Papa's Last Stand
Papa had been unable to write anything worthwhile for nearly six months. Every time he sat down at his typewriter a foreboding gloom enveloped him. His anguish felt like trying to take a hopeless shit on a short leash, with each agonizing moment passing in constipated waves of creative misery and psychological torment. Why won't it come anymore? he though weepily to himself.
One day Papa tried drinking a martini to quell his doldrums and start a literary flow. This first drink only increased his despair, clamping down on his sore, out of shape body like the talons of a gigantic attacking eagle.
"Goddamn it!" Papa yelled. "Why the hell isn't it working?"
He went immediately to the bar to refresh his toddy. Papa made the second cocktail more quickly and with less enjoyment. He poured it into the same glass, then returned to his writing desk. Sitting down, the 61-year-old novelist took a healthy sip of the aperitif and set the cup on a coaster beside his Vintage Royal. Time to work, he thought.
Slowly, Papa's mood began to shift, but not in the direction he hoped. A dread grabbed him by the throat, ripping at his chest like a one-hundred-year flood. The old man felt as if hungry piranhas were tearing teaspoon-sized chunks of marrow from his tired bones.
"Damn it!" He screamed in agony. "Mary! Are you there? Mary! Goddamn it, Mary, where are you?" Mary, his fourth wife, had gone into town for groceries and more liquor. Papa's worsening alcohol dependence had him hitting the sauce most afternoons now and more often than not the tortured Nobel prizewinner would be blind drunk by dinner time.
With abject frustration Papa slammed the second round and marched himself defiantly back to the bar. He just needed another drink. Yes, one more drink would do the trick. He knew the trick inside and out and had used it to great success many times before. But that was before, he thought. Before it all caved in on me.
Papa was a famous writer, one of the most celebrated writers in the world. But now, 20 days shy of his 62nd birthday, he felt as old and worn out as his famous fisherman at sea; older and fatter and more tired and depressed and beaten than he'd ever felt in his life. To make matters worse, he was having trouble remembering things, little things like which stories he read in the morning papers and what he ate for breakfast while skimming through them.
Papa saw the writing on the wall. He'd reached a point in his life when most men of his age and physical condition run sorrowfully and inopportunely out of gas. Sadly and simply, he knew the time had come to skedaddle.
