passes: we start with a few words or a couple of good sentences, and then we feel things start to roll.

But there are those rare days when nothing comes out. There are those frightening times when the research gets more interesting than the actual writing. And we’re scared to death that it’ll be a while until things start rolling again.

I’m having a heck of a time out here on the road getting material for Apostle Islands, but I’m also learning that writing a sequel is hard work. When you get that first book published, you’re so happy just to have it in the bookstore and the library. But when you are presented with the opportunity to continue the story in a sequel, you want this one to be your Moby Dick, your White Album. When you are given the opportunity to write a sequel, you want the second part to be even better than the first. You want to impress the people who gave you this opportunity in the first place: the publisher, for one, as well as the nice people who read the first book. All sequels are judged as an extension of the original story, and that’s something the author can’t control. But that doesn’t mean we don’t worry about it on a daily basis.

For my part, I’m out here putting together the sequel in the same way I put together Nazareth, North Dakota. I’m sitting in diners listening to folks talk, I’m taking pictures of street corners and hunting down weird artifacts. I’m soaking in all the cool details about the place. In putting together Naz, I found all this legwork really does translate to the writing — maybe not directly, but by some kind of weird osmosis, it builds the story. It makes the writing part a whole lot easier; I don’t think I could do it otherwise. When you’re on the road, it can be whole lot of fun exploring a place for the first time. Library research is important, but there’s no substitute for experiencing a place first-hand. Plus, you get to eat a whole lot of Nutter Butters by the campfire.

Right now I’m about halfway through the first draft of Apostle Islands, and I have to say I absolutely love the writing so far. Old characters are mixing with new ones and the story is taking me to new places. The sequel is slated for a Summer 2012 release, and if I think logically, I know I’ll meet my deadline with room to spare. But as all writers know, our fears don’t care too much about logic. The good news is, we also know that fear is the same thing that drives us to create something great. We use fear as motivation. We can never really tell if the project we’re working on will be our White Album — other folks will decide that — but any writer will tell you that the unique feeling of being surprised by your own writing is worth all the agonizing fear churned up in a hundred Navy Dreams. With this draft of Apostle Islands, I’m still excited by the story as it slowly unravels in my dusty brain, and that lets me know that this is going to be something I’ll be proud of in the end. I’m not worried yet about what other folks will think: after all, Revolver and Meet the Beatles were kick-ass pieces of art, too.

Tonight I’m camping out on the real Apostle Islands, and I can’t wait. As I get closer it’s hard to stay under the speed limit on this back road. If you’ve been up in these parts, then you know how beautiful and lonely this place is. I’ll be off the radar for a while, which can be the best thing for a writer. Tonight I’ll set up my little tent the same way I have been for the last week, on my way out here; I’ll pump up the old air mattress and put the coffee pot on the fire. And when I lie down to sleep, I know I just might wake up in the middle of the night again with that same Navy Dream. But that’s a good thing. It’s a sign I’m getting closer to turning the corner on this story. And when I deliver that finished draft to my publisher, it’ll be more than worth it.

About the Author
Tommy Zurhellen was born in New York City. His debut novel, Nazareth, North Dakota, was released by Atticus Books in Summer 2011. The sequel, Apostle Islands, is slated for an August 2012 release. Learn more about Tommy, Nazareth and his research at tommyzurhellen.com.

Photos by Tommy Zurhellen

© 2011, Tommy Zurhellen. All rights reserved.

“This shirt’s better than a dating service,” my friend Carrie used to say. Carrie’s “Marry Me” t-shirt was tight and lime green. She wore it on layovers and never paid for drinks. “You’d be amazed what people will do for free plane tickets,” she’d say.

I’m amazed what people will do for love.

When I finally ask Danny to marry me, it comes almost out of nowhere. We’d gone out to eat at a restaurant called the Red Star. The Red Star is half restaurant, half train station. The décor is circus kitsch. Above the bar, there are two huge papier-mâché sculptures. The sculptures are two bulbous tightrope walkers, a man and a woman. The walkers are balanced overhead on chubby tiptoe, perched like fat birds on their tightrope, toddling there, against the odds of gravity, against any good sense.

“I have healthcare.” This is how I propose, over a plate of potato skins and some peel-and-eat shrimp. “I have flight benefits.”

Danny hates to fly, but he still says yes.

“That was the nicest thing anyone has ever asked me,” Danny says later.

“That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever asked,” I say.

We don’t tell my mother or our friends. We don’t call Danny’s kind and lovely parents. That weekend, we cash in the last of his savings bonds, buy two simple rings at The Clark Building in Pittsburgh, and fly to Las Vegas for free, first class.

How I know Danny loves me: he said yes, even though both of us had at one point sworn off marriage. And he’s not complaining about the flight, even though he’s gripping his armrests and sweating so much a flight attendant thinks he might be having a heart attack.

“We’re getting married,” I say.

“That explains things,” she says, and brings us a bottle of champagne and an extra airsickness bag, just in case.

“Close your eyes,” I say to Danny. “I’ll wake you when we get there.”

“There’s no way I’m sleeping like this,” he says.

As much as Danny’s miserable, I love it up here. After years of working flights like this one, I can sleep better on an airplane than I can at home. Some flight attendants I worked with used to take home recordings of jet engines and play them as white noise so they could sleep on the ground. Danny’s more like most people, who think, rightfully so, that flying isn’t natural. But I’m with the little old lady who, on a flight to Kansas City once, in the middle of a bad bout of turbulence, threw her arms up and yelled, “They should charge extra for this!”

The flight from Pittsburgh to Vegas, with a stop in Atlanta, takes about six and a half hours. When the plane finally starts to descend, I nudge Danny, who’s closed his eyes despite himself. I say, “Look. It’s beautiful. Trust me.”

***

It’s around midnight, Vegas time. Flying into Vegas at night is a magical thing. At first there’s only desert, one long stretch of black, and then there’s light. The signs that make up the Vegas skyline appear and the whole place looks like luck, something invented to sell on TV. On one end of the strip, there’s a sphinx and a pyramid. Farther down, there’s the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge, King Arthur’s castle and a pirate ship. Vegas looks like the world tossed in a Yahtzee cup. It looks like a jumbled Atlantis rising out of the sea. It looks like the inside of a madman’s snow globe.

“The whole damn place is a dream,” my father who loved and believed in Vegas used to say.

“I don’t need to go to Paris,” a passenger told me once. “I can visit the Eiffel Tower right here, where people speak English.”

“Everything’s fake,” another passenger said, “but it’s nicer than the real thing.”

I’d wanted to get married in Key West. Key West is literary and romantic. Hemingway had a house there. The descendants of his cats live there still. Tennessee Williams wrote “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the La Concha Hotel. Key West has beautiful sunsets. People get married barefoot on the beach, with the sun breaking open like an egg.

Key West would have been a perfect place for Danny and me to get married. It also seemed more legitimate than Vegas. Vegas is the place where drunk celebrities get married and divorced in 48 hours or less. Vegas is, like my passenger said, fake, which meant getting married in Vegas might be fake, too.

