Alcoholics Eponymous

Any Recent Friday Night, In This Indescribably Foul Epoch, The Dominion of the Grek.

The road whips ahead of me as I slam my foot down on the accelerator. These buses have pretty good pickup for such huge vehicles, and I’ve become a master of weaving in and out of traffic, grinding along gutters and terrifying pedestrians with last-second manoeuvres in which I swing the front of the bus inches from their faces before coming neatly to stop right in the bus zone. I am the bus master, I am Hammerfoot the Fucking Excellent, but the bad sweat is coming, another turning of the wheel and this endless fucking grind of an existence swings around to the bad part of the week. For I am speeding hard down a major stretch of road towards the city centre and it’s 8:30 on a Friday night, and I’m hoping against hope not to see any of the worthless cunts I know will be lining the road only metres ahead. Of course, such hope is futile. The Grek swarm on nights like these, dressed like clowns with their bad haircuts, already loaded when they arrogantly hail the chariot and swagger aboard, reeking of cheap rum and bad cologne. Every stop is a victory over the urge to hop the sidewalk, grind the Grek into a paste and keep on rolling into the hills where I can roll the bus off a cliff and spend the rest of my life hunting kangaroos and yelling at the moon. And as I near the city, this strange and vicious urge grows stronger and stronger, and I wish I had outfitted the bus with a mechanism to simply dump the passengers under the wheels.

This, of course, is the product of a ressentiment lifestyle. One of the very huge problems with the driving of heavy vehicles is the inability to consume alcohol and still legally be able to operate the things. One of the very huge problems with being a casual shit-kicker in a bus company is the requirement that you work six days a week. The big problem with working night-shift is that even when you could conceivably drink, nobody else is awake or willing to wake up with the Captain at 9am on a Thursday morning. Combine all three and you have my existence – a life of involuntary asceticism, a grudging existence of dragging Greks to and from their petty drinkings and mean good times. When real people get drunk, great and horrible things happen. The Grek merely dance obnoxiously badly to terrible music and throw up. I was annoyed at first. But week after week after week my schedule was nothing but picking up adult infants, ferals and other worthless Greks, taking them to town so they can cornhole each other, piss their pants and max out their credit cards (respectively), then picking up the aforementioned scum and enduring insults, sneers and much annoyance for daring to take them to their houses. I became bitter, ugly, twisted and inextricably hostile to all that lived and breathed. In these circumstances I learned first-hand why bus drivers are all such foul-tempered cunts. Perhaps it isn’t hard to see from where ressentiment could spring.

Much has been made in the general media of the bad effects of alcohol on the human, but little has been said on the matter of sobriety. As a drunk who accidentally stumbled into the land of the sober for six months, I feel qualified to say to you, right fucking now, that a lack of alcohol turned me distinctly odd. Odd like off milk. There’s something distinctly untrustworthy about the man who won’t drink. Designated drivers are welcome for their utility but they find themselves isolated in a drinking situation. They make everyone uncomfortable as they sip their water and look at the clock, waiting to go home. There’s a constant edginess and aroma of bad times that make the sober man a stranger in the land of the vicious drunk. So much for the short term effects. Long term effects of sobriety include a draining away of the vicious fluids, ebullience of the liver, severe loss of drinking buddies and an increase of life expectancy with a corresponding decrease in social life expectancy.

After a time, you begin to miss the hangover. Sobriety is a kind of clear-eyed, clean-shaven madness, where you sit upright and talk straight and never miss a beat, mechanically clicking down the hours until you can sleep, rising and doing it all again. Yes, I missed the hangover. That badge of merit that only comes after a night of chair-smashing, double-fisted drinking horrors – the wrenching headache that drives you from sleep at the crack of noon like a screaming goat skull on spider legs, the bloodshot eyes grinding open as the filthy light that filters through half-closed shutters shrieks directly at your brain and the running tap in the kitchen howls like a banshee on the moor. The foul temper as you rise, clutching your head and stumble into the hallway. Everything is smashed, there is glass everywhere, but you somehow make it unscathed to the bathroom where you collapse in the tub – still half-full of rancid melted ice-water and empties. Your hand reaches down and gropes around on the cold floor tiles and miraculously grasps a packet of painkillers. You empty this over the general vicinity of your mouth, some of it falls into the tub but at least a portion go into your mouth. You thrash in the water and sit up to avoid drowning in this filth, and scream at the top of your lungs to anyone who might hear, “BREAKFAST! BREAKFAST!”, but your distorted sense of hearing cannot process the reply. Heaving yourself from the tub you nearly tumble out as your balance gives way on the slippery tiles and you nearly brain yourself on the sink, but...

And so on in this vein. I missed the hangover, how much more did I miss the vicious times, the cheating at poker, the smashing chairs over people, the burning and the hate. But now the good news, humanoids. Due to completely ridiculous and far-fetched medical reasons why not, I can no longer be a bus driver. I will miss the money, but I will not for a second miss the files and columns and masses of Greks, all going off to drink. I will not miss being the chariot of the people. I will not miss the mind-numbing, constant sober, the wretched anti-binge I was on. And I will never again miss a good opportunity to get violently drunk, scream at fires, and throw hammers at things.

Fin.