Doctor Winters Forgetfulness Clinic- The Drink Took Him

“I just don’t think I can live with this. I need it gone, or it’ll drive me to drink.”

Dr. Winter tapped the edge of a spoon against the tea cup, and the sound it made was like a clarion bell. She brought the cup over to the man sitting across from her, taking him in with a study to glance. He was different from her usual clientele. The man looked as if his demons were far behind him, all save this one thing he couldn’t quite exercise. He wore a crisp, white button up shirt, was clean shaven, and looked as though he had a handle on his life. He looked as though he ran most mornings, perhaps hit the gym for more than three months out of the year, and other than his eyes, which roved like a scared horses, he seemed very well put together.

That was likely a smoke screen for the problems that lay beneath surface, however.

“What seems to be the problem, Mr. Turner?”

“It was something that happened almost 10 years ago,” Mr. Turner said, taking a sip of his tea, “Oh, that's good. I was wrapped up in something with someone who was very close to me, someone I thought of as a brother. We’d been through a lot, but we couldn’t both make it out of this it seems.”

“Why don’t you tell me all about it? Sometimes talking about it is the best way to get it off your chest.”

Mr. Turner nodded, taking another sip of tea before letting the cup sit under his nose as he contemplated

“I guess it all started with the Burbank program.”

I am an alcoholic

Just because I haven’t had a drink in ten years doesn’t change the fact.

They say in AA that once you’re an alcoholic, you’re always an alcoholic, it’s just a matter of time before you either slip up or you die.

Well, I guess I’m waiting for eternity, because I’ll never take a drink again for as long as I live

Not after what I saw.

Me and Tommy were in AA together. We had met in the Army, crawled to the sandbox together for a few years, and I don’t know very many of them that didn’t come out of the war zone with a burgeoning drinking problem. There wasn’t a lot of help for guys like us when we got back stateside, so we did our jobs, lived rough more often than not, and capped off most nights with a bottle of something cheap and strong. We had been drinking stateside for about seven years when the scare happened. Tommy was wandering around one night, blitzed out of his gourd, when a city bus hit him. The ER doc said if he hadn’t been drunk, he’d probably be dead, but I told him if he wasn’t drunk, he'd have had no reason to wander into the street in the first place. He broke his arm, broke a bunch of ribs, and fractured his skull, but he seemed like he was gonna make a full recovery. He didn’t have insurance, didn’t have money either, and the city didn’t look like they wanted to take responsibility for him wandering drunk into the street and getting hit. The city lawyer said they would make him a deal, a one time thing.

They would pay his medical bills, and give him a one time settlement of about 50 grand, but only if he completed an alcoholics anonymous program.

“The City Council wants to look like it’s doing something about the drunk and homeless problem. You just happen to cover both of those bases, so they have offered me a deal. You complete the program, look good for the cameras, and give them a feel good piece that they can use to show the mayor that they’re doing right, and they cut you your check and send you on your way. What you do after that is up to you, but I’d suggest not wandering out in front of any more buses.”

Tommy thought it sounded like a great idea, and I decided to start AA with him. The whole thing had been a wake up call, and I knew that it could’ve just as easily been me out in front of that bus. I thought it might help if he had somebody to go through it with too, and Tommy swore that once he got that money, he’d help make both our lives better.

“I won’t forget this, Derek. You help me come on on the other side of this, and I’ll help us both get back on our feet.”

So we joined AA Together, and for the first three months it was fine. They don’t tell you when you get started, but alcohol is one of the hardest drugs to kick. I know that sounds weird given that you can buy it anywhere, but it is a drug, don’t misunderstand. Tommy and I spent the first couple of weeks, shaking on the couch together, going through DTs with a handful of drugs they gave us at the Free Clinic. The city had put us up in a cheap apartment, mostly so they could do well checks on Tommy, and we were happy for a place to stay that was out of the rain. For two months, it rained just about every other day in the city, and that was the other thing that made sobriety so bad. If we’d been able to walk around, roam the roads, we'd have probably been a lot better. Cooped up in that apartment was hell. We had cleaned out all of our hooch, and Tommy wandered around like an angry ghost. I hadn’t started drinking seriously until my second year with the army, but Tommy had apparently been drinking since he was nine. His dad was a real piece of shit, the kind of guy that likes to tie on half a dozen and come home and beat his kids as a warm-up before he really lays into his wife. Tommy fell into the bottle hard from a young age, and we’ve had screaming matches in the floor of that apartment as I held him down and refused to let him go till he finally passed out.