But Vegas it is, because we’re broke. Vegas is cheap and uncomplicated. “It doesn’t matter where we go,” Danny says. “We’re not the kind of people who care about those things.”

And I think: we. Even though I was the one to suggest all this, I feel fear bubble up. Marriage, and all the possible disasters that can come with it, still seems terrifying. I can’t name one couple who calls themselves we that liked, let alone loved, each other. Nearly every married couple I know is on their way to divorce or permanent misery. Most we couples talk to each other like Day Planners. “It’s Tuesday. Don’t forget to take out the trash.” “The dry cleaners closes at 8.” “You didn’t forget to buy milk, did you?” “I penciled you in for sex a week from Friday.”

“You’re right,” I say to Danny, and I put the pictures of sunset weddings and my copy of The Sun Also Rises away. We’re not those people. “Isn’t it pretty to think so,” Hemingway’s Lady Brett echoes back.

***

In Vegas, we get a room for $30 a night at Circus/Circus. The hotel is one giant Big Top. The Red Star’s papier-mâché trapeze artists feel like foreshadowing. Here there are real trapeze artists. There are mimes and clowns. The concierge is dressed like a circus barker. Being inside Circus/Circus is like being trapped inside a Fellini film. It’s like being stuck in a giant pinball machine.

When the writers Tess Gallagher and Ray Carver got married in Nevada’s Heart of Reno Chapel, Carver called it a “high tack affair.” After the ceremony, Tess went on a three-day winning streak at roulette.

“It’s perfect,” I say to Danny as we stand in line to check in.

“What?” he says. The bells from the slot machines, the circus music, the crowds – everything except the mimes – drowns everything out.

Upstairs in our room, the mattress sags. There are cigarette burns in one pillowcase. A Styrofoam take-out container is moldering under the bed.

“It’s not the honeymoon suite,” I say.

“Shut up and kiss me,” Danny says, and runs at me full on, knocking me onto the bed that creaks and bows and threatens to snap under our weight.

***

Later, we hire a cab driver to take us for a tour of wedding chapels. The cabbie, a middle-aged woman in a bedazzled tank top, says she’ll look out for us. “A nice couple like you,” she says. “I’ll get you a big discount.”

We drive down the Strip. Howie Mandel is playing the Tropicana. Sinbad is at the MGM. The cabbie seems nice at first. Then she starts talking.

“You picked the perfect place to get married. Vegas is the most romantic place on earth,” she says. “Just look at that.” She points to a blonde man and woman on the sidewalk. They are both very tan and dressed in matching white polo shirts. They’re holding hands. They look like an ad for a timeshare.

“Now there’s a nice couple,” she says.

She says, “Not like all these white girls with the black men.”

She says, “And those Mexicans. They’re everywhere. They’re taking over. Just look around.”

She says, “We should shoot them all.”

I feel sick. We get out of the cab at the next chapel and walk what seems miles back to the hotel. The heat is unbelievable, well over a hundred degrees. Danny’s sweating, dry heat or not. I feel my tongue swelling. I feel dizzy.

“Fucking psychotic,” Danny says about the cab driver.

“I think I might throw up,” I say.

But it’s more than the cabbie, more than the heat. The whole place seems off, wrong, an illusion. In the hotel lobby, a mime is stuck in an invisible box. A woman dressed in flammable Lycra is eating fire. Blindfolded trapeze artists swing overhead and throw themselves at each other. Trust is one thing. The huge net under the high wires is another. Families with children are everywhere. None of them look happy. Most of the children are crying.

I am having a child. I am getting married. All of this is making me sick.

Just off to our right, a couple and their young son are checking in. The son has his own suitcase, a Thomas the Train roller-board. He’s whacking it back and forth against a marble pillar. His mother’s saying, loud enough for me to hear it over the big-top noise, “Stop it, Tommy.”

I think Tommy, Thomas. Cute.

“Tommy, I mean it,” the mother is saying. Her voice is flat as cardboard. She’s wearing sunglasses, celebrity-style frames, black plastic with rhinestone lion heads at the temples.

The husband is dragging another suitcase. This one’s huge, big enough to store a body in. The check-in line’s moving, an old movie reel, but the husband stops for a second because the bag’s toppled over. He’s struggling to right it. He doesn’t see the girl at the desk who motions him down. He doesn’t hear her say, “next.”

The wife hears.

The wife’s wearing boots, high heels, black, shiny, sturdy.

She kicks once, hard, to get him moving.

The husband barely flinches. He drags the suitcase up to the desk. Tommy drags his Thomas bag too. Tommy’s crying. The girl behind the desk gives him a sucker. “Stop it, Tommy,” the mother says, and Tommy goes on crying.

People get married and have children and do unbelievable, hideous things to each other.

Danny’s red-faced, his shirt soaked. He’s flopped into a chair. I bring him a bottle of water I buy from the front desk cooler for five dollars. I say, “Maybe we should go home.” He gulps the water down in one long chug. I watch his Adam’s apple move up and down beneath the soft skin of his throat. “We came all this way,” he says when he finally comes up for air.

***

That night, when Danny falls asleep, I flip through channels. I watch reruns of “The X Files,” where the poster in Fox Mulder’s office never changes. It’s a picture of a flying saucer coming in for a landing in some suburb. There are trees and well-groomed lawns and pretty little houses with families inside. The poster says, “I Want to Believe.”

***

We get married the next night at The Special Memory Wedding Chapel on the Strip. It’s an all-white building with a gazebo and a bell tower and a flashing neon sign that advertises drive-through wedding service. We opt for the regular walk down the aisle. If we had the money, we could be married by an impersonator called Elvis the Pelvis Himselvis. Grandpa Munster could give me away. We could get commemorative t-shirts with our faces and the words “Making Special Memories Together” on them.

As it is, Danny wears his own plain white t-shirt. He pins a rose on the pocket. I wear a lilac dress I ordered from the Spiegel catalogue. I carry the tiny bouquet that comes with our Bargain Memory package. We are married by a tall Unitarian minister who looks like he plays a Unitarian minister on TV. He talks about love being patient and kind. He talks about how some marriages work and some don’t. He shrugs, then talks about honesty and trust. His $50 suggested tip is mandatory and included on our bill.

On the wedding video, I blink a lot. I blink when I’m nervous. I look like someone squirted vinegar in my eyes. Danny’s face is shiny. His cheeks are red. He smiles and beams. The only time I stop blinking and he stops beaming is when we kiss. In that moment, preserved forever on tape in case we ever doubt it, we both look calm and certain, sure of the world and our place in it.

In his poem “Late Fragment,” Ray Carver asked and answered the two biggest questions of his life. Did he get what he wanted? Yes, he said. And what was it he wanted?

“To call myself beloved. / To feel myself beloved on this earth.”

