Mercury is in retrograde, I suppose. Because it’s been like this all week. For me, for my friends, for the people represented by avatars I follow on Twitter. For Jason, certainly.
I am driving with Jason to the hospital. I am driving. Jason is sitting. Squirming, a bit. I roll his window down. It’s chilly but he doesn’t complain. He hasn’t had fresh air in days.
In the back seat of my car are two boxes — yes, boxes — of Franzia white wine; they were the two remaining in his apartment before we left. They were how I got him into the car. After hours, days of pleading and pulling and screaming and crying, I simply picked up the two remaining bottles of Franzia and I walked with them out of the apartment. He put on his shoes and he followed. He got into the car politely. He is unerringly loyal to King Alcohol. I don’t know why this never occurred to me before.
He has been drinking since Sunday. The drinking did not start Sunday — it started twenty years ago and has been punctuated regularly by AA meetings and detox stays and long-term rehabs and sponsors and steps and Campral — so Sunday was just the day it started again this time.
I brought my dog over and moved in late Wednesday night, because the cranky demons that existed in my own head were so loud that I felt no other choice than to blanket them warmly in the sadness of someone else’s more pressing problems. (This is a human form of insanity.) Also, I love him. (Another human insanity.)
I went over there to save him. In the least selfless way possible. The layers of illness here are woven deeply and misshapen. I went over there to lay against his body at night. To feel his energy intermingle with mine. To feel a part of something whole through him. To hold him here in the human experience and to refresh, for me, the visa I was about to let expire.
The first day I got there he could talk. He could say things. He said he loved me. He said he had always loved me, since the day we met. I told him I loved him too. (This is a form of human insanity.)
We watched some TV but mostly we just passed out in bed. We held each other tightly. By day two there was very little talking. He would eat if I fed it to him and drink water if I put the glass to his lips, but mostly he drank constantly from a small glass of white wine, then laid down in bed and stared at the ceiling. There is no true sleep for him. He wakes up regularly to drink from the glass. He pours the glass from the boxes of wine spread out along the kitchen counter. Much of it spills, and so the tile floor of the kitchen is sticky, and his flip-flops make a smacking noise as he walks across it.
I tried to give him a shower, to wipe the grime off his hair and the wash the thickening layer of wine from his mustache, and he nearly cracked his head open trying to put his own shorts on afterward; he fell suddenly and he slammed his head on the back of the bathtub, where he then lay, a crumpled, stunned mess. I pulled him out and told him to go sit on the bed and put his shorts on there. It was the only point in all of this where I thought — just for a minute — that perhaps I was in over my head.
By day three he is a shell of a human.
“Do you want to die?” I ask him.
It takes him some time to form a word, his bloated tongue moves in and out and around his mouth for several rotations while his eyes attempt to focus. “No,” he says, but it’s more of a loosely directed breath than a word. “I just wanna drink,” he tells me.
I feed him potato chips, one at a time. “Potato chip,” I say — I chirp it, really — and he opens his mouth wide, like I’m playing Airplane with a two-year-old. I put the chip in his mouth and he eats it. After two potato chips he gets a sip of water. Sometimes he pushes the water away and he takes a sip of wine instead. We do this until the bag is empty, and I have long ago stopped chirping and I stare at the wall as I feed him his next chip.
His body is cold, pale, soft. Rotting, almost, already. The soft skin of his arms skims the surface of the fat beneath it easily, like an old ladies’. He is squishy, his stomach distended. His hair is long and curly and wild. His eyes are wide open and they are seeing nothing.
There is a demon inside him and I understand it in a way I never understood the phrase before. I don’t know what else to call this thing. There is some force demonic inside him and I can’t tell the demon from Jason. And Jason can’t tell the demon from Jason either.
“We need an exorcism,” I think to myself. “There is a demon inside him that needs to be exorcised.” And I mean it truly. Because medicine has been helpless here. Medicine has tried. I don’t think Jason wants to die. But this demon inside him is strong and it is vicious and he is powerless against it and so am I. How do we fight it? I pray and I pray and I pray but mostly I wish someone would just come perform an exorcism. There is a demon in there. I can feel him.
When it was not like this — when it was better, when the demon was quiet — Jason and I were in love. (This is a human disease.) He couldn’t say a mean thing to me, not even when I poked and prodded and pushed his buttons and did everything I could to make him jealous and bitter and angry. He never had a mean thing to say. He never knew how to do anything but be fair and kind to me. (This is a rare form of human sanity.) And the moments I loved most in the world — the moments I felt the safest — were the moments I spent with him, on his couch, in his arms, wrapped in his itchy Mexican blanket and in his arms. The long walks through Discovery Park or the day we took the dog to Folklife and sat on the grass eating hot dogs and avoiding ants. I would ask him questions — about finance, about business, about technology, and he would answer, because he knew. Because he read everything and he talked to everybody and they all adored him. Anything short of pure love that I perceived from him was merely my tendency to reflect myself onto him. Jason, demon-free, is pure in his ability to love. There is incredible human value in Jason.
