Thanatos on the Rocks

The refuse of my disease isn’t orange pill bottles or syringes. You won’t find used needles or vials on the floor or in my pockets. You won’t find anything, but if you could, you’d see only fat bottles—emptied. The big bottles wait for me at the store. They hold amber liquid, which sloshes inside as I drive us up the mountain. I park outside my apartment and the bottle is in my hand, the liquid eagerly falling from bottle to body. At the store, there are small bottles too. I don’t know why anyone bothers with them. Only alcoholics in recovery buy the small bottles. They’re trying to limit themselves. When I see them in the morning at the liquor store, I think of them as starving rich men who choose to have just a snack. They must enjoy the torture of limiting what their body begs for. Poor bastards, cheers to them and again, and once more, and again—Cheers.

I say, enjoy the disease. Feel the clean blood move from the dialysis machine to your body, and be thankful for the feeling that others take for granted. Have you ever been controlled by something? If I don’t drink, my hands shake and my head throbs, but I don’t remember when that happened last; I’m proactive.

And all that shit that everyone worries about—mortgage bills, burial plots, birthday presents—none of it matters. Those people are always standing at the edge of the cliff trying their best to slowly back away. Jump off and fall with me. Once I lost my address, I stopped receiving bills. Eventually, my debt got so big it became fantastical—a big, green unicorn with magical numbers that only multiply. “HOLIDAY SPECIAL: 2 Liters 4 the price of 1!!!” = double the pleasure. I can do math too.

At first, I only drank on weekends, but Friday is almost the weekend too, right? Then there was Thirsty Thursday, Whiskey Wednesday, and Tequila Tuesday. Eventually, I found Margarita Monday, but by then, I only drank rum from the bottle. One night, not so long ago in a cabin right down the woods and up a trail, I drank two jugs of cheap wine, smoked too many joints, and tried to join the fire that we were all huddled around. I wanted to feel myself leap and dance like the flames, wanted to warm everyone as I consumed downed trees and dried leaves. I wanted to incarnate as God’s destructive force. I knew my wine soaked flesh would burn, my physical being might’ve even vaporized. As I was warming up to the idea, feeling the heat against my flesh, someone told me it was time to come inside, and I focused on standing instead.

On bent knees, I confessed my latest sins to the toilet in the morning. My boater buddy showed up then and demanded that I go kayaking with him (he didn’t know he was karma’s tool for the day). I told him I’d be there if I could lift my head. He told me I’d be there. Forty-five minutes and five tries later, I stood, walked into the kitchen, and pounded water. The shrill of his truck’s horn cut through the soft mush of my brain, but I was dressed, as ready as I could be. I slept beside him as he, determined, drove to a river that was too close. Later, he told me that this was part of my training—realizing that I can kayak in any condition, and that the river is more important than the amber liquid and green grass that left me in this shape. Maybe that was a part of his motivation, or maybe he just wanted to paddle.

We say we’re kayaking addicts, but what do we mean? Are we controlled by kayaking like one can be controlled by drugs? “I’m Morgan and I’m an alcoholic, addict, compulsive overeater, and aqua-holic.” Maybe we just mean we’re passionate. “I’m Morgan, and I’m passionate about booze, drugs, food, and kayaking.”

I took risks on the river, so, I didn’t need to drink then. Besides, the sun rays, indirectly angled on the Vermont river, were too bright; I was the equator’s temporary replacement on my first hour on the job.

Sigmund Freud said we’re all moths mesmerized by the light, flying into our own fiery destruction. He probably thought this death drive idea up while bent over—his nose above the powdery line, his whole body inhaling. I’ll never trust an addict, so I know he’s full of it, but maybe there’s some small truth in just this one Freudian “phallacy.”

A few cult members of Alcoholics Anonymous agree with him, but I don’t trust them either. They’re the kind of people that make small kids wear elbow pads; they sand down all the sharp points. Did you know that addiction is a disease? Just like Spina bifida, you’re born with it. You wouldn’t yell at someone for having been born with diabetes, would you? Of course not, unless you were born a dick. Maybe that’s a disease too.

We all like the sharp edges, those rough pieces that remind us that we can die because we’re mortal, vulnerable, and weak; the pinching possibilities that let us know we’re alive. Sanding them smooth doesn’t make the longing go away, so, why bother? I walk by those pieces and feel the rough spots playfully bite and tear my flesh. Once the adrenaline hits my heart, I don’t even feel the pain until it wears off, and I touch the scars with pride and longing. After Freud’s body rotted, people started listening to him. They call the death drive “Thanatos.” It’s why we take risks and work for our own destruction, they say.

I take risks to realize that I’m more than the soft mush of my body and to remind myself that that is all I am. The first time I drank, I woke up with my brain trying to hammer its way out of my skull, and I couldn’t even remember a second of the last twelve hours; one bottle and I disappeared from myself. Paddling too, what’s weaker then a gill-less pile of flesh and bones trying to move in the flow of twelve thousand pounds of water a second? I express myself by learning to work with the flow that dwarfs me and thrashes me indifferently, by finding a way to be a part of the river, not fighting against it.

My body habituates to risk, so I have to take bigger and bigger risks to get the same orgasmic off that I once got just by paddling a class two rapid or slowly sipping from a small bottle. Eventually, the bottles and my sips got bigger, and soon I’d blackout before I got off. Consequences were all I remembered. The cliché consequences that every addict talks about came first. Bright sirens and pressed uniforms, the first rape, the subsequent anger. Time travel was my favorite. I’d drink and then hours flew. Sometimes I even teleported. I’d wake up next to a stranger in a strange house. I got good at detective work. How do I get home? Where am I? Who is he? I even got a Sherlock Holmes pipe, because I kept waking up as the star of my own detective novel.

