The Corner Store Disease by Brian Allen Carr
“Envy is the desire to have what others have”
When I was twelve, my friend Stuart and I stole a bottle of Jack Daniels from his father. Stuart’s father was an eccentric doctor who collected Pez Dispensers and had purchased an antique Baskin-Robbins counter, which was fully functional and stocked with ice cream, sprinkles, cherries, chopped nuts—all the things you’d expect. There was even a soda fountain.
Stuart and I sat at that counter pouring shots of bourbon into sundae bowls which we sipped from. After we’d loosened to the taste of it, we lined up a row of sundae bowls, poured them full like they were shot glasses, and we drank the line of them as though we were in a spaghetti western—wayward gunslingers looking to quell a murderous thirst.
Even now, as I think of it, my heart goes achy—longing to be filled with that poison, I assume. But I cannot drink.
After my wife’s miscarriage in February, I slumped into a stupor. The event of it was too real, and I numbed it, as I’ve learned to numb so many things, with drinking. I stayed drunk for days, wandering the irrigation canals of the Rio Grande Valley, screaming at wild dogs and making videos of the sun: I was certain it was haunted.
When I came to, I swore off alcohol. My blue jeans were dirt washed, as though I were homeless. My hands swollen like vomit filled balloons. My sweat the smell of urine. I think I began losing my hair.
It was February but warm, and I paced inside my home for a day or two feeling bloated with nostalgia, like I’d lost a best friend. I said prayers. I went to the basilica. I am not Catholic, but I know the Hail Mary.
In this first sobriety, I went to AWP. I made it through the weekend without sipping a drop. It was the first time I enjoyed AWP, the first time I didn’t lose my shit at all the careerist poets and spend a day in my hotel room promising myself I’d never write again.
I felt amazing, and I wish I could say that amazement stretched on.
You can mark my relapses with my Facebook tantrums.
I deactivated and reactivated my account. I killed one. Started a new one. Killed that.
At the moment, I’m sober and off social media. I take yoga. I bought a new house, and I sit on the porch watching hummingbirds.
I only want to drink again.
Envy is the desire to have what others have. If you can have a few drinks and stop yourself, I want that part of you.
Here is a list of all the drugs I’ve done, how long I did them, what I thought:
Acid - I probably took acid from fifteen to twenty times in the span of four or five years. The last time I dropped, it was microdot, and I wandered the streets of Corpus Christi in the early morning light, amazed that the wild packs of dogs weren’t attacking me. Were they even there? I wouldn’t do acid again if you held a gun to my head.
Barbituates - I know I have, I just can’t remember.
Cigarettes - They’re legal. Unless I’m drinking, I don’t care for them.
Cocaine - I did cocaine for a summer after I finished high school. I’d never seen so many sunrises. I had a friend named Fast Eddy who had fallen off a high dive and cracked open his head when he was a kid, and when he turned eighteen he got $11,000 and we spent the evening drawing out arm length lines of white on the top of a grand piano. Then, one morning, I shit blue. I’ve done coke a few times since then, but I don’t really care for it.
Gasoline - I half-heartedly huffed gasoline with Jonas Jones because I was in love with his sister and because Jonas taught me about Naked Lunch. I don’t know that I did it right, or huffed it hard enough, because Jonas kept saying my face was melting, and I just felt weird that my face smelled the way it did and I wasn’t mowing the lawn.
Hash - This German exchange student used to come and stay every summer with my friend Amon. In the winters, he’d send us hash from Amsterdam. We’d mix it with tobacco. It was good. It looked like chocolate.
Meth - I did meth twice. It was like fucking work. Along with acid, meth is the only thing I’ve ever taken where halfway through the experience you get angry at yourself for taking the shit. Your body feels like a rusty screw. You can’t chew anything enough. You can fuck forever on it, but shit, you can’t get off.
Morphine - I only did this under doctor’s care after breaking my ankle when I was thirteen. My God, it is amazing. I had this little blue button rigged up to a regulator, and every five minutes I could press the button and get a hit, and a fist of warmth sprawled up my arm toward my heart, where it opened like a rose and gently shed its silky petals.
Mushrooms - Every Thursday during the fall semester of my sophomore year of high school (so long as it had rained recently), we would drive out to the cow field near the Corpus Christi airport and walk the damp grass looking for mushrooms in the cow pies. Some of those cows were real assholes about it too. It’s a good clean trip. Lasts about five hours. I recommend making the stuff into tea, but my brother used to put a raw, unwashed cap on a Whataburber and eat it. He’s dead now, but I don’t think there’s a correlation.
Weed - Can someone please tell me why weed is illegal? Less deadly than tobacco, less potent than alcohol. America, why are your rules so full of bullshit?
But the only thing that took, the only thing that has drawn me down into that rabbit hole all the teachers and counselors warned about—the dark place where minds become deranged—is alcohol.
And they sell it on the corner.
How many times have I stood in line drunk, trying to feign sobriety—a quart of beer in each hand—anxiety pulsing through me, because I needed another sip. How many times have I paid with scavenged nickels and dimes so my wife wouldn’t see the charge on the card and ask me why I spent $3.06 at the convenience store—me apologizing queerly to the cashier for making her count out my change.
Most other drugs, there’s a level of inconvenience. You’ve got to go to an odd person’s house, sit on their couch as they tell you about their new TV, why this might be the Cowboys' year. You have to pay in cash. You have to get high with strangers to show you’re legit.
Alcohol is so simple. It’s there. Refrigerated. You get a receipt for it.
You can buy it and wander loosely through the world with an open container, down the canals. Screaming at dogs. To the water. Roiling by. Where you chuck the receipt and watch the currents take it off, because you’ve done this long enough to know, that if you leave it in your pocket, your wife will find it, and then what then? Where would you be after that?
+ + +
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.