The Rats

Some people I have spoken to have arrived at sobriety via alcohol detoxification programs. Some have had prolonged bouts of delirium tremens. I checked the dictionary: “Delirium Tremens: [L = trembling delirium] delirium with tremors and terrifying delusions, occurring esp. as a withdrawal symptom in chronic alcoholism.” So that’s a disordered state of mind (derangement, madness, insanity, irrationality, hysteria) with the shakes and seeing or hearing things that aren’t really there.

Wikipedia lists a few colloquialisms for this state of affairs: the DTs, the horrors, the fear, the abdabs, the jimjams, the rats, or, my favorite, jazz hands. The same source notes that afflicted individuals, in 1930s Harlem slang, were referred to as “jitterbugs.”

The delusions don’t have to be nasty – I know one man who called the police: two guys were stealing cars by lifting them onto a truck with their bare hands, and they had lions posted on the corner to make sure no one approached them – but they usually are. More than a few people I have listened and spoken to have felt that the dreaded "they" were after them, at the very door, their nastiest emissaries banging on it. Some have felt talked about, hunted, and haunted. Others have heard voices. So when that trembling delirium turns up, it’s usually not the jazz hands (who wouldn’t want a pair of those?): it’s the rats.

I feel lucky. For the last ten years, no matter how much I drank, I’ve barely had a hangover (a curse, of course, as well as a blessing). I would have to admit, though, to an occasionally acute sensitivity to the malevolence of some people I have found myself drinking beside, a malevolence that can dissipate with small talk, or amplify into the definite proximity of violence. For the most part, I’ve been gregarious, and tried the small talk. Occasionally, I’ve left the bar, thinking someone was going to get at least a sore face or that the bar itself was about to be robbed. I’ve thought this a rather tolerable measure of paranoia. There are, after all, plenty of bad bastards out there.

But today I remembered something I haven’t thought about for years. Ten years ago, more or less, I got less tolerably paranoid. This was my Confessions of a Justified Sinner period. I had put some thought into the Devil as a potentially interesting character in fiction. I had the inflated idea that while the great European novel could involve selling your soul for love or power, the great American novel would have the main character getting right down to selling someone else’s soul, or working out some kind of franchise arrangement for the soul selling business. So the Devil- not so much the theological personification of evil as the Walter Huston character in All That Money Can Buy – was much on my mind.

And did he not start turning up? For a while, he would be somewhere in whatever bar I was in. That would be him on the stool at the end in the checkered hat, hiding his face. Or the guy on the stool next to you, his pockmarked face in a book. Sometimes it would just be the way the door opened, the stale smoke, or a sudden wave of cold air. I knew this was nuts at the time, and I probably played with it a bit, scribbling in a notepad. But it seems more insane now than I would have cared to admit at the time. I even had the idea that I had to have ten words to beat him off with should he approach, a commandment with what had to be exactly ten words. Something like, “Get thee away from me in the name of Christ,” or “By the power of Jesus Christ I tell you depart.” One word more or less than ten and he’d stick a filthy finger right through your heart.

I don’t recall exactly when this nonsense stopped, but it did, so I’m right to feel lucky. Many were (and are) not so fortunate. Burns allegedly wrote the following on the window of an Inn after being refused entry: “We cam’ na here to view your works/In hopes to be mair wise/But only, lest we gang to hell/It may be nae surprise.” I’ve used the lines as a toast many times. I never meant them literally. But I almost did.