Alexander Steele Daniel
Magazine, Period 4/5
December 12, 2007

The Devil Wears White

I used to live in the apartment where it first happened. The orange street lamps and tri-colored traffic lights would light the darkened walls of the third-story abode through the gaping windows during the night.
He woke in a cold sweat to the sound of her alluring voice. She was a twelve-year-old Asian girl wearing a white gown seated delicately on the foot of the mattress where he slept. Her hair was long and as black as her eyes. Even though he did not know the girl, he was not alarmed by her uninvited presence. They talked for hours and over the course of separate nightly visits. Through casual conversation, he learned all about the girl. She already knew everything about him though – she was the Devil.
I can’t remember if the Devil visited him before or after his telepathic capabilities developed. I do, however, remember the phone calls during which he attempted to prove his newfound abilities to me. He asked me to think of things: drinks, sea animals; he would hang up and then call back and tell me what exactly I was thinking.
Having met the Devil and developed a whole new sixth sense all within a month’s time, it’s safe to say that this guy was having a rough time in general. A night of relaxation and marijuana with Jerry (the downstairs neighbor) was his self-prescribed solution. His night of reconciliation was short-lived, however… Thirty or forty hooded men surrounded the apartment building. He could see their pale faces watching him through Jerry’s blinds. They wanted to kill him. He suppressed the panic he felt within with all of his strength. Still, his uneasiness was too unnerving for Jerry to deal with, so Jerry carefully walked him out the back door, through the mass of hooded men, and up the winding wooden stairs back to his own apartment.
Once Jerry went back home, the hooded men ran up the winding wooden stairs and broke in through the door. The apartment wasn’t located in the safest part of town – you slept with a Louisville Slugger and an Airsoft pistol at your bedside. Having half-expected the killers to rush in, he grabbed the baseball bat and demolished several of the them in a violent and panicked frenzy. He ran through the bathroom and escaped through a large open window onto the roof ledge. He ran across the roof, over and around his own apartment, until he reached the winding wooden stairs that lead to the ground floor. The first stairs down were slippery and he lost his footing and tumbled down to the first landing. Bloodied and high, he eventually reached the pavement and ran away into the night.
I got a phone call at an unusual hour. It was during fourth period science that I learned that he had gone missing around midnight.
The cops found him in the Marsh parking lot four or so blocks away from his home in underwear and a t-shirt. He was sent to the psychiatric ward downtown after being treated for his injuries. Perhaps he would find normalcy locked away in the pale green room that they kept him in. Unfortunately, he found quite the opposite. If he listened closely, he could hear my sister and I crawling around in the ceiling above his bed – sometimes we would watch him through slightly lifted ceiling tiles. Sometimes, during the periodic interviews that the psychoanalysts held with him, random people would walk into the room and tell him how he should respond to the questions. This confusion lasted for almost a week. His mother drove up from Texas to pick him up and take him away.
He lived with his family in San Angelo, Texas for nine months and then finally came back to Louisville. Three months after his return, he went missing again. He was living in my bedroom at the time of his disappearance. In the middle of the night he abandoned my room and ran through the neighborhood, trying to evade his pursuers. The federal government wanted him dead and they had sent officers to do the deed. Two patrol cars flashed their lights silently as they cruised the neighborhood searching for him. Despite the icy snow on the ground and the frostbite on his feet, he darted through backyards, dashed across ill-lit streets and jumped over countless fences. Occasionally, the officers would catch a glimpse of the barefoot man and open fire. The gunshots rang and echoed among the sleepy houses, yet somehow they never woke me. He survived the night.
Months later, he was shot at again – I saw the bullet-riddled windshields. A week after that, he was stabbed by a teenager on the street – he showed me the vicious gash.
Years passed. I got a phone call at an unusual hour. It was the tenth of August, 2006 when I learned from a coroner that my father had been found dead behind his apartment. He was forty years old.
I left out important details from the above story for effect. Within the appropriate context, however, it all makes a little more sense. My father was sixteen or seventeen when he started drinking alcohol. I’ve been reminded countless times that there are “responsible casual drinkers” and then there are “alcoholics”. Dad obviously fell into this pre-defined “alcoholic” category. After twenty-three years of regular heavy alcohol consumption, he developed mild cirrhosis (liver decay) and insomnia. After being stabbed by the teenager, he decided to turn his life around (not as a result of being stabbed; I used the incident merely to refer to a relative time within the story). He moved out of my bedroom and finally got his own little apartment some miles down the road. He declared he’d work his butt off and better himself.
