(no subject)
I.
It’s the autumn of 1999 and you’ve just celebrated a year of sobriety and your twenty first birthday. You’ve been lying, supine, on your parents’ brown leather sofa for a month because you’ve had mono.
You got mono from a beautiful redheaded bombshell. She’s nineteen, about five foot three, ninety eight pounds, and has borderline personality disorder, except you won’t realize that until several years, relationships, and hours of therapy later. She was your first girlfriend in your new found sobriety, and all the feelings you feel with her are more profound than any feelings you’ve ever felt in the past. She set the benchmark which will haunt you for the rest of your life.
She broke up with you. While you were lying supine on your parents’ brown leather sofa, she calls you up on the phone in tears.
“Billy, I miss her. I miss my daughter.” She was talking about an offspring she had birthed and given up for adoption five years prior. She had claimed to you that she was raped by an ex boyfriend, and that’s how she got pregnant. That this vile ex boyfriend raped her and took her virginity. Strangely, though, you didn’t put together that she could fuck like a Venezuelan whore.
Your fever had spiked 102, and in some ethereal moment of clarity you say to her: “Diane, she’s not your daughter anymore. Get over it.”
She responds indignantly and tells you in sobs and spite that it’s over.
Your fever climbs, and your tonsils and adenoids swell to near total occlusion, and you haven’t eaten in three days because it hurts too much to swallow.
Your parents take you to the emergency room. They give you an IV of saline and glucose, rehydrating your emaciated self. The young doc on staff gives you Vicodin so you can bear the pain of swallowing so you can eat. He also gives you a serum of Xylocaine and glycerin, which he calls his “own concoction,” claiming it is something to gargle with to numb the pain.
You later find out that Diane’s big boned lackey friend, Jesse, who works at this particular hospital, knew the doctor, and was charged with checking up on you by the benevolent Diane. You find out this, and many other things, later.
Diane’s sister, Stacy, is in AA, and you see her at young people’s meetings. You chit chat small talk, and later find out she started dating this paunchy arrogant DJ she had befriended that summer. You never liked him.
You pump Jesse, and Stacy for information, and they become more and more distant.
You amble gaunt and pallid, back to meetings. Feeling like a new comer. Your sponsor, he doesn’t even seem to think you’re sober. Looks at you like you’re a leper.
You’ve lost thirty seven pounds. You swim in sweatshirts. The world to you looks horrid and gnarled. A nebulous crow about Y2K looms on the horizon, hanging a bland pall, which, curiously, comforts you. At least, you figure, everyone seems to be going mad.
William Comparetto
© 2008