The Drunk Logs (26 page)

“I have no idea, but I sure had Maureen going there for a while when I didn’t react the way she thought I would,” Jack Jack said as he slurped a spaghetti noodle. “I have the whole week to decide, so I’m sure something will come to mind.”

We continued to eat as conversations and the clatter of plates built around us, and competed with the “click, fizz” of the juice machine and the screech of the steel chair legs on the vinyl floor, when in walked Big Toledo and Danny. Slightly pale and disoriented, they shuffled toward the serving line, to the death stare of Jack Jack.

“Hey, Toledo,” Jack Jack waved him over.

The rest of the group and I turned and watched Big Toledo stumble toward the table, in a haze, top heavy and sluggish, as he swayed back and forth like an oak tree ready to tip. Paranoid and skittish, Danny reluctantly followed, like a virgin prisoner who waited to be attacked. But he added to his ignorance, for the predators were not around him; instead, it was the one he walked toward.

“Hey buddy, I haven’t seen you in a while. You all right?” Jack Jack said as he glanced over to Danny. The air became tight.

Danny tried to cut through the tension and extend the proverbial olive branch as he graciously greeted Jack Jack, but his advances went unnoticed.

In this awkward moment, we sat nervously and waited for Big Toledo to answer the question. But he continued to sway back and forth, and rub his face with his hand as if he was trying to create a new expression. He took a deep, labored breath and looked at the table, as if the faces he had seen so many times before were complete strangers. He steadied his feet and remembered the question that was asked of him only a few moments before.

“Fine…fine. I think I might be coming down with a cold,” he said as he began to rub at his face again.

Danny nudged him and pointed to a table that had recently opened. He seemed oblivious to the situation around him. Big Toledo followed Danny like a lost puppy and poured into a chair in front of the salad bar. He leaned to one side and rested his head on the concrete pillar next to him.

We stared at this odd behavior, but finished eating our meals without commenting. Everyone except Jack Jack had turned back. With an expression of disgust, Jack Jack threw his paper napkin over his food and mulled something over.

As he began to stand, Dr. Lyedecker approached and requested his appearance immediately in his office to discuss the issue of his release. He grudgingly agreed, followed him out, and turned back with that playful, evil grin he had worn since the moment I arrived.

“Man, he still must be reeling about the stolen druggy buggy from last time,” Sam said as he laughed and shook his head. “And it looks like he took the initiative to squash anything from happening this time. Jack Jack must love all that attention, and knowing Jack Jack, he’s going to drive that man crazy guessing as to what he’s going to do.”

We grinned as our imaginations blossomed, and I hoped that my story was the one Jack Jack chose for his departure. We wiped off our faces and politely waited for Mick to finish eating as tomato sauce dripped from his mouth, when the intercom cut through the conversations.

“Matt H., report to the nurses’ station. Matt H., report to the nurses’ station.”

I took a deep breath through my nose, stood, and straightened out my pant legs. As I grabbed my tray with one hand, I pushed my chair in with the other and headed toward the door, giving a nod to the table.

With my hands in my pants pockets, I wondered why I would have been called; the last time everything had been fine.
Probably just a routine check up
, I thought.

As I passed the elevator and entered the detox area, the place was alive and jumping, like a dance club late at night where the nurses worked frantically to service all the new patients and get them to their rooms. Sedation was their primary tool. Carl stood at the corner with a bird’s eye view, and looked exceptionally tall and inflated as he laid his crossed arms on his chest. We slapped hands in a friendly hello and passed on by. Neither of us looked at each other, concerned only with our tasks at hand.

I leaned against the wall, still with hands in pockets, and stared at the half-door. I didn’t looked into the tiny nook like I usually did; I already knew that with this number of patients, the room must have been full.

I stared too long at the green carpet, rubbed my eyes, and heard the half-door rattle, then squeak. I focused and looked up, as Molly stood in the doorway and waved me in. I pushed off the wall with my behind and walked toward Molly, who forgot to check my wristband and closed the door behind me. In the chair by the shelf, I sat with my hands still in my pockets as Molly clicked her pen and flipped through the pages on her clipboard.

