Snakelegs

I had stopped sponsoring other men in their attempts at recovery well before Chap Nolan’s funeral. Sometimes I’m amazed that I’ve kept myself sober for thirty-one years. A lot of stories don’t go that way. Most days I’d wager just about anything that I’ll never pick up again, but I’ve seen enough to know better. Chappy put together twenty-three years, seven months, and two days without a drink. Seems no amount of time is enough to protect a person from themselves.

When I first met him, he wasn’t even forty. Looking back now though, it seemed like he had always been an old man. A giant of a guy, with a beard that went from pepper to salt pretty early on. Perpetual smile. He couldn’t wear red in December or kids would hop right into his lap and start reading lists. People just warmed up around Chap. Trusted him. It sure made him one hell of a salesman. By the time he died, he had built himself a little empire made up of three car lots here in town, and a fourth one over in Dayton.

He liked to downplay his intellect—fluid as he was in the language of the common man—but it was always clear to me that the knives in Chap’s drawer were plenty sharp.

It was last spring that he phoned me up, asking if we could meet. We hadn’t talked in quite a while, so right away I was concerned. Turned out he’d already been off the wagon for months by that point.

As for myself, I was living on disability and holding the couch down full-time. Two years had somehow gone by since the day—it was a Thursday—when I was talking to a bank teller and a black curtain slid down over my right eye. I went from describing my financial needs to babbling like an infant in the span of about five seconds. The radiologist pointed to a bright spot on my MRI. Most of the symptoms had gone away overnight, so they called it a ‘transient ischemic attack’ and sent me on home. Transient my ass. The eye went back to working fine, but I couldn’t keep my thoughts stuck together anymore. Like trying to build a castle out of dry sand. The doctors ran tests, but that was about all. They just told me to sell my restaurant and retire. Find a hobby that didn’t take too much brain power.

I was starting to think it might have been better if the whole thing had just done me in. Or that maybe a Johnny Walker on the rocks could help. That was right about the time Chappy called.

“I was watching Evan, my daughter’s baby,” he told me, sitting in a booth at Rayburn’s. It looked like he had dropped thirty pounds since I’d last laid eyes on him and I hoped he would order some food to go with his black coffee. “I’ve usually got the wife with me for stuff like that. Her mom was up there in Mercy Hospital, so I was flying solo. It turned out that the kid had an ear infection, but at the time I didn’t know what the hell was wrong with him. He just wouldn’t stop crying. Not the normal kind of crying either. It was that sharp screeching that rattles your eardrums. Wound me up something awful. Ally and Tom were gone all weekend so I took him to the urgent care and they prescribed an antibiotic, but it was hard to get him to take it, you know?”

I nodded like I did.

“Even when he finally conked out, I was too wired to relax. I didn’t sleep for two nights. Once Ally got home, I explained what had been going on, tried to tell them that he was okay. That I had it covered. She was pissed I hadn’t called. I mean, I didn’t want to ruin their trip when there wasn’t anything they could do.” He winced like something was hurting. Maybe it was. “Now she won’t answer my texts or calls.”

“Damn. I’m sorry, Chap.”

He surveyed the ceiling of the place a minute, then looked back down into his mug. “I got back to my place, but I still couldn’t sleep. My mind wouldn’t shut off. All but stopped eating. I went to the store to pick up a few things and when I rolled around past the liquor section, I grabbed a bottle of whiskey off the shelf like it was nothing. I kind of told myself that it was like taking home Tylenol or Excedrin. Medicine. Just mix it with a little soda once or twice, I thought. Until the headache is gone and I catch up on rest. It took off like a rocket from there. Now I can hardly even get out the front door.”

He never had been one for holing up at the house and drinking alone. Most folks want to hide their habit, even when no one around them cares. They judge themselves through other people’s eyes. Not Chap. In his heyday he was an old-fashioned, red-faced, life of the party social drinker, putting it out there for all to see. To everyone in his life, his alcoholism wasn’t a disorder, it was just Chap.

The problem he had was that nothing pushed him toward recovery. Some might say he got lucky. Never wrecked his car or passed out at work. No weekends in the drunk tank or marital ultimatums. But it was his luck that kept him sick. When he finally quit, his friends poked fun at him for going to meetings and switching to ginger ale on dart nights.

“Whatcha need AA for, Chap” a buddy once asked him. “I can drink you under the table and I ain’t got no problem needs a circle of winos in the church basement.”

