11. Abandon All Hope

The waiting drove me mad
You’re finally here and I’m a mess

–“Corduroy”, Pearl Jam

Ransom paid the Devil…He whispers pleasing words…
Triumphant are the angels if they can…get there first…
Little secrets tremors…turned to quakes…
The smallest oceans still get…big, big waves…
I’ll decide…take the dive…
Take my time…not my life…
Wait for signs…believe in lies…
To get by…it’s divine…whoa…
Oh, do you know what it’s like?

–“Tremor Christ”, Pearl Jam

I worked 6 pm to 2 am, Tuesday through Saturday every week. I would definitely get drunk on Saturday and Sunday nights. And quite often on Monday. And sometimes I couldn’t wait for Saturday so I got drunk on Friday, too. And also on Thursday if shit was bad. If the week got off to a rocky start, I’d drink on a Tuesday night as well. That left Wednesday as my designated no-fun, no drinking day (I didn’t want to become an alcoholic!). Of course, if it was a really shitty week, I might drink on Wednesday, too; that no-fun day rule wasn’t carved in stone or anything.

Talking about my drinking later, I’d tell people, “I drank when I was happy, I drank when I was sad, and I drank when I was bored.” (That pretty much covered it, like drinking all the time.) Mostly I drank to take the edge off the constant state of rage I found myself in. It really wasn’t about Megan, it was more of an existential crisis; like why did my life suck so bad? I didn’t miss her, I missed being in a regular stable relationship. I missed having someone waiting to see me at the end of the week, having someone in my life who was actually glad to see me. And most of all, I missed having something to believe in, a future, a promise that things could get better.

Having given up on a music career, I turned my focus to creating mix tapes, compilations of different bands’ music. I leaned heavily on the new bands out of Seattle: Pearl Jam, Nirvana, the Stone Temple Pilots as well as Cracker, Chris Isaak, Smashing Pumpkins, Portishead, Green Day, G. Love, Morphine, Social Distortion, Chris Whitley as well as old favorites, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley. There’s an art to mixing and matching the different sounds and moods. I’d try and start with songs that were loud and strong. The music would turn moodier and darker in the middle and then I would try and end things on an up-note. The cassettes were 45 minutes a side; so 90 minutes in total. These tapes were the accompaniment to my drinking, alone or with others. Kevin and Todd made a few trips up from southern California to hang out and party and eat burgers and sauce, which was cool. Mostly, I drank alone (there are not a lot of people to drink with at two in the morning).

I‘d sit on the floor of my bedroom with my back against the bed, a six-pack of beer and a half-pint beside me (whiskey or tequila, usually whiskey). The room would be dark, save for my desk lamp illuminating a spot on the wall. I’d put on my tapes and slowly and progressively get hammered out of my mind.

Apathy has rained on me
Now I’m feeling like a
Soggy dream
So close to drowning but
I don’t mind

I’ll live inside this mental cave
Throw my emotions in the grave
Hell, who needs them
Anyway

I’m not growing up
I’m just burning out
And I stepped in line
To walk amongst the
dead

—“Burnout”, Green Day

Yeah I got faith,
But sometimes fear it just weighs too much
I don’t want to feel,
Cold winds blowin’ through me with an icy touch

I wait for a warning, I’m waiting for some kind of sign
I try to separate,
Try to separate my body from my mind

Cold feelings in the night
You know, this feeling just ain’t right
And though I try, I just can’t hide

Cold feelings in the night
Cold feelings in the night

You know, this feeling just ain’t right
And though I try I just can’t hide
Cold feelings in the night

—“Cold Feelings”, Social Distortion

Nirvana did a chilling cover of an old blues song:

My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night?

In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through

My girl, my girl, where will you go?

I’m going where the cold wind blows

In the pines, in the pines
The sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through

—“Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”, Leadbelly

They say that I’m crazy,
my life wasted on this road
that time will find my dreams
scattered, dead and cold

—“ 200 More Miles”, Cowboy Junkies

The Cowboy Junkies also did a cover of a country classic:

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill
He sounds too blue to fly
That means he’s lost the will to live
I’m so lonesome I could cry

Did you ever see a night so slow?
As time goes draggin’ by
The moon just went behind the clouds
To hide its face and cry

The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky
And as I wonder where you are
I’m so lonesome I could cry
I’m so lonesome I could cry
I’m so lonesome I could cry

—“I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, Hank Williams

I’m all by myself
As I’ve always felt
I’ll betray myself
To anyone

—“Soma”, Smashing Pumpkins

I’m the baddest of the bad
Since you’ve been gone
The baddest of the bad
Since you’ve been gone

I lay around here
And I just drink beer
The baddest of the bad
Since you’ve been gone

Everything is bad including me
But being bad is good policy
It protects me from your past
’til your memory’s gone at last
Everything is bad including me

—“The Baddest of the Bad”, Reverend Horton Heat

I took the cannonball down to the ocean
Watched the diesel disappear beneath the tumbling waves
Love is a ghost train howling on the radio
“Remember everything,” she said, “when only memory remains.”
“How do you do?”
She said, “How do you do?”

