Masters of Horror (18 page)

Yet, that’s how many people alcohol kills in different methods—cirrhosis, other diseases, drunk drivers (62 victims a day from that alone!), accidents, fights, mayhem—every year. It out-kills every other drug we’ve come up with, except possibly for tobacco, while we lock up nonviolent marijuana users by the thousands. And as a society, we let it slide. The legality, prevalence and perceived ‘normality’ of alcohol—and its enormous lobby and tax income—makes it seem ‘not so bad’.

In fact, if you were to give alcohol a human voice, it might just say so.

SHOWDOWN WITH DEACON BLUES

By K.K.

At 11:40 AM, Deacon Blues was almost finished redecorating the room. The framed EASY DOES IT and DON’T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF placards were still there, along with the huge posters describing the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, but he’d added some real eye-catchers.

A Corona poster had been added. A hot model in a bikini posed with a bottle of the beer, but her beautiful face had been cut out of the picture. Other poster-girls for Coors Light and Smirnoff Ice posed on other walls, equally headless. Magazine ads for Captain Morgan’s Rum, Southern Comfort and Jack Daniels were taped up at eye level here and there as well. They were all very commonplace images, but very incongruous for a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. And if Rick didn’t arrive soon, Deacon Blues would have to take down all his work before the next meeting started. “Where are you, Tusgrin?” He growled under his breath to the empty room.

At 11:45 AM, Rick Tusgrin rolled his battle-scarred Impala to a halt next to Deacon Blues’ ancient Triumph motorcycle outside the West Side Group, and got out. As the door crunched shut with a pained metallic groan, he noticed all the damage he’d done to it over the last two years. Dented door, dented quarter-panel, dented fender, dented grille…it went on and on. Now that he was sober, he could connect each dent to a different bar or party. Funny how he hadn’t noticed before. He walked towards the building’s door, then groaned at his own malfunctioning memory and stalked back to the car to get the photos Matt had requested.

Inside, Deacon Blues raised a hand in greeting. “Hey, Rick. Did you bring ‘em?”

Rick nodded, holding out a manila envelope. “Right here, Mr. Bluzinski.”

“
Call me Matt, for the thirtieth time…and thanks. These are all Jane Does, right?” he asked.

Rick nodded. “Of course. If they weren’t, you wouldn’t be able to look at ‘em.

What the hell did you want these for, any…” His sentence trailed off as he saw the new décor. “Awwww, no.”

Matthew “Deacon Blues” Bluzinski raised an eyebrow. “What?” Instead of waiting for a reply, he taped an eight-by-ten photo of a female corpse’s face where the bikini model’s face should have been. “Hmmm, probably ought to cut these down to size…ah, I’ll do it later.” He repeated the process on another headless model.

“
That is freakin’ sick.” Rick grumbled.

“
That is the exact point.” Deacon Blues kept taping as he spoke. “Advertising in reverse. Haven’t you seen those TV ads for ‘The Truth’? They’re freakin’ sick, but they get their point across because they’re sick. And that’s for tobacco. Nobody stands up to alcohol, no matter how many people die. People leave these meetings, they’re right back on the street, and every billboard shows people livin’ the wild nightlife. No wonder so many people relapse.” He touched up the Captain Morgan ad with a black and white photo of a crashed car. “Yeah, these are shock tactics. I think we need shock tactics. But if anyone tells me they’re disgusted, I’ll take them down. I bet you nobody does.”

“
Okay, I’m disgusted,” Rick said with a smirk.

“
You?! You’re a coroner, for God’s sake! How could anything disgust you?”

“
It doesn’t. I was just kidding. You got any coffee going?”

“
I just brewed it, help yourself. Hey, how’s that workout goin’?” he said as he finished up. Luckily, the Jane Does that Rick had selected weren’t impossible to look at; the women were young, mostly overdoses or drowning victims. Their faces were bloated and discolored but not mutilated. Still, Deacon Blues was right about their effect. They did make you think twice about hoisting a Corona.

“
It’s killin’ me…and I’m still not as huge as you,” Rick muttered as he poured an avalanche of sugar into his coffee.

“
Well, give it time, keep eatin’ right…”

The compliment seemed to have bounced right off him. Matt was one of those bodybuilders who didn’t seem to care how muscular they’d gotten. But the bearlike biker was also a cool trainer, and sponsor. Rick just privately wished he’d be a bit happier, maybe smile once in a while. The Deacon’s private war with demon rum had made him ultra-serious. He might have brought hundreds of people to serenity, but sadly he seemed to have won no serenity for himself.

Other alcoholics began to file in, ready for the meeting. Matt and Rick greeted them all. Most of them blinked at the new décor but didn’t mention it.

At 11:59 AM, Brandy stood on the sidewalk, watching the others enter the West Side Group. She gave a slight smile to them all, but inwardly she judged them all in turn: That one looks like a junkie…and she’s GOTTA be a hooker…and oh, sir, have you stopped beating your wife yet?

She took a step towards the door, then stopped. This was ridiculous.

She didn’t belong here. Out of all places in the world, she certainly did not belong here. She wasn’t like them.

But today, certain things had come to her attention. Certain things were getting out of hand. Certain things had to stop.

Let’s get this over with, she thought. It was high noon, and she heard the meeting begin with a prayer. She reached for the door and stopped again. She felt bad, interrupting a prayer. She could wait a few more minutes.

“
As we became subjects of King Alcohol, shivering denizens of his mad realm, the chilling vapor that is loneliness settled down. It thickened, becoming ever blacker…” Matt’s voice rang out. But Rick had to stifle a laugh. To him, King Alcohol’s Shivering Denizens sounded like the name of some 60’s acid-rock band: “And NOW, please give a Big Easy welcome for…KING ALCOHOL and the SHIVERING DENIZENS OF HIS MAD REALM!”

