by Martha Garvey
(08/27/03)

I taught my own damn self how to be a drunk.

And I learned how to stop being a drunk the usual way:  with a group of fellow drunks hip to my bullshit.  As I was hip to theirs.

But it was Evan who taught me something else, about myself, about love, maybe, and finally, about grief and about the bottle.

My Dad and I were always close.  My mother called us the co-conspirators.  So it wasn't so strange one day when I walked into an AA meeting, there he was:  my hipster daddy, hanging with the sober sisters and brothers, porkpie hat cocked back, trying not to drink.

He waved at me. If I'd been the sentimental type, I would have cried, but that’s not how my father raised me. 

"Want a ride?" he said.

"I guess so," I said.

So we hung in, my Dad in Pittsburgh, me in New York, miraculously contradicting our Irish American DNA by not doing the thing we were so fucking talented at doing. One day at a time.

When we were in the same city, we would go to meetings but not sit together, then go to a jazz club where we'd drink seltzer water and lime and Dad would tell me how many times he'd seen Charlie Parker fall off the stage. Dad had wanted to be a musician, but he was smart enough to know he wasn't good enough. So he settled for being a fabulous audience. It was his great gift. AA was the full flowering of that gift. Every night, he got to hear a new story.

The last time we were truly together, Dad and I went to a new Brooklyn club, where in return for listening to some truly awful jazz, they gave us a small sapphire-blue bottle of gin, shaped like a mermaid. Dad shook his head when they plopped it on our table, and the smooth waiter shrugged: "So save it for your lady friend."

"She's not," Dad said, but the waiter was gone. And so my father shrugged, too, and handed it to me, and said, "Don't say I never gave you anything."
       
I kept the bottle, but I didn't open it. It was waiting for Evan -- though, of course, I didn’t know it. I still served booze in my house. I was still someone who liked to watch others soften and blur under the influence of alcohol. I kept the mermaid on my night table. I imagined opening the little blue fishwoman and my next boyfriend giving me a gin-tinged kiss.

Besides, it became a kind of code between my father and me. We were far too cool to discuss our sobriety openly, but each time I talked to my father on the phone, he'd ask:  "How's the mermaid?"

And I'd say, "Completely full."

"Good enough," he'd say.

"And you?"

"Oh, still completely full . . . of shit!" Dad would say, and laugh.

And then the doctors found a big lump in Dad's big brain, and there was no way to get it out. I knew the end of that story.
       
In the meetings, they told me to be grateful for something about the brain cancer, and this is what I came up with:

Gratitude part 1: It wasn't a heart attack, so I got to see him a few more times before he slipped into a coma -- which, if you’re interested in knowing, looks nothing like the ones on TV.  In real life, comas are noisy and smelly and expensive.  Know this before you decide to slide into one.

Part two of my gratitude: it wasn't Alzheimer's, which meant that the forgetting and drooling he experienced while he wasn't in the coma wouldn't go on forever.

Part three was Evan: at the tail end of the worst year of my life so far, I found a man at the food coop, right by the dried apricots. I liked this, I liked this Evan, this massage-energy-balancing guy who does not talk like a new age twit because he is from a part of Brooklyn that still has not, and may never become, chic. Built like he should be hauling meat, not realigning "chi." Downy-bodied, red-haired, with skin lit from within.  A ripe peach who talks like a longshoreman. Evan has a reputation as a massage therapist: he has the kind of hands that can make anyone cry. In a good way. Under Evan's touch, people release their grief, while Evan watches over them, detached.   This doesn't happen when he massages me; I am, he says, "one tough customer."

Evan is into detachment in our relationship, except about one thing.  Evan thinks keeping the bottle is sick. I tell him I'll throw the bottle away when he can promise me that he will never look up La Bitchface Unforgettable Girlfriend on the Internet when I’m asleep.
       
The bottle stays on the night table. Once it was lonely, now it has company: an amber glass bottle of Evan's massage oil, bergamot and coriander, oranges and spice. Sometimes Evan rubs me down before sex until I nearly pass out.  And sometimes, after we have sex, Evan gets up and borrows my computer and types a hundred words a minute into the ether to another woman who doesn't want to touch him. The bottle, the bitchface:  if we thought this thing was going to last, we'd give each other a hard time. But we don't. At least, I don't. 
       
My father dies one cold Pittsburgh morning, and by the end of the evening, I'm packed in Brooklyn, all black clothes and Big Book and positive tapes and phone numbers of friends who will be supportive. I leave early the next day. Evan, not a big word man, has brought food and videos to distract me, but I careen around the apartment, trying to rush the morning into existence.

"Let's just go to bed," Evan says. I let him undress me, and put me down on the futon, and cover me with a quilt.  He sleeps in his underpants, a fresh pair he changes into just before sleep, which I usually find amusing, but not today.

Evan lies next to me, but his cock doesn't seem to know that I am in grief. 

