You Know Where This Avenue Ends

Seven anxious twelve-year-olds with one Colt M1911 will approach you at dusk and in the same language that the Queen of England speaks they will demand your wallet and phone. You have been mugged before. A professional makes it easy. Sometimes he’ll let you keep your driver’s license. An addict is usually all bluff and a shove will send him scurrying. A kid is variable, though. He startles easily. He doesn’t consider consequence. He might shoot a man, even a white man, even if he didn’t mean to. Seven of him just compounds it all. You will give them your wallet and your phone. You will even give them your cigarettes, which they will decide they also want. They will run off into the purpling shadows, frolicsome, free, as if you’d gladly handed them singles for the Mister Softee truck. It’s the third or fourth worst thing that will happen to you today.

Insomnia isn’t the reason you started drinking, but it’s the easiest reason not to stop. The hardest part of sobriety is learning how to sleep again. You can’t lay your head on a pillow without awakening that nameless, chromosomal dread, so you (yes you, don’t worry about me) pace away the night, survive to the dawn, celebrate with whiskey in your coffee, and fall apart again. And those are just the nights when you’re trying to quit, trying to hate yourself back into some normal sort of person. The inevitable conclusion is that it’s already too late: you misstepped at some point back when stepping still mattered, and inertia will carry you on to whatever fate you’ve earned. You take some solace in the idea that there are other, hypothetical yous in parallel realities. That there is a Platonic ideal of you who is sober and getting shit done. That you are just one of the secondary, alcoholic yous, suffering for the betterment of the collective. You kid yourself that this makes you noble.

Kensington isn’t the worst neighborhood in Philadelphia (“worst” being such a subjective term, anyway) but no one would argue with you if you called it “tough.” Other neighborhoods may rise and fall with the decades, but Kensington has always been tough: it was tough in the age of Franklin, tough in the age of Poe, tough in the ages of Morley, Goodis, McHale, and Wideman, and tough now in the age when no one’s writing about Philadelphia at all. You moved to Kensington because you felt the neighborhood reflected the fault-split geography of your own soul. You’ve never said this out loud to anyone, of course. You know how asinine it sounds. You smoke on your stoop in the evenings, listen to the yawps of domestic dispute, the violent shifts of furniture, the questionable bark of firecrackers out of season, and it rocks your soul like a troubled babe’s.

When you meet the twelve-year-olds you will be on your way to the state store for a handle of the discount Scotch in the plaid plastic bottle. You will have been sober for about twenty hours at this point. In the dark, early morning you poured what alcohol was left in the house down the drain and spent the rest of the day drinking black virgin coffee and smoking furious cigarettes. But you will have broken by this point, and cursed your own improvement-minded self of the night before, and will walk quickly, excitedly, hatefully toward the promise of relief. The mugging will affect you, though. You’re superstitious, more than you’d care to admit: something about the muzzle of the gun, the shaking arm behind it, the pubescent face above it, will cause you to wonder if maybe God isn’t speaking to you. You believe in an interventionist God; all addicts believe in an interventionist God. When the kids leave you with nothing but your car keys, you will decide to try to will yourself to keep with it, to meet the night and...