I’m addicted to crack (machines).

There’s an epidemic in Starkville.

I know because I’m very attuned to these things. Like any hypochondriac.

Won't someone help this pretend man?

It’s crack (machines). I speak from experience. (And I’m pretty sure it’s not an epidemic of One, but if it is, that’s ok, because the army is an Army of One, and I know for a fact that there’s more than one person in the army.  I’m stepping forward to speak today because I’m no longer afraid to confess that I’m addicted. Perhaps, I can speak as One for us All. Perhaps, my story will help others).

I could hardly write that last sentence without giggling…at least, a little.

Ahem, anyway.

It’s one thing to enjoy a “devil” beverage at a bar, much to U.L.’s chagrin, but it’s entirely another when you’re enjoying it plus sliding countless dollars into a medium-sized black box with lights flashing and a menu of over 100 different touch-screen challenges, ranging from puzzles to quizzes to action and strategy. 

There’s even a Triple Threat option for those who like to live on the edge.

With my hypochondria, though, I take too much medication to attempt the Triple Threat. I’m nervous just sitting here thinking about it.

Here’s how you recognize that you have a problem: You’re going out to bars, on a regular basis BUT you’re not drinking at all, which bartenders don’t like. You’re simply going to play the games. On top of that, you’re accosting innocent people at bars like that time I did at Dave’s because I thought the machines were broken, which, of course, I knew immediately meant that they were phasing them out, getting rid of them, possibly because of their addictive natures, or to discourage me from coming out to Dave’s in the first place.

(Hypochondria can be mental, as well).

It turns out they’d just turned them off. It’s good to be energy-conscious. That’s what they reminded me of, again, last night.

Last night where I bet I spent ten dollars on one single machine because I am a competitive individual, I can’t help it.

I wanted to see those words Winner! or New Grand Champion! roll across the screen because I knew right after it rolled across the screen would come my favorite part: I’d get to type in my name and stand back as it clicked in at the Number One spot.

Some have said to me, Well, Kris, I’m certainly glad you don’t gamble.

Ha. Please.

That’s not even remotely the same thing. And let me tell you why.

Gambling doesn’t have a Top Ten list, for one thing, and second – you wouldn’t know those people anyway, probably. But at a local watering hole, like Dave’s and OVP, or Barrister’s, chances are you know the people on the Top Ten list, and you know them well. And so, you have to beat them because you know them.

See how flashy and red it is...

You want them, more than life and breath itself, to stroll back into that bar one evening, grab a Coors Light or a Cape Cod, or Vodka Collins, whatever, and sit down at that machine and try their hand at Gone Fishin’, or Double Quiz, or Type-A-Phrase, all the while thinking they’re going to beat their own score (they naively consider themselves still in the Number One position, naturally) and when all is said and done: Oh, they beat their own score, all right, but not mine.

Then, they have that moment where their fists ball up and they murmur a soft curse, That Kris! And order another Seven & 7.

That’s why I play. Imagining the look on their faces when they fall to second place is the whole of my addiction.

And that’s, also, the hole in my wallet.

But, I mean, doesn’t money exist to be spent? Where else would I put it? The bank?

Please. I’m one of the last members of Generation X. We don’t “do” banks. Our entire reason for existing was to aggravate everyone else. Especially parents. And parents “do” banks, so, there goes that.

I admit it – we’re probably the reason for this current recession.

Of course, now that I’m in my 30s, I’m ok with a bank. I’m wishing now that I’d “done” banks, back then. Because my car needs a tune-up, two new back tires, there’s electricity – I like having it – so I’ll have to pay for it. Yes, just when I least expected it, Life came running back downhill and kicked me in the face for being a “rebel.”

God, I’m using a lot of quotation marks, today.

Probably because I recognize the futility of a youth mostly wasted. Not all, but mostly. And if it took me this long to figure that out, then I worry for my nieces and nephews. They’re already belligerent. And the oldest isn’t even 5, yet. Still, they’ve established a pecking order: who sits where at Sunday dinner, who gets the yellow truck, who gets the green and blue books, etc. So young, and yet, they “must have” certain things, if for no other reason than to keep someone else from getting it.

Is that what propels us to addictions, in the first place? A lack of control over anything larger than the Self? An inability to see beyond the temporal? I wonder…

Sure, you might argue that an addiction is the opposite of self-control, but is it? Really?  The more I think about it, the more I come to believe it isn’t, actually. It’s an abusive, unhealthy form of self-control, but all the same, it’s self-control…it becomes a luxury in its destructiveness, a habit that we eventually must enforce.

