Now or Never 10

What a strange and beautiful day.
When I went to bed last night, I knew I’d wake up with a niggling little headache. It wouldn’t be a big, thrusting one. This would be a teasing reminder from King Alcohol that he was still boss.
When the alarm went off at eight, I opened my eyes to another day and King Alcohol spoke.
‘Look at you, in your pathetic little dry-house pretending that you don’t need me any more. Look at you, surrounded by fucked up gangsters waiting to be sent down, thieves and tramps fresh from detox staying clean to get a flat. Losers! You know damn well you’re not one of them. You’re better than that.’ He took a breath. ‘You could walk away from people like that when you were with me, couldn’t you, but not now. Ha! And you’ve got a tincy wincy headache. You never got a headache with me, did you, unless you drank too much, of course. You’ll never be able to live without me. You’re always knackered and you can’t think straight, can you? Admit it! You’re nothing without me.’
Sure enough, the teasing little niggler of a headache registered itself in the wires of my right eye, so I got out of bed and brushed my teeth.
‘Look at you, you soppy git,’ said King Alcohol. ‘You don’t look any better than when you were drinking so why do you bother? Christ, you’re such a loser, just like all the idiots moaning and groaning at those AA meetings, spewing their shit about God and serenity. You really can’t see how stupid you are, can you?’
I nodded ‘no’ to the mirror and carried on brushing my teeth.
There was a lot to do today.
The two best things about being sober are, a. being able to see things the way they really are and, b. having the guts to do something about it. For me, Strength and courage= No Booze, just as Pain and Anger=Booze.
I’m not talking about you, mind; just me.
I went downstairs and had breakfast; bacon and eggs. Sometimes I’ll have corn flakes or Alpen but today I wanted bacon and Old Cotswold Legbar. Before, I’d have had a spliff and a coffee or tea, but certainly no breakfast.
After a quick roll-up, I went to the office to be breathalysed and told J about my appointment at the hospital.
I left and walked to the car.
On the way, there was a snarled-up bit of traffic so I skirted around the back way and looked for a space outside the dogs’ racetrack where I knew there was a strip of free parking. Not surprisingly, it had been turned into a bus stop so I decided to go into the car park of the racetrack and ask the greasy spoon if I could park there on the condition that I bought two rank coffees, one then and one on my return. The young blonde girl said it would be OK.
These are the lengths I go to in defiance of the extortionate rates for parking at the NHS.
So I started walking down the road and past the cemetery with my wee head tapping away and telling me that her boss’d find out and clamp me. It poured down.
When I got to the head of the queue at Ear, Nose and Throat, I was told that I’d got the wrong date. It was for Friday 8 October.
I’d been to get my throat seen on the Monday just gone, and that appointment had been brought forward from Monday 4 October, so my brain decided to think that today was Friday 8 October when it was still only September 24. Today’s appointment was to get the lowdown on straightening my nose and unblocking the passage of the right nostril, which has been a bit of a problem for about twenty years since getting it broken at The Moscow in Bayswater during my punk days.
If I’d been on the sauce, I’d have lost it there in the queue, somehow finding a way to blame them for messing up my day when I knew damn well that I’d made the mistake, but I’m not on the sauce and I didn’t crack up. Instead, I calmly walked out, joking about my thickness with the receptionist as I went.
Another thing about getting sober is that you want to take care of yourself and correct the neglect piled up over the years.
I’d noticed a lump in a rather private place about two months ago and had it seen by the GP, who’d made an appointment for me to have an X-ray done, but I’d missed it. You see, the brain’s finding recovery hard to manage and things just go by the by from time to time. I’m so used to constantly worrying or thinking about the next beer/spliff/horse/pound-note that I forget the simplest of things.
So I went down to the ward that deals with X-rays and told the lady there that I’d missed my appointment and could I please have another one. Lo and behold, someone had cancelled and I could have it done next Tuesday.
I thanked her kindly and left.
And another thing about giving up the sauce is that you need to be sure that everything’s OK in all ways, so I went to the clinic that deals with HIV tests and had blood taken for hepB, hepC and HIV. I didn’t sweat up when the pretty young nurse put the needle in and left with a goody-bag of johnnies, hoping that the results would be fine.
Back at the racetrack car park, the car stood untouched so I got a cup of tea (30p cheaper and funds are down), took two sips and left.
You must be thinking, ‘Christ, this guy’s a real drain on the system now he’s not drinking’, and you’d be right.
When I was on everything, I was the idiot best friend of landlords, the taxman, the authorities and the middle-classes. Working, paying two rents and two sets of bills (until I became homeless), spending most of my leftover money on drink, gambling, petrol and tobacco (which are taxed at about 80%), smoking myself into oblivion, hardly ever in trouble with the law, and all for a nice early death.
What a wonderful system it is, too.
It wasn’t even midday so I went back to the house and had some lunch.
The council had written to me to justify my rent etc. and needed a reply immediately so I got back in the car and drove to the civic centre with the necessary paperwork. I found a spot with an hour’s worth of free parking and strutted. On the way, I counted all the shops that had closed or gone bust. There were twenty-nine. The only ones still open were takeaways, mini-marts, accountants, banks, lawyers and one undertaker.
The queue was short and I was seen by yet another lovely young girl, who photocopied my papers and let me go with an eye-flutter.
You see, the colour comes back into the cheeks after a while off the sauce and the ladies get interested again. All they really need to know is that you’re not a deadhead and that you want to live a life.
After that, I checked for emails in the library and took out a copy of George Orwell’s collected essays (a real find).
Then I posted a few letters (one to justify, yet again, my alcoholism to the benefits people, who seem to be more in denial than I am, the other to justify my national insurance contributions from years past, which they conveniently keep on ‘losing’, and another an application form to learn extra parenting skills for when I get to see the kids again).
