A MAN OF FASHION by Mary Kudenov
Mark Coon makes a lot of noise when he moves, and he moves slowly. At my desk in the administrative offices of The Salvation Army, I close my eyes and listen for the bump-bump of his carved bone cane and the whoosh of his leather – noises that precede him like the clinking of his chains and buttons and pins. Faded badges, sewn into his jacket long ago, exhibit his former bike chapters. His newer badges display the number of years he has been in recovery. Mark has three sobriety badges, each for two years clean.
The sight of Mark leaning against the doorway makes me grin. In a religious non-profit environment, he stands out like the clichéd black sheep – only picture a white sheep in worn leather. And cussing. And smoking. The office fills with the smell of Brut cologne and cigarettes.
“How you doing, Mark?”
“Well I woke up sucking air. So that’s good. But these stairs are a bitch.” He sounds winded. “Ever heard of an elevator?” He asks this nearly every day he comes. It’s our routine. He acts older than he is, but years of hard living make this act believable. He has the face of a man who spent decades working physically, playing hard, and riding without a helmet – tattoos, gold chain, scars on scars. At 48, he already has a pacemaker.
“What do you have for me today?” he asks as he moves to the volunteer workstation. He tucks his cane under the desk and pulls Ding Dongs and Dr. Pepper from a plastic grocery bag.
“A whole lot of the same thing,” I say.
“Good. I’ll try to be of use. Where’s Cool Breeze?” Cool Breeze is his nickname for the Development Director, Josie, a woman who walks and talks fast and always at the same time. Mark frequently says of her, “The only way I know she’s been in the room is by the cool breeze on my neck.”
Dress for the job you want, not the job you have, Josie’s given to reciting like a mantra.
“I got a new shirt she’s going to like,” he says, slipping his leather jacket off his shoulders. Although he is a volunteer, Josie has been encouraging him to dress up more. Last month we had a big fundraiser to kick off the holiday season. The event was a luncheon and the dress was recommended as “business executive.” To avoid hurting Mark’s pride, I intercepted Josie’s enthusiastic advice as much as possible, but she had called Mark into her office ahead of time and given him a $50 gift card to get something “professional.”
The morning of the event I found Mark outside of the ballroom of the Sheraton Hotel tucking his shirt in his pants. The gift card was enough for him to rent the top half of a tuxedo which he wore over jeans with cowboy boots and his big black Stetson.
“Do I look okay?” he had asked, uncharacteristically self-conscious.
“Texas charming, my friend.”
But he didn’t go over the top today. I see a new, pale-blue, button‑up shirt under a layer of flannel, tucked into his soft, grey jeans. He mostly wears old tennis shoes but today he wore his cowboy hat, which means he walked here on heeled boots. “You always wear boots with a Stetson,” he told me once. “Texas rule.”
If you ask Mark about his nickname he’ll say, “They call me Hard Walkin’ because I make walking look hard. I’m always walking – the court won’t ever give me back my license.” For long journeys, he relies on Anchor Rides, a public transit service for the handicapped. With five felony DUIs under his enormous belt buckle, it is unlikely he will ever drive legally again. Every couple of years he falls off the wagon and starts over this familiar cycle of recovery – drink for a time with no consequence, drive illegally, go to jail, get sober.
When I first started working at “Sally’s,” as Mark calls it, I was told that the phrase “on the wagon” was coined by men and women receiving social services in the late 19th century. Evangeline Booth, daughter of the founder, drove her hay wagon through the streets of New York. She called to the inebriates in the street, the impoverished: Climb on board for a ride back to The Salvation Army’s soup kitchens for healing and gospel. This would have been during America’s great Temperance movement, which would eventually lead to the prohibition of alcohol. Whole countries make their way on and off that wagon, one citizen at a time.
