The Tricks of The Craft by Tetman Callis

       Jes CC




THE TRICKS OF THE CRAFT


    There’s a lot about those days I’ve never written about. When I have, I’ve written it out as fiction. Smooth the rough edges, apply the tricks of the craft. Call it fiction so I can tell the truth and still feel safe. Just say, “Oh, that’s fiction. How true is it? It’s as true as you want it to be.” 
    This is not fiction. 
    This is the story that I can’t tell you. So I will tell you. 
    The day I poured the almost-full, very recently purchased fifth of Southern Comfort down the drain, the kitchen sink—this story has everything, including a kitchen sink, ha ha—this was the day I called AA. The man on the phone told me where the nearest AA place was, and told me that even making that call, the call I was making right then, was an important, vitally important, step to take. To have taken. To be taking.
    I never went to AA. That call was the closest I got.
    When I poured, when I called, I had a wife. We met in 1983, wed in 1985, divorced in 1991. Valentine’s Day of 1991.
    When I poured the Southern Comfort down the drain, that was October of 1988. 
    The things we remember.
    I remember I told her about it when she got home from work that day. Told her what I had done. She said she would help me any way she could.
                                                                                                                                          •
    I just want to tell you a story. It’s about a man. He’s a writer. He’s also a father and a husband. He’s other things, besides, but there’s no point in calling him names.
    It took me a long time to understand where it all came from. Why had I crawled into a bottle to hide? What was I so afraid of? Jesus, I was scared half out of my wits. Not the pants-wetting, screaming and sobbing scared that would have made my fear obvious, but a slow-burn scared like a piece of iron rusting in the rain.
    There were sunny days, too. But sunny or cloudy, at the end of them, I had lost my home, my business, my wife—and the time. All that time.
    All that time that I was too drunk to get off the couch, or the floor. Too drunk to do anything other than stay drunk. 
    Too drunk to change a diaper. My wife and I, we had a son. Our baby boy. I was his primary caregiver. A stay-at-home dad, when it was still considered a very unusual and by many persons a socially unacceptable way for a man to be. My wife and I, we were pioneers of the new social order. She kept her maiden name after we got married. (Loan officer at a bank in Texas said, “I didn’t know that was legal.”) She was the breadwinner. Accountant. CPA. Major firm. She supported me while I wrote.
    I couldn’t write worth a damn. Didn’t help I was so often drunk.
    Couldn’t read much that way, either.
    Riddle me this: what kind of writer is a writer who is too drunk to read and too drunk to write?
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    I’m trying to tell you a story. I’m running out of time and I have to tell you this story.
    Are you still there?
    My wife’s job frequently took her out of town. Routinely she was assigned to spend weeks in other towns, auditing the books of Native American tribal entities. She would leave on Monday mornings, return on Friday evenings.
    She knew her husband was a drunk. Before we had our son, she knew this. So picture this: young mother, job requires her to be out of town, away from her baby boy, who is being cared for by her husband whom she knows to have a problem.
    Ah, but I was a crafty one. A sly bugger. She’d leave on a Monday morning and the first thing I would do after she was gone is I would drive to the supermarket and buy a case of beer. Twenty-four cans, each can twelve ounces. That’s two gallons of beer, and a quart extra. Leave the boy in the car in his car seat while I popped into the store. First thing in the morning, no crowd, I’d be in and out in a jiff.
    It worked every time.
    Thus would begin that week’s boozer. That case of beer would last however long it would last—a couple days, I think—then I would want— 
    “Want,” hell. What kind of “want” was it to want something no one in their right mind would want? 
    It was a need. Pure and simple. I had conjured myself up one fierce need. A man who had everything he needed, but still needed to have a need.
    Monday it would begin. After she left, so she wouldn’t know. (Did she know?) It would last through Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday was for sobering up. Friday she’d be back and her husband would be sober. (But did she know?)
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    I was going to tell you, so I will tell you, the state we lived in allowed liquor stores to have drive-through windows. Any drunk in such a state knows what a gift it is to have a drive-through window at a liquor store. You can be too drunk to walk and still be able to sit in the driver’s seat of a car and drive.
    Too drunk to drive? Yes and no. And driving anyway.
    The nearest liquor store with a drive-in window—I mean, drive-through, not drive-in—was in the next town over, ten miles away. When I was too drunk to walk and it was late Wednesday afternoon and I knew I wouldn’t make it through Wednesday night because I would be coming down when what I needed to be was passing out, I would put my baby boy in the car seat—after having changed his diaper for the first time in so many hours it was sopping wet—and I would make sure the car seat was firmly in place the way it was supposed to be and I would drive him and myself out of our town on the hill and down to the next-door town in the valley and to the drive-through liquor window where I would buy whatever I was getting—at this point in the boozer it would be whiskey or brandy or vodka or rum—and I didn’t have to get out of the car.
    It was so easy. Drive. Stop. Roll down the window. Say, “Pint of Jack Daniels black.” Pull out the money, give it to the man. Take the bottle and the change. Roll up the window. Drive back home. Try not to break any laws—I mean, any that would get me stopped by a cop who would quickly discover the other laws I was breaking—and try not to have any accidents.
    Worked every time.
    What’s the story? God looks out for children and drunks? 
    Maybe sometimes God does and maybe sometimes God does not. That’s God’s business. Not mine.
    This happened. Driving back from the liquor store, three days drunk, baby boy in the back seat in his car seat. Northbound on the highway, two-laner, speed limit 45 or 55, I don’t remember. Turning left across oncoming traffic to get into my neighborhood. I was pretty sure I could make it, and I did, the oncoming car’s horn sounding a long and dropping note as it sped past behind me.
