How Christopher Became a Drunk

Christopher disappears

Christopher had skipped ahead of the Big Sky man. The Teacher Lady lagged far behind. They had  bought him a hamburger. When that couple wasn’t looking, he had pocketed the tip. Then he had disappeared in the Burger Barn. He popped back into view, then disappeared in the alley next to the Burger Barn. After that, he had vanished in the street where the totem pole stood. Minutes later, he dodged out of sight into the Luxe movie house and slipped past the usher into the dark auditorium just before the Big Sky man came running up. He heard Big Sky, in the lobby, ask, “Have you seen a boy? Six-years-old? Dark hair? Blue jacket?” 

On the screen, someone was riding a horse. Christopher knew there would be shooting. He slipped into an empty row and felt his way down to its end. Somebody had left a popcorn box, half-full, on the floor. Christopher, when he accidentally kicked the box over, grabbed it up before too much had spilled. Then he sat and ate and watched the movie.

Interlude I

The clear sky above Boon wore a color the same silver as the inside of a mussel shell, even though the bedtime hour had come. Stars were blinking on at their impossible distance. Couples walked the docks and gushed about the beauty of the night and its serenity. Bars made their usual racket, but that noise could be eluded. It could be escaped. Facing the quiet Narrows, with its tame waves, and watching the silhouetted mountains loop their line against the sky, the dreamier people grew serene. 

Christopher steals Ring Dings

The little Dobbins six-year-old told the Teacher Lady somebody had stolen something from his lunch.

“What is missing, Larry?” The teacher lady stooped to ask her question. She could see how close to tears the child was.

“Ring Dings.”

“Dessert?”

The boy nodded, and the tears he’d fought to keep from spilling burst the little dam his lower eyelids made and in two parallel but not quite simultaneous lines ran down his red cheeks and dripped off each side of his chin.

The Teacher Lady had heard similar complaints from other children. Each child who had lost an apple or a cookie from his lunch sack said Christopher had taken it.

“Did you see him take it?” the Teacher Lady always asked.

“No one ever actually sees him,” the Teacher Lady told her principal, Mr. Loomis, when she stepped into his office to report the latest theft.

“But you’re sure it’s Christopher, Diane?”

The Teacher Lady grimaced. That answered her principal’s question. The grimace said she regretted to say yes but yes was the right word.

“We can’t keep him, Diane.”

“Where else can he go? Not Main School. Main already kicked him out.” Main was Boon’s only other elementary. “His mom? You want to try his mom again, Larry?”

“Hopeless, Diane. No permanent address. No phone. Four other children and a drinking problem. Can we say we’ll haul her in and sober her up and convince her to take better care of Christopher? She can’t take better care of herself. She can’t take care of anything. Her kids are with her when she’s picking up her tricks. This is a very ugly side of our society, Diane. It gets dumped on the school, and, frankly, the school can’t handle it. We don’t have the resources. What we’ve got is a whole bunch of other mothers, and fathers, too, and grandmothers and grandfathers, entire families saying, ‘Get rid of that little troublemaker. Get rid of that damned thief. What kind of school are you running? How is my child going to learn?’”

“We can’t kick him out.”

“If you’ve got a plan, Diane, I’ll listen. I’ll listen to any plan you can come up with, except we haven’t any money and we don’t  have personnel. There’s nothing plus nothing plus you.”

At home, the Teacher Lady told the Big Sky man, “You fix dinner. I’ve got some work.”

“Sure.” The Big Sky man said he’d whip up  his secret recipe for spaghetti sauce. While he whistled over  his canned tomatoes and garlic in the kitchen, the Teacher Lady pulled down old college textbooks from a shelf. She knew in one of them she’d find a theory about classroom  theft. She whipped through page after page of dense type until the right sub-head popped into view. The book was one of her oldest texts. It had a wounded spine, and its pages threatened to tumble loose, but by holding it together with both hands the Teacher Lady could read the theory that said theft occurs when there’s a need a child finds impossible to fill. To stop the stealing, fill the need. That bare outline of the problem and its suggested solution was easy to grasp, though it had to be pried loose from a lot of verbiage describing scientific studies. 

The Teacher Lady didn’t need to read the verbiage. The outline told all she had to know. Over the spaghetti, she told the Big Sky man she’d put a whole box of Ring Dings in her desk drawer at school. She’d tell Christopher the treats were his and he could take one any time he wanted.

