Bad Dog (4 page)

“Going up?” The Holavator and its passenger
.

Three years later, Gloria still didn’t like it: “She really should not be sleeping on the bed.”

“Of course not.”

“Stop encouraging her.”

“I’m not,” I protested. “I’m asleep. How am I encouraging her?”

“You smile in your sleep. It’s misleading.”

Actually, it was Gloria who smiled in her sleep, slightly but unmistakably. I’d always thought it spoke well of her character.

Hola simply waited on the floor beside me, pretending to snore, biding her time. Berners keep their eyes half open when they nap, an odd quirk attributable to double eyelids and an inherited disorder called ectropion, so it was almost impossible to know if she was faking it.

Once Gloria and I were safely sawing wood, Hola pounced onto the bed and started doing something that my better half, of course, took to heart.

“She’s rolling up against me,” Gloria complained. “It’s annoying.”

“I think it’s cute. She loves you.”

“That’s not it. I know what she’s up to.”

“What?”

She looked at me with that semi-exasperated lather I knew so well. “You wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

“Try me.”

A couple nights later, she did. I was in bed drinking an Elephant malt liquor and reading an Agatha Christie; Gloria’s eyes were narrow with weariness as she pushed against Hola’s supine body with her leg and said: “She’s trying to kick me out of the bed. The dog is rolling me onto the floor.”

“That’s ridiculous. She’s just big is all, and she’s moving around.”

“You’re spending more time with her now, and she sees an opening. She’s trying to squeeze me out of the picture.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “That’s silly. She loves you.”

“She wants me out of the bed. It’s part of her master plan.”

“What master plan?”

“She wants to be lady of the house. That little bitch. I know her type. It’s like Bonnie Welles in junior high. She’s probably up all night pawing in her diary, ‘Senator and Mrs. Martin Hola Kihn,’ over and over. It’s sick.”

“You just need some sleep. She’s only a dog. They’re not that smart.”

“Smart enough,” said Gloria. “She’s smart enough.” Then she got a look that I told myself was simply curious:

“How many drinks have you had, Marty?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

A moment. “Why don’t you try jogging in the mornings? I think you’d like it.”

“Sometimes I get the urge to exercise. But I lie down for a while and it goes away.”

Ha-ha. I’m here all weekend.

There was always some new suggestion for me—jogging, eating organic, a facial, a colonic. The peanut gallery commented, and I told myself it was almost kind of sweet.

It wasn’t sweet. It was a four-alarm fire going on in my house. I heard tears in the night and thought they were a strange, sad dream.

Worry is a prayer for something we don’t want to happen. And I was praying all the time. While Gloria cooked and sang and Hola mastered extreme martial arts, I managed to sell my first
book. It was written in a white heat early, early in the morning in Marriotts around the world before I started my day as a consultant to drug companies. The firm I worked for pretended to help its clients reach important strategic decisions, and the clients pretended to listen. Days were long, wine a-flowing, the book an exposé that ended my consulting career without replacing it with anything in particular.

But it did get us back onto the island of Manhattan, to a co-op in Washington Heights. I got a job at an online advertising agency with better hours and less travel, Gloria found her way into cooking, and Hola instantly became the acting mayor of the Upper Upper West Side.

A pretty picture all around. A wonderful life.

And then a thousand small doves flew out of a very tall tower.

W
HICH WAS TRUE
.

Except when my head expanded and took over the world.

Take this one story, multiply by ten:

A few years ago, there’s a massive art installation in Central Park, which had been crammed with orange-curtained wooden structures you could walk through, a momentous exhibit called
The Gates
. And it was Saturday, and I was thinking, nice crisp day in early spring, birds are a-chirp. And it’s early as I walk Hola around the New York–Presbyterian Hospital to visit all her doctor and nurse friends. She’d always been admired by the medical community because they appreciate expensive luxury goods.

And we’re back, and I was drinking my coffee and thinking,
Hey, it’s the weekend. There’s no reason why not
. And somehow I was in the bathroom sucking on a half-pint bottle of vodka. It was eight a.m.

And I sat for hours staring at the airshaft, talking to my dog.

Who, for once, wasn’t really in the mood.

Topping it off, doing my thing. Four hours later Gloria was up, and I was saying, Isn’t there that orange thing in the park?

The Gates
.

She was not a morning person, like I’ve said, so I was in and out of the bathroom—I don’t know—a bunch of times before she’s like, Is everything okay?

Yes, what?

You’re going to the bathroom a lot this morning. Can I get in there?

Women, right?

And we’re on the sidewalk down on Riverside. The concrete there was perilous; it’s coming up at me like a fist; we’re on the street with the air settling on our faces like a Wet-Nap.

Hey, I was saying, isn’t my buddy Bryan in town?

I don’t know, is he?

We’re on the train going south, one stop after another, piece by piece a journey into the civilized world, like buttoning a shirt from the top down.

We left the dog asleep at home.

I was thinking, Where did I say we’re meeting Bryan again?

You talked to him, Marty, not me.

Did I say that out loud?

Bryan was a guy I’d known for twenty years from publishing. We were fact-checkers together, like in
Bright Lights, Big City
. In the day when people waited a month for a few thousand meticulously chosen words.

So there he was now.

Bryan! Whassup?!

That look on his face like, Huh?

So here’s the thing. What I’ve got in my pants pocket is one of those half-pints of vodka. Which I got I don’t know where.

The feeling of having a supply so close to hand was as reassuring as a freaking kitten on my lap. Better, right?

He’s a skinny guy, Bryan, paper thin, with a Harvard head on his shoulders and gentle, piercing eyes.

What his people call, I think, a mensch. Gloria loved him.

Gloria was walking with him, in fact. They were in front, then behind me, in impressive good spirits. They talked about Appalachian singers, laughing; what they were doing was pissing me the fuck off now.

