Morris

One regular, Morris, had a distended stomach from alcohol-induced liver disease. His liver bled into his body, or so it seemed from his bloated belly. I don’t know. I just know that his liver was destroying him and his abdomen was filled with blood. Internal bleeding. Dying. A sick liver sending ammonia through the blood and to the brain as a byproduct of its dysfunction, causing him personality disorders. I'm not a doctor. I don't know the exact details. I just know what I saw in Morris’s case. An Internet search later confirmed this basic assumption of the ammonia/alcoholic/liver disease connection. What a strange and terrible sight was the result of his liver disease, his alcoholism and his extreme cocaine use. Alcoholic insanity. Ammonia insanity.

I breathe in now, thinking about Morris and I sigh and look down, bewildered, just as he did time and again before he disappeared from the wilderness slash unreality of the bar. I can only picture him crawling away into some alternate reality to die, an aging Eskimo in ice, dying. Insane, then simply dead.

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 80)