Designated Maniac

April 2024

When everyone’s drunk or getting there and you’re not, there’s an island you inhabit where the intense loneliness of being surrounded by other humans stings less than during the sober, awkward daylight hours.  This is because, when inebriated, the innate ability of humans to sense another human’s loneliness is compromised, meaning they don’t treat you like a lonely person like they do when they see you in the grocery store, avoiding eye contact (thank God) or at the grad party or at church (as if) or on the playground the first day of school.  

Instead, they treat you like another Bestie, leaning on you, literally and emotionally, only half-embarrassed by their self-consciousness, depending on how expert and experienced they are in the craft, the most practiced fully realizing they’ll not remember a bit of it, liberated, then, to lay it on thick as Elmer’s Glue, which is digestible, unlike the bullshit issuing from your Bestie’s Bad Breath mouth.

As the Designated Driver, living out the night on this night’s particular island, you’re initially amused and a bit embarrassed, recognizing yourself like looking at a photograph and having to admit that it’s you even though you look fatter, older, sadder and stupider than you do inside the safety of your own head. Like Match.com.

Inevitably, though, the amusement wears off and exhaustion sets in, heavy like tryptophan. You fight off yawns while trying to smile gamely when people nod at you on their way to the bathroom. You play with your phone and engage in the pretense of being occupied, checking the time, bummed that it’s early.

“You like this song, Dude?”
     “Sure. Boston…”
“I knowww, right! Boston kills!”
“Yup. They sure do. A hundred times a day. If it ain’t Boston, around here, its Petty, Rush or Foghat.  …all the fresh stuff. ”
“I knowww, right!”
“…and Bob Seger.  And Heart. And--”
“Huh?”
“Forget it.”
“Need anything, Bro?” he asks, absently gesturing to his empty beer glass. He walks away mumbling and you know he’ll be back. When the speakers start playing “Free Falling” and he turns to give you the Thumbs Up, it’s more than a feeling.

You nod and return his Thumbs Up, and immediately regret it, looking around like a kid in church, wondering if anyone has noticed, but no one gives a shit and that fact jolts you back to the reality that absolutely no one gives a damn about anything you’re feeling, thinking or doing.

So, you feel, think and do nothing. You stand like a moveable corpse, engaged in familiar internal dialogue, which strikes you as mildly pathetic.
    
I can’t even stand talking to myself.

Hours later, you’re driving and the car is full of boozy silence after a surprisingly short duration of jocularity and the group’s unison singing of Yellow Ledbetter.

Someone wants a Nick Cave song, but only half of them know it and no one can find it.
    The night drones onward toward the miles and, somewhere, dawn.

When you draw breath again, your lungs expand and you adjust your hands on the steering wheel and something in you calms. You hear everyone breathing, half-sleeping and your loneliness feels safer.

Ebbing from them, collectively, is an invisible, profound gratitude, un-articulate-able, but as real as any secret any friend ever lied about keeping.  

-parnell