the black seven

arise, therefore

I was seven when my light came on, when I felt alive for the first time. I was lost and dreaming in a long black night and then I wasn’t. The golden moment didn’t come the first time I touched a soccer ball. Not the first time I picked up a book about the Hardy boys. Not the first time I saw Butch and Sundance jump off that cliff, not the first time I saw myself in Peter Parker or Captain Kirk. It was the first time red wine touched my lips, the first time I got good and proper drunk. The first time I felt the warm internal glow of alcohol. The glow from the light that comes from within. The first time I felt like myself. The first time I became myself. As if the blood cells and molecular machinery under my parched skin had been crossing a hot white desert for seven years while I was dreaming and I was not interested in a glass of water. I didn’t want apple juice or ginger ale. I didn’t know it yet but I wanted a real drink and a real drink was had in a roadside family taverna in the Italian Alps somewhere on the high winding road between Amsterdam and Milan. I was five thousand miles from my home turf of Mississippi.

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I was traveling with my parents and brother in a tiny yellow Fiat hatchback, floating like a bug in the back seat with a Batman comic book and stack of baseball cards. Daydreaming about being a cowboy pirate. I was Kit Carson. I was Jim Hawkins. I was Tom Sawyer. Mississippi has its own odd customs to be sure. The first time a boy kills a deer he is drenched in its blood but he may or may not have his first beer until he is old enough to join the army. In most of Europe and certainly in Italy it is customary for children to have a small glass of table wine with supper. My brother and I were no different. I had my first taste and in that heartbeat, that teardrop in the rain, I felt like I was at long last one with my body. My porch light had come on. I had been half asleep until that day and didn’t even know it. I was a zombie NPC adrift in a game I didn’t realize I was playing. Now I was awake. I was self-aware. I was genetically predisposed to be an alcoholic. The affliction runs deep on both sides of my family. The sleeper cells in my small still perfect body snapped online and without even thinking about it I was suddenly a sneaky little fucker. I was a natural. I was an effortless addict, a junkie born. My brother took one or two experimental sips and said ick. He pushed his glass aside like a normal little kid and asked for an orange Fanta. I tucked away my glass then finished off his and somehow managed to get my hands on five or six more.

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I have a half dozen flickering early memories from the years before that day. I can pull up scratchy black and white and sepia faded snaps of me and brother chucking snowballs at each other, racing turtles and matchbox cars down a long hallway, building Lincoln log shanty towns in our room, trading baseball cards for gum and candy cigarettes, making up our own pirate bedtime stories in a crooked pillow fort in the cool shadow of our bunk beds. Those images are unstable, pale shimmering washed out flashes reconstructed from photos and dreams and half redacted stories told by mom or dad. But that taverna is total recall, three-dimensional and fully rendered, warm and rosy and buzzing with high def reality. I can shut my eyes and step inside that one and walk around. I can take that first drink again like it was yesterday. I can taste the wine on my tongue, the back of my throat. I can feel it warming my belly.

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Back in the yellow Fiat my brother fell asleep within a few minutes. In those days he usually went to sleep with his head in my lap. I almost never slept in the car. On any other night I would have disappeared into a book reading by flashlight with one hand on brother’s shoulder. I would have traveled the landscapes inside my head, flying low to the ground. I would have kept my mouth shut. But that night brother slept behind me in another world. I knew he was there but I was somewhere else. I was awake, I was online. I was connected to the universe. I was alive for the first time. I was full of beans and I had stories to tell. I sat in the middle of the backseat leaning in between mom and dad, chatting up a storm. This was long before seat belts, mind you. I talked and talked and jabbered their ears off about god knows what for a hundred miles. I told them about the book I was reading. The books I wanted to read. The books unfolding in my head. I wouldn’t shut up and I remember a look passing between my father and mother, a look that said my dad recognized something dark and crooked in me, something that lived in him too. The look said no more table wine for the boys. I didn’t have another drink until I was thirteen.

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Anyone who has ever sat in on a meeting of anonymous alcoholics has heard a few hundred stories of hitting bottom. I’ve heard thousands. They are all different and all the same. Every story of the bottom features an echoing ever shifting cyclone of ambulances and jail cells, shitty motel rooms and blood spilled, hearts broken and fortunes lost. Every bottom is ugly and messy and shameful and hurts like hell. Every bottom is unlike the others, every bottom is the same. There is always a lost highway behind them. The first drink stories by contrast are less often shared. Not every drunk remembers their first, or doesn’t want to. I have no specific memory of that second drink even though it was the one that set me back on the path down the bottomless pit I had yet to start digging. I know it was the summer after seventh grade. I know that it was bourbon. I am a Tennessee boy after all. I was in a treehouse in Memphis with two of my friends whose names shall be spared from this telling. The day was hot as monster’s breath and we were smoking Marlboro reds stolen from one of our fathers. The odd thing is I don’t remember if my brother was with me that day. I expect he was. He was always beside me. He was my shadow, my right hand. But when I try to step inside that memory and look for him my own shadow fades into the dark. The darkness visible spinning in my wake. It doesn’t matter. I was already on the path to my lost highway and some part of brother already knew he ought not follow.

peace.

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the whole pirate family in Milan circa 1973.