He knows where we’re going, but he stays quiet, the wind blowing his hair. We’re going to the hospital we always go to. Sometimes it’s his sister, or his mother, or another friend driving, but this time it’s my turn, this time I’m the one there when no one else is willing. I’m the one looking this thing straight in the face today, and although I had promised him I would allow him to die on his own terms I am now realizing that I am unwilling to make good on that promise.
“Do you want to die?” I ask again.
“No.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to drink.”
The doctors have been very clear with him. He’s got limited attempts at this before he bleeds out. Before he’s dead. Saying that he wants to drink means he’s prepared to accept the consequences, but as long as he tells me — as long as there is some voice in there able to speak loud enough to tell me he does not want to die — I feel like I have to fight for him. Is this enabling? It is easy to call it enabling when it is not you staring at the decision.
I had not planned on taking him to the hospital. I had planned on sitting in his apartment with him, waiting it out, holding his hand, allowing him to die on his own terms but not alone. I believed myself capable of that. I was not. Was I not strong enough? Or does this have nothing to do with strength and everything to do with love? (Thoughts like that are part of the human disease.)
We’re crossing the Ballard Bridge on the way to Swedish and this motherfucking Colbie Caillat song comes on the radio, and she’s singing about how she misses everything about a man she loved, a man who is gone now, and her voice is crystal clear through all of this, juxtaposed with the fog of this demon, of this man I have loved and lost, and it’s like the words themselves are inside the car, they are propelling it across the bridge, and I bury my face in the door and I sob.
Jason is barely conscious at this point, but he follows me into the ER and he admits himself. He knows how to answer questions for the doctors. He knows exactly what to say. His BAC — a 0.42 — says more than he ever could. Jason should, by all accounts, be dead with this level of alcohol in his system. But he’s not. And he wasn’t last year, either, when we did this same thing up at Lakeview, and his BAC was 0.42 then, too. The demon isn’t going to let him die. The demon wants to play with him for as long as he can. We all have demons. But Jason has a really, really vicious demon.
We sit in the hospital room. The blood pressure machine beeps, and the tourniquet tightens, and sometimes the ledge of my nose starts to burn and I know that’s because I’m about to start crying.
I text the guy I’ve been sleeping with lately: “Will you be rough next time?” He responds: “Yes.” Me: “Like, really rough?” Him: “Yes.” (This is a form of human insanity.)
The doctor comes in to see Jason and tells him that he wants to admit him to the hospital’s acute alcoholism treatment program. Jason refuses. He wants to go home. “I want to drink,” he explains to the doctor.
“Just get a fucking gun and do it then,” I spit. “Quit being such a fucking pussy. You’re pathetic. This is pathetic. Kill yourself like a man if you’re gonna do it.” (This is not something Jason would ever say to me.) (It is also a form of human insanity.) I am angry.
The nurse brings in the discharge instructions. “Alcohol Intoxication” is in large letters at the top. There are some recommendations for low-risk drinking (no more than two drinks per day) and a warning not to combine alcohol with painkillers.
I flip to the next page. “Hey Jason,” I say, reading from the instructions, “Has your drinking ever caused you problems, such as problems with your family, problems with your work, or accidents and injuries?”
He doesn’t respond. The doctor doesn’t think I’m very funny.
“Any problems at all from drinking, Jason? Any at all?”
Jason is struggling to change from the hospital gown back into his street clothes. He has put his shirt on backwards.
“I’m not taking you home,” I tell him as I kiss his matted hair.
“Please?”
“No. I’m sorry. I won’t be the one to do that.”
I did drive him there. And now I’m abandoning him. Is that right? Is that the right choice? Is that the love part of me or the demon part of me making that choice? I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. I want him to go to jail. I want something horrible to happen to him. Something — anything — to remind him that this sequence of events he loves to repeat can have new and exciting and horrific consequences. Something just a step less horrific than death. I feel bad about leaving. But not very bad. Mostly just sad. Mostly just overwhelmed with sad.
He calls me thirty minutes later and leaves a message: “I got home. But I need my keys.”
I have his keys, and I’m not going to give them to him tonight. Because I need to sleep. And I need to make some changes in my own life. And I can’t do that if I haven’t slept.
This week has been hell. But it has pushed a reset button inside me. I have a clearer idea of who I am and the actions I need to take to align with her. Thank you, Lord, for creating a world in which nothing, absolutely nothing, happens by mistake. Thank you for providing a path that always results in growth if I choose to follow it.
Lord, please, if it be Thy will, free my friend from his demon.