“He’ll gobble them all, Diane.”

“I’ll buy more, Stan.”

“You can’t shoot your whole pay check on Ring Dings.”

“Stan, he’s a child. How many Ring Dings can a child eat?”

Both of them were right. The Ring Dings disappeared from the Teacher Lady’s desk. She replaced the emptied box with a second box, a full one. Those Ring Dings also disappeared.

The rate of disappearance was very quick at first. In two days a replacement box had to be slipped into the drawer. But that changed. After only ten days, a box of Ring Dings lasted for a week. The treats were an expense, but not an impossible one. What they bought was peace in the classroom. The cookies and brownies other children brought to school stayed safe in paper lunch sacks until snack-time every day. Parents had no more reason to complain. Mr. Loomis congratulated the Teacher Lady. Out of his own pocket, he contributed to what he and she privately called the Ring Ding fund.

The only surprise about the experiment, the Teacher Lady told the Big Sky man, was that she never saw Christopher anywhere near her desk. Whatever he did to satisfy his need he did with practiced stealth.

Interlude II

On frosty mornings, when the air is still, the waters of the Narrows steam. The science behind the steaming has something to do with the relative warmth of the water compared to the nippy coldness of the air. The phenomenon only occurs at dawn, so the people who see it are the ones whose work requires them to up at that hour—bakers hurrying to get their ovens heated so they can fill their kitchens and even the streets outside with the delicious aroma of warm bread; weary policemen at their change of shift, reporting to their station house and changing clothes to head for home; the graveyard shift the pulp mill has released after eight steamy hours in the bowels of the great, brick plant. Many of those sleepy, tired people pause to take in the magical sight. They see wisps of steam ascend like ghosts from the pale water. The shreds of steam waver in what looks like a dance, as if some celestial music played and the spirit of the water was compelled to rise with grace and beauty before it faded in the air. It was the ephemeral nature of the beautiful scene that held men and women entranced. Each watcher privately reflected, and what those reflections were no one will ever know. There is no language for the kind of mystery suggested by ghost wisps, and by the time the sun broke above the mountain tops, the spectacle had ended. People went home and jumped in bed.

Christopher gets his first ride in a car

On some of the days when Christopher’s mother could not take care of him—when she was too drunk, or when an emergency involving another of her children arose—the Teacher Lady and the Big Sky man brought Christopher to their home. He ate dinner with them. He took a bath there. He heard a story read to him by either Big Sky or Teacher Lady, and he fell asleep on a bed with only him in it, with no Oren or Rudy or Pam or baby Cecile to squeeze him up against the wall or hog the blankets or pee in places where he had to lie. When he woke up, he sat at a table with the Teacher Lady and ate the same thing she ate, which was often Cheerios, a breakfast Christopher liked.

The Big Sky man, who was a newspaper reporter, went to work before that breakfast hour, but on a Saturday in May he returned  home at mid-morning excited by what he said was a good idea. He’d been told to take pictures and get comments at the grand opening of a new marina north of Boon. The sparkling marina lay in a cove twelve road miles out of town. “I’ll take Christopher,” he told the Teacher Lady. “I’ll show him things he’s never seen before.”

“Have you ever ridden in a car, Christopher?” he asked. He’d noticed the six-year-old hesitate, standing five or six feet from the car, balking about going further.

The right answer to that question was ‘no,’ but Christopher couldn’t bring himself to say it. If he told the truth, he feared he’d be disqualified from this promised ride. If he lied and Big Sky knew he’d lied, the ride he hoped for might be cancelled or withdrawn. Keeping his mouth sealed and his expression blank, he let Big Sky help him climb on the car’s front seat and buckle him down. He sat silently alert to Big Sky seating himself and buckling himself. When Big Sky turned the key and the engine purr began, Christopher tensed. He didn’t know if the sound meant a danger. His automatic response was to keep still. 

When the car moved backwards his eyes widened, because it seemed to him going backward might cause a crash and he’d be killed. But the backing-up was only temporary. It was to pull out into the street. On the street, the car went forward, and the phenomenon of speed captivated Christopher. He could blink, and in that blink, things ahead turned into things behind. He experimented, first with cars approaching, then with buildings, then with telephone poles. The same miracle moved everything from in front to in back, and Christopher was seized by exhilaration. There’s a mastery to movement that sinks deep into the soul. 

