Of all the things I am guilty of,
Jesse Millner
the afternoon beers, the quick shots of bourbon, the badly rolled joints—of all the slurred choices I made under the influence of something greater than myself, I regret most those long hours shaped by bad choices, like an October morning I called in sick and drank beer to wash down a couple of Darvon capsules the dentist had given me for an abscessed tooth. I listened to my neighbor’s cats running upstairs across oak floors until there was a kind of music to their thudding paws that broke the misery for just a second or two of remembering my wife had left me for a furniture maker from North Carolina and the rent was due last Thursday, so I’d have to hide from the landlady for a week or so until I got paid again. My bad choices accumulated like snow on a January morning when cold and misery were indisputable facts. I brewed Maxwell House, then pulled the Jim Beam bottle down from the kitchen cabinet and poured a generous helping of hospitality into the coffee that steamed with caffeinated enthusiasm. I went both ways: wired yet drunk and drowsy as I looked out the window into a world that was vanishing: streetlights dimming in the storm, Addison Street disappearing, even the Victorian two-flats across the alley had sunken beneath the world’s grey horizon. By the way, the day I called in sick, my stomach did hurt so I wasn’t lying, and the booze-Darvon duo made me feel better until my appendix burst in an operating room at Illinois Masonic. For two weeks, a plastic tube drained pus from my left side as I watched soap operas on the TV I shared with a homeless guy whose head had been busted in while he drank cheap wine on Division Street. It’s funny, now I’m remembering how the homeless guy and I had dueling controls to the TV and how he’d change it from General Hospital to some silly game show and how I’d click it right back. One night, I turned on the Bears’ game and watched them lose in Green Bay as early snow flurries drifted across the screen until my roommate made that world vanish into a cop show with shots fired into the night, so I fell asleep to sirens and trouble and didn’t wake up until the nurse poked me with a needle full of pain medication, which lifted me up toward Paradise and I swear to god, I could almost smell Jesus’ cheap cologne.