I suffered from an eating disorder for several years. Originally, it was harmless enough. I’d had a car accident, I’d hurt my left leg (nerve damage), and I wasn’t able to play tennis, officially, so I did what most do under the circumstances: I became depressed. (And I didn’t need much help in that department).

At first, it was easy enough to not eat. I wasn’t in the mood for it.

Some things just seem fat.

But, then, I actually began to enjoy the looming end result of not eating. I couldn’t do what I wanted to do (tennis, etc.), but rather than focus on that, I could do something else: re-make my body image. Denying food became a game…with no clear way to define a winner. I lost an ungodly amount of weight. My family eventually intervened, of course. But, it wasn’t an easy intervention, upfront.

However, when, I fell out in church, that was that.

We knew something was wrong then. Baptists don’t get the Holy Ghost. If you fall out in church, it’s most likely from a medical reason. Also, one time, Miss Ada Lee may have had a heart attack in church. Point is, we knew why people fell in church and it wasn’t because they found God. Per se.

My weight was sickeningly low. I was 22, 5’10”, and maybe 118? U.L. has burned all the pictures from that painful time, and painful it was, but I must tell the truth: I “felt” entirely in control of myself, my life. When I put on a pair of blue jeans that I’d not worn since the fifth grade, I was elated. Not for the sake of weight loss, anymore, but for the idea that I could fit in these pants, and the last time I’d worn them, I was a child…and that meant, I was someone else’s responsibility. That was the safety I think I was trying to secure by not eating.

I think that’s what addictions do for us.

They cover us, they shield us, they protect us, bad as they are. They distract us when we need it…the problem is they also distract us when we want it. The danger comes in marring the line that differentiates the two: want vs. need.

I know, I’ve kept my toe on that line for many a year.

The monsters in my mouth.

I’m no prude, but violence in any form shocks me. (I’m rather hoping that’s a universal statement).

But, and here’s where we may differ, my response to it is to laugh. Maybe it’s a nervous habit, maybe I think it’s a deflection on my part to make it less real. I don’t know why I do it, but I laugh. And loudly.

See, what you might not know about me is that I am the world’s most foremost expert at inappropriate laughter.  It just seems easier to laugh at everything, for me.  I get tired of crying. (Though, I’ve done my share of that, too).  Let’s not dwell on that, yet…that’s not today’s focus.

This man is thoroughly enjoying his laugh.

This is: what I’ve been noticing lately is that my conversations, and by this I mean those that I happen into, like around the dinner table, out with friends, after rehearsals, etc., not ones I instigate, necessarily, I’ve noticed that they have become almost exponentially more violent in content.

That amuses me.

I wonder if we think that’s entertaining. Sure, sure, in a movie, like Die Hard or Scream or that dreadful imposition of a film called Forrest Gump, ok, that’s one thing, but in the every day? When we’re face-to-face, are we so worried that silence is too disconcerting that simply enjoying another’s presence isn’t enough, anymore? 

Either way, it makes for good conversation, I guess.

Before rehearsal, yesterday, I met a couple of friends at Old Venice, an Italian restaurant within walking distance from my house, as is the theatre. It’s terribly convenient to have them both so close, and I worry that at any moment someone will come and tell me I’ve had it made for too long, to please move.

I was a bit late, and they were already there, drinks in one hand, menus in the other, and as I sat down, Jene turned to me, in that wonderfully comic way of his (everything’s a big, fat joke to him and I like that), and announced that he’d hurt his ear. Burst the drum. He’d poked a Q-tip too far into the canal. I reminded him that the box, of course, carries a warning to the effect of: Don’t stick this Q-tip in your ear canal.

That wasn’t the point, he said.  It never is with Jene. That’s what makes him delightful company. That story, however, led us immediately down a long, winding path of physical incidents in Jene’s life. Like the time that he got hit in the left eye with a stick and for the next eight days had to go to the emergency room, before school, and meet his doctor there to have his eye scraped.

I found this irresistably funny. So, I laughed.

Jene paused. Assured me that it really was quite painful. Then, he laughed. So did, Chris. (Another one).

As is the way in the Deep South, Jene expected equal disclosure. The whole gambit of “I tell a story, you tell a story.”  We are a culture of story-telling people.  Also, we are called liars. But, we’re good ones. As Mark Twain has famously written, There’s an art to lying, as anything else. Forgive the paraphrase.

I was prepared, naturally. So, I regaled them with my most recent horror: wisdom teeth extraction. I waited late in life to have it done. For one thing, I didn’t really, really know I had any. Secondly, when I couldn’t eat for three days because my back teeth hurt, I realized then, that Yes, indeed, I had wisdom teeth, and they’d shown up just in time to be taken out. Much like an evangelist…they spoke with a vengeance.