–“Ghost Train”, Counting Crows

Wind of fate has pried us loose
Light of mercy hurts my eyes
Is it worth the things you lose
To board the train and watch the sky

I sing myself to sleep at night
I sing myself to sleep

Another song about the rain
Coming down it burns through me
Another song about the rain

–“Another Song About the Rain”, Cracker

Breathing is the hardest thing to do
With all I’ve said and all that’s dead for you
You lied –Goodbye

Leavin’ on a southern train
Only yesterday you lied
Promises of what I seemed to be
Only watched the time go by
All of these things I said to you

–“Interstate Love Song”, Stone Temple Pilots

How can it feel, this wrong
From this moment
How can it feel, this wrong
How can it feel, this wrong
This moment
How can it feel, this wrong

Oh, can’t anybody see
We’ve got a war to fight
Never found our way
Regardless of what they say
How can it feel, this wrong
From this moment
How can it feel, this wrong

—“Roads”, Portishead

Give me a potion to make me love you
Give me a potion to make me care
Give me a potion to make me love you
Make it a double
Make it a double

Below the ocean, I make a bed down there
Below the ocean, I gotta live somewhere
Maybe a graveyard,
yeah, maybe I don’t care

Why can’t love be blind
Instead of just a blind man cryin’?
Why can’t love be,
Why can’t love be blind?

Thanks for the potion to make me love you
Thanks for the potion to make me care
Your charms are workin on me

Your charms are workin hard
Your charms are workin on me

Your charms are workin hard
Thanks for the potion to make me love you
Make it a double
Make it a double

—“Potion”, Morphine

So meet me at the junction
I’ll buy you one last round
Let me in on something
Before I leave this town
Well we used to have a password, girl
Now I can’t recall

You gotta tell me was it love
Or some high-grade alcohol
Some high-grade alcohol
You gotta tell me was it love
Or some high-grade alcohol

Kick them stones out of my bed,
Stones out of my bed
I’m begging mama please move over
Kick the stones out of my bed

—“Kick the Stones”, Chris Whitley

Jim described the music coming out of my bedroom as sounding like “a nightclub in hell”. In retrospect, I’d say that was a fair assessment of where my mind was at.

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One Halloween when I was working with Al, the two of us got a bright idea: we found a big blank white poster with a beer company logo on it. It was an unused part of a beer display. We scrawled on it in big letters: “Abandon All Hope All Ye Who Enter Here” and then taped it to the front door where all the customers would see it on their way inside. For the rest of the night, drunken Halloween revelers (some in costume, some not needing one as they were sufficiently outlandish as their regular everyday selves) came staggering in, grinning and guffawing at our sign.

The next day, Maxine confronted me. “Freddy wanted to fire you and Al on the spot when he saw that poster you guys put up.”

“Oh, that’s ridiculous! The fucking customers loved it. They laughed their asses off, I swear to God,” I told her.

“Well, you might want to avoid him for awhile. He’s still pissed about it.”

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I miss the comfort of being sad

–“Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle”, Nirvana

I had this one customer who would come into the store about every three months. She was a chubby young woman in her late twenties. She had the same routine every time. She’d approach the counter with an armful of junk food— cookies, ice cream, potato chips, donuts, candy bars, soda, etc—every bad thing you could find to eat in a liquor store—she’d plop down on the counter in front of me and stand back to gauge my reaction. I would be poker-faced, of course. What was I gonna say? “It looks like you’re trying to kill yourself with junk food”?

I would start ringing her up and she would say, “I know what you’re thinking…Well, I used to be pretty. I had a boyfriend. Then I got hit by a car. I was in the hospital. I had a brain injury.” She would finish in a despairing wail, “Now look at me!”

Hearing that once was bad enough but I had to hear it every time she came in the store. And if somebody else came in while she was in the middle of her routine, she’d start all over again from the beginning for their benefit.

I had a couple of regular customers who endured it multiple times right along with me. We’d shake our heads and mutter to each other.

“ Brutal. That’s just brutal to listen to.”

“Well, if I wasn’t gonna get a drink before, I’m definitely getting one now…”

It would have been comical if it wasn’t so depressing. Speaking of that, I once had a clown customer in the full getup, wig, face paint, red nose, the whole outfit. She was drinking across the street at the bar and she’d come in very half hour or so for one of those little airport bottles of booze. She got drunker and drunker and sadder and sadder as the hours went by but the smile stayed painted on her grim face.

