My Dark Places - James Ellroy [67]
Long Beach said they’d take me. I was slated to go down there with three guys on the ward. They were old drunks with years on the rehab circuit. They were professional alcoholic recidivists.
We went down in a hospital van. I liked the look of the place.
Men and women bunked in separate dorms. The cafeteria looked like a restaurant. The rec rooms looked like something out of summer camp.
The program featured AA meetings and group therapy. “Rap” sessions were not mandatory. The patients wore khakis and numbered wristbands—like the trusties in the L.A. County Jail system.
Antabuse was mandatory. Eagle-eyed nurses made the patients take it every day. You got deathly ill if you drank on top of it. Antabuse was a scare tactic.
I started to feel better. I rationalized the DTs away as a freak non sequitur. I was dormed-up with drunks from all walks of life. The men scared me. The women turned me on. I started to think I could beat booze and dope on my own terms.
The program commenced. I daydreamed in the AA meetings and ran my mouth during group therapy. I invented sexual exploits and directed my tales to the women in the room. It hit me a week or so in: You’re just here for three hots and a cot.
I went along with the program. I ate like a pig and put on ten pounds. I spent all my spare time reading crime novels.
I was coughing a lot. A staff nurse braced me about it. I told her I’d had a recent string of lung ailments.
She had a doctor check me out. He shot me up with a muscle relaxant and stuck a tube with a penlight attached down my throat. He peered down a scope device and wiggled the little beam around my lungs. He said he didn’t see anything wrong.
My cough persisted. I endured the program and wondered what I’d do for an encore. All my options scared me.
I could find a crummy job and stay clean with Antabuse. I could stay off booze and inhalers and use other drugs. I could smoke weed. Weed goosed your appetite. I could put on some weight and build muscle. Women would dig me then. Weed was my ticket to a healthy, normal life.
I didn’t really believe it.
Inhalers were sex. Booze was my fantasy core. Weed was strictly for giggles and hot dates with doughnuts and pizza.
I completed the program. I stayed on Antabuse and moved back to Lloyd’s roof with thirty-three days sober.
My cough was getting worse. My nerves were shot and my attention span topped out at three seconds. I slept for ten-hour stints or tossed all night.
My body wasn’t mine.
The roof landing was my refuge. I had a nice perch by the fire door. It went all-the-way bad right there.
It was mid-June. I got up from a nap and thought, “I need some cigarettes.” My mind went dead then. I couldn’t recall or retrieve that one simple thought.
My brain hit blank walls. I couldn’t say the thought or visualize it or come up with words to express it. I spent something like an hour trying to form that one simple thought.
I couldn’t say my own name. I couldn’t think my own name. I couldn’t form that one simple thought or any thoughts. My mind was dead. My brain circuits had disconnected. I was brain-dead insane.
I screamed. I put my hands over my ears, shut my eyes and screamed myself hoarse. I kept fighting for that one simple thought.
Lloyd ran up to the landing. I recognized him. I couldn’t come up with his name or my name or that simple thought from an hour ago.
Lloyd carried me downstairs and called an ambulance. Paramedics arrived and strapped me to a gurney.
They drove me to the County Hospital and left me in a crowded hallway. I started hearing voices. Nurses walked by and yelled at me telepathically. I coughed and bucked against my restraints. Somebody stuck a needle in my arm—
I woke up strapped to a cot. I was alone in a private hospital room.
My wrists were raw and bloody. Most of my teeth felt loose. My jaw hurt and my knuckles stung from little abrasions. I was wearing a hospital smock. I’d pissed all over it.
I reached for that one simple thought and caught it on the first bounce. I remembered my nigger-pimp name: Lee Earle