My plan was brilliant: I would give up alcohol and just smoke pot. Alcohol was my problem. This had been confirmed by God Himself. The plan was to never drink again.
But I needed something to help me mentally escape from the horrors of the life I was living.
With solidarity Larry declared, “I’m not gonna drink beer either.” And Larry, the non-alcoholic, quit drinking alcohol without hesitation.
One night, we had a pizza and Larry said, “This is the only fuckin’ time I miss beer. I like beer with my pizza.” But he didn’t drink one.
He made sure to always have marijuana on hand – which was not easy, since it was illegal.
I hated the way pot made me feel. I felt stupid. My life screeched to a halt whenever I smoked it. I couldn’t function. I couldn’t drive. I could barely speak. I was just a lump, sitting, being high.
Without alcohol, I swore I would be a better person. I never, ever got into arguments – let alone fist fights – when I was high. I never got into any trouble, never had sex with the wrong person, never even vomited. And think of the money I would save! I could remember stuff when I wasn’t drinking, although smoking pot guaranteed that there was never much to remember.
I was too high to feel any passion.
Otherwise, my life returned immediately to what it was before Europe: I smoked cigarettes incessantly. On weekends I went to the bars and drank Diet Coke, stepping outside every hour or so to smoke a joint. I went to work three nights a week, and got high with my friends at lunchtime. When work was over, I got high again, then passed out on the floor. I didn’t bother listening to music and wailing along with the boom box. I was too stoned to care.
This went on for weeks.
On Valentine’s Day, Larry informed me that he was going out with another girl – someone named Apryl (“with a ‘Y'”). I asked him if he was going to have sex with her. Larry said, “Nah, I just told her I’d take her out on Valentine’s Day.”
I couldn’t have cared any less if Larry had said he was going to screw a donkey. Or make a sandwich.
Thanks to pot, I didn’t care about anything.
Still, when Larry didn’t come home after the bars closed, I freaked out a little. High and bored, I went to bed, then stayed wide awake. Waiting. I didn’t care about the girl. I just wanted to feel safe.
Finally, Larry stomped up the stairs. I rolled over without a word and went right to sleep.
For the first time since high school, I had three weeks sober.
I felt good. I felt like life had meaning again, purpose, like there was some reason that I’d been saved from both my suicide attempt and my more recent stupidity on New Year’s Eve. I had God – a real, tangible God – who was on my side, who confirmed that it was in my best interest to stop drinking alcohol.
I flew home from London without my family; I needed to get back to work after taking an entire year’s worth of vacation. I rode on a huge jet where they offered me – legal at 23 – many options for alcoholic drinks.
But I didn’t feel compelled to drink. I could smoke on the plane and, without any parents around, I smoked a lot. I also slept a little. But mostly I sat anxiously awaiting my re-arrival in the United States.
Finally I got off the plane, purple duffel in tow, and there was Larry. He was standing right at the gate, waving wildly in front of the waiting crowd, grinning that crooked-toothed smile that I’d grown to love.
Except suddenly I didn’t love that smile anymore. Suddenly I was super-conscious of the crookedness of his teeth. His hair was so stringy; when had it gotten all stringy like that?
Larry was obviously going bald, and he was older than I remembered. When did he get so old? He looked older than my father – like somebody’s grandfather. How had he aged so much in three weeks?
Was I really dating this man?
“Hey Baby!” Larry said in that beautiful, gravelly voice. He lifted me and my duffel and swung us around wildly, right in the heart of all those people, grinning right into my face and whacking some very unhappy lady in the face with my bag.
He didn’t even notice; he kissed me like we were in a movie, like we were being reunited after a war.
And while I kissed him I thought, Who is this guy? When did Larry turn into this socially inappropriate old man?
He grabbed my duffel in one hand and put his arm around me with the other, reeking of dirt, oil, and obnoxious exuberance.
“I fuckin’ missed you, Baby!” he yelled. “I’m so glad you’re fuckin’ home!”
I hadn’t sworn in three weeks. Larry’s repetitive use of the f-bomb felt unusually uncomfortable.
In fact, everything was uncomfortable. Larry felt uncomfortable, unfamiliar, like a caricature of himself.
At the airport, I didn’t realize that I’d never seen him through sober eyes before. I didn’t know that it was me who had changed. I’d reconnected with a part of myself I thought I’d lost forever; I was still getting to know the real me.
