On Memorial Day weekend, Bonnie came to visit me in my new apartment.
I was so excited, I threw a party for all of my non-existent friends, meaning I invited the two people next door and everybody from work, plus Gregg and Bonnie and me. My apartment was one room, and I invited a dozen people.
Fortunately, the weather cooperated and we mostly congregated outside. Gregg somehow got us a keg, which we set up on the porch, and I blasted the music so I felt like I was in college again. Food may or may not have been provided.
Instead we did LSD.
Bonnie had done it before, and was thrilled to do it again. Gregg was also an experienced user. It was my first time.
“Who wants to do acid?” I yelled over the music. There was a general roar of approval. Although a couple of the party-goers dwindled away, most of them stayed. My supervisor stayed but did not partake; Dave seemed to feel responsible for us even though we weren’t at work. Within a couple of hours, he left.
The LSD came on a tiny piece of square paper, about the size of a fingernail, with happy little pictures on it. Putting that tiny piece of paper in my mouth was the most terrifying thing I had ever done.
“You’re sure I’m going to be okay?” I asked Bonnie, who hooted her approval. She didn’t even examine the tiny papers, just tossed one on the tip of her tongue and laughed.
“I can’t wait for you to try this!” she said.
And then, quite suddenly, we were tripping. We were all tripping. And it was glorious.
LSD made everything beautiful.
Doing acid was like lighting up the world with fire-bright glow sticks. Everything I saw became more impressive than it was before, more interesting, more enlightening. Something in my brain clicked on for the first time ever, and I loved everything.
LSD made me want to move, to explore. I wanted to see everything, go everywhere, do everything.
I started by walking on the brick streets in my bare feet. I’d done this a million times, but never noticed the coolness of the bricks, the tiny pockets of gravel between them, the smoothness under my feet. Within minutes, I had everyone else walking on the brick streets, too; all of us stared at our feet, smiling and chattering about the amazingly wonderful sensation of smoothed brick.
Someone found a bicycle, and we took it out on the brick street, too. Everyone rode the bicycle. The wind, the bumps in the road, the sheer speed of a bicycle amazed us.
Bonnie and I wandered down the street to the woods, where we stumbled into the grove of trees, feeling the mud and sticks under our feet, touching the trees, petting the bark, admiring dead, fallen leaves in our hands and blazing green leaves blanketing the sky. Trees were the most spectacular thing I’d ever seen: towering and regal and bright.
We watched the sun shine through the trees; we watched it set with rays dazzling the porch rails and our skin. The trip went on for hours and hours and hours, with everyone staying and exploring together. We laughed forever.
As the sun came up, people started to trickle home, even Gregg.
Bonnie and I, too, finally went indoors. Listening to the birds chirp, laughing, the radio playing, we fell asleep.
I went to three AA meetings in 1988, but my sobriety date isn’t until 1992.
I was 23 years old when I went to those meetings. I was astounded to find that alcoholics came in all ages, shapes, ethnicities, genders and sizes.
But I was 23 years old! I wasn’t going to sit around in a church every Monday night. I am not a fan of church. I am a fan of God, who tossed me a shooting star and with whom I feel a deep connection, but I have never been a fan of organized religion.
But I was 23 years old when that shooting star went across the sky. A few months prior, I’d been living with a guy who was nearly 40. For years I’d been hanging out with people who were old enough to be my parents, maybe even my grandparents.
At 23, my brain hadn’t even fully developed yet. And the prefrontal cortex develops last. That’s the part of the brain responsible for – according to the NIH – “planning, prioritizing, and making good decisions.”
I’d like to blame my streak of poor decisions on my immature prefrontal cortex, please.
Thanks to those many bad decisions, it took me 11 years to believe I’d reached the ever-elusive “cool” status I’d desired for so long.
I hadn’t actually achieved that, but I believed I had. It is very, very, very easy to be cool when you live alone and create your own determining factors for coolness.
Of course, the people from middle school and high school who had set my standards for cool had moved on to something called “adulting.” Meanwhile I was still fuming about the 15 cents I loaned to Mindy Ford in the sixth grade, since she never paid me back unless you count her pummeling me into the ground after school. I was still crying about being shunned by Max – the man I’d once deemed the epitome of coolness. I was completely stuck in the past, having never emotionally developed.
So at 23, my head was still fighting with demons I developed in adolescence. Alcoholism stunts emotional growth, and I was likely a tad autistic, too. Growing up was never something I actually wanted to do. Drinking and doing drugs kept me feeling youthful and alive, even as my death loomed around every corner.
