Greetings from the Vodka Sea (16 page)

THEORY IV.
All objects are accelerated equally by the force of authority

The Mardi Gras Detox Centre had three rules etched in a bullet-proof, shatter-proof window that separated the guest foyer from the clinic per se.

1. Everyone gets out alive.

2. To forgive is holy; to forgive yourself, divine.

3. One day at a time.

This last rule had achieved corporate sponsor status at the clinic. The counsellors (jeans, sneakers and, as a rule, earthtone sweaters) and nurses (jeans, sensible shoes and, as a rule, pastel smocks) used the expression compulsively, leaving Plumber to wonder if they weren't all part of some complicated royalty sharing scheme. Within the first hour after admission, Plumber heard the phrase used to admonish a teenaged girl who was refusing to make her bed
²⁰
(“Someone's not feeling very one-day-at-a-time today, is she?”), calm two prepubescent dotcom billionaires arguing over a disputed line call in table tennis (“You can't respect your one-day-at-a-time unless you respect other people's one-day-at-a-time”) and praise an old bum
²¹
who'd successfully swallowed his medication (“See? One pill at a time and one day at a time. It's that simple”). Plumber was a quick study.

Counsellor A: We treat a lot of celebrities here. I just want you to know that you can't expect to be treated differently from the other patients.

Plumber: I understand. I just want to take things one day at a time.

Counsellor A: That's the right approach. You've got your work cut out for you, but if you just take it one day at a time, it'll go a lot easier.

Plumber: One day at a time?

Counsellor A: Yes. One day at a time.

The first days of treatment were not bad. Plumber was put on a strict diet — lots of water and fresh fruit — and confined to his room and the exercise yard. The sudden abstinence didn't hit him, a career binger, as hard as it might some. He'd glimpsed the worst of the lot,
²²
those patients in the cheap seats, the semi-private rooms and wards in the east wing of the centre, strapped to their real aluminum hospital beds, frothing and howling and crying like the worst Emmy-conscious hack in the cheesiest made-for-TV MOTW. Plumber was amazed to see real drunks act this way. They must have been the hard core, the superdrunks, who'd transcended ordinary drunkenness and addiction and landed on a higher lower plane, the mythic realm of the DTs. Plumber silently applauded their tenacity. In a world organized to help them, a culture which in fact orbited the diseased and miserable like an obedient, dependent satellite, these drunks had persevered. Kudos all round.

THEORY V
. For every inaction there is an equal and opposite contraction

One the third day, the nurse stood with arms folded, blocking Plumber's exit. She'd just appeared, an uncouth vision. It had been his refusal to go to group that seemed to summon her from the depths of the darkest nurses' station. Group was mandatory, she informed Plumber. Option was not an option.

She stared for a long time without speaking. Plumber couldn't tell if she was really angry or simply reaching into her patient-motivation bag of tricks. It was effective in either case; Plumber enjoyed watching a professional at work.

“I'm not going to pick you up and carry you there.”

“Try again tomorrow. I'm, like, too one-day-at-a-time today.” Plumber smiled and shifted on his bed. It was basic physics at work. An irresistible force coming up against an immovable object.
²³
The nurse stood in place, breathing deeply, trying, Plumber supposed, to calm herself. She was taking her role much too seriously. What were her options? Would she kick him out? No. The clinic needed high profile cases like Plumber to keep the cheap seats full. Would she cut off his privileges? Not likely, since it was the privileges that kept his cute butt in the centre, helping to drum up business. A vicious circle.

“I don't want to have to call the orderlies.” She spoke with the empty authority of someone who had survived a lifetime of assertiveness training seminars.

“Good. I don't want you to have to call them.” He wasn't being cheeky,
²⁴
although it no doubt sounded that way. He really didn't want her to call the orderlies.
²⁵
Almost as soon as he said the words, though, he regretted them. He'd painted both of them into a corner. You learn this kind of thing at theatre school,
²⁶
how to pace a scene to move toward an end-point. The key was listening, always listening. If you weren't listening, truly listening, to the other actors, if you were only paying attention to your own lines, then you wouldn't react properly. That was the key, reactions, because despite the name — acting — the craft was really all about reacting. Clearly, then, Plumber hadn't been listening; he'd been too I-focused and not eye-focused.
²⁷
He'd been acting, not reacting, and now he was nine-tenths through a scene without an ending in sight. He wanted to start again, but life, as the counsellors were wont to tell him, was not a dress rehearsal. So there they sat, neither giving an inch, the nurse growing angrier as each second sauntered past, and Plumber — Plumber even more handsome than usual, noticeable more thirsty, wishing that he'd begun better so he could end well, but most of all impatient. When was Nancy coming? She should have been there by now.