And now I was reconnecting with Larry, who seemed absurdly flamboyant. I didn’t like this new Larry, the guy he’d always been. He was boisterous, loud, unkempt and unclean, and absolutely ancient.
Suddenly I felt out of place in the world, like Larry was pulling me away from a place I actually belonged. As we walked through the airport, I could feel the angry tug away from myself.
Larry’s boots were loud. He squeezed me too hard. I didn’t want to be with him. But I truly had nowhere else to go.
I need a drink, I thought immediately. Then: But I’m not going to drink.
I really didn’t want to drink. I’d seen a shooting star.
But as we reached the car, another thought slowly crept into my brain, a brilliant idea.
If I had been drinking, I would have missed England. Instead, I was fully present.
We shopped and strolled the streets of London and saw a handful of punk rockers who, with their rock-hard hair and nose rings, were so cool it made my stomach flip.
We actually rode on a double decker bus.
We visited church after church after church where the ceilings were so high, looking up felt like studying a decorated sky. We saw Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where I marveled at the names: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bronte, Dickens – and my favorite, Dylan Thomas, who drank himself to death in his thirties. (I liked him because he was Bob Dylan’s namesake; I didn’t know he was a drunk and I am no poetry scholar.)
We went to restaurants where they served us the world’s greatest fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, grease dripping as we carried it outside. We ate a dozen different kinds of potato chips from the market and called them “crisps” as we tried to perfect the elusive English accent. We went to a place where I ordered something called “prawns” which the server said was “shrimp” but the little dead things came with their heads on, and I could not eat them in spite of the prawns’ ultimate sacrifice.
We rode the London Underground, which had nothing to do with slavery like I’d originally thought. My dad read the maps and we all stood behind him, waiting for him to figure out which train we were supposed to ride to get to where we wanted to go. Sometimes we had to hop off at the next stop and go the other direction, but we actually laughed when this happened.
I laughed with my family.
We toured Oxford where I stood awestruck in the library and never wanted to leave. We toured Cambridge and The Open University, where we saw my dad’s personal parking spot near his Open University office. We saw the heart-wrenchingly beautiful Les Miserables at the Palace Theatre, where I wept aloud.
As I started to feel things again, I felt proud of my dad for getting the Fulbright. I started to like my family again; I felt close to my sisters. We quipped and shared inside jokes.
I started to feel interested in the things around me; the grayness lifted and I could see some light. I felt lighter, happier, more comfortable in my own skin. I wasn’t healthy by any stretch, but I was getting better.
I could feel it. Every day, I could feel it. I felt better.
And then, at the end of three weeks, it was time for me – just me – to go home: sober, clear-headed, brain fog lifted for the first time since high school. I was finally able to be myself, free from the chains that had shackled me for so long.
But I knew what was coming: I was going back to Larry, to biker life, to Pitcairn.
I did not want to go.
So I dragged out my departure. Before arriving at the airport, I forced my long-suffering father to take me to the London Harley-Davidson shop so I could buy myself a Harley-Davidson t-shirt, transitioning my brain by buying a British t-shirt from a distinctly American motorcycle store. I was more than a little insistent that we buy that shirt, in spite of the distinct threat that I might miss my plane.
No one was happy with my behavior, but somehow we made it to Heathrow on time.
I waved goodbye to my family, and headed back to the States.
After the amazingly timed shooting star and my realization that I would never find happiness in alcohol, I quit drinking and never looked back. I suddenly had the foresight to see where my life had been heading, and knew that I didn’t want to go there. I awoke with a completely new attitude. I knew what I wanted, so I instantly created an entirely new life for myself. I became truly enlightened, turned myself around, and never forgot from whence I’d come.
Oh, how I want that to be my story.
I want it so badly, I can taste it still, three decades after the fact.
I knew that 1987 was the worst year of my life. To this day, I maintain that there was never a worse year.
I’d spent night after night after night wailing along to my boom box in a filthy kitchen as I drank beer and chain-smoked, lonely beyond any concept of loneliness I could have ever imagined. I’d been brutally attacked and raped and my “boyfriend” – an old man (39) I didn’t even like – had doubted the truth of my story. My favorite bar was ruined by a night I’d stayed too long. I’d gone to two Bike Weeks and what I remembered best was being humiliated into begging half-naked for a t-shirt and sleeping in mud puddles next to the world’s worst port-o-johns.
To get out of the mess I’d made of my life, I’d even tried to kill myself – but I was still alive.
My very best night I had in 1987 was one I don’t even remember. But for one brief, glorious moment the next morning, I’d believed I’d finally gotten away from the hellhole I’d created.