Mark’s temperance movement began early in 1998, while spending his last day in the Spenard Motel, just four blocks away from his favorite bar, the Carousel. A storm had shouldered its way to the edge of the city and the air pushing through the window seeped with cold humidity. Mark sat on the double bed where pale light of the late afternoon exposed cigarette burns and food stains on the blankets. He doesn’t remember exactly how the room looked, just that it smelled nasty and you couldn’t walk barefoot on the carpet. It was used mostly by whores and partiers like him.
Mark had spent the last of his money on an 18-pack of Budweiser and renting the movie Leaving Las Vegas. All he had in the world was in that room, minus the $5 key deposit, and he would need to give the front desk more cash if he wanted to stay through the night. He’d blown through an inheritance and several decent jobs just trying to stay drunk. He was still recovering from a severe motorcycle accident a few months before. At 5′11″, Mark had partied himself down to 113 pounds and had few teeth left.
“I thought I looked damn good back then,” Mark told me once, “the cat’s meow. I remember looking at myself in the mirror the day before I wrecked my bike, thinking ‘Damn, I’m gonna get laid tonight.’” But when he finished watching Nicolas Cage’s character drink himself to death, he saw himself as if for the first time and threw his beer away. He called his mom to borrow money.
“I knew she didn’t trust me,” he says, “because I wasn’t trustworthy. I asked her to rent me a room and then she gave me the single best thing she ever gave me – apart from my existence – and I love her for that.”
On January 3, 1998, just as the sky opened its big white arms to blanket Anchorage in a foot of snow, Mark’s mother finally, finally said “No.”
And now, 13 years later, Mark is scheduled to graduate from a last-ditch treatment program, which means that he won’t be coming to Sally’s as much. In January, 2010 the Anchorage Wellness Court required Mark to provide 12 hours of community service a week to a non-profit organization. This was bullshit, he thought. After years of pushing the proverbial stone up bureaucracy hill, back surgery, brain surgery, and blowing both knees, he was finally declared fully disabled by the Veteran’s Administration. He shouldn’t have to volunteer. But this was phase two of the program, the “go to court once a month, piss in a cup” phase, as he described it to me the first day we met. “They want to keep us bastards busy – idle hands and all that.
“I’m going to jump through hoops until I graduate,” he said. “They want me to ‘volunteer,’ I’ll volunteer. If they want me to turn my head and cough, I’ll turn my head and cough. But I’m not going to prison.”
A little background – Alaska parties like it’s 1999. We spend many months in the dark, followed by the briefest summer of manic, 24‑hour light. Maybe, in an effort to conform to our environment, our internal landscapes begin to match the extremities of our climate. The heightened alcohol and drug abuse rates in Anchorage and throughout Alaska correlate with increased DWI arrests, suicides, domestic and sexual violence – the Molotov cocktail of a city self-medicating. It is a part of our culture and perhaps one of the reasons Mark and I share an ease in each other’s company. We know this landscape. We are both what psychologists call ACOA’s – adult children of alcoholics.
The idea behind the Anchorage Wellness Court falls under the blanket term of Therapeutic Jurisprudence and it saves many families from losing a loved one to the prison system. The goal of the court is to decrease recidivism among offenders by addressing the more complex issues leading to the criminal behavior. Instead of going to prison for drunk driving after his fifth felony DWI, Mark opted for the 18‑month treatment program that would require abstinence from alcohol, group therapy, individual therapy, community service, and frequent court attendance.
The Salvation Army considered Mark a Community Work Service volunteer. Free labor. Normally he would have been given a physical task in a thrift store warehouse but poor health made him harder to place. In one of his sober periods he had done some data entry for the Veteran’s Administration so I paired up with Mark because I needed assistance keeping up with data cleanup and miscellaneous tasks. There is never enough staff in the non-profit world. That’s a fact. Adequate staffing leads to shameful administrative costs.
When the court ordered Mark to volunteer, he didn’t want to be here, mainly because he doesn’t like being told what to do. “I am a disabled vet,” he said. “Fully disabled.” But now he says he looks forward to coming in.
