By Cody Cook; Art by Will Schaff
It was 2005, and What Comes After the Blues had just been released. Magnolia Electric Co was announced on the lineup of the Intonation Festival in Chicago. I had a couple of friends who wanted to go, and I agreed. I didn’t have a car, so I took a Greyhound bus from St. Louis. It took twice as long to get there, stopping in every town on the way. I passed the time by listening to that album on my mp3 player. Nobody else on that bus was going to the festival; it was full of the kind of working-class people in the songs I was listening to. I must have looked out of place with my tattoos and rock band shirt.
I had been a big fan of frontman Jason Molina and was excited to have a chance to see him play live finally. He felt mythic to me. Some people had The Beatles or some other important favorite artist, I had Songs: Ohia. The festival was painfully hot, almost unbearable. My friends and I sought shelter from the heat in some shade, and Jason strolled past us in black jeans and a long-sleeved black metal band t-shirt, effortlessly cool, like he wore what he wanted, and the weather had it wrong. I worked my way up to the front during their set. They played most of the new record but slipped in some old favorites and a Warren Zevon cover. I hadn’t liked the new album as much, but hearing the songs live gave me a new appreciation for them. I reflected on the long bus ride home, listening to the album with new context. I had found a new love for those songs, and as I stared out the window, I started jotting down some notes. Those notes turned into a review of the album and ended up being my first piece of published writing.
Around that time, I started a job working in a music venue. Minimum wage plus unlimited draft beer and rail liquor. I didn’t care about the money, I was in love with live music and determined to surround myself with it. Drinking on the job wasn’t just tolerated, it was encouraged, it was good customer service. I got caught up in the social side of it, going out with coworkers every night, having fun. It became a nightly ritual. I had to play the role of being social and charming, and alcohol made it easier. The character I was playing led to making a lot of friends who drank, and led to finding love.
I got promotion after promotion at the venue. I was charming and funny, and people enjoyed being around me, but it was largely a drunken role. When I was training to become a manager I was overwhelmed with how much math and paperwork I’d have to do. I told the guy training me that I didn’t think I’d be able to do it and drink as much as I had been. He laughed and said, “Don’t worry, you’ll figure it out.” I got good at working drunk. Sometimes there would be mistakes in the paperwork and I’d brush it off, apologizing for “rushing.” It seemed like it would catch up to me one day and it never really did. One night, I had to take a break from doing my closing duties to go throw up, but I sat right back down and finished up like it was the most natural thing to do. For a while, it worked.
I married a woman who had found this version of me to be very charming and attractive. She offered me her number across the bar and before you knew it, we were inseparable. In those early days she drank just as much as I did. Everyone in our social circle did.
Over time, it became a necessary social crutch. I hated that I couldn’t be this person without drinking. If I tried to socialize without it, I would be uncomfortable and withdrawn. It became less and less about drinking to be comfortable in public and more about just wanting to be drunk. I started hiding it from my wife. For her it was still a social thing. I kept empty Old Crow bottles stashed in cabinets and buried them deep in the trash when she wasn’t home. Figuring out how to get drunk was my daily challenge, and I couldn’t stock enough alcohol in the house to keep up with my thirst. I’d walk to the local drug store and go through about ¾ of a handle a day. On nights that we would go out, my wife would keep pace with me, but at home she didn’t drink. She never confronted me with it either. I assumed she knew more than she said. We went camping and I waited for her to go to sleep, saying that I just wanted to sit by the fire for a bit. I pulled out the bottle and the next thing I remember is waking up on the ground next to the fire, with scrapes on my face. I got into the tent, and she woke up, took one look at me and said, “Oh good, you’re alive” with disgust. She’d known what I’d been doing, there was a coldness setting in.
Months later, my brother and I went home to Ohio for a memorial service for our uncle. He’d struggled with alcoholism, and I suspected it had a role in his death. We were staying in a hotel and, again, I had snuck a bottle in my bag. After he was asleep I drank the entire thing, knowing I’d need it to be able to go to sleep. I woke up in the bathroom on the toilet in total darkness, with no idea where I was or how to get out. I searched for the door or a light switch but was so drunk I could barely stand at all. My brother woke up to my struggle and came and rescued me. He made one passing joke about it the next day, and we never spoke of it again, my uncle’s fate hanging over us.
I was no longer the charming drunk I had once been. I had to get drunk every single day, and nobody could know how drunk I needed to be. I had to be so drunk I could barely walk. Once I vomited in our bed, I started sleeping in the guest room. I claimed that my wife and I had different sleep schedules and it was easier that way, but I’m sure she was glad to have me out of her bed. I knew it was wrong and I hated myself for it but didn’t want to change anything.
I studied Molina through all of it. When stories started coming out about his health issues from drinking, I felt an eerie kinship. I understood how he felt, why he couldn’t quit doing something he knew was killing him. He had so many people who loved him, so much success, and yet he still wrestled this demon. We both had a public persona that alcohol was the fuel to maintain, and a private persona that was using it to drown ourselves. I imagined that, like me, the fact that it was killing him was the point.
