I have to interrupt this drunkalogue to talk about the addict who died yesterday.
Probably more than one addict died yesterday, actually, but most of us know the name Matthew Perry. Beloved Friends star and world-famous actor, he also wrote a book called Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing. Even the title was funny.
The content was funny, too, but only because Matthew Perry was always able to be funny about anything – even his own demise and first death.
The book details his struggles with addiction from first use to literal death, when he was brought back to life and declared that he would never use again.
When I read Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, one thing stood out to me. It was a story of a lonely child who traveled from one parent, who lived in Canada, to another parent, who lived in America, as an unaccompanied minor. His parents put him on an international flight alone. He was only five years old, and neither parent bothered to go with him on his first flight.
He was terrified and alone and he never recovered from the trauma.
He referred to himself as an unaccompanied minor well into adulthood. The loneliness that he felt on that first trip – and several subsequent trips thereafter – taught him that he wasn’t wanted. He carried the scars with him for the rest of his life.
Addicts almost always have a story like this – a story onto which they grasp that explains who they are and why, a story that explains why they’re using. They believe it’s the root cause of their addictions.
Their perceived trauma becomes an excuse. With time, they should heal from the trauma – but they instead hide behind the perception, the excuse, the feeling that they can never overcome the trauma.
My trauma was my parents moving me to eight different schools in 12 years. After a mid-year move in 8th grade, I broke.
An addict who wants to get clean has to do one thing that, from his book, I don’t believe Matthew Perry ever did. Addicts need to forgive whoever caused the trauma and recognize that the blame for addiction can’t be placed anywhere but on the addict.
I think Matthew Perry was starting to get clean, recognized the trauma, but still held onto it so tightly that he had no way to break free. I think he started using again because he couldn’t find it in himself to forgive them – or to forgive himself – for his entire life.
I watched the same thing happen with Jeff Conway, who was on Celebrity Rehab. He’d been locked in a car trunk at a young age, bullied by some boys who were total jerks, and he couldn’t get over it.
I don’t think Matthew Perry randomly drowned; I imagine toxicity levels in his bloodstream were very high. I’m glad he wrote the book; it gave a clear picture of how much abuse a body can take before crumbling.
But I’m so, so sad that he didn’t recognize his ability to forgive before it was too late. It’s a powerful tool, and one that we all can use to survive the very worst things that were ever done to us – by our parents and anyone else who comes our way.
I will dearly miss Matthew Perry, his quick wit and his sweet soul, even though I never met him. And I am so, so saddened by his death.
When another addict dies, it’s always heartbreaking; but this one hits so close to home, I had to speak up.
Larry slept in my dorm room the night I returned to campus. He’d done it before, climbing into my loft bed at night, peeing out the window before sunrise.
I usually snuck him in through the first floor window after a long night of drinking, but we were careless on the first night of the new semester. We walked right into my room – the room directly across the hall from the living quarters of the Resident Assistant, the dorm’s main security person.
Since I’d had a few issues with my hamsters escaping already, to say I had been previously warned would be an extreme understatement.
I was immediately put on social probation – again. If I violated my probation, I would not be able to graduate in May.
Unlike my first social probation experience, this one concerned me. I’d passed all of my classes for the prior three and a half years. I’d survived until the very last semester of senior year. And now, with a 37-year-old in my bed who scared the bejeezus out of many students and every authority figure on campus, I was risking a timely graduation.
“I don’t know what to do!” I said to Larry. “You have to sleep over sometimes!”
“I’ll figure it out,” Larry said. And, as usual, he did. He took the truck home – much against my will – and figured it out.
The next time he came to visit, Larry showed up in the same old black Ford F150 pickup truck – but now it had a severely ugly giant white thing on the back.
“What’d you do to the truck?” I asked.
“I put a cap on it!” Larry smiled. “Now we can sleep there!”
“Oh, like camping!” I said. “That’s awesome!” I forgot how ugly it was; now I could graduate!
“We can spread out, too! Plenty of room in there!” He was so proud of himself. The cap probably cost him a fortune.
That night we went to The Rose, then to Denny’s for a “midnight breakfast.” (It was 3 a.m.) After breakfast, we crawled into the back of the truck where Larry had stored a blanket and a pillow.
The knit blanket was about five feet long, with holes. There was no pillowcase on the bed pillow. Both had been in the back of the truck; they were already very, very cold.
And we had to share them, like we did in every other bed.