The poem was dedicated, as all his late poems were, to his second wife Tess, the poet, the woman he married in Nevada in that high-tack affair.

“You have to remember what matters,” Danny says. “We matter. This,” and he gestures at the air between us, connecting us, like it’s an artery, a lifeline.

In our Special Memory Chapel video, when we turn to leave, our one witness, the chapel receptionist, is clapping. She’s bored. She’s probably done this all day. She claps, slow and polite. She claps like an audience that’s happy the show’s finally over. The clapping bounces off the walls of the empty chapel. The neon drive-through sign flashes overhead. Off to the right, there’s a gift shop with t-shirts and postcards and Special Memory refrigerator magnets shaped like doves.
Right before the camera pans out, Danny does a cheer. He kicks his left leg. He hoots and punches the air. The camera zooms in and it’s just the two of us. I lean into him and we walk off together like that. It looks perfect. It looks like forever.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lori Jakiela is the author of the memoir Miss New York Has Everything (Hatchette, 2006), and three poetry chapbooks. Her full-length poetry collection–Spot the Terrorist!–is forthcoming from Word Tech. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, KGB BarLit, and elsewhere.

Photo Sources
Key West Sunset, TrolleyBlogs.com
Circus/Circus, Wikipedia
Paris, Las Vegas, InnovationsInNewspapers
Airplane, Photo Dictionary

© 2011, Lori Jakiela. All rights reserved.

I looked forward to him coming by every night in his big black limo, handing me a fiver for a three-cent Daily News and asking me the same question. And every night I had a different answer. It was like writing poetry, coming up with a different answer for Frank Costello.

He was a notorious gangster, but he always looked to me like a harried shopkeeper who had just run out in his beat-up gray fedora to grab a sandwich. I liked his face. It had the lovely sadness of his fellow Sicilian, the actor Richard Conte.

I stood behind a newspaper stand made of two saw horses and two planks of wood. Every night I sold 360 copies of the Daily News, 340 copies of the Daily Mirror, the two major tabloids in the 1950s, 50 copies of The New York Times, 40 copies of its morning competitor, The Herald Tribune, and many fewer copies of The Journal-American and World-Telegram and Sun.

What I saw was plenty. The corner of 46th Street and Eighth Avenue was the nexus of the theater district and Hell’s Kitchen where the Westies, an Irish mob, still held sway. And Mr. Costello wasn’t passing the time of day. He wanted to know anything unusual going on because that’s how the Mafia got wind of something to horn in on.

I would dash from around my stand to the curb and hand him his paper and he would address me as he might a businessman. This was much more respect than I got from professors at Columbia or family or damned near anyone else. So I made sure I had something to tell him.

—Two plainclothesmen always go into the bar over there at 10:30, exactly at 10:30.

—The Daily News driver always takes ten from a bundle of 50 and reties the wire with pliers.

—Cab number…. leaves brown bags at the restaurant on 45th.

—Mike Todd buys a $5 cigar in a glass tube every night and distracts showgirls so he can bend their sundae straws and laugh when they suck on them.

What a creep, the doleful mobster said. He didn’t need to know about this peccadillo. He knew a lot about Mike Todd and was probably shaking  down his big Broadway shows. Guys and Dolls was the rage of the moment. But he was amused that I told him. When I mentioned showgirls he elevated his hand palm-down as if to suggest a great height and we both laughed—the Guys and Dolls showgirls were notoriously tall.

Chatting with Frank Costello gave me a certain cachet in the neighborhood. Punks thought twice before ripping off my papers. The cops wanted to know if my last name ended with a vowel. Mr. Costello—I never thought of him as Frank—had been a confidante of Charlie Luciano. He had known Dutch Schultz and Meyer Lansky. He rubbed shoulders with Vito Genovese. If you talked to him you weren’t a punk anymore.

He didn’t need to know we watered down the orangeade at the Zeigfeld Theater, but maybe he did need to know which hatcheck girls on 52nd Street were hooking and, better yet, who they were hooking for.

It never occurred to me that someday I’d write a book about… well, not Mr. Costello but the culture over which he presided looking as sad as Lorenzo di Credi in his self-portrait.

I was clinging to my classes at Columbia, breaking down without knowing it, listening to the poetry of Hell’s Kitchen, the lilting Irish argot of Hell’s Kitchen, the slapstick Yiddish of lower Second Avenue, and the grand ominousness of Sicilian-American gangster talk. I was on the verge of physical and emotional collapse, but enraptured.

And years later in my old age it all came back to me as theater, a theater that had swirled around me, filled me with incomprehensible wonders. What could I make of it? What song could I sing? And slowly I began to sing of friendship, loyalty and redemption in the heart of the Mafia. I knew that I remembered those voices, those faces and gestures. And I knew they had something to tell me.

Saraceno emerged, the story of a Hell’s Kitchen thug, half Irish, half Sicilian, violent as men come and yet a nobleman. Against all odds he becomes a magus. I thought of him the other night watching the hired help in Masterpiece Theatre’s Downton Abbey–we don’t know who the true aristocrats are, as John Fowles pointed out in his neglected book, The Aristos. I needed to tell Billy Pucini’s story because he had been haunting the corridors of my mind.

The single word that moved me to sing of gangsters had only two letters: so. To begin a sentence, an overture, as Mr. Costello did, with the word so implied an ongoing story, a prior relationship, a body of accepted knowledge. He was inviting me to continue my story. It was a Noo Yawk expression of speech that bore an immense cargo. I was not a stranger. We were involved in a project. He could have said, So, kid, whuddya say, what’s up, whuddya got fer me? He expected something from me. “We” had a story.

So—you should forgive the expression—I kept this little word in mind each time I returned to Saraceno. So, Billy, whuddya say? So, Hettie, whaddya got fer me? So, Connie, what’s wichu?  And that’s how the book got written. But I doubt that little word appears very often, because it was my own little thing. Cosa Nostra, our thing, is a reference to the Mafia. The word so is my thing. It means there is a story to be told.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Djelloul Marbrook’s book of poems, Far From Algiers, is the 2007 winner of Kent State University’s Stan and Tom Wick First Book Prize in poetry. He is the author of the short story, Artists Hill,which won the Literal Latté K. Margaret Grossman Fiction Award in the spring of 2008, and the novella Alice Miller’s Room. His poetry has appeared in Solstice (UK), Beyond Baroque (California), American Poetry Review, Oberon,The Ledge (New York), Perpetuum Mobile, Attic (Maryland), The Country and Abroad (New York), Arabesques Literary and Cultural Review (Algeria), and Istanbul Literary Review. His fiction has also been published byPrima Materia (New York), Breakfast All Day (UK), and Potomac Review (DC). His career as a newspaper reporter and editor has spanned all the major transitions in modern journalism—from typewriters and teletypes to computers, from hot lead typography to photo-offset and then to the Internet. He writes frequently about Internet journalism and produces a daily blog about literary and cultural affairs. He retired in 1987 to write poetry and fiction and now lives in the mid-Hudson Valley and Manhattan with his wife, Marilyn.

