Rule one of the Salvation Army: You can never baptize a cat...even if he joins your church.

I was suffering the tortures of the truly afflicted as I boarded the bus leaving the pearl of the pacific coast. They never put the bus station in the wonderful, kitschy part of town, but where people like me hang out. Outside small beer and liquor stores, blood banks, adult bookstores and gotta love 'em, the Salvation Army.

I always wanted to put that on a resume-under military experience- Special Forces, Salvation Army. I could kill you with a spork and a rolled up sermonette, while bashing your brains in with a tambourine, and do it all...silently.

"Just a closer...WHACK...walk with...WHACK...thee....Sing, DAMN IT, sing."

We were the usual bus passengers...garbage bag luggage, pockets filled with crap food, and all smelling ethnically divergent. God, I felt like hell. As the bus pulled out I leaned my head against the window in the flow of the cold, air conditioning.

It would be some time before I felt like living. As we cleared the south part of the city, I knew I was done with this part of my life, with no knowledge of any kind of future.

So I slept, fitfully, as best one can on a Greyhound, waking as we pulled through some little California desert town, stopping briefly, then rolling out again, the miles stacking up.

We had stopped outside Modesto when she got on. My age, carrying a rolled up copy of Penthouse Letters. She sat across from me and smiled.

Whoever was in charge of irony was laughing their ass off. "Dear Penthouse, we had stopped outside of Modesto, when she got on the bus..."

You had to be freaking kidding me. I watched her read, look up, catch me, and smile.

Oh my.

You can go home again...but you'll never, ever live there.

My options were shit. I was losing my mind in this weird free fall and reached down deep to get it to stop.

I did the unthinkable. I called my Mother.

Now, our relationship was odd, as she had nothing to do with me from the time I was seven until I was fifteen when I moved in with her and husband number four in a small town in Oklahoma.

They met at the State Hospital. He was a butcher by trade, but told me in private he was a secret agent. Said he was one of the one's they sent to get Francis Gary Powers from the Soviet Union. Yeah, and I was Eleanor Roosevelt.

She found him hanging one day in the front yard. Swinging from a mulberry tree, his face bloated and purple. There was no note.

She got drunk and bought a pet rooster.

She loved often but desperately and her choices were poorer than mine.

Her last husband had killed his wife in a car crash, and the guilt left him totally impotent, and to tell the truth, pretty fucked up.

My Mom and I were more like Harold and Maude, and he was jealous of whatever it was we had with each other.

There was no apple pie and Motherly advice. There were Viceroy cigarettes stubbed out in my eggs, and the smell of nail polish remover, and the memory of a quart of cheap vodka under the kitchen sink.

But she was sober, and she knew where I was. I sincerely believe she wanted to help.

She sent me a bus ticket, and said sure baby, come on home.

Swimming in it, but too stupid to stay under.

I don't need to tell you. I don't need to describe it. Those of you who know, certainly don't need to be reminded, and those who don't, well, we should keep it that way.

Couldn't drink enough when I was drinking, and couldn't not drink when I wasn't.

It was worse first thing in the morning, especially when I was broke, and I knew there would be an eternity of ground glass under my skin, sweats, shakes so bad I couldn't write my name, auditory hallucinations like a softly spoken conversation in the next room that I could never quite catch.

I could only hope to die in my sleep, as bravery was not my strong suit, but God only shook his head, at times embarrassed to call me his son.

I took to haunting churches, alone, huddled in a pew, away from the altar, away, always away from the pitiful, withering gaze of his only begotten son. (I was more the mixed-race stepchild) but still I went, and kneeled, crying out if not for mercy, at least some fucking sympathy.

And one day God answered.

He said, "No..."

I slip and the slope is longer than I imagine...

Can't figure it. My Dad was okay, it was good news, so why did I feel the need to blot out everything in my path?

Maybe what they say is true, that this 'disease'-once we get sober-becomes arrested and when we start up again it is always worse, with no exception.

(If my alcoholism had been arrested then it had been released on bail, tracked me down, and made me it's bitch...I was running this string out all the way to the end.)

