Yvonne Cha
The Drunkard
She couldn’t say no to the drink, or to the hike, or to those disposable flavored vapes shaped like a vibrator or a baby’s bottle from Randy’s E-Cig Emporium. If someone asked her, “Want to grab six beers?” she’d say yes just as promptly as she would to, “Do you want to lead worship this Sunday?” She wanted the God who endowed the prophetic, who gifted peacocks with fighting flight. So she kept dusty boots in the passenger seat, empty of feet, jostling each time she pumped the brakes at a red light. She couldn’t afford a Tesla or a child, but these were ancient things, warm and luminous, that held her captive to the prayer mountain where she heard herself thinking, it’s not true that God can do everything. For instance, it is not true that God can lie.
At a REST!-themed weekend retreat in the San Bernardino hills, she climbed to her cabin and then the meeting hall. On her knees, she asked the speaker, a grizzly man with tattooed sleeves, what exactly was her condition: was she being given away to her desires, and how did she come to desire them? Which desires were gifts and which were her plunge? She desperately wanted to betray what betrayed her. He stood on a chair and said, “El Roi—God sees you. He is the God of sight. Now know that he sees you, and come to His table and eat.”
But what did He see, and before she could eat, where was the lie?
So she read and she drank and she walked, almost always in that order. She had inherited a weakness for miscellany, and drank the traipsing pitches off the edge of perfidy. She was scalded by the commotion of the gingkos; their leaves, crushed up gummy under her soles, smelled like open sores.
Sucking deep breaths through his nose, her dearest friend Jon said, “I scent-se they’re sexing.” And they returned, in their waste, to gyrating against the fire hydrants on Bloomington Street until it started to rain, and Jon decided he would be washed away, down the gutter, wedging himself between a parked car and a curb, face planted against the metal squares of a sewage drain, planking sideways in the muddy concrete.
“Drink me down too,” he wagged a finger at the clouds, and she tugged on his dead arm to get him to stop crying, “Jon, why are you crying down there?”
It was a Wednesday afternoon in October, at 4:00 pm, a pack of celadon American Spirits smushed in the side pocket of his graffiti-print backpack from the Marc Jacobs outlet in Aurora. His eyes shuttered open and closed, his glasses were crooked, his curly shoulder-length frizz aflame in the soggy autumn light. “It’s not even dark out yet,” she said, but what she thought was, people can see us. The one person who passed by was too busy watching his own shadow cross the street; he thought to himself, big head. He had tried all day to have a thought worth having, and big head was the day’s single thought, an example of how it had to get really bad before it could get any good. Just when she managed to strap Jon into the front seat of her car, trying to do a good thing and get her friend home, she saw the siren circling in her rearview mirror, an epiphanic flashing that stretched her shadow into a traffic cone.
Or so she appeared, curled up on the bottom shelf of a steel bunk in a deep orange two-piece, tracing the words BLAH BLAH BLAH etched into the frame above her. At first, she prayed for a miracle, and smiled through her mugshot despite red-rimmed eyes and the shock of handcuffs and a police car’s rough backseat. When they asked her to blow, she did, not imagining her breath was numbered. At the .091 that lit up off the tube, Officer Brad said, “Like, this is obviously not good,” and at not good, she was not good, the shame building big inside her. With the metallic taste and dry tickle of red wine still lodged in her throat, she asked to use her phone call. And when she dialed, it was her father, whom she asked, “Why why why did you leave us us us when I I I was twelve?” It was not because of him that she was in the Johnson County Jail, and whatever the correlation between her abandonment and her drinking, they weren’t grounds for speeding thirty-five miles per hour on a twenty-five mile-per-hour road. It was not a copula nor a copout, because everything was measured objectively, from time (it was midnight), to the speed (slow but fast), her direction (down down down), to the air (hammered) in her body. They freed her from her bra when they made her change into the jail suit, even providing small medicine cups full of saline for her contact lenses. But there was no way she would let go of her sight, especially when there were no actual bars in the cell, only People magazines, a small TV, and the metal toilet her cellmate Gina frequented frequently for micro-doses of pee, her UTI flaring from the alcohol that charged her with public intox. Gina had a Barbie bandaid on her forehead, and both her parents were dead. “I lived in Greenwich Village, you know, went to culinary school in NorCal,” said Gina, and she had no reason to be lying, but also, who asked? Aren’t they all compulsive liars if they end up in a place like this, she thought, then remembered to see herself in this place too, that she was there now. Lying on a plastic cot in the dead of night, twenty-one years young and lying to herself: this is a gift, this DUI is a gift because this is as bad as it will ever get. Thank you, God, for the wake-up call, for the mercy of being found out. But what will she wake up to, and did she want healing or did she want comfort? She couldn’t decide. She felt that wherever you go, there you are. She was housed somewhere in the space between, in the synchronized buffering of soul and sin. It was a sickness, and she had not asked to be sick, but she kept getting stuck in this paralysis, this passivity of woe is me as she downed another shot of Jameson and made out with a dying YouTube actor in front of her summer boyfriend, wearing a fishnet for a dress and sucking on Marlboro Lights in the stairwell behind Maru, thinking to herself, I am hot but not angry. Surely someone will still want me, big head.
