The Clarinet Polka (64 page)

I started off real optimistic. You think that when you get sober, everything's going to get better right away, but the same things that bothered you when you were drunk still bother you. The only difference is you're sober. And another thing—Austin didn't turn out to be the little slice of paradise I'd been dreaming about. You can't go and hang out in funky country bars, or cat around checking out the nightlife, or do lots of things you used to like doing—when you're not drinking.

Don't get me wrong here, Austin was still okay. A warm, friendly place in general, and there was still a nice laid-back feeling to it, and I did have a lot of good times there, but— Well, having fun is not the main thing I remember. There was one night after I'd been in Austin a couple months, and I was at a meeting, and somehow or other the whole— I don't know if this has ever happened to you, but there's a point where you know where you've been and what you've lost, and it's so heavy you can't even cry about it. I came out of that meeting and I walked the streets for hours.

I kept thinking about that flight to Goose Bay, Labrador. When you know that the whole world could end at any minute, the only thing to do is get dead drunk, right? It's kind of obvious. And when I got back to Carswell, that's exactly what I did. But now I had a new way of thinking about it. When you know that the whole world could end at any minute, the only thing to do is live a good life.

*   *   *

I think maybe AA made sense to me right from the start because it's so much like the Catholic Church—you know, repentance and confession and all that. Like there's Steps Four and Five. They're real killers, but if you can't get through those suckers, you can't get nowhere. Step Four is where you make your fearless moral inventory of yourself, and Step Five is where you admit to God and yourself and to some other person exactly what you did wrong.

Naturally the person I picked to hear all this shit was my sponsor. We set aside a whole evening for it, and we settled down in a couple easy chairs in his living room, and I said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

It's a joke, right? And we both laughed about it, but then he gave me this real long hard look and said, “You sure you don't want to be talking to a priest?” He knew I'd been raised Catholic.

“No,” I said.

“Why's that?”

“I'm not really hooked up with the Church at the moment.”

“You still think of yourself as a Catholic?” he asked me.

“Hell, man, I'll always think of myself as a Catholic. But that's neither here nor there.”

“Okay,” he says, “go ahead.”

When I'd been making my inventory, I'd said to him, “Give me a little guidance here,” and he'd said, “I usually tell guys to start with the Ten Commandments and the seven deadly sins,” so that's where I'd started too.

Well, not only had I coveted my neighbor's wife, I'd fucked the hell out of her, and that's what we call adultery. And then there's all those times when I knew perfectly well I shouldn't get involved with Connie again and I went ahead and did it anyway. Why? Because I was letting my prick do my thinking for me, and, yep, that's what we generally call lust.

When I was telling my story, it was real easy to slip off to blaming Connie, and every time I did that, Art caught me. “Wait a minute here. We're not doing that woman's inventory, we're doing
yours
. Let's just stick to
your
moral defects.”

I used to tell myself that Connie didn't believe she was doing anything wrong so somehow that made everything all right, but of course it didn't—because
I
knew it was wrong. And it was real easy to say, oh, well, Connie was on her way to busting up her marriage, and if it hadn't been me, it would have been some other guy, but it wasn't some other guy.

Another big one was sloth. That one surprised me when I figured it out because I've always thought of myself as somebody who liked to work, and even when I was drinking, a lot of the time I did keep busy with one thing or another. But for years—pretty much from the point I joined the air force—I hadn't taken any initiative about any damn thing whatsoever.

“Most alcoholics are like that,” Art said. “When you're drinking, life's just something that happens to you.”

“But am I allowed to be pleased with myself over the few little things I did right?” I asked him.

“Oh, yeah, you're allowed to do that.”

“Well, you know that little girl? Janice Dłuwiecki? She had a real rough summer, and I'm glad I was there to listen to her problems and help her out and all that. And I'm real glad I never laid a hand on her.”

“Do you think she was in love with you?”

