Robert Gets Clean

This is a short story I wrote for my Creative Writing class. Hope you enjoy! 4-1-13

The room was a mess. It seemed as if a hurricane had attacked a city made of pizza boxes and beer cans. The bed sheets had fallen off, and stuck to the beer-glazed floor. It had been a rough night. Come to think of it, they were all rough nights. Robert lay asleep, half-hanging off the bed. In a few seconds, his alarm would shake him from his stupor. Today’s date had been marked on the wall calendar for weeks. Sera was coming. Today was the day. Robert had to clean up.

                As he opened his eyes he found himself face to face with the pamphlet, lying open, tethered to the vinyl floor. Step 4: The unflinching, unforgiving self-inventory. In the past 30 years, Robert must have hit that wall two dozen times. He held no illusions of what kind of life he had led. But all the same, writing it all down seemed more daunting than swimming the length of the Mississippi. Part of him felt that he had an alibi at the pearly gates if he didn’t put his crimes on paper. But he would have to change that. Today was the day.

                As he surveyed the room, he knew a deep clean was overdue. It was necessary. He didn’t want Sera to see him like this. It was bad enough he was still in Nutbush, the pit of a neighborhood in Central Memphis. He might have been the last white man in a 3 mile radius. He hadn’t stepped a foot out of Memphis in ten years, and then it had only been a jaunt up to Millington to see his mother. But he could only fix a few things today, and the first would be the weeks of trash he’d let pile up. That was easy. Bottles, boxes and bags, all empty, like Robert. They were past sins, the easiest to let go of. He took out a garbage bag and filled it. And then another. After 8 bags he’d finally got the worst of it cleaned up.

                He stumbled out to the dumpster. The apartment next to his had the windows open to invite a breeze. No air conditioning in the summer was a fate worse than death. They had their radio on full blast, using it like a fan. He tossed the bundle of trash bags in. Done. Everything in those bags was behind him.

After the garbage was taken out, the floor needed to be scrubbed. The whole place was disgusting. Booze was the only thing that made it livable. Pops would have died of shame to see Robert scrubbing the floors, hung over. Pops had been a good-for-nothing drunk too, but his floors had always been spotless. Momma had made sure of that. She had been the ever patient Protestant woman. Cleaning up after her husband in the morning and praying for his soul at night. She got him to work every day at the airport. The key to functional alcoholism is a long-suffering woman. Perla had been that kind of woman. But Robert had found a way to ruin that too. He always found a way.

The worst of the stains wouldn’t come out, but at least now someone could walk from the kitchen to the bed without worry of getting trapped like a cockroach. The bed needed some work as well. Robert had shared his bed with a hundred other women since Perla left, but each one was just as anonymous as a bottle in a brown bag. They were all addicts, like him; victims to pleasure and a lure of painless existence. He had brought them all back here for a time, and they shared their drugs of choice: booze, coke, meth, sex. In the end the supply would dry up and both parties would move on. Being a drunk means a life of revolving doors. As Robert stripped the sheets he thought of everything and everyone he’d tried to use to black out his memory of Perla. She wasn’t like those other girls. She had been clean, pure. She’d never shared as much as a glass of wine with him. She wouldn’t even let him bed her till the Padre pronounced them man and wife. It was hard to tell what bothered Pops more: Robert marrying a Puerto Rican, colored and Catholic, or the fact that for one instance, Robert had seemed happy.

The trip down to the laundry room was unpleasant. Nobody in the complex cared about tidying up any more the Robert. The whole place reeked of sloth and vice. Oh, Sera was going to be in for a surprise tonight when she saw the landfill her father was living in. But Robert couldn’t fix that. He could just fix his apartment. As he threw his dirty clothes into the washer he caught his reflection in a mirror to his right. Lord Almighty, he’d gotten old. His hair was all white now, but his teeth were far from it. He looked every bit the town drunk. Well, it was time to clean that up too.

He left his wash in the dryer to go freshen up. Crime may be rampant in the area, but he felt all right leaving some old clothes unattended. He’d gotten used to not having anything of value. He had a medal from Vietnam somewhere in his house, which he supposed must be worth something. He chuckled to himself as he realized it had been 40 years since he did something respectable. And that was in Vietnam. Whole lotta good he’d done. Last time he checked the old VC had taken Hanoi, and his year of duty had been for nothing. It was fitting somehow. Everything in his life had ended poorly, why shouldn’t he be part of the first war America had lost? It wasn’t all for nothing, he reminded himself. Military pensions were the only thing he could subsist on, now that they’d taken his disability checks away.

