In the morning there is passing through my wasted body a slime of the night before. It burns on my throat and my ass. I can see in it’s smell the dark sea. The dancing laughing forms. The long walk staggering left to right. The affection and confidences I did not mean. I see wasted time spilling out of my bowels in all its noxious glory.
But there is another side. for though it may be dangerous for a mind such as mine to drink; to steal from a precious store of bliss too much for one night and so leave the mind reeling in the morning to go with out. There is romance in drinking. And there is warmth and companionship as well. And, for some, and only in the right light for an unseen moment, there may even be god.
Not for me any more any how. Not for me. But one morning in Guatemala I woke up, in some one’s summer time share. In all of the clothes I was wearing the night before on an Indian woven wool blanket in the stone paved entry way. I was being spooned by a very attractive, but very suspect young argentinian who I was certain was not there the night before. He had an erection. I lifted his arm up and away from my shoulder like it were a perfectly legitmate -if vaguely offensive- sheet and sat up. The sun was shining and tropical birds were twerping in through open doors and windows and the verdant succulents of central America. I was the lone wakeful in dream land. Every where were little heaps of sleeping hippies gilded with the morning sunlight. And I had one hell of a hang over. The kind that makes your hands shake. The kind that makes you wonder if maybe instead of wine last night you were drinking about nine or ten large brillo pads you’d possibly found under a sink some where soaking in a bucket of human excrement.
Perhaps it was something else, or perhaps it was that the hangover was so stinkingly wretchedly vile that it made my body as uninhabitable as a bathroom stall some stranger had just vomited all over and my soul was instead floating a little bit above my head until the stink cleared out, but in addition to feeling weak and sick, I also felt euphoric. I walked out of the summer time share, down the little dirt path that led up to it, through the tiny grey stone made town of San Marcos, and down to the edge of Lake Atitlan in search of a café to drink something cold and healthy tasting in. in my memory it was very early in the morning. The hippies were all still sleeping, and I didn’t see any one in town. But I probably did see some folks in town, they were probably locals, wearing their clothes and being their height and speaking their language and going about their business and looking to me admittedly to be a part of the scenery. San Marcos was a relatively untouristed part of the lake. It could have been any time of the afternoon, but it was morning to me.
I had never had a hangover like this before and I’ve only had one since, on new year’s day in New Orleans last year. My heart was jumping around in slow exstatic moon leaps and I was smiling and smiling little secret smiles that steal warmly across the face like when you’re remembering the recent kissy endearments a lover has whispered to you. I was alone. Alone in the world. I was alone under a heap of miles of countries that weren’t mine and piles of languages I didn’t speak and no one that ever cared for me could dig me out of them. I had burrowed down into them all on my lonesome like hiding in bed clothes on a sad day to escape the pain I had in my heart from being left by a boy I had sincerely loved. In the cheesy immortal words of Jimmy Buffet I was wasting away again in margaritaville.
A couple of months earlier, in the worst winter Seattle had seen in sixty years; in a house in the Central District where I lived with a good friend and her sister and her sister’s husband and their young daughter, I learned that according to numerology and the tarot, not only was that year my year of the hermit, but the card that represented this lifetime I am living is also the hermit: an old lonely recluse with a lantern, searching the world for one honest man. I had recently been ostencibly forgotten all about by a man I was hopelessly in love with. I didn’t like being told my soul was an old hermit. But having spent a month or two reeling in town under the weight of this failure, I took the bus one day from work in Madison valley to University Avenue in the University district to buy one round trip plane ticket to and from Mexico city leaving in two months and returning three after that, and a Lenard Cohen anthology to get me through the interim. Like a good little hermit.
I realize that having our heroine believing in tarot cards and numerology and astrology and the like is just the sort of self centered wishy washy tripe to make one put down the silly book this girl is writing and go back to a comfortable existence knowing that the author herself is self centered, wishy washy, silly and has accomplished no more than you have in fact maybe less. But I’ll have you know I can read palms. When I am drunk I am very good at reading palms. My best friend recently told me that there was no mysticism to this; that I am simply one remarkably accomplished bullshitter and when I drink my capacity for bullshitting borders on divine inspiration. An assertation that I find at once more flattering and less believable than that I might actually have psychic powers.
Walking through the town of San Marcos, smiling with bliss attempting to burst out of my heart while bile wanted equally to burst out of my ass, throat or pores, I thought about myself being the hermit. In all the time that had passed in pain, in reaching out for a man who wasn’t there, in speaking to the people who wanted to care for me and hearing the garbled nonsense that was coming out my mouth, and watching their furrowed brows trying to believe that I was making sense, I felt finally gleeful again. And I was gleefully alone. I was laughing, alone. Every one was funny and every one was wonderfully doing exactly what they do. And the trees and the lake were doing exactly what they do. And I was doing exactly what I do. And I was alone.
Of course I didn't stay gleeful. That day of euphoria was more like one panicked gulp of air to a drowning person than it was the first breath of freedom to the recently imprisoned. But it was nice.
Of course I didn't stay gleeful. That day of euphoria was more like one panicked gulp of air to a drowning person than it was the first breath of freedom to the recently imprisoned. But it was nice.