So in 1988, after a Sure Sign from God had blazed across the sky just for my benefit, I had no idea what to do next, except to not-drink for as long as possible. I thought, “I will never drink again!” And I meant it.
I had no idea it might be hard. I had God on my side, after all. I literally had God listening to me, watching me, and sending shooting stars across the sky for me. How can anyone argue with that?
Oh, how I wish I’d turned my life around in January of 1988.
But I am an alcoholic. And there is nothing about my brain that isn’t affected by the insanity of my addiction. So no matter what my resolve, no matter what I’d wanted with every ounce of my sober soul, my 23-year-old self had no idea how to make it happen.
This is how Alcoholics Anonymous saves lives. People who have lived through alcoholism and addiction who want to stop but don’t know how – they can learn how to stop inside AA. There’s a whole Big Book about it. There are not a few but hundreds of thousands of people who have gotten sober by following a path that two guys laid out for hopeless drunks starting with a meeting of two drunks back in 1935.
But I didn’t know about AA. I just knew I no longer wanted to drink.
(It wasn’t enough.)
But while I was in England, I fell into a space where I was the same person I’d been before I ever picked up a drink: the child of two loving parents, the sister of two loving sisters, a member of a family who happened to be traveling in the extraordinarily beautiful United Kingdom.
With the shooting star fresh in my mind, I decided I’d just go ahead and enjoy that.
I’ve heard a lot of miraculous stories during my 30+ years of sobriety, but I am the only one I know who, upon realizing that alcohol was my problem, got a literal shooting star.
I believe, to the innermost core of my being, that God sent that star. The timing wasn’t “interesting;” it was perfect. I had the revelation, and there was the star.
Suddenly I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt: alcohol was my problem. Years of denial were broken in that moment, and any doubt I ever had about the existence of God disappeared in that moment, too.
I had three days sober.
I would like to say that I literally dropped to my knees and worshipped the Good Lord Almighty like I have never worshipped before, but that’s not exactly what happened.
I stood there with my mouth hanging open, a cigarette dangling by my side, and stared at the dark space where that spectacular star had briefly lit the night sky.
And then I started to smile.
Then I started to cry.
The tears rolled down my face faster than I could feel them, but I kept staring at the space where the star had been. Somehow I expected another one to fly by.
I said it aloud again: “You can’t find happiness at the bottom of the bottle.” Nothing happened in the sky the second time, or the third, or the fourth.
I stabbed my cigarette into my makeshift ashtray and joyously cried, “You can’t find happiness in a cigarette, either!” I watched to see if that was also a shooting-star-worthy sentiment, but it was not.
I kept hoping that there was a fireworks-style showing of stars taking place just for me, somewhere in England at 3:00 in the morning, but a second star did not come.
I stared at the sky anyway, willing it to happen, doubting my own eyes even as I could never doubt again.
I stood for a long time staring, crying, laughing, crying, laughing. I stared at the sky until my neck hurt and I could no longer stare.
I’d just uncovered the key to the universe, and my discovery had been verified by the universe itself.
I had no idea what to do with myself.
So I walked into our little house in Bletchley, sat down, and cried some more. I cried blubbery sad tears interrupted by fits of giggly, choking laughter, feeling both incredibly small and incredibly special.
I finally knew the answer: I would stop drinking, and find happiness another way.
Since it was 8 a.m. in America and none of us had adjusted to European time yet, my mom randomly awoke. She wandered through the dark living room and found me giggle-sobbing on the couch.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I looked up, my face drenched with tears. “I’ve never been more okay in my life,” I said.
I told my mother what had happened, how it happened: the whole story. I told her about my revelation about alcohol, about happiness, about God.
Mom didn’t doubt my miracle for a second.
“Oh, Kirsten,” she said, and held out her arms. We held each other in that room for a long, long time, both of us crying.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, it’s said that every alcoholic needs to hit bottom before it’s possible to get sober. That “bottom” is a point in an alcoholic’s drinking where we believe we can’t go any lower – hence the term.
On January 4, 1988, I had reached my bottom. I didn’t realize it then, but while everyone else was sleeping, I was reflecting on my life after three days without alcohol.
I ruined the Eiffel Tower, I thought. I completely ruined my trip to Paris. I spent my whole time either sleeping or bitching about everything.
I fell over in customs. I thought I was going to die. It really, really felt like I was going to die.
