Something about St. Patty's always gets to me. Every single one I've celebrated has been an amazing time, with one glaring error. It's like Murphy's Law, but it applies only to a specific holiday, and only once.
The day started off great. My boss, Mitch, was sick, and needed some company at the doc's, so I caught a ride into town and cashed my paycheck with him after his appointment. I've only been out to Jackson with him once this entire season, and we had been hoping to hang out more, so it was a good chance to unwind and let our beards down. We got some amazing sushi (I still can't believe Jackson's sushi is this good, it's a damn valley in the mountains) and picked up prescriptions at the local drug store. I also bought ingredients to make chianti braised beef with rigatoni, so I'm stoked for that.
Evening on St. Patty's (after a glorious nap in which I dreamt my friends Chris and Matt were putting silly-putty in slingshots and shooting people with it) kicked off pretty well with some Jameson and Guinness (a trend which continued through the night.) What really got things going was when the live music showed up.
Max Hay is amazing. He is, bar none, the most entertaining solo performer I've seen. He knew all the old irish favorites like Whiskey in the Jar and Moonshiner, but he could rip out Flogging Molly, Dropkick Murphys, and Gaelic Storm like he was born to it. He even played a fast-kicking version of one of my favorite old Jim Croce tunes, which was awesome. Even better, he was calling all the staff by name, taking shots with us, and interacting with the crowd in a great way. If not for the one thing, I could have watched that all night.
For those of you who've been witness to drunken idiots before, things tend to go a certain way. Guys like to get drunk, swear a lot, tell jokes that only they think are funny (I'm certainly guilty of that one even when sober) and kick around. Usually after about two hours of this the alcohol works its magic and people leave. It's when they come back that it's a problem.
My roommate is an alcoholic. Usually he just sits in his room, drinks straight whiskey from the bottle, and keeps to himiself. He's full of loud opinions, angry rants about how there aren't any drugs up here to do, and stories of his life in Detroit, Alaska, and everywhere else he was an addict. I'd dismissed him as harmless for the most part; when he got drunk and angry, I'd tell him to STFU and go home. If he was belligerent in our room, I'd leave, and he'd just sit in his bed and get more drunk until he passed out.
Yesterday he'd had half a bottle of whiskey by about 3:00 in the afternoon. So, of course, he decided it would be a good idea to go to the bar. I got back from Jackson around that time, and was completely exhausted from Wednesday's snowmobile ride. I proceeded to take aforementioned nap, then get up for some dinner and head to the bar to celebrate someone else being Irish. What do I find when I'm there? My roommate, of course. Drunk as a skunk that's replaced its own blood with pure alcohol.
My roommate has told me many times about how he blacks out. Once he's drunk, he won't remember a damn thing he said or did, period. After about three weeks of telling me this, he finally admitted that he "might have a problem with alcohol, but AA is for pussies and god-lovers."
I could already tell he was blackout drunk. He had no idea what he was saying from one minute to another, you could barely understand his speech, and he would have crazy outbursts for no reason. Suffice to say, they sent him packing. That should have been the end of it. If I had been in my room reading or playing video games like I usually do on my days off, he then would have been my problem.
But hey, it's a holiday, and there's live music, so screw him, right?
Halfway through the evening, just before the music started, he came back for more liquor (he'd drunk the last of his bottle of whiskey and most of his beer.) I was sitting at a table with two male employees and one female housekeeper, a girl about my age. My roommate proceeded to sit down next to the girl and pester her, completely unintelligible. When she continued her conversation as if he wasn't there, he started playing with her ponytail and pulling on her hair. She got up, moved a seat over, and tried to ignore him. Noticing what was going on, one of our bartenders came over and put water in front of my roommate, then left to get a manager.
You kind of had to be there to get this. Here my roommate sits, acting like a child and demanding booze and attention, when out of the blue someone just puts a glass of water in front of him. It was funny to most of us. When we laughed, his expression changed from childlike glee and petulance to some kind of drunken, bruce-bannerish rage. He started dropping f-bombs and n-bombs all over the place, got up, and went outside for a smoke.
Again, we all thought "problem solved."
I got up to chat with some people, and walked out to the front desk (empty-handed and mostly clear headed) to talk with the girl working the night shift. We were joking around about how many times I got my sled stuck (twice) and how many times I fell off the damn thing (once for no reason while parked) when my roommate appeared from behind me like a drunken dracula. He slurred several phrases about how much people where we work suck, are hillbillies, and how he was going to go home. He turned to leave, and I thought that he'd finally just give it a rest.