The marina’s grand-opening festivities included a smorgasbord of seafood delicacies. Christopher was told to help himself. Beverages in a wash tub full of ice included Cokes and orange soda for free. At one end of the smorgasbord table brownies and cookies and doughnuts heaped up for the taking. 

During the speeches, while the Big Sky man took notes, Christopher wandered among the boats on display, touching all the shiny parts he could reach and amusing himself by crawling under the hulls of boats resting on sawhorse supports.

When time came to go, the Big Sky man shouted, “Christopher.” He had lost sight of the boy when his job required him to pose dignitaries for their smiling photographs. Big Sky checked the car. He asked guests at the smorgasbord table and others near the water, drinks in their hands. No one had seen the dark-haired youngster. “He wouldn’t have gone in the water.” Big Sky spoke in a voice close to panic because Christopher could have gone anywhere, including into water over his head behind a boat or under a raised walkway. He could have struggled and splashed and swallowed mouthfuls of brine without making any more of an impression than a salmon’s sudden jump. 

Alarmed searchers, abandoning the drinks table and the smorgasbord’s array of treats, searched the marina and the nearby woods. A woman named Joyce Vincent, who was an out-of-town sister-in-law of the marina’s owner, spotted Christopher inside one of the cabin cruisers which was mounted for display on a wheeled cradle. The boy had seated himself at the wheel, and what the sister-in-law saw was mostly just his hair because even seated on a stool he was hardly big enough to be seen from below. 

Christopher had locked the cabin door. All Big Sky’s pleas and threats could not unglue him from his perch behind the wheel. He sat as if he were the master of the boat and could, were the boat to be magically launched, speed it over the waters.

A marina boatman came running with the necessary key. The door slid back into its recessed slot. Big Sky dashed in. When he grabbed Christopher, the boy clung to the wheel. He screeched. He slapped. He bit. 

“Sorry . . . Sorry,” Big Sky kept saying to the shocked dignitaries and their wives and all the other guests at the grand opening.

Christopher wailed on the drive back to town The Big Sky Man kept yelling to tell him that locking himself inside someone’s boat was bad, and that he had to learn how to behave.

Christopher wailed to drown out the words. In his thoughts, the boat wasn’t ‘someone’s’; it was his. He was steering it across the water to a new place far away.

Interlude III

One of the delights of Boon’s wet, heavy snow is how it clogs the street drains. The snow dams at the foot of hill streets plug the grates. Water backs up until the street is made uncrossable because of puddles the size of small ponds. Drivers speeding by splash passers-by, which does not amuse the passers-by but delights the urchins gathered to watch those displays. The slush pools draw civic-minded citizens in galoshes or rubber boots. They wade into the water to kick away the snow dams. The ponds almost instantly gurgle away. In pouring down the grate, they bring a fresh layer of slush floating to the drain. The well-intentioned citizen has to repeat his kicking performance time and time again. He does it in secret delight, because what other good deed is so instantly rewarded as the violent wrecking of a snow dam? And the pleasure that comes from draining a street pond is perfectly unalloyed. Bystanders, sometimes, even reward the kicking with applause.

Christopher celebrates a birthday

In July, Christopher pulled a fire alarm. Fire trucks came. Police cars pulled up with blazing blue lights. Christopher hadn’t tried to hide. He stood leaning on the fire-alarm pole and drank in the spectacle of excitement and disruption. When an officer asked, he said yes, it was he who had pulled the alarm. The fireman in charge of the responding crew delivered a blistering lecture. Christopher wouldn’t tell his name or where he lived. The alarm-pulling incident had taken place in a neighborhood about a half-mile from the transients’ hotel where Christopher’s mother and her brood currently took shelter. Because of Christopher’s young age, the police called a social worker. Nora Tillotson, who had intervened in calamities involving Christopher’s mother previously, drove the boy to her office. She called the Teacher Lady, whom she knew to have an interest in this problem child. The Teacher Lady came and walked Christopher to her home. He was at the table with a coloring book when the Big Sky man walked in and said “What’s this? Christopher. You’re paying us a visit.” 

In private, the Teacher Lady explained what Christopher had done. She said she’d agreed to keep him overnight while Mrs. Tillotson and others at her agency attempted once more to acquaint his mom with the responsibility she bore to her children. 