Photo Sources:
Frank Costello, Wikimedia Commons
Saraceno, Smashwords

© 2011, Djelloul Marbrook. All rights reserved.

I am so miserable
I am so tired
I just sit on the Mississippi River
and watch the fish swim by

My life is so confused
But I don’t wanna die
I wanna go to Heaven
but I’m scared to fly

—O.V. Wright, “Everybody Knows (The River Song)”

I was walking down Decatur Street in New Orleans one morning when I caught a glimpse of the Mississippi and crossed a parking lot to be near it. Two men were asleep on a grass bank. Five stairs carried me up to a paved riverfront walk, where I found a bench.

I had a heart full of trouble and some questions in my head which I couldn’t answer for more than a couple of seconds and my mind was shorting out. I watched the interplay of sunlight and shadow on the wind-riffled surface of the river, trying to empty my head and disconnect from the exhausting expectation that all nature and experience were raw data to be processed through the little hole of my consciousness. I stared at the water, trying to do a mind-clearing perceptual trick whereby the light and dark of the ripples switch their emphases, in a way, or do the opposite of themselves.

The song “Dock of the Bay” came to me, and I felt it, or remembered what it’s like to be in a city with no money, knowing no one, unknown, at the end of the line, and all you have is time. A man came along the walkway with a cane. We nodded to each other. He looked a little like Otis Redding. He said “Every day I gotta make it to this last bench.” Carrying himself straight, he limped past where I was sitting and reached to touch the last bench with his cane.

It occurred to me that the opposite of despair is gratitude, and at times the two feel almost the same. But, like the water trick, I couldn’t quite get to gratitude, I couldn’t let it happen. Again I heard the words of the slender, bent, elderly bishop of a church in Memphis from two days before: “This is the day! That God made. This is the day that God made! And if you’re not rejoicing—you’re living below your privilege.”

The man came back and asked if he could sit down. We started talking.

After working in restaurants all over the country for fifteen years, he went back to Minnesota when his mother got sick with cancer. He took care of her for a year until she died at fifty-three. With no family and nothing to keep him in Minnesota, he landed a job in a restaurant and moved to New Orleans. Four days later he was hit by a drunk driver. Shoulder and both legs broken. Now, a year later, he’d been through eight surgeries, all his savings, and was homeless. He’d been arrested twice for sleeping outside, and was waiting for Friday to have his right leg amputated below the knee. He had a staff infection in the bone, and his present fear was that he’d be arrested for vagrancy again between now and Friday and miss the surgery.

People tell him to count his blessings, but he doesn’t see that he has any. He said this simply and with acceptance. Another homeless man suggested he get himself arrested again so he could go to jail. The suggestion angered him. I said that if he were going to think that way he might as well jump in the river, and he agreed.

He said the police in New Orleans are hard on the homeless. A tourist can pass out anywhere and sleep unmolested, but if you’re homeless they run you in. The city jail holds eight thousand people—he pointed downriver to the Wyndham Hotel to show me the size of it—and the city gets fifty dollars per night from the state for everyone they bring in.

He showed me the leg, swollen black from the calf down.

After the surgery he’ll be eligible without contest for disability. The benefits will allow him to go back to school in Virginia for a three-year program of culinary arts. After that, he’d like to move to San Francisco.

We talked for about half an hour.

Then I said “My name’s Mike.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m Rodney.”

We shook hands.

I said “I’m going back to where I’m staying.”

“Thanks for listening,” he said, touching his ear.

“Sure.” I stood up. “Can I give you a few bucks to get you through the week?”

“Sure,” he said. “Anything.”

I gave him some money. He thanked me.

He told me I should keep my eyes open, in about three years, for a new executive chef somewhere in San Francisco named Rodney. I wished him luck and left him there on the bench.

The other night I watched one of my favorite John Huston movies, Fat City, from the excellent Leonard Gardner novel of the same name. A woman I was worried about in New Orleans had left me with everything I felt for her and nowhere to put it. I was trying to pass the time before turning out the light. At the end of the movie, Stacey Keach runs into Jeff Bridges after they haven’t seen each other in a while and persuades him to go into a poolhall for a cup of coffee. Stacey Keach is a drunken ex-fighter at thirty who’s back on the skids and Jeff Bridges is a younger man who’s still fighting now and then while trying to support a wife and kid. Stacey Keach has nothing to hang onto but his former dream. Jeff Bridges has put the destructive notion of glory aside and settled for meeting his responsibilities. They sip coffee and Stacey Keach does most of the talking. Jeff Bridges doesn’t want to be there. Through a window on the kitchen we see an old Chinese waiter making coffee. It’s hard to tell whether he’s smiling or his face is just like that by now.

Stacey Keach says “How’d you like to wake up in the morning…and be him?”

Jeff Bridges says “Maybe he’s happy.”

Stacey Keach thinks it over and then, in a lucid moment beyond bitterness, says, “Maybe we’re all happy.”

Lyrics: M.J. Keep/Roosevelt Jamison, copyright MCA Records, Inc.

Photo Source: RiverBills

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael DeCapite was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His first novel, Through the Windshield, was written in London and New York from 1985 to 1990. Although the book gained a small underground reputation by way of published excerpts, readings, and word of mouth, it was unable to find a publisher until it was brought out by Sparkle Street Books, in 1998. DeCapite’s short story “Sitting Pretty” was published as a CUZ Edition in 1999 and then included in The Italian American Reader (William Morrow 2003, HarperCollins 2005). “Happy” was written in 2004, for Radiant Fog, a column he wrote during 2003 and 2004 for the monthly Cleveland arts magazine angle. In 2006, he completed a second novel, RUINED FOR LIFE! He lives in Brooklyn.

© 2011, Michael DeCapite. All rights reserved.

Author’s note: I wrote this short piece in 1998 while my wife and I anxiously awaited a trip overseas that would result in the adoption of a bright-eyed toddler from Romania. Twelve years later, at peace as an often humbled father of a 13-year-old girl, I am not quite as disgruntled a writer but am certain of one thing (spoiler alert): George Orwell was right to create a happy ending in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. For those readers who like their dessert bittersweet: sorry to ruin your day, sourpusses. Man is simply wired to desire happy endings. (And to those who went there … get your minds out of the gutter. Ha.)

I once aspired to be a 29-year-old moth-eaten writer who thought, to hell with the money world and to hell with hypocrisy, I’d rather be dignified than successful. My role model and champion of hardship causes was none other than Gordon Comstock, a bitingly cynical English book clerk whom George Orwell created and I, in my freshman year of college, embraced, if not emulated.

Gordon Comstock, the protagonist of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, is a noble rascal who spends his days constructing poetry and quietly poking fun at an assortment of customers, including romance readers and pompous old ladies who namedrop best-selling authors to impress their peers.

