My high school years are filled with solitary terror, like sailing alone in a small boat across a stormy sea. Like most teenagers I want to be unique and special - preferably in a grandiose sort of way, like a leader of an uprising - but I am tormented by doubts that I have what it takes to be unique and special. I am especially fearful of ending up like the people in my parent's generation: mere cogs in the socialist meat grinder, which turns individuals into a "mass" or "class" to be molded into some sort of "new humanity", devoid of the selfish, materialistic impulses of people in capitalist societies.
I see people in mind-numbing, life-long jobs, coming home to their families cramped into tiny apartments in non-descriptive housing projects aptly named "ant hills" - sometimes 3 generations occupying 400-600 square feet of a concrete cube along a corridor on the nth floor of a huge box containing hundreds of such cubes. Their lives are terribly mundane, proscribed, predictable, and dull. Their dreams are reduced by all this oppressive dullness to desiring material things that are so unattainable as to seem worthy lifetime goals: a concrete cube of one's own (if still living with parents or in-laws at the age of thirty - a common predicament); a car (the tiny, unreliable Fiat produced by a state-owned factory, with a waiting list of several years); a furniture set; a front-loaded washer.
The prospect of ending up like that scares the living daylight out of me, but I have very little evidence that my life will be different. It is depressing. All around me I see people resigned to their fates, convinced that this is normal, the only way to live. Scary thing is, they may be right. I feel like a caged animal, with the painful consciousness that I was born in a cage and will die in a cage. I dull my anxiety with alcohol and chain smoking. Obtaining alcohol at the age of sixteen can be a difficult task, but not insurmountable. Some of us are starting to get facial hair, which makes us look older. I do not have that advantage, but with my recently discovered acting abilities I can emulate the confidence of an adult; strangely, it works most of the times, but I am probably giving myself too much credit. The laws against selling alcohol to minors are just another of many examples of laws that are rarely enforced and widely ignored; if anything, it is the personal conscience of an occasional store clerk that sometimes sends me out the door empty-handed. I quickly learn which ones to avoid.
The same with cigarettes. Our brands of choice are, not surprisingly, the cheapest ones: "Sport" and "Extra Strong". The former are especially vile; it is impossible to tell whether they contain tobacco or any other shredded plant. The suspicion that this is not tobacco becomes stronger every time one finds a large wood splinter in one of them (not uncommon). The jokers say that "Sport" is made at the end of every shift, from what falls on the floor all day long and ends up in the janitor's dustbin; the pieces of wood are splinters from that factory floor. There may be some truth to that, but the popularity of that brand would overwhelm even the most frequent sweeping. Perhaps my Grandma is right and they use carrot greens instead.
By the time I'm eighteen I smoke a pack a day. Everybody smokes. Our high school restrooms are so filled with cigarette smoke during recess, one can hardly see. One day I am standing at the urinal, cigarette hanging from my lips, so focused on the act of peeing that I do not notice that the restroom becomes eerily quiet. I feel a light tap on my shoulder and, without looking back, I hand over my cigarette with, "Have a drag, but don't wet it with your spit." When I turn around, zipping up my fly, I find myself face to face with the vice principal holding my smoldering cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. Luckily, he is amused rather than angered by my confusion and utter surprise, so he just wags his finger at me sternly and confiscates my almost-full pack. The rest of the school will learn of this encounter in no time at all and I will hear the story repeated ad nauseam, but no more serious consequences follow.
There are two things I do not know at that time (among many others): that I suffer from depression, and that alcohol, while appearing to temporarily help, makes that worse. One night I meet with a friend, from the now defunct amateur theater, in a local cafe. We order a bottle of Coca Cola and two glasses. We pour the Coke into the glasses and I top it off with cheap vodka I am hiding in my backpack, making sure that the waitress does not see that. We keep drinking that way, ordering two more Cokes and giggling at the confused expression of the waitress, who can't quite figure out why we appear to be getting drunk on a common soft drink.
We still have some of the vodka left when I decide I had enough. Alcohol does not agree with me and I vomit violently on my way home. It makes me feel a bit better and I do get home. My parents are watching TV behind closed doors and my sister is reading in bed. I go to my room and decide to put in motion the plan I hatched just weeks ago - killing myself.