“Don’t put yourself in situations you can’t get out of,” they told her, the counselors and the spiritual advisors and the lovers who tried so hard to see the good in her, despite all the things she did which were not. Not good. But it seemed what had given her the appearance of good was her ability to withstand the bad things that had happened to her. And now that she was in a better place, she made the bad things happen herself. She didn’t really know why she did it, didn’t know how to know, or why God had done the things to make her good if he knew she wasn’t going to commit. She concentrated very hard, when she could, on trying to be kind. But she still couldn’t see the peacock waddling on the road, bursting into the air when she nearly mowed it down, at dawn, on her way to meet her friend Hannah for a hike behind Descanso Gardens, during a heatwave. She had never seen a peacock fly, never imagined its elaborate feathers could also be functional. The eyelashes had eyes. If she lived to eighty, and if she calculated her age according to the hours in a day, it was only 8:45 in the morning now, but for the bird, it was metaphorically 11:59 pm every day. The peacock, from the other side of the road, roosted and crowed.
On the hike, she and Hannah snaked up many hilltops, and then they didn’t recognize the way back. The sun had changed positions, making the same road look very different. When she whimpered that nothing was familiar, Hannah said that this was nothing, that some women suffer through labor the length of Nolan’s entire Batman Trilogy and have to get vaginal reconstructive surgery because the skin starts to flap and then overlap so it’s impossible to find a hole to penetrate should she want another dark knight, and Madagascar was now a dustbin. Kamala’s recent word salad, too, was proof, Hannah said, that the world had been drained of its verve, or did she say verbs. Hannah droned on about the poor people of Tonga and Nauru mining the ocean bed for the nodules in our EVs, there could be no real equity in clean energy, and materialists, in the Marxist sense, were to blame. She listened intently as they came down the mountain, deep breaths dissolved to shallow panting under the scorching sun, distracted by Hannah saying so much but not knowing what any of it meant. She felt confused, and they were still so far from where they had started, how was Hannah really doing?
Eventually, they sat down for carbohydrates at a diner called Dish to celebrate the completion of their labored walking. Fixed on each table was an individual toaster so patrons could toast their own damn bread. It was like sitting in a Koons exhibit, surrounded by the ubiquitous yet nearly archaic four-slotted machines rattling and popping slices of rye into the air, a wonderful counterpart to the phallic vacuum, birthing thin slabs of burnt bread. She dialed the heat to 1 so the bread would be warmed but not singed, and ordered a Bellini but hold the prosecco because it was her first weekend sober. She struck up a conversation, “How’s school?” Hannah, her last sensible friend, huffed, stabbed her fork into a short stack of silver dollar pancakes, and replied:
“Dude, I went on a Hinge date with this guy last week. When we matched he basically said let’s just skip the awkward small talk and meet up in person for breakfast. I was like, Oook? Breakfaaast? Love the early birdie vibes for us, and lowkey also finally a man who seems like he could slap me around! Anyway, it was like 9am on a Tuesday and we met at a coffee shop in Larchmont. When I got there he was already at a teeny corner table with his coffee cup empty, sitting very upright staring straight at me as I walked in the door. I was confused, like, am I late??? I sat down without even ordering because I was so flustered and in my mind I’m thinking, red flag that he didn’t get up to hug me??? But I wasn’t gonna be the one to initiate, I just couldn’t really read him, though he looked okay, kind of in a preppy half-zip navy knit, slightly pockmarked skin, mussy hair. Anyway, I apologized for making him wait, even though, not my fault??? He went right in and asked me, What do you do, and I said, I’m studying to be an occupational therapist, and he was like, Oh, what is that? And I’m like, acting all shy and shit, Oh, I specialize in hands. I work a lot with patients recovering from trigger finger, and they can’t really move their fingers well. Here I am, trying to seem chill about the fact that I help people for a living, because I like helping people, it’s the most saleable thing about me in romantic currency, and I guess I thought it was kind of a flex that this was going to be my career, massaging palms and stretching wrists and holding hands, literally. He looked kind of amused so I thought I’d show him this exercise I recently learned to do with my patients. You touch your thumb to the tip of your other fingers, a classic move in hand therapy. You go from thumb to index to middle to ring to pinky and then back again. You do it on both hands. So I asked him to try it, I was like, Here, let me practice on you! Let me give you a hand! And I thought my ass was so cute and clever, I was thinking, maybe I’ve salvaged??? the vibes??? When finally, at my insistence, he pulls out his left arm from below the table, and bam. He has no hand. He was missing a whole hand. The left one. He never texted me back.”
