Poisoned By My Own Hand; Death By Chambord

The Royal Vial of Poison

It was the worst hangover I ever had.  And I’ve had a few over the years, but this one wins the gold.  The National Anthem plays, and I put my hand over my heart.  I humbly accept that I had something to do with its shining success.  I’m the man behind medal.

Lets see.  Beer, tequila, champagne, some wine in there, somewhere, then more beer and tequila.  A little weed to give the merry-go-round a good spin, then a cheap cigar.  Good party.  I loved everybody.  Everything was hilarious.  I came home and wasn’t quite done.  Just needed a little knick-knocker to bang the box closed.  Nothing to drink except an ancient bottle of black raspberry liqueur that I brought back from my grandparents’ house after they both had died.  Some shit called “Chambord.”

From Wikipedia:

“Chambord is made from red and black raspberries, Madagascar vanilla, Moroccan citrus peel, honey and cognac.

Chambord is produced on the premises of a traditional Loire Valley Chateau, using all natural ingredients. Whole raspberries and blackberries are steeped in French spirits for a period of several weeks to produce a fruit infusion. This infusion produces a distinct raspberry flavor and aroma.

After the infusion is extracted, a second set of spirits is added to the fruit and allowed to rest for a few weeks.  After this second infusion is drawn off, the remaining fruit is pressed to obtain the natural sugars and juice.  The fruit-infused spirits and juices from the final pressing are then combined, and finally, the berry infusion is married with a proprietary blend of cognac, natural vanilla extract, black raspberries, citrus peel, honey, and herbs and spices. The liqueur is 16.5% alcohol by volume.”

Oooh!  Sounds wonderful, especially that 16.5% alcohol part.  What they don’t mention in the article is that all that fussing and fruit-infusing produces a lethal toxin, and that drinking it will give you a hangover you’ll remember and write about almost twenty years later.

It came in a fancy bottle that looked like the orb a King holds to symbolize something symbolic, His Majesty’s Royal Thing.  I remember looking at this very same bottle as it sat on their shelf for over 30 years gathering dust.

I never saw anyone drink from it.  People must have been hip to it.  They must’ve have known it was death in a bottle.

I didn’t know that then.  All I really knew was that it was a bottle of booze, and I wasn’t going to let a perfectly good bottle of booze go to waste.  After my grandfather’s funeral, I threw it into my suitcase.  I was never much into liqueurs and shit.  Too fucking sweet.   If I want to drink something that tastes like cough syrup, I’ll drink cough syrup, thank you.

The bottle continued to sit on my shelf for another year or so gathering more dust.  I just kept it around.  Hey, you never know when you’ll need it.

Like right now.  I picked up the royal globus cruciger and uncorked it.  I quickly took four or five deep swigs to get it down before the taste hit.  The sickly sweetness made me want to retch.  Dear God, that’s some evil shit.  Who would drink this by choice?

It wasn’t long before the synergistic effect from introducing this unholy concoction into my already multifaceted drunk finally pushed me over the falls.  I stumbled over to my mattress and let myself fall face first.  Sweet holy oblivion!  The Universal Void!  Oh blessed dissolution!  My soul’s husk entombed in the dark City of Pyramids, where I shall dwell with no name, hooded and faceless, in the Desert of Desolation for eternity.

Then, almost instantly, a loud alarm clock.  Time to rise and shine, and give God your glory, glory!

I knew when I opened my eyes.  This was no ordinary hangover.  This was going to be special.  Today, I would become a man.  Calling in was not an option.  Not because of any heroic work ethic, but because my finances were strung so tight, any day’s pay lost would spell my doom.  I was $64 away from The Abyss.

I worked as a laborer for a local plumbing company.  Most of the time I just dug trenches and ran the jack-hammer.  The average day usually didn’t lack some brutal pain in the ass, but now it was winter and freezing cold.  Everything would have a little extra suck attached to it.  It had stormed three days earlier.  Santa Fe was covered with 6 to 8 inches.  I got Friday off because of the snow, so I was out of the blocks quick that weekend and had an early lead.

By Saturday night, I was at a world record pace.  Remember being 86’d from Luna.  Helping Marko push our car out of a ditch.  Being at some St. John’s party where we almost got into a fight with some visiting Dutch dudes that looked like The Bay City Rollers.  Eventful for sure, but we were on our A Game, and dealing effectively with what we had to deal with.  I was just navigating my way through a fairly typical week-end night.  Nothing yet to foreshadow the personal milestone I was about to be set.