    But I didn’t hear tires screeching the scream of slammed-on brakes. So everything must have been all right.
                                                                                                                                           •
    There was a bottle of Amaretto—a Christmas gift, loving drunken husband to 
(still-)loving wife—thrown in anger by the wife onto the living room carpet, and the drunken husband on his hands and knees, picking the slivers of broken glass from out of the weave.
    Oh, does this make me a hero? Does this make me a good guy? Or—The Good Guy?
    I don’t know what to say to that, other than, No, it does not.
    There were two incidents. The first came before the bottle of Southern Comfort and the second came before the bottle of Amaretto.
    First incident:
    My wife was out of town on assignment. The usual, Monday out, Friday back. She was traveling with a co-worker.
    Early Wednesday night, I woke from my pass-out on the couch and knew I needed one more bottle to get me through the night and into Thursday’s sobering up. I could take a quick drive down to the supermarket and get a bottle of wine. My baby boy was asleep in his crib. No need to wake him and change him and put him in the car seat and bring him along. I would be back in twenty minutes. Twenty-five at the most.
    If I wrote this up as fiction—what’s about to happen—what did happen—if I wrote it up as fiction and you were my editor you would throw it back at me and tell me, “That doesn’t work. You have to cut that. Rewrite it and make it believable.”
    I don’t know how long as I was gone but I think it was twenty minutes. Twenty-five at the most. 
    It was Wednesday night. She wasn’t supposed to be back until Friday.
    I drove up the street to my house and there was a pick-up truck parked in my driveway. Right away I knew what had happened. 
    I thought for a moment to keep driving. Just keep driving. Run away and never come back.
    That thought was only for a moment. There was no place to run to, no way to hide. My baby boy was in that house. I had to go there and face up to what I was going to have to face up to.
    Does this make me a hero? Oh, please, enough of that. I was caught, is what I was.
    I don’t remember if the front door was open. I think it was. I do remember the kitchen light was on. The living room lights, too, though I probably had left them on. I have only a vague recollection of what my wife’s co-worker looked like. Young woman, same as my wife. Longer hair.
    I haven’t thought about this in a long time. Not in detail. When I’ve thought about it, it’s simply been, This is what I did, This is what the truck in the drive looked like, This is what I thought to do, This is one of the two ways I wrecked my marriage.
    I think I remember that my wife’s co-worker was standing in the living room and my wife was down the hall. I think I remember hearing my wife saying from down the hall, “He’s not here.” I think I remember her saying she had checked on her son—our son—and he was sound asleep.
    I remember I was carrying a small shopping bag with a bottle of wine—Mouton-Cadet, a sentimental favorite—and a canister of toasted onion rings. I stashed the bag in a kitchen cabinet. I don’t remember when I drank that wine and ate those onion rings, but I know it wasn’t that night. It was almost certainly the next time my wife went out of town.
    I remember that my wife’s co-worker left shortly after I got back home. I don’t remember what else happened that night, except I don’t remember there being any shouts or screams or tears.
    I must have reeked.
    The second incident came at the end of the year. Friday evening. Company Christmas party. Not my company, I was “self-employed.” My wife’s company. By now she had left the major accounting firm and was working at a major bank. A bank that would fail the following year.
    All things that fall must converge.
    I was so drunk. I showed up that way. My wife was at work all day. I was to come to the party early that evening, after dropping our boy off at a night-care center. 
    I did this. Down the hill from out of our town and into the city where my wife worked and where the night-care center was located. Drop the baby off. Motor on to the party.
    I don’t remember what it was I was drinking before I got to the party. What I was drinking while I had been on duty as a writer and a baby’s sole caregiver. 
    Active duty, dereliction of. A punishable offense.
    I do remember the look of alarm and dismay, tinted with horror, that crossed my wife’s face when she saw me crossing the office space to where she stood socializing with her co-workers. She hustled me out of there real fast. We went and got our boy. I remember that I drove, but that can’t be right. She must have driven.
    We got our boy and stopped by an Arby’s for dinner. I remember being sheepish and apologetic. I may have said, “I don’t know why I did it.”
    At the time, that was true.
    At the time, I didn’t know this incident was the last straw.
    Later, I saw this sign: in photographs I took of her after this happened— 
    “Happened”? This didn’t “happen.” I did this. No one else did this.
    In photographs I took of her over the year we were to remain married, she never any longer looked at the camera.
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    This is not the entire story of those days—not even close—but I have run out of time.    I wouldn’t have wanted any of this to be true.
    Is there any happy ending here? Consolation that it wasn’t worse? That I didn’t kill anybody? That my wife remarried and had the husband and family she had wanted to have and once thought she could have with me? That our son grew up to be a capable and intelligent man? 
    What’s done is done. There’s no trick, no craft, that will change that.  

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Tetman Callis was born in the Northeast and raised in the Southwest, his father a soldier and his mother a homemaker. He holds a degree in philosophy from the University of Texas at El Paso. His work has been published in various magazines, including NOON, New York Tyrant, Atticus Review, The Writing Disorder, BULL, Book of Matches, and Anti-Heroin Chic. He is the author of two published books -- the memoir High Street: Lawyers, Guns & Money in a Stoner's New Mexico (2012, Outpost 19), and the children's novel Franny & Toby (2015, Silky Oak Press). He lives in Chicago with his wife and her cat.

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