The bed of the pickup truck was dirty and brutally made of hard, ridged metal. It was the most uncomfortable sleeping surface I’d ever encountered.
There was no heat in the truck bed to counter the January weather.
Drunk as usual, I decided this was great. Larry and I christened our new sleeping quarters, then I huddled up next to him for warmth and passed out somewhere around 5 a.m.
I woke up freezing in the dark.
My bare body was sticking to the icy metal and I was bruised from rolling around on the bumpy surface. I pulled my jeans back on, complete with the Levi’s rivets that always prodded my body when I slept in them. I grabbed the blanket off Larry, sitting up and wrapping it around myself while waiting for my teeth to stop chattering.
Larry barely woke up. “Ya all right, Baby?”
“Yeah,” I said, dying.
Eventually I fell asleep and, when I woke again, sunlight electrified our white ceiling.
Larry was shaking the truck trying to get out. “I gotta take a piss,” he said.
We slept this way half a dozen more times … just so I could graduate.
Before going back to college after winter break, Larry and I spent some holiday fun time with Larry’s brother, Timmy, and his family.
Timmy was two years younger than Larry – so, mid-thirties. Unlike Larry, Timmy was married and had a daughter who was in high school. Kim was in her rebellious years, like me, and I related a lot more with her than I did with her parents. Timmy and his wife, Lee, were just old fogies like my own parents.
But I was confused. I didn’t want to give away my age by hanging out with the daughter. So I sat with Timmy and Larry and Lee at the kitchen table, listening to them complain about their daughter’s “phase” and wondering what to do about it.
I wanted to say leave her alone! She’s doing what she wants to do! Why can’t she stay out until 2 a.m.? What’s unreasonable about that? She’s 16 for God’s sake! But I said nothing. I frequently walked outside to smoke cigarettes and tune out the whole lot of them.
Fortunately Timmy also wanted to tune out the whole lot of them, so while Timmy also had a sports-themed bar downstairs, Larry, Timmy and I often went to the local VFW. I have no idea if Timmy was a veteran of a foreign war, although his age put him directly in the draft path for Vietnam. If he went to Vietnam, he never talked about it. But he sure did love that VFW.
When Larry and I were finally able to go off with Timmy to drink cheap draft beers, my biggest concerns were behind me. The daughter was no longer a confusion for me; I didn’t have to relate to her or her parents. Timmy and Larry could talk and I could just sit there and drink. The VFW even had BeerNuts.
I sat on the bar stool and I ate Beer Nuts and drank beer; I stared at the scene around me.
At the VFW, my new drinking buddies were decades older than me. The men had pot bellies and bald heads and they wore hats that said VFW and Ford and Irwin Bowlers.
They talked loudly to the people next to them, so loud in fact that no one could hear the television over the bar, and nearly every one of them was male. Timmy talked louder than almost everyone else, able to carry an entire conversation across the bar and into the corners of the establishment if necessary.
Timmy was darling and funny and hyper, although I rarely spoke to him one-on-one. When I did have time alone with Timmy, it ended in a situation that I pretend never happened for fear of causing him harm 40 years later.
Timmy’s wife thankfully never wanted to go the VFW. She stayed home with “Kimmy” – who wanted to be called Kim – and neither of them ever ventured out just to get sloshed.
So I went and listened with one ear to Larry and Timmy blather on about bikes and cars, and listened with the other ear to the incredibly dull conversations around me, and with both eyes I stared at the TV. Being in the bar with these people fascinated me; it was like being an alien observing human life forms.
I was glad to be returning to college in a few days. It never occurred to me that this would be my life after graduation.
On Christmas morning in the Moore household, we’d leisurely awake – either blissfully late or brutally early, depending on our ages – and run downstairs to the tree. Like in a Hallmark movie, we’d find dozens of presents in brightly colored paper perfectly placed under the tree – every one carefully matched with the deep desires of its designated recipient. We’d spend the day enjoying the gifts, enjoying each other, feeling the love.
But in 1985, I didn’t live at my parents’ house. I lived in that cold, tiny room with three other people: no tree, no lights, no presents. I’m not sure – because I never asked – what Christmas morning was like for Larry and his four siblings, but 1985 wasn’t like any Christmas I’d ever known before.
My parents – who kindly and thoughtfully invited over both Larry and me for Christmas day – gave us both gifts and fed us better than I’d eaten in months, other than Thanksgiving. We were hopefully grateful and definitely sober for the bulk of the day.
