Your Fate….

You will state your first name and the phrase “and I’m an alcoholic” to a small group assembled in a church basement.  But that won’t help at all.  No more than the court ordered treatment that came later.  Or the “intervention,” which was more of a beating and robbery on the steps of your apartment, but you like to tell it like it was a gathering of concerned friends and family. 

Decades into this lifestyle, you will see your father’s obituary in the newspaper at 2 a.m., and come up with a great idea.   You go to his house, break a window, climb through, cut your head, hands, arms and legs, fall to the floor, pick yourself up and finally arrive bloody before an antique cabinet with glass doors protecting a lifetime’s worth of personal trinkets – an army medal, a railroad watch, a leather bound children's book from the 19th Century, a woman’s wedding band tied with a decaying ribbon, and many other things – most importantly – a pint of Soldier’s Joy Whiskey, which your great-grandfather gave to your grandfather on the day your father was born. 

There is a brief twang of unidentifiable feelings, but you will figure this bottle is, after all, your heritage.   Fuck your siblings. They don’t need it.  The cabinet’s locked.  You break the glass.  A faded tax stamp has come loose from the dusty wax seal over a cork. You rifle through the kitchen drawers looking for the bottle opener.  You open another hole in your hand with the screw as you struggle to remove the cork, which crumbles as you pull it out.

You hold the bottle up in a drunken salute to ancestors and raise the bottle to your lips.  It tastes wrong. You have to take two more significant slugs before you can state with an uncharacteristic clarity that it ain't whiskey.  It’s stale water.  And bitters.  And pieces of old cork.  And disappointment.