Two Thimbles Full of Hell

My mom went to a Christmas play at another religion’s church (we were all devout Mormons, I’m no longer affiliated) to support a friend. She rooted around the foyer for snacks before the show, filled a plate with a couple of cream puffs and butter mints, a handful of mixed nuts, and got a cup of punch. She took a mouthful. Then she set down her tray and quickly looked for a garbage can.

Her yuletide frenzy subsided, replaced by the transgressive sip of red wine she now held in her mouth. She raced from one corner of the room to another, then another, then another. Foiled! This was apparently the only building in the state without a garbage can. Finally she went outside and spat the wine into the snow. One of the only things she hated worse than intemperance was litter, and staining the pristine snow an alcoholic red was not something she was proud of.

She and I joke about it in a good-natured way. But she isn’t just a prude who avoids alcohol because she thinks it’s a sin. She’s seen a lot of the damage that alcoholism can cause. I’m the oldest of four kids, and when my dad stopped drinking, I was the only one who knew it had been happening. It was never a problem for me, or my siblings. My dad was my hero. I never even saw him take a sip.  All I know was that sometimes he and my mom argued about it, and I wouldn’t even know that until later during more grown-up discussion.

Then one day he stopped completely, choosing his family over his addiction. Not everyone does that. Not everyone can. That’s when my dad really became my hero. I have more admiration for him than anyone I can think of. And it was he who said to me, “Son, alcohol has done more damage to families than all the wars in the world.” I’m not sure if that’s an original, but I heard it from him first.

True or not, Mormons don’t drink.

My uneasy relationship with alcohol began in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1831. The Prophet Joseph Smith had started his “School of the Prophets” on the second floor of a mercantile store. The purpose of the school was to teach men great truths, prior to their departures for global missionary work. Sadly, this righteous duty was undermined by the fact that, apparently, everything was covered in spit. The acolytes would seat themselves, fire up their pipes, and then, as Brigham Young stated, they would: “put in a chew on one side, and perhaps on both sides and then it was all over the floor.”

All of these holy, bearded men were puffing their heads off, to the point that they could barely see each other. Then they’d cram tobacco into their mouths and either spit it on the floor, or just let it dribble out, pooling at their feet. And so the great work was nearly undone, washed away to hell in a malevolent flood of salivary glop.

Spitting all over everything was not the brethren’s only hobby; Joseph and the men were also fond of wine.

God intervened.

Joseph received a revelation that would come to be known as the Word of Wisdom, or, for the sake of dynamic capitalization, WOW.

In addition to sparing the womenfolk yet another viscous mopping of the School of the Prophets, the WOW said that we should eat more herbs, not eat too much meat, and avoid “hot drinks.”

The WOW would evolve, but today it means that Mormons don’t drink coffee, tea, or alcohol, and they don’t smoke cigars, cigarettes, chew tobacco, snort cocaine, shoot up with heroin, bone while dosed with Ecstasy, and so on.

Avoiding many of these drugs and substances is prudent. You may already know this, even if you haven’t been commanded not to touch them.

Regardless, I know plenty of people who think a cup of tea might as well be Satan’s Rohypnol, and they still manage to stuff fistfuls of bacon in their maws a couple of times each week. I also know Mormons who smoke marijuana because God says that herbs are fine.

When I would teach the Word of Wisdom in Sunday school classes, I generally focused on the health benefits and the idea that our bodies are our temples, and you wouldn’t pollute a temple with something damaging. It was incredibly tedious to teach these lessons in classes where the chance of someone having tried alcohol, coffee, or tea, was slim.

“So why don’t we drink coffee, tea, or alcohol, class?”

“Because of the Word of Wisdom, Brother Hanagarne.”

“Right! Um…does anyone else want to talk for the next forty minutes until class ends?”

I went through the ringer the first time I tried coffee and tea. I was at a library conference. Prior to the early morning sessions, the librarians were all staggering towards the coffee pots. A friend appeared and said, “You look like you could use this.” What? What did I look like? I thought I must have looked like some crackhead, twitching with need, willing to entertain any offer, no matter how sordid, just for a little taste.

The coffee was brown. It was hot. It smelled good. I hesitated with the cup at my lips. Was this how Eve had felt with that forbidden apple? Probably. Every sip felt like a sin. That sentence looks ridiculous to me, but I lived it. I’d taken a sip of coffee and felt like the Creator of the Universe might be angry with me.

As to other vices, I have zero interest in tobacco and no passion for spitting.

I’ve tried marijuana because studies have shown that it can benefit some people with Tourette’s (I have an extreme case), but I don’t like how it makes me feel, and it has usually made my tics worse.

Alcohol was something different.

One of the potential challenges about suddenly not being Mormon is that there can be a desire to break all the rules, to prove that you’re over it all. I mean, it’s not like it’s a switch you can just turn off, but there are times when you can prove that you are no longer Mormon. Those times usually require a choice. A choice to disobey the laws you swore by,

Let me explain how scary this can feel. If you ever truly believed in the Mormon church, then this scripture from the BOM is directed at you (and me).

