October 28th.

My roommate’s cousin finds me coming home from the bars and tells me how he saw someone shot and killed on Frances Street:

I said honey, honey, get down, get the hell down, I know gunfire when I hear it.

In the morning my roommate Donner wakes me up and says, We need to do something about the trash in the living room, there are flies everywhere, and he also says, Varana, we need to do something about all these shootings.

I say, What and roll over in my empty bed.

My roommate pushes the door open further. We need more guns out there, you know, protecting people. Good guys, like us. Let’s hit the range today, bring your Sig.

I say, You know I don’t keep ammo for that.

He says, That’s okay, I’ll lend you some. It’s a nine right?

I say, Go away, my head hurts.

In the afternoon I get up and walk into the living room in my underwear. The bottles and pizza boxes are gone, and so are the flies. My roommates, Donner and Feldson, are sitting side-by-side, crisscross applesauce, AR-15s in their laps. Our other roommate, Klay, is probably holed up in his room playing World of Warcraft or Rocket League. I’ve been offering to write his anthropology paper for weeks, and for weeks he’s told me, in the face of increasing evidence to the contrary, that he’s already written it.

Gotta keep her clean, announces Feldson, and I look up to see her lubricating her rifle’s upper receiver. Gotta be ready for the fucks out there. Varana, what’s wrong? You look like shit. Too much booze?

I shrug. Probably.

Donner and Feldson have been in the Guard and college ROTC for years, like me, getting older and weaker on Subway and dip. Sometimes I can hardly keep my eyes open.

 

October 27th.

Today begins, as a lot of them do, with an attempt to reconcile a vague sense of shame with memories of last night. Drunks all over the world are this way, waking up thirsty and trying to figure out if they’ve pissed themselves. Given the opportunity, I’ll revel in self-pity for an hour or two, like a pig rolling around in shit, but today I have work. As I lift the covers and shimmy to my feet, the guy in my bed wakes up.

You can stay, I tell him, awkward hand on his bare, pimply shoulder.

He says, What and closes his eyes.

He has beautiful, gnarled cauliflower ears, the kind one gets from years of being punched in the head, and he farted in his sleep all night. I hoist myself to the kitchen counter for some coffee, splash of bourbon, Body Armor (a potent Gatorade alternative), drop of gin. Also a PBR tallboy with my eggs and, naturally, a Hamm’s after I floss. It’s important to stay ahead of the hangover, especially on a workday. My weekend job at the museum requires very little of me, besides patience. I stand around browsing Insta and mentally cataloguing my dreams while baby boomers swirl by, complaining about minimalism. One of them is aggressive:

Do you like working here? Yes? And you think this is good art? Have you been to the Guggenheim recently? We live in Tribeca, have for years.

I nod along. Oh yes, I say, Millenial-ly, I used to live in the Cloud District. Do you get there very often?

After work I find Feldson crying in the kitchen. CNN is on in the other room, airing coverage of the synagogue shooting. I put an awkward hand on her bulging tricep, think better of it, and pour us each a glass of whiskey. It’s a personal favorite, Bulleit Bourbon, from my special underwear and KY jelly drawer collection. Feldson downs her glass quietly and goes upstairs to her room. I shrug and have another. It’s good stuff. Nobody really drinks to forget, but they end up doing it anyway. You lose memories, good and bad. Not the bare facts, but the texture that gives them meaning. And you forget the words for things, like transcendentalism.

 

October 26th.

Is it ever a good thing to wake up in ________, Wisconsin? I hop on a Greyhound and watch the bluffs roll by like ice cubes melting on my temple. The tweaker behind me talks to himself about the trials and tribulations of working as stevedore. I read a WikiHow article about becoming a stevedore and conclude that I lack the disposition. Once I get to Madison, Donner, Feldson and Klay make me go out. It’s Halloween(ish) again, apparently. We drink wop in a basement, and Donner point out asses going by.

That one, that one, yep, ahuh, that one.

Klay finds a fellow Libertarian, no mean feat in Madison, and falls into hearty conversation. Feldson introduces me to James (You’ll like him, Varana, he’s bi too), an intelligence analyst who works at Joint Force Headquarters on Wright St. He knows government secrets, probably very boring ones, and has fucked up cauliflower ears.

