We Are Not Saints Read online

  I was never in serious trouble. It was always piss-ant little things like loitering, curfew violations, trespassing, and of course underage drinking. It was one of these arrests which lead to me getting served for the first time.

  I went into the court house to pay a fine one day. There was a nice older lady on the other side of the glass who asked for my ID, took my money and handed me a receipt. I left and didn’t give it anymore thought.

  A few days later I was in a desperate situation. I had some money but no one to buy me booze. I decided to try my luck at a bar. The plan was simple; I would walk in and ask for a six-pack. If they asked for ID I would tell them I left it in the car, walk out and never come back.

  I picked a little dive bar and walked in the side door. As the door closed behind me I saw the nice older lady from the court house. I knew I was screwed, but I was past the point of turning back.

  I smiled and gave her a wave, then walked to the other end of the bar where they kept the six-packs to go and the cash register. The hulking man behind the counter didn’t look near as friendly.

  He asked what I needed, and I said I’d like a six-pack of “old mud” to go. I figured using a slang term I had heard for a popular beer may add a little credibility to my request. He gave me a hard stare and asked if I had some ID.

  “Sure,” I said, and reached for my wallet. This was it. Should I bolt for the door now, or feign surprise when I look in the wallet to find no ID card. I was about ready to bolt for the door when I heard the nice older lady speak up from the other end of the bar.

  “He’s OK Ted,” she said. “I remember checking his ID a few days ago.”

  This lady, my savior, had remembered checking my ID. She just didn’t remember where she had checked it or why. Suddenly, the hulking man on the other side of the bar was my best friend.

  From this point on it became a numbers game. I stopped at nearly every bar in town for a drink. Most of them threw me out, and some even threatened to call the cops. But, before I was even old enough to legally drive, there were a half-dozen bars where I had become “a regular.”

  I always got a thrill out of taking a friend or a new girl, who was over twenty-one, out to one of my regular bars. Watching them get carded while the bartender sat a shot and a beer in front of me before I even had my coat off made me feel like a million bucks.

  As smooth as this time of my life sounds, it wasn’t without a multitude of mishaps. The arrests continued and began to get more severe. I was becoming a repeat offender in several different jurisdictions.

  This was also the time of my life when the brownouts and blackouts began. The difference is that you form memories in a brownout. Things come back to you after a while and you remember bits and pieces of events. In a blackout no memories are ever formed. You never get the time spent in a blackout back.

  I was out bar-hopping one day when the first of my major bouts of memory loss occurred. I was riding a motorcycle I had bought from a coworker for a few-hundred dollar. I think I still owed him about fifty bucks at the time. I don’t really remember.

  I couldn’t say where I started the day or where I ended up. I do, however, remember leaving a little hick bar in the middle of nowhere in a hurry after swindling a drunk hillbilly out of some money. I think it may have been the old “I can do between two and three-hundred pushups in under a minute” gag, but I’m not sure.

  I don’t think anyone was chasing me, but I rode like a bat out of hell anyway. I got lost.

  I was sitting at a t-intersection trying to decide whether to go left or right. There was nothing but cornfields and cow pastures around, so I settled on a left turn and began to pull onto the road. That’s when I heard the crunch and felt the bike jerk to a halt.

  The chain had popped off. This wasn’t major bike surgery, but let’s face it; I was piss-drunk. Besides, remember me saying that drunks don’t like to clean up there messes. This would be a prime example.

  I pushed the bike a short distance down the road when I came to a cluster of trees at the edge of a cornfield. Upon close inspection, I decided this would be the perfect place to stash the bike until I could come back with a friend and a truck.

  I pushed the bike into the woods about twenty feet and into a ditch. I covered it with deadfall until even I couldn’t tell it was there. Rambo would have been proud.

  I walked back out to the road in search of another bar from which to call a ride. I hadn’t been walking very long when a biker in a pickup truck saw the helmet in my hand and offered me a ride. When I climbed in the truck he promptly handed me a beer. God bless rednecks.

  He dropped me at the next bar, and from there I made my way to one of my regular hangouts. I don’t remember the rest of the night, but somehow or another I woke up in my own bed the next day.

  I called a friend with a truck and we hit the road in search of the hidden motorcycle. We didn’t find it. I think we searched every clump of trees in every cornfield in Central Pennsylvania, I just couldn’t remember where I had stashed it.

  Like so many other things, that old motorcycle is a piece of my youth I will never get back. The worst part is that I think I still owe the guy I bought it from fifty dollars.

  Chapter Three:

  Around that time, a lot of my friends were discovering drugs. I had already found mine, and other than the fact that I was underage; it was legal. But for the sake of solidarity I figured I’d give drugs a try anyway.

  I liked acid, but it was hit or miss. You never knew if you were getting the good stuff or just strychnine on pretty paper. Besides, even if you got the good stuff it only took one chubby bastard on a bad trip, crying in the backseat of his car to blow your buzz.

  Speed didn’t do anything for me. I was hyper enough without it. Crank was popular but it was also the one drug I truly hated. I had massive anxiety attacks both times I tried it. There is nothing worse than thinking your heart is going to explode in your chest, and being paranoid that you’ll be arrested for it.

