Vampires and the Dry Life Revisited

On January 17th, 2009 I was at the tale-end of my trip to Paris, where my sister was studying for the year. The day before, she and I had taken the train from Hendaye, an off-season vacation town at the southern-most tip of France. Spain was just fifteen minutes away and we spent a day in San Sebastian, though our visit was poorly timed—the season and siesta hour limited our options. We were only in Hendaye for a couple days but one drunken solipsistic conversation resulted in us swearing off drugs, alcohol and—for me—cigarettes, for life. We ceremoniously whispered our intentions to sea rocks and then through them back into the water. I think we may have also attempted to burn a piece of paper that said “alcohol, drugs and cigarettes”.


These rituals took place on our last day and we were both hung over—dehydrated and broke with a lot of extra time on our hands, we walked the couple miles to the train that would take us back to Paris. The night of our arrival we went to the Pompidou for a late-night showing of Werner Hertzog’s Nosferatu. Sitting outside while my sister smoked a cigarette—she hadn’t given them up, and my cigarette abandonment, the first of many, lasted only a few months—we talked about how difficult life would be without alcohol, drugs and cigarettes.


As I sat in the theater watching the gloom of Dracula-induced mayhem flicker across the screen, I prayed for a token to symbolize my sobriety in this French museum, something I could squeeze between my fingers to remind me of how daunting I believed the approaching abstemious years to be. Steven King’s vampire in Salem’s Lot instantly brought me back to this prayer eight months later with the line: “Without faith, the cross is only wood”. I was reading in bed at a B&B in Woodstock, Vermont and was suddenly smelling Parisian cigarettes and pondering symbols' lack of inherent power without faith.


I’ve begun to realize that I’ve been subconsciously collecting tokens in lieu of the one I lacked that night—lines from books, old photographs, even an “11-month” sobriety chip a friend fashioned with a poker chip and a sharpie. Nearly a year and a half into my booze-less existence, I wonder about the test of time on these keepsakes—if they’ll be dropped and lost along the way or end up in a giant hope chest I keep within reach. Am I immortalizing them here or will they get lost in the consistent roaring chatter of the world wide web? Dramatic, but aren’t these things supposed to be?