Kelvin

 

Panic in Needle Park (Jerry Schatzberg, 1971)

The Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara, 1992)

I have known Kelvin now for a little over a decade. We went to the same Monday night A.A. meeting for a number of years and originally he had two more years sober than me, not that my own track record has been all that squeaky clean (after a healthy stretch of seven straight years, one day at a time, don't ask me to elaborate). Neither Kelvin nor I handled COVID great, ultimately, and neither of us regained his proper footing in the immediate aftermath. The condition is groundlessness. I didn’t see Kelvin much during the last half of this past year and knowing what that would tend to indicate I could not help but fear the worst. I don’t think I’ve ever told anybody this, but once Kelvin came into the homeless shelter were I was assistant supervisor back in the day, deep into an obviously gruelling crack binge, and he acted contemptuous of me when I offered him my own sandwich, subsequently acting contemptuous of the very idea of his wife and daughter and their existence when I brought them up, trying to assess the scale of the calamity right in front of me. It was the nastiest show you could ever want to see some loathsome, disreputable creep stage publicly. This is the man who taught me the fundamentals of fly fishing and gushed openly and often of his wife and daughter who I saw very clearly as people Kelvin loved with the deep and simple devotion of a normal, decent man. To fuck it all up monumentally? Simply throw in a Ziplock full of crack rock. Kelvin was at the meeting last night for the first time in ages, definitely still in post-acute withdrawal though I was very pleased to see him counted still among us the sour and cantankerous living, here as we are to nurture, however boorish and bothersome we may at times be in our untimely ministrations. Kelvin had gone out on crack and booze agin and was couch surfing currently. I took him and bought him a sausage roll at a place I know and put the screws to him real blunt-like. Okay, fess up, kid, what the fuck happened this time? Are you not yet already sufficiently smeared across the tarmac? In answer to this question, Kelvin, nobody’s idea of an intellectual, said as wise and true a thing as has ever been said on the subject of relapse, brevity being one of the statement's main selling points. He said: “the obsession came back.” A blue bolt shot downward through my spine. Then Kelvin told me a story about how just before Christmas he was driving in his car with a drug dealer to whom he owed a considerable amount of money. Stopped at a freshly-red light at 17th Ave. and 14th St. SW, Kelvin had turned his keys and pink slips over to the dealer and just started walking directionless through the snow in a hoodie and beat-up sneakers. I was of several minds respective of the fact that Kelvin told this story in a cheerful and upbeat manner that obviously couldn't do much to eclipse how nightmarish the actual experience would have had to have been (and I’ve had similar, alas). These impossible goddamn addicts, am I right? They’d snort and chortle at the fucking gallows.