Halfway House: A Story

By J. Durbin

Set in a crime-ridden, inner-city neighborhood teeming with hookers and drug deals, Halfway House is one man’s story of tragic downfall and recovery from alcoholism in a house full of alcoholics and addicts from all walks of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483519364

Book preview

heaven."

Bad News

It is a rainy Saturday evening in mid-October in Indianapolis, and I’m riding downtown on a bus from a meeting at The Club, a hangout for people in recovery. I can see my face in the bus window, and I’m thinking I look haggard. My skin is sallow and I’ve got bags under my eyes. I can’t weigh more than 160 pounds, and I don’t look good this skinny. Maybe it’s just the lighting, I tell myself. My mind wanders. Then I’m watching out the window at headlights reflecting on the wet pavement and the cars swishing by, windshield wipers slapping back and forth, and up ahead, just below 16th Street, I see the marquee for a gay bar I sometimes go to, and that gets me thinking. Yeah, I felt good saying I was an alcoholic at the meeting earlier, but, hey, it’s not like I’m giving up that much. I’ve only really been sober since whatever time I passed out last night. I mean, I didn’t say that at the meeting. Usually I just mumble my name and: I pass.

I yank the cord and hear the bell before the brakes start groaning to let me off at the corner. I want to get off on the north side, because I’m just that iffy in my decision not to go to the gay bar, even though it’s a Saturday night and I know what a hassle it can be fending off advances from some hammered queen, even with the bartender leaning across the bar saying, Leave the man alone, honey, he’s not interested in you. Besides, lately I’ve been blacking out after the first drink or two, still standing at the kitchen counter with my coat on—then I’m coming to at four in the morning. That’s been going on a lot since early May when I got out of treatment, stayed sober for a couple weeks and then fell off the wagon hoping to get lucky with some gal. Hell, it happened in a bar right downtown. I stopped in to grab lunch and started chatting it up with some forty-ish brunette who seemed—well, like me, a drinker. Then I come out of a blackout and I’m sitting at a table with a much younger African American woman, and apparently we are in the middle of an engaging conversation, and then, cut to: I come out of another blackout and the younger woman’s gone, too, and the bartender is eyeballing me, and I barely have the motor skills to get out of there and walk home.

Anyway, I get off the bus in the drizzle and cross Pennsylvania Street, staying on the north side of 16th, and start walking east, past the art college where I used to do a bit of partying. The art college was one of the attractions of this neighborhood for me when I took my apartment—or memories of the good old days, I should say—because at forty-nine now, I don’t have much to bring to the table for some young art student honey. I’m too old. I don’t look my age yet, but I haven’t taught anywhere in years and years, and these kids don’t want to hear my twenty-year-old lies about New York and poetry readings and artists and writers they’ve never even heard of. The world has changed, and my vision of things doesn’t grab their attention, even though in the last five years I’ve probably done my best writing and my name is out there in some small way. Right this very evening a novel of mine is on the shelves of bookstores in this city and elsewhere, and these kids really might dig that book—it might speak to them—if they knew where to find it, if they actually read it. But they don’t, and they won’t. Somehow I was never able to make a life out my writing in any practical sense, never able to get the kind of exposure that would carry me onto the public stage in a substantial way. Maybe I was just too busy partying and chasing women, I don’t know, but I’m starting to feel like I’m becoming a dinosaur, and I don’t like that. I don’t want to be one of those creepy old guys who hang around campuses or poetry readings and such ogling the young girls.

Continuing east, I pass a four-story apartment building, boarded up and condemned now, where early mornings I see this old guy slip out with his dog for a walk. I think about how my landlord is trying to evict me, the green notice plastered on my mailbox every other month or so, until I get the past due rent paid. Or the telephone gets turned off. Christ! I notice the homeless men downtown now, too, thinking it may not be long for me, what with the boss looking to fire me for absenteeism every couple of months. Last time I thought they had me. I was given an exit interview and I had to sign off on a bunch of paperwork that came down from corporate and everything, but then I noticed they’d screwed it up, they’d miscounted their days. I tried to tell my boss right then, but he says, "Maybe that’s how you want to remember it. He had an assistant manager drive me home as a courtesy. I immediately dug out the paperwork from my last write-up, and yup, there it was. They had miscounted the days. I called an attorney friend who said, What do you want? You got ‘em by the balls."