It was the shindig at my friend Collette’s house on Sunday night that really propelled me to my bitter victory, and it was those last slugs of  Moroccan citrus peel and honey that pushed my nose across the ribbon.  I’m sure the Chambord assured that this Monday morning would become immortalized forever as my worst.

There was the most amazingly brutal, temple-banging headache, the kind that beats at the eyeballs so hard it jars them blurry.  My stomach was clenched in nausea.  Throat burning from bile.  Hands already beginning to shake.  I got out of bed, walked a few steps, then actually had to take a knee, like I had been chop-blocked.  Fuck me.  This is some new super strain of hangover.  After all, I wasn’t a little baby about alcohol poisoning at this point, but this kind of suffering was almost biblical.  This was very different.  Why?

Beer, wine, tequila, champagne, beer and tequila and beer.  Check.  Nothing amiss there.  Hmm.  Oh, the fucking Chambord.  That was the last, so that’s whose fault it was.  Chambord.  That’s the X factor in our equation.  Fucking Chambord.  From France.

I rode the walls down the hall to go outside and start the car up.  I walked out in my underwear and one sock.  I saw the lady across the street getting into her car to go to work.  She saw me, and I saw her, but neither of us waved.   The Olds Omega was a block of ice.  The door was frozen shut.  I got one foot up on the car and was trying to pull the car door open like it would make me the King of England.  I finally got it open and after a few dozen tries, got the engine to turn over.  I went back inside.

Breakfast was out of the question.  I took a shower and put on my Gumby suit, which is what Marko and I called our green, cold-weather coveralls.  I could only find one glove and settled for that.  One of anything is better than nothing, except maybe tumors and shit.  Or a hangover like this one.  None of it would be a lot better.  So much for that axiom.

I drove to the plumbing office late where Joe, yes, the plumber, was already waiting.  Joe was an ex-speed freak from Farmington, NM.  He wore his long blond hair in a single braid.  He could be cool sometimes, but more often was one of the most hateful and sarcastic bastards that ever crawled the earth.  I could forget about getting any sympathy from him.  It was all I could do to get him to stop at a drive-thru so I could attempt food.  He pulled into Hardee’s.

I hated Hardee’s but it was this or nothing, and except for tumors and a bunch of other stuff, something was always better than nothing.  I got the 99 cent hamburger and a small coffee.

We drove up towards the ski basin.  I pushed the burger down against a rebellious gag reflex and nursed the coffee.  We drove in silence for a while.

“Whew! You really smell like liquor,” Joe said, rolling down the window.

“It’s Chambord.”

“Well lah-dee-fucking dah!”

We drove up to the job site.  It was up by Hyde Park.  We were putting in a gas line to this multi-million dollar home belonging to an actress that starred in a terrible movie with Richard Dreyfuss.  They couldn’t get a back hoe in on the side of the steep rocky hill, so it was up to me to jack hammer up the rock, then pick and shovel a trench about forty feet across.  I had been working on it for three days and was only half the way there.

I had kept myself going by picturing myself in a Russian labor camp.  I used to pretend that I was The Iron Prisoner, a man doomed by fate to a life sentence of hard labor.  I would suffer silently and with dignity.  Resigned and resilient.  Bent but not broken.

When I climbed into that trench that morning, I was broken, and bent.  Joe had gone inside the house to top out some drains and left me to my misery.  I put on my glove and lined up the jack hammer on a cluster of rocks.  I was just about to pull the trigger when I let go, turned, and puked my hot coffee and 99 cent burger.  I watched it steam and sink into the snow.  Seeing that made me puke again.  Fucking Hardee’s.

After watching my two dollars disappear into a puddle of slush, I went back to the hammer and pulled the trigger.  All hell erupted in my skull.  A jack-hammer is an unpleasant tool to operate, even when you’re well-rested and in love with a beautiful woman, but hung over, poisoned to the pores, hating the very concept of existence, it’s…really…something.

I tried to picture myself in a cozy cabin sipping a pint of stout, with a nice roaring fire and a bi-sexual punk rock girl posing dirty for me on a bear skin rug.  Hell, even folding laundry in the garage would’ve been better.  Just about anything anywhere else than here now.  My suffering silently and with dignity was now being broken up with periodic puppy whimpering and weeping.