As an 18-year-old suburban misfit, I somehow related so well to Gordon, even though culturally we existed as polar dilettantes. I had never lived alone, barely knew what the word “poverty” meant, and had trouble reading Elizabethan verse, no less writing it. Gordon, on the other hand, had one book of poems published, although the work’s subtle brilliance (in Gordon’s mind) apparently eluded the mainstream so it  immediately became remaindered, a forgotten collection buried in a discount bin.

Unlike my hero, I was altogether bourgeois: a devotee of rock concerts and pool halls, not art museums and antiquarian bookshops.

Gordon, though, voiced the resentment I felt toward money with its obstacles and power. He alone expressed so ably the loathsome, insincere quality of jingles and billboards that I found inescapable in capitalist society.

To a young angry man groping his way through Orwellian times, Gordon represented the artist’s struggle to be an individual, not a conformist — to be true to one’s own belief system, not someone else’s.

Gordon, however, eventually becomes well enough rounded in the novel to recognize that in life, compromises are sometimes necessary. In the end, he surrenders his protest against society’s mores and material goods for a doting wife and ambitious career.

As an unattached and unsettled teen, I understandably was appalled that Gordon would abandon his admirable dreams, all for the sake of a woman. I found it difficult to accept then that a so-called true artist, one with integrity and a higher purpose, would permit love to alter his thinking.

Only now, as a 32-year-old husband and soon-to-be-father, do I understand why Orwell found it necessary for Gordon to change his priorities and transform his character. Otherwise, Keep the Aspidistra Flying easily could have concluded with a tragedy. In the name of art, a marriage would have been forsaken. Instead, the exceptionally told tale ends with Gordon listening for the rumble of a fetus in his wife’s protruding belly.

In some ways, I’ve based my life on this book. I’ve become a bookseller and a disgruntled writer to boot — sometimes disgusted and often bewildered with the indifferent ways of our world. But in the end, I too am a loving husband and a nervously expectant father willing to make sacrifices for my marriage — and family life — to work.

******

Now, dear reader, indulge me in a playful poem that I wrote a year prior to my decision to see life through a different set of eyes. I’m not sure I recognize anymore the guy who wrote this poem. But he’s a near relative whose world view had not yet been unwrapped like a present by the prying fingers of a baby girl.

Cha-Ching

Not even a hired laborer on a ladder
With paint brush in calloused hand
And a suede leather watchband
Has time for personal matters.

As for the neighborhood dentist,
“Just sit in the chair still,
It’ll only take a minute to fill,
There, ain’t that better, now sign this.”

Off you go hurry to the gym to train,
Maybe your partner can listen between spots,
You’re always a shoulder when her life rots,
But all she can offer is “no pain, no gain.”

Then there’s your butcher looking tired and broke,
Plenty of parking in front of his downtown shop,
His days of discussing bologna all but stopped,
The lone talk is business: “We’re havin’ a special on Coke.”

Your husband comes home, he’s testy and worn,
Another starched collar on Wall Street,
Gel in hair, bunions on feet,
He’s weighing his options, his face forlorn.

Your widowed friend calls, she needs a loan
It’s god-awful tough to make it alone,
The rent’s overdue, the house lacks heat
The kids are afraid, there’s nothing to eat

She’s hysterical, you’re in a trance—
Why is it always me who has to feed these goddamn plants?
Your husband growls, hungry and mean,
Your friend howls, aching and lean.

You wake in the morning and run to the bank,
Withdraw a few hundred and fill the gas tank,
As you drive to your friend’s, you step on it and sing,
“There’s gotta be more than cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching.”

~ DC 6/20/97

© 2010 – 2011, Dan Cafaro. All rights reserved.

Editor’s Note: This is the third of three installments from Chapter 1 of the forthcoming serial memoir, Worse for Wear, by Adrian Margaret Brune. To read Chapter 1, Part 1, click here. Chapter 2, Part 2 is here. For additional information on the collaboration between Atticus Books and Ms. Brune, see the Atticus Books press release.

“Ok, here’s what you’re going to do,” Cathy said in her Jersey ‘burbs, Jewish mother accent. “You’re gonna go to the car service down the street, pay them and take a car to the noon meeting to look for Jeff – he’s my sponsor, Jim’s, sponsor, so he’s your great grandsponsor.” Yeah, okay, whatever the hell. My head hurt. “You’re gonna sit in that meeting and listen, then you’re gonna get some numbers. After that, I want you to get in a cab and come here. We’re going to figure out what to do with you.”

I did what I was told and wound up with a number from a lesbian with a Southern accent named Margaret. She seemed nice enough, I thought to myself, sticking her number in my pocket instead of my phone. I didn’t really give it another thought before I headed for the nearest bodega for O’Doul’s and then a cab. When I arrived at Cathy’s, she was, literally, up in arms.

“Adrian, Adrian, what’re we gonna do with you?!” she exclaimed, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking them a little bit rougher than she usually did when I went “back out,” as AA people liked to call it.

“I don’t know, Cathy, but I’m done. I swear I’m done,” I said, trying to convince myself that I meant it. “I can never, ever see that look of disappointment on my brother’s face again.” And I couldn’t, though by that time, the remorse had started to compete with the withdrawal. Even while sitting on Cathy’s tasteful Mitchell Gold couch, staring into her sincere brown eyes and nodding yes to her plans for me, I started to plot. If I could say I needed some Tylenol at Duane Reade and dash to the corner store, then chug, I could put down two tall boys in about 20 minutes, I thought. I could be good for another two hours.

“So, this is what we’re gonna do. I need you to listen, and then you’re gonna run an errand to Post Office for me.” Yes, my way outside! I secretly exclaimed.

“You’re gonna go to a meeting in the morning in Brooklyn, then you’re gonna come here and stay and work with me in the afternoon. In the evening, we’re gonna go to an Atlantic Group meeting and afterward, you’re gonna go home, you understand?” I nodded. “We’re gonna do this for a few weeks and see how it goes until you get a job. Then, we’ll see what happens.” It all sounded fine to me. Just let me out the door; I was beginning to feel punchy and achy.

“Here’s $20. Walk up to the post office on 63rd and mail this overnight,” she instructed.

I walked out of her building as the afternoon traffic began to mount on Third Avenue and stopped at a bodega. As I stared again at the selection before me, something stood in my way – something that prevented me from grabbing the two Miller Lite cans. Maybe remorse was winning the battle over my shaky hands and sweating brow. Maybe the disappointment of others had reached beyond my own disappointment in myself, which always subsided after a drink. Maybe sheer exhaustion from drinking night after night had overtaken the fatigue prompting me to buy beer in the first place. Whatever it was, I grabbed two O’Doul’s instead, drank them with the fervor of an alcoholic at a bar, walked to the Post Office, then walked back to Cathy’s.

“I think I’m going to pull through this time,” I announced, practically running through her door. “I think I’ve hit my bottom.”

She looked up from her desk. “You’re right. You’re going to one of these.” She pointed to a printout of the Stonington Institute and “Choices” rehab in New Jersey.

