Alcoholics Eponymous

I'd been sleeping in a small building by the train station, 
where I could keep a few toiletries and such, 
and I had some money from social services, 
and I was writing on a daily or near-daily basis. 

There was a McDonald's less than a mile away 
that I'd walk to in the morning, get some 
breakfast, coffee, and watch the early 
talkshows and scribble a few things 
in my notebook. 

After that, I could walk around the town, 
moving, being, the grimy hassle of other places 
behind me. And by nightfall I'd have nowhere 
to go besides the all-night gas station, where 
the staff accommodated my drinking coffee 
and writing in the notebook for several 
fulfilling hours. 

And that's where I met Gene. 

He was a goblin of a man, terribly old, 
and life had taught him little besides 
a slimy, pretentious hospitality and 
a passionate disdain for alcohol. 
But he offered me a place to stay, 
an easy exit from the street 
plus another channel to my secret fortune. 

I agreed to quit drinking completely 
(and broke this rule only twice in his absence) 
attending AA Meetings with him as 
a fellow alcoholic... I never did all the steps, 
like confessing powerlessness to my addiction, 
or making amends to all the shitheads 
who wasted my time when I wasted theirs. 
But I did see writing as an inventory: 
the poems, vignettes, and various attempts 
at prose....which is maybe why 
all that confession just seemed like self-pity. 

At any rate, the meetings weren't a total deadend. 
They provided a healthy contrast (not alternative) 
to the debauchery of parks and parking lots. 
There was sometimes a casual humor 
and the women were exceedingly ladylike. 

I never really said much. It's a gift I have. 
Comb your hair, sport a handsome face, 
responding to the question of What's Up? 
with a sense of reason, delight, and boundaries. 
Strangers will rush to meet you like 
the Pope pissing in a fountain. 

(And through all of this the coffee, 
coffee and stories and good aromas.) 

Except it never totally worked on Gene -- 
and I certainly didn't get my fortune. 
I just got a job in a hardware store, 
bought a used car, paid Gene rent, 
until sometime in December, ten months 
living with him, my resolve was unmanageably 
distorted. 

Hence: the third major visit to a hospital 
in as many years. 

It's a problem I don't hear others speak of. 
In print, perhaps, but never in direct speech. 
Wherein one party compulsively engages in 
criticism and circumlocution 
while the other party (in this case, me) 
has no choice but to suppress his own opinion 
or junk the arrangement entirely. 

And I'd had enough of Gene. 
He was the Jeff of his time & place. 
He'd open his laptop with man-on-man 
pornography in the livingroom 
when I was doing something in my room 
or he'd walk from one of the trailer's two showers 
in his underwear in this goofy, unnatural way. 
And by then I was thinking of California... 

I stored what things I had at my mother's trailer. 

Ten months later, October 2017, after 
many considerable episodes, 
I had a job in a warehouse and a room 
in Pleasant Valley. 

****