All the tiny bottles

By: Andrew Tomacelli

I don’t count the first three days of my sobriety because I wasn’t sober. Hell, I wasn’t even a dry drunk. I was a cold shuddering mass of failed self-destruction; a limp meteorite crawling out of a shallow crater. That I was fired again was no surprise. That consequently I decided to sober up again was also not a surprise. It was part of the pattern. Wash rinse repeat.

I knew what I had to do and exactly how to do it. I wrapped myself up in a comforter like a leftover fast-food burrito. I made myself a room temperature blob of refried beans and greasy cheese with slightly yellow sour cream and baby shit brown guacamole. I became a tepid shivering lump sweating a stale whiskey scented silhouette into the bed sheets. Shivers and shakes followed by the itchies and twitchies and bowel movements that made the whiskey shits seem like healthy digestive regularity. Coming off recreational drugs made me miserable enough to want to die but drying out came with the very real potential for seizures or an aneurism. I wandered through the apartment in pajamas and a bath robe, a dark drifting depression as she baked Christmas cookies and watched Hallmark holiday movies.

She wanted to help. She kept my sippy cup full of ice water and urged me to eat some Saltines or something. I promised I would. When she left the room, I rifled under the bed to see if there might be just one more banger single shot bottle of Fireball hidden under there, just one to cut the twitching, but all I found were empties.

A bartender once told me that there were exactly nine drops left in every “empty” liquor bottle. I don’t doubt the accuracy of that statement. I’m sure that the brilliant mind responsible for this revelation was undoubtedly a drunk in the process of reluctantly drying out. At times in my life, I have actually tested the theory, collecting all the tiny bottles, metering out the meagre contents into a shot glass, hoping to collect enough precious caramel colored liquid to coat my tongue and get me straight for my walk down to the liquor store. Like a castaway drinking freshwater dew from every morning leaf, I have tilted a bottle out for the backwash dregs, hoping for even a placebo buzz. Finding all of those little bottles, the urge was still strong. I didn’t resist the urge by conscious choice. I just couldn’t bear for her to catch me slurping a few measly drops out of a tiny bottle.

I found the empties between couch cushions, tossed behind shelved books, buried under stacks of laundry. The empty bottles became my unholy abacus, counting out my sin tax a buck at a time. I found a full-sized empty Fireball fifth in another couch and an empty gallon of vodka stashed on top of the water heater. Finding the little banger bottles everywhere, I began to get angry. I wasn’t angry at the price tag yet, although having counted out the change on occasion, I knew, to the penny, the exact value of each little empty bottle. I was angry at the temptation, that my heart beat faster at the sight of the little red cap, and the crushing disappointment when I found it empty of all but the last nine drops of precious liquid stubbornly clinging to the bottom of the bottle. I knew that I had a few left somewhere. I had saved a few, stashed in various places for just such an occasion.

I was angry that I could not find them and consequently, after a few days of desperate searches, I was angry at every red cap that mocked me with its emptiness. On the evening of my first excursion out of the house, she found me in a rage over a handful of the little empties discovered in my sock drawer. Two little Fireballs and a double shot of cheap vodka. I had short fuse already, but the morally bankrupt easter egg hunt sent me spiraling into a red rage somehow.

Walking around the neighborhood that night, she kept a close eye on me. Having seen this sort of thing before she knew that three days without a drop did not mean that I was ready for recovery. Three days was the minimum safe distance for her to broach a reasonable conversation on the subject.  

A few days later she confessed to me that she had found a few full bangers hidden around the house. In the past, I have asked her to set them aside, just in case the detox went sideways, and I ended up pitching a fit on the kitchen floor. My solution to catastrophic alcoholic withdrawal was that she would just pour a shot down my throat and hope that I might settle before she had to call an ambulance. After three solid days, as the itchy twitchy subsided slightly, it was clear that I wouldn’t need a step down, and that I was ready to make a decision regarding the pink elephant in the room.