I Fancied Myself a World-Weary Picaresque Melancholic Poet Dude (Part Five – In Which My Grandmother’s Warning Proves Itself Correct)

First, you need to understand where I was coming from. For the following fiasco to make any sense, you have to know that I was raised in a straight-laced Protestant household where communion on Sunday mornings meant a morsel of saltine cracker washed down with a shot of Welch’s grape juice. Alcohol was not part of our daily life. In fact, up to the time of this story, my entire alcoholic consumption would not have filled the smallest tankard offered at the corner bar. My cumulative inebriant punch so far had included: 1 – a taste of bubbling Cold Duck forced on me by a worldly friend in junior high school, 2 – a half can of warm Budweiser shared with a gregarious farmer after hauling his hay, 3 – a tablespoon of cough syrup poured down my gullet during a bad chest cold, and 4 – two big gulps I accidentally swigged from a carton of orange juice that had gone a tad past its expiration date in the back of my mother’s refrigerator. I was, that is to say, an alcohol virgin.
Not that I wanted to be. I knew that all the greatest writers were fervent imbibers. Heck, Hemingway alone had made drinking seem an integral part of the creative process. But I was wired pretty hard in the ways of Protestant self-denial. Regarding the evils of drink, I believe this went back to a morning in my childhood when my grandmother and I had walked by the Pastime Tavern on our way to Milt’s Market. There on the sidewalk, curled up in a ball of slovenly disgrace, laid a man in drunken slumber from his boozy binge the night before. My grandmother tried to shield me from his sinfulness, but I saw him clearly – the drool puddled on the cement beneath his unshaven cheek, the oblivious, wicked smile on his lips – and this image burned itself into my young and impressionable psyche as the greatest example of the dangers of drink.
“Wine is a mocker,” grandmother whispered to me as we hurried past the hell-bound degenerate, “and strong drink is for fools.”
Still, I knew I would someday need to partake of this particular vice if I were ever to understand a large portion of the wayward humanity for whom I hoped to pen my poems. If nothing else, it was a necessary part of my research for becoming a writer. And now, like a blessing from Bacchus, the perfect opportunity had arrived.
“Why don’t you come up some time,” the girl had asked me on that blustery day in the square, “…for a glass of wine or something?”
Wine and a pretty girl named Sara – there was a lovely ode hidden in there somewhere. I could feel it in my poetic bones.

Whereas my apartment was shabby, Sara’s was not. I noticed this right away when I stepped through her door. Where was the rodent smell? Where the grime and bugs and peeling linoleum? Instead, Sara had clean carpet. Her sparkling kitchenette was furnished with a stainless steel teapot and a tidy bowl of bruiseless fruit. She had framed prints on her walls – things by artists with exotic compound names like Maholy-Nagy and Cartier-Bresson.
“It’s nice,” I said, with nonchalance. But I could hear in my voice that first hint of intimidation.
“Stay cool,” I muttered to myself. “Kerouac cool.”
She showed me the rest of her cozy apartment. She had a separate bedroom and her very own bathroom, complete with a shower. (My building had a latrine at the end of the hallway that I shared with ghostly, fragrant people I never saw.) She had an arched window looking out onto the main street in her front room. She led me to her work nook and pointed out another window into the near distance. “And there’s your place over there.”
Sure enough, there it was. The moment was mildly shocking. I felt I was being allowed to see myself through Sara’s eyes. My dilapidated writing table stood waiting across the intervening space like a lame and sway-backed horse. Don Quixote came to mind. It was sort of like passing a mirror and discovering, with a certain measure of horror, that you have a booger on the end of your nose.
Well, I encouraged myself, Sara did ask you to come up to her place “for a glass of wine or something.” So she must like guys with boogery noses and pathetic apartments. Stay cool, Brian. Just stay cool.
“Why don’t we sit and chat?” said Sara.
Stiffly casual, I sat into a comfortable chair. Sara put on some soft music and settled into the chair opposite me. She wore a pair of yellow socks scrunched down around her beautiful ankles, and she drew her feet up onto the cushion while tucking a strand of blond hair behind an ear. Between us on a short table, like liquefied forbidden fruit, stood two empty glasses and an open bottle of wine. A plate of white cheese and thin crackers sat beside them.
“I hope you like merlot,” she said.
“Mmmm,” I replied, not knowing for sure if she was referring to the music, the wine, or the cheese.
“Would you pour us some?”
“Of course,” I smiled. “Absolutely.”

Once, when I was about seven years old, I was in a Christmas play in our church. At one point in the production, I, dressed as a sheep, was supposed to step forward from the other kids and address the audience with an adorable and meaningful speech about the Christ child. But somehow my nerves got the best of me just as I was to deliver my lines and instead of saying, “Behold, baby Jesus!” as I was meant to, I said, “Behold! Bejesus!” Feeling the heat of shame spreading over me at my mistake, and then hearing the gasps coming from the various righteous souls in the audience waiting for me to correct my wrong and move forward into my eloquent soliloquy, I lost all control of my brain and said, again, “Bejesus!” And then, in a downward spiral of infamy, as if to seal my history in the church as a corrupt and demon-possessed child, I said it once again.
“Bejesus!”