**********

I squirted more shampoo in my hand and rubbed my head harder as I thought of the last few hours before I arrived at the New London train station en route to my first stint in rehab.

**********

The next morning, dawn broke slowly over Cathy’s apartment, and I began to count the ten-minute intervals before Cathy would nudge me awake at 7 am to make arrangements for my drug-free future. Before the meeting the night before, I grudgingly accepted the fact that I would be rehab-bound if the Stonington Institute had a bed open up by the time I called the next morning. After the Monday night Atlantic Group meeting, a weekly ritual of remorse followed by meditation, and over dinner at the faux Moonstruck diner next door, I made the pact with Cathy.

“Good morning, Stonington Institute,” the voice on the other end of the phone said.

“Hi, my name is Adrian Brune and a friend of mine called on my behalf last night to inquire about free beds in the residential treatment program.” I used the most professional, I-do-not-belong-in-rehab voice I could muster.

“I’m calling to follow-up. Do you have any beds today?”

“Let me transfer you to Veronica in admitting.” Crap, I had to go through this again?

“This is Veronica.”

“Good morning, Veronica. My name is Adrian Brune and a friend of mine called on my behalf last night to inquire about free beds at Stonington.” If only I could have sounded this good after a liquid lunch, I might have kept my PR magazine gig. “Do you have any availability today?”

“What insurance do you have?”

“Oxford.”

“Oh, we take Oxford. And it looks like you would have 28 days under the policy.”

Dammit.

“Well, Adrian, it looks like we have a bed tomorrow, but not today.” Sweet! One more day to put this off, I thought. Maybe I wouldn’t go after all. As soon as I cupped the mouthpiece, however, and turned around to tell Cathy, I saw, then heard her on her home phone. She had called Stonington while I was on hold.

“Cathy, they don’t have beds today,” I told her.

“They do! I’m getting you set up right now.”

“Cathy, I’m not sure I’m ready for this – or that I need this.”

“Adrian, you’re going. This is a gift. It is a fresh start. You need a fresh start.”

“But Cathy…”

“Wait a minute. What?! What?! Speak up honey, I can’t hear ya. Okay, as long as she’s in New London by three, you can accommodate her? Great. She’ll be there.”

Cathy hung up the phone. “Okay, here’s the deal: I’m going to loan you $200 to cover the first week of residency and $100 for cabs and the train ticket. You’re going to take a cab to Brooklyn, pack up, take a cab to Penn Station and get on the 12:30 to New London. You’ll call me when you get there. Now it’s almost 10. You need to get going, if you’re going to make it. And you will make it.”

Cathy didn’t exactly push me out the door, but I took the hint. I followed her instructions to the letter with the fear of losing her sponsorship on my mind, and boarded the train with my green duffle bag full of clothes and a six-pack of O’Doul’s. I took a seat on the train behind a family on vacation – a psychiatrist, her Hedge-Fund manager husband and their two kids – and engaged in pleasant conversation with them about various articles I’d written and my old life in Boston, all the while guzzling O’Doul’s, downing my last Ativan (I couldn’t have Ativan in rehab and I was sure the house Nazis would find it), and wondering how I could carry on a civil conversation riding the rehab train. I chalked it up to my prep-school upbringing.

Two hours later, I arrived at the New London station, still frazzled from the morning and wondering where I would find this Stonington van, my chariot.

Close to a half-hour later and dangerously near losing its latest intake to the bar ten paces away, a large Econo van driven by a short, stout woman whose name I would later learn was Brenda, pulled in front of me. “You Adrian?” she asked in a Connecticut clip. I was, I answered and threw my bag in the back seat. Piling in behind it, I immediately noticed the crocheted cross hanging around the rear view mirror and the large Big Book next to the mug of coffee in the console. Jesus, I thought, what had I done?

Brenda and I didn’t say much on the way to check in, and 15 minutes later she pulled the big van into a strip mall parking lot where I noticed the big blue words “Stonington Institute” next to a drawing of a sea shell: Stonington’s logo. Apparently, I squeaked in just as everyone was headed home for the day and shuffled between the intake woman Loreen and the waiting room where one very nervous, middle-aged woman sat being consoled by a thin middle-aged man with a large dagger tattoo on one arm and a cross on the other. She must be staying for quite a while, I thought, eyeing her large suitcase. Just then, a small, thin bleached blonde woman walked in the room, looking almost as yellow as the bright sweatpants she wore.

“Ma, ma. Don’t worry, ma. I’ll be alright,” the woman said.

“Renee, you know your father and I worry so much. You’ll call us as soon as you get there, right?”

“Ma, I said I’d call and I’ll call. You and Daddy probably need to get goin’ or you’ll never make it back to Jersey.”

Jersey! I knew there was something about the couple that didn’t quite fit the Connecticut mold. They were from Jersey! It, of course, didn’t matter that we were all sitting in a rehab waiting room, trying to figure out how fate was going to play its cruel hand.

“Honey, honey. Do you know if there’s a quicker way to get back?”

“How should I know, Dad?! We’re in fuckin’ Connecticut?”

Well, that’s really no way for a daughter to talk to her father, I immediately snapped to judge, then realized I had somehow turned into a prim-and-proper Connecticut socialite just by crossing the state line. I stopped myself there.

“I can tell you a fast way to get back,” I immediately volunteered.

“See, Dad, she can tell you! Go ahead.”

I explained to the confused man who had probably spent his entire life on the East coast that he could take 95 to New Haven, then down the Merritt Parkway to 287, over the Triborough Bridge, 278 through Brooklyn and then cross the Verrazano. “And you can avoid Manhattan altogether,” I added.

He thanked me, hugged his daughter goodbye and urged his wife to the car, looking more flummoxed than before. “We’re grateful,” his wife said before she started crying.

“Ma, ma. I’ll be ok. Ma, ma, don’t worry. I’m gonna kick this this time,” the woman, whose name was Renee, said before she shut the door of the family’s Lincoln.

As the car exited the parking lot, I asked Renee what she was in for.

“Heroin,” she said. It should have been my first warning that this rehab would not be anything I ever expected, much less look like the pretty picture of the blue beach house Cathy had shown me the day before.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adrian Margaret Brune is a Brooklyn-based journalist and writer whose work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times and Chicago Tribune Magazine. In her free time, she writes autobiographical short stories and sells them in the subway tunnel at Grand Central Station. She blogs about her experience with the writing enterprise, Short Stories for the Long Ride Home, on Facebook.

© 2010 – 2011, Adrian Margaret Brune. All rights reserved.

Editor’s Note: This is the second of three installments from Chapter 1 of the forthcoming serial memoir, Worse for Wear, by Adrian Margaret Brune. To read Chapter 1, Part 1, click here. Chapter 1, Part 3 is here. For additional information on the collaboration between Atticus Books and Ms. Brune, see the Atticus Books press release.

“You’re goin’ to rehab, Adrian.”