“Wristband,” she said as she walked over. She stared at the numbers from my extended hand and wrote on her clipboard.

“So…why do I have the pleasure of seeing you today?” I asked.

“We haven’t checked on you in a while, so we just need to make sure that everything is still fine.”

She tore the Velcro, wrapped the belt around my arm, and pushed the start button; the belt became tight as the machine hummed.

“So, everybody here must be happy that Jack Jack is leaving, huh?”

“No, we’ll only be happy if he doesn’t come back.”

I looked down at my arm and watched my veins grow and pulsate as the belt grew tighter.

“So, who decided that it was his time to go?”

“His father,” she said as the machine beeped and the belt deflated. She removed the belt, checked the screen, and wrote on her clipboard.

Suspicious, I looked at Molly and waited for her to stop writing. She looked up from her clipboard, her eyes wide as she waited for my next question.

“His father? I thought it is supposed to be a clinical decision if the patient is healthy enough to leave?”

She looked like she was searching for the best possible answer.

“Yes, after careful consideration between Dr. Lyedecker and Jack’s father, they determined that the best or next course of treatment would be to release Jack.”

“But what if he doesn’t have anywhere to go, and doesn’t have any support from his family? What do you think is going to happen to him?” I became agitated, for my concern was really for myself and what would happen to me if I was in his place.

Years of experience had brought her far in her career. She seemed to understand that my cries for Jack were really for me, and offered advice the only way she knew how.

“Matt,” she said in calm, motherly voice. “We have given the people here the gift of knowledge to succeed. So it is up to them to make it work.
You
…are the cure to the disease.”

Nestled in the bosom of her words, the solution clicked in my head and the reason I was here suddenly made sense. As I laughed, warmth began to flow over my entire body. How stupid I had been to believe that a pill or potion was my cure all. They had been saying the answer all along, but I was too deaf to hear.

“So all that medication you’ve been giving me has just been some type of placebo.”

Seemingly delighted that I truly understood, she relaxed and began to smile. “No, at the beginning it was medication to heal any internal problems you might have had, and the Valium was to help with the tremors. But since then, all you have been getting are vitamins.”

I shook my head in disbelief.

“You see, everything starts in here,” she tapped me on the head. “Then we work on the body, and then the soul.”

I had an awakening and stood to deliver the news to my friends. But before I left, I stopped and asked about my blood pressure results.

“Normal,” she said.

I realized I still had time before lecture and walked outside to smoke a cigarette and tell my friends the promising news I had just heard, in hopes that they would revel in the knowledge as much as me.

Chapter 14

At a picnic table, in the corner of the pavilion, with a plume of smoke all around them, they watched a game of cornhole being played by a mixture of the athletes and the wannabes. I heard Jack Jack as he heckled the players in the distance and hurriedly walked through the grass. As I arrived, there was a full on confrontation between Jack Jack and the players, as their words became more colorful and the spectators grew with anticipation of a fight. Finally, a brief moment of calm set in as I began to speak, when a corn sack banged on the table and slid off.

“That’s enough already, Jack Jack. One more word and I’m going to kick the crap out of you,” a man the size of Big Toledo said.

He lumbered over like a brick outhouse, when Jack Jack understood he had gone too far, backed down, and assured the individual it had only been in good fun. If it had not been for his silk tongue, he would surely have been in the infirmary, and he damn well knew it.

He laughed off the incident, smoothly lit a cigarette, and walked back to the table, where his friends waited in anticipation to hear the rest of his encounter with Dr. Lyedecker. It was not the right moment to share my news, so I sat idly by.

“So what happened next? What did Lyedecker tell you?” Sam asked.

He shrugged off the entire event and sat down next to Bobby as he looked over to the nurses’ station.

