In the King County Courthouse, our client is being sentenced for the murder of forty-nine women. It is a week before Christmas and a man who works as a seasonal Santa is confronting the killer for the sadosexual murder of his daughter. The aggrieved father presents well as Santa with his white beard, ruddy cheeks, and ample belly. Wearing rainbow-colored suspenders, he offers his forgiveness and expresses his sadness that the killer will never know the joy of the Christmas season. At this, the killer is overcome with emotion and tears fill his eyes. At our Christmas party later that evening, I am unable to drink away the disturbing image of Santa making the serial murderer weep.
In the five-star Connecticut detox, the Anger Christ is pacing the hall outside my room, threatening out loud to do violence to the people in his head. He looks like the Catholic Jesus of my childhood, but he is a sick and angry meth-head whose demeanor warns of imminent violence. I am unable to enjoy my blackberry cobbler as I brace for a possible attack.
In the Seattle psych-ward, they let me order from the normal-person menu and I become attached to a companion dog named Star. I meet a woman who is hopeful that electroconvulsive therapy will restore her former happiness. After discharge, we conduct a brief affair that ends when she shoots herself a day after feeling “happier than ever.”
In Carmel-by-the-Sea, I am on all fours trying to gather Ativan pills from the floor while the twenty-seventh love of my life is kicking me in the ribs. Between kicks, she’s frantically splashing water from a pitcher to dissolve the pills. When the violence subsides, I have recovered eight pills, and I hitch a ride to Big Sur where I eventually abandon a suicide plan in favor of vodka shots at Nepenthe.
In Santa Cruz, I wake up on the sidewalk in front of State Farm Insurance. As I come to, I realize I am newly homeless and have no money and nowhere to go, but upon discovering a half-full pint of Gran Legacy in my waistband, I am overcome with desperate enthusiasm. I offer a prayer of thanks to the God of Small Things and begin looking for somewhere to steal cigarettes.
In the Big Sur monastery, the monks are disappointed when I am arrested for DUI while driving their recently donated Chevy pickup to Monterey to rescue Brother Ezekiel, who is suffering a panic attack at the Comfort Inn. In the Salinas holding tank, I befriend Ricardo, a Mexican fellow charged with “terroristic acts” for kicking someone’s door in after they interrupted his effort to steal a bike from their yard. We find common ground in the way hard liquor informs our poor choices.
In the Flushing park, a man is explaining that his family owns an “attack dog farm” upstate. He says they have African attack dogs, Canadian attack dogs and every other kind of attack dog you could imagine. I notice he has an axe attached to his belt, and behind him my sister is vomiting after accepting a challenge to “fire the red bottlecap” full of Bacardi 151. There is a sense of foreboding in the hot and humid air, and the party has hardly started.
I am on the far night journey. Not the straight path. Not any path. I run from the police through suburban vegetable gardens. I am drunk and unruly in Seat 32F. I fire airline bottles in the 26th-floor men’s room of Seattle’s finest office tower. I search for God in emergency room lights. I fall in love with table dancers. I climb through the doggy-door of the Jordanian Sex Witch. I hold counsel with bus-stop inebriates. I help Larry empty the piss buckets. In a hallucinogenic nightmare, I tour hell on a donkey. I sprout soul tumors. I almost die in Burien. I am a sex-addict, a failed poet, a convicted felon, and a disappointment to Uncle Desi. And it goes on and on and on.
And then,
an epiphany:
I must extricate
my life
from my ass.