And even though I didn’t always see the death looming there, I thought the way I was living made me more fully alive. In spite of my complete innocuousness, I continued to dream. I idolized Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, who had all dropped dead at age 27. I wanted to live the way they lived.
Looking back, maybe I did.
I had no idea that they had all died as a direct result of their addictions. When I was 23, I didn’t even know they’d been human. They were larger than life legends to me, not real people.
But, at 23, I knew something was wrong with me, so I tried out Alcoholics Anonymous and discovered that I definitely fit in. And I had the opportunity to dive in and be a part of that group, but that is not what I chose to do.
While I was wildly entertained during those meetings, my heart was still stuck on stupid.
And I was right on the verge of discovering something brand new that I believed would change everything.
When the AA meeting was over, I ran out the door as fast as my young legs would carry me. The lady had stopped talking and everyone stood up and I needed to get out of there before anyone else tried to shake my hand or talk to me or even look randomly in my direction.
While that meeting had been the most wonderful thing I’d ever experienced, I had no idea how to actually converse in a roomful of people. So I skedaddled out of the church to the car.
Gregg, my ever faithful puppy, was right behind me. We hopped into the car, safely away from the crowd of laughing, happy people.
But I’d noticed that Gregg didn’t laugh at the AA meeting.
“Didn’t you think it was funny?” I asked him.
“Not really,” he said. “My dad’s an alcoholic.” Oh right, I thought. I had forgotten.
I’d only met Gregg’s dad once; he seemed old and angry. He lived in a very dark house. Gregg’s mom had died when Gregg was 14, so I assumed that was Gregg’s main problem.
Gregg’s Dad was a “real” alcoholic. He was old and sad and nonfunctional. I hadn’t yet equated “real” alcoholism with what I was doing.
“I don’t think those people were real alcoholics,” I told him. “I didn’t see anyone who was even drinking.”
“I guess,” Gregg said. He didn’t seem to care. “Ya wanna smoke this joint now?”
“Let’s wait,” I said. Gregg didn’t wait.
I didn’t smoke it; I couldn’t stop thinking about the meeting. The AA meeting was not the boardroom I’d expected.
If I’d only been allowed one word to describe AA, I would have said it was fun.
It was a roomful of laughter. The lady and her stories were funny. Not funny like whirling-around-in-a-dark-bar-and-tripping-over-your-own-barstool funny, but really, actually, deep-in-the-gut, relatably funny.
And others in that room thought it was funny, just like I did.
Plus I didn’t have to do anything, or talk to anyone, or even drink the stupid coffee.
So I went back the following Monday. This time, Gregg and I went inside at 8:28. And this time, a guy was up at the podium talking. He wasn’t as funny as the lady, but he was funny, too. He talked about getting fired from his job and people laughed. And he talked about passing out in the backseat of his car and waking up with his hand in a bag full of cold fries and eating the fries for breakfast. And people laughed again.
Not Gregg. But I laughed. We laughed.
I wondered if this was how people got sober. I’d heard that laughter is the best medicine. I wondered if people just laughed themselves sober every Monday and then they felt better. I didn’t know.
I continued to drink and get high.
But I went back the next Monday. And someone else was speaking, and she was also funny, and I thought, I want to go to this meeting every Monday for the rest of my life.
I believed this was the only AA meeting in the world, and that those people were the only AA people in the world, and Monday was the only day anybody went to meetings.
So I went to three meetings – three Mondays in a row – and never spoke to a soul. But I laughed a lot.
The following Monday was Memorial Day. During Memorial Day weekend, I discovered something else.
I didn’t go to another AA meeting for a very long time.
I didn’t drink all day on Monday – which wasn’t hard since I’d slept until evening. Still I felt proud.
Gregg suggested that we take a joint to smoke on the way to my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, but I declined. I wanted the AA people to see me at my best, and I knew “high” wasn’t my best. I knew “drunk” wasn’t my best.
I didn’t actually know what “my best” looked like; I only knew what it wasn’t.
So I was terrified. I didn’t know what AA was all about. I expected to walk into a board room – like the meetings my dad had at work. There would be old men sitting around a table, a white board maybe. Everyone would be very serious. And, I imagined, when I walked in, they would all look up and glare at me. I’d be wearing the wrong thing, and my hair would be wrong, and I wouldn’t be smoking but I knew I would stink.
I took Gregg with me because I couldn’t face these people alone.
