2016: A Mostly Sober Year (more anecdotal poetry)

I'd spent New Year's Eve with the street urchins of New Paltz, drinking all the beers and booze that could be poured, filling the tissues and nothingness within me with mountains of smoke and the wild breath of starlight and the concernless good will of of the people around me. Woke up the next morning in the hospital for dehydration, and, thinking I was still in New Paltz, I signed what I was meant to sign before leaving and asked for directions to Main Street and started walking there. 

Soon found out it was about 15 miles, and kept walking. 

Their confusion could be alienating at times, but the urchins weren't completely incapable of hospitality: They'd managed to rescue my bookbag (and all its contents) and stash it somewhere safe, and so I had that. 

My mother or Natalie or someone was paying for a bed in the hostel for me for a while (after the a.b. someone told me about got evacuated by the cops) and I guess the family voted it was unfair to leave me outside all the time despite my recklessly ignorant behaviour (I'd turn 33 that May) and I was writing far more days than I wasn't. Plus, I had foodstamps, cash assistance, and I was typically sober the first half of every day which saves an introverted drunk a lot....

I guess it was about the second week of the month, when mom maybe just wanted me close to her, that I got this motel room in Dover Plains for I think it was a couple weeks. (Got caught up on SyFy's 12 Monkeys and some other things that are slower in coming to mind.) No fences mended, no bridges restored with mom. I was soon homeless in Dover, sleeping around the trainstation, wherever I could keep warmest in the sun's absence. 

One night, sitting in a Cumberland Farms, doing refills on a coffee and writing an old novel-attempt as a new one (this was just after I did a first run at the third Bad/Things book) and I was on that counter-stool at least two nights a week I'd guess, this extremely peculiar man named Edward "Gene" Fogarty came into the store for his routine coffee & handfuls of creamers. He saw me writing, made his assumptions, and offered me a place to stay if I got sober. 

I'd been smoking less and less pot even since leaving Poughkeepsie the previous November, and even my habit of affordable beer had turned more to maintenance than to amusement or therapy. Nothing else in sight besides hoping for credit & respectability, I figured I'd give this rando a chance. 

Spoiler alert: "Gene" turned out to be a spreca di vita. 

And it wasn't really the sobriety, for either of us, that made him that way. It was his choice, his choices that made him that way. 

Gene lived in a trailer community a mile or so from the center of Dover. A quiet place of modest dwellings and rolling streets and well-tended lawns. He received some kind of a pension and paid his rent that way; fed himself out of food pantries (and for a little while, my benefits) and of course the handfuls (handfuls) of creamers he took (then insisted I had to take) every fucking time we were near that place.... 

Sobriety didn't suit him in the least. 

I'm not sure if life suited him in the least. 

I remember he used to watch gay male porn on his laptop in the livingroom, fucking at full unwelcome volume, sometimes when I was trying to watch the news or at night when/if we watched a movie together, or Jeopardy! could be interesting. Hold that image a minute: this 70-something alcoholic who hadn't had a drink in decades, this packaday smoker who smoked the cheapest cigarettes you can find and about as upright and self-assured as 5 1/2 feet of stacked ash...this pathetic rot of a geezer who'd insist on showering in the bathroom in the front of the trailer -- instead of the one next to his bedroom, in the back -- and would walk his deformed-penguin body in briefs that were older than Socrates...this blemish on the face of homosexuality & the rest of humankind alike, watching people who were the least, absolutely fractions of his horrible age less than 10 feet away from You while someone in the television is answering questions about science and pop trivia, or is maybe the President giving the State of the Union address.   

As I went to Meetings, got a job at Home Depot, got a car, kept the job, enjoyed seeing girls in various places, when they and I were showered and wearing clean clothes, Sobriety was hardly the burden it could be, and even further from the outsized-claims of most of those who attended out of independent/? choice. 

But without honoring every last detail of this, (X was still Twitter and I had an account called BooksAreStupid that I'd use to share assorted blog posts and videos and thoughts and such) let's just skip to the part with the mental breakdown. 

It wasn't one event that sent me over. It was the notion of spending one more day, one more week, another 10 or 11 months with this annoying, humorless and lecherous old turd of a person who never had anything good to say and either yessed me to death if I talked about Buddhist detachment or scolded or harassed me in some indirect way when I tried talking to a female in his presence -- the petty frustrations -- like millions of platinum needles stalking every quality or mundane thing I did: that's when I was thinking the most about suicide, and that was the night I ended up calling the ambulance and checking into MidHudson for the second longstay since 2014.... 

Well, if the doctors prescribed any meds for the long- or short term, I forget-- I would've taken them in the hospital for quips & sniggles since nicotine gum, games of Spades and All The Water You Can Drink will only go so far...but after I got out, as my father before me should have: I stayed away from that trash like I'd stay away from Adolph Hitler passing out meth-filled candybars at Easter with little Swastika-emblazoned eggs printed in the chocolate.... And, since Donald "Red Hat" Trump was about to take office, I figured things couldn't get any worse (mistake on my part), called my mother, stored my things there, and went back to Poughkeepsie for a few months or so. That May, I flew to California. September, I came back to New York. Got Aunt Laura's car while my mother found a room in a house in Pleasant Valley and I had the job interview with the GAP warehouse people even a couple days before that. The year was almost over. The bullshit went down to a murmur. There was this unbreakable diamond of equanimity. 

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