Skin and Bones

Phil lights a match and puts it out between two fingers. He looks like a young Neil Young.

“You look too skinny,” I tell him.

He pours more scotch in my scotch and soda and grins.

“I’m not that skinny, I just don’t have any fat.”

An American Aquarium Drinker

The group and the prayer and the behavior modification stop working eventually and then you will revert, you know this ahead of time, so you do what you always do when you’re lectured about drinking so much: you pour yourself a tall glass with one ice cube and stir it around with your finger before transferring it into a Dixie cup and then you leave, you walk out, into the piss-pour parts of the city late at night because everyone else is drunk like you, tongue-tied like you, frustrated like you, alone or very well could be like you, but before you get to the end of your drink your foot catches in a grate, your knees buckle and your wrists flap again the rough sidewalk and you’ve got yourself a fine set of cuts and a bloodied chin and what’s left of the drink is puddled around your ass like you’ve gone and pissed yourself, so you sit there, licking ribbons of blood off your hands like a wounded cat and wait for the rye to dry and the pain to subside and you imagine how nice, how really goddamn nice it would be for the sun to come out in this black dead of night, just this once while the rest of the big city sleeps, so you could make your way uptown and dig out your keys and get back for one more dose and the dizzy spell of those goodnight dreams.

We Won’t Be Hungry

The bed was perfect, the sheets tucked exactingly into the navy blue bed frame. He sits at the desk with a ziplock bag of grass and a neat folded paper. Why is the door locking? And when we all sit together, draped over the bed in our gray shifts and pale sweaters, blowing wind at the corners of the hotel room, our lungs expand and collapse and when someone uses the bathroom we can all hear them piss into that gorgeous white industrial toilet. We clutch our feet together. We take turns at the bedside table and clean up neat little expensive rows, our fingers tracing over the invisible dust of whoever was in this room last. We won’t be hungry. Tender noise in the window. The traffic lights in Tribeca turn red like a parade or a funeral procession. There is someone in the bathroom. There is someone at the door. Why is the door locking? Our ribcages rise and fall as we inhale, exhale, laying on the bed with our warm hands outstretched. Bring us water when you’re done. Clean up the remains of the desk, of the squat bedside table when you’re through. Jaws clenched, chins up, eyes closed. Don’t mess up the perfect sheets and whatever happens don’t lock the door.

Cabin Fever

In college, we would leave campus and drive a few hours north of Boston into the backwoods of Maine and spend the weekend at my friend’s cabin that, while equipped with electricity and running water and most of the creature comforts that had become necessary to our winter of 2005 survival, lacked two major components: television and internet. So, in the backseat of my used Saturn, we wrapped a towel around an oversized plastic container with a matching bottom, a little metal bowl and a big sack of grass. We sat around the kitchen table drinking glasses of aggressive red wine and took hits off the gravity bong, allowing the plumes of smoke to overtake the lofted cabin and lull us all into a quiet, post-adolescent thoughtfulness, the herbal smell dissipating only days later when we packed up our possessions—the plastic-cut jugs, the empty bags of grass, the wine bottles and corkscrews and university sweatshirts, the video camera with philosophical-leaning footage of questionable taste—, loaded them back into the Saturn and drove off with the headlights on bright, our eyes twinkling and our lungs darkening in the dusk.

Weekerthan

My bed feels like a garden and my legs feel tethered to it like weeds. Maybe it’s the vicodin, but it wasn’t the wine. I didn’t drink a sip of wine tonight. The week was corkscrewed open and poured close, down my throat, until I curled under the blankets and let myself go. The vicodin, I swear, I had to take because of my back. I slept on it all wrong. And once I fell out of a window. Once I was even in an upside down car. This week, you could say, was an upside down car—except, instead of crashing into rocks, it was served on them with a lemon. You could say that, you know. There are pictures and bottles and rumors to prove it. Too many police officers and not enough heavy breathing. But what happens at the end of the long, autumn nights? Where do we keep the umbrellas when the rain has stopped coming down? I lie slack in bed and ask questions with or without the wine. The vicodin, I promise, won’t answer.

11/13

It’s Friday the 13th. Don’t get arrested. Whatever you do, jesus, do not get arrested.

Uncontrolled Division

How much cancer should we postpone today, I ask myself, lying back on the paper that makes obscene crinkle-crinkles when I shift. How many days should we wait, I wonder. I don’t ask them. I don’t speak. I close my eyes and make fists. I stare at the ceiling and hear an occasional snip-snip as bits of my body are cut and laid out like malevolent paper dolls, like malignant origami.

Foam Explosion

I came home drunk last night and cooked something—a toasted bagel. I put the plate in the dishwasher, threw in some soap, turned it on and went to bed. The hours were all wrong. I was confused and passed out with the bagel on my pillow.

At nine I woke up and walked to the kitchen for water. And I got water—and foam. The entire floor was soaked in foam six inches tall. I stepped in the foam, got a glass of water, and sopped back to bed.

When I woke up at three—yes, three—I went back to the kitchen. The foam was gone and the floor was squeaky clean.

Was it all a dream? I decided to investigate.

The box of dishwasher detergent was empty. The antibacterial handsoap was, it would seem, my drunken way of cleaning the dishes. I must have used half the bottle, which lay in the sink looking guilty.

I turned the dishwasher on once more to rinse the dishes and foam poured out from the machine. “Shit!” I yelled, and unrolled long squares of papertowels on the floor, dancing on them and slipping around. Five minutes of internet investigation later, I returned to the crime scene with a bottle of vegetable oil and a prayer. I emptied a cup of Wesson into the machine and turned it on once more.

The foam stopped. The floor is squeaky clean.

The only downside, I think, is that I’m all out of oil. That and my dishes feel slightly greasy.