“There really isn’t much else to tell. He was just warning me that he will not tolerate any insubordination and will, as he put it, ‘use the full extent of the law,’ if anything was to happen.” Turning his attention back to the group, he nodded his head toward the building. “He even has Carl keeping an eye on me from the nurse’s window.”

We turned in unison and noticed Carl, half illuminated by the sunlight.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Sam said, dumbfounded.

“I know, and the beauty part of it,” Jack Jack smiled and shook his head, “is that I thought about doing something. But, it would be worth it not to do anything and have that guy waste all of his energy on poor old me.”

Appearing to have awakened from a shallow sleep, Father Tom looked up with sad, soulful eyes and licked his dry, cracked lips.

“My mind is a little hazy, but that reminds me of a story about a man whose lust was so great for one specific thing in his life, he forgot about the things around him that had true meaning, until they all withered and died and left him with nothing.” He sat for a moment and dug deep into his memory files as he tried to find the correct story, but to his dismay the story seemed to be lost from time. “I think that’s how it went. Well, you get the meaning of the story.”

While the others looked as though they were pondering the words of wisdom, I saw an opportunity and started to tell them about my visit with Molly.

“Yeah, I was…”

Robby came out of the sea of picnic tables and sat next to Jack Jack. “Well, good thing I’m leaving tomorrow. Looks like they’re going to surprise you guys with a drug test,” he said in a slow mumble.

The conversations adjacent to our picnic table became silent.

“How do you know this, Robby?” Bobby asked.

“I heard it when I was reviewing my release papers at the nurses’ station. They said they needed to get all the piss cups ready for the test coming up.”

He folded down the collar of his windbreaker and motioned to Bobby if he could have a cigarette from the pack that lay on the table. Bobby agreed.

The conversations in the pavilion quickly turned to rumors as individuals began to become worried. It was a trait that followed us from our addicted days, always paranoid.

“What the hell is everybody so worried about? The only thing that is going to come up positive is the shit that they’ve been giving us,” Jack Jack said. “Unless certain people are guilty?”

Jack Jack smiled devilishly and looked over toward Danny, who leaned against a wooden post.

“To all patients, lecture will start in 10 minutes. Lecture will start in 10 minutes,” the intercom blared.

Sam stretched, “Well, I guess it is that time.”

While Sam’s arms were up, to his surprise, I leaned over and rested my head on his chest and rubbed his belly. “Santa, I want a fire truck, and some Lincoln logs, and…”

Sam pushed me away to everyone’s laughter. “Get the hell out of here. You’re crazy.”

“Just trying to liven up the situation. Everybody looked so serious when they mentioned the drug test.”

Through the tall grass and back to the building, we joined the other patients who followed the leader down the same hallway we had always followed before. The atmosphere started to change as I could feel another hallucination begin.

I grew accustomed to my surroundings, as I flowed in unison with a mass of miscreants and misdeeds and possible misfortunes that were illuminated by artificial light. You hid me away and kept me until you said it was all right. You let me march up and down until my feet became weary and bare like my life. Thirty-four days was not enough, my dear fellow. You made me march one hundred more.

Like multi-colored pebbles in a sea of blue, we rocked back and forth from the waves of patients who entered, laughed, and giggled, while Victoria smiled from across the way. Almost complacent, Larry Gates entered and bellowed his usual rhetoric that was joined by the answers of the deviants.

Quietly, we absorbed the message that was taught high atop the lectern, with its dance and pomp, as we writhed to the rhythm of the silver-tongued orator. Hallelujah, we had been blessed with the word. And released the demons and cleansed our hot pipes with the stone river of salvation. As young children we spread the word like a virus. We spread the word.

I wiped the cold sweat from my forehead and took a few deep breaths.
That, by far, had been the worst episode to date
, I thought. I pulled a small piece of candy from my pocket and sucked on it. The sugar started to calm my racing heart.

After the lecture, we filed out of the auditorium and embarked on what little free time we had. Bobby, Pat, and I splintered off and ventured to the second floor, while Jack Jack, Father Tom, and Robby decided to have another cigarette and join in on another game of cornhole.