can you buy disulfiram over the counter in uk FFFFFUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
ever screamed a primal scream in a car, sis? given that you cracked a guy’s head with a beer bottle for trying to take your boyfriend’s bar stool to hit on you, i’m guessing so. i never asked; did the bottle break?
the key, i find, is to give it your all. you gotta really scream it. preferably to rage against the machine, jane’s addiction, any group that hates the world as you. but you really gotta let it go. i try to make my throat sore and my ears bleed. pain is what does it. you startle yourself, get a breath, rasp from the vent. it usually does the trick.
not today. i was wrapped in my world. maybe my stomach hurt. maybe i wasn’t given the freedom to bray about my every pondering in my feeble brain. who the fuck knows.
but i was down, angry, hurt. and the screams weren’t doing anything except a piss-poor job as backing vocal to alice in chains.
so i decided to treat my pity with the best concoction known to the human palate: diet coke and hostess donettes. you know, the little white powdered ones. not the chocolate ones. teddy says those taste like dookie, without the delicious after taste.
i get em at the circle k. one of my many temples to human decay. at jack n the box, they ask about my dogs. at mcdonald’s, they know to put extra ice in the diet coke.
and at the circle k, i’ve gotten to know the faces, not the names, of the cashiers there.
there’s one i find fascinating. she’s tiny, must be about 30, but looks twice that age. i hate to say it, sis, but her demeanor makes me think she has tough mental issues. coke bottle-thick glasses that she looks through askew. walks slightly askew. will engage in conversation waaaay too lengthy for a 24/7 convenience store.
and it’s a tough area. i wonder if it’s frightening to leave work.
but she’s so oddly committed to the job, it seems. once, i was waiting to pay for my donettes, and she politely asked if she could wait on the teenager standing behind me by the cheetos. i hadn’t even seen him. she said he’d been too shy to step up.
i apologized profusely to him. and when he left, told her that was an admirable thing. i can’t think of any of those 7/11 fuckbags giving a black kid a break.
anyway, i was there, filling up my diet coke. and she’s at the register, getting ripped by her boss for cash register receipts that were $1.20 over the printed total. ‘you have to call me when this happens,’ he says. ‘you know better.’
‘sorry,’ she say. ‘it was so busy i must have gotten confused.’
‘then call me.’
‘sorry. it’s 9:45. is it okay to take my break now?’
‘fine.’
‘i’ll be back at 9:55.’
‘fine.’
she walks back to the fountain drinks, where i’m putting the lid on my bucket o’ soda.
‘hello,’ she says. complete smile. complete sincerity. ‘how are you doing?’ i smile, nod, say finehowareyou in rote politeness.
she pours out the remnants of her pepsi from the cup she must keep for refills (i remember from working at theaters that businesses count cups, so you can’t have a free one). she walks to the back of the circle k, where the office must be.
and i drive home, sis, absolutely disgusted with myself.
how do i lose sight so easily? why do i go deaf so quickly? must i lose touch with the world like a psychic quadriplegic, convinced the chair into which i settle is somehow real and rickety and the least bit unfair?
i come home, where teddy and esme bound on me as if i’d circumnavigated the globe and took the Snausages with me. and i let them climb on me and lick my face and fur me the fuck up and stink me out and i feel myself ease as i think about my horrible horrible horrible day. and how that girl, sitting at the office, sipping a flat pepsi and watching as 10 minutes bullet by on a manager’s punch clock that never stops metering your life in spare change, how that girl, if she had a taste of my trouble, would call her mother and wonder how she got so lucky.
fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
i love you today, but i’ll love you more tomorrow.

it’s late, and i’m in the tub outside, lookin at stars, dogs, and trying to think out this silly story.

outside. smells like my uncle’s place in georgia, where my father was born.superman. my uncle guy, after whom i am named, told me he was superman. at night, he would call me to the bathroom window.

guy was a strapping man, a soldier who was injured in an explosion in okinawa. he lost an eye and perhaps, his edge. he was tough as nails, but never married, never talked of the war, had a facial twitch dad believed came from guilt. but you’d never know it to meet him, at least to a boy named after him (i’m guy scott). he could have kept a phone booth in the house and i would have thought nothing of it.

‘watch,’ uncle guy says, whenever i visit. ‘i will fly past the window.’

i watch. too dark. so pitch…wait…what was that?…wasthathim? no, couldnthavebeen. couldit?

guy back in a few minutes.

‘did you see me?’

‘no.’

‘i flew right past.’

‘no you didnt! i was watching. do it again!’

‘you didnt see me? that’s funny. i thought for sure you’d see me this time.’

forever like that.

he died a few years ago. or many. all that blurs untilitdoesn’tmatter.

what does matter is that i see him clear as a goddamn sunrise, cape aloft, arms forward, chest barrelled, soaring past the window with a nod and a smile and a wave for a namesake in a bathroom window.

smells like that now, here with the dogs and the music and the crickets and the water and the…

wait.

what was that?

If you were lucky enough to know Michael Tyrone Ingram, your life was better for it.

Michael was a wondrous contradiction. He wasn’t a socialite, but every relationship he forged meant something, to him and the object of his love. If you liked Mikey, you were going to like people who liked Mikey.