“So are you going to clean your desk out today?” I ask. Mark uses a desk between mine and the administrative assistant. It displays a picture of him on a motorcycle, another picture of himself fishing with Jim Belushi (a privilege he won from a call‑in radio contest), and a toy raccoon imprisoned by a miniature cage. “I’ll let him out on Graduation Day,” Mark has told me several times. Graduation day will be whenever he next phases up and out of Wellness Court. Soon.
“I think they’re going to keep me in a little longer,” he says. Unfortunately he keeps butting heads with the wrong people and is spending longer than normal in phase 2. He nicknamed his parole officer “Special K.” He gives most people nicknames. I don’t always understand the rationale behind them.
“Special K gave me an assignment,” he says, emphasizing the word. I can tell by the tone of his voice that he didn’t take it seriously. When he talks about his interactions with Special K I’m reminded of the boy in high school who always ended up in the hall for sassing. The assignment this time was a “recovery collage.” When men and women in the program are out of line they are told to submit an extra urine analysis or write essays answering questions like, “how do you prioritize treatment, school, and recovery meetings?” The recovery collage was part of Mark’s Moral Reconation Therapy, a cognitive-behavioral treatment approach designed to strengthen his moral reasoning. Perhaps Special K thought a collage would be right up his alley, as he was, in sober periods, an award-winning artist.
“Let me ask you something, Ms. Mary.” He reaches into the inner pocket of his leather jacket and pulls out a folded piece of paper. He makes his way out of his chair and wobbles over to my desk with his assignment. “Does this seem inappropriate to you?”
Mark often asks about appropriateness, as I did when I began work at The Salvation Army. He hands me his drawing. It’s a big circle cut into pie pieces, each slice with a sketch to represent a cycle of the recovery program. There is a cross in one, a hand reaching out in another. One picture is of a penis with a trail of urine splashing into a plastic cup.
“Yeah. Special K might find that inappropriate,” I say. “Good picture though. Real nice collage.”
“Thank you,” he says, pleased with himself.
Today is Mark’s graduation and I’m getting ready for court in the bathroom at work, waiting for the curling iron to heat up and applying the expensive makeup my mother had bought me at Nordstrom the day before my wedding. I will have to get more soon and dread the thought of going to a mall. The bathroom, like the rest of the building, has a kept‑up façade. Our fiscally conservative boss is trying to get just a few more years out of it. The divisional headquarters, like the rest of Sally, is fighting to stay current, to become something more than your grandmother’s charity.
The dim yellow light sinks into dull beige tiles. Former staff attempted to brighten up the bathroom with plastic plants and kitsch artwork of framed text – the “Live, Laugh, Love” variety. I’m spending time on my appearance for court at Josie’s request. Normally I don’t wear a lot of make‑up or hair product to work. I spend the majority of my time behind a computer unless we have a fundraiser or media event.
“You look good for events, Mary. You should really look that good every day,” Josie had suggested. I’m trying to forget the rest of that conversation as I begin to curl my hair, but I can’t help but replay it: “Sometimes I want to send you to events in the community, but I take one look at you – and I don’t.”
My face reddens as I recall Josie’s statement and I see the beginning of a wrinkle in my brow. I have a face that looks angry or happy, not much in between, so I consciously have to remind myself to smile in public. After I finish my makeup I clip my hair into a horn at my forehead so I can curl the bottom layer. Even in my best grey suit and softest purple blouse I still see myself as rough around the edges, low class. Poor. There are so many days that I want to quit trying to fit into this culture, quit jumping through the hoops.
Although what Josie said was cruel, I recognize that she said it under the banner of good intentions; she is a friend, and she knows that I put myself through college waitressing and didn’t know how to dress any better than Mark when I left home. But I took her comments personally and have been irritated by them for weeks. On days when Mark senses that I’m not fitting into the mold he tells me to keep my chin up. When you’re class-passing, you no longer belong where you came from or fit in where you are. It’s an essential loneliness. I wonder if Mark feels as isolated as I do at times, with his old friends still drinking and himself not yet sure how to socialize in the sober world.