In that respect the meetings helped a little.

The meetings were an excuse to leave the house, and they were something that Tommy and I looked forward to every day. The city only wanted us to go to one a day, but Tommy and I always went to both. The noon day meeting was the best, mostly cause you could count on getting fed. The evening meetings were good too, but I had to watch Tommy because there was always a chance of him trying to sneak off to a bar we knew of a couple blocks over. Tommy wanted to be sober, he told me so, but his brain hadn’t quite figured it out yet. I caught him drinking Listerine more than once, and one night I had to rush him to the ER when he drank half a bottle of rubbing alcohol.

He was always apologetic afterwards, swearing, that he never do it again, but I think we both knew Tommy was a relapse waiting to happen.

He didn’t relapse for six months, but when he did, he relapsed hard.

We were sitting at an AA meeting around noon, listening to some guy talk about how he had stolen money from his sister because he had spent the paycheck he just gotten on booze, when Tommy suddenly stood up and walked to the coffee pot. I figured he just wanted more joe, but when I looked back, he was gone. I looked for him, but he was nowhere to be found. I called his sponsor, telling him to keep an eye out for him, and went home to wait. All the while as I paced and worried, this needling little voice in the back of my head tried to get me to go look for him. It told me just where I would find him, but I squashed it. I knew what it wanted, knew where it wanted me to go look for him, and I knew where that would lead me.

It had wanted the same thing for the last six months.

It wanted me to go look at a bar, not for Tommy, but for my first drink.

I sat in the apartment and watched TV instead, and that’s where I was when the Broken Stool called me.

The Broken Stool was a dive bar, plain and simple. It was a kind, a place that guys like me and Tommy went when money was tight. You could drink their watered down booze for damn near nothing. The bar owner was a lifelong alcoholic, too, and sometimes he give us drinks just cause he knew what the DTs were like. He knew it all too well, and I guarantee you that half of his stock probably went down his own throat. I should’ve known Tommy would be there. Tommy had gone out to get smashed, and if you weren’t in funds, then the broken store was the best place for it.

“Derek, your buddies down here and I’ve had to cut him off. He’s drunk up near five hundred dollars of hooch, and I am beginning to suspect that he doesn’t have enough to pay his tab. Tommy's a friend, D. If it were anyone else, I'd toss him out on his ass and call the cops. Since it’s Tommy, I’m calling you, so come down here and be a friend.”

I hung up the phone, thinking that if Lenny was so worried about friendship, he probably shouldn't have served a recovering alcoholic five hundred bucks worth of camel piss.

I went and got Tommy, paid his bill, took him home, and called his sponsor.

The next day, a representative from the council was at our door, and he didn’t look happy.

Tommy told him it was just a relapse, it was just a little slip up, he was so sorry, it wouldn’t happen again, and he hated that he had to come all the way down here for nothing.

The man took it well enough, and left to get back to whatever qualified as work to those guys.

Tommy was good for three months, then he relapsed again

This time, however, it wasn’t so private.

Tommy got drunk and wandered into a nearby park where he proceeded to take a dump in the kids playground. This might’ve been easily covered up, except the playground was full of tykes and it was about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. I came to get Tommy from the police station that time, and the smell of him made me want to relapse. That’s a hard thing to say, but the man smelled enough like a distillery that I wanted to drink. You know you’ve been drinking too long when you can pick out the individual flavors on a man’s breath. Thunderbird, Mad Dog, Honey Bee, all the old friends from days gone by.

The ones that cost about three bucks a bottle, and are gone in about thirty seconds.

The city had been using Tommy as a success story, but now it was gonna be hard to do after a very public relapse.

The same guy as last time came back, but this time he wasn't smiling.

“We realized that AA may not be for everyone. So we found you a new program, a program with a one hundred percent success rate.”

I asked him how that could be in, and he said the program was just that good.

“They have never failed to cure someone of there alcoholism. It’s called the Burbank Program, and I’ve signed Tommy up to start tomorrow.”

I asked him if it wasn’t something we could do together, but the man said it was very exclusive, and more than a little experimental.

“This is your last chance, Tommy. Otherwise you’ll be back on the street and you’ll have to pay for your rehabilitation your own way.”

I came back from my noon AA meeting to find Tommy sitting on the couch with a bottle of strange liquid and a placid look stretched across his face.

I got mad, asking him what he thought it was doing, but he told me it was part of the program.