The plane ride resurfaced in my mind: Throwing up on the plane wasn’t pleasant either.
I puked all the time at home, I thought.
I’d often drink so much that I vomited, which made more room in my stomach for alcohol. I’d considered this a win-win situation – staying drunk and vomiting up excess calories.
But puking on the plane was bad. Vomiting in front of my family was bad.
As I reminisced about my Paris trip, I wandered out onto the back porch in Bletchley. It was the middle of the night, pitch black outside, and dead silent.
Perfect for reflection.
I lit a cigarette and stared at the sky.
My family was inside, asleep.
I thought back to the time in high school when I’d come home from a party and vomited into the toilet. My mom held my hair back for me, like she’d done when I had the flu when I was little.
My parents don’t deserve this, I thought. I am breaking their hearts and they don’t deserve this.
Standing on that porch I considered suicide, but then I remembered: it’s only been nine months since I dove out of that window and landed on my head. I remembered screaming, “What do you want from me now, God?!”
Standing on that British porch I thought: God isn’t finished with me yet.
But why would God keep making me suffer? I wondered. Not only did I jump out that window, but I was raped, too! I put a guy in jail!
And what about Larry? Why am I still living with Larry?!I hate living in Pitcairn, that dark apartment, motorcycle rides where we never go anywhere.And it’s cold in Pitcairn!
Suddenly my whole life was flashing through my brain.
I wanted to marry a rock star! Or a writer! I visualized my dream man who looked nothing like Larry, and imagined a dream life that looked nothing like mine. And why do I keep sleeping with idiot guys? And this is the first time I’ve ever traveled! My life at home sucks. I don’t like anything – nothing – about my life.
I just want to be happy, I thought. Why can’t I ever be happy?!
And then I had a thought that had never crossed my mind before – a thought so obvious and necessary, it could only be expressed in the form of a platitude.
I had the thought right there on that back porch.
It was so profound that I declared it out loud to the sky: “Well you can’t find happiness at the bottom of a bottle, Kirsten,” I said.
And just as the words came out of my mouth – at that very instant – a shooting star streaked across the British night sky.
It was the first and only shooting star I’d ever seen.
Someone was splashing water on my face when I regained consciousness. I opened my eyes.
A woman I’d never seen was standing over me, smiling, speaking some sort of jibberish.
Not jibberish, I realized. She’s speaking French.
I heard my mother’s voice behind her – or had it been my mother speaking all along? I couldn’t be sure.
I tried to speak. “Where am I?”
“We’re in Paris,” my mother said. “Are you all right?”
She didn’t mention that we were in a restroom in Paris, but I could see that as I looked around. More specifically, I was lying on the floor in a restroom in Paris. The sinks from which the splashed water came were high above me.
“I’m fine,” I said. As if I were fine.
“She’s okay,” my mom said to my sisters, as if I were okay. My mom nodded, relieved, and one of my sisters bolted out the door to tell my dad I was alive.
“What happened?”
“We think you fainted,” my mom said. Some French women helped lift me to my feet. One of them had a medical box under her arm.
I felt woozy. I wasn’t sure I could stay up.
Apparently, fainting felt exactly like dropping dead. I remembered with vivid clarity thinking: I’m going to die. Then I shoved the memory to the back of my brain and moved forward with my day.
My family eventually got through customs. We got to the home where we were staying in France. Everyone suggested I eat, but I couldn’t.
I suggested I go to bed. I slept for the rest of the day and well into the next morning.
I did not drink in Paris.
On Day Two of our Paris excursion, my family headed for the Louvre.
“That’s just a museum!” I wailed. “I don’t want to go to a museum! I’m going shopping for t-shirts.”
“But we’re going to look at the palace! And the gardens!” my mom said.
“I don’t want to look at a dumb garden.”
“You’ll miss the Mona Lisa!”
“I’ve seen the Mona Lisa in books,” I grumbled.
So while they saw the world’s most famous city their way, I shopped at street vendors seeking a t-shirt for Ronnie. “Bring me a shirt that says something French,” he’d said.
After a full day of street vendors, I learned only that Paris street vendors didn’t like me. The shirt I eventually found never fit Ronnie, and I have no idea what it said because no one would translate for me. It had a kitten on it.
On Day Three of Paris, we all went to the Eiffel Tower. This was the grand finale of our French trip, and my family was excited to see the gorgeous city of Paris from a thousand feet in the air.
At the top of the tower, though, as everyone around us admired the view, I tore into my dad with a venom that should be allocated only to snakes.