THEORY VI.
Beauty is skin deep, but ugly goes right to the bone

They called her Mrs. Charles Bukowski, Plumber and Roy.
²⁸
Not to her face. That would have been rude. Plumber and Roy were not rude. Roy
²⁹
was an actor too, and he'd sort of latched onto Plumber in the way that less successful actors (lawyers, dentists, writers) tended to latch on to more successful actors (lawyers, dentists, writers).
³⁰
Maybe they hoped that some of the magic would rub off, or that they might catch the financial and emotional drips? In any case, Plumber didn't mind. Roy was okay to talk to, just one of the guys. Maybe a little too skinny to be trusted, with bit player features: big head, small black eyes, thin lips. Not too handsome. A good side-kick. Plus, he'd somehow
³¹
smuggled some smoke into the centre and was disposed to sharing it in the exercise yard.
³²
That's where and how they first met, in the exercise yard over a joint. They soon had the giggles. And then they spotted her, seated in a folding lawn chair by the fountain. She wore a pink housecoat with pink pyjamas underneath and pink furry slippers like the ones Plumber's mother, God rest her soul, might have worn. They giggled some more. Who said it first? Plumber was not sure. Maybe they both said it at the same time — certainly they both thought it at the same time.
Mrs. Charles Bukowski
.

The resemblance was breathtaking, which only made it funnier. Not that she was ugly. Just that she was the kind of woman who'd never once been beautiful in her life, not even for a second.
³³
Halt. Maybe once. Maybe for a moment some days after birth, after the ugly-inducing trauma of that event had washed off and before the dissymmetry of her young life had begun to weigh on her face, pulling it apart, separating her countenance forever from the land mass of beauty. It wasn't so much that she'd never been beautiful, there were entire English villages which shared that burden without apparent ill effect, but more that she'd never
felt
beautiful. Every woman on earth deserved that, if only for a moment. Every woman on earth deserved to feel beautiful, which means, Plumber supposed, feel themselves an object of beauty, feel themselves gazed upon — by a parent, a friend, a lover — with adoration and, where appropriate, stylized lust. Even in the least relative terms, beauty was fleeting, and eventually every woman
³⁴
was reduced to mourning lost youth, lost beauty. This woman — she would never know that sad charm. Never, never quite ugly, never beautiful. An entire life on a folding lawn chair, in pink slippers, by a fountain.

Then there were the boils. Plumber thought that was the word for them. Bumps on her face and her hands. On a much older woman, a grandmother, they wouldn't be worth a second look, in fact they'd add character.
³⁵
But on her, so young, so unbeautiful, they were painful. They puffed up her already puffed face, casting little shadows on her pale skin. The boils boiled even along her hairline, where the skin ridged the bright red hair.

So one of them said it first.
Mrs. Charles Bukowski
. Then they both laughed. They laughed and laughed and laughed, laughing so hard that Plumber actually slapped his knee, again and again, and finally snorted, just like his mother used to snort whenever she laughed too much. That made them laugh some more. They laughed until Roy fell off his chair, fell off his chair and onto the ground, where he lay curled up, holding his stomach from laughing so hard, and laughed and laughed until he farted so loud he scared off a couple of pigeons that had lighted on a branch nearby. Roy farted so loud Plumber's chair shook. Then they laughed some more.

THEORY VII.
The length of a body contracts as humiliation increases

The woman knew they were laughing at her.
³⁶
Plumber could tell by the way she shifted in her seat, uncrossing her legs and crossing them again. She probably wanted to get up and leave. But that would signal defeat. That would acknowledge that the assholes were winning.