I had seen him in the rooms those early days, mostly sitting in the back, listening to the parade of true tales and lies, boasts and regrets, and eventually he got around to asking if I’d sponsor him. In the program, we were only supposed to take on one guy at a time, but it happened that a kid who I’d had under my wing for a while moved off to Nevada to chase a girl. Chappy had gotten his six-month chip that day and he knew that the honeymoon was over. Harder times were on the way.

I asked what got him sober.

“Nothing,” he said, a stew of shame and fear simmering on his face. “I’ve had zero consequences to my drinking and I’m tired of waiting around on them to show up.”

Sitting across the table from me all these years later, I could see that same look of desperation.

“Eat something for Christ’s sake.” I waved the waitress over and he ordered scrambled eggs and toast.

“I’ll try. I know I can’t manage this on my own,” he said. “I’m all snakelegs.”

“The hell does that mean?” I asked.

“Oh,” he made a sound, closer to a cough than a laugh. “That’s what the old man used to call me growing up. He’d have me clearing rocks out of the field from sunup to dark, or make me dig post holes until my hands bled. No matter how hard I went at it, he’d still say I was as useless as legs on a snake.” He watched out the window like he was expecting someone. “Just good for nothing.”

—

I had an idea of what he meant. After my so-called transient attack, I tried cooking part time at Rayburn’s. Same place I always came back to when one of my own spots went belly up. After a few weeks, I stopped putting my name on the sign-up sheet. My knees can’t take twelve hours in the kitchen anymore, though I could usually keep up with lunch. I learned long ago to avoid nights anyhow—all that booze flowing, everybody high on adrenaline and other things. I used to watch for the guys coming in late on Sunday brunch shift, their whites all wrinkled, bloodshot eyes, big bottles of Gatorade. They move like they’re underwater.

“You thought about giving it up,” I’d ask. Some would look confused. A few got defensive, like they’d been caught. Once in a while, a guy just looks relieved, like he didn’t know how trapped he was until someone opened the door.

Jack Skinner took me up on my offer back in ’96. He was washing dishes at The K&M when I used to run the place. Young guy. He had a wife and kids and all that, but he couldn’t stay off the screwdrivers long enough to settle into a job with a future in it.

He didn’t show up for work one day. No one had heard from him. Despite being a full-blown alcoholic, it was out of character. If he woke up feeling too hungover to keep from puking on the plates, Jack typically had the courtesy to let someone know.

Turned out that he’d been in jail all weekend after catching his third DUI at the ripe old age of twenty-three.

“Busted for a dirty windshield. You believe that shit, boss?” He said. “And here I am, a professional cleaner of glassware.”

He went on to explain that his wife had taken to searching the house top to bottom for liquor bottles while he was at work. She figured out all his hiding spots, so he had to be inventive. Even the lowliest addict can prove damned resourceful when the supply chain is disrupted. He ended up threading a plastic tube through the air vent in his dashboard and down into the wiper fluid tank. After draining the thing out as well as he could, he filled it back up with hundred proof vodka.

“The first couple runs were a little soapy,” he said, “but after that, you couldn’t taste it.”

This was August, and it occurred to me to ask if the vodka didn’t get hot, but I let it go. I mean, when you’ve reached the point that you’re sucking booze through your instrument panel, you’re not exactly focused on the ideal temperature for appreciating flavor.

After a couple months of this, Jack’s windshield got fairly coated with road grit and insect parts. It was gradual enough that I guess he didn’t notice. I told him that several years before my wife died, she started dieting and taking long walks. I couldn’t tell the difference from one day to the next and so had never mentioned a thing about it. One weekend we were grocery shopping and ran into Ed Switalski who she used to teach with over at Scutter, and right away he asked her how much weight she had dropped. I caught hell over that one.

Jack and I ended up bonding over our mutual blindness to incremental change.

The trooper that pulled him over claimed that the dirt was an impediment to his visibility and that it posed a safety hazard. He ordered him to use his wipers right there on the spot, but Jack insisted that the fluid tank was empty. The guy told him to pop the hood. After some more back and forth, Jack realized that the bastard wasn’t going to give it up. He sprayed the hot windshield a good one and only managed to whip up a thick layer of vodka mud.

 It’s a funny story to tell when life is fine and dandy. At the time, Jack wasn’t yet in a position to see the humor. His wife took the babies and went back to Huntington. The first time he brought a bottle home and didn’t have anyone to hide it from, he knew that he was in trouble. I was there to open the door for him, and he stepped on through.