He wasn’t a ladies man, but he had so many who adored him. His final conscious moments were spent surrounded by the women who meant the most to him — Mikki, Jocelyn, Rachel — and who sang him good night.

He didn’t travel much, but he could tell you more about the city you just visited than you could.

He was the kind of guy who’d offer you his kidney.

Below are some memories and anecdotes about a man who touched more lives than he could ever know, and whose life, despite burning out like a Roman candle, will glow long after we’re all gone.

If you knew Michael, please feel free to join the chorus. Share a moment, a laugh, a joke. Michael lived for those.

If you didn’t know him, read on. Michael was as welcoming as a soul gets.

And we will dearly miss his.

—

Michael loved the movies. He worked for years at a theater, then at Blockbuster, and finally as a Hollywood regular at premieres and screenings. He once joked he was going to change his name to Plus One, but there was no need since he was becoming a “studio bigwig.”

Michael and I met at Lenox Mall, where we worked the box office. We were the only college kids at the theater, so the manager put us in charge of the money.

Big mistake. We weren’t going to steal anything, but we were going to goof all day, by his design.

Michael loved the cuties that came to mall, and developed a system where he would knock on the counter when a hottie was coming up to buy a ticket. We knocked so often the manager once came in and asked “who the hell is hitting our windows?” Michael convinced him it was faulty air conditioning.

The system worked fine until Michael, as his nature, got competitive. The guy would dive for tennis balls on an asphalt court, and he turned the box office into an Olympiad for flirting.

If a cute girl were coming up to buy a ticket, but she was behind a sweaty hick tub of lard, Michael would intentionally drop a bill on the floor, leaving the Orca to me while he waited on the girl. I caught on, and soon we were dropping money, coins, paper clips, anything to avoid the uglies. It must have been a sight, the line running the length of the mall outside the theater, while we were stooped over, nowhere to be found.

It should have been enough to get us fired, but we ended our days at the theater for another reason.

New management had the idea of putting high school girls in the box office, thinking guys would be more likely to buy a ticket if it came from a ditz. Michael, never one to duck the moral stand, asked for a meeting with higher management. He said he would gladly go back to selling popcorn, but asked that I stay on box office to keep the lines moving. The manager thanked Michael, and said he would look into it.

Michael was fired by the time he got home.

When I came in that night, one of the scumbag bosses said Michael had been fired, and to keep my mouth shut or the same would happen to me. I waited until the weekend rush lined up, then walked out of the box office and went home.

Michael heard about what happened, found me at the small independent theater The Tara and we worked together there for the rest of the summer. We had to clean the theater after every midnight showing of Caligula, which was the equivalent of Georgia porn.

But it remained an incredible job, because we never had to face it alone.

—

Hobos loved Michael, for some reason. Once he tried to help a homeless woman by letting her sleep on his couch in DC for a night. She would forever love him. Occasionally, she’d leave a chair on the porch for Michael. Or you’d hear her scream from the front door, after leaving a paper bag full of beets and kidney beans on the porch, “Michael, I got some food for ya!!”

Another time, a vagrant sat next to Michael on the bus, pulled out a clove of garlic and began eating it like an apple. The smell was so bad Michael got out and walked 2.5 miles home.

But my favorite came on the METRO commuter train in Atlanta.

We had just come back from a movie, were sitting next to each other laughing, when a sanely-dressed woman in the bench across the aisle began muttering. We couldn’t hear exactly what she was saying, but we began hearing the vitriol boil.

She must have thought we were gay, because she kept saying “fag,” “fucking fags,” “you’ll burn in hell.”

A black guy sitting a row in front of us heard the commotion, and told her to “leave those guys alone.” Perhaps he thought we were gay, too, but wasn’t going to have that bullying.

She got quiet for a moment, then began muttering, now worse. “Fags,” “faggots,” “worse than niggers.”

That was it. The guy stood up, walked to her, spit in her face. Stood there, daring her to say another word.

She wiped the sputum from her face, stood up, walked out at the next stop. As the doors closed, she turned, put her hands to the glass outside our bench and screamed “FUCKING FAGS” as the train pulled off.

We were quiet for a moment, not quite sure what happened. After a minute, Michael looked at me.

“Do you think she liked me?”

—

You could make an album of Michael’s phone messages.

While he wasn’t a drinker, Michael enjoyed the occasional Ambien.

And Ambien enjoyed him. Julie and I kept a voicemail for months he left once after taking the sleeping pill and chasing it with his homemade amaretto sour.

I’m still not sure why he called, because he lived on the second floor of our house and was passed out by the time we got home.

But he loved to chat when was a little stoned.

“Howdy howdy,” he said. “I was just…calling. I took some Ambien and I’m feeling kinda spacey. I’m standing…I’m dizzy. I’m standing and I’m….DIZZY! Anyhooooo, see you in the morning.”

He never once asked us to erase it. Even enjoyed listening to it. Michael didn’t fear laughing at himself, and was usually the loudest one laughing.

One afternoon, when I was in his place, Michael hit the play button on his machine and I was surprised to hear his voice on it. Michael said he occasionally left himself voicemails to remember important chores after work.

“A lot of people do it,” he said, half-defensively. “It’s not weird.”

Except, he conceded, the part where he told himself goodbye.