Initial Script - Off the Wagon by Rosalind Meadows
Oct 27, 2015 11:35:32 GMT
Post by joannem on Oct 27, 2015 11:35:32 GMT
Off the Wagon
by Rosalind Meadows
Hello, my name is Darrel and I'm an alcoholic. It's been almost two years since my last drink; well it had been until last night. I've been having a real tough time of it lately, and I guess I back slid. They're back, you see, the monsters from my childhood, the nightmares too, and I don't think I can deal with them without the sauce. This isn't the first time, but this time, oh man, I think I made a huge mistake.
You're all going to laugh at me, I've been laughed at before, and I don't care. I just have to get this off my chest. I started drinking to forget something I couldn't remember in the first place, except deep down in the reptilian part of my mind. It was an instinctual dread, like the rabbit that shrinks at the shadow overhead. I remember lying awake terrified, but not knowing why.
The night I remember most clearly of those dark days was a summer night of my 11th year. The magic hour was dimming; it seemed to last forever in my youth, like a low note played on the strings of a cello, drawn out for an eternity. The sky was fading from purple to navy blue and the night was turning the leaves of the box elder tree outside my window from nuanced greens to a uniform gray. All around a still night was enveloping the world in a silent embrace.
Ah yes, the silence. That must have been what triggered my dread. Every other night in the summer the world was an orchestra of singing nightingales and chirping crickets, of squirrels scurrying up trees and raccoons rooting through garbage. But when they came it was always silent. Even my house, usually alive until the late evening with the sounds of my father watching television, was quiet. He was deep within his cups that night, I remember that very clearly.
I pulled the blankets up to my chin; my body was as stiff as a board yet trembling like a feather in the wind. I felt my heart racing in my chest, pounding so hard I thought it would break my ribs at any moment. My mouth, dry and foul tasting, felt like it would years later when awaking form a bender. I grabbed white knuckled onto the sheets. My bed began to vibrate, very slightly at first such that I thought it might be my own quaking, the shaking grew stronger and I saw the leaves on the box elder begin whipping violently as if before a gale. I noticed too that I could once again make out their colors; the world outside my window was growing light again. The last thing I remember was no more than a sensation, a certainty that I was no longer alone in my room.
When I awoke the next day I had no recollection of what happened the night before, and would not remember until years later. I do recall feeling anxious and violated, emotions for which I could not determine the source. I asked my dad if he remembered anything strange about the night before, to which he replied, "Shut the fuck up." He was hung over.
That wasn't the last night I laid terrified in my bed, it wasn't the first either, just the one I remember most clearly. The nightmares came a little later, I'm not sure exactly when. I may have been sixteen or seventeen, maybe younger, but they were very distinct, very memorable dreams. I guess everyone has nightmares about being naked in front of a group of people at that age, only in my dreams they weren't really people.
In my dreams I am in a room of dull gray metal, lying on a table. The light is dim and has a faint purplish hue to it, like the bruises under the eyes of an insomniac. I don't think they see in the same spectrum as us, because it's always that twilight, violet hinting at deep blue light. I don't see them at first, the one I think of as the Doctor is behind my head, I can sense him there, feel his thoughts. This is the first part of the exam, he's checking to make sure nothing is wrong, that I am under their control. When he assures himself of this, he circles around the table, and I see him.
It's a monster. At first I find it hard to focus on his face, as if his features are made of Caro syrup which will hold no definition. Eventually, I realize that the effect is just a trick of my mind, a defense to prevent me from seeing a horror I can't comprehend. But that defense too, finally breaks down. How to describe something so inhuman? I cannot use terms like chin and cheek without belying the nature of the thing. It has nothing which can be described as a chin or cheeks, no brow or nose, but something which might be described as a mouth. A gaping horror show of jagged points and dripping opaque white fluid. What I think of as eyes are so high on the oblong head that they look like horns. But I don't know if they are even eyes or merely darker bumps on the orange skin.