But being with my parents nauseated me – not because they were nauseating, which is what I claimed at the time, but because I couldn’t rectify my aberrant feelings.
My parents represented safety and care, offering me a haven from the cruel outside world. They took care of me for my entire life, provided me with everything I could ever need. My sisters and I always had our issues but we’d been raised with infinite love. My parents were loving and kind and beautiful people, and they taught me to be a loving, kind and beautiful person.
But that’s not who I was under the influence of alcohol and drugs.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want someone to care for me – obviously, I’d found Larry to do that job. It was that I believed I wasn’t worthy of their love and kindness. I knew what I was doing when I wasn’t in their home; I knew that my behaviors were absolutely destroying them. The guilt that came from just being near them was staggering.
So I wanted to stay away from them. I wanted to never see them, never remember their kindness, never think about how much I was loved before I left. I wanted to completely ignore their way of life so that I wouldn’t recognize the abyss between their life and mine.
And having Larry in my parents’ home nauseated me most of all. I didn’t feel proud or happy to have him there. He didn’t fit into his role when my parents were around. I felt like I had two fathers and one of them was an enormous fraud. At the time, I didn’t know which one it was; I just knew that something was desperately wrong.
Of course for this, I blamed my parents. They expected so much from me.
So at the end of Christmas with my parents, I thanked God that it was over and I didn’t have to do that again for a whole year. I ran away as fast and as far as I could.
I ran all the way to Pitcairn, where we found one bar open, mostly empty. The only people there seemed to have no one to love them on Christmas day.
I sat with them, both sad and happy to be there, and I drank.
Christmas break was substantially different for me in senior year than it had been in prior years.
During junior year break, a typical day went like this:
I woke up in a large, warm bed while someone made breakfast downstairs. I had a little brown poodle who casually greeted me when I arrived in the kitchen, at which point I started complaining about my breakfast and asking if I could have Peanut Butter Crunch instead. (I could not.) I complained loudly and moped silently all day about how hard my life was, about how much I wanted to get out of this stupid house with its stupid rules. I showered for 55 minutes, using all the hot water in the house. I locked myself in my room, buried under my headphones, and blasted Violent Femmes at full volume to drown out the world. After dark, I smoked cigarettes outside, sulking until the wee hours. Eventually I fell asleep in my warm, comfortable bed.
During senior year break, a typical day went like this:
I woke up smashed into a very cold wall while Larry elbowed me, trying to reach his cigarettes. He called from the bed “ya in there Dante?” to determine if the bathroom was empty. Danny would grunt and the toilet would flush, enticing Larry into the bathroom and sending Danny out the front door. I’d chain smoke cigarettes until Larry reappeared from the bathroom to have sex. Afterward, without showering, I’d light another cigarette and pull on yesterday’s jeans. We’d go to the diner downstairs, where I’d consume chocolate milk and bacon, then we’d hit the streets … for 30 yards. Inside Barry’s Bar, Larry said a loud hello to the other old men in there, then we’d drink for hours, pausing only to go back to the apartment and have more sex. We’d play the jukebox and drink until dinnertime, at which point we’d order burgers and then drink until the bar closed.
On big days during junior year:
My parents, sister and I would hike through a tree farm to cut down the perfect White Pine. We’d decorate the tree with a hundred ornaments, each one with its own story, then wrap garland around its branches. We’d drive around looking at lights, go sled riding if there was snow, or make a snowman in the yard with a real carrot. We’d go to church for a candlelight service and have a wonder-filled Christmas morning with so many presents we couldn’t count them all, and they were all exactly what we wanted.
On big days during senior year:
We’d walk through the snow to Caputo’s and buy square pizza that tasted like dish detergent. We’d take the bike across the river to Paul’s Place, next to the strip club, and drink until well past closing time. Or we’d hit Denny’s at 3 a.m. and order eggs “lookin’ right at me baby” for Larry and pancakes – sometimes with chocolate chips – for me. We did not go to church or decorate a tree or buy each other presents.
By senior year, I didn’t even want to look at Christmas lights. I knew what I was missing. I detested the beautifully decorated holiday houses. They reminded me that something better was still out there, something simple that used to be able to make me smile.
The only thing worse than my pre-Christmas angst was living through Christmas day.
If I had to categorize the relationship I had with Larry, I would not say it was love. It was the dictionary definition of lust.
