Fake Names for Stars by Brian Allen Carr
“the glutton adores the moments before the wreckage”
What follows is a list of thoughts on gluttony, because I can’t scrape a narrative from this sin. I suspect that it’s because every time I try to, I have to argue myself out of getting drunk.
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1. My favorite literary drunk is the tippler from The Little Prince. On a planet of his own, he sits at a table alone, surrounded by empty and half-full bottles. The little prince confronts him:
“Why are you drinking?” demanded the little prince.
“So that I may forget,” replied the tippler.
“Forget what?” inquired the little prince, who already was sorry for him.
“Forget that I am ashamed,” the tippler confessed, hanging his head.
“Ashamed of what?” insisted the little prince, who wanted to help him.
“Ashamed of drinking!” the tippler brought his speech to an end, and shut
himself up in an impregnable silence.
2. Of all the sins, gluttony is the ugliest. William Ian Miller puts it most accurately, saying “[g]luttony requires some immersion in the dank and sour realm of disgust” that “inevitably leads to regurgitation, excrement, hangover, and gas and to despair and feelings of disgust.”
3. Sadly, the glutton adores the moments before the wreckage. As Rhett Miller croons in the Old 97’s “Wish the Worst,” “I like being miserable swimming in sin.”
4. For the true glutton there are two speeds: something like suffocation or something like hyperventilation.
5. I went to an AA meeting once and a 70-year-old man who’d been sober for thirty years said he’d be an alcoholic until he’d been buried for three days, and that he’d always have cravings. He had a nose like a battering ram.
6. Bill W., the founder of AA, is said to have asked for three shots of bourbon on his deathbed.
7. The real glutton exists in a wilderness of their gluttony, an oddly lit thing with shadows as brilliant as the light that forces them, and they grab with everything, their hands, their mouths, their minds, that which they are gluttonous for. They force feed their desires, treating their orifices as flaws to be packed full, and aren’t satisfied until the packing of the cavity renders them immobile, throbbing, confused.
8. When they are not packing themselves, gluttons fear they’ll never fetch a happy moment in all of their lives. They exist as if under multitudes of water, constantly swimming toward the surface, constantly not piercing it.
9. It is a heinous world when the myriad souls that inhabit a single physical specimen operate with conflicting agendas.
10. I heard a fat lady say she wanted Santa to make her skinny for Christmas, and while she was saying that, she was eating an ice cream cone.
10. You have to know what you’re doing to be a glutton.
11. You can be out of control and aware of it.
12. My maid once ate a piece of cake at another home she cleans. It was space cake. She had no idea what she’d done. She got high, but she thought it was the lord punishing her for stealing.
13. My maid is not a glutton. She lives in Mexico. Every morning she takes the bus across the river to clean houses—$60 a pop.
14. Her brother in law was recently shot in the head by the cartels—I didn’t ask which one, and she didn’t tell me—and I assume he was a pot peddler. That was sad for her. She told me it was sad.
But a thread comes along. . .
The first time I could ever score alcohol on a regular basis, I was 13. My girlfriend’s mother would drive us along in her mini-van, and let me persuade her into buying me quarts of Miller High Life. It’s the champagne of beers. We would park on a dead-end street by an elementary school named after a local hero I can’t remember. I would drink beer and Allison and I would do everything but sex, and her mother would sit in the front seat listening to the radio.
If she was watching us in the rear-view mirror, I wasn’t aware of it.
When we got bored of that, Alison and I would stand out on the street and I would point out stars to her and tell her their names. I didn’t really know the names of the stars, but neither did Allison. Perhaps I was becoming a fiction writer.
She was something of a child star, Alison. She had been in an Embassy Suites commercial with Garfield the cat, and she’d done the voice over for a girl in a Showbiz Pizza commercial. It had been years since she landed a gig like that, but those ads still ran and she still got residual checks in the mail. Her father was an out of work sportscaster who threw newspapers. I don’t think her mother had a job. They kept hoping that Alison would land a better role. She took singing lessons. She took drama. I think she was in plays.
This was in Plano, Texas in 1992, but that summer I moved away to Corpus Christi on the Texas coast. Alison flew me home a few times to see her. But eventually we drifted apart. Ultimately, I forgot about her.
But then, the oddest thing happened. She wrecked a celebrity home. Somehow, she was Sara Evans’ nanny, and she’d slept with Sara Evans’ man. A friend e-mailed me the news. I’d never been more proud of her.
She got national exposure off the story. I saw a picture of her and she looked almost exactly like she did when she was 13, and of course she told all the reporters she was a victim.
She did nothing. She’s a good girl.
I don’t know; I always thought she was lying, but how could she help it?
In her mind there are stars with all the wrong names. Things she learned on a dead-end street from a boy trying his best to become an alcoholic.
Here's a link to the story. You should read it. I do. Over and over and over again. It makes me feel alive. It makes me feel drunk and 13. And really, that might be the best thing to be.
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Brian Allen Carr is a writer and teacher who lives with his wife and daughter near the Texas/Mexico border. His most recent novella, Edie & the Low-Hung Hands, was released on Small Doggies Press in January of 2013.