WHOSE BLAME IS IT ANYWAY?
By Jeff S. Martindale
 

My name is Cole, and I am the enemy.

It took me most of my life and countless weeks in rehab to reach that conclusion.  I began drinking young and hard growing up in Memphis, a city known for its blues, barbecue, and Graceland.  My parents raised me a stone’s throw from the Midtown bar scene, where my father, and his father before him, held court with their Overton Square buddies for as long as I can remember. From the time I turned twelve, I could drink my friends under the table – I came by it honest, as my grandfather often said.  When they hit the wall after a couple of six-packs, I couldn’t – no, wouldn’t – stop until I’d safely out-consumed them.  I soon graduated to harder, and more illicit, ways to satisfy my insatiable hunger for the high, chasing the beer with a smorgasbord of drugs that I either smoked, snorted, or shot up.

None of this I found particularly unusual.  My peers reflected my white, middle-class, teenage angst, and we collectively fed our self-destructive ways.  My mom always said I had a talent for attracting, then trashing, those I looked up to, which probably explains my early exit (read: expulsion) from high school.  I remember like yesterday the principal walking me to the front door for the last time.  With a sympathetic hand on my shoulder, he wished me luck.  The sorry bastard smiled the whole time. ‘Big deal,’ I thought then, ‘I’d rather be anywhere but here.’  I knew I could find misery for my company.  People like me are as common as crabgrass.

I went home, packed a duffel, threw it and a guitar in the back of my Civic, and hit the road for Atlanta, where I heard I could buy drugs off the street 24/7.  I found a cheap efficiency near Georgia Tech, not that I stayed there often.  I drank much and slept little, generally feeling high and lousy most days, working when I needed the cash, befriending a few pushers, liquor store owners, and other users like me.  

I kept boozing and shooting up at a breakneck pace until I got busted one Friday night buying dope from a guy near the World Congress Center after a night of binge drinking with a Tech coed who I hoped to fuck before sunrise. It didn’t bother me; I’d been arrested many times before. I told that to the cop on the way to jail, but he just laughed and shook his head.  I get that reaction a lot.

Later that night the arresting officer – he of the shaking head –stuffed me, handcuffed, into a crowded holding cell that reminded me of the old “Barney Miller” TV show.  I asked a nearby cop – a chunky fellow with stumpy legs and a beer belly that hung so far over his gun belt that I wondered whether he could do a single sit-up – if Fish was on-duty.  He shot back a puzzled look that shrieked he lacked the finer knowledge of classic cop shows.

The following afternoon they freed me and ten of my new friends from the cage. They shackled our arms and ankles together, and herded us like cattle—“Moo” I uttered as we shuffled along, to the chuckles of the chain gang—through a courtyard and into a small transition cell that looked older than Methuselah.  It was a smothering Georgia day with a temperature comfortably into triple figures.  There’s a reason they call it “Hot-lanta” – because of days like that, when the sun played hide and seek between gray, soupy clouds, and a quick walk across the courtyard left my shirt soaked in sweat.  It was so humid it felt like being inside the mouth of a dog.

Once chained to an unfriendly stainless steel bench – so hot that it singed my leg hairs through my city-issued orange trousers – I asked the officer to turn on the A/C.  He just smiled and shook his head.  I guess I should’ve said, ‘please.’

Fifteen minutes into our ordeal, I saw through a dingy window a bus pull up and sputter to a stop. My internal thermometer screamed for a change of climate, and I remember thinking I’d kill somebody’s momma for a fan.  The cell windows had been welded shut and protected by thick steel bars.  No relief there.  We started to bake like a batch of Pillsbury roll cookies.  After twenty more minutes of wiping burning sweat from our eyes, I, with my colleagues in crime, collectively voiced our displeasure.  I had a knack for making timely—or perhaps untimely, as my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Compton, often said—wisecracks, which kept my acquaintances in stitches but my elders within arms-reach of the Tylenol, and I now expressed them at will.  My captive audience called me “Eddie” because some asshole, who thought less of my sense of humor, asked me, “Who you think you is?  Eddie-fuckin-Murphy?”  Finally, a window separating the prisoners from the guards slid open.  A bushy mustache appeared in the little slot.  A voice said, “Okay, ladies.  We’re waiting for a backup van to come pick your sorry asses up.  Until it gets here, you’ll have to sit tight.”

That went over like David Duke at a NAACP meeting, and I suddenly feared a riot looming.  As the only alabaster face in the lot, I didn’t like my chances.

“Hold your water!” yelled the mustache over the din of the mob.  “We’ll turn on the fans for ya.  Hell, we’ll even pass out cold’uns if it’ll shut you up.”  The hatch slammed shut and I could hear them laughing.