In Larry’s world, having a woman on the back of the bike was the only essential thing to complete his lifestyle. I don’t believe it mattered to him who I was, how deeply I felt about things, what I thought about the state of the world, or how much intelligence I had.
It mattered that I looked good on the back of the bike, that I was always there when he went places, and that we had plenty of sex.
While I was still wishing I had more intellectual companionship than Larry could provide, I knew my place. I knew that in order to have unlimited beer and chocolate milk, I needed to do whatever Larry wanted to do, go wherever Larry wanted to go, be whoever Larry wanted me to be.
Larry wanted me to be a hard-core biker chick with no qualms about risk – so that’s what I became.
In addition, we had a physical relationship that was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Given that we had little else to do, and little money with which to do anything, we had sex all the time. We had sex in the morning and sex at night, and often found time for sex once or twice during the day, too.
Larry’s vasectomy gave me the freedom to enjoy sex for the first time in my life. As a result, we had mind-blowing sex almost every time we connected. We could have sex anywhere at any time, virtually always resulting in simultaneous orgasms.
So we had sex a lot.
It helped me that he played guitar and sang, because I was in love with music. It also helped that we had absolutely nothing in common. There was no thinking involved – just animal instinct. Our conversations were baseless and dull. He talked about the bike; I thought about the meaning of life.
We rarely connected emotionally or philosophically. My head was swimming with ideas and observations about this new life I’d started. Looking at Larry, watching Larry, listening to Larry … it fascinated me – like Jane Goodall, observing the apes.
I’d never experienced anything as wild as Larry. He was tough and simple and confident. He was sure and determined and free. He had nothing, including ambition, yet he was extremely comfortable with himself – and that never wavered.
While I believed that he was 100% in charge of everything, he spent his time pacifying me – my requests for camping, comfort foods, beer, or leather. He even occasionally got me cocaine, in spite of its expense. He wanted me to be happy, and would have given me anything I’d asked for, if he could afford it.
He couldn’t afford things like traveling on the toll roads, or flying anywhere. He couldn’t afford a vehicle off the showroom floor or a custom-tailored suit. But those weren’t things I wanted anyway. I just wanted to drink, to stay drunk, and to get cocaine occasionally.
Being with Larry, I had everything I wanted, except sometimes there was no heat.
Fortunately his body kept me from freezing, and the desire for warmth added to our sexual activity. It was a simple life, really.
Looking back often makes me forget the pleasurable parts. I recognize all of my idiocy – and his. But there were pleasurable parts – and those memories are still inside my brain somewhere, swimming around with my animal observations.
Like the idealization of sleeping on the beach and living on raw potatoes, I loved the idea of camping. Camping was something that I imagined I could do forever: a cozy tent in the woods, cooking hot dogs and marshmallows over a roaring fire, staring at the stars.
As a girl, camping usually involved a camper – five of us shoved into fold-out beds, eating burgers cooked on a little grill, using a shower somewhere down the street. It was probably more “glamping” then camping. We camped at the beach, too, which made it that much more exciting. Sometimes I would nap on the hammock outside, which was delightful.
All of my camping memories were fond ones.
So I dreamed about camping. A case of beer and a bag of marshmallows seemed like all we would need, and those glorious summer nights would re-materialize in front of me.
We’d be sitting in Barry’s Bar and I’d say: “Can we go camping?”
“Camping?!?” Larry said the first time I asked. “We have everything we need right here!”
But after awhile, he started to realize I wasn’t giving up on the idea. He’d say: “Nah, not tonight. Maybe next week.” He said it over and over until I started to believe we would never go.
One night, on an atypical winter day, when the weather was nice enough that we’d ridden the motorcycle to a bar far from home, I mentioned camping again.
Larry said: “Okay! Let’s go!” And Larry meant now.
He got up off the bar stool, put on his leather jacket, and we hopped on the bike. I was so excited I could scream. It was gorgeous outside – unseasonably warm – so I rode with my arms outstretched in the wind, imagining sitting by a roaring fire pulling apart those gooey marshmallows.
Neither of us had any idea where the nearest campground might be. We were already far from Pitcairn, and we drove at least an hour before we saw a sign for a campground.
We pulled in; nobody was at the check-in booth. It was winter; nobody was anywhere. In fact, we never saw a human.
We drove through the grounds and found a campsite far from the gate – the perfect spot. “There’s a good one!” Larry said.