And I held off as long as I could. The AA meeting started at 8:30 p.m. Gregg and I arrived at 8:12 and sat in the car until 8:29. We didn’t talk. I watched people walking toward a very large church – going in, not coming back out. Lots of people. I imagined the church was having some other kind of service, too, because these people didn’t look like old, judge-y men. There were people of all ages, dressed in all attires, going inside.
At 8:29 I said, “Okay let’s do this.”
Gregg looked genuinely surprised that I was actually getting out of the car. He got out of the car, too.
He tried to hold my hand but I shrugged him off. We walked toward the church where all the people had gone in, and walked inside.
The room was enormous, like a warehouse inside a church. It was nothing like the room I’d imagined. A guy with a mustache reached out his hand as I walked in and said, “Welcome!” He smiled and reached toward me. I shook his hand.
I didn’t want to talk to this man. I looked around at the room – dozens of tables, all with people sitting around them. So. Many. People.
I didn’t know what to do. I followed the people in front of me, who went to a long, rectangular table with cookies and coffee and cream and sugar.
I didn’t want cookies and coffee. I wanted to sit down and/or vanish from sight as quickly as possible. I saw two empty chairs far away from coffee, and raced toward them as the room started to quiet and a voice spoke over the din.
I looked toward the front of the room where all eyes were pointed, and there was someone talking. A woman. Blah blah blah, I heard. My stomach was in knots. Someone new stepped up to talk, another woman. Blah blah blah, I heard. And then, without even meaning to, I started to listen.
For the rest of the meeting, the woman told stories. She talked about puking in the bathroom in high school, and losing her car when it was a block from her house, and getting arrested for peeing in somebody’s garden, and spilling vodka into her cereal and eating it anyway.
And people laughed. I laughed. We laughed.
They were the funniest stories I’d ever heard. She talked and we laughed and I felt, for the first time in forever, that I fit in.
Even in my active addiction, I tried very, very hard to be honest. And I thought everyone understood the importance of honesty. I thought everyone told the truth, except when talking to parents about how much alcohol had been consumed. Then lying was often necessary.
Otherwise, I was the most trusting soul on the planet, in spite of a strong history of occurrences that should have encouraged me to be distrustful.
But I had never met a pathological liar before.
I let Gregg back into my apartment, my life, my underwear drawer, because I believed wholeheartedly that he would never, ever steal money from me again. I didn’t think much about his helping me look for the money, all the while knowing he was responsible for its disappearance. That was too weird to consider.
I attributed Gregg’s behavior to his mother’s death when he was 14 and his (living) alcoholic father.
Gregg did zero self-analysis.
“Don’t ever touch my money again!” I told him sternly, like an angry parent. Gregg’s response was very childlike, too: no actual remorse, just shame and embarrassment at being caught.
“I won’t,” he said. And then he changed the subject. “What are you doing this weekend?”
“I’m going to a bar … by myself!” I didn’t need a thief in my life.
“Wanna smoke a joint first?”
I did.
So I did.
And then Gregg went with me to the bar. And home from the bar. And we got high and watched Pee Wee Herman and My Little Pony in the morning. Then we went back to the bar the next day, and danced around a lot, and then went back home together the next night. We had sex until the sun came up and then passed out.
By Sunday morning, I’d realized that my life was exactly where it had been before, when I’d lived with a biker I didn’t like and jumped out a window and been raped by friends and strangers and spent long, lonely nights wailing With or Without You to the boombox.
Except now I was in a one-room apartment living with a guy I couldn’t trust who was snoring on the pillow beside me in spite of stealing every cent I had. And I couldn’t imagine my life without him because who would dance with me?
I’d finally found a friend, technically a boyfriend, who wasn’t an old man. But without trust, what did we have? We had … sex, drugs and rock-n-roll. We had the things I’d always believed I needed to make my life “cool.”
But Gregg had broken my trust. I’d thought we were friends. I thought he loved me. I never for a moment thought I loved him, but here he was.
And here I was – feeling completely and utterly alone – loneliness beyond comprehension in my own home. Again.
I focused briefly on Gregg’s issues. I could blame Gregg for my life being uncool because he stole my rent just as my life was starting to unravel again.
Still, somehow I knew that the problem was not entirely Gregg. Something was desperately, impossibly wrong with me. Was drinking really the problem?
Was I the problem?
I shoved that thought aside. But I remembered my mom telling me about the AA meeting – that one meeting that could somehow cure me of my unhappiness, and I decided to go.
But first, Gregg and I spent another drunken Sunday together.
We slept all day Monday and then, on Monday night, I took Gregg with me to my first AA meeting.