“What?! I thought we had worked this out?,” I replied to Cathy, by then my AA sponsor of two months. “When did you come up with this?”

I loved to argue with Cathy over her AA tenets, but this time, I was dead serious. No rehab.

“Listen, while you were out, I sat down on the Internet and found a couple of rehabs that take your insurance. See?!” She handed me two printouts of places in Southern New Jersey and Eastern Connecticut. Vowing to never spend more than a day in Jersey, I picked up the Connecticut paper. “Stonington Institute,” it read. “Rediscovering Life.” But wait a minute, I had already sort of rediscovered life in New York Alcoholics Anonymous. What had changed in the time that I left Cathy’s apartment for an errand to the Post Office, thinking we were pushing forward, to my return and this rehab business?

“I don’t understand. What’s with the about-face?”

“I think you need more help than I can give. If you don’t go, then I can’t be your sponsor.” There it was: emotional blackmail. Cathy wielded it well. We went to a meeting and then I considered my options that night while I listened to the distant traffic sixteen floors below her tastefully decorated, one-bedroom in a doorman building, unable to sleep.

I had started my latest binge the previous Thursday night, having not received a second interview for a job I desperately wanted. By then, having been “in the rooms” of Alcohol Anonymous for nearly three months, drinking hardly held any joy for me, but I nonetheless picked up hoping for some relief. I was already drunk after two beers, however, when I normally should have just had a nice buzz going. I passed out after a finishing a six and woke up the next morning with a terrible hangover, which I soon cured with another beer, then another, then another until I passed out again. Coming to at eight on a Saturday morning, I realized I forgot to pick up a prescription on the West Side and I sipped more beer as I looked at the pouring rain outside and contemplated my next move. Drunk by the time I left my apartment an hour later, I called my crazy, Syrian friend, Kendah, to arrange to meet her for breakfast and stumbled on to a C Train. After I dropped off the prescription for my psychiatric drugs, including one for the ever essential Ativan, I walked across 9th Avenue and sidled up to the bar at Flight 151, where the waitresses and bartenders were still cleaning up from the night before. I soon spotted my favorite bartender.

“Heeeeeeyy, Rachel. How are you? How’sssss the writing?”

“Good. Going well, thanks,” Rachel replied, looking at me, eyebrows raised.

“Hey, could I get a Coors Light Draft?

“Uh, don’t you want an O’Doul’s?” she said, referring to my usual beverage request.

“Nope. I’m not doin’ that anymore. I’ll have a Coors Light please.” It was not even 10 am. Kendah wanted to meet soon in the East Village – four or five avenues away, but I still had drinking to do. I guzzled three beers in 30 minutes, then walked out of the bar into a ray of misty sun – the calm between the downpours on a humid summer day – and picked up my prescription. I called Kendah and told her I was headed her way. But halfway through the Village, I dove headfirst into another blackout and somehow decided to get back on the C at West 4th and go home to Brooklyn. Eventually awaking at the Nostrand stop, I wobbled off the train and emerged out of the station into another downpour, not knowing where the hell I was, only that I had clammy hands, racing thoughts, sweats and a desperate taste for more beer. Sipping a tall boy from the closest bodega, I walked due West toward my Brooklyn beacon – the Willamsburg Savings Bank Clock Tower Condominiums – relying on what I thought of as my spot-on sense of direction to guide me back to my apartment. When I eventually found Lafayette Avenue, then South Portland, then my door, then my key, I collapsed onto my bed and fell asleep, exhausted from my journey through the boroughs. I woke around eleven to watch Saturday Night Live, drink a few more beers and take my Ativan. Thirty minutes later, I was out, finally putting to end a waste of a day.

The next morning, I awoke early again – my curse for using alcohol as a sleeping aid – and remembered that I had an appointment for breakfast with my older brother, Jim, then a date with the local flea market to try to maintain a fledgling antique business I had started with a friend months before. As I looked out my bedroom window, the sun – always glowing a brighter hue of yellow after a day of rain – seared my eyes and pierced my temples. I reached for another Ativan, swallowed and laid back on my pillow for a few minutes waiting for it to pulse through my veins and hit my brain. Damn Ativan never worked as fast on the hangovers as Zanax, I lamented, reaching for the Bud Light by my bed. I swallowed down a few gulps and felt the alcohol wash over my body, releasing my constricted veins.

Yet, it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t have my brother smelling the alcohol on my breath. But I couldn’t meet him without its warm haze to keep me comfortably checked out. Showered, toweled and teeth brushed, my hands still shook as I tried to stencil in a straight line on my eyelids and bulk up my eyelashes. A crack and a gulp – much better. In fifteen more minutes, I felt physically ready to walk out the door, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to cross the threshold, hoping that somehow I could make time stand still to drink for another hour. So I consumed in 15 minutes what might have normally taken an hour and began the mile-long walk from Fort Greene, my neighborhood, to Park Slope, sunglasses over my eyes and ball cap low.

By that time, I felt good. Whenever I drank, my entire perspective on life – on the world around me – changed. My cares vanished and I could concentrate on the moment ahead of me. Everything around me moved slower, almost lackadaisically. Strangers stopped, smiled, and even talked to me. The hue of the trees and the sky was richer, deeper. I absorbed everything around me, able to focus almost completely on one thing at a time. Moreover, I felt free to say – to express – the things on my mind: ideas, opinions, sentiments I had suppressed for years and years out of the fear of rejection. These were the feelings that kept me coming back for more. Feelings my brother couldn’t possibly understand – or maybe he could. He just wasn’t letting on.

“Have you been drinking again?” he asked almost immediately after I showed up on his doorstep. “Have you been fucking drinking again?!”

“Jim, let me explain, will you?!” I desperately needed something to eat, but I could sense he wasn’t about to take me out for brunch.

“You’re unbelievable! You’re fucking unbelievable, you know that!”

I nodded, yes. I knew.

“Do you know what lengths to which Sarah and I have gone to make sure you’re not on the street – to make sure you’re not homeless!”

I nodded, yes. I knew.

“Yet, you’re still drinking! Why do you keep doing that?!”

I nodded, no. I didn’t know.

Or at least, I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t explain the peacefulness, the state of blissful inertia to which alcohol brought me: the rolling black clouds and cool breeze that felt cooler as it blew through my window after the brunch sangria; the thin dusting of snow that looked brighter on the quiet Brooklyn streets as I walked from the bar to my little, loveable apartment on Lafayette; the tingling excitement that ran through my body as I made love to a beautiful woman, still buzzed from an Irish nightcap.

“Well, c’mon, let’s go!” Jim said. “You have a commitment – you’re going to sell this stuff.” He pulled out a folding table and two boxes of British china my friend’s parents had shipped her from England two months before. I reluctantly grabbed a box, grateful for the numbness in my extremities. We walked out the door, down the street to the flea market and set up shop.

“Do you think you could watch my spot for a minute while I run an errand,” I asked the nice lady selling costume jewelry in the booth next to me. It was blazing hot and the sickening, clammy, malnourished faintness had started to creep upon me an hour into my tour of duty at the Park Slope flea market. I needed calories – the alcoholic kind.