The next day, after Christopher had been bathed and fed and was well-rested, the Teacher Lady walked him to the place where his family squatted—all six in a single room with a bathroom down the hall. She kissed Christopher goodbye. “Be good,” she whispered. She left with a feeling of dread, because his brothers and sister stood staring like dolts and his mother’s slurred speech clearly said she was inebriated.  

Christopher, that same day, found his way back to the neighborhood he’d been removed from the day before and pulled the same alarm box.

Mrs. Tillotson, after the police and firemen had raged at the boy, called the Teacher Lady and asked if they could talk. In the discussion they had, in the privacy of Mrs. Tillotson’s office, she and Big Sky and the Teacher Lady thrashed out the pros and cons of taking the little boy in as a foster child.  

“Something has to be done,” Mrs. Tillotson argued. “His mother can’t cope. She’s a drunk. She’s a tramp. All the children are going down the drain, but with Christopher maybe there’s a chance. You love him. You have shown him you love him.”

The Teacher Lady and the Big Sky man went home to think about what Mrs. Tillotson proposed. They talked late into the night, but their decision was to not agree. The second setting-off of the alarm weighed most with them. How much good could they do for a boy whom rage and shouts and threats and innumerable entreaties could not dissuade from mischief on a scale involving fire trucks and the police?

The guilt of saying no to such a needy boy weighed on the Teacher Lady, and in August she told the Big Sky man, “Christopher’s birthday is Wednesday. Can we do something special? Can you take the day off? We’ll have a picnic maybe. We’ll do something really, really nice.”     As it turned out, the birthday Wednesday saw a drenching storm move in and darken the sky and soak the beaches and the city park where a picnic could have been enjoyed. The Teacher Lady had a back-up plan, though. She had won permission from Christopher’s mother for the boy to stay overnight on the eve of his special day. After the nighttime routine of bath and story, when Christopher was asleep, she baked a cake while the Big Sky man wrapped gifts. They had splurged. Christopher would unwrap a new sweater, a new pair of pants, and new socks. But that was just the practical part of the gift extravaganza. The gift pile included four Matchbox cars, and Lincoln Logs, and a toy truck with a dump body that lifted to empty, just like a real truck’s would. The couple hid the wrapped gifts in a closet. Big Sky made room to hide the frosted cake on that same closet’s high shelf. 

Morning came. The breakfast meal included waffles with real maple syrup, a treat that was Christopher’s favorite. The downpour hampered any treks outdoor, but in the middle of the morning the Teacher Lady took Christopher to the library and read to him from picture books while he sat in rapt attention on her lap. For a lunch-time treat, he and she sat on stools at a soda fountain’s counter and ate first hot dogs and then slurped up ice cream sodas. 

Christopher napped for an hour. While he slept, by arrangement, Big Sky came home. Sleepy-eyed Christopher wandered into the living room just five minutes after Big Sky had walked in. He and the Teacher Lady had piled gifts on a coffee table and put candles on the cake, which sat on the kitchen table.

“Happy Birthday, Christopher! Today’s your big day,” they shouted. They handed the astonished youngster gift after gift. They sang the birthday song. They lit the candles on the cake, and on each plate with its generous, frosted slice they piled ice cream, too. 

While the Teacher Lady cooked macaroni and cheese, which was Christopher’s favorite, Big Sky sat on the floor with the little boy, explaining the mysteries of Lincoln Logs to him, and then playing with the Matchbox cars while Christopher, over the same imaginary roads the cars used, guided his big truck and made truck noises. 

The sleepy boy, after dinner, supervised the loading of his treasures into a cardboard box for the trip back to his mother’s. He was very particular about what went where in the box, and he insisted on holding his dump truck himself. The Big Sky man could carry the box, and store it safely in the car, and buckle Christopher in for the ride of a few blocks, and carry the box up the rooming house’s dingy stairs, but he could not touch the truck. Christopher wouldn’t allow it. 

At six the next morning, Big Sky was at work. His newspapering day began with punched-tape duties. AP stories came in through the night both in hard-copy on a teletype, and on yards and yards of yellow tape punched in a code for the type-setting machine. The half hour Big Sky spent matching each roll of punched tape to the appropriate story was the calmest part of his day He was alone in the office. No phone jangled at that hour. Serenity reigned before the bustle of police-log duties and fire-log duties, and attendance at the district court session to record the misdeeds of the night. 