Voices started in.  “Yo, blue! I wanna Mad Dog 20-20!”  “Yeah, Scotty! Pop me a Schlitz!” The tension was thick, but not as thick as the sweaty, humid, musty air I breathed.  People began to throw up where they may.  The door didn’t open.  
I panicked.  

Was this hell?  Would prison be worse?  I looked at the faces around me.  Could this be my fate?  Was I more likely to end up dead than in prison? Or in prison then dead? Maybe I had already died.  I’d felt nothing for years.

The door opened.  

The mustache appeared.  He said slowly, “The bus’ll be here in ten minutes, ladies.”  As he closed the door, I heard a genuinely perplexed voice, “Dumb bastards think we’re the enemy.”  

The door closed.

I thought about this a lot as I continued drinking and getting high, time after time, trying to stay clean, failing, trying again, failing again. Who is the enemy? The spinning arrow of blame never pointed at me. I moved back to Memphis. I tended bars, worked as a school janitor, played crappy guitar in a crappier band, and spent the lion’s share of my time in Midtown getting high. I asked my parents for help – once – and they returned almost immediately with a universal No which they intended to cover all future requests. I got caught skimming cash at a bar while on cocaine. I didn’t give a shit.  I got engaged and unengaged. Twice.  

I probably would’ve killed myself if I hadn’t wrapped my car around a telephone pole on Poplar Avenue early one morning after a rave in southeast Memphis.  Fate just didn’t intend for me to die.  

I knew that I was too old for that shit, but I couldn’t resist the lure of free drugs and teenage pussy.  I got plenty of the former and not a pungent whiff of the latter, but suffice it to say I floated high on a jet stream of ecstasy when my ego convinced me I could drive home.  

The telephone pole had other ideas.

Two days passed before I finally came down—and another six before the doctors discharged me from the hospital.  They said I was lucky the telephone pole broke when I hit it, but the police weren’t as forgiving.  No sooner did a nurse push my wheelchair through the automatic doors and I took my first breath of Memphis smog in a week when the cops slapped metal bracelets around my emaciated wrists and took me to jail.

They charged me with DUI and simple possession—neither were virgin charges on my rap sheet. Oh, God, the withdrawal symptoms knocked me for a loop. I can’t describe how miserable I felt.  The week in jail awaiting arraignment was the longest, pain-wracked, sleepless days of my life.  I thought I would die.  God knows I wanted to rather than suffer another day of torture. The prospect of an extended prison stay made me physically sick to my stomach, and soon I confused this anxiety with my withdrawal symptoms.  The fear shook me down to my marrow.

I probably would’ve lost it – my freedom and my sanity, that is – if not for a sympathetic judge taking some serious pity on me. He sentenced me to a stay at Lakeside, probation, and time served.

I sniffed the judge’s order like a mouse in a cheese cupboard, but I had no way around it.  So I finally got help.  Lakeside accepted me with open arms, which is more than I can say for my attitude when I arrived there, but I eventually bought into it and came out cleaner than a hospital tray.  

Two years later I found myself in the office of another rehab program, where I volunteered as a counselor when not working the morning shift at a local assembly line.  I had a head full of recovery steps and few answers that the user sitting across from me wanted to hear.  He was a witty, interesting fellow, and we were getting along pretty well, so I asked him: “Who do you think the enemy is?”  He looked at me for a long time, then snapped, “What do you want me to say?  You want me to blame it on the drug dealers, or my parents, or the DEA?  I’ve got a wife and three kids waiting for me, and they want me to clean up or get the hell out.  Shit, Cole, it’s not like I have a lot of choices here, right?  You wanna know who the enemy is?  My wife blames the government.  My kids blame me.  And I, well, I pretty much blame goddamn everybody.”

Something tingled in the back of my brain.  I recognized it as hopelessness from the depths I’d felt that steamy summer day in Atlanta.  He’d gotten himself in a hole like the one addicts find themselves in.  I thumbed through my mental Rolodex and realized that most of the people I’d counseled – and probably the hundreds of acquaintances I’d made during my darkest years – had spoken in a similar voice about the battles we fought.  And that voice lacked all hope.  When we fight a battle against human nature, everyone is the enemy.  We’re all to blame.

This sat in the pit of my stomach like a 10-ton weight. Despite all the money and suffering and good intentions, we still find ourselves surrounded by the enemy.  It watches us, and beckons us, and tells us that everything’s going to be all right. It is what we seek that they prey on, and the foul notions floating in their wake often infect not only our desire to remedy the present but also our faith in the future.