Your Yellow Bird

Finding myself legless at the bottom of a ditch was neither the beginning nor the end of this story. Beginnings and ends are arbitrary anyway, the end of this story is the beginning of another.

The beginning of this end was on a foggy August morning at London’s Gatwick airport. I dashed in late for a flight to JFK, shouldering my way through the queues. An overbooked flight and a meaningless title got me upgraded to first class, an exceptional turn of events by any measure. As I strolled down the jet way, head held high, I looked forward to an eight hour flight full of hot towels, crisp English stewardesses in short skirts, rare steak and all the free booze I could drink.

I sank contendedly into my La-Z-Boy of a seat and prepared myself for the lavished attentions of British Airways. Relaxed as we taxied and took to the leaden English skies and promptly passed out.

Because. Because I had started the trip to Heathrow that morning the way that I started any trip. Hell, started any day. I had started it with a medicinal dose of ethanol. But this day, a travel day, meant that that dose needed to be increased. To deal with the stress. So, I had spent the entirety of the bus trip to the airport fortifying myself with liquid courage. Drinking away the tremors. Drinking away the tedium. Drinking away the inconvenience of sobriety.

But on that morning, I misjudged. Misunderestimated, as a wise man once said. And I had spent my first, and to this day only, first class trip in a drunken coma. Or in blackout. I still don’t know which.

I came to with a squeeze of a shoulder and the exhortation to return my seat to its full upright position. The haze in my head began to clear with the announcement that we were beginning our descent into JFK and with that descent, the descent of my mood. The disappointment that I had wasted eight hours of luxury quickly gave way to the shame that always accompanied these kind of unforseen alcoholic accidents. They were becoming increasingly and, when I let myself admit it, disturbingly more frequent.  

My final destination was Ithaca, where I had been sent for a fortnight to do some business. Business that I managed to fit in between hours spent alone in a dirty flat systematically working my way through countless bottles of cheap bourbon. When I came to every morning, I finished off the stale amber liquid on my bedside table. Liquid occasionally fortified with protein in the form of drowned flying insects who no doubt enjoyed their final moments. My day properly started, I would muddle through my work for the day before returning to the flat, grilling a steak and tucking in for an evening of  anasthetic drinking. At some point in the evenings I lost consciousness and fell into a blank dreamless sleep. I would come to in the black predawn and repeat.

I had never visited Ithaca, New York before. But I couldn’t summon the energy to explore the place at all. That was where I was at. Paralysis. All I could do, all I wanted to do was to drink. I didn’t want to drink with other people, didn’t want to go to bars. I wanted to be left alone to drink to oblivion. To drink to quiet my head and the voices therein. The voices that were becoming increasingly shrill in their insistence that something was just not right with the way my life was going. I spent two weeks with the only companion whose friendship I really valued. Two weeks sat in that flat, trying to drown in a bottle of whiskey.

Until my last day in New York. I went to Cooperstown.

I went to Cooperstown because I grew up with a love for baseball. And baseball always took me back to a time before things had gone so wrong. A trip to Cooperstown, to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, then would be a pilgrimage to a more innocent time. It would be the thing to shake me out of this funk, to get me back on the right track again.

Except it wasn’t. Because I started the trip to Cooperstown that morning the same way I started any trip. The same way I started every day. And I spent the long drive topping up. Keeping my blood alcohol level high enough to hold off the shakes. Not staying buzzed or happy, but just maintaining. It was the only way I could do anything anymore and while recognizing that driving across upstate New York in a state of mild intoxication was a questionable decision, I considered it safer than the alternative.

When I got to Cooperstown it quickly became clear that I wouldn’t find what I was looking for. Wandering the halls of the Hall, I felt numb. Empty. I watched fathers and sons enjoying a day out together, immersed in the arcanity of the American game. I watched old men trudging happily down memory lane. I watched groups of school children, soaking up chunks of a nation’s history. And I felt nothing. I never felt anything anymore other than an unbearable need that could never be sated.

I left after an hour or so. Feeling the itch, the need. There was Belgian style brewery just down the road from Cooperstown that I wanted to hit before heading back to Ithaca. And there was a fifth of bourbon under the front seat of my rental.

MP3: The Felice Brothers “Cooperstown”

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Image credits:

“Yellow Breasted Crazy Bird Leaving His Tree” – Americo Salazar

The Felice Brothers’ “Yonder Is The Clock” is available from .

Sometimes I wonder what the hell I’m doing here.

There’s something about public transport that nurtures introspection. Riding the bus home today, leaning against the window, basking in the blaze of the Australian summer sun. Coming home from a job that I love, to a partner and two little boys who I adore. On my way home to take my kids to the beach. To play in the surf. Maybe pick up an ice cream. Coming home with a smile on my face like any other regular guy living a regular life.