I asked him to tell me about it, and in between swigs he did.

“It’s great Derek. They give you this bottle and they tell you to drink as much as you want. It taste terrible, but it always refills itself and it kind of keeps you sociably drunk. It won’t get you falling down drunk, but it keeps you buzzed, and it always refills itself. Did I mention that last part yet? Cause it’s kind of important.”

I was skeptical, but the program seemed to really work for Tommy. He spent his days moderately buzzed, drinking out of his bottle in big long poles. True to his word, the bottle kept refilling itself, and Tommy kept drinking. I didn’t know how that was possible, but it just kept coming back. Other than that, Tommy described the usual AA stuff. They had groups you attended, classes you took, and different therapy sessions that made you want to give up drinking on your own. He said that some of the guys in the program never even picked up their bottles again after the first day, but Tommy seemed to like his too much for that.

“They say it tastes bad, that it makes them sick, but it just tastes like Rotgut to me,.”

Tommy kept on drinking from the bottle, and as long as he had the bottle, he never went back to the hard stuff.

The man from the city was happy, Tommy was happy, and I had to admit I was kind of glad that I didn’t have to fight him every night to get him to not go to the bars.

It seems like a great solution, but I guess it couldn't last forever.

After a couple of months, Tommy came back and said they wanted him to give up the bottle.

“Some of the other guys in the program have already done it, but there’s a few of us that don’t want to give it up. It’s stupid, why should we give up something that makes us feel good?”

I could think of a couple and I told him as much.

Tommy might be enjoying himself, but he looked terrible. He was pale and he looked like he hadn’t been sleeping well. I would have suspected he was on a several days bender, but I knew he had done nothing but drink habitually from that bottle he carried. I had asked him to see it a few times, but he always got very nervous and refused to let go of it. The bottle was his obsession, his worry stone, and the longer he kept it, the more he seemed to cling to it.

AA had really been helping me, but when I suggested that maybe he could go back he would scoff.

“Why would I? I’ve got everything I need right here.”

I didn’t claim to be an expert, but I had heard enough stories to know when someone was circling the drain.

A few days later, I came home from work to find Tommy crying on the couch.

“Larry disappeared! He never showed up to group today and we checked everywhere for him. He’s just gone!”

He took a long pull from the bottle and I waited for him to finish before asking him what he was talking about?

Turned out that Larry was someone from the Program, someone who also didn’t want to give up the bottle.

When Tommy and his friends told the directors of the program that Larry was missing, they didn’t seem too surprised. They said that people sometimes left the program for different reasons and that Larry had probably realized that he had gotten everything from the program that he could and left to live his life. Tommy said that's how many of them did it, but they always said goodbye first, had a little graduation ceremony.

They continued to look, but when Cecil went missing too, Tommy got scared.

Cecil was another one from the Back of the Room Club, as we used to call it in AA. The kind of guys who sit in the back row so you can’t smell the stale booze on them. The kind of guys who joke and cut up but don’t make it a year and eventually drop off.

In other words, guys like Tommy.

He had gone missing about a week after Larry, and it was just Tommy and his three friends now, the ones who wouldn’t give up their bottles. They were all a little scared now, not sure what was going on, but it seemed that Tommy had come up with a plan. When I came home to find two new guys sitting in our apartment, I had serious questions.

“They're gonna stay with us for a little bit,” Tommy said, “Just till all this blows over.”

They introduced themselves as Chuck and Ferris, and they looked like the kind of guys that Tommy and I had hung out with on the streets. They both had scraggly beards, faces just coming back from being wind burnt, clothes from a rag bag, and shifty eyes that didn’t quite trust what they saw. They were guys getting back on their feet, in other words, and I told them to stay as long as they needed to.

That didn’t stop me from moving everything I didn’t want to disappear from the living room into my room.

Sometimes drunks take it into their heads to steal, and these three were no different. I noticed little things missing sometimes, but mostly it was just the food from the pantry. They had tremendous appetites, something I had failed to notice when it was just Tommy, and I found myself making frequent trips to the store. Besides eat, all they seemed to do was go to the program activities and sip from those endless bottles. It wasn’t till they were all together that I started noticing how Tommy wasn’t the palest of them either. They all looked ragged, all looked haggard, and all of them seemed utterly attached to those damn bottles. The weirdest part was how they drank from them. Each sip seemed to drag their lips into the neck, making their faces look long and stretched before they were released with a loud pop.

The effect was a little sickening.