That was all, like I say, last spring when my girlfriend Bobbie was really putting the heat on me about my drinking—former girlfriend now, I guess. Anyway, I told my boss, when I called and asked him to actually read the paperwork from the last write-up, that all I wanted was treatment for as long as the insurance would carry me, and then day shifts. My boss had no choice.

I don’t know how serious I was about treatment. I probably thought it would get me back in Bobbie’s good graces. I don’t know, but here we are again, the boss is trying to fire me and Bobbie will hardly take my calls. It’s funny about treatment, or rehab—whatever—I’ve done it twice as an in-patient and twice as outpatient, and I thought I was serious at the time. Well, maybe—I was in-patient at the VA in the late ‘80s, but I was looking at a court date, and I also had a court date for one of the outpatient treatment programs I went to. The other two times I was in trouble with whoever my spouse or significant other was at the time. I was always in a lot of uncertainty and ambivalence about the idea of being sober, about the thought of not ever, ever taking another drink. I would make a decision, but then somehow I couldn’t really ever stick to the decision, and I would just sort of let things unfold however they unfolded. Even now, some mornings I come to and there’s three or four beers left and maybe part of a fifth, and I’ll make a decision: no mas, so I’ll pour everything down the sink. But by four o’clock, or whenever my last break is, I’ll go out for a smoke and dart across the street to the drug store and buy one of those fifths of vodka in a plastic bottle that I can sneak in to my locker, and I’ll decide that I can wait till I get home to drink it, but then the bus will be going by as I come out the front door, meaning I’ll have to wait another hour for the next one, so I decide to walk out back by the dumpsters and I end up drinking half the fifth and smoking six or seven cigarettes to kill an hour. It’s shit like this—I can’t seem to make a decision that I won’t go back on.

I cross Central and decide I’d better get something to eat, so I walk diagonally through an empty lot and head into the Kroger supermarket to get a few things. Coming out, it’s raining now, but not hard. I get to the corner, across the street from the liquor store, and I feel another decision get unmade—my legs just carry me across, dodging a couple of cars, and into the liquor store.

It’s one of those dingy little liquor stores where no alcohol or anything else is kept out on the display floor. It’s not like liquor stores downtown or out in the suburbs. The floor is bare linoleum except for dirt and grime. All the liquor and beer and wine are kept behind the counter, behind thick Plexiglas and wire mesh. The sales clerks—two young black women—are behind the Plexiglas and wire mesh, too. You have to communicate with them through a round metal grill in the Plexiglas, and they deliver your booze and cigarettes and whatever else to you through a large sliding metal drawer just below the counter.

I take my place at the end of a line of seven or eight customers, a couple of whom are glancing back with disgusted looks on their faces. I’m wondering what the hell, when I catch a whiff. It smells like somebody just defecated in his pants. After a couple of seconds the smell gets worse, almost like it wraps itself around me in a big hug. Somebody else looks back down the line now. She’s looking at the creature directly ahead of me, who is a wreck of a human being. He’s small and bent, and it’s impossible to tell from looking at him how old he is. He’s too weather-beaten and just plain worn out from living on the street. He’s bundled in two dirty overcoats, with a gray stocking cap pulled down over long matted, unruly gray hair. He glances back at me through red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes and then looks away, muttering something.

Pardon me? I say.

The bum looks back at me again, frightened suddenly. He begins mumbling to himself. He puts his hand into his pants pocket and pulls out a large handful of change, which he now begins to count.

The odor coming off this guy is choking me, robbing me of oxygen, and now it smells a little like he’s pissed himself, too. It’s all I can do to keep my place in line. Of course, I’m not really considering leaving without what I came for.