Gregg and I had been co-habitating, for lack of a better term, since I moved into my new apartment. I’d invited him back for one night, and he just stayed there. Sometimes Gregg disappeared for a couple of days at my request, but we were a couple, for convenience sake rather than choice.
With Bonnie in Akron and Larry (and therefore Ronnie) gone, Gregg was my only friend. So he became my boyfriend. I didn’t want to be too alone.
Gregg was fun, in the way that someone who mirrors your every move can be fun. Everything I wanted to do, Gregg did. Every time I wanted to go out, Gregg wanted to go out, too. Every time I wanted to eat, Gregg wanted to eat, too. Every time I wanted to drink, Gregg wanted to drink, too. Every time I wanted to get high, Gregg wanted to get high, too.
So when I extolled the virtues of cocaine, Gregg wanted to do cocaine, too. He went out and got us some cocaine, which we snorted all weekend while drinking ourselves into oblivion. It was a particularly fun weekend that I barely remembered – which had become my pattern again. I regularly blacked out.
A lot. Again.
On Sunday, as I wandered around the apartment with my last can of beer, I reached into my underwear drawer for some cash, and there was no money there.
“Fuck!” I screamed.
“What?” Gregg asked from where he sprawled innocently on the bed.
“My money’s gone!” I dug around inside my drawer, tossing underwear all over the apartment. I still didn’t wear underwear, but there was lots in the drawer. “My money is completely gone!”
Gregg jumped up. He helped me dig. “Fuck!” he repeated. “Where could it have gone?”
“I don’t fucking know!” I yelled. “That’s all the money I had in the world! I can’t buy any more beer!”
“Fuck!” Gregg said again.
Then I realized that it was May 1st. My rent was due. Immediately. And all of my money was completely gone.
“How am I supposed to pay the rent?” I shrieked. “It’s due today!”
Gregg continued to dig in the drawer. “I don’t know!” he said, seemingly flabbergasted.
I threw myself onto the floor with my beer. My last beer. I would have cried, but I no longer felt my emotions.
“Fuck,” I whispered. I put my head in my hands. “What the fuck am I going to do?”
Gregg plopped down next to me on the floor. He put his arm around me and dipped his head onto mine in solidarity. “I don’t know,” he said.
It took me three hours of whining about the missing money before I realized that I had not left the apartment all weekend, so I couldn’t have spent my rent money during a blackout.
The realization hit me like a brick: Gregg took my cash.
“It was you!” I said, shocked. “It’s only been in there since Friday and we didn’t go anywhere all weekend!”
Gregg sat silently, suddenly hanging his head in shame. Finally he whispered: “I didn’t have enough so I used it to buy the coke.”
“That was my rent money!” I screeched. “How am I supposed to pay the rent?!”
Head still hung, Gregg shrugged. He did not apologize.
“GO.” I spat. “Get. Me. My. Rent. Money!”
Gregg got up off the floor and left without looking back.
On Friday, Gregg reappeared with $250 – the full amount for rent, but not the entire amount he’d stolen.
He stayed, because I had not one other friend in the world.
Given how much my life changed overnight, I recognized pretty quickly that I was drinking too much. Again.
But I didn’t know what to do about it. My life slid right back into the despairingly lonely place it had been before, and this time I couldn’t blame it on Pitcairn or Larry. Briefly I considered blaming Gregg, but he hadn’t yet proven himself to be a problem.
Many people whose lives are crumbling like a stale cookie beneath them are able to see it right away. They look at the cookie and – aack! it’s crumbling! – and then they do something about it. But alcoholism makes it really hard to see that the cookie is crumbling; in fact, it makes it hard to see that anything we do is the cause of our angst. So it took a shooting star for me to recognize that drinking was my problem.
If I’d learned nothing from the shooting star, I had learned that. So why was I drinking again?
I had no idea.
So I did what I always do when I don’t have any idea what to do next: I called my mom. “We can’t help you,” she said.
“Why not?” I asked, completely baffled. They had always helped before!
“We can’t help you if you’re drinking,” she said. “We can’t give you any money.”
Suddenly I realized that I did need money, and I hadn’t needed it before I drank. But I said, “I don’t need money. I need to know what to do.”
“Do you think you’re an alcoholic?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Do you want to get help?”
“Maybe.” I didn’t think I needed help; I just wanted to go back to not being so messed up. “I don’t know,” I said.
Mom told me about a woman with whom she worked. She had mentioned Annie before, because Annie chain-smoked cigarettes in the office and it drove my mom crazy.