  Pot was alright, but it really got in the way of my drinking. It made me talk a lot, which made me tired. I would typically doze off when I smoked it and no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t drink in my sleep.

  Then I found cocaine. Some of my friends and coworkers thought this was a wonder-drug. I really didn’t see it that way at first. On its own, cocaine didn’t do much for me. But when I mixed it with alcohol I could drink seemingly forever.

  It didn’t matter how much I had to drink or how drunk I had gotten, one or two lines and I was back in the fight.

  I began buying a little coke every time I got paid. I didn’t buy a lot, but I always had a stash. With a few lines at the bar I could always outlast the bartender. It made quick-work of hangovers as well.

  I remember hearing somewhere that Coca Cola was originally invented in a drug store as a hangover cure, and used cocaine as an active ingredient. I don’t know if this is true or not, but I’m pretty sure it would have worked.

  At the time, I didn’t consider myself an addict. In my mind I was consuming a drug which allowed me to drink more without allowing it to consume me. But it did consume me.

  Before long, I was making semi regular trips to the emergency room. The simple fact is that no matter how you pull it off; the human body is not meant to ingest such large quantities of alcohol. When you add cocaine to the mix you have a recipe for disaster.

  At one point, a girl I had shacked up with noticed I was on a serious down-hill slide. We had only lived together about a week when she said those three little words; “Dave, I’m pregnant.”

  I didn’t know it at the time, but she had found out shortly before we were introduced that she was pregnant and was desperate for a steady second income. Damn, was she in for a surprise.

  She got me a job at the little restaurant where she worked in the hopes that I would contribute to the bills that were piling up. I didn’t have a car at the time so she and I worked different shifts so I could drive her car. This w
orked out alright for a short time but in the long run my antics were too much for the management.

  I was called into the office one day and told the management could think of no good reason to retain me as an employee. The guy behind the desk asked if I could give him one good reason he shouldn’t fire me. I couldn’t think of a single reason.

  I turned in my apron, did a line of coke in the bathroom and walked out the door. I was planning on stopping by the liquor store on the way home, but as I pulled out of the parking lot I ran into a problem. To be a little more accurate; I ran into an oncoming truck. I was fine. My girlfriend’s car was not.

  I went back into the restaurant and asked to use the phone. They argued that I was no longer an employee, but since I was calling my girlfriend, and she still worked there, I won the argument. Besides, if you’ve ever argued with a guy on coke you know it’s a bad idea.

  When I got my girlfriend on the line, I said, “Hi, Honey. How’s it going?”

  “Hi,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be working?”

  “That’s why I’m calling. I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Which do you want first?”

  “Give me the bad news first,” she said.

  “Well, I was just leaving the parking lot here and I wrecked your car.”

  At this point there was some yelling, and what sounded like pots and pans flying on the other end of the line. She wasn’t taking this nearly as well as I had hoped. Then suddenly everything got quiet.

  “Wait,” she said. “It’s only 10am. Why were you leaving work at 10am?”

  “Oh, that’s the good news. I got fired, so I don’t have to work at this shit-hole anymore.”

  There was a lot of crying at that point and the girl moved out soon after. When I later found out that I wasn’t the father, and that I was nothing more than a failed meal-ticket, I began to feel good about the way things ended.

  Looking back now, this poor kid was in a desperate situation when she met me, and all I did was add fuel to the fire. I don’t know where she is now, but I hope she’s doing well.

  I soon found myself in another town, living with another girl. This one didn’t seem to mind my drinking and never got pregnant. I loved this girl.

  One night we were sitting in the kitchen sharing a bottle of whiskey when, out of the blue, she said she was fine with how much I drank, but she didn’t want me doing cocaine. This seemed like a fair trade to me, so the little bit of coke I had left went down the toilet and I never looked back. Because it was so easy for me to give up the coke, I never identified myself as an addict. It took years, but I finally learned just how wrong I was.

  This new girl and I were happy for a while, but it wouldn’t take long before the rollercoaster I called a life would become too much for her. One thing alcoholics like to do is run from their problems, and I was born to run.

  Chapter Four:

  I had moved around a lot in my teens, but other than a year in Texas when I was seventeen years old it had been mostly apartment to apartment, or town to town. Unfortunately, it always seemed as though my problems followed me. I figured I just needed to get further away.

  After a slew of difficulties in our current location, my girlfriend recommended we move to Texas. She had heard me talk a lot about it and decided it sounded nice. I was ready for a change so I agreed.

  As always, Texas was paradise for a little while, but all of the old problems found me. I couldn’t seem to find a decent job, and I couldn’t hold a shitty one. We had been struggling for money from the time we set foot in Arlington.

  I finally found a job that required me to travel for weeks at a time. It worked out for me for several reasons. It was a person to person sales position which dealt directly with cash, so I never seemed to run out of money. Secondly, since I was on the road three weeks out of the month, she never knew what I was doing with the money I had.