"I don't want you inside me," I say, though I can feel him poking behind me, nuzzling my neck. Evan is not usually like this, but death charges the air with electricity; his cock is trying to balance the energy. Evan's father is dead, too, but not quite like my father. He left Evan's mother for Evan's mother's best friend when Evan was twelve, and then promptly dropped dead of a heart attack. Fathers are not reliable people in our world.  Either they leave you and they die, or they die and they leave you. Evan's father was his first big teacher in detachment.
       
"I'm pissed you don't want to come to the funeral."

"I met you six weeks ago," he says.

"I miss him, and I want to drink," I say.

"Well, don't," says Evan. "It won't make him any less dead."

"You sure know how to comfort a grieving...what?  Fuck buddy?"

Silence. Evan is snoring. The first man I have ever known who can doze off in the middle of a fight. That's how fast his energy shifts. Normally I'd be pissed, but this is my chance. When I am sure Evan is deeply asleep, I reach over his body, and grab the mermaid bottle, where the gin has begun to sing to me. The glass is blue, but the gin, I am sure, is clear and lovely, just the way it used to be.  No one would judge me if I drank this night.  No one.

"What are you doing?" Evan hisses. And snatches the bottle from my hand. We wrestle. I bite him. He slaps me. He holds me down with one arm across my throat, a leg to either side of my body.  And suddenly, I feel how hard he is.

"Give it to me, fucker," I say.  "It’s none of your goddamned business."

"I say it is," says Evan.

The mermaid glitters in his hand as the moonlight leaks from the edges of the curtains. Evan moves in and out of the light. I realize I’ll have to give him something to get the bottle.

"Oh, fuck me," I sigh.

"Really?" I can't see Evan's face, but his voice is full of electricity. 

"It'll help me sleep."

"I don't have a condom."

"Well, make something up."

Evan shifts. I can see him staring at the blue mermaid. He runs the bottle, cap side first, across my breasts, and they leap to attention, even though all my brain can hold is the smell of my father's skin in the creepy hospital room, the sound of him getting my name wrong.

Evan sets the mermaid down, picks his own bottle up. He pours the oil into his hands and rubs them together as if he were trying to make fire. He lets me up. I don't try for the bottle right now. I'll let him fuck me first, and then I'll drink.

He smears oil across my belly and my cunt, and suddenly I am hot.  Evan takes the bottle and puts it in me.

"Oh," I say.

The bottle's too big to really fit entirely into my cunt, and Evan doesn't try, he just wedges the beginning of it in. Then he urges, with his hands, his mouth, his skin, for me to relax. He knows all my pressure points, my chakras, my energy centers. He makes short work of me. He’s a professional.

The metal cap is cool, the glass cooler. I shudder at the chill. Metal and glass: dangerous, but not as deadly, I think, as cells gone wild inside a man's brain.  

And though the bottle is sliding in and out of my cunt, utterly intact, though the citrusy oil is all over my body, I smell gin. 

I smell the gin my father used to drink in the living room of our big lonely house, I smell the gin my mother is probably drinking right now as she stares at the suit the undertakers will put my father in, I smell the gin I used to drink to finish poems, to start poems, to have sex, to have a life, to end my goddamned thinking, thinking, thinking.

Evan puts one hand on my mound and stops fucking me.  He leans into my ear.

"I'm sorry he's gone," he whispers. "I really wanted to meet him." Then silence, and the mermaid swims deeper up into me, and away, and in. And I come, but I don't cry. And Evan rolls away from me.  

My body glows from the orgasm, but the part of me that wants to drink still wants to drink. The bottle, where is the bottle? I lean over Evan, and touch his cock, groping, really, for the mermaid. He pushes my hand away. 

"Later," he says. I hear him put the bottle back on the night table, and then he falls asleep. 

Now is my chance. I slither off the bed. I pick the bottle up from the table. It smells like me.   

I go to the living room, where all my bags are packed, and I stare at them. Evan did this. I go to the kitchen, where the dishes dry on the rack, so neat I know I had nothing to do with it. I hear Evan snoring. It’s the first time we've had any kind of sex without him firing up the Internet after.

I look at the mermaid and for a moment I think she's looking back at me. In the fairytale version of the story of my life, she would speak and ask me to release her into the sea. Or at least, into the East River. But she says nothing.

I take a glass from the dishrack and bring it and the bottle to the living room. Already I’m rehearsing my AA relapse story, deciding whether I will include the bottlefucking part of it. I imagine the meeting I will go to, to repent. 

But I see my father at that meeting, and suddenly, I don't want to tell any part of that story.  I put the glass down. But I still hold on to the mermaid.

It's begun to snow. I open the window and feel the air, cold and wet. I lean out, careful to make sure no one's below. I let the bottle go. It shatters on the wet sidewalk, and the glass sings like Charlie Parker's tenor sax. I wish my dad could hear this music. 

And then I turn, and Evan is there. I fall into his arms and weep. 

Our permanent collection of erotic stories