He turned off the bike, making it pitch black and deathly silent. I was standing on a patch of gravel but could see nothing.
Flicking lighters randomly, we searched for sticks to build a fire, which Larry tried to burn with his lighter. The handfuls of grass Larry found did nothing to help our cause, but he kept trying.
As my eyes adjusted, I looked around. This is the moment I realized we didn’t have a tent.
Then I realized we didn’t have a sleeping bag or a pillow. The roaring fire was in my imagination, too, as was the bag of marshmallows. We didn’t even have beer; we surely didn’t have food.
Larry gave up on building a fire. He said, “I guess we should just get some sleep!” He threw his helmet on the ground, tossed his leather jacket over it, and laid down in the gravel.
I stared at him for a minute. This was not the dream.
“C’mon, Baby, I’ll keep ya warm!” he said. He didn’t seem to know the dream at all.
It was painful sleeping in gravel. And it was very much not warm.
The next morning, we woke up when the sun rose, frost all around us, freezing beyond frozen.
Sometime after we started living with Larry’s brother, Danny started dating Carol, so our minuscule apartment housed four people. Danny and Carol slept together in the kitchen on the fold-out chair that was barely big enough for one person, while Larry and I continued to sleep on the twin bed. All four of us shared the doorless bathroom and the rusty sinks and the dorm-sized fridge. Since it was cold outside and there was no apparent heat inside, I guess we kept each other warm.
Carol was a husky type who never once smiled, her voice loud, low and angry. Her eyes were big and glassy and she always pulled back her stringy hair into a ponytail, making her face seem harsher than it needed to be. She was taller and wider than me, and a little intimidating. But Danny liked her and he was a kind man, so I decided to be grateful for female companionship.
One day Danny and Larry went out to get food or cigarettes or beer, leaving Carol and me alone in the apartment. We hung out on the fold-out chair, which was still folded out like a bed. She was angrily spewing venom about some guys she’d met earlier in the day.
“I don’t have to take none of their shit,” she spat. I didn’t know what she was talking about; I just kept nodding and grunting my agreement.
While still rambling on, Carol casually reached into her purse and pulled out a tiny baggie of something black.
“Ya want some?” she asked.
I had given up marijuana in high school and I sure didn’t want to do opium again. “No thanks,” I said, swigging my drug of choice.
Carol pulled out a small rubber hose from her purse, still talking about the guys she’d met down the street. Then she pulled out a hypodermic needle, a lighter, some foil … I don’t know what all she had in there. But while she talked as casually as could be, she liquified the black stuff and sucked it into the needle.
“Don’t tell Danny,” she said. “He doesn’t like me doin’ this stuff.”
“Okay.” I had no idea what I was not telling him. “What is it?” My voice shook a little.
“Just some H,” she said. “Ya sure you don’t want some?”
“I’m sure, thanks,” I said, scared to death and trying to remain cool.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” she said, and she plunged the needle into her arm.
I watched her shoot heroin from twelve inches away. There was nowhere for me to go. I had nothing else to do.
Carol got quiet very quickly. There was no more talk about the guys.
“You have no fuckin’ idea what you’re missing,” she said. “You have no ….” And then she stopped talking. She swung her head from side to side slowly, like she was singing some very mellow song inside her brain.
Then she reached for a cigarette. She lit it after 12 tries, then just held it while it burned. She stared at the wall for a very long time.
I wanted so badly to leave.
If this is heroin, I thought, I never, ever want to do heroin.
Carol dated Danny for a very long time, so we lived together for the rest of my college career. I never saw her shoot up again and I never told Danny.
After they broke up, I only saw Carol once, in a bar; she didn’t acknowledge me. I assume she died young.
Larry and I did not eat much. He was very thin and I – also malnourished – subsisted mostly on beer and whatever nuts were in that bowl on Barry’s bar. We often had burgers. There’s something about a cheeseburger that makes it really easy to eat, even if it has to be done with beer.
Occasionally we would splurge and get a pizza. While I loved pineapple on my pizza, Larry would have none of that silly fruit mixed with his pizza.
Larry liked mushrooms and pepperoni, so we got that every time.
I learned to love mushrooms and pepperoni on my pizza, so much so that I will now order these toppings when I am seeking a comfort food (as if pizza weren’t already enough of a comfort food).
And cold pizza in the mornings was one of my favorite breakfast foods. I loved reaching into the tiny fridge and pulling out a giant pizza box, folded over twice so that it fit inside, and pulling out a slice of hardened pizza for breakfast.