“My whole life!” I spat at him. “You moved me for my whole life! How could you think taking me to this stupid city could ever make up for what you’ve done to me! I don’t need to look out at the stupid city! I don’t care that we’re in Paris! I hate this place!”
I made our trip to the Eiffel Tower memorable indeed.
We had an uneventful flight back to London and to our little house in Bletchley, where my parents would stay for three months.
My family had planned a delightful three days in Paris, our only scheduled jaunt from London during my stay, where we would see the romantic city in all its glory.
But I made this enchanting trip very, very challenging for anyone to enjoy.
After spending New Year’s Eve partying with the Americans, I could barely hold up my head while trudging through Heathrow. Everyone was rushing but I lagged behind, my duffel slamming against my exhausted, horribly inebriated body as I dragged myself forward.
My parents kept turning around and yelling, “Kirsten! Hurry up!”
I was barely conscious of their existence. Somehow, we managed to get onto the plane in time for takeoff. Wasted beyond repair, I passed out immediately.
Within 20 minutes, I jolted awake to sudden nausea – a reaction to the flight, maybe, but definitely a reaction to the alcohol. There was no time to get to a restroom.
So THIS is what these are for, I thought, grabbing an air sickness bag from the pocket in front of my seat. I fumbled to open it – why the heck are they made like this – then I wretched several times into the bag trying to keep the vomit contained. I dry-heaved for a few minutes, then sat there holding it, wondering what to do with a bag full of puke.
Too tired and too sick to think for very long, I crumpled the top of the bag, tossed it on the ground next to me, and passed out again.
Mere moments later, we landed in Paris.
My family woke me up before it was our turn to get out of our seats, and I screamed at my parents: “Why can’t you just let me sleep?!”
I was fun.
They shrugged and started walking toward the front of the plane. Eventually and begrudgingly, I got off the plane, too.
The airport was enormous. After disembarking, we had to walk a million miles to get to wherever we were going. “Look, everything’s in French!” my mom said, pointing at signs, excited to share this experience with her children.
I didn’t care where I was, and I sure didn’t care that the signs were in French. I dragged myself and my duffel through the airport behind them, my feet slow, my brain foggy, my muscles aching, feeling like I had so often felt at home – like I’d been hit by a dump truck.
The feeling was so familiar, but the timing so inconvenient. I knew what I was doing to my family; I just couldn’t fix it. Instead I trudged forward, trying to keep up.
Having landed in a new country we had to go through customs, so eventually we stopped walking and stood in a line. I didn’t have the sense to notice how long the line was, or to pretend to be happy about Paris. I couldn’t talk or enjoy my surroundings.
I was physically incapable of doing anything except staying upright, feeling the blood sloshing aimlessly in my head, stunned into complete mental emptiness. It took all of my strength to just remain upright in the line for customs, staring at the ground, kicking my duffel along.
I stood and waited and waited some more. It felt like I’d been standing there forever, no thoughts, no feelings. Just a blob trying to turn back into a human.
And then quite quickly, without any warning and for the first time in my life, I thought: Oh, I’m going to die.
My head spun wildly, and then everything went black.
Back at the hotel, I pocketed a couple of tiny bottles of rum before heading into the hallway “to smoke.” I took my trip journal with me to write poetry, and plopped myself down on a landing in a stairway of the ritzy London hotel.
These were not my normal drinking circumstances.
Two tiny bottles weren’t going to last long, and I was completely alone, though I could feel New Year’s Eve in the air, even in the stairwell. Doors opened and closed, people occasionally bounding past me in the stairwell yelling “Happy New Year!” in the most adorable accents ever.
The writing in my journal was despondent. I had one tiny bottle left to last me the rest of the night, so I snuck back into the hotel room, leaving my journal on a table. It was dark; everyone was trying to sleep. I didn’t know if it was safe to take another bottle so I quietly grabbed another pack of cigarettes, and went back to my spot in the stairwell.
A guy leapt over me with a smile yelling “Happy New Year!”
American, I thought. “Happy New Year,” I replied somberly.
The guy leapt back up the stairs to where I sat. “Are you American?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“You should come to our party!” he said. “All the Americans are partying on the fourth floor!”
“A party?”
“A party! It’s NEW YEAR’S EVE!” He started running down the stairs again. “I’ve gotta get some ice,” he yelled as he disappeared.
He left me there.
Even after two beers and two mini-bottles, I was not walking into any party alone.
