todd of tacoma

Plan B

You do the boring thing, you live. You go back out, you die. That’s how Bill sees it. Well, how I see it.

It’s not how B sees it. He doesn’t believe in boring. He is newly tanned when you meet him, and also appears to have done pushups minutes ago. He wears a tank top, sunglasses, and slides. His feet, this tan!, his feet are tanned to the toes, no strap marks. His jawline matches his crewcut and surfboard-sculpted calves. To prep for meetings, he grinds his teeth.

He is sober!

I’m not supposed to give advice. But don’t let B tell you his life is less boring since he got clean. Don’t let him talk you into a weight room or Applebee’s fellowship or pickleball or skydiving. Don’t let him tell you he can’t be your sponsor yet, and don’t let him tell you that he is. And for the love of Christ, don’t let him near sharp objects or firearms. You see the same thing I’m seeing, he’ll murder-suicide without a note. He’ll be the first to stab Caesar and turn the knife on himself in celebration. If he unclenches his ecstatic jaw, the rocks will cry out. For fuck’s sake, he fellated a pistol for three years.

He’ll tell you all about it.

It doesn’t work if you work it, it works in spite of you and in spite of B, thank God. It makes you champing-at-the-bit crazy if you work it like he does. You hear him in the rooms and you look at him and you worry, I know you do because I worry, too, you worry this is what sobriety looks like.

I, who had thought so well of myself and my abilities, of my capacity to surmount obstacles, was cornered at last.

I got sober knowing my chaotic life would be infinitely better on snooze. Too many manic days and schizophrenic nights living as I lived, people whispering about me under the bed, and plotting against me in trees, and voices inside walls.

In the rooms, the degree of severity of your disease, as we’re wont to call it, lies in how close you came to suicide. If you thought about it, great. If you called friends to talk you out of it, even better. Owned a gun and cradled it, awesome. Hospital intervention? Share with us. Take all the time you want, five minutes is just a suggestion to cut off the small-time whiners.

Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?

During the long haul of my relapse, the gravest threat to my life was the nail gun. I thought night and day of a pneumatic end to the voices in my head. Of pumping a ring-shanked spike into the very source. A glue-tipped poison dart to spear the demons. But I didn’t own a framing nailer, only two finish guns and a stapler, enough power to drive a large splinter into my temple. Wouldn’t do. I wanted to Frankenstein a sixteen-penny there. For that I needed a contractor’s gun, but I didn’t have the money. Spent it all on vodka and White Claw.

Looking back, I was naive. The likelihood of death by nail is probably higher if you catch one by accident, or on a cross. The best I could have hoped for by this method was Broca’s aphasia.

Plan L

Musicians, by contrast, are fabled suicides. Flashes, bolts of lightning. Twenty years ago, they were gods to me, rock musicians, whole planets of cool. Everything I wasn’t. I couldn’t sing, was not dangerously sexy, could not hold my liquor or be chill on drugs. Never played a musical instrument.

But my best friend H did. And in his orbit were other rock musicians. By dint of will, I infiltrated his circle, where I met L.

First L sighting, Bozeman, Montana. The Zebra Upstairs. He frontmanned a band composed of only himself and a drummer with a trombone. He played blues and skateboard punk and 1920s drinking songs, all with a guitar hung just below the bulge in his jeans. His voice spoke to me, plumbed the depths of that universal impulse, the death drive, raw, scratched, and broken.

Everyone’s trying to kill me!

At the end of the set he slid his guitar, one of four he’d brought on, over an amp dressed in shredded leather, and then tossed it to the floor. The exquisite dissonance, it gave me an evening-long erection. I stayed up all night with it, drinking, writing terrible prose.

L’s band was in the lineup, too, of the final Zebra Upstairs show, before the bar shuttered. By two a.m. there were holes in the walls, broken mirrors, crushed pint glasses, and a urinal in pieces on the sidewalk.

Three or four years of binge drinking later, both L and H were set to play The Filling Station. Metal PBR signs and road signs on the walls behind the stage, license plates, too, shelves with empty liquor bottles, and a huge, faded plastic pegasus, some gas station emblem.

A Southwest Montana thunderstorm was rolling in that night, how perfect, and L was running late and so was the show. H texted him, t9, and he didn’t reply, so we knew he had to be close or not coming at all. Then a massive crack in the sky and the power went out. One second H was texting and tuning his guitar, the next, a microphone shot sparks and an amplifier choked to death in the dark. Ten to twelve seconds after that, L ran in, nerves ablaze.