My hair is now in the throwback ’50s bob of which I know Josie approves. I lift my chin and catch the eyes of the Divisional Commander’s wife as she comes into the bathroom. At Sally’s, husband and wife ministers get promoted together and are given the same rank, although they have separate roles that fit traditional gender lines. Husband and Wife Major are the highest ranking officers in the Alaska Division; they also happen to be fourth and fifth generation ministers who I doubt have ever seen the inside of a bar.
“You look so pretty,” Wife Major says. “Have you been losing weight?”
I tell her it’s a slenderizing outfit, but the compliment is well-timed; my self esteem is fish-tailing and I need to present a confident persona.
“I noticed it the other day. I was going to say something about how good you look, but there were men around,” she says. It takes me a minute to understand what she’s talking about, a testament to the different universes we come from. Is it really improper to bring attention to a woman’s appearance in front of a man? I think.
As she leaves – her tidy, skirted uniform looking perfectly decent – I remember one of the first conversations I had with her. She said she always carbon copies Husband Major whenever she has occasion to email a man, just to be transparent. Giggling, I try to imagine what my husband would think of that. Would he find it absurd? Would it make him suspicious? I put my makeup away and run the rod of the curling iron under cold water before putting it in my bag.
With my face stretched into a smile I spread glitter-pink Dior gloss slowly across my lips. There are so many moments in my past, public and private, that would curl the Majors’ hair. I am of the world, fully. Sinful, ornery, and proud.
Salvationists do not drink. It would be hypocritical, it was explained to me, with The Salvation Army responsible for so many recovery programs. I go to a Lutheran church. My pastor will occasionally drink beer and eat bratwurst; as he said in a recent sermon, “Jesus drank with the sinners and went amongst them.”
When I imagine Jesus as he may have been twenty centuries ago, drinking with new friends, I can’t imagine that he glided, ethereal, into some inn with a persona of perfect piousness. By accounts, Jesus was a man of humility and compassion, without airs. I also speculate – and I hope that’s allowed – at His many unknown and undocumented acts of kindness and humility, executed quietly and without ado.
I think of Mark’s graduation with a little sadness knowing I won’t see him as often. No matter where I came from, or how humble my position, Mark will never look at me sideways. Another reason I’m worried about Mark’s graduation is it implies he is recovered. We like to fix problems and be done with it. That’s the problem with addiction – there is no safe distance; it’s never over.
On weekends I teach in a correctional center for women. Most of the ladies are inside for crimes either directly or indirectly related to drugs or alcohol. A woman is sober inside because she has to be. She may be determined to stay that way, to change her life, but within months, sometimes weeks after her release, she will be back in prison and back to square one. It’s the revolving door. It is the same people, the same problems, over and over and over again.
It’s almost impossible, even for the most fervent advocate of social change, not to get disheartened by this. Terms like burnout and compassion fatigue describe what occurs to many clergy, mental health professionals, emergency care workers, human service workers, and volunteers. Often people who start out caring the most become disillusioned. A symptom of compassion fatigue is increased cynicism and dehumanized perceptions of people; the caregiver begins labeling clients in a derogatory manner. The former idealist transforms into a cynic.
I put my stuff away and run downstairs before Husband Major beats me to the kitchen. Husband Major is already in the kitchen and I’m just in time to see him add a single scoop of Folgers to the old grinds, which he stretches into ten cups of brown water. His family has been in the salvation business for many generations; he prides his penny-pinching genes and lives in an impoverished state with a certain amount of smugness. Sally’s prides itself on its care ethics. Only eight cents on the dollar is used for administrative costs, according to internal reports. Of course the pay structure for officers is such that the organization meets all of their basic needs – housing, transportation, uniforms, and a stipend – so although they live modestly, they live without the same risks of the real poor who have to ask questions like, “should I pay rent on time or buy groceries?”
Since Mark arrived my office has been increasingly productive. It’s almost like being fully staffed. I boast about him a little to Husband Major while we wait for the coffee to brew. High productivity and free labor are sure to please him.