It was easy to stifle the laugh, though, since he knew firsthand that King Alcohol’s realm truly
was
mad. His last night on the town, two months ago, had consisted of three hurricanes, countless shots of tequila, and then…

The dance floor was packed with zombies. Corpses with cyanotic-blue flesh pulsated all around him to a funky beat. Scents of smoke, sweat and perfume had given way to the noxious unseen gases of decomposition. The undead had no choice but to smile, as their tightening lips peeled back from gray teeth and scabrous tongues. Bodies twisted and turned and fondled each other, even as parasites rippled underneath their bloated skin.
They were all around him, and even more were pouring onto the dance floor. He turned to Emily, his date, praying that at least SHE would be unchanged…and her eyes were like two rotting hardboiled eggs. Beetles and maggots poured out of her smile…

Now he
was
shivering. It was the last thing he remembered from that night, but afterwards Emily had angrily filled in the blanks for him: he’d fled, taken her car, drove it through the doors of St. Luke’s (thankfully unoccupied) Church, and had attacked four policemen when they’d entered after him. Supposedly he’d been screaming something about needing sanctuary, but the policemen had translated this as needing nightsticks and tasers.

After a few days in jail, and thirty more at good old Hayden Hill Sanitarium, he was quite sober. His judge had mandated A.A. meetings as part of his probation, but Rick privately thought he would’ve ended up in ‘the rooms’ with or without probation. His love affair with tequila had gone from blissful to horrifying, and he was hanging on to his job by his fingernails. Looking back on it, he’d ended every workday with a six-pack (“A coroner’s best friend”, Dr. Coyne called it), and spent every weekend night at a different club, throwing all his available income to various bartenders that never remembered his name.

True, the rooms were threadbare tombs of folding chairs, bare tables and coffee—and sadly lacking in hotties—but meetings only cost him a few dollar’s donation, while the clubs had taken his every last dime.
My God, how much have I spent on that venom over the last year? Hell, the last TWO years? Five grand? TEN? No wonder all I’ve got is an apartment, a car and a TV.
He scowled, trying to kick out the self-pity.

There was something else about the rooms, too. Something about the way people opened up to each other, and shared their innermost thoughts…it was simultaneously horrifying, fascinating, uplifting and addictive. The ‘denizens of his mad realm’ were friendly, too, in comparison to the barflies who would break a bottle of your head for looking at the wrong girl. Even though some of them looked like death warmed over, there was a light glowing in their eyes that looked like hope.

“
Anyone have a topic?” Deacon Blues asked. There was a huge pause as everyone looked at each other. Apparently nobody did. “Well then, how ‘bout
madness
. Anyone got some old madness they want to get off their chest?”

The door opened and an elegant, platinum blonde woman came in; she looked incongruously out of place with a long fur coat and sequin-rimmed sunglasses.

Everyone noticed her, and Rick noticed how they noticed, and she seemed well accustomed to the effect. She gave a fast, polite nod of acknowledgement to the room in general, then sat down in the folding chair closest to the door, sweeping her coat daintily as she did so.

“
My name’s Kyle, and I’m an alcoholic…” One younger man began; he looked barely out of high school.

“
HI, KYLE!
” Chorused from twelve-odd others, Rick included.

“
Me and my friend Tony would hang out in the park every Sunday, ‘cause there were these guys who would buy a big Hefty bag and fill it with ice and beer, and they’d drink some, hide it, go off to do something, then come back and drink some more. We knew where they hid it, and they had too many cans to count, so we’d sneak some and they never seemed to find out…we thought it was fun for a while…hell, we were thirteen…but one Sunday they brought bottles instead of cans. We didn’t have an opener, but
damn
, we wanted that beer! So I told Tony ‘Okay, we can just break the necks off and drink out of them anyway!’—
there’s
some madness for ya—and Tony said ‘You first’. So I smashed the neck off on a rock, and the beer started foaming right out, and y’know when that happens your first impulse is to get all the beer before it spills away. So I held the bottle up over my mouth and tried to drink the rest that way.” He winced at the memory and took a sip of bottled water.

“
I ended up drinking a piece of broken glass. A couple of them, I think. Thank God my gag reflex kicked in, because if I’d actually
swallowed
them…” He grimaced with the idea and went on. “I puked most of them back out right away, mostly over Tony, and he wasn’t too happy about that. But one of them got caught in my mouth, it slid under the skin. I started bleeding from the mouth. It looked about as bad as it felt.” The others in the room nodded, sharing the pain.

“
Tony’s like, ‘C’mon, we gotta get you home’, and I’m like ‘HELL no, my father would KILL me!’” Kyle guffawed for a moment. “You know, I hear other kids say that all the time—’
My father’ll KILL me!
—and has anyone’s father ever actually
done
it? Killed their kid? Hell no, but that’s what we think. Anyway, I took my shirt off and used it to soak up the blood. Finally the bleeding stopped, and I figured the piece of glass had just slipped out of my mouth like the others, ‘cause I couldn’t feel it or find it in there. Then I went home afterwards, and told my folks I was playing on the ‘skins’ side in a pick-up football game, and I lost my shirt. They bought it. Lookin’ back on it, I wish I
had
gone straight home and told the truth, ‘cause I bled from the mouth on and off for weeks afterwards. Tony and the other guys started callin’ me Dracula. I found out the glass was
still
in my mouth. Now the skin’s grown over it, so it’s there to stay. I’m actually grateful for it, I call it my ‘built-in reminder’ not to drink…” A ripple of quiet laughter passed through the room.