I Don’t Drink.
Lacking Atari, I tried to find solace in dog sitting. Instead, I discovered alcohol in a kitchen cupboard.
“I don’t drink,” I said to the sheepdog. I stared at the wine, gin, vermouth, whiskey. “If I did drink, I wouldn’t drink these. Yuk.”
I took the cap off the Jack Daniels and inhaled deeply. My eyes automatically closed as I was transported to a biker bar in 1986. The smell emanating from that bottle conjured the scents of leather and oil underneath the whiskey. It was like a time machine.
I hadn’t had a drink in almost three years.
I put the cap back on the bottle and went back to typing. I’d been freelancing for my dad, transcribing interviews for his new higher education work in Washington, D.C.
When I tired of transcribing, I wrote pitifully sad poetry that no one would ever read.
In spite of the gut-wrenching sadness in my poems, I felt utterly numb, like a trauma victim in a corner. Since I didn’t have my Atari game set, I typed and typed. Eventually I finished the transcript.
Now what?
I was still dog sitting. I didn’t bother going to meetings or calling a sponsor, or even visiting my neighbor, Louise. I fed Kitty quickly, twice a day, then went back to the sheepdog. I was purposefully 100% alone.
And that’s why I thought: I should get some pot.
It wasn’t as though I’d ever had a problem with marijuana; in fact, I gave up pot for several years during my active addiction. I was an alcoholic. I had a problem with cocaine. I had a problem with LSD. But I had never, ever had a problem with pot. I didn’t even like pot.
Call Ronnie, I thought.
It had been four years since Larry, and equally as long since I’d talked to my old friend, Ronnie. Ronnie always had pot. And I still remembered how to spell his last name.
So I found Ronnie right there, where he’d always been, in the phone book.
Ronnie’s mom answered the phone. He still lived with his parents at age 42.
“Hello?”
Ronnie’s voice sounded terrifyingly familiar, like a warm blanket made of horse hair. After all this time, he was rightfully wary of me. “Why did you call me?”
“I miss you!” I replied, pretty sure I was lying.
“I’ll meet you at the bar,” Ronnie said. “But not if you’re going to drink.”
“I don’t drink,” I said to Ronnie. The sheepdog was, again, my witness.
When we met, Ronnie had the giant, goofy smile on his face I remembered so fondly; he seemed genuinely happy to see me.
I was terrified. I faced a world that existed only in my memory: a dark, smoky purgatory where the emotionally dead come to sit.
I was ogling the wine coolers. They’d only recently been invented. I’d been sober, so I’d never had one.
“They suck,” Ronnie said. “Anyway you don’t drink. Let’s smoke a joint instead.”
I was happy to leave the bar and go to Ronnie’s truck. Pot was, after all, the reason I was there.
He lit the joint as though it were a normal thing to do.
I was shaking. But I took a long, deep drag. I coughed.
Ronnie laughed.
Instantly, three years’ worth of anxiety and pain vanished. I felt overwhelmingly, spectacularly normal.
Finally, I thought. I feel good.
It felt like I’d been transported – after three years of being lost – to the place I belonged.
Immediately, desperately, I started chasing that “normal” feeling again, although I would never, ever catch it.