Yet, I sit there and wonder.

One night when I was 19 I nearly lost my life by my own hand. An overdose of bourbon and pills and melodrama. In my 20’s I went at it in a slower more subtle, but equally effective way – with drugs and sex and bad decisions. In my 30’s, I tried to do it with booze. The means varied, but the attempted ends were always the same. Blackness, numbness. Silence.

I wanted out of my life because I couldn’t deal with who I was. Because I couldn’t fathom how to change, I made self-destruction into an art form.

But despite my best efforts, here I am. A dad. Sober. A productive member of society. A teacher. A non-smoker. Financially solvent.

I can divide my life in two halves – before and after. But which is real?

In the glare of the Australian sun, which renders everything in high contrast, sometimes I feel like a mask is going to melt away and I’m going to be exposed as what I really am. An addict. An alcoholic. A liar. A thief. A cheat. A user. A loser. That this current life, the shiny happy one, is illusory. That I’m going to slip back into the self-destruction that is my genetic program. My fate. The real one.

Sometimes I wonder.

And that, at least a little bit, is what this is about. Because I know that there is no predetermined course for my life. That there is a choice. And I choose this life. And Your Yellow Bird is a way to come to terms with the other life and to leave it behind.

MP3: Sinead O’Connor “All Apologies”

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Sinead O’Connor’s “Universal Mother” is available from .

Image credit: Yellow birds

Supine in a damp ditch under the milky tea sky of a British spring morning, I thought that maybe I was drinking too much. I could quite easily blame the dog, who had been distracted by some skittering in the underbrush. A rabbit, maybe, or a rat more likely. This damned country was teeming with rats. Seven rats for every person, I had read or imagined somewhere.

Rats aside, I was in a bit of a pickle. I had been stumbling along behind the dog, carelessly close to the creek. Paying more attention to finding the perfect song on my iPod than the tedium of where I was going. With an unexpected jerk of the lead the omnipresent slick mud had given way and in an altered state of equilibrium, so had my footing. I had slid a couple of meters down into a creek bed recently flooded by the constant winter rains. A few inches deep in slimy Thames mud, I took stock and nothing seemed seriously damaged excepting my ass and my pride. Convinced that nothing was broken, I turned my irritation at the dog who was crouching sheepishly at the end of his lead. With curses and threats, I began to flounder about trying to find my feet and something to throw.

But then I thought about the vodka. The vodka with which I had started my day. The vodka with which I started every day. The vodka that granted me a reprieve from the dread that came with the first flickers of consciousness. The vodka that calmed the storm in my stomach and steadied my jittering muscles. The vodka that gave me the energy to get out of the house in the morning. The vodka that enabled me to get through another day at a job that I hated with people that I despised. The vodka that made me human enough to maintain the shell of a relationship. The vodka that finally, at the end of the day, brought on blessed unconsciousness.

The vodka that had lubricated my short ride to the bottom of a ditch

And in what I’ve since heard called a moment of clarity, I granted the dog a pardon and thought, “Maybe I’m drinking too much.”

I paused in my bed of oozing mud for a few moments. Then using a scraggly sapling as an aide, pulled myself erect, took stock of the state of my clothes – muddy. Standing in four inches of loose river mud seemed slightly less destitute than laying in four inches of loose river mud. And nobody had seen me fall. And the aching in my hindquarters wasn’t really that bad. I probably had time to shower again before work and change clothes.

I reached into the inner (secret) pocket of my dripping jacket and pulled out a travel bottle of Sainsburys’ vodka and took a long, luscious pull. The familiar warmth cascaded down my throat and hit the pit of my stomach with an anaesthetic punch.

And that uninvited clarity just melted away.

MP3: Drive-by Truckers “(Something’s Go To Give) Pretty Soon”

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Image credit: Folk art yellow bird

The Drive-by Truckers superb “Decoration Day is available from .

Why?

Because I want to be able to write without worrying what my Mom or my in-laws or some random stumbling work colleague thinks. Because I want the freedom offered by an impenetrable mask of anonymity. Because I want to write about the darkest secrets that lurk unwanted deep in the white matter of my cerebral cortex. Because memory is fickle and I neither want to regret the past nor shut the door on on it. Because I have stories that I have to tell that are too painful or private for a ‘public’ forum. Because writing them down makes them hurt less.

And why ‘Your Yellow Bird’? Because of this song.

And my friend comes after work
When the features start to blur
She says these bars are filled with things that kill
By now you probably should have learned
Did you forget that yellow bird?
How could you forget your yellow bird?

Probably doesn’t answer the question, but hopefully things will become clearer as we go along.

MP3: Bright Eyes “We Are Nowhere And It’s Now”

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Bright Eyes’ “I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning” is available from .

Image credit: Moberg Gallery