I was numbed to this, chasing the off I knew I couldn’t get anymore. Then the bad became too bad to ignore. My friends disappeared halfway through the handle, and only came back when I was sober. I avoided them, and everyone else. I tried to assault the cops and punched my mother. I took risks without seriously considering the consequences and broke my own safety rules on the river. None of that was enough. I spent more time in a dry bathtub crying then in class or studying. Movement was impossible, sleep was the only relief I could find. Drink, don’t drink, a little, a lot? I was stuck, knee deep in the thick shit of my disease. So, I started listening to all the wisdom around me and went to the place most likely to help me get sober: the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. The first night I went, I went home with a cheap plastic chip and a mind full of questions. All the answers, I was told, were in a big blue book.

We don’t talk about it, but I know as well as anything why we struggle. We’ve lived, and now we’re asked to just exist. Have you ever felt vulnerable and alive? Time slows down, your heart beat speeds up, you can feel each movement of your every cell, and your whole body responds purposefully. The next second is the most important one of your life and the last was your most terrified and most grateful. When it ends, you’re consumed—by pain, love, passion, purpose, something. How can you describe those intense moments of really living?

Three years earlier: the earth drops away and I’m carried by rushing current. I swing into an eddy, using a stroke I’ve never seen before, and suddenly the paddle is me and I am the flow. I am the river, and I am nothing.

One year earlier: It was my first class-four rapid ,and I was drunk. My buddy followed behind me, in a truck tire tube, holding a kayak paddle—a directionless beetle with a death wish. The two in front were stoned, but they still waited at the bottom. We both swam, of course. My body managed to take the perfect, most painless line. I was circulating in a keeper hole for too long. My body went up to the surface, and sometimes I caught a single breath before I was dragged back to the bottom. Underwater, I reached toward what I thought was the shoreline, but felt air. Finally, I managed to find left and reached for any small stream of water that wasn’t the hole. I don’t know if I found one, but my boat was waiting for me in an eddy and my paddle was in my hand at the bottom. My buddy wasn’t so lucky. I watched his large frame bounce over huge rocks and tumble in the rough spots. His tube took a better line and gracefully swirled below the rapid. I remember every second that I scouted and every other moment of my swim. I can still taste the PBR and fear sliding down my throat before I decided to make the run. If I close my eyes, I can look up at the diagonal reactionary wave that flipped me. It is easily one of my favorite moments. I drank a forty on the way up the mountain and knew that I had earned life and appreciated it, finally, because I found it’s perfect mixer: risk with a dash of destruction.

The cult of Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t allow mixers; you’ve got to take everything straight. After three months of reading the program-approved literature, studying the meetings, and trying to understand the vocabulary, I started asking questions. “If God is a higher power as I understand him, why is he male and why do we say Christian prayers at the end of every meeting? Why do we update the literature for racist language but not sexist?”

The group guru told me, “I’ve never met someone too stupid to get sober but I have met people who were too smart. Jesus was Jewish, and he said the Lord’s Prayer.” Shut up and accept it. He used to be a preacher but has moved onto more lucrative work. I wonder if he considers Martin Luther a Catholic.

I didn’t know how to understand without asking questions. It felt like trying to describe colors without sight. But he was sober and I was struggling, so I stopped asking questions and started melting into the pot. I was an alcoholic and an addict. I couldn’t trust my mind because it was infected with alcoholism, which spoke louder than my self, they told me. I drank the Kool Aide and waited for relief.

My mother is racist, but she thinks of herself as a positive racist, “Irish men are best in bed unless you just want to be pounded, then go for a black man. Romanians are the best to work with, but if you want to have fun play soccer with the Mexicans. And for marriage, go Jewish. They treat their women the best. White men are boring, but they’re the best at eating pussy. And honey, never marry an Indian— your alcoholism would surely be passed to a feather headed baby, and you’d divorce a man with a dot the first chance you got.”

It’s with my mother’s voice that I read the AA Big Book, the central text that they say has all the answers, and all of the other AA literature. It’s epic—some tale written in some far away time complete with, “ the double edged sword of alcoholism,” and “our ancient enemy rationalization.” Most of all, the literature is sexist, racist and homophobic. It tells us that “every normal human being wants to find a member of the opposite sex and have children.” It even has a “Chapter to the Housewives.” The housewives, of course, aren’t alcoholic themselves. They are wives of alcoholics, bitter and jealous of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is able to save their husbands when they couldn’t. The literature means well, maybe. I still have to confront sexism in the room to get my medicine. And the next man who touches me while calling me beautiful before he gives me advice on how to stay sober is going to have to regurgitate his dick in the back of an ambulance and hope they reattach it in time.

Does alcoholics anonymous really save us from our addiction or are we just substituting something that might kill us tomorrow for something that might kill us in five years? Dave, thirty-five years sober, still sticks himself into anything with a pulse, and Sharon seems to survive on a constant flow of sugar. At meetings, she adds bite after bite onto her three hundred pound frame. Who among us could keep their coffee cup in the cabinet “one day at a time?” And if you’re ever unsure of where the meeting is, just look for the smokers. Outside every AA meeting is a crowd of people sucking down carbon monoxide and tar, trying to feel something, maybe nothing, or bring themselves closer to the end. Joe says he’s good at “changing seats on the Titanic.” He used to be morbidly obese and wishes he was asexual because then he could “ have a fucking second to think about something else,” and just quit smoking, again.

Because I needed to stop drinking and I didn’t know any other way but AA, I devoted myself to the insanity of abstaining from my lover, alcohol, and following the Big Book. Even with all its faults, it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me: I love Big Brother.

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On a serious side note: Alcoholics Anonymous literally saved my life. Don’t let this piece keep you away from the program. If you’re struggling you should check it out and make your own opinions.