Page 66 of Proof Of Life
Unlike the man who greets me with his hand out. “I’m Brewer Marx. Please, take a seat, get comfortable. Can I get you some water? Coffee?”
He’s tall, at least the same height as me, with dark wavy hair that's longer on top and shorter on the sides. The careless style blends together smoothly, just barely kissing his collar. His tone sounds easy, casual, but his dark eyes are shrewd. This man is smart, and he doesn’t miss a thing.
“I know you. Don’t you run the addiction group?” My senses buzz on high alert, and I feel like something’s off, like I’m walking into a trap.
“I do, but I’m also a trauma therapist. I’m more than just a one-trick pony.” He sits and gestures for me to take the seat across from him. “What about you?”
“What about me? I’m pretty much a one-trick pony,” I repeat sarcastically. “I spent my whole life chasing one dream. I was good at it, and it’s all I knew, all I wanted. And now it’s gone,” I say with heavy finality.
So maybe he’s not setting me up, but I’m still tense, sitting forward with my hands fidgeting between my knees. These pleasantries will only last another minute or two before he wants to dig up the nitty-gritty of my past.
“Look, I get it, I do, but I also get that I can’t just throw that out there without backing it up. Why should you trust me? You don’t know me. I’m a big believer in trust, and it goes both ways. Your recovery is only going to be effective if you feel like you can open up and lay yourself bare, and you can’t do that with me if you don’t trust me. So I’ll go first. I’ll tell you who I am and where I came from. Then, after you’ve heard me out, you can decide if you think I’m someone you can trust. Deal?”
Fuck me, I was not expecting that.
He sits forward with his arms braced on his knees, mirroring my pose. “My name is Brewer Marx, and I’m a recovering addict who suffers from PTS. I spent eight years in the Army. I had one deployment to the desert. One long deployment,” he breathes out on a sigh. “Spent almost eighteen months there. Do you know what I learned?” I just shake my head, having no idea what he’s about to say. “I learned that no amount of training or education can prepare you for battle. Nothing on this earth can prepare you for the desert.”
That’s the fucking truth.
“I was infantry. Stationed in Iraq. We were en route from a village back to the FOB. We, ah–” he pauses to clear his throat. “–took on heavy fire. From everywhere, on all sides. In a matter of minutes we were surrounded.” His throat works furiously and I know exactly how he’s feeling. Trying to swallow down that lump of emotion so you don’t lose your shit.
“I think there were tunnels or something underground and they just, they were popping up like fucking groundhogs. Anyway, my buddy and I returned fire. He was yelling something to me, but I couldn’t hear him over the gunfire. He was telling me to retreat. That one second that he took his eyes off the fight to focus on me cost him his life. One minute I was staring at him, listening to him shout at me, and the next, he took a bullet through his head. Right through the side of his face.”
His voice fades as his words trail off. I know what he’s seeing in his head right now. He’s somewhere else, no longer sitting across from me in this office. He’s reliving the day his buddy died. Like he probably has a thousand times.
When he focuses on me again, his eyes are wet, rimmed with red, and he looks visibly distraught. “I froze. I was wearing his fucking face. My buddy, the guy I trained with, the guy I bunked with. His brains were on my fucking face. In my goddamn mouth.”
Jesus Christ. I can’t even imagine. I was spared from having to see the carnage of my team's death. Hearing it was bad enough, but seeing it, feeling it on your skin, that’s a whole other nightmare.
Brewer excuses himself and grabs a bottle of water from the mini fridge in the corner by his coffee maker. He swishes and spits into the trash can, like he’s rinsing his mouth of the taste of his friend’s blood.
When he reclaims his seat, he continues. “It only takes a second to make a fatal mistake. In that moment, I gave up several precious seconds, and it cost me. It almost cost me my life. Another guy was yelling at me to get my head in the game, and just as my head came back online, I was taken out of the game with a bullet. Right here.” He taps the junction of his arm, where his shoulder meets his body. “The bullet hit my artery, and I began to bleed out. Thank God, the guy who was yelling at me was a medic. I could feel myself slipping away, getting weaker, my vision becoming darker, and he reached into the wound and pinched my artery close with his fingers. Can you imagine? The pain brought me back. I threw up all over myself,” he recalls with a humorless laugh.
“He held my life in his hands for eighteen long minutes until air support came and cleared out the scene. On the chopper, my heart stopped beating from the loss of blood, and they gave me an emergency transfusion and brought me back. But at the hospital, they lost me again.”
