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Lida Bends Your Ear
So I decided again to embark upon the ever-renewing experiment of sobriety. As I stare down a chain of dry days, I have no idea how I am going to pull it off. I am the most compulsive girl in the room. Any room. If the room is the Global Convergence of All 12-Step Programs and Reunion of People Who Have Ever Attempted Recovery, I carry away the trophy whether they award it to me or not because I’m also a compulsive thief. The State Department and the entire caucus of the United Nations have a vested interest in ensuring the continued raging success of my alcoholism, because if the blood hiccupping through my veins weren’t a whiskey river, I would run this fucking place. The world, I’m talking. If you poked through my closet you’d see a crisp sheepskin, Magna Cum Laude, of course. If you stop in the living room, you can’t miss the ten volume set of Plato’s Republic, in Greek, no less. As you slip victim to this appearance of accomplishment, you may think I have spent a single sober day since I escaped the rapist over a year ago. I assure you, I have not. There is a rumor that I am the friendly sort. Trust me. I’m just lushed. I ricochet between drunk and drunker like a silver pinball in a Who song before I plunge down the long blinking chute without saying, Ding Ding! Here’s the thing: when I attempt sleep without wine, I wake from dreams so gruesome, from reverie so macabre, Josef Mengele couldn’t stomach the specters I shake off. Clive Barker and Stephen King would wage a bidding war for what worms through this brain. Without the narcotic whisper of two liters of Pinot carrying me down like the River Nepenthe, I lie flat, curl around a pillow, crawl out of my tee shirt and then my skin as I pitch and fling the sheets till dawn. Some lucky man could take advantage of that energy. Mmm, like maybe the dark haired one. He says he wants to ride from Orlando to Richmond. Can you picture it? Speeding up I 95 to come see me? He would only pull over to burn cigarets between his James Dean lips and to take a piss. I can see his tattooed shoulder blades, his chiseled ass, his full open grin before I remember; I have an ole man, going on six years now. Whenever this occurs to me, it’s like somebody stepping on my foot, hard, right in the middle of a great daydream about revenge or a sudden windfall that would make it possible for me to tell the assholes in my life to shove. He shows his affection by doing my taxes and occasionally brings home loaves of Russian rye. Our sex can be sweetly familiar, blisteringly urgent, distracted and languorous, or um…let’s just go to sleep. He is hilariously funny and prodigiously talented or he is grindingly obtuse and emotionally unreachable. Recently I set aside an afternoon to spitefully conjure up each episode defined by the latter so I won’t feel so slutty when I drawl suggestively into the phone at tattoo boy.
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