There Were Bears And Rumors Of Bears by Andre Miftaraj

Author:Andre Miftaraj [Miftaraj, Andre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780595775828
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2011-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

Some Things You Lose

When I first met Pere Handel I was living in an old converted warehouse in Depot Town, and I had been sober for six months. I was thirty-three years old. This was the year after my father died, when my wife left me, I lost my job as a programmer, and went into debt all within a fairly short period of time. A close friend of mine hooked me up with Pere. She didn’t know him well but said he was in some kind of group that was keeping him sober. She gave me his number, and I called him, and he said he’d meet me at the Brakeman bar.

“You can’t miss me,” he said. “I’ll be the tall skinny guy with white hair.”

A bar seemed like an odd meeting place for two recovering drunks, but at the time it didn’t occur to me to object. I could see the Brakeman bar from the window of the warehouse. I got there first and sat there drinking club soda waiting for him. He was about six feet five inches tall and he did indeed have white hair. He walked through the door and paused with his head tilted back looking around the room. When he spotted me a strange look of weariness and disgust crossed his face, a look that seemed half apology and half accusation, as though he had just tripped over his own shoelace and was silently admonishing himself for being so clumsy. He walked over and said, “You look like a guy who’s waiting for someone.” I was about to get up to shake hands, but he didn’t extend his, just pulled a chair out and sat down. “What can a guy get to drink in this dump?” he said.

We repeated what we had already said on the phone to dissipate our nervousness, and fifteen minutes into the conversation he said, “Well, it’s clear you’re an alcoholic.” Just like that. We were on adjacent rather than opposite sides of the table, and his chair was angled a few degrees away from me so that when he talked to me it was as if he was talking over his shoulder. His eyes would be on the table in front of me and at the end of a statement they would lazily meet mine for an instant, then he would look up in the direction he was facing as though the two of us were sharing a view of some vista, like we were sitting on someone’s porch looking out at the lake.

“I did all my hard drinking in a ten year period,” he said. “For a long time nobody knew, because I was so good at covering it up. I went to class drunk, I went to committee meetings drunk, I had bottles in my office. Nobody could figure me out because I was such a good liar. And of course secrecy and dishonesty, well they’re what an addict lives on. No one would have found me out either had things kept going along the way they were.

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