Robert turned on the shower, which was freezing cold. The water heater hadn’t worked in months. It was actually a blessing in disguise, as the cold water made him feel more alert, more sober. This was the time. He was done with the sauce. He looked at his naked body and the toll it had taken over the years. He was fat. Scars ran up and down his body from bar fights and drunken accidents and God knows what else. He ached. This is what the glorious body God had given him had turned to: a beat up Volkswagen that ought to have been junked years ago.

There was a part of Robert that was feeling better already. He felt like a hard exterior was being peeled back. The soft spot in his heart was opening again. Sera had that effect on him. She made him feel like he had a future. He’d named her after his mother, Sarah, but altered the spelling when Perla explained that the Spanish word será meant will be. He liked that. Sera could be anything she wanted to be. She didn’t have to be like her father.

The final step of the clean was the hardest. He needed to empty out his cabinet. He needed to get rid of all his alcohol. Bottles were easy. They were past sins. But these unopened bottles of whiskey? They were his future sins. If this hadn’t been the day he swore he would start his sobriety, one or two of these bottles would have been singing him to sleep tonight. He remembered his first drink as a teenager: a shot of rum. It had made his innocent head float gently into the clouds. It had made him feel warm. His first time being drunk he’d made sure that he took in every wonderful feeling. This was how Pops felt all the time.

He remembered the wine at his wedding: the taste of virginal bliss. He remembered sharing whiskey with his platoon the night before he’d seen half of them blown up. That was the only two images he could muster of them; their bodies blown to bits, and their immature giggling of the night before. Alcohol had marked every moment of his life. And that’s when it truly dawned on him: alcohol had marked every moment of his life.

This was the liquid that had made his childhood a nightmare. This was the poison that had lost him every job he’d ever earned. This was the rat piss that stole Perla from him. Perla could put up with it all, until he strayed. That was when she must have known that the alcohol had truly replaced her. When Robert could spend all night with another woman, just a bottle of whiskey and a bed, that was when the marriage was over. Robert only ever cheated once. But it was all it took for Perla to take Sera and disappear.

His knuckles grew white as he clutched the bottle of Jameson. How pathetic. He was a child that had been so obsessed with his candy; he’d forgotten to grow up. This bottle was the devil. He’d sold his soul for a quick fix. He took it right to the curb and threw it as hard as he could at the ground: steps 5 through 7 all in one. It shattered, sending shards of glass across the gutter. He felt a little weight release of his shoulders. He ran into the apartment and grabbed another one. This is for Perla! This is for Momma! This is for Sera!

At six in the evening a brand new silver Civic pulled into Nutbush. The driver, a sharp woman in her thirties carefully examined each street sign, looking for the right one. She was on a mission. She had come to the dirtiest part of the city to pull the last bit of her childhood out of it. She’d been a toddler here, but nothing looked familiar. Everything looked like a miniature Mexico now. She pulled over to the curb. A few Chicanas were loitering on the sidewalk.

“Oye, chicas. Estoy buscando los apartamentos Berclair.”

“You lost, girl. There ain’t no country clubs around here.”

The woman got out of the car. She was taller than the Chicanas had expected. But they were right; in a pencil skirt and high heels, she fit in about as well here as a presidential motorcade. She saw directly ahead of her, a sign with peeled white paint. Berclair Apartments. Just outside she saw a man sitting on the curb, hands cuffed behind his back. A police officer stood behind him, scribbling on his notepad. If only this had been the first time she’d seen this sight.

“Officer, that’s my father. I’m here to pick him up.”

The officer gave her an odd expression that was hard to read behind his sunglasses.

“Well, he made a pretty big mess. It looks like he made his own little Rodney King riot. The landlord said its gonna take him months to clean up all this glass”

“Look, I work for the state. I’d be willing to pay whatever in damages...”

“Nah,” the cop smiled, “just get him outta here and keep an eye on him. First time I ever seen him sober.”

 The cop reached down and unlocked the cuffs and took them off her father’s hands. The old man spun around, his eyes were full of tears. There was a look here that Sera had never seen.

“Papa, are you ok?”

Robert gave his daughter a fatherly look, one he hadn’t mustered in years. There were still 3 bottles of whiskey in the cabinet. He wanted them like hell. The withdrawals were killing him. In fact, they probably would. He would think about those bottles tomorrow. He’d think about them every goddamn day for the rest of his life. But he couldn’t even pretend he minded now.

“Let’s get outta here, Sera. My life is over. My life is over, and I’m ready to start a new one.”