He was at his desk in the back of the newsroom when he was surprised to hear the front door close. He hadn’t glimpsed anyone opening it. A further surprise came when what he saw moving past the front counter was the top of a little boy’s head. Christopher had come, his dark hair still bed-mess rowdy. He moved in silence past the unoccupied desk of the circulation lady. He reached Big Sky and stood so close Big Sky understood he wanted to be held. The tall man lifted the boy to his lap. Christopher leaned his head against Big Sky’s chest and spoke in what was barely a whisper. “Today’s my birthday,” he said.

A load of love and sadness made Big Sky bow his head. He kissed the little boy’s unruly hair. “Oh, Christopher, you only get one birthday each year. Next year you’ll have another. But you have to wait.”

The two of them sat while that reality sank in. Big Sky wished he could say a year isn’t very long, but to a seven-year-old a year is forever. Big Sky fantasized, preposterously, about a land where boys had birthdays every day. But that would be a lie. Christopher had learned one fact the day before. It was the fact of celebration for the day on which he had been welcomed to the world. He had learned another fact on Big Sky’s lap. He had to wait and wait until that day of celebration came again.

The little boy let tears roll down from his dark eyes. Big Sky had never seen him cry before. Then he climbed off Big Sky’s lap and, in silence, wended his way back to the newsroom’s front door. Big Sky watched his mop of inky hair move past the front counter. He saw the door open. He saw it close. Beyond that, he saw nothing. The sorrowing boy had disappeared.

Interlude IV

Salmon spawn in the creek that runs through the center of Boon. The spectacle the silver fish create each autumn draws tourists with their ever-ready cameras, but it entertains Boon’s permanent residents as well. The fish school up in the tidal part of the creek’s mouth. From a bridge that spans the creek, sightseers gawk down into the grass-colored water where fish mobs move in wavy undulations. Fish in countless numbers make their way upstream until they reach a rush of rapids, spanned by a narrow bridge made of planks. The plank bridge is also a prime viewing spot because at the rapids, salmon leap in athletic splendor. They fling themselves out of the water entirely fly to calmer pools above the roiled water. From there, they continue to their spawning grounds, where females lay their eggs and males fertilize them before both sexes die. 

Not all salmon make successful leaps at those white-water rapids. Some injure themselves on rocks and drift back down to wherever the creek chances to drop them. Others fly boldly into their foreign element, the air, but land in shallows with too little water for swimming. They thrash there, exhausting themselves, and seagulls flock around them, a winged horde. The birds peck out the fish’s eyes before they pull strips of flesh from their helpless bodies. The blinded fish thrash defenseless under the violent assault, and many viewers turn away from what looks gross and hurtful. But stoics take the scene in unperturbed. They have enrolled themselves in an unsentimental school of nature, one with gore as well as beauty, where the rule is survival, and the price is paid in pain.

Christopher is penetrated

In her hours of hazy inebriation, Christopher’s mother had sex with many different men. Sometimes six-man fishing crews followed her home, the glaze of concupiscence stamping their ruddy features with carnal anticipation. Among those revelers intent on opportune immorality of that sort, there occasionally could be found one who posed a danger to children.

A man with a gold tooth trailed four of his crewmates in Christopher’s mother’s wake on the fourteenth of June in 1969. Gold-Tooth and his wolf-pack crewmates crowded together in the front-room squalor of the family’s temporary shelter. Christopher’s mother hosted them one by one in the squalid bedroom while those next in line bragged and cracked crude jokes in the room their burly bodies filled almost to bursting. Christopher, squeezed into the same room, wished his sister Pamela was with him. She had slipped away as soon as she’d heard the rowdy men coming. She’d told Christopher to watch the baby, Pamela, who lay listless on the dirty couch. Christopher’s older brothers, Oren and Rudy, had disappeared even before Pamela had. Except for the baby, Christopher might have slipped away himself. But the baby was more helpless than he. He stood guard over her, keeping himself between her and their mother’s rowdy guests. The only grown-up who seemed to sense the tension the racket created for the little boy was Gold-Tooth, who talked to Christopher, and told him facts about fishing, and described his own childhood, which he said he had spent on a flat, dry, faraway plain. 