In a country as inebriated as Poland in the 1970s deaths from alcohol poisoning are not uncommon. Newspapers and television give grim reports of people dying after ingesting methanol - usually moonshine that is not properly distilled - or simply drinking too much ethanol (the "good" stuff). The latter reports often include the blood level of alcohol of the deceased. From that I learn that the percentages are rather tiny - less then half a percent is likely to cause death. I am obviously unable to drink enough alcohol to achieve lethal level, but what if I were to put alcohol directly into my blood? Much smaller amounts would be required. I want to die but I'm scared of pain, so this seems like an easy, almost pleasant way to go.
I calculate the amount of alcohol to be added to the bloodstream of an average person, and it turns out that one medium syringe would be enough. I fill a syringe I stole from my stepmother (a nurse) with the leftover vodka, and give myself an injection in the vein of my forearm. (I will later be complimented by a nurse in the ER for having found the vein on my first try, without any prior experience whatsoever.) The vodka burns my vein like hell, so I manage to squeeze in only half of the planned amount, but I figure I probably overestimated, so I lie down and prepare to die.
It occurs to me that, having written no suicide note, I should at least let my sister know what's about to happen. I stagger into her room and drunkenly explain the situation, showing her the half-filled syringe. I just want her to know, is all. She, of course, freaks out and tells my parents. Ambulance is called and I'm taken to the ER, drifting in and out of consciousness. My life is not in any danger - I am just very, very drunk.
The ER nurse has me drink cup after cup of warm tap water, until I vomit. She administers that treatment three or four times until I puke back only the clear water - nothing else left in my stomach. (I will use that technique of "stomach flushing" in later years for food and alcohol poisoning. It's simple and effective.) I am given an appointment with a psychologist and sent home with my parents. I am not disappointed to still be alive, but I am a bit angry at myself for causing such a turmoil for what turned out to be a silly, drunken gesture. I resolve to never do that again; either I will make sure that I die at the end, or not try at all - it's just too embarrassing. Also, killing oneself is much harder than it appears in books an movies.
Showing posts with label drinking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drinking. Show all posts
Monday, May 12, 2014
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Chapter 17
I am spending the rest of the summer working, to earn money for my growing smoking habit and other necessities. My father finds me this job through one of his strange connections in the semi-legal world of small-time entrepreneurs and street peddlers. This time it is an owner of an ice cream shop on Bazar Różyckiego - a sprawling, walled-in area in the run-down section of Warsaw, with hundreds of stalls hawking wares that the state-run industry cannot provide, or those it does provide but can't keep on the shelves. (Selling this latter type of merchandise is considered speculation, branded as anti-social and punished, although with half-heartedness that becomes the modus operandi of the Polish state in that decade.)
As travel restrictions loosen up - especially within the Eastern Block - the Bazar (bazaar) becomes the main conduit for bringing merchandise from abroad: children's shoes from East Germany; pepper and spices from Romania; caviar from the Soviet Union; cheap sheepskin furs from Turkey; salami from Hungary. That in addition to plentiful wares produced in private homes and tiny workshops all over Poland, from clothing to shoes, to herbal remedies, to foodstuff, to household hardware, to toys, to religious kitsch. This enclave of free-market economy is tolerated by the communist authorities because it partially fills an important hole that the centrally-planned economy is unable to fill: the seemingly insatiable appetite for consumer goods, which keeps the shelves of the official stores bare, and the lanes of the Bazar teeming with crowds.
The ice cream store is not a stall but a small shed divided into two sections: ice cream is dispensed from an Italian-made gelato machine at the front of the store, and it is produced in the back, where I work. According to state regulations that ice cream is supposed to be made from a powder (supplied by a state-owned factory), but that is too expensive and provided in quantities not sufficient to make a viable business out of it. We keep a bag of that powder for state inspectors, but each morning I go into the stalls to purchase dozens of eggs and vats of milk. I then combine those ingredients with bags of sugar and vials of vanilla flavor, pour the mix into the machine - and voila! In an hour of so the vanilla ice cream is ready for consumption.
The work is not well paid, but it is easy and relatively stress-free (if not for the specter of a state inspector's raid, but I figure it is not my headache). There are two of us working here: myself, and a middle-aged woman selling the waffle cones of ice cream. The owner shows up in the morning to give me a shopping list and money for the daily supplies, and then disappears in pursuit of other business opportunities. That is, until he discovers that I make a good drinking buddy. From that point on he shows up twice a week in the afternoon and sends me to the monopolowy (liquor store) for his drink of choice: Krupnik, a mixture of vodka and honey.