But she was also my mom’s friend. “Annie goes to AA meetings,” Mom said. “Alcoholics Anonymous.”
That sounded dreadful. “How is a meeting supposed to help me? I don’t want to go to a meeting.”
My weary mother sighed. “Well I don’t know what else to tell you to do.”
I sat quietly for a minute, wondering if I had any other options. I looked around at my apartment, ashtrays overflowing, cat hiding in a corner, crumpled beer cans strewn about. Finally I muttered, “When is the meeting?”
“Let me call you back,” Mom said.
I imagined walking into a board room with a bunch of old men staring at me in my cutoffs and bare feet. I didn’t like the idea, but I believed that if I went to one meeting of AA, I’d be cured. So I seriously considered going and getting my life back on track.
Then I considered begging my mom for five dollars instead.
Minutes later, the phone rang. “There’s a meeting on Monday in Shadyside,” Mom said. She gave me the day, time, and an address, and I wrote them all down.
“Is Annie going to be there?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” my mom said. “But if you want help, you can go anyway. It’s every Monday.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, and I hung up the phone with no intention of ever going to any meeting, ever.
The first thing to disappear when I started drinking again was self-care.
I stopped brushing my teeth; I barely brushed my hair. I showered only sporadically. I barely ate. I stopped washing dishes – so I stopped using dishes. My “meals” were found at the 7-11 when I bought cigarettes, mostly Little Debbies snack cakes and fruit pies. I called the pies “produce” and felt proud when I could get one down.
I stopped washing myself, my hands, my clothes. Laundry piled in the corner, then fell onto the sofabed, which I no longer called a couch. I did not dust, let alone organize or reorganize my albums. I was lucky to put them away as I tossed one aside and started playing another. My decorations – toys and magazine photos – were ignored and subsequently devalued. I stopped emptying ashtrays. I no longer cleaned up dirt in my carpet and instead flicked cigarette ash with complete disregard for cleanliness.
Possibly the greatest calamity, though, was my complete disregard for the cat I loved most in the world.
Since leaving Larry, Kitty had gotten used to my constant care. I’d fed her religiously morning and night, making sure she had plenty of treats in between. I’d played with her when she wanted to play, and cuddled with her when she wanted to cuddle. We were bonded.
But I broke that bond when I started drinking again. Sometimes I forgot to feed Kitty until well after sundown, and then I realized I didn’t have any food for her. If I was lucky, I’d have some lunchmeat to toss in her direction. I stocked up at the grocery store but couldn’t seem to keep enough food in the house for her anymore.
Kitty couldn’t trust that I would care for her.
We didn’t cuddle; we didn’t play. If she purred, I don’t remember it. Blackouts were constant.
Kitty had no peace. I jumped on the sofabed, sprawled on the floor, puked in the sink. I threw empty beer cans at the wall, mercilessly terrifying my pet. She had nowhere to hide.
Kitty spent a lot of time on top of the refrigerator in the kitchen. At first, I found it amazing that she was able to leap up there from the floor – it was a standard-sized fridge – but then I realized she seemed to be happy there.
But I think she just didn’t have anywhere else to go. My apartment had gone from a relatively pleasant place to be where sometimes the music was a bit too loud … to an unsafe, horrifying place for any living creature. It was mayhem.
Sometimes I would sit outside with Kitty, but then I’d forget her. I’d go back inside without her, or walk down to the bar, or hop in the car and drive away. I’d come back 10 hours later and find her racing to the door, soaking wet or freezing cold, always starving.
Kitty was the best thing that had ever happened to me, and I basically just forgot about her.
I’d like to say that this improved, that finding her in the snow once was all it took, but that didn’t happen. When I didn’t take care of myself, I didn’t take care of Kitty, either.
And Kitty had no way to take care of herself.
Somehow my dear cat – the runt of her litter, and my only feline pet – lived to be 18 years old.
I like to think I made up for all the neglect by getting sober and treating her like a princess, but that behavior was still a long time away.
The best thing about my new drinking life is that I could drink how, when and where I pleased. I had money and no reins.
Other than intoxication, the only thing I cared about was music. In Pitcairn, I could only listen to my favorite music after Larry had gone to sleep. Larry used to say, “That music will fuck up your singin’!” He believed in country.
In 1988, I could go to the places I’d always wanted to go, especially the Pittsburgh and Oakland bars where collegiate drinkers abounded and where America’s youth danced the night away. There were often live bands, and some huge names came to these tiny bars just before they got huge.