About a week after they came to stay with us, Tommy handed me some fliers as I headed out to the corner store.

“For Cecil,” he said, “If he’s still out there, we want people to know we’re lookin for him.”

I wanted to refuse him, but his face looked so nakedly hopeful, that I just couldn’t say no.

The store owner wasn’t excited about letting me hang the poster in the window, but he said to go ahead.

I inevitably found myself stopping in the liquor aisle, my arms shaking a little as I buried the pissy little voice that told me to go buy a bottle, a case, and put all this silly AA stuff behind me. I could be happy again, satisfied with the way I was, live happily ever after.

I was getting ready to leave with the little basket of snacks, when I noticed something else.

I’m not proud of it, but I’ve gone through a lot of liquor in my time. I’ve drank most brands of gas station alcohol, and when I saw the gaudy silver package, it looked alien to me. It wasn’t a brand I was familiar with, but the well dressed man on the label was someone I had seen before. If I needed a reminder, all I would have to do is walk outside and look at the front window.

I had just hung his picture in the window, hadn’t I?

My hands shook as I reached for the package, and it took all my newfound control to take it back without stopping in a convenient alley and plunging into oblivion.

I had intended to show the case to Tommy, but it turned out that something had happened while I was away. I could hear a commotion from our apartment as I came up the stairs, and arrived to find Tommy and one of his friends freaking out. They were standing around one of the big glass jugs they all had from the program and yelling about how Ferris was gone. When I asked where he had gone, they just kept pointing at the jug and saying he had gone in there.

I got the two of them calmed down a little, and Tommy was finally able to tell me the whole story.

They had been drinking in the living room, taking pulls from their jugs, when Farris had started coughing. They had pounded him on the back, but Tommy said the third slap had sent a hand straight into his clothes. Before their very eyes, he had leaned over the jug, coughing into it harshly, before simply sliding into the neck and sloshing into the container. When I asked how that was even possible, they said it was like his body had turned to liquid and he had simply fallen into the container.

They had set his jug on the coffee table in the living room, and I don’t think any of us were capable of looking away from it.

It was hard not to notice the set of nearly transparent eyes that floated inside like a mirage.

The case of beer lay forgotten in the foyer, and it may still be there to this day.

We didn’t leave the apartment for the next five days. Tommy and Chuck mostly just sat around, and I was afraid to leave them for more than quick bathroom trips. They snuck horrified glances at the jug on the coffee table, but seemed unable to stop themselves from sipping from their own. They had witnessed something terrible, something none of them had expected, and now they were forced to come to terms with something so unreal. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure that I believed them, but I couldn’t deny the way they were acting.

Two days later, I wouldn’t be able to live in ignorance any longer.

Two days later and I would watch Chuck suffer the same fate.

It was raining again as I cooked them breakfast, and I had already decided to skip today's AA meeting like I had yesterday. My sponsor had come by the house to make sure I hadn't relapsed, but one look at Tommy and Chuck had been enough to prove that I was “helping a friend through troubled times.” He said to maybe bring them to a meeting if they wanted to come, but they were both so shell shocked that neither wanted to do much besides eat and sleep.

And drink, they still did plenty of that.

Tommy had cut way back on his drinking, looking at the bottle with great distrust, but Chuck was really hooked through the bag. He would sob every time he took a drink, and every drink seemed to cost him more of the skin on his lips. His lips had looked chapped when I'd first met him, but now they looked like someone with fever blisters who keeps picking at them. I could see skin floating in the bottle sometimes, and the whole picture made me squeeby.

I had just plated some eggs and toast, the ladle for the grits in my hand, when I heard a loud thunk that was followed by Tommy's helpless wail.

I turned towards the sound, and saw the strangest thing I'd ever witnessed.

I had seen atrocities before, seen woman and children blown to pieces and men set on fire in the street, but this was the closest my mind had ever come to simply packing it's shit and stepping out.

The bottle was on the floor, Chuck's hands tugging at the small handles on either side, but his head was stuck in the neck. He looked like a cartoon character, his suddenly malleable melon squeezed into the mouth of the jug. Through the glass, I could see his terrified face, his eyes roving around like a spooked horse, and the more he tugged, the more he seemed to fall inward. The jug had him, the bottle slowly consumption him, and after a particularly hard tug, he simply glooped into the jug and his body filled it to its breaking point.

The sound of him pressing into the space was like a honey dipper truck pulling sewage from a part-a-potty.