  When I was home we were on a shoestring budget, but when I was on the road I was Donald Fucking Trump. She had a real job that paid most of the bills and kept food in the house. I was a hustler who spent all of my money at the bars and strip joints, and didn’t come home for weeks at a time.

  Finally, she had reached the end of her rope. She was ready to pack it in and move back to Pennsylvania…alone. Somehow I convinced her that the solution to our problems was to move to Louisiana, a state neither of us had been to before.

  I would open a sales office there and hire crews. We would run the office and the crews would travel around the country. The Idea sounded good in theory and she agreed.

  I should mention at this point that every time I relocated it required an infusion of money from my mother. My intention was never to dupe her out of cash, but I’m sure that was the appearance; and if it waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck…

  Louisiana started off like all of the other moves. Life was good. We found an office, picked out furniture and began exploring a culture that was new to us both. It seemed to me that I never had a drinking problem when I had a wad of cash. It was when the cash ran out that the problems began.

  So imagine how I felt when we got robbed our first week in Baton Rouge.

  We were in a dingy motel room on Florida Boulevard when I heard a knock at the motel-room door. She was in the shower so I cracked the door and poked my head out. The guy standing there said he had his kids in the car and needed a jumpstart. He looked like he was in a jam so I agreed to help. When I turned to grab my keys he slipped into the room.

  He didn’t seem too threatening but still; he was in the room. He sat in a chair and pulled a bag out of his pocket, asking if I wanted to smoke a joint. I said I didn’t smoke and tried to politely usher him along.

  He stood up and walked over to the phone on the dresser, asking if he could make a call. I said I hadn’t paid the phone deposit and again tried to urge him out the door. Things were starting to get frightening.

  That’s when he heard the shower running in the bathroom. His face suddenly changed. He no longer looked like a poor-lost child in need of help. He suddenly looked very, very dangerous.

  He laid a hand on the bathroom door and gazed at the wood as though it were a window. Even though the door was solid, the lust on his face made me momentarily believe he could see right through it. His hand slid slowly down the door toward the knob.

  “Who you got in there,” he asked “Some fine young thing I’ll bet.”

  Until this point I was paralyzed with fear. What I was seeing was so far from anything I had ever experienced that I had a hard time convincing myself it was actually happening.

  What happened over the next few seconds is a blur. I remember checking him into the wall like a hockey player and slinging him toward the motel-room door. Whether he ran out on his own or I forced him out, I can’t clearly recall. All I know is he was gone as suddenly as he appeared.

  I poured a stiff drink, and then another. I was still visibly shaking when my girlfriend emerged from the shower.

  “We have to go,” was all I said

  We began packing up the room as I tried to tell her what had just happened. I left out the fact that, I believed, she had nearly just been brutally raped and murdered.

  That’s when I remembered the wad of money that had been next to the phone on the dresser. There had been nearly three-thousand dollars in cash; now it was gone.

  Frantic, I called the police, but they were no help at all. They said they would send an officer by when they had no more violent crime to worry about.

  Fine, I had paid cash for the room and obviously didn’t have to worry about the police showing up, so I allowed my inner monster the freedom to play. If the owner of this motel wanted to allow criminals to roam their halls, then I would show them what a criminal is capable of.

  The motel manager gave momentary thought to standing in my way, but quickly decided his own safety was more important. By the time I climbed in the car the room looked like the scene of a massacre rather than a simple robbery. The fur
niture was trashed, fixtures were broken, mirrors and walls were destroyed, phone, TV, Lamps…nothing was spared.

  We never did completely recover from that first week, but with a few more injections of money from my mother we stayed afloat for a time. As things got worse, so did the drinking, and vice versa.

  I began to spend all of my nights in the bars around Baton Rouge hustling pool for money. I was never a pool shark, but I could spot an easy target a mile away. This lead to a lot of fights, and subsequently increased attention from the police.

  Of course, the greatest danger is that I was hustling in a town crawling with hustlers. On a good night I would win enough for a bottle and our motel room. On a bad night I would lose hundreds of dollars.

  Soon, we were living in the office and taking cold sink baths early in the morning in the restroom we shared with the other offices in the building. We were at the end of our collective rope when our luck changed, if only for a short time.

  We had finally pulled enough money together to get an apartment forty-five minutes away in Denham Springs, LA. I decided to hit the road again to generate some cash flow, and because it had been a while since my last unsupervised bender. What I did next is something I still haven’t forgiven myself for, and I’m not sure I ever will.

  I said goodbye and drove out of Louisiana one morning with the intention of being gone for a few days. I left this girl, who I truly did love, in an apartment in the middle of nowhere with no electric, no money, no car, and very little food. I left her stranded and desperate for nearly a month. Words can’t express the absolute anguish and humiliation I feel for this, even twenty years after the fact.

  I returned to Louisiana and attempted to revive the relationship and the business, but failed miserably. Before long I was living alone in a motel room, drinking day and night.

  I woke up one morning in the hospital. Another guest at the motel had found me outside my room with an empty bottle of whiskey next to me. The motel manager tried to wake me up but I wasn’t responding. When he couldn’t find a pulse he called an ambulance. I was still alive, but barely.