Gold-Tooth kept a pack of cards in one of his big pockets, and he entertained Christopher with tricks. Whatever card Christopher plucked from the deck at random, Gold-Tooth could tell him what it was. Gold -Tooth was still doing tricks after his last shipmate had finished his business in the bedroom. Most of the crew had already trundled off, sated by the sex they’d had with Christopher’s mother. Gold-Tooth said he’d follow his last friend out the door as soon as he’d taught Christopher a card game. Maybe the men he’d come with worried, but even if they did they were too drunk to care about him and his cards. They left him alone with the dark-haired child. 

“You are such a smart little boy. You’re the smartest kid I’ve ever met.” Gold-Tooth lavished flattery on Christopher. “I’ll bet there’s one thing I can do better than you, though. I’ll bet I can pull off my shoes so fast it will be like lightning. You want to race? Want to have a contest? I’ll tell you what—if you can whip your shoes off faster than me, I’ll give you a nickel. A nickel per shoe. That’ll be the deal.” 

Christopher grabbed his shoe, and Gold-Tooth had to tell him, “No. Wait. Wait for the signal. This has to be fair.” He could see in the child’s eyes how exciting this game was.

Christopher won two nickels pulling off his shoes.

“No way! I can’t believe it. No one has ever beaten me before in my whole life. You must be the fastest puller-off of shoes in the whole world. You won fair and square, kid, but I claim the right to try to win my nickels back. Those two nickels against this quarter. This shiny, silver quarter right here.” He showed Christopher a quarter, but he closed his fist on it when Christopher tried a grab. “No sir. Fair contest. Button contest. Who’s the fastest at unbuttoning his shirt?”

Through sordid inducements, Gold-Tooth beguiled Christopher into disrobing. He flashed his golden smile each time a sock or undershirt came off. He emptied his pockets of change—all Christopher’s, he said. That potent tom-foolery continued until Christopher had been showered with more money than he’d ever had at one time in his life and stood face to face with Gold-Tooth, both of them with just their underpants on. Then lust in its most overpowering eruption tore through whatever weak restraints had so-far checked kept Gold-Tooth’s passion. He seized the nearly naked boy and pulled him close against his  hairy chest.

When Oren came home, Gold-Tooth was gone and Christopher was bleeding from his rectum. 

“Does it hurt?” Oren asked.

Christopher screeched his answer. “Yes!”

Oren laughed. “That means you’re queer,” he said.

Final Interlude

Before a storm, seagulls, alert to changes in the currents of the air and alert to sudden violence of wind on the water, like to wing and circle just below the banks of building clouds. The sight turns gazes skyward. The grace of the birds on their motionless wings, gliding in their climbing spirals, captivates. People stare and point at the air-borne pageant.

Inevitably, a half-dozen ravens also take to wing. The black birds lack the grace and artistry of gulls. They circle drunkenly. They haven’t got the balance that lets them ride the wind like smoke. Black wings flap. Birds drop from circulation and have to scramble back in place. Their clumsy efforts might be interpreted as homage, if birds as raucous and brash as ravens were capable of homage. Mockery is what it really is. Ravens fill the sky with pure buffoonery, as if to tell the world not to let a thing of beauty fool it. Reality is something clumsier. Reality is not transcendent. Reality is crude and slapstick.

Christopher drinks

In 1970, Big Sky and the Teacher Lady moved to Arizona, where Big Sky had found work at a larger paper. After their departure, social service workers in Boon removed Oren, Rudy, Pamela, Christopher and baby Pamela from their mother’s inept and drunken care. There’d been a fire in one of the sordid hovels where she temporarily sheltered. The children were not safe with her, and she agreed to give them up.

In their scramble to find foster homes, officials thought of Big Sky and the teacher, who, they knew, had shown an interest in Christopher. Would they be willing to formalize the concern they’d shown and become Christopher’s foster parents? 

The letter from Boon caused consternation in Arizona. The young couple wanted to help. But they were being asked to take an enormous step. Each had a new job. Together they were expanding their circle of friends. They examined the request from every angle over a period of weeks, and before they reached a decision the Teacher Lady learned she was pregnant. 

They wrote back saying, regretfully, no.

Christopher, by that time, had discovered vodka. He’d discovered beer and wine. What he drank most often made him sick, but it also brought an escape of sorts, a kind of oblivion, the cancelation, for a while, of his sorrows and distress. So despite his incidents of vomiting, he drank and drank and drank.