Why Am I Doing This?
I didn’t skip a beat without Scott. As I slunk further and further into my drunken ways, I continued to do whatever I wanted to do, believing I was more alive, more independent, and more free than I’d ever been before.
I didn’t feel the invisible chains. But things started happening that I didn’t want to happen.
Bonnie and I still had our pact that we would never leave a bar with a stranger – unless we left together with two strangers – but sometimes those strangers were not of my choosing.
I remember one night in particular when Bonnie and I were the only two people left in the bar at closing time, with the exception of two guys with really bushy facial hair and bad teeth. They were throwing gutter lines at us like, “Hey ladies, ya wanna get lucky?” They weren’t exploring our intellectual prowess.
At 2 a.m., Bonnie and I – who were broke as usual – had a choice. We could go back to our dorm without any beer, or we could go home with the bushy guys buying a six-pack. And we made the obscene choice to go home with the guys, because that meant more beer.
For the math-challenged, one six-pack for four people equals 1.5 beers per person.
For a beer-and-a-half, we followed two complete jerks to their filthy home where we rolled around on the floor doing things neither of us wanted to do. I was drunk out of my mind before I arrived but I remember very clearly thinking, Why am I doing this?
This was never, ever what I wanted.
To Bonnie’s credit, she grabbed the last two beers – which were warm by then – as we headed out. So technically we got two beers each for selling our souls.
The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous succinctly describes this kind of behavior as “pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization.” The pitiful, incomprehensible phase in my life began slowly, simply.
The book then says that over time “… we get worse, never better.”
But I didn’t learn this from a book; I lived it. The more I drank, the more I shifted my moral compass, the more I violated my personal convictions to ensure that I would get another drink.
One night (without Bonnie) I naively went home with Denny, a guy I’d befriended during weeks of drinking at The Hood. Denny wore thick-lensed glasses that made his eyes look much larger than they were, but not in a cute, stuffed-animal way. He looked deformed.
Denny was a teacher, so I deemed him “safe.” Plus he had a twelve-pack of Budweiser.
At his house, I scanned Denny’s album collection. From prior conversations about my childhood, Denny knew I grew up with the Carpenters. Very quickly, he threw on a Carpenters album. He was already half-naked and kissing me before I had a chance to tell him that the album was wildly inappropriate for his sudden and astonishingly brash intentions.
Inspired by a song I never liked and now detest – Touch Me When We’re Dancing – Denny morphed completely. With his bug-eyes three inches from my face, he whispered “touch me… touch me!” while staring into my face, practically drooling on me. Wasted, appalled, and utterly repulsed, I stayed and played Denny’s game.
That beer was never really free.
“Demoralization” is a simplification for what I did. “Degradation” is closer, but barely scratches the surface. Even after 30 years, jagged memories stick like a knife wedged in my gut, twisting and threatening my sanity.
And these relatively harmless incidents were only the beginning; I had years ahead to spiral downward.