THEORY VIII.
The mediocre are the message

Life? Now was that a cool medium or a hot one?
³⁷
Plumber had read
Understanding Media
from start to finish six times and read it again when he got into the Mardi Gras Detox Centre. In truth he never understood it,
³⁸
but little things, useful tidbits, he picked up. Television. Was that cool?
Never be hot on a cool medium
. A good rule of thumb. Film. Hot, as he recalled. Direct to video (it could be assumed): cool. Books — literature — were surprisingly hot, were they not? But what of sex?
³⁹
And love?
⁴⁰
What of truth and beauty?
⁴¹
What of life? Where did life fit into McLuhan's scheme? He'd planned to ask Nancy that, but her promised visit never materialized.
⁴²
Instead he had Dad. Dad, overcome with the sudden urge to impart fatherly wisdom.

Voice A: The secret to life is not a secret. Simple blind acceptance, that's all that's needed.

Voice B: Did she say why?

Voice A: It's funny, but all that square stuff you hear growing up? It all turns out to be true. You Get Out of Life What You Put In. Respect Yourself. All Things Come to Those Who Wait.

Voice B: She's been saying all week she was going to come.

Voice A: But the worst thing you can do is blame yourself. You can't turn back the clock. You Can't Turn Back the Clock. Everyone makes mistakes. It's time to take action. It's time to move on.

Voice B: I don't understand. You'd think a woman, a wife, would visit. Why wouldn't she visit?

Voice A: Sometimes you just have to move on.

Voice B: What's wrong with me?
⁴³

Voice A:
Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point
.

Voice B: That's your answer to everything.

Voice A:
Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point
?

Voice B: No. Moving on.

Dad patted his hand as he might have done when Plumber was a boy. “There, there, there, son. One day at a time. You've got to take things one day at a time.” Dad stood up, he looked around like a man looking for his hat.
⁴⁴
Then he left.

THEORY IX.
The distance between two bodies is directly proportional to the previous intimacy

Day fifteen. Plumber does not get out of bed. He spends the morning throwing up into a bucket and the afternoon in his four-poster unable to budge. The nurses see this as a good sign. The body throwing off its poisons, the cells, chemically altered by the ongoing exposure to alcohol, realigning themselves, dutiful planets. In the evening, Plumber cannot sleep. Eventually he has to be restrained by orderlies as the night nurse injects him with Valium. Still Plumber wards off sleep. He lies strapped to his bed, moaning. He expects hallucinations, but they never come. He closes his eyes and hopes to dream of Nancy.
⁴⁵
But when he finally falls asleep, he dreams of nothing at all.

THEORY IX, restated:
Gravity is directly proportional to mass and inversely proportional to distance.

When Plumber finally came to his senses, he was strapped to a metal bed in the ICU. He mouth tasted like a raccoon's nest, his brain had a charley horse. His lips were so dry he had to pry them apart with his tongue. Mrs. Charles Bukowski was strapped to the next bed. She looked like Death with an attitude. Like Death on a bender. Like Death after losing the Daytime Emmy for Best Performance by Death to some young upstart Death for the seventh year running. Like Death after His wife and mistress had just run off together to set up house in Iceland: cold, cold Iceland. Snot oozed along the tube in Mrs. Charles Bukowski's nose. A white paste of spittle surrounded her mouth. Each time she inhaled, her body was shaken by a thunderous snore. Imagine waking up to that every morning.
⁴⁶
The folds of her hospital PJs had fallen open, and Plumber could follow the vein-splattered contour of her skin from her neck to her belly. One large boob hung out, artfully arranged across her arm, the huge, huge nipple engorged in sleep, her silver-dollar-pancake-sized aureole, her truck-tire-nipple-sized nipple engorged asexually, artfully. Even aroused, she was not arousing. All subject, no object. Plumber studied her. He was thinking about inner beauty and wondering seriously if it was true, as the ancients believed, that the surface was a genuine reflection of the depth. Was an ugly woman ugly inside? Was her heart ugly? Was her soul ugly? Did she, as the ancients believed, have ugly thoughts and ugly corpuscles? And conversely, were beautiful people really beautiful inside and out? But no. Surely our inner life registered our reaction to circumstance rather than simple circumstance. Beauty, he reasoned, could be found in even the least beautiful objects: Arbus's freaks; Mapplethorpe's plundered assholes.