August, 2001

The days are rough.  Six months in, I still don’t sleep that well.  This month before school starts is dangerous for me, I know that.  Lana, still clinging to that wagon, is at work on the assembly line, every day, at 6:30 a.m, which leaves me alone, left to my own dastardly, piss-poor devices.  I wake up at seven a.m. sharp out of habit, make some coffee, smoke a cigarette or two, then fall back asleep till noon.

I go for a lot of walks, mostly up through the graveyard, which is on this huge upgrade plot of land just before the university.  To get in the graveyard, you’ve got to climb up dirt clod hills of thorny bramble, slipping between dry-rotted wood, crisscrossed railroad ties, kicking through tall weeds and thick overrun New England summer grass.  The heat this summer has a particular taste to it that I don’t recall.  Maybe it’s because it has been a while since I’ve lived here.  I’ve come back, though, so that’s not it.  It’s the senses.  All your senses fire on overdrive when you kick junk.  The dope dulls everything—pain, thoughts, hopes, sights and sensations, even smells.  When I was inpatient, we’d go down to the meetings on hospital grounds, some musty conference room in the basement, and at break we’d sit on the picnic tables outside the cafeteria and smoke cigarettes, and even though it’d be 8 o’clock or so, it was still light out and hot; it just tasted like summer.

I make this trip through the cemetery up to campus a lot, a pointless trip with no particular destination, where I sort of wander for hours.  Sometimes I buy a coffee at the corner market on the other side, sometimes I just walk around a deserted campus, smelling new mown grass and feeling like an alien.  I don’t know anyone.  Friends I may’ve had when I lived here when I was nineteen, I wouldn’t know where to find them now, and even if I did, my name is pretty sullied.  Ours is a small hometown; everyone knows about me.  My friend Peterson lives down the road, and sometimes I’ll walk down there.  He’s usually around.  But I am not at my best and I avoid pretty much everyone. 

When the semester starts, I’ll learn all about this new thing, computers, and I’ll spend hours on them after class in the university’s computer lab transcribing the sheaf of wadded-up papers that I tote everywhere; it is the start of my…book.  Written in the first months of sobriety, it is an incoherent, hand-scrawled mess, the plot revolving around six tiny Chinese monkeys the size of field mice and a nameless junkie narrator as they try to find an invisible god living in Delaware, driving around the country in a Pinto, getting sidetracked by America’s smallest cultural attractions.  I am certain this book will make me famous.  I will hand out copies to every professor I have.  They will look at me differently after that.  And not in a good way.

But I haven’t started doing that yet because classes haven’t started yet.  Right now I’m just a skinny weirdo who walks aimlessly through tombstones repositioning wreaths on headstones, around a two-block radius, for hours.  It’s not that different from when I was a freshman in high school.  Weird and lonely then, too, I would start to walk from my house deep in the woods, down the long Kensington Road, past farmhouses and dairy farms, big John Deeres and Harvester waiting in the weeds, alongside the train tracks, and up into the tiny center of town, which was a pizza parlor, a bank, and a Dairy Queen that closed in October and didn’t open again until March, until some sympathetic senior would see me and ask if I needed a ride somewhere.  I’d nod, maybe mumble something incoherent.  And he and his girlfriend would drop me off back at my house in the woods.  And when they drove off, I’d start walking again.

           

I could go to meetings, pedal to one on my bicycle, I suppose.  My mom bought me a bicycle at Walmart.  But I prefer walking.  Besides I don’t know where there’s a meeting.  Furthermore, I don’t want to know.  They’ve told me all along that I can’t do it my way.  I’m doing it my way.  Even if I am miserable at it, white knuckling it, and heading for an eventual relapse if I don’t find new ways to entertain myself.

           

I spend one entire Tuesday afternoon sitting at Lana’s kitchen table with an egg timer.  I set the egg timer.  I watch it, wait for it to ding.  Then I reset the clock, and I do it again.