I say unto you, that the man that doeth this [this scripture specifically refers to talking about breaking the rules after knowing them and believing in them, or disseminating anything that is not “faith promoting”], the same cometh out in open rebellion against God; therefore he listeth to obey the evil spirit, and becometh an enemy to all righteousness.

You might laugh at the weight of that if you’ve never been in the thick of this holy fervor, but it is serious business. Whether it’s taking a drink or hitting the snuff or writing the very piece you’re reading…these are acts of “open rebellion against God.” It’s not just having some fun and giving in to temptation. There’s no safe way to explore. You are obeying the evil spirit and you’re an enemy to all righteousness! All of it!

There is no amount of good works that cancels out open rebellion against God, as defined by the scriptures. There’s no way to be hard on the system but to go easy on the church members. Open rebellion. Purposeful aggression.

This is why I couldn’t turn off the fear. Alcohol was still a huge boogeyman. Everything was, but this was the most horrendous specter of them all.

But as every haphazard, scattershot book of pop neurology has taught us, when you feel the fear, you must rush towards it, cradle it to your breast, and make sweet love to it. Only by dominating it can you face down the resistance that wants you to forfeit your dreams. “Take that, reptile brain!” say the people who have at best a layman’s knowledge of neurology and the evolution of the brain, yet who feel qualified to refer incessantly to the amygdala and the quantum foam as props for pep talks.

There was an article in the satirical newspaper The Onion, entitled “Newly Out Gay Man Overdoing It.” A concerned friend of the fictitious, newly out gay man, says: “It’s like he’s scared that if he doesn’t wear hot pants and say ‘You go, girl!’ a lot, somebody might think he’s straight.”

I was worried about experiencing a similar overcorrection with alcohol. See? Look at just how Mormon I’m not. Bottoms up!

Most people drink. It’s just part of life. Sometimes it’s a bad part, but most people who drink are not alcoholics. However, I had alcoholism in my genes. My dad, his dad, and even further back. Even the fact that I’m one eighth Navajo was on my mind, because I’d grown up around tons of drunk Navajo neighbors and didn’t have any reason to believe that I couldn’t instantly become at least one eighth alcoholic.

To date, my experience with alcohol was:

One glass of red wine at a Penguin publishing dinner in San Diego.

Half a glass of red wine in Rayne, Louisiana.

A glass of white something at a book club where I was visiting as an author.

A non-alcoholic beer as an eighteen year old.

Twelve beers with actual alcohol in them. It was very easy to remember the number because it took me nearly six weeks to get through them without worrying that I was a drunk.

I was certain that I’d never even been a little tipsy.

Now, in February of 2014, 181 years after the Almighty made everyone wipe their slovenly chaw-mouths and commit to a more elegant and decorous set of behaviors, I was sitting in my crappy apartment losing a staring contest with an unopened bottle of whisky. It didn’t even have eyes and still I couldn’t handle its judgmental gaze. I will be your new god, Josh, if you’ll only just believe.

At work that day, I’d had a thought that arrived with such instant, irrational clarity that I wondered if maybe it actually had been from Satan: I’m going to get some WHISKEY! That’ll show ‘em!”

But there was no one to show. I’d be alone in my apartment. Only one of the light bulbs worked and the only person I knew was an old lady who was always sitting on the ground, in the parking lot, in February, on a cushion that she carried around. I didn’t want to show her I was able to lay it all on the line, risk everything, and so on. I’m not sure she knew how to speak. She’d grunt congenially, but it was always just grunting.

Sometimes I’d grunt back.

I spent the afternoon practically trembling with anticipation. I read whiskey reviews online. I found one that said “This is basically whiskey with training wheels.” That was for Gentleman Jack. I’d seen some really stupid commercials about Gentleman Jack, but tried not to let that distract me.

The lexicon was baffling and arcane. Peat, finish, nose, oak, lavender, stones, wood, charcoal, malt, double barrel, single barrel. “It’s like drinking a campfire mixed with a pine cone,” said one five-star reviewer. Ah, that sounded…did that sound good? At all?

Well then, here we go.

I looked up a liquor store. It was near my apartment!

I went to the liquor store. Talk about a dizzying array of evil. So many bottles. So many options. Sin sin sin, lap it up me hearties, let’s openly rebel against God.

I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t make my emotions and guts agree with my shiny, new, rational mind.

In Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, the judge says:

A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

It might as well have said, “But when God made liquor the Devil was at his elbow.” Well too bad! I’d show ‘em! I’d read some reviews online! I was there for Gentleman Jack.

I was pretty sure Jack referred to Jack Daniels.

Just finding the bottle was onerous. Bourbon, whiskey, rye, scotch, Canadian whiskey, rum, champagne, liquer, wine, vermouth, gin, and a zillion options in each category. Oh, it felt bad. In all the right ways, right? I asked myself. Yes. Yes. I thought so. A nasty business, this. The store felt like a well-stocked brothel of endless variety that you could dump right into your mouth.