I need to find a men’s room? I said.

What?

A men’s room?

A what?

Here was what I was doing: pissing against a tree on a hill doing that over-the-shoulder, hurry-up bladder contraction thing, and this family walked right past me.

Three small kids, up front this little towheaded muffin with a bow, staring at the steam cloud rising off my antiseptic waterfall of piss.

And her dad picked her up and turned her head away from me. These moments we remember forever. The dad like not even mad, just in damage control; let’s keep the kid safe.

Why the fuck was I here.

Who needed this for the rest of my life.

I went to Yale University, people. I had a master’s degree in busyness.

In other news, I reached down for my little ampoule of juice and it was gone.

So, Bryan was saying, lunch?

Imagine standing just outside a crowd of people you know but you can’t get too close because you don’t want them to notice you, and your feet are towel-wrapped hammers installing shelves in the rear wall of your skull.

That horrible moment when you see how drunk you are and can’t get away from yourself.

At lunch.

I can’t describe the relief to be in that phase of the social encounter where it was acceptable to have a drink out in the open. They were so talky and cliquish I was feeling like they were ignoring me on purpose.

Come on, Marty, Gloria said.

Awkward.

So I said that out loud, too.

What is it like then? Huh? What is it like?

You know, said Bryan after a while, I think you can tell a lot about a restaurant by how it looks from the outside.

What the fuck, I was thinking on the train, did he mean by that?

You’ve got a mean streak, Gloria said to me, looking me right in the eyes. It comes out when you’re drunk.

Oh, my God, I was thinking. So, like, unfair.

I only had a couple glasses. That’s hardly—

She was looking at me. We were on the train. There are a thousand stories like this one. Stupid stories so common they don’t even have a decent dog fight. So pointless the storyteller can’t even remember how they end.

Quiet on the street, but I just didn’t hear the vultures circling over my bloody, twitching marriage. Couldn’t see the goonies barking in the corner of my living room.

The pink sofa.

Gloria’s crying.

She was saying, You absolutely reek of alcohol.

Tell me something I don’t—

You know the scary part, she was saying.

No, Gloria, what’s the scary part?

You don’t even know what you’re like. You’re such an incredible guy down in there. Such a star. Basically a really sweet man. And you … you’re … like … disappearing …

Somebody was sobbing. Somebody close.

I forget how it ended.

According to the preamble read before all Alcoholics Anonymous meetings across the world, “The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.”

The fellowship in the 1930s originally had the word
honest
before
desire
but, after some deliberation, decided to remove it. They knew from personal experience that active alcoholics have no idea how to be honest.

That night on the sofa in tears with my wife, I had more than an honest desire to stop drinking.

I had an honest desire to stop breathing.

So I woke up and opened my eyes, and I said, “God, I will never drink again.”

And I meant it, again.

And after work that day I was shaky and hot, and I thought, There’s one thing that will help me here, just to take the edge off this physical thing, and ease into the new sober me. I can’t rush this, could be physically actually dangerous, and so I popped into the bulletproof liquor store on Broadway in my ghetto, next to the closet that sold single-pack vanilla Dutch cigars, and bought a couple three of those airplane bottles of peach-flavored vodka, barely counted as alcohol, and drank them standing on the street between the bus stop and the doughnut place.

T
HE DRUG ETHYL ALCOHOL
, called ethanol, depresses the central nervous system. It is a common solvent and intoxicant and is considered a nonessential nutrient. The enzyme dehydrogenase breaks down the ethanol molecule into acetaldehyde, which is then catabolized into acetic acid by a different enzyme. The final metabolic phase is the conversion of acetate into fats, carbon dioxide, and water.

Ethanol’s mechanism of action is not fully understood, but it is known to modify cell membranes by dissolving their lipid layer and increasing fluidity. An increase in the action of the receptor GABA is believed to cause the drug’s evident impact on behavior.

The effects of alcohol on speech and behavior increase along with its concentration in the blood and are influenced by blood volume, body size, and hydration. Effects at low concentrations include reduced inhibitions, relaxation, and euphoria. At higher concentrations, the drug causes slurred speech and motor impairment, and at levels of about 0.30 percent, it causes confusion and stupor. Blood alcohol levels above 0.50 percent can lead to respiratory paralysis, coma, and death.

Its impact on the life of a chronic consumer, who pounds down drink after drink over a period of many years, are far
from euphoric, or even relaxing, particularly to those unlucky enough to be around him. Among adults the most common effects of chronic consumption are dehydration, ennui, memory loss, and liver impairment. Also, the gradual erosion of self-esteem, confidence, any feeling of well-being or sense of hope that tomorrow can be better than today.

Because it never is.

Over time, chronic brew-suckers and winos lose their looks, the people they thought were their friends, their jobs, families, country club memberships, houses, inheritances, coin collections, unpublished manuscripts, shoe trees, and cellular phones.

Eventually, they end up living in a cardboard appliance box on Santa Monica Boulevard with only a single companion until—in the stunning final act of the tragedy that is their life—Animal Control comes and takes away their loyal Bernese mountain dog.

At which point the alcoholic is dead in every way but legally.

Medical science is still far from identifying all of the environmental and genetic factors that cause the disease of alcoholism. Researchers in the field have yet to discover
any
biological treatment or cure. Psychiatrist Carl Jung once noted that he had “never seen one single [alcoholic] recover except through what are called vital spiritual experiences.”

Many addiction specialists today claim the best treatment for alcoholics is one in which the addiction is replaced by another, more socially adaptive response. Often, this replacement takes the form of a spiritual commitment that in important ways can mimic the expansive and hopeful effects of alcohol consumption while avoiding its negative consequences.

This spiritual commitment can take manifold forms.