I'm under age , but he introduces me to the store manager as his employee, and I will have no problem purchasing alcohol for us. Actually, it is not that unusual for children to be sent to a liquor store to buy alcohol for their parents, but I'm at an age when I can drink this stuff myself, so under normal circumstances I would be asked for an ID. I do have a school ID that I doctored in order to be able to see movies rated for 18-year-old, but in a liquor store I would be expected to show a state-issued ID confirming my adulthood.
I am a good listener and don't say much myself, so Sylwek (we're now on first-name basis) can dazzle me with stories of his drunken escapades and of blowing sums of money I can't quite imagine. At his wedding, rather than have new dishes put on the same plates, he orders the waitstaff to remove the table linens, together with china, silverware, and glassware, put it in trash, and then set the table anew for the next course. He dots on his wife and his twin sons with expensive presents and vacations in exotic places. He buys absurdly expensive, Italian bunk beds for his sons' bedroom, and then, after an argument with his wife over the color scheme in that bedroom, smashes them to pieces with a sledgehammer.
I take these stories with a big grain of salt, until one day he brings me an article he clipped from the biggest daily newspaper in Warsaw - "Życie Warszawy" ("Life of Warsaw"). It describes a drunken brawl he caused in a fancy hotel restaurant with a business rival of his, and the mayhem that ensued when he tried to evade two bouncers intent on ejecting him from the establishment. At some point in the melee, with tables overturned and chairs being hurled across the dining room, he managed to jump behind the cocktail bar, from where he yelled triumphantly, "Bar taken!", and began throwing bottles of expensive liquor at his pursuers.
To appreciate the rich hilarity of this account one has to keep in mind that these two words, "Bar... taken", have special meaning and are well known to every educated Pole. They appear at the end of volume one of the much-beloved XIXth century novel "With Fire and Sword" ("Ogniem i Mieczem") by Henryk Sienkiewicz , referring to the news that the Polish defenses of a fortress in the town of Bar in Ukraine succumbed to the masses of revolting Cossacks led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky (Chmielnicki) and aided by the Crimean Tatars. That XVIIth century revolt was a turning point for the powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, starting a downward spiral that resulted in the loss of independence for Poland a hundred years later.
My boss is probably completely unaware of that, but his drunken exploits are much more than funny vignettes from a life of an immature 30-something with too much money to burn. Projected against the rich cultural and historical background of Poland, they are ironic contemporary appendices to that background, illustrating the sad truth that it was the extreme individualism and obstinacy of Polish gentry (szlachta), more than anything else, that led to the demise of Poland. (With alcohol serving as lubricant for these two destructive traits.)
For my part I am usually too drunk after these sessions to make astute observations of this sort. I am so drunk I serve a woman ice cream on a 20-zloty bill she just handed me. I am so drunk I don't know how I manage to navigate the multiple transfers required to get home after work - all the while drifting in and out of consciousness, and fighting a powerful urge to puke. I do wonder occasionally what the other tram and bus passengers think of a 17-year old so hopelessly inebriated, but I discover that I don't really care. Nobody ever says a word, especially not my parents, who happen to be out of town on vacation and know nothing of it. I just wish my hangovers would not be as bad. I don't know it yet, but my body reacts to alcohol as if it were a poison. (Which it is, of course. In a sense.)
As travel restrictions loosen up - especially within the Eastern Block - the Bazar (bazaar) becomes the main conduit for bringing merchandise from abroad: children's shoes from East Germany; pepper and spices from Romania; caviar from the Soviet Union; cheap sheepskin furs from Turkey; salami from Hungary. That in addition to plentiful wares produced in private homes and tiny workshops all over Poland, from clothing to shoes, to herbal remedies, to foodstuff, to household hardware, to toys, to religious kitsch. This enclave of free-market economy is tolerated by the communist authorities because it partially fills an important hole that the centrally-planned economy is unable to fill: the seemingly insatiable appetite for consumer goods, which keeps the shelves of the official stores bare, and the lanes of the Bazar teeming with crowds.