Even though I’d read those reviews, most of what I knew about whisky was still coming to me through snippets of books. Everything reminds me of books, and books remind me of everything.

In PG Wodehouse’s short story By Advice of Counsel, a sassy woman is described thusly:  “She Held her chin up and looked you up and down with eyes the colour of Scotch whisky, as much as to say, “Well, what about it?”

Just having whisky-colored eyes made people defiant!

I was going to write that night. I was, after all, a published author. Maybe this would open up a fantastic new chapter of creativity. Just add whisky. Instant genius.

From Roald Dahl: It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope, and courage.

But I didn’t want false faith, hope, and courage. And I wasn’t writing fiction. I just wanted to have a good, real, authentic, happy life. But this, this, this empty apartment. I wanted to forget.

I heard James Fenton’s staccato brogue reading from his poem The Skip:

I threw away my life, and there it lay.

And grew quite sodden, “What a dreadful shame.”

He was right. It would be a dreadful shame. Maybe I didn’t have to buy whiskey and drink it and throw my life away.

But in Lonesome Dove, Augustus McRae says, “The only healthy way to live life is to learn to like all the little everyday things, like a sip of good whiskey in the evening, a soft bed, a glass of buttermilk, or a feisty gentleman like myself.” And he was one of my favorite characters in all of literature! If he said this was the only healthy way to live I probably owed it to him. Okay, this would be a good thing.

Except, wait…in the movie Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood used whisky to steady his nerves and get himself, at least a former version of himself, primed for the slaughter of women and children. I didn’t want to slaughter women and children.

But Mark Twain—MARK TWAIN—said, “Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.”

That sounded nice.

In the apartment, I circled that bottle with even more evasiveness and hand-wringing than I am circling it here on these pages.

Fine then. Fine fine fine, time to go to hell. I opened the bottle and sniffed the rim. If this was whiskey with training wheels, I was hesitant. When I’d seen the 750 milliliter bottle at the store and saw that it was going to cost me twenty bucks, I’d laughed. I’ll drink this whole thing in one night, I thought. What a waste! Now I thought, hmm…if I drank this whole thing tonight, would I die?

It smelled like it. It smelled like butterscotch gasoline.

I poured myself what the internet had said was “two fingers.” I’m 6’7” and weigh 260 pounds. My hands and fingers are enormous. What if two fingers worth, meaning two of my fingers, would make me go blind? What if it cauterized my throat? I considered going out to the grunting woman and grunting at her for reassurance. Surely she was familiar with hard alcohol abuse.

I tipped the bottle back and let the tiniest bit drip out onto my tongue. It burned. I took a swallow. It made me cough and cleared my head. Determined, I took a bigger swallow, then had to stop. I’d had maybe two thimble’s worth.

I went to the bathroom to get a rag and wipe some of the coughing and sputtering off my chin. I stared at my eyes. Was I drunk? Was I an alcoholic? Did I think I could go without another sip that night? I didn’t feel any different…or did I? Nope. Pretty sure I didn’t.

The bottle was waiting for me on the counter. I was done drinking for the night, but it wasn’t done watching me, or I it.

In 2005 David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College. It got packaged as a little book called This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered On A Significant Occasion, About Living A Compassionate Life. He says:

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

Okay then. That made sense. So why was I choosing to worship a bottle of whisky? That’s what it felt like. If I was willing to openly rebel against God to the tune of two mouthfuls of brown liquid, what wouldn’t I be capable of?

But I also worshipped books. And ideas. And questions. And libraries. I knew that I’d choose any of them over alcohol. It barely occurred to me that maybe I didn’t have to choose. Maybe all of the things I liked and loved could work together to give me a richer life, each small pleasure enhancing the others. Maybe.

The bottle watched me. It didn’t believe me. It wanted me to finish it in one fell orgy of insidious guzzling.

Well too bad, bottle, I was going to bed.

I had ugly dreams, but when I woke, I was elated. I was sure I had a hangover, even though I couldn’t feel it at all and hadn’t gotten even mildly tipsy. But I had drunk some whisky, and everyone knew that whisky instantly gave you a horrible hangover.

In the daylight, the bottle looked less like an avatar of evil and more like a piece of glass. The boogeyman had been thwarted. I actually called my girlfriend to tell her that I’d bought a bottle of liquor and had managed to take two tiny sips before chickening out and throwing myself onto my bed, wracked with the fear of hell.

But that morning, I felt brave and strong and virile, like I’d slain an invading horde and just needed to go find a grateful, wanton princess to reward me for my valor. And my girlfriend, of course, represented another level of vice, and one way, way worse than alcohol. In fact, I’d been raised to believe that only murder was a greater offense to God than premarital sex.

And I got some solace in knowing that Joseph Smith banged tons of chicks. If he had walked a righteous path, I was doing fine.