Beirut, Lebanon, April 20, 2010

Beirut was anticlimactic. Not to say that there weren’t moments of excitement, like when police with machine guns stopped me from taking pictures of new buildings, or when they searched my small backpack for bombs on my way to the pedestrians-only downtown area. But despite the scars of war on a few of the buildings, and the occasional shock of a light armored vehicle guarding a government facility, it was much like any other Mediterranean city.

​

I had a good time just walking around. After a lousy getting ripped off on a cab ride a couple days before, I resolved not to take another taxi in Lebanon unless there was no other way. I walked all over town, from my hotel on the Corniche at the seacoast all the way to the National Museum, along the “green line” that used to separate the Muslims from the Christians during the war. I had falafel for lunch across from a bullet-ridden building, and ice cream for dessert in a shiny new restaurant. I was lonely, but I am used to going solo. I was struck that my biggest worry in Beirut seemed to be where I was going to get my next ice cream cone.

​

When I got to my hotel room, I realized that it was April 20th. Twenty years before to the day I had quit drinking. What was I going to do to celebrate? I wound up playing air drums to Van Halen’s song “Jump” while I listened to it on headphones, because I had to do something. Afterwards I opened the French doors and stood out on the balcony, one floor above a street choked with traffic, the shiny roofs of cars jammed close together, all moving forward inches at a time. If I leaned out a little bit and looked down the street to I could see the ocean, a sunny day blue. Twenty years is a serious milestone. I was happy to celebrate it on such a nice day.

​

I thought how when I was only a few months sober I moved to Utah and worked at a factory. I lived in Mormon-run housing, so I had to walk off of the property to smoke cigarettes. That was back before I had rid myself of the nicotine demon. There was a set of steps leading down into a supermarket parking lot where I could sit and be alone. After smoking I felt self-conscious dragging the tobacco smell back with me into all that clean living. I liked the Mormons’ purposeful optimism, but disagreed with some of what they found sinful. I understood their feelings on alcohol and smoking, but I didn’t have any problems with pre-marital sex or hot coffee.

​

One of my room-mates offered to give me a job landscaping in Las Vegas. He wasn’t much older than me, and had the cocksure pride of a young man given a good job by his father. The pay was excellent, but I turned him down flat. When you’re trying to stay sober, Las Vegas is about the last place outside of Amsterdam you’d want to live. Utah and minimum-wage factory work was good for me because I needed a place to hide out, and Provo, Utah, fit the bill. Mormon and boring, it was the perfect anti-Vegas.

​

I manned a production line making books and manuals. The presses ran around the clock, chunking machines keeping time in fractions of a second. With each pile of pages, each sheet, each staple and fold, I felt like I was heading in the right direction. But my progress felt as slow as a twelve-hour graveyard shift. Dry paper, bright lights, industrial oil, and the smell of propane from the forklift saturated my life. At break time I smoked outside and everyone wondered why I was so quiet. I didn’t have much to say. I drank coffee and ate tiny artificial doughnuts out of cellophane packaging. I liked them even though they always made me feel crappy.

​

I walked the twenty minutes back and forth to work, usually after the swing shift. There is something sinister in deserted buildings and empty, poorly lit parking lots when you’re alone on foot. Utah is not a pedestrian-friendly state, so often there weren’t even any sidewalks. I felt like I was trespassing whenever I crossed one of the green lawns. Some places had their sprinklers on at night, and zigzagged to avoid them. After midnight the police stopped me to run my ID through the computer. It happened every few weeks. You’d think that I would have gotten used to it, but it always pissed me off, having to explain what I was doing walking through that deserted part of town at night when I was just working hard and trying to get my act together. There was something so maddening about it. “Where were you when I really was raising hell?” I wanted to ask them, but never did. Sometimes they would turn friendly after the warrant check came back clean, and make small talk. Usually they’d hand me the ID and speed off without saying a word, like I wasn’t worth even saying goodbye to. I’d be left to continue on alone in the dark, a silhouette against the mountains, a reflection in the floor to ceiling windows of car dealerships or software companies.  

​

A giant American flag flew near that supermarket by my apartment. I would go to those steps at night after work, just off the Mormon property, and sit there and play my electric guitar. Looking up at that giant flag I would plink through the “Star Spangled Banner.” Unamplified, the electric strings made a weak tinny sound. My fingers found the wrong notes a hundred times before I got it right. It took weeks for me to be able to pull it off without mistakes. But I had nothing but time. A spotlight lit the flag all night, and sometimes, if there was enough of a breeze, the flag would roll and wave. I don’t think I was afraid that I wasn’t going to stay sober. I would see it through even if it was going to be a long haul, a marathon, and I was just out of the gate. I wasn’t tempted or worried, but an imposing pain followed me like a shadow. Within a few months it was reduced, but not to what you would call easy. It would not have seemed possible then that in the distant future, on the day I got twenty years of sobriety, I would not even notice the occasion until half the day was gone, let alone that I would be more concerned with where I could find some ice cream than even whether or not I was safe in Beirut.