The second act of the nightmare begins; the foreboding, creeping terror of the mental probe is done. Next, the external exam begins. He runs various instruments against my skin, against my most intimate parts, with a cold mechanical efficiency that demonstrates his experience. In the back of my mind, beneath the blanket of fear and revulsion, I wonder how many times he's done this. Then a question I wish never to have occurred. How many times has he done this to me? I open my mouth to scream but no sound emerges. Act two continues with the steady efficiency of a Swiss clock. Act three is more horrible than the first two, a fitting climax to the tragedy that has thus far unfolded. I can't describe the rest, not even if I wanted. But always in my mind that memory lurks, like the shadow of a predator beneath the murky waters of a swamp, waiting, always waiting. Until today, I've never been able to admit, even to myself, what happened when I was growing up.
Not long after the dreams began I started drinking. I knew the instant I felt that gauzy veil of insobriety pulled over my mind that I would never be the same again, that I could escape the harsh light of reality behind the shadow of alcohol. It was like Novocain for my psyche, no longer forced to feel, to deal with the trauma of those nightmare horrors that flooded my mind, I felt free. I've told you all a thousand times the next part of my story, in our group it's like the refrain to an old, familiar song, the kind that gets stuck in your head and stays there. I found the bottom of a bottle and kept looking for it for the next seven years. At the end there was nothing, living on the street, eating out of dumpsters, begging for change for just one more drink, just one more sweet release from the nightmares.
I hit rock bottom in a jail cell. Leaning my face on an unspeakably filthy stainless steel toilet and fighting the DTs. I looked around the cell and saw a half dozen other rummys like myself. Some younger, few older, and I knew that there weren't many old lushes, at least not to the degree of my own drinking. I looked into the toilet and, like some charlatan auger, saw my future in my own sick. Die in a bottle or live without it. I came to a meeting the next day and have been dry ever since.
Until yesterday. It was the terrors I felt at night as a boy. They began to come back. It started again four months ago, lying in bed on a February night, the wind howling through the fire escape, I was suddenly filled with fear. It was the familiar sensation, an old friend come home. It was like deja vu, I trembled yet felt paralyzed, and I gripped the covers and stared at the window all the while praying for the night to remain black. I thought I saw, no I DID see a hint of light. When next I awoke, I felt the shame all over again.
Finally, last night I could take it no longer. I went to the store and bought a case of beer. My sick mind told me that a few beers wouldn't be like falling off the wagon, hell, it wasn't scotch, not the hard stuff. I just needed something to ease my mind. Less than an hour after I cracked open the first can and the smell of hops hit my nose, I was blacked out. This time, the lost memory was not their doing, but my own.
When I woke up this morning I realized what a terrible mistake it had all been. My apartment looked like Dresden after the allied bombers had their say. Beer cans, the whole case worth naturally, littered the carpet. There were cigarette burns on the night table, broken furniture in the corner what might have been a kitchen chair but now a pile of unrecognizable splinters. I slept on the floor, the mattress turned on its side, the box spring broken in half. I saw smears of blood on the door jamb and connected it to my throbbing hand. The knuckles were busted wide open.
I heard a clattering sound from the kitchen, and that was where I found it. Their control of me worked on my mind, not a physical restraint but a mental one. I guess the booze messed with their control, and I guess that when they came for me last night I wasn't the helpless, paralyzed 11 year old they were expecting. It was the Doctor, or I think it was the Doctor. Maybe they are like Monarch Butterflies that all look the same except to the trained eye.
The monster of my childhood was laying on my kitchen floor, broken and beaten by me in a drunken rage. He was so small, so fragile, the size of a child. It reminded me of seeing my father for the last time, after the cancer had eaten him down to a skeleton wrapped in skin and begun to gnaw on the bones. I hated my father, but that last time I saw him all that anger melted away and I only felt sad for the pitiful man. He wasn't the monster of my youth any more than the Doctor. He's dead now, just like my father, and my anger and shame comes bubbling up. I ran to the bathroom and was violently sick. I felt so weak afterwards that I laid my head on the filthy toilet. Deja vu all over again. When I went back to the kitchen the body and my shame was gone, as if I had sicked up some poison in my soul and with it the horrible thing I had done. I know this all sounds so crazy, especially since I can't ever prove it, but I don't care, I just had to tell someone so that I can be free of the last bit of poison.
by Rosalind Meadows
Hello, my name is Darrel and I'm an alcoholic. It's been almost two years since my last drink; well it had been until last night. I've been having a real tough time of it lately, and I guess I back slid. They're back, you see, the monsters from my childhood, the nightmares too, and I don't think I can deal with them without the sauce. This isn't the first time, but this time, oh man, I think I made a huge mistake.