Just this year he walked his daughter down the aisle at her wedding. And he always has a clean windshield.

—

“They didn’t really seem to understand alcoholism when I was in medical school,” Chappy said. He blew air across the surface of his steaming coffee. “They talked about it like it was a lack of willpower. A character flaw.”

“Well, shit fire. I didn’t know you went to medical school.”

“Sure, I did. For a while anyway. I think I just wanted to shut my parents up. Show them that I could manage something like that. It worked. They told everyone who would listen that they had a doctor in the family. I said that I was just a student, to stop saying I was a doctor. I think it was more about scoring points in the social game for them than any actual sense of pride in their kid.”

He ate half a piece of toast and finished off his coffee.

“What happened,” I asked. “With school, I mean.”

“Oh, well the first couple years went fine. That’s mostly book learning. They teach you all about how the body works. Fascinating stuff. I wasn’t expecting it, but I really took to my embryology class.” He perked up a bit just talking about it. “You’d be surprised how many weird things we grow in the womb that we don’t actually need anymore. Gills, tails, it’s all programmed in the DNA from millions of years ago. Usually our genes make sure they go away. That they change into something else. But every once in a while one will stick around. Kid’ll be born with a flipper or something.”

“Like ostrich wings,” I said. “Vestigial, I believe it’s called.”

“That’s right.” He looked impressed. “I even read, years after I left home, that some snakes have little bumps on their sides. They used to be legs, but evolution decided that they were just in the way. Worse than useless.” He shook his head. “Guess maybe the old man knew more than I was willing to give him credit for.”

He went back to watching the parking lot through his haggard reflection. His hands trembled when he wasn’t using them. Little twitches and jerks kept him squeaking around on the vinyl bench seat.

“Third year is where the rubber meets the road,” he said. “We started clinicals, rotating through different specialties. I held retractors in surgeries until my back seized up. Spent a couple months on the state psych ward and collected some real stories up there. After that, I moved on to labor and delivery.”

“Boy, they really put you through your paces, huh?”

“Postpartum rounds started at 4:30 in the morning. I’d never had to muster that early for anything, even in the Navy. These poor girls had just gone through hell and here I come like a rooster in my oversized white coat, waking them up to rate their pain on a scale of one to ten. Asking about vaginal discharge and such.”

“Must’ve been strange,” I said, “playing the role of a doctor but not really knowing how to do it yet. Lot of responsibility.” Just thinking about it made me uncomfortable.

“True. But you have your supervisors. Course, even the residents who were one rung above me on the ladder were clueless half the time. The real docs, the attendings, they were usually off sleeping somewhere after being up all night. It’s crazy to think about how often the whole place was being run by a handful of kids with cheat sheets in their pockets and brand-new stethoscopes looped over their necks.”

He got quiet for a moment. I waited. Forks clicked against plates all around us.

“One afternoon I was assigned to a couple of patients who were in labor, bouncing back and forth between their rooms, checking vitals and whatnot. The resident I was working under was this gal named Carla. She was very kind. Really wanted us all to learn. So, she poked her head in while I was trying to restart an IV that had come loose and told me that it was game time in room 508.

“I half expected screaming and wailing,” he said, “but it was pretty calm. Just these tired little whimpers that would come and go. The nurse stopped whatever she was doing to help me fumble my way into a gown and gloves. Then Carla hopped up off her stool and motioned for me to sit. I was nervous, but in an excited kind of way. I mean, how many people can say that they’ve actually delivered a baby? I knew for a certainty that I wasn’t going to become an obstetrician so, short of getting stuck in an elevator when somebody’s water breaks, this was likely to be my only chance.” His head shook subtly, somewhere between a tremor and lamentation. “Boy, I had no idea what I was walking into.”

My throat had gone dry at some point and I went for my water. I couldn’t help but notice a greasy smudge on the glass and I felt my mind wanting to steer away from the conversation, wondering who the dishwasher was, half-assing it back there in the kitchen. There was a time when that kind of thing, a half thumb print on a glass, didn’t bother me.

A time when that short-sighted, careless kid in the kitchen was me.

—

I grew up around drinkers. Pittsburg in the ‘60s. To find that an uncle had pissed himself at my cousin’s third birthday party was nothing all that alarming. Or a hole appearing in the drywall where two of my dad’s coworkers got into a bourbon-fueled brawl after a dinner of pierogis and peas. The neighbor walking into our house in the middle of the night after parking in the wrong driveway. I didn’t see my relationship with alcohol as any different than the rest of the people in my orbit.