Mushroom and pepperoni pizza also takes me back to the few moments of the day when I didn’t drink beer. I couldn’t consume pizza and beer together.
At some point, after drinking too much beer while trying to eat pizza – or eating too much pizza while drinking beer – I realized that I was getting sick. Rather than recognize any kind of lactose intolerance or gluten problem (which I had later in spades), I just suffered every time I ate pizza.
I really wanted to eat pizza while drinking beer. Everyone said pizza and beer were a great combination; I wanted to believe them. They sold beer right there at the pizza place, and Larry really enjoyed pizza and beer together, and everyone else seemed to be fine. But I wasn’t.
I just couldn’t pull it off. I got sick every time. Even at college, I had to keep my beer and pizza separate. At college, I mostly kept my meals separate from my drinking. With Larry, I was drinking all day long, so there was not a lot of room left for food.
Eating pizza while drinking beer made me feel like a waterlogged hippo.
I had not yet learned the fine art of vomiting when I felt sick. I just suffered. I guzzled the beer, then shoveled in some pizza, then guzzled more beer, and more pizza. I ate as much of the pizza as I could possibly consume, leaving a couple of slices leftover for morning.
Later in my drinking career, I learned that if I felt sick – even for a second – I could go somewhere and vomit, then come back and drink more. This was a huge relief to me. I was able to drink for many, many more hours this way – vomiting sometimes four or five times a night.
But I never vomited after pizza. A precious commodity like mushroom-pepperoni pizza cannot be wasted in such a manner.
I was almost 30 before I realized I had trouble digesting dairy – which includes cheese. To be honest, by then it was just a relief to know.
Bonnie and I were headed to Pittsburgh for Christmas break when we stopped at The Hood to have “one for the road.” But leaving after one beer was hard.
As consolation we decided to stop at the Bier House a few blocks away. But the Bier House was dreadfully dull. So after one beer, we came up with a brilliant plan.
“Let’s have one beer at every bar between here and Pittsburgh!”
“Great idea! Let’s do it!”
By then I’d inadvertently decided that driving drunk was okay. I was always drunk and I still wanted to drive. My rationale was that simple. And stupid.
We hopped into the pickup and drove to the next bar, and the next. There were quite a few bars between Alliance and Salem, 20 miles away. Also there were bars that appeared town-less.
We stopped at all of them.
We’d driven the route before, so it was fun seeing the interiors of the places we’d always passed. We proudly stuck to our one-beer regimen. Most were relatively empty bars, which was perfect for us.
When we stopped at a large, dark building on the side of a two-lane road somewhere near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, we knew it would be our last stop. The drinking age in Pennsylvania was 21, and Bonnie wasn’t legal yet. We went inside.
There were pool tables and a brightly lit jukebox blasting tunes in the corner. The place was sprawling and empty, except for a couple of “old” guys (maybe 40) playing pool. We ordered our beers and decided to have a shot, too, since it was our last stop.
We drank our “last beer” and then we drank several more on top of the dozen or so beers we’d had already. I vaguely remember the guys sending us shots more than once, and trying to play pool with double vision. (There should only be one cue ball.)
By the time we dragged ourselves outside, we could hardly walk.
Laughing like idiots, we aimed ourselves toward the truck. I stumbled over to the driver’s side, throwing myself against the hood to stay upright. I leaned on the truck all the way around, clawing my way toward the driver’s side, grasping in the dark for a door handle. I grabbed it and pulled the door open – it was never locked – and threw my boot up onto the running board to climb in.
As I climbed, I reached for the grab handle above my head, but I missed. My hand grabbed only air and I fell backwards into the gravel, hooting “whooooaaa!” as I went. I felt nothing but the effects of the alcohol. I slammed my head on the parking lot as an afterthought, then pushed myself back into a sitting position, flailing at the open door to pull myself up.
Finally upright, with Bonnie still laughing, I gripped the steering wheel, stepped on the running board, and successfully hauled myself into the driver’s seat. I felt for the ignition with the key and, holding my left hand over my eye so I could see straight, I started the truck.
That’s when I realized it had been snowing. It took me a minute to find the windshield wipers, but eventually I swooshed away the flurries that had settled. Then I put the truck into reverse, pulled onto the pitch black road, and drove the remaining 90 minutes to Pittsburgh.
I have no memory of the drive. Someone must have been praying mightily for me that night.