A one-week ordeal ensued, during which he lay in his new empty apartment for days covered in whiskey and vomit, drinking himself away. We found him delusional and incapacitated multiple times that week. He never did work his butt off or turn his life around. We locked him in his own home and brought him food and soap. When he got too bad to live, we took him to an intensive care facility downtown. After a month or so of containment, he was sent to live in an Alcoholics Anonymous halfway home in Clarksville, Indiana. For about two years he lived here with relative success. He lasted one year of sobriety. My mother, sister and I had moved to Indianapolis by this point. He moved out of the halfway home eventually and got his own place. Having abused depressants all of his life, he now depended strongly on caffeine and sleeping medications to regulate his sleep patterns. This extreme variety of drugs overworked his heart valves and they grew in size and weakened in strength.
His friends have told me he was hallucinating the night he died. The cause of death was heart failure. We lay roses in the gravel by the shed where he was found by the neighbor boy. My father’s delicately balanced sleeping habits sometimes became unbalanced and he’d become sleep-deprived for weeks at a time. This insomnia would trigger the hallucinations that occurred because of what’s generally called “swollen brain syndrome”. This swelling of his brain was due to extensive alcohol abuse. It’s comforting to know that his incredibly extreme psychological instabilities cannot attributed to genetics, but only to alcohol abuse. However, the heightened likelihood of his becoming addicted to alcohol was hereditary; his father, Steele Daniel, also had an alcohol addiction. He used alcohol to escape from his pains. He loved it. He loved it so much that he forgot where the road was and drove over a cliff when my father was four years old. I feel honored to carry a potential alcoholic within myself and know with all of my being that he will never consume the poison. I feel like I’m disrupting a pattern, like I’m halting a disgusting and pointless cycle that ruins.
I talked to my dad a ton after he met the Devil: when he hallucinated, he’d believe it was all really happening. The instant somebody told him he’d been imagining it, he would realize that it wasn’t real. That doesn’t mean that he would say it didn’t happen though; it did happen, it happened to him alone. I do know for a fact that he was stabbed in the ribs, I did see the wound and it was too awkwardly placed behind him to have been self-inflicted. That story is unique in that it actually physically happened. Same with the bullet-riddled windshields. The rest, however, was all imagined.
I saw the Louisville Slugger aftermath – the apartment was battered and trashed. He did bruise his tailbone and scrape his flesh falling down the stairs as he escaped the thirty hoodlums. He did in fact have frostbite on his feet the night he hit the snow-covered neighborhood. There were no hoodlums, though. No telepathic capabilities; he guessed all the drinks and sea animals incorrectly. There were no cops trying to gun him down. My sister and I never peered in at him through the ceiling. The Devil never even came to visit him…
I might be frowned upon for describing my father’s last years in such a degrading light. I might be criticized as attempting to strengthen my anti-alcohol beliefs with a pitiful example of what could happen if you drink too much. In reality, I just did do both of those things, but I wrote this because it has never been written. “What if what happened in the horror movies actually happened?” I think it’s interesting to know that it has happened and I witnessed it as a bystander. In some ways I am very much grateful that he’s been relieved of the uncontrollable horrors that periodically haunted his helpless soul. Every single detail in my story, I kid you not, was obtained by talking with my sober father. Looking into his eyes and hearing his voice, you’d know he spoke the truth. He hated it. The fear he felt is unimaginable and his reality was different than our own.
For countless more reasons than the extreme ones described here, the line between “responsible casual drinkers” and “alcoholics” means less and less to me. Whether you’ve drank your brain away into a surreal hell over a period of years or you’re simply sipping one cocktail at Glen Dorshin’s party, you are temporarily (or permanently) changing your natural person. I’ll strain to pretend you don’t “impair” your decision-making skills or your driving abilities and I still see nothing respectable in the minute and “responsible” changes you’ve voluntarily made to yourself. I’ve lived as long as the little social drinkers I know today and I’ve yet to find a single reason why their decision to drink is anything but horrible and repulsive.
Mitchell Morgan Daniel’s story has been written and now you know it.