12/9/23
Newsletter #527
The Crack of Dawn
Several weeks ago, my friend and neighbor Mike asked me, “Have you told the story of Guns & Safes in your Crack of Dawn newsletter?” I said, “No. I try to avoid stories like that.” Mike shrugged, “That’s too bad, it’s a good story.”
Maybe Mike saying that got me on to thinking and is why I started telling stories like that – meaning true stories of addiction – that I honestly felt got more than enough space elsewhere. Me, personally, I’d rather think about Thomas Ince.
After eleven days of incarceration in St. Joe’s psyche ward, and now filled with every anti-depressant and anti-psychotic medication available, I was set free. My sister Pam just mentioned that when I immediately went back to drinking after going to the psyche ward, she was very disappointed in me. I find this slightly astonishing. To get to the psyche ward I had finally drunk so much alcohol that I was convinced that taking all the pharmaceutical drugs in my cupboard seemed like not only a good idea, but viable alternative, then spent eleven days locked up with the craziest motherfuckers in Oakland County, so now the very least I could do was drink. If I was a junkie or a crackhead, I’d have gotten right back to that.
I spent several weeks drinking constantly, mercilessly, and as it’s termed by psychiatrists I was in a state of Active Suicidal Ideation. Clearly, none of my meds would kill me, I’d proven that. My doctor at that time actually laughed at my suicide attempt, saying, “Do you have any idea how much Xanax you would have to take to kill yourself?” I said, “No, how much?” He said, “Your body weight. You’d need to take 200 pounds of Xanax.” He held his hand at chest level. “That’s a mountain this high.”
Well, I have vertigo and I hate heights, so anything like that was out. People sometimes hung themselves in their garages with extension cords. I went out to the garage and located a long orange extension cord. Inspecting the 2x4 crossbeams of the garage, I suspected that they wouldn’t hold. Maybe they even would, but bullshit if I was going to untangle the dirty 50-foot extension cord.
As a note, during my recent eleven days of incarceration, I had either unwisely or wisely read a really good biography of Ernest Hemingway, called Papa by A. E. Hotchner. At the end of Hemingway’s sixty-one years of life, he tried to kill himself several times. He tried walking into spinning plane propellers on more than one occasion. He finally settled on choosing one of his many rifles and blowing his brains out.
And then it came to me – right up the street from my house is a little store called Guns & Safes. I’d simply buy a shotgun and blow my brain out, just like Ernest Hemingway did. As drunk as I could possibly be, I got into my car and drove up to Guns & Safes, which is mercifully close by. I staggered into the small store and found that I was the only customer. I walked up to the glass case of pistols, put both hands down on top of it to support myself and perused the many rifles on the wall. The cheapest shotgun was $29.99 and was the exact same model as the one that Bruce Campbell and I bought at K-Mart for Evil Dead in 1979 for $19.95 – a 20-guage, one-shot-at-a-time, no frills, shotgun. A salesman of about my age came over to help me. I pointed and said, “I’ll take your cheapest shotgun and one box of shells.” As I now recall, the salesman couldn’t have been nicer, “Certainly, sir, could I see your driver’s license?” I said, “Certainly,” took out my wallet and gave him my license. He went into the back room. I returned both my hands to the pistol case to support myself because the chances of me falling down were running very high. The salesman returned and handed me my license, saying, “Come back Saturday.” I couldn’t believe it. “Why?” He said, “That’s how it works.”
I drove home pissed as hell. Then I thought, “Hey, I did just get out of the nuthouse, maybe there’s some kind of list or something.” I got home, poured myself a glass of vodka, then dispiritedly dropped onto the couch thinking, “Now what the fuck do I do?”
That question was promptly answered as flashing lights came up the street. First one EMS truck pulled up my driveway, then another one, then two cop cars parked on the street in front. Fuck. The salesman ratted on me.
Then — POOF! — there I was back on the 6th floor of St. Joe’s. Nobody seemed particularly surprised to see me. There was the six-and-a-half-foot-tall, unsmiling monolith named Anthony. There were all the same doctors and techs. I got a couple of, “Mr. Becker, my, my, but aren’t we back soon?” I’d say, “Yes, apparently we are.”
First thing every morning they took everybody’s vital signs – temperature and blood pressure. One white, blonde girl in a wheelchair with her hair in her face who never spoke to anyone had such low blood pressure — like 20/30, meaning dead — that she broke the machine. During designated game time, half of the people could not hold a hand of cards, let alone play the game. I thought, “If this is where I keep ending up, these must be my peers.”
In arts and crafts class and I spent several days making a leather wallet with stitched sides, from a kit. Was this my fate?
My roommate at that time was a white fellow named Dave, with a military haircut, about my age, who was a truly goofy, ex-20-year sailor, who was a total drunk, and had been busted for drunk and disorderly in every port in the world. He spent years aboard the aircraft carrier, U.S.S. America. Since he was always on shit KP duty, his job was to throw garbage off the fantail. Everything was thrown out: food, bottles, cans, tools, but many, many electric floor brushes – as there were miles of linoleum floors aboard – and even lathes and workbenches. He and his fuck-up buddies were 50 feet above the water. Because there was so much food, there would always be packs of huge sharks. These sailors would take these heavy stainless steel floor brushes and aim for the sharks. He said that if you could hit them right on their heads, “they’d just fold up.” Meanwhile, there used to be a chain of gas stations called Clark Gas. When Dave was a young man, he had a Barracuda. He came driving into a Clark gas station, completely drunk, and took out both gas pumps. I asked, “What did you do?” He said, “I didn’t stick around. I took off as fast as I could, but one of the pumps was stuck under my car.” I said, “That must have fucked up your Barracuda.” He nodded, “Uh, yeah.”
And yet another day. Funny, that.