I fucking saw it! It hit the power pole! Huge ball!

He pointed somewhere we couldn’t see.

The bolt had sparked L’s imagination. His show couldn’t die just as he’d arrived. He parked his car two spots north and shone his brights through the open door. We slammed PBRs, now the only menu item, from a cooler holding the last of the Filler’s ice. Dollar a pop in the honor jar.

I spent nineteen, twenty dollars? Meanwhile, L played gospel in the shadows like the devil would. Even acoustic his songs felt like train tracks of cocaine.

L’s car battery died. H took him home.

I drove home drunk and didn’t sleep, again. Had to stay up writing bad poems I was so on fire.

L followed H to Seattle years later. And I followed them a year after that. I saw them play The Crocodile, Neumos, Tractor Tavern, High Dive, the Shadowland bar, and some vegan coffee and beer hangout, where L played on his knees and screamed Hail Satan, he holds the key! to aghast parents with children in tow.

Alcohol, by this time, was ruining me, torturing him.

My fiancée and I took him to a Mariners game one night, might have been the last time I saw him in Seattle. We drank whiskey from a plastic flask and in the seventh inning, when vendors stopped serving beer, we skipped. On the way out L slid down a rail and cracked his head on a couple stairs. He refused to go to the ER because he’d have to stop drinking there, so we took him to our apartment, where he kissed my fiancée, showered the blood off his head, and slept on the couch. When we woke up in the morning he was gone.

Gimme whiskey, whiskey, woo!, before I die!

The last show I saw him play was six years later, in Bozeman again, where he’d moved back after a failed marriage. His band set up without him at the Haufbrau, one of three dives in a part of town aptly named The Barmuda Triangle. You never went there to find a good time, but to scare up profound hangovers, some decent music, and hookups that leave you smelling like a car’s ashtray and cinnamon vomit.

Minutes before L was supposed to take the Hauf’s stage, he was still missing, and his band was so mad even their tattoos had flared nostrils. And he did not assuage tempers when he finally did walk in. He grabbed two shots and a beer, seemed to forget where he was, and just sunk into the deep booth where I was sitting.

L!

We hadn’t seen each other in two years. He looked like hell. I looked like hell. I’d relapsed and he never quit. He put his head in my lap. He said he loved me and I was a good friend. Then he sat up and introduced me to four women half our age, all of whom he’d slept with. Only once, that was all they could stomach.

L!

I left halfway through his set, it was such a disaster. He could barely hold his lips to the microphone, some inner ear issue, and his face was puffy and blotchy and he couldn’t remember lyrics. Sixty percent of the show was him tuning guitars.

So I walked to a friend’s house and slept on her porch.

A few months later, L died on a friend’s couch, a bottle of whiskey to really drive that nail in the coffin.

H had bought it for him and it broke his spirit that he had, despite knowing L would have found it regardless. Love finds a way.

Today, H plays pool alone at the Eagles Bar and Molly Brown and avoids other musicians.

Today, I look for L’s music online and can’t find a damn thing. I know H is holding out on me. There’s a recording, I’ve heard it, of a performance in a barn near Norris Hot Springs. Just the two of them playing for no one. And it was ten a.m., apparently, so L wasn’t falling over yet. I’ve heard it, just once I’ve heard it, and I want it so badly. That good.

Todd, addict.

Imagine Ziggy Stardust performing an exorcism on Wilco.

L had ten thousand demons, all tortured musicians and characters from songs half-written. His was that slow death you don’t read about or sing about, twenty-plus years. Not a car crash, not the mythical rock ‘n’ roll suicide. It was a prolonged, hard life. And a death hard won.

I’ve worked hard for something else, something fiercely grateful alcoholics like B will never comprehend. Monotony.

You can’t quit drinking just to go out dancing. There’s nothing to dance to and you never danced to begin with. You must kill the devil and run your battery juiceless. Sit down in your wingback chair and pump Bach through your speakers and never get up. Because you can’t have your friend back and can’t hear rock ‘n’ roll.

You must only be boring forever.

L wouldn’t understand my life, either. He could never want what I have. But he didn’t want what he had, either. He wanted to wreck like a fiery locomotive, instead his track ran out of ballast just a little too soon. But probably long after it should have.

He got there, though. Like a tired, wasted Orpheus he got there. I plan to get there even slower.