I arrive in the Twin Cities at 12:30 p.m. on the first of September – already poised to worry. My mind is frantically pacing in an attempt to assess the staggering amount of money I have spent preparing to leave for school, and juxtaposing it against the dark expenses looming before me. This is going to be an expensive year. There is no doubt that by the end of spring semester, my debt will more than double. But over-thinking these financial shortcomings leaves one irritable and exhaustingly pessimistic. Not a sunny outlook to have on the last weekend of summer. So I instead focus on how I will spend my time until Tuesday the sixth. If I am able to push money out of my mind until then, I’ll be fine.
Once classes start financial issues seem surreal-foreign, they are numbers on paper, far off in the distance. Nothing legitimate, a monetary civil war across the world, inconceivable in the most practical sense of the word. I glance at my roommate Paps, sucking down Marlboro Ultralight 100’s next to me, slender strands of smoke curling out his nostrils like gray hairs from the bottom of an elderly man’s woolen cap. His thoughts and worries are most likely exactly in sync with mine. My fingers tap the plywood railing of our porch-restless. At 3:39 p.m. we begin to think about drinking.
Thirty-four minutes later I am walking through the double doors of the Dinkytown liquor store, fingers crossed, fake I.D. safely stowed in a casually accessible pocket-pressing against my ass as I imitate confidence. I practice the Adrian face, the facial expression that makes me look most like my 23-year-old brother. This is the same face that has sealed my Friday nights since I was fifteen, memories lost but remembered like some amazing childhood dream that sticks in the catacombs of your mind through the years. To pull off this impression my lips must be tucked in at the most precise angle; dimples hidden, cheeks sunken as a calm, humble look sweeps across my face. And then, as if it had been apparent from birth, I am Adrian. Character acting – Marlon Brando would’ve been impressed.
Inside of this alcohol emporium, this bonanza of booze, you meet the worst and best kinds of people. Suburban mothers shuffle silently through the crowded aisles buying cardboard boxes of Franzia – the winos of the twenty first century. Their great internal conflict of the day is choosing white Zinfandel over Merlot, five gallons over one; after all, it’s Thursday, why not? Meanwhile their husbands are looming around the vodka and Captain Morgan, aging great whites ripped out of the water. They are winking at 19-year-olds as they pretend to love life, wallets fat with money I desperately need.
Sickened by this open display of quasi-prostitution, I choose quickly and shuffle into line to stand uncomfortably and try to look smug. I listen to the useless chatter of my schoolmates, many of them in the same terrible position I am in. Riding out into the sunset on false identification and immense debt; a terrible inflated sense of maturity like when a 15-year-old retracts rheumatism. The line moves and suddenly it is my turn to pay, picking a register I go to the young girl, avoiding the man. One must always avoid the man. Smiling, sheepishly, I make small talk, but avoid using my lips. My gigantic lips. They are not Adrian’s. They are a dead giveaway. I take a bag, a bag for the bottle. My poker face is not what one would call “stony,” and my hands are shaking with excitement as I grasp the receipt and stuff the change in my pocket hastily. I avoid the soft cardboard of the fifteen-Parliament Lights tucked away safely between my walls of denim. Flagrant cheating never felt so good.
I crack my first beer open while getting ready to make dinner. A process involving cooking stale Macaroni left over from my dorm room of the previous year, as well as finishing three beers against the backdrop of our stove. Milwaukee’s Best Special Reserve – terrible beer that lingers in your mouth distractedly until about the fifth can. Since it’s sold in thirty-packs at a going rate of twelve dollars, you soon get over the less than immaculate aftertaste. Matt Paplham (Paps), the only roommate who has moved in besides me, is on his fourth by the time I finish two. Sitting down next to me on the large couch, which doubles as a dining room, he lights up a cigarette. We are basking in the smooth period of grace in which we’re the only inhabitants of the house – probably the only time where we will be able to smoke cigarettes inside. My eyes dart towards the bottle of one hundred proof Rootbeer Schnapps standing placidly on an overturned storage bin in front of us. I laugh, lifting the bottle up to tear off the plastic from the cap. Paps goes to get two glasses. 5:47 p.m. I am reborn.