Having heard about these bars from the radio, I’d always wanted to go – but I’d been with Larry since before I’d been old enough to legally drink.
And I had a friend who, as long as I paid his way, would gladly go with me.
So, with money in my pocket from my new job as Shift Supervisor, Gregg and I headed out. We went clubbing. We danced at Metropol and Confetti’s, where Gregg exploded from the dull person he was sitting on our couch into an insanely obnoxious dancer who loved waving his rather hefty butt around to Da Butt, a song that I couldn’t stomach – but his dancing made me laugh.
It didn’t hurt that I was constantly inebriated. Gregg was never funny.
We went to Graffiti, where bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nine Inch Nails and They Might Be Giants played before anyone had ever heard of them. We went to The Decade where Bruce Springsteen, The Police, Aerosmith, U2, Stevie Ray Vaughn and The Ramones had played before they were big, and the bands who performed there felt touched by greatness.
We didn’t see any big names, although I was in a blackout most of the time so maybe we did.
The one I’d been dying to visit, though, was the Electric Banana – the venue with hardcore punk, the kind of place I’d dreamed of finding in London. Neither of us had any punk attire, but they let us in – and we thrashed and banged ourselves against the other patrons with great vigor, trying to fit in.
Even with copious amounts of alcohol, I knew I did not fit in at the Electric Banana. I was a drunk geek who wanted to be cool, and it was insanely obvious from that visit. After years of believing I was a punk rocker at the core, I realized I didn’t even like punk rock. We didn’t go back to the Electric Banana again.
But I bar-hopped in Oakland with the best of ’em – riding the bus into town, since it kept me from driving drunk. Sometimes we had to leave the bar early so we could catch a bus before the transit authority stopped for the night.
We’d flop down onto a relatively empty bus, loud and happy and wasted, for the long ride home.
I remember feeling like I’d been in a fairytale all evening. With its insanely boring interior and the cruel irony that we suddenly had to be fairly quiet, that bus always brought me back to a sad reality.
Something … was still … wrong. I just couldn’t remember what it was.
It was mere moments before my life became an alcoholic hell again.
I woke up with a hangover that didn’t feel comfortable so much as it felt familiar.
Dying of thirst, I opened a two-liter of Diet Coke and stuck my head under the faucet for water. My head was pounding, my eyes wouldn’t open all the way, my hair was stuck to the side of my face, my head was foggy and broken.
I went into the bathroom and dry-heaved into the toilet. I laid my face on the floor and hoped the cool of the tiles would ease some of my discomfort. I tried to fall asleep on the floor but I couldn’t.
“Fuck,” I murmured under my breath. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I couldn’t think of another word. I couldn’t feel a single thing. I knew only that I knew how to handle this feeling – this unbearable, agonizing sickness that had become a part of my daily life for so many years.
The only way to handle this feeling was to drink more.
It wasn’t a conscious thought. It wasn’t an I’m-gonna-drink-again consideration. It wasn’t a decision.
My reasoning – if it can be called “reason” – was simple. I thought: I hurt. I need alcohol.
There was simply no room in my head for anything else.
I smoked cigarettes in my bed and waited.
Kitty leapt into the bed with me, reminding me that she existed. I got up and fed the cat, cleaned out her bowls, opened the window so she could sit on the sill.
I crawled back into my bed.
Eventually I brushed my teeth. I still had yesterday’s clothes on, but I had to go. This time, for sure I was going to get a six-pack – just a six-pack – and my hangover would dissipate. I went to the store and bought a 12-pack.
I drank one as soon as I got home, and I felt normal again.
After three cans, I walked out the door. I went back to the bar down the street, but it was closed.
It was Sunday.
I had to find an open bar. I wandered the streets of Swissvale until I found one, and I went inside. It was empty, except for me and one other person. I pretended to be Larry and did the little head-nod, but I didn’t feel confident. I didn’t like that bar.
It was too bright. I stayed anyway, drinking another couple of drinks before I decided to call Gregg from the payphone on the wall.
“Meet me at the bar on the corner!” I slurred. “I’ll buy you a drink!”
Gregg didn’t ask why I was drinking, or where the bar might be. Knowing our little town as well as he did, he just showed up. We picked up right where we’d left off, all-night party buddies, except without the marijuana.
When the marijuana returned about a week later, I didn’t stop drinking.
Drinking was way, way more fun than I had remembered. I would never make the mistake of quitting something so wonderful again.
The shooting star and my stolid resolve to stay sober became a distant memory.