But when the same guy bounded past again with two buckets full of ice he said, “Are you still here? C’mon! We’re on the fourth floor!”
“Okay,” I said – and I followed him.
Within two minutes, I was in a hotel room with a hundred of my new closest friends, and enough free alcohol to feed all the people in London.
Finally. I could drink the way I wanted to drink!
So I drank and drank and drank and somewhere in the middle of my holiday blackout, I started making drunken phone calls to Larry.
Larry was playing with his band at Paul’s Place for New Year’s Eve, so I called the bar. “Happy New Year!” I screamed into the phone. “I’m calling from London! Can I talk to Larry?”
Since it was earlier in Pennsylvania than it was in London, the band hadn’t even started playing yet. Larry got on the phone; I drunkenly screamed “Happy New Year!” at him.
The night is a blur, except for endless phone calls made from a stranger’s hotel room. In 1987 – or 1988, as it was in London – long-distance charges were astronomical, and even more expensive when using a hotel phone.
I did not pay for these phone calls. As the night progressed, Larry kept hanging up on me, so I kept calling back. I called maybe forty times.
After the sunrise, I wandered into my family’s hotel room. They were awake, showered, and wondering where I’d been.
Obviously I was wasted and hadn’t slept one minute. But I insisted on calling Larry again.
“I’ll pay for it!” I slurred. “I just need to tell him Happy New Year!”
As if.
“We’ve got to go,” Mom said. “Get your suitcase.”
“I have to call him!” I demanded. “Just give me five minutes!”
My parents were not happy to wait.
And five minutes cost me $50.
Then I slung my purple duffel over my shoulder and followed my family to the airport.
New Year’s Eve was always a reason to celebrate, and my dad knew that if I’d been at home, I would have been drinking somewhere. So he truly believed he was helping me by ordering those two pints at the British pub. He thought we’d have some bonding time, a real daddy-daughter experience, right in the heart of London-proper on one of the biggest nights of the year.
I felt conflicted. Part of me wanted to drink more than anything in the world. The other part really, really didn’t want to drink with my dad. My parents never drank when I was growing up; this was something I did independently, knowing it was frowned upon by my family’s upper echelon. I wasn’t sure how to go about drinking with my dad – but the desire for alcohol beat down that thinking pretty quick.
Two gulps in and my brain sighed with calm. I felt that familiar pleasant buzz.
I tried to sip my pint of “lager” the way my dad did, but my dad drank so slowly! My beer was gone before he was even half done with his.
“You don’t drink very fast,” I said.
“Do you want another one?” he asked. He flagged down a guy with a tray, who brought me another pint. By the time my dad was done with his first, I was done with my second.
I was ready for my third.
Dad said, “This was fun! We’ve got a flight to catch in the morning, so let’s head back to the hotel now.”
It wasn’t even 10:00. On New Year’s Eve.
My thoughts raced, screaming: I’m not even drunk yet! The new year doesn’t even start until midnight! I thought we were going OUT! Two beers??! Why would anyone drink two beers??! I drink more than that just to get ready to go out! I want to stay at the pub! I HAVE to stay at this pub!
My dad cutting me off after two beers felt like a severe punishment, and I had no idea what I’d done to deserve it. Hadn’t I sat quietly enough in the bar? Hadn’t I tried to sip slowly? Was the beer too expensive here? What if I offered to pay? Could my dad could go back to the hotel and come and get me later?
I wanted to be screaming with the throngs in Trafalgar Square!
Really, I just plain wanted to scream.
“We can’t go back now!” I tried. “We just got here!”
“We’ve got to leave at 8 a.m.” my dad explained. “We’re going to France! We’ve got to get some sleep so we don’t miss our flight.”
Non-alcoholics don’t generally understand the “phenomenon of craving” in the alcoholic, since non-alcoholics literally don’t have it.
But I have it in spades. One drop of alcohol in my system makes my entire being – soul, body and mind – beg for more, as though my very survival depends upon it.
And I’d had two whole beers. I wanted to keep drinking – as I usually did – until I passed out.
“Okay,” I told my dad. What choice did I have?
My manipulative mind was racing when I remembered the tiny bottles of alcohol I’d seen in our hotel room. Surely no one would know if I took a couple of those when we got back to the hotel.
Whew. I felt slight mental relief.
Then I sulked as we made our way through crowds of ecstatic celebrators doing exactly what they wanted to do … as I was dragged away from all the excitement so I could “sleep.”
