The Pope Mobile?

   After eight years, Jane had seen my slow descent from the outside. She'd seen me as her sober bartender at Seven South Bar. She'd seen me relapse. It was Jane who'd helped me go to the Mainland Hospital when I'd crashed to another bottom during my second stay at the Brunswick Hotel.

　
   It was Jane who'd offered me a place to live in after Seven South unexpectedly closed and I was fired from Dunkin' Donuts for showing up drunk at the end of a binge, still disturbingly drunk after being passed out for twelve solid hours.　　

　　

   "Where are the bullets?" Bob keeps asking me again and again. He only ever really asked me once. Maybe twice. But in my mind, my memory I hear “Where are the bullets?" over and over and over again with a knife at my throat. I don't know where he got them, three days out of jail after a multiple year stint. He was drunk. I was drunk. He passed out. I took the box of bullets to the next door neighbors at two or three in the morning and had the neighbors call the police.　　　

   Cop-killer bullets, next door. Suicide attempt, next room. Ambulance on the way, cops on their way.

　
   "Where are the bullets?"

　

   Click. Make me three days drunk in Atlantic City after all this. After all this. Click me sober, click me drunk. Bob plea-bargained himself into Ancorra Mental Hospital. Two months later, for whatever reason, he sought me out at the Mays Landing Diner upon his release from the hospital. He said he was there to ask my forgiveness and to take me out for a drink after work. I told him to come back in two hours when my shift ended. Scared, I ran to Atlanatic City for another three day drunk.
　

 

   I will leave that behind me now. My sobriety is not bullet-proof. Sobriety is not the Pope mobile.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 12)