Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [39]
“Okay,” I said, realizing for the first time that I was unsteady on my feet as I attempted to walk away from the car and head toward either the holy void of uncreated emptiness or the most supremely mundane and mediocre of all possible horrible suburban ranch-style houses.
When I arrived at the front door, I hesitated. I had a better idea. I could go into the garage and sleep in my mother’s car until I got my bearings. That way, when I woke up, I would be refreshed and better equipped to deal with both the stability of the intrinsic Mind and the unpredictable moods of my parents.
It all seemed to be working so well, until the frantic piercing voices of my mother and father interrupted my reverie.
“What are you doing out here?” they both shouted as they got into my mother’s car in the middle of the night to drive to the police department. Apparently shocked to find me asleep in the backseat, they were far too hysterical to appreciate the subtle but effective way that I was moving the human race forward.
During the death march from the car back into the house, I remembered the original orders from the mad holy man who had driven me home.
“Okay,” I said to my father, who just stood there, staring and shaking his head. “Well, I’m going to my room now to go to sleep.”
“Whose clothes are you wearing?” my mother asked, her voice drained of everything but her barely contained rage. And when I looked down, I saw not innumerable lotus-lands falling open but an unfamiliar pair of button-fly blue Levi’s with a tear in one knee and a man’s white T-shirt.
“Um, I don’t know,” I said, trying to appear blasé, as though it was a commonplace thing for me to not recognize the clothes I was wearing. “Well! Okay!” I said. “Good night!”
“Are you drunk?” my mother asked me.
“No, not at all,” I said. “Tired. Gotta get some sleep!”
My parents stood there, glaring at me. But instead of taking me into the kitchen to interrogate me under a bare light-bulb, as I feared, they watched, unamused, as I rushed into my bedroom and closed the door.
Lying in my bed, I reminded myself that parental alienation was a desirable new part of my mad-to-live troublemaker persona. Maybe if they stopped speaking to me for a long enough time, I would have a shot at being an artist after all.
Right about then was when I discovered that apparently the earth had slipped off its axis and begun spinning at a right angle.
My parents refused to talk to me for the next four days. Luckily, during that time I was allowed to make a very confusing set of phone calls to my equally hungover friends so I could piece together what had happened after I started making out with Bob that magical night. During the holy void of uncreated emptiness, they told me, I had begun puking all over myself.
Could that be true? I had? Had I buried my one true love in a geyser of puke?
Maybe there was some way he had scooted out before the dam burst? I was too afraid to find out. Oh please, God, let that be what had happened. Let him have been lying on top of me at that point. Let him have sensed the danger and rolled to safety before I erupted.
Meanwhile, I tried to comfort myself with the knowledge that Sal and Dean would have found poetry in an evening of necking and puking. Talk about total madness. Maybe in my drunkenness I’d done the “monkey dance in the streets of life.”
And then, as luck would have it, the school week began with an omen: the principal announced that there was a special mandatory assembly for the whole student body featuring a speaker from Alcoholics Anonymous. After some generic opening remarks, the AA representative gave each of us a checklist to fill out that would help us gauge how far down the road to alcoholism we had traveled thus far.
“Have you ever been drunk to the point of blacking out?” was one of the first questions he asked. “If you answered yes, than you are an alcoholic.”
I felt a chill run through my body. Really? I was? Had I somehow gone from a friendless teetotaling transfer student, suffocating in a stifling airless suburbia, to