It Was Hot.
Before long, I seriously questioned my desire to live in sunny Florida.
We’d been to the beach, and it did not live up to the dream.
I’d conveniently ignored the foreshadowing of spring break, when my best day concluded with passing out under a trailer. I still believed that things would get better since I lived somewhere warm.
But it wasn’t warm. It was hot.
Moving to Florida from the snowy north makes a ton of sense – in the winter, when it’s actually snowy. But moving to Florida during the summer is absolutely insane.
It was brutally hot every single moment of every single day. Larry’s “cooling system” included an air conditioning window unit in the bedroom and a fan over the dining room table. If we opened the door to get more air flowing through the living room, even with that one ceiling fan, the blazingly humid air that poured inside engulfed us, making it hard to even breathe. So we kept the doors shut.
During the day, it was impossible to walk outside except to go somewhere air-conditioned, which we never did. Even when it rained, it was hot. In the evening, when my drinking fun was just getting started, the air was stifling. In the wee hours of the morning – when I was getting ready to go to sleep – it was still hot.
And my drinking “fun” was relative, now that there was no one with whom to drink. There were no weekend parties, no concerts or comedy shows, no sports to watch. Other than our “day” at the beach, we didn’t go anywhere or do anything. Since we weren’t living in a hellhole (relatively speaking), we could finally drink in our own home.
Yippee.
Unlike Larry, whose day included drinking, my day revolved around drinking.
With college over, and Larry lacking the obsession with alcohol that I had, there was no one around who could commiserate. There was nothing but a twelve-pack in the fridge that needed to be repeatedly replenished.
Larry thought being “home” was great. He thought working on the bike in the front yard was better than working on the bike in the gravel lot in Pitcairn. And while he worked on the bike, or ran out to get bologna or beer or cigarettes, I stayed inside where it was not quite so unbearably hot.
Drinking without a frat house or a bar jammed with people or a floor full of screaming girls … well, it was just boring.
But I was an alcoholic who had been drinking every day for at least a year. It never occurred to me that I could create any life I wanted to have. I was too busy drinking to create anything but occasional puke.
Quite frequently I was drinking with Joe and Dave, my new roommates. I’m sure they both had jobs, because they occasionally disappeared for hours on end, but they were also home a lot. They sat around inside with cans of beer, too.
Joe and Dave were younger than Larry, but they were not my friends. They weren’t interesting or funny or smart or even particularly nice. They weren’t fun to be around. I didn’t look forward to spending time drinking with Joe and Dave.
Worse yet, Joe and Dave didn’t even like each other. And we were living with both of them and their squabbles, which happened whenever they were both home.
Apparently it got worse when Larry and I moved in … because of me.