CHAPTER EIGHT

The following is an excerpt from the book Stream of Unconsciousness available on the Amazon and Barnes and Noble websites.

Everything seemed normal at home when I arrived. The kids were home from school and were doing homework in their respective rooms upstairs. Lauren was in her office doing something that was keeping her busy. The housekeeper was downstairs in the kitchen preparing dinner. The smell of dinner was floating through the air. Taco night.

I loved taco night. I never had much of an appetite during my coke binges, and trying to make it look like I was eating required Houdini-like skills to hide the food. Pretending to eat tacos, though, was a piece of cake. With other types of meals, chicken, for instance, it was a challenge to pretend that I was actually eating dinner while seated at the table with my family. Tacos, on the other hand, were easy to manipulate to my advantage. I would take a few bites, put the taco back on my plate and let it unfold spilling out the contents. I would then push everything around on the plate to make it look as though I was making progress eating my food. If I really wanted to make it look as though I was eating, I’d push a load of food with my fork into my napkin and surreptitiously dump it into the trashcan conveniently located behind me.

I quietly entered the house and went upstairs, heading straight for my closet. I closed the door and removed the bag of coke from my front pocket in my shorts and put it in the inside pocket of the third suit jacket from the left on my coat rack. It was an old Brooks Brothers suit that was hip when I bought it a decade ago and was now grossly out of style. Now it made itself useful as my designated cocaine jacket. I had selected that particular suit because it had a small obscure inside pocket in the coat that housed my Baggie of coke perfectly. It was also a particularly heinous looking suit that I figured I would never wear again.

Over the years the jacket had become disfigured from my coked-up fingers desperately reaching into its pockets for my stash of coke. Noticing the damage I had done to the suit from many frantic forays into the inside pocket made me perversely happy that I had selected it instead of one of my nicer, more contemporary suits.

Normally, after I stashed the coke I would then hide my whiskey and beer. To get the alcohol into the house from the trunk of my car, I had to wait for the right moment. Like today, when I got home from work, I would creep into the house and perform a little reconnaissance, taking particular notice of where Lauren and the kids were located. If they were upstairs, the coast was clear for me to run back to my car, grab my supply of alcohol and go into the garage. From there, I transferred the booze into my gym bag and carried it with me upstairs to my closet.

I had another suit selected for my whiskey bottle. Fifth suit from the left. Gray with cream-colored pin stripes. Although it was a good quality classic suit, it rode too high in the crotch and was just too uncomfortable to wear. Yet it had a large inside pocket, perfect for my whiskey bottles. It too had become mangled from housing pints of booze day after day. The pocket, which I imagine was designed more for things like reading glasses or business cards, was actually starting to come off from constant use. Fortunately, when the time came for me to break in another suit for a hiding place, I had a vast selection of out of style late eighties suits from my days as a lawyer to choose from.

Hiding beer bottles was easy. I would just stick them in shoes in the back of the closet under some sweatshirts. If, for some reason, I purchased cans of beer instead of bottles, they would be disposed of by crushing them flat as a pancake and placing them in between sweatshirts that were stacked on the top shelf of my closet. In the morning, I went through my closet, rounded up all my “empties” and put them in my gym bag. At some point before I left the house for work, I would take the gym bag down to the garage along with a brown paper grocery bag. With the door closed to the garage, I transferred the empties from the gym bag to the brown paper bag. I then would walk out to my car, throw the bag of bottles in my back seat and dispose of them in some back alley trashcan on the way to work. I had it down to a science.

Tonight I would forgo my whiskey-and-beer-hiding ritual since I had skipped the liquor store and come straight home, thanks to my friend, the stalker. I decided to check my “liquor suit” to see if by chance I had blacked out from the night before leaving precious unopened liquor abandoned inside the coat pocket. After a frantic check I was pleasantly surprised: nearly a pint of whiskey was resting peacefully in its cozy pocket. What a relief! I had no idea how or when it got there. It was there and that was the important thing. I had found a silver lining to the day. I decided to wage my luck in the bonus round in the hope that I would find a surprise beer stash as well. I went to the back of the closet where I normally hid the beer and looked under some clothes. Bingo! We have beer. Two bottles of Mickey’s and an Amstel Light. These newly found treasures should have alarmed me, yet instead gave me reason to rejoice.

I never paused to consider the fact that I had no idea they were there in the first place. Just how blitzed did I get the night before? When and where did I get it? Was it possible that this was a small example of how bits of my life had become lost? Going to a store, selecting booze, driving back home and hiding them are not insignificant chores. Yet I had no recollection of these actions. This revelation would normally be the kind of thing that might cause me to pause and consider what in the fuck was I doing to myself. What should have been obvious to me was that I wasn’t anywhere near normal. In my current state that fact never crossed my mind, and it certainly was not a concern. In that moment, when I discovered the cache of booze, I was relieved I had the necessary alcoholic supplies for the evening and counted my blessings. I was on track to drink myself into a stream of unconsciousness. Nothing else mattered. …