The dentist was, how can I say it?, frankly appalled.  He took one look at my X-rays and loudly sighed. How could I not know that these monsters were in my mouth. I liked that phrase, though…don’t you.  I told him they’d never bothered me until that weekend.  He held no restraint in telling me that I was almost too old for a safe surgery.

But, that he’d try. (Of course, he would. It cost $1200.  Heck, in this recession, I’d try to take your wisdom teeth out for $20).

I signed waivers saying that I wanted to be “put under,” and that if I died, I wouldn’t sue, etc. etc.  (They didn’t ask me to include family members though. If something happened, I felt I’d be avenged.  Hell hath no fury like my Mother).

The day of the surgery came, bless Erin and Amanda for the week of torture they’d have to endure on my behalf, and I took the Valium. The nurse asked me if I had any last questions. In retrospect, this is not necessarily what you want to hear on your way “down.” I asked her if anyone had gone on to meet God from the chair I was in.

She said, “No. Not that one.”

I was out in under ten seconds.  That part is not Hollywood fiction; it’s very real. When I came to, I was drowsy and packed: cotton, gauze, my mouth was free of monsters and full of Proctor & Gamble.  The dentist said that despite my age (again with this age business) it was a textbook operation.

I asked him which edition.

He laughed, as was his social responsibility. And two days later, I had a massive nerve infection. Not a dry socket, a nerve infection. So painful that I almost committed a crime: vandalism. I didn’t though. I wasn’t able to drive to his office without assistance, and I just wasn’t willing to incriminate anyone else.

These are happy teeth. They are also fake.

I had to go, for a solid week, at the hands of mercy belonging to Erin and Amanda, God bless them, every morning back to the dentist’s office to have my “holes packed.” It is as painful as it sounds. They would stretch my jaws as widely as they could, no anesthetic, no being “put down” for this, no, no…I watched the atrocity with every last ounce of awareness one is offered by being fully awake.

The nurse took, what I imagine were Guiness Book of World Records award-winning tweezers – they were a foot long if they were an inch – and while another nurse, unseen, held my jaws open (and anytime your jaws are held open, it is always against your will), drying out my throat, the first nurse took two awful-smelling strips of yellow gauze, soaked in kerosene and castor oil and also Ipecac, I think it was, and proceeded to force them into the space previously occupied by God-given teeth.

Every morning for a week I endured this.

I could hardly speak, the taste of those stips was like having two creosote poles (crisoak, as we say down south) jammed into your gums because any foreign object put in your mouth shames it instantly; your mouth becomes offended – it begins to feel inadequate, as if it’s not doing its job. Your mouth knows what should and shouldn’t be there. I’m pretty sure that’s one of Newton’s laws, oh, and that taste, ick….nothing could get rid of it. Nothing.

I finished my story, and turned back to Jene, who stared at me. That was nowhere near as painful as having your eyeball scraped. I had to agree.  No matter how I twisted the facts around to make them more violently presentable, just merely saying the words “eyeball,” and “scraped,” in the same sentence trumps everything else.

He then rounded out the evening, at least for me – I had to get to rehearsal – by telling the embarrassingly tragic story of his 12th birthday. Having grown up with horses, in the stables not the house, he’d invited all his friends to the ranch to show off his precious, tame horse named Cantalope.

He’d been practicing and practicing pulling off a Trigger routine, which as you may recall, I believe, involved Roy Rogers jumping over the back of the horse to mount him. I think. At any rate, I’m sure it wasn’t Dale. Jene had reheared this routine a thousand times, he said, and was eager to show his friends what he could do with a horse.

And I mean, come on, the horse’s name was Cantalope. What harm could that cause.

I wouldn't trust this face, at all.

A lot, apparently. The horse panicked and kicked Jene in the genitals four quick and nearly lethal times. His mother, desperate to save him, should a fifth and sixth kick be imminent, immediately jumped the fence, grabbed her son, and tore his trousers off to inspect the damage, much to the wild-eyed amusement of all of his friends, who stood there, a mute audience.  At least until school started back, at which time they introduced to the student body a new nickname for Jene which was…

…and, that, I’m afraid is where the story ended.  He didn’t say another word, and wouldn’t.

Don’t you just hate when people do that?

I’m sure it had something to do with blue jeans, that’d be a first and obvious choice, and of course, balls.

It’s crass, I know, but then, so are most twelve-year-olds.