Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [15]
LEWIS itched. Having run out of cigarettes, he was smoking butts pinched from ashtrays, first his own Camel straights, then anything that didn’t look mentholated. The muscles in his legs and shoulders and back were sore to the touch. He didn’t have conscious memories of seizures, only the physical sense that his body had been wrung out like a washrag. Bobby said the seizures were DTs, delirium tremens. Lewis doubted that. More likely, he had smoked some questionable pot at that party, or done a line of something that was supposed to be cocaine. Drugs in academia were always suspect. Undergrad kids drove over to Ramparts, bought whatever was shoved through their car windows, and cut it with baby laxative, veterinary antibiotic, photographic chemicals.
Which is not to say Lewis didn’t drink. He drank almost every day. But he didn’t, like, drink drink, or go crazy to get the top off a bottle or anything. He knew some legendary drinkers, and he, clearly, wasn’t one of them. He once drank with a famous writer from Montana who’d ordered round after round, and although Lewis drank hard to keep up, a long avenue of amber-tinted bourbon-and-waters soon stretched out in front of him. Nobody ever called that famous writer an alcoholic, so how could he, Lewis, be one?
Around noon, Bobby wandered up and asked if he wanted a sandwich or a piece of fruit. Lewis preferred not to take food from this small, balding bureaucrat. “That’s okay,” he said, only you might’ve thought he’d said, “Sit down and tell me your whole life story, Bobby.” It was an AA thing, Lewis surmised: in the two, three days he’d been in detox, several people had launched into long, earnest secular testimonials.
Bobby had a short beard and thick tortoiseshell glasses. As he talked, he patted Lewis’s forearm. “I wish you’d eat something.” Pat. He just wanted Lewis to know how glad he was to have met him. Lewis reminded him so much of himself when he first got sober. It was important to remember what that used to be like. Bobby had run a sheetrock business that was so successful, he had everything: the car, the house, the gorgeous wife, the kids, the boat, even a plane. Another pat. Did Lewis ever fly a plane? Well, Bobby had discovered how fast you can get drunk in a plane; he’d take his Cessna up to ten, twelve thousand feet and chug a half-pint. After his wife left—because of the drinking, of course—and after he stopped going in to work, all he did was fly and drink. “I figure my last drink was a pint of bourbon at twelve thousand feet.” This last glugging episode made him so drunk and lost—here Bobby gripped Lewis’s arm—he landed on the first runway he spotted, which happened to be a military airstrip out in the Mojave. He opened the door to a dozen MPs with their guns trained right on him. An amplified voice told him to lie facedown on the tarmac—not that he had any choice, drunk as he was. He detoxed in the stockade for twenty-four hours before receiving any medical attention. He was lucky he didn’t choke to death on his tongue or fracture his skull during the seizures. “That was fifteen years ago.” A concluding pat, then a pause. “I never did get my plane back.”
Lewis didn’t know or care why any of this reminded Bobby of him. He let the guy talk and pat away to his heart’s content because it seemed to brighten him up, give him a charge. Helping other alcoholics, Bobby said, was the best life he ever could’ve imagined for himself. This made Lewis sad—that anybody could be so pleased with a crummy administrative job in such a depressing place. Okay, Lewis thought, fine: I can listen. Why not let some poor guy cheer himself up?
Bobby went off in a great mood and came back with Lewis’s knapsack. The knapsack held Lewis’s notebooks, a few pens, matches, and a falling-apart paperback edition of the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Bobby also handed him an envelope containing the contents of Lewis’s pockets when he’d been signed in: matches, keys to the apartment he no longer rented, keys to the car he junked three months ago, a three-inch length