“You say he’s in Wellness Court?” he asks.
“Yes, sir. And he’s going to graduate today,” I say, with a little pride.
“These people – you have to be careful. Keep your boundaries. They are in and out of our programs all the time.” He leaves me in the kitchen, percolating.
Anchorage is divided into many camps when it comes to dealing with the chronic inebriate homeless population and I know that is what is shaping the Major’s fatalism about alcoholics. It has been a hot-button issue in the local press: what do we treat first, the alcoholism, or its symptom, homelessness?
“Just because they are drunks doesn’t mean they deserve to live like that,” argue those in favor of treating the symptom first.
Anchorage has a mayor-appointed committee tasked with addressing the issue. In 2009 and 2010 deaths among street people rose dramatically. On the corners of busy intersections men and women hold signs that say things like, “NO LIES I JUST NEED A BEER.” Nearly every morning on my way to Sally’s I drive by the same man on the corner of Northern Lights and C Street. His sign says, “Sober 16 years. Will work for food.” Like many Anchoragites, I don’t want to give him money because I think he will use it for booze. I think he’s a liar. If the light is red I try to give him something from my lunch. I’d like to think it’s altruism that makes me lean across the passenger seat and dangle a banana or a granola bar out of the window. I usually feel really good about myself for a few blocks.
I know that it is the guilt as much as the good in me that makes me share. The guilt at those brown eyes that look into me over the cardboard, eyes that see I have been lucky. I can afford to give more and I don’t. I could look at him, actually look at him and see the horrid reality of how he must live but when it’s 21 degrees below zero and I am under a soft blanket, snuggled up to the clean warm body of my husband, I think only of what is mine.
When I asked Mark how long he was homeless after his mom refused to get him a room he said, “Not too long. I walked all the way to the east side in the snow, trying to get to Tudor Rescue Mission. They preach a little God but the food is good. I collapsed right across the street and the rescue workers took care of me.”
“Were you ever like the men that hold the signs?” I asked.
“No. I never held a sign. But I did tell the bartender at The Carousel that my mom died so I could get free drinks.”
Mark once told me he saw a street man walk behind a dumpster and throw fruit on the ground, bananas, oranges, apples – the same food people hold out their car windows.
Mark said, “That’s why I don’t give them anything except for money sometimes. When they’re honest.”
“January 13, 2011. 2 PM.” The court clerk says this into the recorder.
“Judge!” A man in Carhartts and a T‑shirt shouts from the back of the courtroom, as soon as Judge Swiderski is seated. “Can I go first? I have to be at work by 3 o’clock.”
I sit three rows back in the center of Wellness Court, which looks and sounds like a loosely controlled classroom. Men and women in various states of casual dress loudly heckle each other. Judge Swiderski, a white-haired man with steady eyes and a slow manner of speaking, takes the call-and-response casualness in stride.
Mark has been in the program 23 months, about six months longer than most, on account of his hard-headedness. When it is finally his turn, Mark stands before the judge doing his best impression of The Man in Black – legs apart, shoulders back, Stetson off, and hands clasped by his biggest buckle.
“Okay Mark Coon. Let’s do it,” Judge Swiderski starts. “You have the right to say something before I impose judgment.”
“Impose away, Your Honor,” Mark says, all business. All Texas.
“Three years suspended. Two years probation. Your license is permanently revoked. Forfeit registration of any vehicle you own. Oh that’s right – we need to get your mother on the phone.”
“It’s her birthday today,” Mark says. A blush moves up his neck as he looks down.
“What a great present,” says the judge.
The voice of Mark’s mother comes over the speakers. She sounds like the cookie cutter version of any mom or grandma, sweet and a little shaky, a voice that could comfort or condemn. The judge explains to her that the court is invited to speak about Mark, of experiences with him, for or against him.
One by one people around me stand and share stories of a subversive man, a man who didn’t take recovery seriously when he began, and later a transformation and submission. “I’m so proud of you, Mark,” was the most repeated expression. “Proud that you learned to surrender.”
