Memory Hole

My people come from Boston by way of Ireland. I'm the son of a man who drank every day since he was fifteen and only got three DUI's in his lifetime. I went to college in Iowa, where every crop can be turned into whiskey. Which is to say that I am a 5'11, 150 lb, twenty-three-year-old. unassuming, bookish Freak of Liver. Throat wide as a sewage pipe, a roaring tunnel of beer and pickle juice. I pride myself on marksmanship, and so always vomit into a toilet with minimal splash. I'm the drunkest man in the room and you'd never even know. 

I remember making an Australian vegetarian cry in Barcelona. 

Skulls and spiked helmets were super glued to the walls. I lost several arm wrestling matches to a guy in his mid-thirties on one of the fold-out, padded, wrestling setups in-between the other biker memorabilia. We competed for drinks, and I paid out three in a row. My body is slight, but my fight is hulking and dumb - amplified by liquor. I knew I’d lose but I couldn’t stop myself; no way I could win against this guy, but he had to know I wasn’t afraid of embarrassment. 

Nor could I stop myself from making the Australian, twenty years old, jubilant, and naive, cry. She was “on holiday” before starting “uni.” She wanted to study environmental science and marine biology, save the reefs with charm alone. She dove regularly in the Pacific Ocean and never once considered being eaten by a shark.

A group of us sat around one of the arm wrestling benches, salt on the rims of our glasses. I described the virtues of meat to the Australian and her older sister in florid detail. How rare flesh tastes, the juices, the texture of baby cow versus more mature beef. Tacos, filet mignon, salami, breaded chicken, dark meat! My mouth watered as she grew more uncomfortable. I had visions of barbecues and the halal method of slaughter, where the lamb never sees the knife coming. 

At first, I thought she was joking, putting on a show of sensitivity, so I leaned in all the harder, invoking five-gallon buckets under a suspended deer, the animal cut and dripping from pubis to sternum. I told her to drink from the bucket of my mind and what she found there was hot and stank of pennies. 

But then she put her fingers in her ears and started singing to herself. That’s when I saw the tears in the red neon. My teasing went too far and I was angry and embarrassed, just as she must have been in that moment, angry and embarrassed. I think I was jealous of her: the marine biology, the diving, the belief that people are essentially good and that there is a solution to every problem. 

I grew up with lies and predators who loved me. On the nights he actually came home, dad sat in the driveway for hours, making phone calls and spiking a single can of ginger ale with the vodka bottle he kept in his car, again and again, until the ginger ale was actually spiking the vodka. He thought he was so slick all those years, but the screaming matches and the text messages from misstresses and the explosions of drunken self-righteousness will were as impossible to hide as his red face.  

The man who beat me at arm wrestling and I went outside onto the cobbled street for a cigarette. He spoke of his wife and aging, how he couldn’t stay out drinking late anymore like he used to. At that point, it was four in the morning and we’d been drinking since eight or nine. The bar wasn't closed yet and I had a hunger brewing. 

Before we went back inside he told me about Catalonia, about the giants that lived there before people, about how their bones littered the hills.