I moved south of Mission, into a converted warehouse. My employers had to bring in an outside source to make sense of the mess I had made of their books and I hooked up with a small, independent record label, promoting records.

Not as glamorous as it sounds. It was 1987. A lot of booze. A lot of other drugs and very little music. Add the fact that I had no idea what I was doing and you get a pretty good picture.

I started to realize what withdrawal meant and what the hair of the dog could do. It was more like an entire dog, sometimes more than one and I was rapidly falling apart.

Any relationships I had cratered and I took one more stab at rich and famous. Or my idea of it, at any rate.

I was in a bar and met a sales rep for the Columbia School of Broadcasting. By the time I signed a contract, to include a guaranteed student loan to become a disc jockey, I was in a full on, free fall, blackout.

Years later some pinched face government wench, with the personality of a stomach cramp was demanding I pay back the money. She actually said, "The U.S. Government will not rest, Mr. Hill, until you have satisfied this obligation."

After I composed myself I felt compelled to ask what she could possibly know about satisfaction.

Then she hung up on me.

That was hardly fair. I wasn't through laughing.

I turn from the light...embracing the darker pleasures.

I drank on the plane and I drank at the airport, waiting on a girl from the office to pick me up. She joined me while we poured a few down and played 'spy' at the airport.

I talked her into stopping for provisions on the way to my apartment. She was drunker than she ought to have been, but it didn't matter to me.

She was the one driving.

After more libations and clumsy, embarrassing sex, I decided to put on a pot of beans. The old fashioned way; slow, simmering, southern goodness.

We both passed out with the beans on the stove.

I came to in a grey world filled with acrid smoke, populated by large angry dude's in space suits. One of whom was slapping the shit out of me before throwing me over his shoulder and carrying me outside.

The San Francisco Fire Department takes a dim view of stupid drunks almost killing themselves with a pot of burning beans.

She was wearing a blanket, playing cutesy with a fireman while I watched, stark naked- thank you very much- to yellowish smoke billowing from my now burning apartment.

The apartment manager had been summoned and I could imagine she was not going to be happy about this.

She was still mad from two weeks ago when I carpeted the kitchen.

My feet were cold.

The light of reason hurts my eyes...

The surgery was a success. It bought my Dad ten more years and a diet he loathed. Already a fairly disagreeable old prick, the diet did not help in making him a cuddly, shorter, Wilford Brimley. More like a seriously pissy Mickey Rooney.

"See..." he said, propped in his hospital bed, showing me the scar that ran like a big blue zipper in the middle of his chest, and a thinner, maroon scar that ran the length of his leg, from groin to ankle, where the 'good veins' had been removed for use in his well buttressed chest. "This is what you've got to look forward to." I think it actually thrilled him in some perverse way.

"Yeah Dad, thanks for the genetics, sport, can't hardly wait to be opened up like a human fucking canoe."

"Watch your language, there's a god damned lady present," he growled, motioning to his 'doppelganger' bride. Shit...she looked just liked him, except her ass was bigger.

He had never in his life curtailed his language for anybody, except possibly his mother, but she was liable to call him a 'shit ass' as well as anything else, so I'm not sure where the big moral push came from.

And then began the family litany of heart disease. My Uncle-bypasses-many heart attacks, but God love him, still going strong as I write this 23 years later, and of course our dear Uncle Charley, the Episcopal Priest whose heart exploded either in his living room, or the fairway at the golf course, depending on who is telling the story.

He even mentioned his Father, which I thought patently unfair, as his heart only stopped after he plowed a 30.06 round through his skull after being found with a hooker on his lap by my grandmother. He was tired of her nagging.

I think he made his point. But that was not technically a heart attack-so I don't think it counts.

I had done my dutiful son routine and it was time I went back to the coast...I made it seem like I was terribly busy at work, and now that he was out of the woods...well, you know.

I should have stayed, sought help and burrowed in with my family, but I had something to prove.

And I knew my Dad was not going to die, at least not yet...because whatever it was, I hadn't proved it to him.

And you know what?

I never did.

As soon as the Southwest flight leveled off after takeoff and I headed into the sunset, I ordered two beers and a tequila.

I had earned it.

Landing in the fog...