The things I saw—I used to tell my fellow clerks that we were watching America’s Unconscious. We were like Santa in the song, “He knows when you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re awake. He knows when you’ve been good or bad, so be good for goodness’ sake.” I had male and female customers cheat on their partners. They’d come in the store, arm in arm with some stranger they picked up from the bar, and they’d always give me the same look, You better not say anything. What was I gonna say? I had all the drama I could handle as it was. I had a couple of women hit on me right in front of their man. When I was giving them their change back they’d run their fingers across my palm and wink at me. I’d look over at their guy, drunk and oblivious and barely upright, and shake my head. What I didn’t see, people told me. Customers (and employees) were always confiding in me. I heard about the background of different individuals; who was doing what—or who.

Carmen came in early one afternoon on her day off and pointed out a customer to me.

“See this guy? He was at my sister’s house last night. He stole her coin collection. Stole from my sister. Who’s blind!”

A knot of guys, regulars, overheard her.

“What?!”

The man got very nervous.

“I didn’t steal anything, I just borrowed it. This is just a misunderstanding.”

He left without buying anything and the regulars followed him out the door, presumably to kick his ass.

I had these two trainees in one week, both of whom confided in me. The first guy was a young, short, wiry, very angry-looking kid in his early twenties. He had just got out of the Marines. It reminded me of a customer, another young guy fresh out of the Marines, a big guy though, who kept calling me Sir until I begged him to stop. Well, this guy didn’t call me Sir and he looked so pissed off I was afraid I was going say the wrong thing and set him off. Out of the blue he finally opened his mouth and said, bitterly, apropos of nothing: “Goddamn Marines. All they want to do is fight.” And I got the whole story right there. He joined the Marines to belong to something, to join a brotherhood, and instead he found himself fighting for his life every day against a barracks full of bullies and knuckleheads. No wonder he was angry.

He only lasted a shift. I had to train his replacement, a big teenage skinhead. (“A skinhead?!” I said to my boss, Maxine. “You hired a skinhead? Are you crazy?!”) So I’m in the back of the store with the skinhead when he starts telling me stories. The first story was how he ran into a bunch of Hispanic gangbangers and after exchanging racial insults with them, offered to fight them. They fought him chivalrously, one after another, mano a mano in single combat, rather than bum-rushing him all at once and stomping him out. He thought that was really dumb of them—and really lucky for him.

I was sitting there wishing they had beat his ass, too when he told me another story, his birth origin story. His mother had been abducted eighteen years before by three men in a van, who raped her repeatedly. That’s how he was conceived.

I was horrified. “Who in the hell told you that story?” I asked him.

“My mother did,” he said calmly. “She told me that’s why she hates me.”

“She should never have told you that story,” I said. “That’s fucked up.”

He shrugged. “It’s no big deal. We never got along, anyway. ”

“She should never have told you that,” I said. “And why are you telling me? You shouldn’t tell anybody that story.”

He shrugged again. “I don’t give a fuck any more.”

He only lasted that one shift, too. I probably trained the next guy after him but I don’t remember any stories that came with them. Thank God.

My co-worker Sammy told me this afterwards: One night, she played pool against some guy in Schneiderman’s bar across the street. The guy kept hitting on her; she turned him down. Sammy got in her car and headed home. She dimly remembered the headlights of a car following her out of town. When Sammy exited the freeway and entered the off-ramp, the car behind her intentionally rammed her vehicle off the road. When Sammy came to, she discovered, that among other injuries, she had lost her front teeth in the steering wheel of her car. It was really awful. Sammy got her teeth replaced so she looked the same but obviously, she was never going to be the same.

With no car, Jim and I gave her rides home every night for awhile. (Where her boyfriend was is a good question.)

A week or so after her crash, a big, blonde, bearded guy with glasses said to me, sneeringly, “ I hear your little co-worker had an accident.”

I relayed this story later to her dad, BA, who became very still. “You know his name?” he asked me.

“I don’t.”

“Well, next time you see him, you point him out to me,” he said.

“I will, I promise,” I told him.

Years later, I was talking to an old co-worker, Dan, who said he thought he knew who the guy was, “Barry”. The guy had been a male stripper, “a real weirdo” he told me. The last time I saw Barry, it was years after that. I was working at the grocery store and he was the coach of a girls’ soccer team. (Nothing troubling about that scenario, oh, no.)

One spring night I was working alone and feeling quite cynical about relationships, wondering to myself if love was ever truly real or whether it was all bullshit. This couple came in, very giddy and excited. They had just met at the bar and apparently had clicked immediately. Ok, I thought, Maybe I was wrong. Maybe romance does exist after all. So I’d see these two on and off for the next couple of months and they seemed very happy together.

One afternoon the young woman came in, absolutely distraught, and asked me, “Have you seen my boyfriend?”

“No, I haven’t. Why?”

She cried, “He raped my son! He raped my 9-year-old son while I was at work!”

“Oh, my God! That’s terrible!” I clutched my forehead in disbelief.

“Why? Why? Why would he do such a thing?!”

“I don’t know.” I had no words to console her.

“You will tell me if you see him?”

“I will,” I promised her.

I never did see that guy again and forever after the young woman and I shared a pained smile and an awful secret between us.