Mother's Ruin

Gin, gin was my mother's ru-in,

And my mother's ru-in shall be mine. --Old Song

It is safe to say that Samuel F. B. Ferdly had never looked worse. His face was haggard, his jaw hung open, his body slumped and sagged. He lay sprawled across the living room couch as if he had been dropped there and lacked the strength to move.

I shut the door of my bedroom and peered down at him. Here, I said to myself, we see the inevitable results of drunkenness and license. And I was glad I spend all my evenings in the library, writing my thesis about the influence of Dionysius the Areopagite on D. H. Lawrence.

He stirred. "Morning," I said cheerily, sitting down on the coffee table to lace my shoes. "Hangin' bad?"

"Grahrghwough," said Samuel F. B., looking disconsolate and not a little hung.

"Yeah," I said. "I guess you are."

"You clod," he said, suddenly capable of speech. "Why do you have to go changing the complexion of my maid-pale peace at this hour of the morning. I feel sick."

"Well, look here, little man, Goddamit, I am your Goddam roommate," I pointed out, rather cogently I thought. "I live here too. And you ought to get out of this habit of getting up promptly at the crack of noon. It's bad for your health."

"Faugh!" he said.

"How was the party?" I asked to change the subject, It worked. "Man," said my roommate, suddenly expansive, even eloquent, "it was King Party, like--a term I do not use lightly."

"I detect a certain confusion of idiom, a conflict in tone, almost a confounding of genres, in what you say." I threw a thesaurus at him, roguishly.

He fielded it with surprising deftness, and tore out all the pages slowly one by one. "I am eclectic. I steal from everybody," he said. "Anyway, it made the almost incredibly splendid scene. Neatoroonie."

"Then why," I replied, "do I behold you in your present state of gradually decelerating decomposition?"

"Perpend," said Samuel F. B. Ferdly. He burrowed into the cushions of the couch, and emerged seconds later with fifty cents, half of a 3-by-5 card, nine Green Stamps, last week's New Yorker, and a hairpin. "I have discovered a new vicious cycle, a perfect closed circle of degeneration. About three glasses after I had become fully convinced of the nutritive powers of gin and tonic--a process that in itself took quite a little while--I suddenly found a cosmic abyss open beneath my feet. I had this very, very full glass, see, and I was afraid, see, that I'd spill it."

"You're switching idioms again. Stop it."

"Sorry. Anyway, I was afraid I'd spill stuff all over the nice rug. So I drank some. So now there was less in the glass than there was before, but now I was less steady, so I had to drink some more to keep it from spilling on the rug. So after awhile the glass became a pitcher, and the pitcher became a barrel, and the barrel became a hogshead, until finally I was tied in with a direct pipeline that was connected up to all the gin and tonic in the world. There I was, trying to drink up this whole enormous ocean of gin and tonic. It was a challenge.

"But I failed. I fell into a sadness, then into a fast, thence to a watch, thence into a weakness, thence to a lightness, and by this declension, into the madness wherein now I rave, and all you wail for."

He foamed at the mouth a bit. Obviously, some sort of fit was on him again.

"Do you think it's this?" I said. "It may be, very likely."

"Has there been such a time, I'd like to know, when I have positively said it's so, that I made a mistake?" He was really sore.

"Not that I know," I said. I chinned myself penitently a half a dozen times on the molding over the doorway. When I turned around again, he was asleep, breathing heavily. I covered his face with my pajama top, but Charpentier's Te Deum on the hi-fi, and set off towards the john.