Then he turns to the girl out of the blue, looks her up and down, and says "Nice nipples." Then he laughs, high-pitched and loudly. I tell him to get the hell out of there right damn now, and he stumbles away.
How the hell do you handle that kind of thing? I'd have taken a swing at the guy, A) I don't need an assault charge and B) I'm not getting my ass fired for a piece of trash like him. The girl was horrified, red-faced, and almost ready to die of embarassment.
For about sixty seconds, both of us just stood there in silence. We tried to talk about it at first, but nothing was exactly easy to bring up. She mentioned that he always stopped by her desk in the afternoons to bug her, and she'd warned him off before.
The level of shock I'd felt began to bleed away. He was the worst I'd seen him since the first time he drank himself into unconsciousness in our room, after threatening me, telling me never to tell a black man to kill you because you don't have anything left to live for, and then hawking a loogie onto his bed. He'd crossed a line, but we could take care of it in the morning.
Of course, that's what I was thinking when he walked back in. I'd locked the room when I left, and he didn't have a key. He swore at me a few times until I gave him the key, then threatened to lock me out. I told him to do it; I'd sleep at my bosses' cabin on the floor and get a new key from the manager in the morning. He laughed, called me a few names, then turned to leave again.
Then he turned around, with deliberate care, looked the girl up and down, and said again, "nice nipples." He laughed the same damn high-pitched, child-like laughter, and ran out the door. If he hadn't, I probably would have hit him as hard as I could. The poor girl at the desk looked not just embarassed, but hurt.
His ass is getting fired as I type this. The second time he came back to harass the desk girl, two other employees heard him.
How the hell are you supposed to handle something like that?
What's worse: he'd established a pattern of behavior before this that I KNEW would get him in trouble. Rather than tell a manager or someone else how he would sit under his covers and spout racist slurs while drinking himself asleep, I just let things slide. Who wants to be a tattle-tale? I figured as long as I was the only one he got pissed at and treated like shit, who cared?
It's only now that I realize that this is exactly the type of thinking people who suffer abuse go through. I was not abused - the worst thing that happened to me is that I'd get sick when he'd stand near me because he smelled like rotten food and alcohol and tobacco. He'd threaten me, tell me I should try mescaline, and talk about how he hoped the Japanese nuclear reactors went critical and caused acid rain to melt the jap's skin off, because humanity is a blight on our planet.
But that mindset, the idea that "if I'm the only one dealing with this, then others don't have to" is a symptom of the larger problem. I was an enabler. My silence allowed this man to continue abusing alcohol, himself, and eventually led to him sexually harassing one of my friends. If I had said one thing, just one thing, to a manger asking for help, there would have been record of his behavior. If I had allowed him to go around knocking on doors at 4 AM demanding that people give him liquor like he wanted to, there would have been consequences. By hiding his behavior, by pretending I was a nicer guy for letting him live his life the way he wanted, I didn't just hide a problem. I made it worse.
I'm lucky he didn't do anything worse than verbally harass my friend. I was stupid, and it's not going to happen again.
What makes me feel like shit even more is he's just been fired. Obviously, there's a no-tolerance policy here for sexual harassment. He just stopped by to tell me that he has nowhere to go, nowhere to live, and the job he was counting on probably isn't going to work out - it was owned by the same company that owns the business I work at. He won't be able to get a job at any of their locations, which means most of his opportunities to work have dried up.
This is not a black and white. He's not a terrible guy when he's sober, and everyone agrees that he's a damn hard worker. He's just an alcoholic who screwed up (albeit in a pretty nasty fashion). No matter how hard I try to paint things simply, it just doesn't work.
The killer? Had I spoken up earlier, he might not have hit up against the wall of zero tolerance. He might have checked his behavior a bit, kept just getting drunk in his room. Or he could have been asked to resign instead of fired, so he could still work with the company, but not up here where he has no outlet for his addiction. Regardless of what might have been, the fact remains that I dealt with the situation badly.
So for god's sake, don't be me. Don't be a martyr to someone else's problem. You won't help anything, you'll make it worse. If your spouse, loved one, or even a coworker is abusive or hurtful on a regular basis, don't keep it down. You aren't responsible for someone else's happiness, but you can be responsible for doing the right thing. If you see something, say something. Don't be as stupid as I was, for god's sake.
Oh, and Happy St. Patrick's day.
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