Hannah chugged her mimosa, wiped her mouth and scowled as she crossed her arms. Blonde-haired families laughed with their teeth while waiting for their food. Was Hannah mad at herself, or at the one-handed man? Perhaps he had had a duty to tell her before she let herself go on a spiel about her professional handiness. Perhaps he would have explained to her that he wasn’t bothered by her talk of hands, that he found her comments rather funny, perhaps he was a good-natured guy who felt nothing about it, being born without. Or perhaps he had been offended that she hadn’t noticed, hadn’t bothered to see what was so clearly not there, especially because he wasn’t afforded the distance, so why was she, when she claimed to be such a helper of human hands? Could she spare the same amount of care for someone handless? Did she even know how? She understood the impossibility of the situation. The wavy hills of the Angeles crest ululating behind her, she said to Hannah, as a kind of solace, “Either way, it’s not his fault he didn’t have a hand.” She returned to her engorged waffle and waffled.
How long would her sobriety last. Returning to her tiny L-shaped studio, she paced around naked despite the floor-to-ceiling windows, irritated by withdrawal, bored to death with having to stay awake until it was time to sleep, and how sleep didn’t come like a bludgeon in this voyeuristic fishbox of an apartment, where she could hear the physicists living just below her window talk about the materiality of death versus the transitive of dying, or vice versa—the transitive of material death, or the materiality of transitive dying, a passive decomposition or an active destruction? Death and dying could not be more different. She hardly thought about death but imagined all the ways to die. It seemed the thrill was not to be dead but how to become dead, which is arguably the most active act in life. Swaying from one end to the other, snippets of conversations swirled and she was pulled outside by the smoke of a barbecue: Blue recounted the discovery of his piss fetish, like Voldemort and Harry’s wands meeting in the Goblet of Fire, the crash of two streams was “blazen,” he said. Gabe asked, “Is that why it’s called that, because you have to be in the shower to be golden?” Cheng Lin undercooked all the white meat, so she ate chicken skin with a spoon and fed the raw breasts to the dogs. Bingsoo the brown poodle licked scotch off her lips, and she made the puppy promise not to tell anyone about the finger of Laphroaig she had stolen off the picnic table. “Shh, Bingsoo, shh, I’m supposed to be sober!”
Though maybe it was okay if there was no one around to be hurt by her drinking. It was only when in her stupor she did stupid things, stupefied by the extent of her own stupidity, the plunge into some abyss of self-destruction that struck down her world in a Jean Grey mood of fuck-you fire. The root of patience and passion are both pati. A lack of patience fed her passion for shock without impact. If life were a game of tennis, she somehow always swung the racket two seconds after the ball, thumped its shadow and not the beastly fuzz. Why couldn’t she anticipate the consequences?
As a fat kid in the fifth grade, she sat out Gym every time, since no one questioned her calling cramps. After she got her period in class one morning and leaked in the middle of Math, the kids laughed, made gagging noises, and threw Styrofoam trays of sloppy joe meat at her head. They even circulated a Xanga page called UR RED DOT . . . with curvy Comic Sans circles bannered in the brightest, most primary red ink. The kids mimed horror and hilarity with pixelated e-props.
She was banished to the bench, and her hand-eye coordination never recovered. She just couldn’t see what came next, the cool kid hurtling a handball at her tender boobs during recess, or the married man who held her hand inside a tent while she stroked his long greasy hair, folding it behind his ear when he bent down for a bump of coke. His wife, he said, forced him into Sex Addicts Anonymous, because every lunch break he found himself at a massage parlor in Morningside Heights. The life of a nonprofit worker was solemn to touch, and there were no happy endings in the environmental crusade.
So it came as a relief to find himself flooded with guilt. Stepping back out into the city’s searing daylight after being jerked off by a quiet woman on a leather table, what burned inside him was finally made translucent by the swarm of sun and strangers, walking slowly into his office with a blank gaze, turning again to the tall task of caring for the trees and the giraffes and the hornets and his wife—did they know how much they needed saving, did they know how much we tried to care?