Rootbeer Barrels: Molasses brown liqueur turned a lighter hue by the ale poured over the top. At this point one needs to establish credentials. It’s not that my black-lunged roommate and I are lushes by any means. Although we both enjoy the occasional drink, we are in no way a duo of excess. No, it is the environment that we are thrown into, the circumstances that we are held within that push us into doing these sorts of things, into having these sorts of nights. After working up to fifty hours a week for three months straight, both Paps and I are exhausted. Like so many college students, we are fed up with the drone work we have become sorrily accustomed to. There is little to no difference between the jobs one suffers through in high school and the jobs one suffers through while attending “higher” education. These kinds of indentured work hours alone are enough to make a man turn to firewater. Yet for us, the straw that broke the wino’s back was the relative twenty six hundred dollars we had spent on school, supplies, and housing in the prior week. This kind of debt, mixed with a feeling of helplessness caused by not knowing if this money is being wasted, is what drove me to purchase the bottle of Schnapps in addition to the beer. Although the beer may offset the debt, it’s the liquor that will truly help us to numb the pain.
10:16 p.m., I am out of cigarettes, and have made this fact abundantly clear to the ten people shuffling down the sidewalk with me. Paps is finished. He has become dead weight hanging off a double bed. No sheets put on. No clothes taken off. He will wake up at 4:26 a.m. confused and hungry. Perhaps he is the lucky one, for I am in no better shape, and still unleashed upon this city that doesn’t sleep, only passes out. The beer is gone, this was expected, but the blinding curve ball, the true culprit here, is the empty Schnapps bottle that shrugs smugly on the porch. It’s all laid out now. The booze is in control.
We partied, but I don’t remember. Don’t remember the people I saw, or the funny things I said. I imagine I was a slurred Hemmingway –devastating wit drowned out in red plastic Dixie cups. Others’ recollections have pieced it together for me. But some things can’t be completely obliviated from my mind. I remember seeing the Golden Arches upon return, the greasy gates of heaven spinning in front of me. I remember sliding towards them, how I told someone-anyone to ride on my back and we could run together horse and rider, steed and carriage. But it was heavy, and my steps became fumbled, like those of a Tyrannosaurus after the fifth tranquilizer dart pumped with percosets. It becomes clear that we’re going to fall, and suddenly I am the last Redwood standing in some lumber graveyard in California.
Clarity. Absolute clarity. Everything is still all around me just for an instant. Only terrible events are this clear, this tranquil. Far off I hear the noise of a cash register closing, the image of twenty six hundred dollars looming in my mind. And then I am down, and everyone is speaking at once. Grabbing my arms. Lifting me out of this black – this rabbit hole I have tumbled down into.
“I don’t care,” I say. Debtors never care. As far as I knew, I had already fallen.
I ate my cheeseburger with a broken left wrist. Laughed as the pain pulsated, throbbing. No one believed me when I would say that my arm hurt, that it was perhaps broken. Drunks don’t care. But the next morning I cared. When I woke curled on the floor hugging my arm in a fetal position, attempting to return to that which I spawned from.
I filled out all the paperwork for my student job that morning. Filled it out with a broken wrist and finger. And when the Boynton people asked me how it had happened I said I had been jogging, tripped on a crack in the sidewalk, likely story. I still stunk like booze. But this is the game we play. This is the game we all play. Nobody says how many drinks they really had; no one says how much money they spent. We had enough. We spent some. But now I know how gamblers feel, when the bookie breaks their fingers for being late on a payment, late on a debt. My rent is due in four days. My tuition bill has a late fee attached to it. Delinquency. Alcoholism. Debt. These things go hand in hand. My fingers are waiting. I can drink gin martinis through a twisty straw.