Just after I’d turned twenty-five, my mother fell on some ice and lay there bleeding into her head for a couple of hours before anyone found her. By the time they drilled holes through her skull to release the pressure, the damage had been done. She came home and was able to get around fairly well, but at work she couldn’t make the numbers line up on those pink and yellow tax forms like she used to. Lost her job, and her social life too. Partly this was due to the fact that most of her friends were people she worked with, but also because she had changed. Started pushing everyone away. It seemed that all her warmth and joy had drained out through those burr holes. After a while she got to calling me several times a day to tell me the meanest damn things she could come up with. Said more than once that I disgusted her and that when I was a baby it took everything she had not to drown me in the bath.

And that was just the appetizer. I prefer not to revisit the main course.

The hardest part was that there was no appealing to reason. Part of me knew that it was the brain trauma talking, but some other part was always putting arguments together. Defending myself. Even after she was gone.

One day, while I was sulking around in a mood, banging cabinet doors and grumbling about this or that, I nearly knocked over a bottle of rum that had been collecting dust on the back of the counter for two Christmases. Without giving it much thought, I spun the cap off and took a pull. Then another. Well, the clouds parted, as they say. I got the laundry done, whipped up some pasta carbonara for dinner, and spent the evening down on the carpet roughhousing with the dogs. Just giggling like a fool.

That strategy worked wonders for twelve years until an evening when I started vomiting at work and couldn’t stop. When the ER doctor came in, I was lying in that narrow bed, IV pumping saline into me, feeling like a used washcloth. A nasty strain of stomach bug was my assumption.

“Pancreatitis,” she told me. “Alcoholic pancreatitis.”

“Can’t be,” I said. “I’m not an alcoholic.”

“Your blood count is off and your sclera are jaundiced. Your LFTs are through the roof. Feel this?” She took my hand and put it on a tender bulge under my ribs. “That’s your liver.”

Some people need to hear a lot worse than that to quit. Fortunately, I’m not one of them.

I never saw myself as a leader, but after a few years in the rooms, people took to me that way. Felt good to be listened to like some kind of alcoholic apostle. You tell a guy who’s been white knuckling it through his first sober weekend that you haven’t had a sip in five years, he’ll think you’ve got the inside scoop on the mysteries of the universe.

Nothing changes if nothing changes. We’re only as sick as our secrets. It works if you work it. I collected pearls of wisdom like I was opening a fortune cookie factory. I learned and taught. Learned and taught. Picked guys up from the hospital and jail, abandoned houses that I was lucky to get back out of alive. Days and years happened.

Then the Thursday in the bank. The mini stroke. Wound up going completely snakelegs after that.

—

“Can I get you guys anything else?” The waitress appeared like a magic trick.

“We’re fine, Annie. Thanks.”

“You get bored, just come on back here. We miss your home fries. And that gravy.” She turned to Chappy and topped off his mug. “You know this friend of yours makes the best red-eye gravy and chipped beef on toast I ever tasted? Calls it shit on a shingle. I’d pay gourmet prices to have that again.”

“Thanks,” I nodded. “That’s sweet of you. Just the check for now, but no hurry.”

She gave a wide, oblivious smile, gathered up most of the dishes, and swirled away.

“Sorry,” I said. “Go on ahead.”

He waved a hand and took a cautious sip.

“I had already watched a couple of babies being delivered by that point,” he said, “but there’d been no official instructions or anything. They’ve got a saying in medical school; ‘See one, do one, teach one.’ I get the idea in theory, but that doesn’t always work in practice. Sometimes it helps to include a couple more steps before you get to the ‘do one’ part.

“So there I was, perched on the stool between this girl’s legs, reaching out as if that baby was gonna, I don’t know, slide right into my wet gloves like a quarterback taking the handoff. One minute it was crowning, this membrane of slimy hair bulging toward me, and the next it was literally shooting out of her. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that it would be as slick as soap.” He flashed that pained look again. “Then there’s this slap on the ceramic tiles. I swear it echoed around the room. God, what a sound.”

It took some effort for me to keep from wincing. I could only imagine the guilt that he had carried all these years. I sure didn’t want him to see any hint of judgment on my face.

“I went right after it, feeling like I might be able to rewind time if I moved fast enough. To erase it somehow. The table was low to the ground, so the umbilical cord was just long enough to reach. Blood on the white floor. I was hoping, praying it was the mother’s blood and not the baby’s. I scooped it up as quick as could be. All the frozen faces stared at me, then they looked around at each other, like everyone was searching for a grown up to tell us what to do.   