On the way back to the car, I wondered if an over-ambitious parking warden had stalked me and staked out the car using his digital camera, but, approaching the corner to where the car was, I looked at my phone and saw that I still had one minute to spare.
It was only twenty-past two, so I drove to the charity shop where I’d offered to volunteer for the afternoon and arrived twenty minutes early.
I knew that parking restrictions ended at three o’clock in this area, so I parked up and saw a warden plodding from car to car, an officious vulture.
I got out and asked him if it was OK to park where I was as there was only twenty minutes to go, but he said no.
Then (and he looked as if he was going against every rule in the book), he told me that the first twenty minutes were free if I pressed the green button.
I got the free ticket, placed it on the dash and waltzed into the charity shop as if I owned the place.
I’d arrived for duty!
The lady there, M, was brilliant and we knocked up a great rapport in seconds. She’d recently opened up in the next-door shop selling furniture and pictures, so I set to task cleaning glass-topped tables, arranging new stock and generally tidying up the place.
Once I’d done that, I went back to the other shop and made tea for us.
After that, we opened up some plastic bags that needed sorting and pricing. She’s a good sort and showed me the ropes in a respectful way.
I went outside for a roll-up and noticed a familiar face from the telly walking by.
He was a presenter on BBC London (aired after the six o’clock national news). I realised that he was the guy that goes around town in search of a topical story; Mike someone, a decent-looking chap. Once I finished smoking, I went back inside and told M.
‘I saw him too,’ she said. ‘He was looking at the shop and talking to his cameraman about something.’
Mike walked past again so I went outside and saw him stop at a silver Mercedes van.
‘Shall I go and see if he’ll film his thing outside the shop?’ I asked M.
‘I dare you,’ she replied, so off I went.
Walking down the street, I imagined myself being interviewed and saying hi to the children into the camera so they could see me, just to make contact, even if it was only on telly and not there with them.
When I got to the van, Mike and his two assistants were looking at screens in the back of the van.
‘I don’t mean to bother you, but I was wondering if you’d like to film outside the charity shop I’m working at,’ I said in an even tone.
‘Oh, hi,’ said a man with a baseball cap sat next to the screens. ‘Yeah, we saw you earlier on. Thought about doing it there. Looked really sexy.’ The others had a friendly sman.
I put my hands in my pockets and laughed.
Mike gave a smile. ‘Sorry, we’ve already done it,’ he said.
I walked back up to the shop and told M.
‘That’s a shame. Would have been good for publicity.’
I nodded and made us another cuppa.
There wasn’t much custom, which we put down to being the last Friday of the month, so we chatted and I told her a bit about myself.
‘I really admire people that give up drinking,’ she said.
I pursed my lips and nodded. Here we go, I thought.
Then, as is sometimes the way, especially with good, honest drinkers, M opened up about her own intake. She’d grown up in pubs as her folks were publicans and then shown a talent as a pub singer, which she’d done on and off for years.
‘Thing is, I’m a shy person so I’d always have a drink to get up on stage,’ she said.
‘You should go on the X Factor,’ I said.
‘Oh no,’ she replied, sheepishly, ‘I’m too old for that.’
Then she let it all out. She was drinking way too much and her boyfriend drank more than she did. She’d given up once, losing two stone, but got bored in the end. There was a determined look in her eyes, though, as if she wanted to give it another go, then it went again, probably thinking about her boyfriend’s reaction and losing him.
‘Can’t you just smoke pot once in a while and not have a drink?’ she asked.
‘Nah,’ I replied, ‘it’s like changing deckchairs on the Titanic. You know, dancing on the grave and all that.’
She liked that. I’d heard it at a meeting. You get some really funny characters from time to time.
Just before closing, I fished out a lumberjack-style checked shirt and bought it at half-price (discount for volunteers). M asked if I’d like to do Fridays on a regular basis and I said yes.
We said goodbye and I started driving to the house. My mind was overflowing with amazingly colourful thoughts. A calm, joyful sensation of self-belonging rested within me. All lights were green, all roads were clear, all worries were swept away. Even the headache, which was still there, didn’t bother me.
I remembered having this serene feeling when I was clean all those years ago and I knew it was all down to the beautiful mixture of doing something useful for no financial gain and passing on the message of sobriety to someone who could use it.
When I got back, there was no one in. S and T had gone to a meeting for once, F was doing whatever he does in his room, and R and B were visiting a move-on house outside London, so I made some supper and flicked through some channels. In the end, I resigned myself to the X Factor, which I thought I hated.
I watched a coloured guy doing his thing with his two daughters waiting backstage.
Once he’d been given the thumbs up by all three judges, he ran to see his children and hugged them. The younger one said ‘It’s very very very very very very fantastic!’ just like my younger one and I burst into tears.
After I’d regained composure, S and S came back and I told them I’d cried at the X Factor. They burst into laughter.
‘If I went on the X Factor, I’d do a ten-foot shit and tell the judges to get on their knees and eat it,’ said S. He’s always joking around.
‘That hooker’s on it tonight, int she?’ said T.
‘What?’ said S. ‘The thousand pound a night tart in the papers?’
‘I wonder what she does for a thousand pound a night,’ I said.
S pounced on his chance to expel his lewd hatred of women. ‘I’d cheese-grate her face, rub it in my shit, hair and all, then I’d tie her up and plate the fuckin bitch so she couldn’t walk for a week. That’s what I’d get her to do for a thousand pound a night.’
T laughed in a contrived way. He’s only just joined the house and seems like a good bloke. Impressionable but not past saving.
‘You’re a sick man,’ he said, jokingly.
‘That’s why I’m here, innit,’ replied S. ‘Gotta ‘ave a laugh, incha.’
What a strange and beautiful day.