Are you a fighter? I ask.

He says, What? It’s loud in the basement.

I put a hand on his forearm and lean in. Do you fuck people up? MMA? I shout. His arm twitches upward for a moment, as if to cover his ear from view, then drops down.

He shouts, Yes. I am a fighter. In twelve weeks, he’ll be at desk in Afghanistan, eating Girl Scout cookies and writing up dry reports on market bombings in Ghazni and Kabul.

 

October 25th.

Feldson says I should go to an AA meeting with her. I’m an atheist, I tell her. She shrugs. Dude, I’m a Jew. We compromise and hit the gym. She’s got quads like Popeye’s got forearms. After the lift, she takes me to Kwik Trip for some Body Armor. I can tell she’s trying to catch me looking at her ass in the juice aisle. I say, Boy, this Body Armor sure is delicious. She says, Varana, _______ drink, and you ______ everything. That afternoon, I teach a bunch of Army ROTC Cadets how to conduct a Platoon Ambush: After near and far-side security are emplaced and the ambush line is set, the PL waits for the enemy to enter the kill zone. He or she then initiates the ambush, using the most casualty-causing weapon available, usually either a claymore or an M249. Never use the open-bolt M240, as it may misfire and alert the enemy to your position. I pause, trying to remember the doctrinal particulars of this kind of killing. Using direct, oblique, and enfilading fire, the assault and support elements fire into the kill zone for a minute, or until all movement ceases. They’re mostly dumb kids who have no idea what enfilading fire really means. I’ve taught this class a dozen times and I don’t know what it means. Sergeant Rokin, who returned from Afghanistan in May and does know what it means, steps toward the middle. Until all movement ceases. He spits dip spit into the soggy grass and ____ at it, as if to emphasize his point.

In the evening, I get a text from my friend Laura. She’s heading through Madison on her way from Milwaukee to La Crosse. Do I want to hop on? Do Third Street then watch Hitchcock movies naked at her place? La Crosse is _____, filled with drowned honkeys and river muck. I’m sweating and jumpy and my skin feels so loose it could slide right off. Yes, I’ll hop on.

 

October 24th.

It’s my second full day of sobriety. Very little to report except a little alienation and mental clarity. All these drunks, all through history[1]. How many of them tried to quit? I go to class, library, Subway, work. I come home late and Donner is playing his guitar and singing, in his sweet tenor: It’s four in the morning, the end of December / I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better. He stops playing when he sees me and puts down the instrument. Hey man, hey Varana. No doubt he wants to chat about Ben Shapiro or the virtues of chia seeds. I say, Go away, I’m tired and shut the door, but there’s no sleep to be had.

 

[1] In 2018, drunks drank PBR and redownloaded Grindr and passed out cold with the lights on. In 1995, drunks ___ Zima ____. In 1917, drunks drank whiskey over Belgium in planes carrying bombs and machine guns, and when German aces found them through whisps of cloud they coughed and hunched forward slightly, wings _____, as men in the trenches below jeered and waved them groundward.

 

October 23rd

Waking up the day after a breakup is always a little better than expected. It feels good to be back in Madison, and it feels good to be sober. I consider emptying out my bottles, cleaning out the underwear stash, but it seems pointless. If I wanted, I could just buy more.

 

October 22nd

I cry at the gate at LaGuardia because I’ll never see _______ again. A group of Japanese tourists stare at me, the morning-drunk tears on my cheeks, and it doesn’t feel like real heartbreak, or the realization that ________, it feels like the beginning of a Leonard Cohen song. ______’s last words are ringing in my ears, like I just got my shit kicked in, sweetheart, honey, clean up your act, you’re gonna die someday. On a layover at _____ I go to Chili’s and buy myself three Budweisers for the low price of $__.  All around me, men and women hunch grimly over margaritas and white spinach queso. In the cab home from the Madison airport, I say to myself, ____ man. I’ve really had enough. The driver glances up for a moment from the road and the strip malls of outer Madison rolling by. What, he says.