Daylight was tweaking over the horizon when we landed at DFW. It was foggy in the City when I left, and foggy here when I landed.

Maybe the world was fogged in. While I was travelling above the earth maybe a huge fog bank had finally enveloped the planet, socking it all in. I warmed to the idea, but, having taken another Valium, I warmed to everything.

My youngest cousin met me at the gate. She was great, the closest thing I ever had to a baby sister, who truly loved me unconditionally.

She took me to my Aunt and Uncle's house, the one I lived in during the third grade Catholic school experience. It was smaller than I remembered, but still the closest thing to home I ever had.

My Dad was being prepped for surgery right before I got to his room. His wife sat in the hard backed chair next to his bed. I could hear him from outside the door, bitching and she shushing him like a petulant child.

A cute nurse exited the room as I was entering, rolling her eyes and smiling. Yeah...he could do that to you.

I steeled myself and walked in.

The scariest part was not how small my Father looked, nor how frightened, but how similar he and his wife looked. Like some strange, white haired, androgynous, couple of twins. Wow. Maybe the drugs had something to do with it.

I hugged him and he whispered thank you in my ear, then began doing his 'bit'. Never failed. He was an entertainer, so scared of who he really was, had to be the 'Nutty Professor' whenever any one walked in to the room. I had finally gotten old enough to tire of it.

She just looked at him, letting him go. She really put up with a lot...his tantrums, moods, personality shifts.

Like they said about the blind hooker; you really had to hand it to her.

Memory Lane is often filled with vacant lots...

I borrowed money from my boss for the airplane ticket. I took the red-eye.
Bad coffee and Valium made for some interesting observations at thirty-two thousand feet.

Of course I was thinking of my Father, after my addiction was calmed. The little yellow pills certainly helped with the whips and jingles that not drinking had caused and slowed things down to a manageable crawl.

My Dad. The first thing that came to mind was his smell. Pipe tobacco and after shave. Funny. You'd think it would be the beatings...as his anger was white hot and spontaneous. But no, I remembered crawling onto his lap, nuzzling in to that smell, and feeling safe.

After all, he was the only one I was truly afraid of.

My first memory oozed into view as shadows fell across the seat in front of me and I remembered the bars of my crib.

My room was dark, and light from the hallway threw a pie shaped wedge onto my crib. I was standing, clutching the bars and crying, terribly afraid.

A friend of my parents stood just outside my reach, his arm in a cast.

I could hear them in the other room. Screaming. Glass breaking. I didn't know what the guy in the cast was doing...I just wanted my Mom and Dad to stop. I wanted him to stop hitting her and I wanted her to stop egging him on, begging for him to do it again.

Fast forward to me and my Mom. I'm five and my Dad is on the road. We are alone and she's drunk and that's not good when you're epileptic.

She would seize, and fall to the hardwood floor, her heels beating a tattoo on the wood as she convulsed and passed out.

I recalled mustering up all of my five year old strength, pulling the mattress off the bed, struggling and slowly rolling her onto it, because I was a good boy, and good boys took care of their mommies.

The stewardess shook me awake.

I had been crying.

The deep end beckons...

I called a friend in the city and he came and picked me up. No questions asked. The Tennessee Williams line about the 'kindness of strangers' rang in my head. I got out with what I brought, minus a little self-esteem.

I still had my job and our mail boy at the office, a small, gay, Asian kid with a big heart would bring me dim sum from the Chinese place next to his apartment. He said it would heal a broken heart.

(The following year he went to New York City on vacation. He was cornered in an alley and beaten to death. No rhyme. No reason. A wonderful soul, released to the universe while his body lay broken in someone else's garbage.)

I stayed with my friend until one night he got drunk, started crying and professed deep feelings for me. Holy shit. Not what I needed. When I told him that, he turned vicious...hell hath no fury like a broken down queen.

My boss helped me find an apartment.

I started to drink again. A quick one at lunch, then deep breaths until five o'clock, then home and flagons of red wine. All was well until I looked out my bathroom window at the adjoining apartment roof one morning, maybe eight feet away. A man was standing on his roof, staring into my bathroom while he masturbated.

That'll unnerve ya before coffee. (Lesson learned...close my blinds.)