Tommy took up the bottle as I stood in the kitchen, the plate of eggs slipping out of my hand, and he stared into the glass with naked fear.

Perhaps he thought he was looking into the future, but the look was inscrutable.

“Chuck!” he yelled, and Chuck's pinched features stared out at him from inside the jug.

Frozen as I was, I couldn't stop him as he reached for the bat we kept beside the door.

I raised my voice to tell him not to, but as the metal slammed into the side of the bottle, I heard it shatter like a bell in the cold.

Chuck may have been freed from his glass prison, but he was far from saved. His form was more liquid than solid now, his skin translucent as water. I could see his organs through his skin, his teeth through his mouth, and when he hit the floor a midst the glass, he began to slide through the carpet. The fabric drank him greedily, and when he tried to scream, his face was like a burbling drain in a bathroom. He stared at us with naked fear as he sank and whatever Chuck had become, he dribbled into the carpet and likely into the space between apartment floors.

Tommy and I could do nothing but stand there and watch him go, the rain providing a backdrop for the tragedy before us.

I'd like to tell you that Tommy smashed his own bottle and never picked it up again, but I can't lie to myself any more than I can to you.

Tommy lasted another two days before the jug took him.

You might think that its odd, but we just sat there, not sure what to do. Who would believe us if we told them? No body was left behind, no evidence of a crime, and what could the police do but laugh at a couple of drunks who had clearly fallen off the wagon? I tried to call the Burbank Program, but all I got was an automated system. The man from the city wouldn't answer his phone either, and the longer it rang, the more I began to think that he had known this would happen. Was this there intention? Did they mean to erase an embarrassing element by means of the bottle?

As bad as I probably looked, Tommy was far worse.

His own bottle sat in the corner when he had tossed it, but his blood shot eyes kept tracking back to it. I tried to get him to eat or sleep or do anything but sit and stare, but Tommy seemed to have uncoupled from reality. If the TV was on, he would watch it. If it weren't he would stare at the set blankly. Regardless, he seemed incapable or unwilling to move from the couch, and I worried that he would do something foolish.

I was coming out of my room on the second day when I found him hunkered in the floor with the jug pressed against his lips.

He looked ashamed to be caught doing so, but as I stared in disbelief, he only shook his head.

“I can't help it. The drinks had me for as long as I can remember. It was only a matter of time before it took me completely.”

He laughed after he had freed his mouth from the opening, shaking his head at the absurdity of his statement.

“My mom used to say that about my dad. “It's not his fault, Tom. The bottle took him. He's not himself when the bottle takes him, Tommy.” I never understood that phrase until now, but I guess my dad and I aren't so different after all. The bottle took him, and now it's going to get me too.”

He laughed then, tipping it back as the liquid sloshed down his front and I realized that I couldn't stay here and watch him kill himself with that damned glass monstrosity anymore.

I went to my room and went back to bed, ignoring the strange watery sounds I heard from the living room.

I came back later to find I was alone in the apartment, the jug sitting beside the couch the only proof Tommy had been there at all.

As I stared at it, I wanted so many things in that moment.

I wanted Tommy to come through the door and tell me he had just gone out for smokes.

I wanted to call my sponsor and tell him I needed help.

I wanted to slide into that same bottle and see what peace lay at the bottom.

But, above all else, I wanted a drink.

Instead, I packed a bag and left.

I knew that if I stayed there much longer, I would inevitably drink again.

I hit the road, lived the life of a nomad for a while, and one day I found myself in Cashmere and saw a sign in the window of the hardware store looking for help.

Eight years later I'm the manager of that hardware store, but the bottle still threatens to take me.

He leaned over the cup and as the ball of sludge slid out of him, he made his own glooping noise. It fell into the tea like a chunk of ice, and as it splashed him, Winter was glad to see that it had cooled as he talked. She took the cup from him before he could come back around, and she had it secured in the cabinet with the others when he shook his head.

It had been brown and smelled a little of hops.

That was new.

“Did I pass out?” he asked, rising shakily as he got to his feet.

“A momentary fugue.” she assured him, “I think we got to the root of the problem. You don't have to worry about it anymore.”

He nodded, smiling dopeily as he tripped from the room. She knew that he would feel a little hallow for the next few days, but he would ultimately forget that he had been here at all. He would feel better then, but sometimes that hallow feeling would come back and he wouldn't understand why.

Doctor Winter wished she could take his desire to drink away so easily, but some things had claws and did more damage upon removal then when they were left well enough alone.