You're all going to laugh at me, I've been laughed at before, and I don't care. I just have to get this off my chest. I started drinking to forget something I couldn't remember in the first place, except deep down in the reptilian part of my mind. It was an instinctual dread, like the rabbit that shrinks at the shadow overhead. I remember lying awake terrified, but not knowing why.
The night I remember most clearly of those dark days was a summer night of my 11th year. The magic hour was dimming; it seemed to last forever in my youth, like a low note played on the strings of a cello, drawn out for an eternity. The sky was fading from purple to navy blue and the night was turning the leaves of the box elder tree outside my window from nuanced greens to a uniform gray. All around a still night was enveloping the world in a silent embrace.
Ah yes, the silence. That must have been what triggered my dread. Every other night in the summer the world was an orchestra of singing nightingales and chirping crickets, of squirrels scurrying up trees and raccoons rooting through garbage. But when they came it was always silent. Even my house, usually alive until the late evening with the sounds of my father watching television, was quiet. He was deep within his cups that night, I remember that very clearly.
I pulled the blankets up to my chin; my body was as stiff as a board yet trembling like a feather in the wind. I felt my heart racing in my chest, pounding so hard I thought it would break my ribs at any moment. My mouth, dry and foul tasting, felt like it would years later when awaking form a bender. I grabbed white knuckled onto the sheets. My bed began to vibrate, very slightly at first such that I thought it might be my own quaking, the shaking grew stronger and I saw the leaves on the box elder begin whipping violently as if before a gale. I noticed too that I could once again make out their colors; the world outside my window was growing light again. The last thing I remember was no more than a sensation, a certainty that I was no longer alone in my room.
When I awoke the next day I had no recollection of what happened the night before, and would not remember until years later. I do recall feeling anxious and violated, emotions for which I could not determine the source. I asked my dad if he remembered anything strange about the night before, to which he replied, "Shut the fuck up." He was hung over.
That wasn't the last night I laid terrified in my bed, it wasn't the first either, just the one I remember most clearly. The nightmares came a little later, I'm not sure exactly when. I may have been sixteen or seventeen, maybe younger, but they were very distinct, very memorable dreams. I guess everyone has nightmares about being naked in front of a group of people at that age, only in my dreams they weren't really people.
In my dreams I am in a room of dull gray metal, lying on a table. The light is dim and has a faint purplish hue to it, like the bruises under the eyes of an insomniac. I don't think they see in the same spectrum as us, because it's always that twilight, violet hinting at deep blue light. I don't see them at first, the one I think of as the Doctor is behind my head, I can sense him there, feel his thoughts. This is the first part of the exam, he's checking to make sure nothing is wrong, that I am under their control. When he assures himself of this, he circles around the table, and I see him.
It's a monster. At first I find it hard to focus on his face, as if his features are made of Caro syrup which will hold no definition. Eventually, I realize that the effect is just a trick of my mind, a defense to prevent me from seeing a horror I can't comprehend. But that defense too, finally breaks down. How to describe something so inhuman? I cannot use terms like chin and cheek without belying the nature of the thing. It has nothing which can be described as a chin or cheeks, no brow or nose, but something which might be described as a mouth. A gaping horror show of jagged points and dripping opaque white fluid. What I think of as eyes are so high on the oblong head that they look like horns. But I don't know if they are even eyes or merely darker bumps on the orange skin.