Boy, did I wish he hadn't asked me that. “I don't know, Art. She was just a kid.”

“Kids have feelings too.”

“Oh, yeah, I know they do.”

“Don't you think you owe her a letter or a phone call or something?”

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

So we went through the whole works. You've heard my story, so you've probably got a good idea what we talked about. It lasted damn near four hours, and just like you're supposed to, I felt this incredible relief afterward. But Art wasn't a priest so there was one thing he couldn't do, and that was grant me absolution.

*   *   *

For those first few months in Austin I spent a lot of my time
not drinking
, if you know what I mean. And eventually you hit a point where you want something more out of life than just what you're
not
doing, so I went to the Y and got back into the weight room. And it seemed like everybody and their dog was getting into jogging in those days, so I started jogging too.

That was a real turning point for me because jogging led to running, and then running led to road running, and lo and behold, I was transformed into one of those wild-eyed, pain-in-the-ass fanatical fitness nuts. When you get your running over six miles, the endorphins start kicking in and you get that runner's euphoria, and believe me, there's not a drug in the world can touch that. Sometimes I'd think, hell, why should I bother to do anything else? I might as well just keep right on running on out to Dallas.

Austin's a fine place to run for three seasons out of the year, but summer in Texas is just hotter than hell, and a man would have to be crazier than a coot to try to run in Texas in the summer, but I never told you I wasn't crazy, did I? I'd go late in the day or at night when I was hoping the temperature had dipped down below a hundred, and I made sure to keep myself hydrated, and it was a kick to have the sweat rolling off me by the gallon, and I only came close to dropping dead from heat prostration maybe twice.

Yeah, so there's the weights, and I had my stretching routine so my muscles wouldn't start shortening up on me, and there was the running, and eventually I got to the point where the thought of getting drunk just seemed ridiculous. The world looked so sharp and clear, you know what I mean? When you're drinking, there's always something in between you and the world. Depending on how loaded you are, it can be as thin as a piece of Saran Wrap or as thick as if you smeared your eyes with Vaseline, but it's always there. And it sure felt good to get rid of it.

*   *   *

Alcoholics can always tell you when their last drink was. It was one year and four months since my last drink. And there was this guy from Braniff I was working out with, name of Hal Sweeney— For years I held it against him, but hell, it wasn't his fault.

One Saturday we banged through the weights and then we went out and knocked off ten or twelve miles on the road, you know, egging each other on past that last thin edge of insanity, and we had ourselves a nice long shower afterward, and I said something to the tune of how I didn't really miss the hard stuff, I just missed the old suds. And he said he'd read somewhere that you should drink a beer for every six miles run—replace your mineral salts. “Hell, man,” he said, “how long's it been since you had a drink? Over a year? Shit, you got it licked. All the running you're doing, you can have a beer now and then. It'd do you good. Beer's a
food
, you know.”

So we're getting dressed, and we're floating along in that terrific high you get after a good run, and he's making jokes about how he figures that article he read got the figures reversed so he has six beers for every mile, and we have a good laugh about that, and naturally we end up in a little friendly neighborhood tavern where he was one of the regulars, and lo and behold there's a pitcher of that fine Shiner Beer sitting in front of us. Well, Hal Sweeney wasn't an alcoholic. That was the problem.

You better believe that beer went down easy. I'm thinking, my God, why did I deny myself this little bit of pleasure all this time? I must have been nuts. Beer's a
food
, isn't it?

Hal had a date, and so did I for that matter, so we strolled out of the bar into that last little bit of daylight, and the whole world looked just wonderful to me, and I thought about how it hadn't looked anywhere near as wonderful as that for a long time. Hal got in his car and drove away. I stood next to my car, checking out the world, and what I was supposed to do was drive away too, but I thought, hell, it's been sixteen months since I had a drink, and if I'm going to have a drink—and I'd already had one—I might as well explore the sensation. You know, purely from a scientific point of view—learn a little bit more about myself and my addiction, right? So I walked back into the bar and ordered another pitcher.