At one point, I thought about just ending it all.  I could lay down, put the chisel bit of the jack hammer in my mouth, then reach up with my foot and press the handle.  I would kill myself by jack-hammering a hole through my skull.  It seemed dicey, and if I didn’t pull it off, I’d be subject to teasing from the rest of the construction guys forever.  Nice idea though.  Maybe I’ll have a character in one of my stories do it.

I’d go as long as I could, then let go of the trigger handle.  I was sweating champagne and Chambord.  Dizzy and dry-mouthed, I’d cup a handful of snow and rub it into my face.  Looking around, I could see I was surrounded by absolute beauty.  We were up on spacious lot of land, with a lot of snow-flocked trees, and from the hillside, I could see all of Santa Fe below.  The sky was deep blue.  The sun bright.

The contrast to my inner landscape, the blighted, bombed out bummer within, was notable.  I remember thinking, “Wow, everything around me is beautiful, and that’s very different from what’s going on inside.”  Why was I always running away from Reality, when Reality looked better than the alternative I created?

My drinking was an escape, for sure, but an escape from what?   Was it from Reality?  Or just from the man experiencing it?

I put the hammer and the big questions aside, and took a few swings with the pick to break up the chunks.  I scraped what I could with the shovel and threw it over the side, then pulled the jack-hammer back up and resumed blasting away.   The open-minded punk rock girl was long gone by now.  Nothing left but bitter irony to chew on, and maybe some hopelessness from a hose to wash it down.

That was pretty much lunch since I didn’t bring anything to eat.  I spent it smoking a couple of cigarettes near a little fire one of the workers built in a fireplace.  After lunch it was back to the trench.  I was still pretty sick and the next four hours dragged.

I hammered and clawed and scraped and got to within seven feet of the end when Joe finally came out to tell me to roll it up.  I dragged the tools and my ass back to the van.  The headache and nausea were almost gone, but I was beat.  Joe finally finished talking to the foreman and got in.

“You look like shit,” he said.

“I’ve never felt better,” I told him, “That Chambord stuff must be some kind of youth tonic.”

He dropped me off at my car.  The left front tire was low.  I’d deal with that tomorrow.  I got in and drove to Kelly’s Liquors.  There was a sale on Beck’s.  I bought three six packs, just to be sure I didn’t Chambord myself again.

One thing I knew by then was that I couldn’t be trusted.  All day long I had been telling myself I’d never drink again, and here I was at Kelly’s again.  Just because I swore off Chambord, didn’t mean if I ran out of beer I might not be tempted to try it again, expecting different results.  Alcoholics are fucked up like that.  We never learn.

Well, almost never.  I never drank that poison again.  Eventually, I even managed to stop drinking.  But, it took a lot more than the worst hangover of my life to want to.  I had to really feel bad.

Am I dead yet?

Stocking Up For Sunday

Hoping Nobody Shows Up

I was on a bicycle, loaded down like an NVA soldier hauling supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but instead of rockets and rice, I carried beer.  I, too, was on a mission.  I needed to get enough supplies to last through the week-end.  While this was not as daunting as an essentially agrarian country having to take on the military industrial complex of a major superpower, it was still a pain in the ass.  Back then, stores couldn’t sell alcohol on Sundays in New Mexico, so you really had to stock up.

I never understood why that law was still on the books.  If you want to get all archaic, why not bring back debtor’s prisons and public flogging?  At least those things made life more interesting.  Blue Laws serve only one purpose, to reassure the self-repressed that there isn’t anyone out there having more fun than them.  Fuck that.  Let them know what they’re missing.  I hope it eats them alive.  The Puritan should suffer from his lifestyle choice just as much as the Libertine for his.

For years this violation of the Separation of Church and State had been a weekly hurdle to clear.  Having enough to drink was already a difficult obstacle course to run, you didn’t need some meddling goody-two-shoes legislator rolling out marbles to trip you up.  Why make the already burdensome burden of alcoholism, more…burdensome?

I would start concerning myself with Sunday on Wednesday.  If it meant skipping a few meals to stock away the funds, so mote it be.  “Better to be hungry than thirsty” was my motto, so was “Dead by Saturday than Sober on Sunday.”  This was serious shit, not like Iwo Jima serious, but as close to it as I wanted to come.