That old mishap flashed in my mind now as I prepared to pour comely Sara a glass of something called merlot. Forcing myself to bolstering thoughts of Kerouac, I bravely took up the bottle and glass into my shaking hands and began to pour.
Something told me that wine wasn’t supposed to glug when it came out of a bottle, but I’ll be danged if I could make it stop. Glug, it mocked. Glug-glug-glug.
Behold! I thought.
Somehow I completed the action more or less successfully. I handed Sara her full glass, and then glugged another for myself. I felt her eyes on me.
Cool as an ice-cold cucumber, I told myself. Think James Bond.
Sara held up her glass, “To getting to know one another.”
I felt like an awkward youngster who had accidentally wandered into a grown-up movie. I held up my glass.
“Cheers,” I replied, with all the charm of an orangutan.
Sara slowly moved her glass to her lips, and I, following her lead, did the same with my own glass. But whereas Sara took only a single sip, I, with what must have been the innate survival method of a little boy about to swallow a draught of castor oil, downed my entire large glass in a series of quick gulps. I guess in my panic I got the sophisticated art of wine sipping mixed up with how cowboys throw back whiskey in old Hollywood westerns. Dribbles leaked along the edges of my glass. I wiped my chin with my sleeve.
I realized my blunder at once. I could see it in Sara’s astonished expression. I could feel it in the liquid fire of hell burning its way down into my innards.
“Wow,” said Sara. “You must have been thirsty.”
With my eyes watering, and my throat constricting, I could only nod.
“Have some more, if you like,” said Sara.
I shook my head and carefully placed my glass on the table. “I’m good,” I wheezed.
I suspected now that I had only a moment to express myself with any eloquence. I knew enough about alcohol from reading Hemingway to realize that the poison would soon be entering my bloodstream to do its lethal work on my already languishing personality. This was, after all, my first ever glass of wine. My system would surely go into shock. Time was – burp! – of the essence.
“I broughted one of my poems to read for to you,” I announced loudly. (It had seemed like a good idea at the time.)
“Wonderful!” said Sara. “I’ve been curious about your stuff.”
I smiled.
And smiled.
Something odd was happening in my head.
Finally, I pulled the folded paper from my pocket, smoothing it flat on the table beside the cheese plate, and then held it up to read before the wine could do its mischief. But I knew it was already too late. My shirt was suddenly wet under the arms. I felt the room shift a few degrees to the left. And then I left my body to float near the ceiling over our heads. But by that point, I knew, I had already made my leap. There was nothing left but to make my fall appear as graceful as I could.

The poem I read to Sara that evening was what I considered at the time to be my best and most honest work. It was, at the very least, sincere. I no longer have it (I burned it later that night), but I remember certain details in its style and tone. It was something of a collision between HOWL and MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB. There was a stanza in which I waded through “the knee-deep blood of my own decimated heart,” and another where I continued my “lachrymose journey into the bitterest depths of my inkish and fretful soul.”
Looking back, I suppose my intention was to impress Sara by being up front about who I was. But I don’t think it came off that way. The wine was doing its dirty work. I was becoming so nervous (Bejesus-style nervous) that my voice began to sound as if I had taken a hit off a bottle of helium. It just kept getting higher and higher, like an adolescent in the midst of a hormone surge. To compensate for this, I slipped into a presentation that had a swaggerly braggadocio. I gestured wildly with my arms. I clutched at my chest over the place where my decimated heart was supposed to be. I gnashed my teeth and writhed in mortal anguish as I rent my hair. I knew that my poem was not having the desired effect on Sara. How could it? I wasn’t channeling Kerouac. Instead, my words were joining into a single, nonsensical slur that sounded as if it were being delivered by a demented, born-again version of Mickey Mouse.

The rest of that evening was, to say the least, fuzzy around the edges. I remember the look of horror on Sara’s face. (She was kind, but she couldn’t hide it.) And I remember a change in the general atmosphere of her apartment. I did my best to save the evening, but it was no use. I was drunk as a proverbial skunk. We never really got around to the “or something” part of the date that I had hoped for. When I finally staggered to the door to leave, I knew that Sara and I would not be moving in together as I had secretly hoped. We would not travel to Nice by tramp streamer. We would not someday settle down as a successful poet and his equally successful artist wife and have two lovely children – a boy, and a girl with blond hair. Instead, I would only see Sara a few times on the street. She was getting ready to leave after Christmas for her apprenticeship in New York.
“Wish me luck,” she said.
Snow was falling in the square.
“You’ll do great.”
She smiled. Those crushing blue eyes. And then she kissed me on the cheek before skipping away into her me-less future.
I watched her go. And then, as was my wont –
I dashed straight home
and wrote a poem.