“The room was silent for a few seconds,” he said. “Then the baby started crying. That snapped us out of our shock. Carla got to clamping the cord and I made myself look up at the mother. From her angle, she didn’t seem to know what was going on. No family in the room. She was just a kid herself. They have the med students work in the high-risk clinic, which is basically full of poor teenagers with no insurance. I tried to stay out of everyone’s way, standing in the corner, covered in afterbirth, ear drums hurting from those screeching cries and thinking that the thing was probably fixing to die right there.”

Annie danced back into my periphery, nearing our booth. I caught her eye and raised the fingers of my right hand just off the surface of the table. She veered away with a wink and sought out empty mugs elsewhere.

“It turned out that the baby, a boy, was fit as a fiddle. No one said much of anything about what had happened until later. Carla and I had to sit in front of a committee. They call it ‘M and M.’ Morbidity and mortality review. A bunch of white-haired doctors grilling you with questions, deciding where to lay the blame when something goes wrong. I got some hard looks, but in the end, they couldn’t throw me out for an accident. I had been put in a situation that I wasn’t trained for, which was Carla’s fault, but it really landed on the attending, this Iranian guy who it turned out wasn’t even in the hospital at the time. The mother could have sued us to hell and back, but she didn’t have the means. It’s my guess that the hospital lawyers bullied her out of it anyway.

“I took a couple weeks off,” he told me, “and then I tried to go back. Started a pediatric rotation. The first day in the clinic, I saw a five-year-old girl with shoulder pain. After she got X-rays, I had to sit there and watch while her parents got the news that she had a bone tumor and would lose her right arm. Well, that was that. I washed my hands of medicine and went off to bump around the east coast. Spent the next half a dozen years working at appliance stores and car lots, learning that whole game. Made good money that just went to paying down student loans. Somewhere in that time I graduated from an amateur alcoholic to a professional.”

“Jesus, Chap.” I said. “All these years and I didn’t know anything about that. I sure appreciate you telling me. I can see it ain’t easy.”

The shaking in his hands was worse and he looked withered.

“Are you ready to get clean again?” I asked. “We can hit some meetings. Maybe get you an appointment to see your doctor for a tune up. It works if you work it.”

He took a couple more sips of his coffee and didn’t answer right away, eyes turning back to the window. After three decades of leading horses to water, I was pretty sure I knew what that meant.

—

             It was the happiest funeral I’d ever been to. Everyone telling funny stories and laughing. Good music. People even danced a bit. Chappy’s wife Sarah held up pretty well. She told me that in the last month or two he ended up getting more confused, talking about things from long ago as if they had just happened. When he couldn’t find something that he’d misplaced, he would turn paranoid and accuse Sarah or the kids. Apparently he could really cut to the bone, which had never been his style. I told her that I knew something about that.

“It’s like you lose him before you lose him.”

“That’s right,” she said through her Kleenex. “That’s exactly right.”

All the damage he had done to himself years back hadn’t gone away while he was sober. It just coiled up and waited. Once he was drinking full tilt again, things went downhill quick. His liver and kidneys quit on him. Heart failed trying to keep up. Tough way to go.

I couldn’t sleep for shit after all that. Strange dreams. My tinnitus had gotten bad and I would lay there at night listening to it like wind in a conch shell. Like babies crying.

The spark seemed to go out and I didn’t do much for a while. At first you just call it rest and act like you deserve it. Tell yourself it’s what you need. Before you know it, the inertia takes hold and you’re in a real rut. Eventually I remembered what a fellow, Lonnie, had said one time in the circle. The guys had got to comparing their drugs of choice. Alcohol is the worst. Heroin is the hardest to kick. Gambling ruined my life. On and on like that.

“They’re all the same,” Lonnie said. “There’s really only one and it’s the most addictive drug of them all. Avoidance.”

I could tell right away it was one of those cookie fortunes that I could use in my collection.

Now that it’s summertime, I’ve picked up a few lunch shifts a week at Rayburn’s. I’m usually in the weeds when it gets busy, but I still get a kick out of it. I go home tired, like I really did something.

The kid on dishes doesn’t leave smudges on the glassware anymore. I made sure of that. He’s been coming in late though. Drinking a lot of Gatorade. I can’t tell yet if he’s looking for the door, but I’ve got my hand on the knob, just in case.