Somehow she understood what he was saying to her, and she couldn’t turn away from how he fell apart. She was a giraffe then, swinging her plasticine neck, unaware of how she issued her own extinction by refusing to look above, to the game of life as positionality against other obelisk heads, busy hiding behind shadow. But the point had been drawn, she twisted an ankle and was dry humping a man-bun in the driver’s seat, quivering with curiosity and cottonmouth from four chaotic nights at a writers’ conference in wine country where their paths crossed over terribly written fiction, fiction they labored over while everyone else was living real life, waiting for words worth writing to appear magically like termites to flip the hivemind, words they hoped would spare them the slow death of irrelevance in a weaning world, suckling self-importance, sipping whiskey by lighter light, half-eaten bars of chocolate, stale coffee, snippets of Major Jackson’s poetry, more grief, more and more grief and finding cheese. Without a kiss or even any real nudity, they parted, vowing never to speak again. And while she thought they carried each other’s secrets like faithful cadets, he had dropped the ball and she didn’t even see.
This environmentalist who lived for guilt went home and smugly confessed to his wife that he had forged an intense emotional connection, but failed to mention that the intensity of the bind was bound to his little mounds of cocaine and the perpetual state of being browned out. Of course, rage ensued. DMs were fired. Beer cans were thrown. Tears were weaponized, screenshots and screaming and three-way calls to uproot the cause of connection. Her partner, who had been sick with Covid while she gallivanted with a 유부남 during a workshop in Napa, frothed at the mouth, rolling around on her floor with a mild bout of alcohol poisoning, slurring at her to show him, “Show me how you touched another man. Show me,” he boomed, pushing up against her while she drooled snot and begged, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” And when he woke up from his 술병 without remembering what he’d done, he threw up and lolled his head at her, “I want my reverse cowgirl.” So she bled all over her green sheets with her back turned to his screwed-up face before he never saw her again. “Failed spectacularly at love, my love,” her mother on the phone said.
They had all left her now, or she had left them, and she wanted to forget that she was alone. The only imperative left was, “Take care of yourself, don’t take life for granted.” But the imperative’s lack of subject made her feel out of control. Who was this subject who withheld the instructional blueprint? How was she expected to self-actualize by a subjectless command?
Alone, finally, she was walking a hungry mile home one day when she saw the Taco Bell, but turned her head, attempting to rise to the occasion of her own hunger, to be her own Taco Bell. She would go home and make stuffed tofu pockets for herself, something she liked, all and only for her. The tofu skins were usually stuffed with seasoned rice, furikake, and a sweet syrupy vinegar, but she would replace the rice with tofu to halve the carbs. She would eat all of it, a whole sleeve of skins and a full tray of tofu. Back in her kitchen, she first drained the tofu, squeezing water out of its pores until it crumbled softly. Bent along the narrow counter that was thinner than a smoker’s vein, she smashed up silken tofu with her bare hands, ravenous, and then seasoned it to a perfect sweet-and-sour balance. With everything prepared, she rubbed her hands and opened the pack of tofu skins, giddy for the final consummation of their stuffing, ready to pack them tight and round and line them up one by one on a plate, ready to make sure that each one was beautifully met with stuffing and stuffed. She would ensure that the plate was fully populated, no skin left hollow. And then, finally, still standing over the plate, she would eat them all.
Except she smelled rot. The minute she tore the plastic packaging, she smelled it. The skins had gone bad, the skins had gone rogue. Slimy curdled juices puckered the little triangular folds. She checked the expiration date over and over in disbelief, in devastation, that the pockets had rotted, when the packaging clearly stated, in official stamped ink, a best-by one year from the day. It smelled rancid, like a dirty dishcloth soaked in sour milk, but she still held it to her lips and tasted to be sure. There was no inconsistency in her sensory evaluation—it smelled gone, looked gone, felt gone, but she had to taste it to believe. Even though it wasn’t her fault the tofu pockets had spoiled, she was crushed even as she remembered to learn, in the moment, that sometimes, you have to give up not because you don’t care, but because they don’t.
A grainy bowl of tofu with no vehicle sat crowned by the wet mess she had made. She was still hungry but her hands were steeped in funk, she had to wash them before she could even clean up. In frustration, in forfeit, she sucked on her rubbery pink vape and slowly exhaled a fruity stream of smoke through her mouth. It tasted of lychee, aloe, mint. Skeuomorph, she thought, a cotton wick soaked in sticky vitamin A vape juice has no real nutritional content. The opposite of sucking is whistling, and the song she hears is the imperative, Drink! In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t even noon yet, and bodies in a roundabout way are solar-paneled. The physicists downstairs were watching The Hangover, and she could hear Bradley Cooper yell, “Whose fucking baby is that?” He was talking to her, or at her. Who did she fuck to be her own baby, and had it at least been good? The ensuing prayer in repose played in her head: please God, sustain me.