Hearing about Jason’s passing stirred up a lot of revelations for me. It should have been the wake-up call that I needed to beat this thing. This was not a game. This was not romantic. Jason was not some tortured mirror image of myself, he was just a man. A man who had just lost his life by doing the same thing I was doing every night. I’d be right behind him. My life was the only thing I had that was worth having, and I could not share the same fate as Jason and my uncle. I had no clue what demons he might have been wrestling with, only that he no longer got to fight them. I still had time.
But I didn’t fight, I kept drinking. I was terrified. I didn’t know who or what I would be without alcohol. I considered it a necessary elixir to bring out my true self. The haze underneath the drunkenness wasn’t a complete person, it was a blank slate that I did not want to face.
I thought of Jason often. I’d sit alone in my living room while my wife slept, drinking Old Crow shots chased with cheap beer until I couldn’t feel anything. Once I was good and trashed, I would crawl into bed and put on my noise-cancelling headphones and blast his music. “Old Black Hen” always got me. Lawrence Peters belting out Jason’s words would pierce through the fog and manage to make me feel something. The lyrics referenced the “bad luck lullaby” as a recurring force that can’t be overcome by the narrator, and it came to symbolize my need to be totally and completely drunk by the end of every night. I felt powerless. I’d play the song repeatedly and just sob at my inability to break this nightly ritual. I don’t tell people these parts of the story often, but in those moments, I found myself resolved to the fact that this would be my end, content with it. This person sleeping next to me deserved better, and I knew that I’d be alone if I kept going. Death was less intimidating than being alone. I felt death was what I deserved.
Jason had been gone for two and a half years before something got through. I found myself in the hospital with pancreatitis. A doctor told me that my liver was failing and if I continued the way I had been, I’d be dead in about a year, maybe less. Lying there, I realized I’d been waiting for someone to care enough to say something. I did not want to die. I was miserable and depressed, but I was still alive. I could still pursue happiness, I could become a person, a partner, worth saving, but the only person who could save me was myself.
I like to say quitting was easy once I finally made the decision. That’s mostly true, but committing to that decision was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. In those first months, I found myself listening to Jason’s music constantly. William Schaff, an artist who’d collaborated with him, had made a drawing he’d meant to help navigate Jason’s path to recovery, a literal map with song references and affirmations that sadly did not make it to Jason before his passing. Schaff had released it as a print in hopes that it could help someone else who was lost. I read the story of the map and felt that I was the perfect audience, someone who could still be helped. I hung it in front of my desk and would study it, recognizing scattered lyrics and motivational phrases throughout. Even though it had been drawn for someone else, it still led to the goal I sought. Like a whisper that the road was still there for me, even if I had to crawl. I made it my lock screen so that it could be a constant reminder that there was still time. It was my north star. There was still a kinship with Jason, but now, instead of understanding his pain, I was trying to honor him by not squandering my opportunity.
Courtesy of Will Schaff and Fort Foreclosure
I remembered a young man sitting on a Greyhound, looking out the window, listening to Jason Molina sing, “Ever since I turned my life around, it still happens from time to time, don’t know what pain was yours, or what pain was mine.” I thought about how I might have interpreted those words on that bus, having no idea how prophetic they would be. Now the lyrics made me think of my uncle, my failing marriage. That blank canvas of a person was no longer something to fear but an opportunity to finally live. First, I tried to be what my wife needed me to be, but I realized that was just as wrong as letting alcohol decide that for me, and we went our separate ways. It couldn’t be for her, or Jason, or my family, I had to learn to identify my own pain, and that was the real map.
This year marks ten years of not a drop. That William Schaff print still hangs at my desk, and not a day goes by that I don’t look at it and feel grateful that I chose to stay alive. I still work in a music venue, I run the place now. Sometimes, I even put on my noise-cancelling headphones and listen to “Old Black Hen,” with a smile, grateful that it can still make me feel something.
Cody Cook has spent the last twenty years working in a music venue in St. Louis, where live performance continues to shape his writing. He is currently at work on his first poetry chapbook. You can find his work in Blood + Honey Lit, and say hello on social media @codycookstl
William Schaff has been a working artist for over two decades. Known primarily for his mastery at album artwork, (Okkervil River, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Songs: Ohia, etc.) Schaff is also the founder of Warren Rhode Island’s “Fort Foreclosure”. The building, lovingly named without the least bit of irony, serves as Schaff’s home and studio as well as home and meeting place for other artists (most notably former resident musicians Morgan Eve Swain, and the Late David Lamb, both of Brown Bird). William also performed for a decade with the What Cheer? Brigade, as one of 20 musicians in a brass band that travelled the U.S. and Europe. An experience that shaped so much of his life. In 2015, recognizing the importance of art in this world, he expanded his community to the West Coast, where he started “The Outpost”, in Oakland, California. There–– financial earnings be damned!–– William filled his days creating works of art for private commissions, bands, exhibitions and his own examinations of human interaction. He has since returned to Rhode Island and can be found, daily, doing the same at the Fort. He has a Patreon page if you’d like gifts in the mail and to help keep the lights on.