The second act of the nightmare begins; the foreboding, creeping terror of the mental probe is done. Next, the external exam begins. He runs various instruments against my skin, against my most intimate parts, with a cold mechanical efficiency that demonstrates his experience. In the back of my mind, beneath the blanket of fear and revulsion, I wonder how many times he's done this. Then a question I wish never to have occurred. How many times has he done this to me? I open my mouth to scream but no sound emerges. Act two continues with the steady efficiency of a Swiss clock. Act three is more horrible than the first two, a fitting climax to the tragedy that has thus far unfolded. I can't describe the rest, not even if I wanted. But always in my mind that memory lurks, like the shadow of a predator beneath the murky waters of a swamp, waiting, always waiting. Until today, I've never been able to admit, even to myself, what happened when I was growing up.
Not long after the dreams began I started drinking. I knew the instant I felt that gauzy veil of insobriety pulled over my mind that I would never be the same again, that I could escape the harsh light of reality behind the shadow of alcohol. It was like Novocain for my psyche, no longer forced to feel, to deal with the trauma of those nightmare horrors that flooded my mind, I felt free. I've told you all a thousand times the next part of my story, in our group it's like the refrain to an old, familiar song, the kind that gets stuck in your head and stays there. I found the bottom of a bottle and kept looking for it for the next seven years. At the end there was nothing, living on the street, eating out of dumpsters, begging for change for just one more drink, just one more sweet release from the nightmares.
I hit rock bottom in a jail cell. Leaning my face on an unspeakably filthy stainless steel toilet and fighting the DTs. I looked around the cell and saw a half dozen other rummys like myself. Some younger, few older, and I knew that there weren't many old lushes, at least not to the degree of my own drinking. I looked into the toilet and, like some charlatan auger, saw my future in my own sick. Die in a bottle or live without it. I came to a meeting the next day and have been dry ever since.
Until yesterday. It was the terrors I felt at night as a boy. They began to come back. It started again four months ago, lying in bed on a February night, the wind howling through the fire escape, I was suddenly filled with fear. It was the familiar sensation, an old friend come home. It was like deja vu, I trembled yet felt paralyzed, and I gripped the covers and stared at the window all the while praying for the night to remain black. I thought I saw, no I DID see a hint of light. When next I awoke, I felt the shame all over again.
Finally, last night I could take it no longer. I went to the store and bought a case of beer. My sick mind told me that a few beers wouldn't be like falling off the wagon, hell, it wasn't scotch, not the hard stuff. I just needed something to ease my mind. Less than an hour after I cracked open the first can and the smell of hops hit my nose, I was blacked out. This time, the lost memory was not their doing, but my own.
When I woke up this morning I realized what a terrible mistake it had all been. My apartment looked like Dresden after the allied bombers had their say. Beer cans, the whole case worth naturally, littered the carpet. There were cigarette burns on the night table, broken furniture in the corner what might have been a kitchen chair but now a pile of unrecognizable splinters. I slept on the floor, the mattress turned on its side, the box spring broken in half. I saw smears of blood on the door jamb and connected it to my throbbing hand. The knuckles were busted wide open.
I heard a clattering sound from the kitchen, and that was where I found it. Their control of me worked on my mind, not a physical restraint but a mental one. I guess the booze messed with their control, and I guess that when they came for me last night I wasn't the helpless, paralyzed 11 year old they were expecting. It was the Doctor, or I think it was the Doctor. Maybe they are like Monarch Butterflies that all look the same except to the trained eye.
The monster of my childhood was laying on my kitchen floor, broken and beaten by me in a drunken rage. He was so small, so fragile, the size of a child. It reminded me of seeing my father for the last time, after the cancer had eaten him down to a skeleton wrapped in skin and begun to gnaw on the bones. I hated my father, but that last time I saw him all that anger melted away and I only felt sad for the pitiful man. He wasn't the monster of my youth any more than the Doctor. He's dead now, just like my father, and my anger and shame comes bubbling up. I ran to the bathroom and was violently sick. I felt so weak afterwards that I laid my head on the filthy toilet. Deja vu all over again. When I went back to the kitchen the body and my shame was gone, as if I had sicked up some poison in my soul and with it the horrible thing I had done. I know this all sounds so crazy, especially since I can't ever prove it, but I don't care, I just had to tell someone so that I can be free of the last bit of poison.