My emotions are getting the best of me, and I can feel them leaking through my eyes and nose, my throat thick with it. I can only imagine the effort it takes him to hold his shit together while he tells me the story.
“As you can see, they brought me back again. But I was done after that. I kept getting lost inside my head, losing time. My short-term memory was shit. I would freeze up and have panic attacks, and I was no good to anyone like that. I was broken. Damaged goods. I finished out my contract stateside. In the meantime, I put my G.I. Bill to good use and went back to school to receive my certification as a licensed therapist and addiction counselor. As you can imagine, it cost me a lot to get up and function every day like nothing was wrong. I relied heavily on pills to get me through school, to help with my focus and my memory and the panic attacks. The anxiety was crippling most days. It’s a wonder I even made it through. After I was discharged, I continued with school and received my bachelor’s degree in social work and mental health.”
He stops to take a long swig from his bottle and swallows so hard I can hear it. “Can you imagine?” He laughs harshly, dragging a hand through his carefully mussed hair. “There I was, high as a fucking kite during my residency, counseling others on the dangers of addiction. Most days I could barely fucking stand myself, could barely stand to look in the mirror.”
I don’t want to hear anymore. I thought it was bad enough, but his story just keeps getting worse. I don’t want to feel for him because it reminds me of my own pain. I have no idea how to cope with that pain.
“What happened? When was your turning point?” I ask.
“You know what they say, you have to hit rock bottom before you can begin to climb back out of the hell hole you’re living in. It was the anniversary of my buddy’s death, and I took his wife and two little girls to visit his grave. I was sort of uncle Brewer, guardian of his family. That was the hardest part for me, seeing this beautiful family grieve for him, an honorable, responsible, wonderful man, and yet here I was, still alive, a worthless piece of shit. The unfairness of it all just made me so fucking angry and bitter. Angry at God, angry at fate, angry at myself.”
I know what that anger feels like. That self-hatred that burns deep in your gut like acid.
“But the moment that got me was when they walked back to the car and left me standing there alone, with just me and Eric. His wife thought I was some sort of hero or some bullshit, but Eric knew better. He could see me for what I really was. He was watching me from heaven, or wherever the fuck he ended up, and he could see every fucked up deed and sin I committed. He saw me for the fraud I was. I was in the middle of a long tirade of apologies and self-recrimination, making empty promises of how I would do better when I spotted a man slumped against a headstone. Maybe he was a homeless vet or something, because he sure looked like it, and I caught myself getting angry at him, like a self-righteous prick. How dare he desecrate someone’s grave, their honor, and their sacrifice, by sleeping there, making a home there, with his dirty, unwashed body. He held a paper bag in his hand, and I know there was alcohol in it. I fumed with anger, so fucking full of shit. I had no right to judge him. Maybe he knew the person buried there beneath him. Maybe he felt responsible for putting them there.”
Brewer paused to finish off his water and then swiped his eyes over the sleeve of his shirt to dry them. “I realized I was him. I was certainly no better than him, except my clothes were cleaner and I had a decent haircut. There I was, escorting the family of the man who died for me, high out of my fucking mind. If I could have taken my life right there in that moment, I would have. I dropped to my ass in the dirt and swore to Eric and God and myself that I would do better. That I would get clean. And that I would use my degree and my experience to help others. I owed it to Eric and his family to make something of the life I was spared, to live the life he would have that he no longer could.”
I lose the battle with my tears, swiping at them as I feel them wash over my cheeks in a warm rush.
“I found BALLS, started to attend meetings here, and when I celebrated two years clean, they offered me a job. Can you imagine? Me, an addict, a fuck-up.” He laughs again, but not because it’s funny. “Been clean ever since. The anxiety has gotten better. But I’ll tell you what, Wardell. There’s no cure for this shit. It doesn’t ever go away completely. It’s a disease that lives in our brain and tortures us on any given day at any moment, when we’re at our weakest, most vulnerable point, and it kicks us while we’re down. That’s why we have to get strong and steady on the good days. So we can defend ourselves against the bad ones.” He clears his throat and swipes at his eyes again. “That’s it. That’s all I’ve got to say. Now it’s my turn to shut up and listen.”
I swallow and shake my head, swiping at my eyes again. I don’t know where to begin. I feel raw, completely exposed. I can feel his pain as if it were my own, and I know he can feel mine. I’m also envious of him. I want what he has. His confidence and strength, his peace of mind. When I open my mouth to speak, my voice comes out, a warbled shredded mess, thick with emotion and pain.