The ice cream store is not a stall but a small shed divided into two sections: ice cream is dispensed from an Italian-made gelato machine at the front of the store, and it is produced in the back, where I work. According to state regulations that ice cream is supposed to be made from a powder (supplied by a state-owned factory), but that is too expensive and provided in quantities not sufficient to make a viable business out of it. We keep a bag of that powder for state inspectors, but each morning I go into the stalls to purchase dozens of eggs and vats of milk. I then combine those ingredients with bags of sugar and vials of vanilla flavor, pour the mix into the machine - and voila! In an hour of so the vanilla ice cream is ready for consumption.
The work is not well paid, but it is easy and relatively stress-free (if not for the specter of a state inspector's raid, but I figure it is not my headache). There are two of us working here: myself, and a middle-aged woman selling the waffle cones of ice cream. The owner shows up in the morning to give me a shopping list and money for the daily supplies, and then disappears in pursuit of other business opportunities. That is, until he discovers that I make a good drinking buddy. From that point on he shows up twice a week in the afternoon and sends me to the monopolowy (liquor store) for his drink of choice: Krupnik, a mixture of vodka and honey.
I'm under age , but he introduces me to the store manager as his employee, and I will have no problem purchasing alcohol for us. Actually, it is not that unusual for children to be sent to a liquor store to buy alcohol for their parents, but I'm at an age when I can drink this stuff myself, so under normal circumstances I would be asked for an ID. I do have a school ID that I doctored in order to be able to see movies rated for 18-year-old, but in a liquor store I would be expected to show a state-issued ID confirming my adulthood.
I am a good listener and don't say much myself, so Sylwek (we're now on first-name basis) can dazzle me with stories of his drunken escapades and of blowing sums of money I can't quite imagine. At his wedding, rather than have new dishes put on the same plates, he orders the waitstaff to remove the table linens, together with china, silverware, and glassware, put it in trash, and then set the table anew for the next course. He dots on his wife and his twin sons with expensive presents and vacations in exotic places. He buys absurdly expensive, Italian bunk beds for his sons' bedroom, and then, after an argument with his wife over the color scheme in that bedroom, smashes them to pieces with a sledgehammer.
I take these stories with a big grain of salt, until one day he brings me an article he clipped from the biggest daily newspaper in Warsaw - "Życie Warszawy" ("Life of Warsaw"). It describes a drunken brawl he caused in a fancy hotel restaurant with a business rival of his, and the mayhem that ensued when he tried to evade two bouncers intent on ejecting him from the establishment. At some point in the melee, with tables overturned and chairs being hurled across the dining room, he managed to jump behind the cocktail bar, from where he yelled triumphantly, "Bar taken!", and began throwing bottles of expensive liquor at his pursuers.
To appreciate the rich hilarity of this account one has to keep in mind that these two words, "Bar... taken", have special meaning and are well known to every educated Pole. They appear at the end of volume one of the much-beloved XIXth century novel "With Fire and Sword" ("Ogniem i Mieczem") by Henryk Sienkiewicz , referring to the news that the Polish defenses of a fortress in the town of Bar in Ukraine succumbed to the masses of revolting Cossacks led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky (Chmielnicki) and aided by the Crimean Tatars. That XVIIth century revolt was a turning point for the powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, starting a downward spiral that resulted in the loss of independence for Poland a hundred years later.
My boss is probably completely unaware of that, but his drunken exploits are much more than funny vignettes from a life of an immature 30-something with too much money to burn. Projected against the rich cultural and historical background of Poland, they are ironic contemporary appendices to that background, illustrating the sad truth that it was the extreme individualism and obstinacy of Polish gentry (szlachta), more than anything else, that led to the demise of Poland. (With alcohol serving as lubricant for these two destructive traits.)
For my part I am usually too drunk after these sessions to make astute observations of this sort. I am so drunk I serve a woman ice cream on a 20-zloty bill she just handed me. I am so drunk I don't know how I manage to navigate the multiple transfers required to get home after work - all the while drifting in and out of consciousness, and fighting a powerful urge to puke. I do wonder occasionally what the other tram and bus passengers think of a 17-year old so hopelessly inebriated, but I discover that I don't really care. Nobody ever says a word, especially not my parents, who happen to be out of town on vacation and know nothing of it. I just wish my hangovers would not be as bad. I don't know it yet, but my body reacts to alcohol as if it were a poison. (Which it is, of course. In a sense.)
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