Why me?

Then I got a phone call at work. My Father was having open heart surgery. He wanted me to be there.

My first thought was not of him. It was not of my family.

It was I had to go home, and I would not be able to drink.

I shuffled through the mental Rolodex and hit upon the solution.

Valium.

Once again, it was a good idea at the time.

Overdrawn at the First Karma Savings and Loan...I didn't even get a toaster.

Karma. The playing card stuck in the spokes of the wheel of life. Every revolution it makes, it comes back around and smacks you in the head.

And then you learn to duck.

This was one of those times. Realizing I was the simpleton she was using to take care of her kid and pay half the rent, while she screwed her boss on his oversized mahagony desk made me physically sick. I called her on it. Of course it went badly, how else could it have gone?

The tears mixed with the instant breakfast version of denial to make a warm, gelatinous mess we both had to wade through to get to the truth.

So I said it. Instant regret. "What about us?" Oh yes, my denial was firmly in place. And then she returned the serve.

"There is no us...I'm in love with my boss...that's who I think of when you hold me." She cranked up the volume on that last part. Unnecessary, I thought, just twisting the blade a bit, I suppose.

Just goes to show...cut the crust off a shit sandwich and serve it to me on a doily...I still have a shit sandwich.

She actually thought he would leave his wife for her. Too bad. (I heard later she got fired, not too long after I left.)

"yes a withdrawal, please....small bills are just fine." Point, match.

Game over.

And the dance began...

It started like most fantasies, with lots of light, smiles and empty promises. Boy meets girl on 12-step campus. Why not. She was sober. I was sober. Seemed like a fit.

Yeah. A round peg bludgeoned into a square hole.

I had answered an ad for an office manager position with a small court reporting firm in the financial district.
Lack of experience not withstanding -the owners were taken in by my considerable charms, (duh) and they hired me. My main responsibilities were doing the books...light accounting.

I took an accounting course at San Francisco City College at night. I looked like I knew what the hell I was doing.

We moved into an apartment south of the city in a bedroom community called Mountain View. She had a five year old son. He never warmed to me. Step kids were never my strong suit.

I commuted by train, everyday, and stood on the platform, paper folded under my arm, walkman on my head, listening to the classic rock station out of the city, while I waited on the train. The commuters looked at me like I belonged, and I looked the part.

But there was an old woman who was there on the platform every morning. She never boarded the train. She just sat. And looked.

Mainly at me, and I knew, she knew I was a fraud.

I would make dinner for the boy when I got home, which was usually before she did, as she worked as a legal secretary for a high powered attorney in the big, gold, pyramid downtown. She worked late. A lot.

I thought we were happy. Or as happy as two highly dysfunctional folks in recovery could be. But something was missing. It wasn't real. It was as big a sham as P.T. Barnum ever imagined, and we said all the right things to gloss over the ugly, harsh, reality.

I'm Irish.

We can put up with something being wrong for a very long time.

My relationship dynamics...sort of.

Before I go any further I feel the need to mention something. These are my memories. Some of which are very old indeed.
Sometimes they are difficult to dredge, while others ignite with the pain of a chemical burn.

The memories regarding the women in my life are some of the most difficult. I am very, very careful not to use any names...you know who you are, or were in most cases.

I do not feel the need to poke, prod or needle any of you. In fact, I wish most of you would just go away, but if you did, I would not be the man I am, and I suppose I owe all of you a debt of some kind in that regard.

Thank you all for teaching me that love is conditional. That the size of the gold card is more important than the size of my heart. That I was never Mr. Right...simply Mr. Right now and for every one of you thinking you could change me, to turn me into your idea of what I should be.

Well, that worked well, didn't it?

No...not quite, but it did make me aware that you wanted me to change; that my good enough, was second best, that my good ideas, or at least the one's from the heart were something to be chalked up to eccentricity, and that love was best kept at a distance.

So, now I can begin the part where I am cheated on for the first time, (that I knew of) and the words, "There is no us..." become a part of the lexicon of language in the memories I try to ignore.

Please don't think I am bitter, or hate you, or I feel sorry for myself. I am simply clear.

There is a difference.