Being alone has given me the opportunity to think, to remember, to ponder my actions of the past few years. And in doing so, the same question keeps popping up:
Dear God, will my wife ever return?
The problem, as many of you might guess relates to alcohol. And it involves that same bizarre phenomenon shared by Ritalin. Ritalin, used commonly to treat ADD and ADHD, as you probably know is actually a stimulant. So there is a strange sort of irony in the fact that giving a known stimulant to a hyperactive person does not result in flames.
The same goes for me and alcohol, a known depressant. You would think 4 beers and two watermelon shooters would have a calming, almost sedating effect on me, especially when combined with a ½ oxycontin pilfered from my wife’s medicine cabinet. But you’d be WRONG. Oh, how WRONG you’d be! And being as that I’m barely scraping by at 150 pounds, you might think that adding a shot of cooking sherry to the mix would pretty much knock me unconscious. HA! You would be SO wrong AGAIN! And you would think that…well, you get the idea. No need to drag the events of the evening of May 15, 2004 out any longer than I have to in order to make a point.
And that point is that alcohol has a stimulating effect on me. It makes me quicker to react, quicker to judge, quicker to drink. And last summer, it made me smash. DOERK ANGRY! DOERK SMASH! DOERK FINISH COOKING SHERRY!
The ‘trigger’ of this episode, if I might offer in my own defense, was my parental instinct. My son was playing in the yard, trying to catch butterflies and pretty much looking like the poster child for Hallmark greeting cards. But he was trying to catch the agile insects with his bare, albeit gigantic, hands.
‘C’mere, boy!’ I said, and much to everyone’s surprise managed to fashion a butterfly net out of an old fishing pole, duct tape, my pocket knife (to cut the duct tape), cooking sherry (to pour on my leg where I cut through the duct tape) and a swatch of lederhosen I bought off the internet thinking it was something else.
Proudly, I handed the contraption off to my son and looked at my wife, obviously stunned with my craftsmanship. ‘Like that, do ya?’ I asked reaching towards her bosom. Obviously she had been drinking as well, because she was much too fast for me, overstimulated as I was.
I went inside to even the playing field, as it were, by pouring myself a tall glass of whatever remained of the vermouth and heard a scream.
I ran outside and Tristan came running up to me clutching his eye. ‘The stupid butterfly stung me!’
Well, as it turned out, the offending creature was a yellow jacket, and not a butterfly, and he would have known it was a yellow jacket had I used something other than lederhosen to fashion the butterfly net. Something see-through, perhaps, like that dental dam I bought off the internet, thinking it was something else.
But I didn’t use dental dam, I used lederhosen, and as a result my child’s eye was rapidly swelling shut,* his faith in me as a provider and protector rapidly waning. (*You can see a photo of my poor child in my 100 things list, page 4)
In my stimulated state, however, I acted quickly. I crouched down next to my son, I held him by his shoulders, I looked him in the eyes and I slurred,
‘Imo kill the sonofabitch that done this to ya!’
(As an aside, I rarely, rarely curse in front of my children, so when I do the effect is wondrous. Tristan pretty much stopped crying right then and there and gave me a high-five. ‘Yeah!’ he screamed. I know this is wrong, so very, very wrong, but there you have it. I know I shouldna spawned. But there you have it.)
Alex, of course wasn’t so thrilled, and pretty much knew something stupid was about to happen. But she was too slow to stop me (there was much more vermouth left than I had imagined). I went into the garage, donned my fire gear and went into the back yard with a shovel and a mixture of gas and diesel.
Tristan and Alex watched me (in awe, if I might add…awe is how you look when your mouth makes a big ‘O’ and you cover it with both hands, right?) from the window.
The yellow jacket nest lay beneath an old woodpile I swore I would chop up before winter 1998 (oops!), and when I got to the bottom, the yellow jackets were swarming about me, futilely stinging at the thick padding of my county-owned firefighting gear. I bellowed in victory when I got to the bottom.
I poured a hefty mixture of the gas/diesel into the nest of the vile butterflies, and walked back towards the house. I had a score to settle as well. Those goddamned things stung me at least 7 times over the summer. And now was the time for revenge.
I went back into the house with a box of matches and stood next to my wife and son, who were still looking at the nest from the living room window. I looked at Tristan and said, ‘Now, it’s payback time.’ My wife made the look of ‘awe’ again as I opened the window and threw a match towards the yellow jacket nest.
I swear to god the match never even left my hand before the flames appeared. It’s as if the yellow jacket nest was itself a single great demon, and I was exorcising it from my yard. Diesel and gasoline, apparently, make for a particularly potent combination. My wife screamed. My son hit the floor. I sobered up and wondered aloud if I had doomed my child to a year of bedwetting.
But instead, he looked at me and though his eye was now nearly completely shut, he said, ‘Coooool!’
And I could tell, the way a custodial father can, that I had gained a heretofore unreached level of esteem in the eyes, er, well eye of my son. From such great heights…
‘Come on, son,’ I said, once again in full assumption of my role as provider and protector. ‘Let’s see if we can find daddy’s old eye patch. You’re gonna scare the bejeezus out of your sister if we don’t cover you up.’
They will see us waving from such great heights
"Come down now," they'll say
But everything looks perfect from far away
"Come down now," but we'll stay...
Powered by Blogger.
No comments:
Post a Comment