Breaking Up with Jack (Daniel)
Jack closed the door gently and we were alone, finally. I wanted nothing more than to throw myself against his chest, to feel those strong arms come around me. To let his unshakable presence drive away my fears and anxiety, like always. Still, I hesitated to turn and face him. To let down the guard I’d been wearing all day, every day, for what seemed like forever.
“Kiki,” he said. His voice was gentle but commanding and my spine – always the last piece of me to succumb – instantly bristled from the tone. Other, softer parts of me had a far different response.
“Don’t give me orders, Jack.”
Even without looking, I could sense the tilt of his head, feel the narrowing of his bourbon-brown eyes. “I haven’t given you any orders, love. I only called your name.”
But it had been an order and we both knew it, just like we both knew what would happen the moment he slipped his hands into my hair, or pressed his lips against my neck.
“Let me take care of you,” he breathed against my ear. “You know I will.”
But this time was the last time.
This time, I was the one who closed the door.
* * *
Last August, after almost 50 years of running wild with Jack Daniel, I stopped drinking for good. My year on the Mississippi Gulf Coast was coming to a close, and the oppressive summer heat had forced me aboard my battered fishing boat, searching for ocean breezes and fat redfish.
I didn’t have a particularly good reason for leaving Jack. No dramatic “I woke up in a dumpster” story or wild health scare. It was, I tried to explain to my friends, just the natural next step in the process.
“Process?” my best friend asked.
“The editing process,” I nodded. “The script of my life. The drinking doesn’t fit anymore. It doesn’t belong in this next chapter.” I shrugged. It was over.
Cutting things out of my world has always seemed simple to me. As an editor, I can slash whole paragraphs, snip words at both ends, take a blade to extraneous details. Burn, baby, burn is my philosophy. I don’t mourn my little darlings; I delight in slitting their little throats.
And after some decades of living with a dagger in your hand, you become not only adept at slicing, but enthusiastic about it. You turn your attention from words to other structures and habits and beings. What else needs to be cut out? Maybe you start in your house with the obvious, Marie Kondo-style. But soon you see extravagance everywhere, even inside your own thoughts and your own body.
Pain and despair and disappointment? Those feelings don't fit, I’d mutter to my red pen. Slash. Slice away husbands, jobs, entire cities. Jack Daniel? Cut him and burn him to the bone.
“But … what do you do when there is nothing left to cut?” my bestie jokes. “Do you move from the metaphorical to the literal? Kill actual people instead?
* * *
Every writer knows what it’s like to travel through time. There are the obvious ways – writing stories that will someday be read by future humans. Or writing stories about the past that, having lived through them, your impressions have altered them for all time.
In Mississippi, time travel happens every day. The beaches, often nicknamed the Forgotten Coast, are empty until you get close to Gulfport or Biloxi where the water parks and casinos and kayak rentals are clustered together. I can walk 10 minutes from my front door and step into the Gulf. Even on summer weekends, there is plenty of free parking. What year is this?
What year is it when you drive from Jefferson Davis Avenue to Dr. Martin Luther King Drive and the only thing that changes is the number of coffee shops?
What year is it when that speed bump you hit in the Walmart parking lot is actually a prehistoric, half-grown gator?
What year is it when almost 40% of the state’s population is Black but not a single Black elected official holds statewide office?
What year is it when you paddle through swampy tributaries into a lush bald cypress forest, and are overcome by deadly certainty that you are disturbing the ancestors? That so many have died on these banks, of smallpox and yellow fever, of starvation and torture. Where your Black ancestors were lynched, and your Indigenous ancestors were starved or infected, and your white ancestors – because you can’t avoid that truth either – survived at least in part because of their cruelty to the others.
Mississippi often feels to me like desecrated land. Beyond redemption. But the soil and the flora, the fish and the birds, cast their own healing spells. I go back to the bayous again and again, paddling in silence through murky grasses. I am alive, I whisper. I will remember.
After a while, the ghosts in the forests come to accept my presence. The poison in the air recedes into the mist. The spirits warn me not to tarry too long, not to get caught in the time warp. In the swamp, emptiness can fill you up so full that nothing else can get in. The emptiness takes on shapes and colors and appetites, like unruly guests at a Jay Gatsby party. The loneliness can’t escape, no matter how hard it pushes at the crowd, no matter how desperately it searches for the exit.
I spend hours or days in the swamp, completely still, watching the birds stalk the fish and the gators stalk the birds. The birds are surgical in their precision; the gators just rampage. Are they wishing or hoping for a different life? It seems unlikely that with all the wild diversity of creation, humans would be the only beings who can dream. But we don’t speak the language of the trees, and we don’t understand the wind when it soothes our hot faces, or blows down our trees, or whips the hot ocean water into hurricanes.
After Mississippi, Jack Daniel can no longer comfort me.
* * *
It was only fitting that when the news broke on social media about the orcas attacking yachts in the North Atlantic, that I was busy editing a series of tongue-in-cheek essays on the so-called revenge of the Kodiak Island brown bears. The bears, according to the author, were fed up with humans encroaching on their habitat, awakening them from hibernation prematurely, and stealing all the freaking salmon and putting them in cans. Good lord, the bears cried, if you’re going to steal the salmon, can you at least prepare it properly? You could’ve grilled it or smoked it. You could’ve stuffed it with shrimp or fluffed it with cream cheese. Cans? Horrors.
I felt some affinity with the vengeful bears and the rogue orcas. After all, they were merely doing what I do: editing in real time. According to reports the orcas were ripping the rudders off the boats, smashing into them again and again until the boats were drifting helplessly. Some accounts alleged that the adult orcas had brought their babies along to witness (and apparently learn from) the battles. I wondered if the new orca militia needed a comms team. I want to warn them not to tarry too long in the wakes of boats, or to be misled by the time-traveling sea. But it’s likely they already know.
I miss Jack sometimes, in that hazy, blurry way you miss your old high school boyfriend, or that bright yellow ‘72 Volkswagen Beetle you used to drive. I have a moment or two of nostalgia, and then I remember that the boyfriend copied my homework, and the Beetle’s faulty clutch almost got me killed.
But every morning in Mississippi, on the beach, the water kisses my toes, and shimmers at me flirtatiously. I peer at the droplets; they seem so familiar. I think I’ve touched them before, under the cliffs in San Diego, or on the icy coast of Skye.
Every morning, before the sun shakes off the clouds, it’s just me here, with all the ocean droplets. They’ve come from Fiji and Madagascar and Reykjavik, from Chile and Alaska and Scotland. They’ve hitched rides on the winds, hurled themselves into the currents, clung to cruise ships and orcas and gulls, all to get here. They come back every morning, back to Mississippi, to this forgotten stretch of Gulf, just to kiss me one more time.
And how can Jack Daniel compete with that?