When the man finishes counting his change he returns it to his pants pocket. He glances back at me a little fearfully again. You okay, buddy? I say. That seems to spook him all over. He looks frantically around him, up at the counter and at some of the others in line, and then back at me. I don’t say anything else to him. I’m afraid I might really rattle him. I just look at the back of his head, trying not to breathe. He seems to alternate between not knowing where he is and panic about his money, mumbling and pulling his change out to recount it. There’s this one moment when he yanks the change out of his pocket where it looks as though he might drop it all on the bare, grimy floor. I think, please, please no. I’m afraid he might completely lose it if that happens.

Finally the bum gets his wine in a paper bag from the metal drawer and then shuffles toward the door. I watch him for a second and it occurs to me that I am just like him; he’s just me without the job and the apartment. Otherwise, we’re the same. We are alcohol-drinking machines. What is happening to me is what has happened to him, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. All I can do is watch it happen. I don’t feel frightened or depressed by this realization. It’s just a fact, an observation that tonight, for whatever reason, isn’t immediately smothered by my sense of denial.

The bum pushes out through the door and I turn back around just in time to see the young black girl behind the Plexiglas mouth the word:

Next.

Yeah, I think. I’m not fooling her either.

I buy cigarettes, beer and bourbon. I come out of the liquor store and look around the parking lot for the little bum, but he is nowhere to be seen.

Bobbie and the counselors at rehab, my doctor, all keep saying things like, You know, man, you keep on the way you’re going, you won’t make it to fifty. I would be okay with that actually. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately. I know I won’t be able to stop, and I know that’s completely insane, but I really can’t see my life without booze. I don’t want a life without drinking, really. Besides, I probably won’t die from a heart attack or cirrhosis of the liver like everybody keeps warning me, anyway. I’ll just go on and on like this guy, sleeping in dumpsters or in a refrigerator carton under a bridge somewhere. Jesus, it could take years.

My problems are the blackouts, the terrible tremors in the mornings, the mood swings, and the deepening depression and loneliness that grab hold of me, and on and on. I mean it’s getting so bad that I couldn’t keep an appointment to look at a new apartment the other day. The building is located on Pennsylvania, not far from the gay bar—an acquaintance that drinks there told me about it—and I had a 1:00 p.m. appointment Sunday to look at it. I had described myself to the building owner, who was driving up from way down on the south side of Indy, and I didn’t drink all morning, and I got there early and I was sweating like a pig. I figured I probably stank, the alcohol coming out of my pores. I started feeling like I was going to faint, too, so I sat on the stoop smoking cigarettes, my hands shaking so bad I could hardly light up. I realized I wouldn’t be able to sign any paperwork, if it even got that far. Finally I bolted for the gay bar and downed two shots and a beer, watching the clock till I figured the guy’s given up on me and left.

Walking home from the liquor store now, I glance around a couple of empty lots and between some apartment buildings, hoping to catch a glimpse of the bum. I don’t know why. There’s nothing I can really do for him. I wonder how he’ll make it through the coming winter.

I let myself into my building and get my mail from the box. I lug my groceries and booze down the hall to my door, unlock, and push in. I don’t waste time. I drop the mail on the floor, dump the groceries on a chair, and head for the kitchen counter. I twist the cap off the bottle of bourbon. I take a big slug, feeling the fire as I swallow. I let it burn its way down my throat, and then I pop the cap on a beer. I take a big, big drink, chugging almost half the can.

Now I feel good. I’m okay. Darkness comes like a giant mouth and swallows me…

* * *

When I tell my story at meetings, looking around the room at my fellow recovering drunks

Reviews for Halfway House

[Marti Bowman · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This true story touched me profoundly, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is dealing with alcoholism. Alcoholism has touched my life through my mother’s and son’s struggles. To read J’s account of his life helped me gain an even deeper understanding of this horrific disease. Thank you J for your candor and humor in sharing your experiences! MB