Mark? Surrender? I thought. Never.
This idea of surrender is paramount in the language of recovery. Mark struggles with this concept the most. Today when a man says he is sober the statement has a lot of connotations. A man who is sober has already blown his doors open, has possibly spent a period of his life as sober’s antonym, maybe woke in his own vomit, in a strange bed, in the wrong city. There is a culture of recovery in America complete with its own assumptions, literature, medicine, religion, and communities. I’m getting a peek inside. As I watch each member of Wellness Court stand up to beam it is clear that Mark is a venerable member of this group. In the AA community he is a popular gentleman. A socialite.
Someone from our agency should say something, both as support of Mark and Wellness Court. I manage, red-faced and unprepared, to stammer out how proud I am. To the court and Mark’s peers I’m the face of Sally, supporting Mark’s tentative first steps into the sober world and their own. He did good.
Judge Morris, another Wellness Court judge, has come down from his chambers to see Mark graduate. He speaks last. This large, ruddy-faced bear of a man worked with Mark several times in the past.
“It’s good to see you,” he starts. “Good for many reasons. Good because there were times I never expected you to make it. There was just so much stacked against you. I suppose that’s the point about the ‘bullheadedness and surrendering’,” he says, referencing the earlier speeches.
“You had to deal with more pain, more physical pain and real barriers than anyone who has been through this court and you had to be incredibly strong to deal with the bureaucracy that gets in your way – the Veteran’s Administration, hospitals, even public transit.”
Judge Morris pauses before continuing. Mark’s face is a beet.
“You had to balance the need to be really strong to get over those objective problems but your success was delayed by your bullheadedness when it came to addiction.” Judge Morris looks out at the court because his next words are for all of us.
“You figured out how to walk a balanced life, to stay strong to get well, and then get out of the way of your own success.”
I try to imagine Mark living a balanced life. I see myself on a similar teeter-totter, trying not to tip too far into the dangerous past or too far into the unknown future. Balancing.
A woman I work with at the prison teaches Buddhist meditation. She told me once about a concept called The Middle Way, a path of moderation that exists between sensual indulgence and self-denial. I can see Mark’s conundrum in the picture Judge Morris has painted. Here is a man whose strength is stubbornness. It is what allowed him to quit drinking in the first place and he doesn’t want to lose it to the court, or to the serenity-prayer-chanting twelve-step community that constantly calls for his complete surrender.
Judge Morris continues. “You look good, Mark. So much better than you did at times in the program when we could see you were in pain. You were strung out and having a hard time, not just from the pain, but the struggles with addiction.”
“Ms. Coon?” he calls up toward the speaker phone. “When was the last time you saw Mark?”
“Oh, I don’t know. At least five years,” she says in her lilting, little-old-lady voice.
“So you really haven’t seen him then. Well, he’s seven-foot-two now, looks like a linebacker with hair down to his knees. He looks fat and sassy.” He turns back to Mark with a twinkle in his eye and says, “Now you’ve shown us you’re a man of fashion.” At this the court laughs.
“You’ve got a coat and tie, hat, spiffy walking stick – I don’t mean to be joking about that – it’s an exhibition of your self-pride and self-esteem, your recognition that you won the battles you had to fight.”
As Judge Morris wraps up his speech to Mark, I mull over the compliment he gave Mark’s attire, thinking of Josie fussing about Mark’s clothes and mine as well. Something about being here makes me want to try a little harder, to reconsider a value I judged as superficial and unimportant. Maybe in all our unconscious actions we show the world the battles that we fight, we show these not just in our attire, but in our scars, mannerisms, speech, right down to the quality of our skin – and they signal to the world the nature of our struggle and the score.
After Judge Morris wraps up, Judge Swiderski looks at Mark. The speeches of the court brought him close to tears, and he puffs his chest up a bit.
“Do you have anything to say?” Judge Swiderski asks him. Over the loud speaker Mark’s mom interrupts.