The car had shit the bed again, so I was riding a sort-of-abandoned bicycle that had no seat.  I had to pedal standing up, which was developing very powerful quadriceps along with a bulging hernia.  I had a twelve pack strapped on to the rack in the back, and a backpack stuffed drum-tight with 40 ounce malt liquors.  There was another twelve pack bungee-corded to the handle bars, and a plastic bag with can of beans and a potato hanging from my wrist. It made for an unstable ride. The smallest pebble would set me swerving into heavy traffic, the bike twisting and bucking like a hooked Marlin.  My greatest concern was not for my own safety, but for the precious cargo on board.  Blood can replace itself.  That was another motto.

Making sure there was enough beer was a full-time job, which might explain why it was so difficult to hold one down,  My work as an “event planner” was constantly interfering with my time-line for world domination. The smallest journey required the logistical planning of Hannibal crossing the Alps. Overnight trip, you say?  I’m going to need street maps with all the surrounding liquor stores and bars indicated with pinned flags, two bandoleros of miniatures, and a suitcase filled with back-up bombers of malt liquor. That bag stays in my car, which I’m taking separately.

Just going to the movies was a big production.  God forbid I should have to sit there for ninety minutes and not have enough.  I once ran out during a movie some friends dragged me to.  It was “Michael” with John Travolta.  I would never make that mistake again.  I’d pack Tall Boy cans up and down the length of my sleeves and pant legs, then walk like the Tin Man into the show. The empties would invariably get knocked over and roll down the length of the theatre, annoyingly announcing an alcoholic in the house.  “Sorry everybody, but I can’t enjoy normal past-times without being thoroughly hammered to the cross of my addiction.  I’m nutty like that.”

This bike was worse than the last one.  That one had a slow leaking front tire that really made the quads burn, but at least you could sit down and coast for a while.  Either way, they were bikes that made the ride downhill seem as hard as going uphill.  A metaphor?  Just more shit to deal with.  I really didn’t care how I got there, as long as I got there. Sunday was looming.  I would walk on my knees like a pilgrim to Chimayo, if I had to.  Although it would have been nice not to have drivers try to graze me, throw shit at me, or pass by screaming “Party down! Motherfucker!” scaring me into a wild wobble that almost punctures my scrotum on the aluminum pole sticking up where a seat should be.

I rode past a Kelly’s Liquors that was about to open soon.  I was excited.  It was close by.  It would make my march to the grave that much shorter.  I would get to know the staff there like family, and they’d worry about me when I didn’t show up.  Kelly’s Liquors.  With the money I spent there, I could have bought a 17 foot sailboat, but what good are those without beer?  There was a cashier there that used to fill me with the most infernal desire.  I can’t remember her name, but she was kind of hot, in a weird way.

I put the bike in the garage, next to a case and a half of cheap canned beer.  I hated the brand, but would buy pallets of it when it went on sale.  It would sit in the garage, until I ran out of real beer. If the stores were closed, or I was out of money, or it was Sunday, I’d drink it.  Then, almost alchemically, it would turn from tasting like nervous sweat into amber ambrosia, grained goodness of the Gods.  Cheap beer is like fine wine. The time has to be right.

I made a note to get more when I had access to a truck.

As I took off my backpack, one of the 40 ounce beers fell out and smashed on the floor.  There’s no way I can describe what seeing something like that is like to my non-alcoholic friends. (I do have some)  Frankly, admitting the extent of the trauma is a little embarrassing.  It’s bad. I just stood there looking at it, jagged shards of dark glass sticking up like shark fins, the agitated foam coming to rest in a puddle of sadness and loss,  Even after eight years of sobriety it hurts to think about it.  I don’t think I ever fully grieved that beer.

I didn’t bother cleaning the mess up.  I just got on the bike and went back to the store.  We all suffer loss, the trick is to keep moving forward.  I got to the supermarket and got the same cashier that checked me out twenty minutes earlier, Michelle, who was kind of hot, in a weird way.

“You’re back already?”

“I dropped a forty on the floor,” I told her.  She went “Awww! I am so sorry!” very sincerely, like she knew how much that would hurt me.

“Yeah well, no big deal really. I’m just here to replace it.”

“With three more?”

“It only seems fair.”

She rang me up.  I put the beers in the backpack and zipped it up tight.  I went out and unlocked my bike.  Even though it didn’t have a seat, I knew some people would still steal it.  I had seen it done.  I stood up and started pedaling.  “This is also very good for the triceps,” I told myself, “And the lower pectorals. I think it’s also making my back stronger.”  It was good to be strong when you have to carry a lot of weight.  It may have been my imagination, but it seemed like the weight was getting heavier by the day.  I turned on to the street and flipped off a guy that drove by honking.

Who Needs A Bicycle Seat?