“Sure,” she said, “I’ll watch your things.”

“Thanks! You need anything from the store up the street?” I asked, grateful to have my reprieve and her blessing.

“Nah, I’m good.” Even better, I thought. More money for beer.

I leapt up, grabbed my wallet and headed down the street to “Slope Green Market,” the Asian market where they practically knew me by name, to pick up my two tall boys of Miller Lite that I figured would tame the hangover until I could go home. A few minutes later, I stood in front of the cooler staring at all my selections, looked at the money in my hand and opted instead for three tall boys of Coors Light, cracking one as soon as the little Korean women rang it up. I pounded it, then wobbled back to my spot, where, thankfully, all the royals had remained.

Through the rest of the afternoon, I tried – very unsuccessfully – to hide the beer from my prospective customers as I poured and drank more and more of it, trying to keep my level between pleasantly buzzed and drunk off my ass. A couple of people stopped and looked over my Prince Philip Wedgwood plates, and my Chuck & Di tea tins, but few bought. I had hoped to unload the entire box of it that Sunday, but as the sun drifted below the brownstones, Jim came back to find me sitting drunk behind a table full of it.

“Ok, you’re done. Let’s go,” he said, loading up boxes.

“Waaaaiiit, Waiiit. You’re moving too fast. I can’t keep up.” I stumbled as I grabbed for my last tall boy and tried to clandestinely drink it down.

I still don’t remember how Jim packed and transported the three boxes of British china and the folding table back to his apartment, but at some point he told me to “just sit here,” and took care of it. The last image of that day left in my mind is of my brother nodding his head side to side as he sat looking at me in his downstairs study, wearing an expression of sheer disappointment I might never forget. He then walked me to the door and shut it.

I returned to the Asian market to pick up my nightly supply of tall boys and drank one to right my sideways walk on the way back to Ft. Greene. The next day, I woke up and called Cathy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adrian Margaret Brune is a Brooklyn-based journalist and writer whose work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times and Chicago Tribune Magazine. In her free time, she writes autobiographical short stories and sells them in the subway tunnel at Grand Central Station. She blogs about her experience with the writing enterprise, Short Stories for the Long Ride Home, on Facebook.

© 2010 – 2011, Adrian Margaret Brune. All rights reserved.

Editor’s Note: This is the first of three installments from Chapter 1 of the forthcoming serialized memoir, Worse for Wear, by Adrian Margaret Brune. To read Chapter 1, Part 2, click here. Chapter 1, Part 3 is here. For additional information on the collaboration with Ms. Brune, see the Atticus Books press release.

The bed felt harder than usual as I awoke with a shiver – and I didn’t remember that I had air conditioning in my apartment, or a fan kept at what must have been 50 degrees. After all, I could hardly afford to pay rent, let alone my electric bill.

I slowly raised one eyelid to look out to the left of my bed, noticing an illuminated window, the bright sun struggling to thwart the dark, miserably ugly curtains in place to dampen it. But wait; I had French doors to the left of my bedside, not windows and certainly not burgundy, navy blue and pink flowered curtains. And what happened to all the morning noise outside my apartment? Things were eerily quiet in this strange room.

Then I lifted my head from a flat, smelly cold pillow and rubbed my eyes. Though still half-asleep, I soon realized that my bed was not my own, cozy, colorful, full-size abode, but a small, mechanical twin with stark white, paper-thin sheets. Looking straight ahead, I saw not my television set propped upon my clothes chest, but a pile of cosmetics on a cheap dresser. And turning to my right, I noticed a large white lump turned on its side, desperately trying to squeeze every minute of sleep left in the fading night.

I checked my watch: 6 a.m. Right. What the hell was I doing awake at 6 a.m.? But moreover, where the hell was I?

I turned my head downward to make sure the rest of my body was there. I noticed I was still in possession of something familiar: my night clothes – old, blue Adidas pants and my Provincetown sweatshirt.

I lay back down and shrouded my face in my cheap bedding. Then I heard the noise that jarred me awake. “Good morning, ladies! Rise and shine! The van will be here in two hours!”

Christ. That’s right, I thought to myself. I’m in Connecticut. In rehab.

For the past three months – possibly four by the time I awoke in the small, stuffy, feet-smelling bedroom of the Stonington Institute’s Summit House – I had been waging battle with the stranglehold alcohol had on me. In the year I had sworn to cut back on my drinking, join a gym, see a therapist and hold down a steady job, I had buckled under the pressures of life in New York. By the time 90 days passed from New Year’s Day, a “gold” membership card to a pricey health club dangled on my keychain, a therapist’s name was in my Palm Pilot, and my byline started to appear weekly in a national magazine covering the self-important, yet pointless, public relations industry. But I was drinking all day, every day. I had taken three steps forward and ten steps back. Now on my third try to stop drinking, I wondered if anything would permanently turn my life around (secretly doubting group therapy, cautionary classes and living with seven other addicts would) and fantasized about a tall, cold, sweating bottle of Miller Lite, my daily dose of liquid relief.

Ten minutes from the time my left eye opened and gazed around the room for a hint of familiarity and Tracey, my loud, obnoxious, Italian bartender housemate shouted at us all, I was already visibly awake and the Ativan my doctor had given me to try and relax on the train had worn off. I sat up again and opened the door.

“Please shut. The. Fuck. Up.” I said as I put on my flip-flops and walked through the kitchen on the way to the shower after a night of tossing and turning.

“Why, look. It’s sleeping beauty!” she called after me in her thick, working-class Eastern Connecticut accent. “Whatsa matter, Sleeping Beauty?! Someone still detoxin’?”

“No one asked for your input,” I said, watching her pour her second cup of coffee. But indeed, she had me dead on. I was definitely in a detox – not quite as bad as I had been six weeks earlier, when I had detoxed for the first time at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. There, I shook so badly the first day, I could barely hold a glass of orange juice as I waited in the common room for the nurses to mercifully call my name for the Librium that would kill the withdrawal. Still my head throbbed with a dull ache, my face flushed pink and I wretched, knowing that with $2 and 24 ounces, I could feel like myself again.

“Yep, you’re lookin’ pretty rough. Maybe a nice shower will help,” Tracey informed.

“Yeah, just make sure there’s some coffee left when I get out. I feel like the waking dead.”

And already the events of the last few days had started flashing before my eyes as if I had, indeed, reached the bitter end of it all. I stumbled into the bathroom and turned on the water, as the memories started to flow through my head.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adrian Margaret Brune is a Brooklyn-based journalist and writer whose work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times and Chicago Tribune Magazine. In her free time, she writes autobiographical short stories and sells them in the subway tunnel at Grand Central Station. She blogs about her experience with the writing enterprise, Short Stories for the Long Ride Home, on Facebook.

© 2010 – 2011, Adrian Margaret Brune. All rights reserved.