“Yes, I do.”
Judge Swiderski raises his eyebrows and smiles at Mark. “Go ahead, ma’am.”
“I am so proud of you, Marky,” she says, “and I had faith. I knew you could make it. I am so proud of you and so is your sister Kelly. I’ve never had a better birthday present.”
“Your first-born is going to be okay,” Mark says for all of us to hear. “I love you, Mom.”
“I know you are, honey. I love you too.”
Early in March 2011, Mark drops by the office to set his raccoon free and “shoot the shit.” Spring is right around the corner, bright and promising. Mark hobbles into the office noisily and in good cheer. I’m winter weary; a lifelong Alaskan learns to be ready for that last storm, the one that comes after weeks of melting snow piles and ceaseless blue skies.
He strikes up a conversation with the new volunteer I’m training to take his place. It’s easy for Mark to make friends. He’s not shy. Nate, a tall and wiry young man with a full sleeve of tattoos, is here as part of a work rehabilitation program that pays him to volunteer at Sally’s. In return we help transition him back into full-time hours after a debilitating on-the job injury.
After the two of them discuss a motorcycle-related mechanical issue that sounds to me like a foreign language, Nate says, “It’s so cool to meet someone else who’s into bikes, man. I don’t have people I can talk to about this stuff.”
“You sober?” Mark asks.
“Yes, sir,” says Nate.
“I go to a bike club, Second to None. It’s a bunch of old guys who like to ride but they don’t drink or do drugs. Call me sometime if you want to go.” Mark pulls a card out of his pocket and hands it to Nate. The card has an emblem of a hand with a flame on the palm and says “Hard Walkin’ Mark. Call before you use.”
Mark has brought in a copy of a newspaper article to show me. It’s from 2000 when he was profiled in The Anchorage Daily News as a “Face of Sobriety.” The whole front page of the life section shows a smiling Mark as he appeared a decade ago, hair and all. He looks similar, but thinner, his hair a long brown mullet. The writer described his rough and tumble rap sheet as “long and mean.”
“Wish I never did that interview,” he tells me. “I fell off the wagon like three months after that. It’s been a long journey getting clean. Over ten years.”
I’ve heard that an alcoholic is emotionally frozen at the age they started drinking. As if proof of this, Mark continues to tell me that a few weeks back he had to be flown to Seattle for a staph infection in his knee. They sent him home with a strict regiment of antibiotics, including an IV bag. Mark had marched straight to his nearest tattoo parlor.
“Was that a good idea?” I ask.
“Well I figured it’s as good a time as any. I’m on all these antibiotics now.”
A part of me expects Mark to fail again, that same part of me that doesn’t trust a sunny March. Not because he’s weak-willed, but because he’s still learning how to be sober, how to have a long game. But the man I’ve come to know doesn’t surrender. Not that easy. He drove illegally to his own graduation. I imagine that the unreachable dreams that plague him – getting his license back, walking without pain, being young and strapping – are only as vivid as the dream of being able to drink and do drugs again without it ruining his life.
Saying that I expect Mark to fail is how I protect myself from disappointment. I also know that if Mark relapses he will try again, and again, and again to straighten himself out.
“What do you think, Mark? Is it going to snow again?” I ask. Mark is packing all his stuff up into a plastic grocery bag and getting ready to leave.
“I don’t know,” he says. He turns toward me, holding his toy raccoon in one hand, a miniature cage in the other. “I sure as hell hope not. Tell you what though; I’m ready for summer, ready to ride.”
Mark can’t physically take his bike on the road anymore – never mind that he doesn’t have a license – his knees aren’t strong enough. But he can’t bear to get rid of it. In the summer months he parks his motorcycle in his front yard, lets the sun heat up the chrome and the black leather seats, and when he goes outside to smoke, he slips onto it. He rode for so long that the movement became muscle memory. It doesn’t hurt too much to mount, to grip the throttle, to remember.
“A Man Of Fashion” is Mary Kudenov’s first essay to be published in a national literary magazine.