Charleston had been an accident waiting to happen, and that was the fact of the matter. It wasn’t about a so-called disease one poured out of a bottle. When he’d come to that realization, he and his therapist Nancy got into their biggest disagreement, an ugly argument. This was right before he’d finished his treatment program. She’d started it by saying that everything dysfunctional in his life was rooted in his alcoholism, and as drunks and junkies got older, they became exaggerated versions of themselves.

She’d even drawn a chart for him when they were alone in the chapel that sunny June afternoon, and all the windows were open, and he could smell the sea air and hear the gulls screaming as they swooped over the rocky coastline on the North Shore, where he ought to have been fishing or riding a motorcycle, or better yet, sitting with his feet propped up, drinking booze instead of blaming his life on it. Nancy had shown him in black and white how after he and beer had become “best friends” when he was twelve, his life had begun a slow deterioration peppered with traumas that she inked heavily and labeled:

Fighting

Poor Perf. in School

Isolation

Sexually Promix.

FX relationships

Risk/boxing/guns/police/motorcy.

Nancy had charted his fuckups for the better part of an hour, using abbreviations that required deciphering. What she basically demonstrated to him was that ever since his first beer, he’d been on an angry, dangerous path of aggression, sexual promiscuity, fractured friendships, divorce, and violence, and the older he got, the closer together his traumas were spaced, because that was the nature of the Disease. The Disease took you over, and as you got older, you physically couldn’t resist its having its way with you, or something like that.

Then she had signed and dated his chart, and even drew a smiley face under her name, and handed the damn thing to him, all five pages, and he said, What do you want me to do? Tape it on my fucking refrigerator?

He’d gotten up from the pew and walked over to the window, and looked out at the ocean crashing against black granite, and spray shooting up and gulls screaming as if whales and birds were gathering and rioting right in front of him, trying to break him out of the joint.

Do you see what you just did? Nancy said to his back, from her pew, while he looked out at the most beautiful day he’d ever seen, wondering why he wasn’t outside in the middle of it. You just pushed me away, Pete. That’s the alcohol talking.

The hell it is, he replied. I haven’t had a fucking drink in a fucking month. That was me talking.