My mother used to keep some bottles at the top of our basement stairs. The bottles were all started or empty and somehow both my parents thought it in bad taste to display them in the house. My mom would line them up there at the top of the yellow linoleum-covered stairs.
I was three years old and was normally left alone for short periods of time. One day while my mom was cutting carrots in the kitchen, I grabbed a full gin bottle and tossed it down the basement stairs. Little three-year-old me, chubby knees with pencils in my pockets. The whole house winced as the crash moved through the lime green paint touching every room. My father was not home. I'm not sure what he'd have done. But my mom ran over, grabbed my arms, and screamed, "What the hell did you do?" She was trembling, but I wasn't afraid. I remember I felt relieved after I tossed that bottle and heard it gurgle across the basement concrete. Mom may have been furious, but things were better with it smashed down there on the basement floor. The feelings passed. The dizziness was corrected. A calm fell across my pink face.
I was a quiet kid, prone to hours of silent adult-watching. An only child, I wasn't "bad". My mom hadn't made a mistake by leaving me at the top of the stairs by the bottles. She made a mistake by making changes.
My father and mother's drinking life was anything but random. (We were Methodists, after all.) And because we lived directly next to Elliot's Liquor Store we methodically replaced our bottles. The following was the standard Week in Alcohol for Mr. and Mrs. Simon Burnkey...
(* Mom was raised Catholic.)
What resulted, at the top of the stairs, was a predictable progression of bottles. A beer bottle arrived on the steps every weekday. A bottle of wine every four weeks, Gin every twenty weeks and a bottle of Tom Collins Mix every seven. She wrapped the JD bottles discretely in newspaper and disposed of them at the center of a trashcan (Every fourteenth Tuesday: trash night).
The top of the basement stairs was the same place where I would suit-up in multiple layers to face the New England winter with my sled and my Dad. The small space had three coat hooks, various cleaning supply bottles on a shelf and on the stairs, the assortment of alcohol ranging from empty to full. The entire arrangement was completely random, to them.
It was around the time that my father received his promotion that the change occurred. My father, a soft-spoken man prone to an array of brown clothing options, was not the stuff of manageria. He couldn't mutter more than a whispered request to any of his fellow postal sorters. The only person to whom he actually had the nerve to delegate was my mother. It was near this time, and before he changed jobs to recreational boat sales, that my mother began to feel some domestic pressure. In search of an extra bit of padding from my father's delegation (which honestly was quite mild), she increased her secret Sunday allowance. Switching to a top-off of gin with her JD shot, she drank from a slightly larger glass. Specifically, the glass with the orange tiger prowling around its hemisphere. The one from the San Diego Zoo. Roughly a five-percent increase.
The result, though, was the closest thing that a four-year-old can come to blind rage. That is, a kid who perceived the world the way I did. The way I still do. I saw the saw-tooth pattern of slow fluid decline, followed by respondent refill. It was like a dance. Events turned to numbers that turned to images with hearts of enumeration and they moved just behind my eyes. As the weeks went by, the mathematic image of refill moments, empty bottles and slow decline danced before me like a television signal slowly correcting itself from misalignment. Even at this age, I realized the pattern was heading in a noteworthy direction. The pattern was due for a very rare moment. The time of Complete Emptiness. Based on Simon and Evelyn Burnkey's drinking and refill patterns, it would arrive only every 34 years. It would arrive that Saturday night. I knew this without yet knowing original ideas. It was instinct. I waited for months for it. Like Halley's Comet. Without even fully knowing how to talk, I knew this.
Mom removed the bottle of gin from the brown Elliot's Liquor Store bag and placed it on those yellow stairs. Then she walked to the kitchen to cut carrots for our typical American dinner. I sat next to the lime green labeled bottle on those stairs. My rage mixed with the smell of cleaning supplies, and then in a moment it was gone. Down the stairs. A solid arc. Floating in space as Force equalled mass times accelleration, where acceleration was that of gravity. A direct hit. To this day, I still don't think she knows why. After she shook me, though, in a sudden movement she stopped. She looked me in the eyes and her eyes said that I was little and didn't know. She loved me and forgave. Forgiveness was a fine way for the situation to turn, but I wasn't wrong.
That was something that happened when I was a kid. People need to hear that stuff if they're even going to care a little. I'm not going to recite the litany of similar events. Of progressions. I grew up. I adapted. Real life isn't about the clean comparison. Real life is where the ideal, like math, and the chaotic collide. Real life is the stuff that's left after the collision. This is real life.
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