Halfway through the second pitcher I had one of those Zen satoris you hear so much about. I realized that getting loaded is the most intense pleasure known to man and all other pleasures—love, sex, food, running, looking at a nice sunset, you name it—don't even come close. There were a number of other patrons in the bar, and I felt impelled to share this insight with them, and they turned out to be a nice bunch of fellows with insights of their own, and then one of those nice fellows set us all up with shots of tequila.

Hey, you don't really want me to run you through this whole thing, do you? Oh, hell no, let's just jump on ahead here. So it's about a week later—although I couldn't have told you how long it was. I couldn't have told you that one and one makes two. I'm laying on the floor in the crapper in your classic hole-in-the-wall down by the river with my face mashed into the piss and puke and cigarette butts, and somebody's saying, “
Con permiso, señor,
I gotta take the leak.”

Carlos his name was. Well, I rolled over so Carlos could take the leak, and then he looked down and took pity upon the sorry state I was in, and he helped me up and inquired if he could assist me in any way.

Carlos had a lopsided VW bug with a medal of the Virgin of Guadalupe swinging from his rearview and huge holes in the floor so you had to be real careful where you put your feet—especially if you're only wearing socks—and he got me crammed in there somehow, and we drove up and down Red River Street until we found my truck. By then I was having a dim memory of a young lady, name of Rita, who I suspected might know the whereabouts of my sports watch, my fine leather belt, my hand-tooled cowboy boots, and my wallet.

I asked Carlos for his address, and a couple weeks later I hunted him up and offered him some money, but he wouldn't hear of it. Who says there ain't any good Samaritans left in the world?

Okay, so had I bothered to call them at work and tell them I wasn't coming in? Had I called up the honey I'd been supposed to pick up at eight? Are you kidding? I'd vanished instantly into the Land of Piss-on-It. It scared the absolute shit out of me. I'd been Mr. Reliable at Braniff up till then, so I gave them a song and dance about the worst case of flu in my life, and they bought it. The honey, the next time I called her, told me to go screw myself sideways. And then, of course, I had to have a little chat with my sponsor.

“You got cocky, didn't you?” he's asking me, and I allowed as how I'd probably got a little bit cocky. “You thought you had her dicked, didn't you?” Yeah, I said, I guess I'd figured I had her about three-quarters dicked.

“You moron,” he says, “you're an alcoholic. It's not fair that pal of yours can have a couple beers and walk away from it and you can't. Yeah, that's really not fair. But whoever said life's fair?”

He asked me if I'd been going to meetings, and I said I hadn't been going to too many of them for a while now. He wanted to know why not. “Shit,” I said, “I was tired of hanging around with a bunch of drunks.”

*   *   *

So now we're into Jimmy Does AA, Phase Two. Once you've fallen off the wagon, you know it's
possible
to fall off the wagon and that changes everything. All my optimism was gone. Before, I'd been like, hey, wow, I'm a new man. Yay, Alcoholics Anonymous—go, team go. Maybe everybody else is going to screw up, but not me. No sir, no way, for I am Koprowski the Superdrunk, and I have been reborn. Well, all that was over.

It was fairly grim there for a while. You're supposed to pray a lot in AA, so every time I turned around, I was saying the Hail Mary. And I was working out like a maniac. And I was back to a meeting a day—driving all over hell and gone to meetings. I was real glad I got along with Art's wife and kids because any spare time I had, I was over at their house drinking coffee and iced tea and lemonade and that Italian soda pop Art liked, you know, Chinotto. “Guys who fall off the wagon,” he said, “they've usually screwed up on their Twelve Steps somewhere.” He told me to go back over my Twelve Steps with a fine-tooth comb.

So I got out all my scraps of paper—when they tell you they want you to write it down, they're not kidding—and I went over it all with a fine-tooth comb.