After all those nights standing at the gas station and waiting for drug dealers, I figured out that the local drug dealers just made their rounds whenever they had something to sell. They stopped at that gas station whenever they saw someone waiting.
I’m pretty sure Gregg never made any actual phone calls to anyone.
Since I was single for two minutes and had a massive crush on Kurt the cocaine dealer, I knew just where to go. I was looking for a long, sleek black car. And I was only at the gas station for about 20 minutes before it arrived.
Kurt got out of the car, all dark and skinny and mysterious, and strolled straight into the convenience store, not even noticing I was there. Before I could catch him, he was gone.
I thought: Should I follow him?
Then: No, I should not.
It was hard, watching him go past without acknowledgement, and not knowing if I’d even get a chance to talk to him, let alone ask about buying cocaine. I’d never done my own drug deal before.
I was standing outside the door, desperate but trying to appear aloof, when Kurt came back outside. He was smacking a pack of cigarettes against his fist. He saw me move in his periphery and acknowledged me with a brief, close-lipped smile and a nod.
He remembers me.
I ran to catch him before he got in his car.
“Hey Kurt …” I started. Then I didn’t know what to say. This was Kurt, after all. Kurt was eminently cool. And I was struggling not to appear desperate.
I didn’t want to believe, at that point, that I was a drug addict. I knew that sometimes there were real junkies, completely strung out, hanging out at the gas station. They stood and stared into the abyss until someone appeared with their fix.
I didn’t want to be that person.
I wanted to be confident and beautiful. I wanted Kurt to take one look at me and think, “Wow, what a knockout! I’d like to get to know her better!”
And then I wanted Kurt to give me some coke.
But I just stuttered at him. What was the coolest way to look hot and also say, “Can I buy some cocaine from you?”
I really, really wanted him to like me. He was the first person I’d found worthy of my affections in years. But I did not appear confident. I’m fairly certain that I came across more like a limp, dying weed.
So when I tried to speak, I was a complete dweeb. It was like asking someone for a date, and the last time I’d done that, in 9th grade, I’d been laughed across the room like part of a Peanuts cartoon.
Kurt saw me stumbling over my words and said, “Get in.”
He didn’t have to ask twice. I raced around to the passenger side of his car and hopped in. Kurt was very, very quiet. He offered me a cigarette, but I had my own. We both lit smokes and sat silently for a moment.
“Where’s Gregg?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re not together anymore.”
“Huh.”
Maybe Kurt was waiting for the inevitable question; he was, after all, a drug dealer.
Instead I said, “What are you doing tonight?”
Kurt turned and stared at me for a second. I dragged on my cigarette.
He put the car in reverse and looked at me again. “Wanna go somewhere?”
I’d never known a pathological liar before. There was no way to google such a thing in 1988, and I had no idea that this wasn’t a fixable problem.
I had only known Gregg for half a year and he’d lied to me a thousand times. Gregg lied to me about enormous things, like whether or not he had $400 for our vacation, about stealing the rent money to pay for cocaine, and about having a full-time job.
But he also lied about things that didn’t matter, like whether or not he’d had a sandwich, or his favorite song. I learned to believe nothing he said was true.
He did his best to make me believe his lies, too. He’d disappear for hours and hours, as though he were going to work, probably splashing in puddles at a nearby construction site so he could look like he’d been working.
Whenever I asked him about money, he reassured me as though I could trust him. He’d put his strong arms around me and squeeze, as though that confirmed that he was trustworthy.
Gregg was the youngest of six boys, all raised by a mother who died when Gregg was 14 and a raging alcoholic father. I don’t know what killed Gregg’s mom, but I knew that people who were raised by alcoholics tended to become alcoholics.
I didn’t see that in Gregg. He was a pothead, sure, but he seemed to be okay without alcohol. In addition to pot, of course, Gregg used sex to avoid intimacy. We both did.
But I saw Gregg’s family life as a pretty good excuse for being a liar. I imagined him being smacked around by his brothers for opening his mouth, beaten by his father in a drunken rage, with no calming motherly presence to save him from the horrors of adolescence.
I’d met his father; he actually existed. His father was drinking, sullen and brooding on the few occasions I’d seen him, living in the pitch blackness of an empty house. Gregg’s brothers had all moved away and left Gregg behind, where I’d found him flopping around like a fish on sand.
I couldn’t imagine the hell that had been his childhood. I tried to figure out Gregg’s motives, what made him tick. I guessed that if he ever felt safe, he would never have to lie.
But Gregg never felt safe, with me or with anyone else. Nothing I did could make him feel safe.
He lied about jobs, school, girlfriends, guy friends, disagreements, feelings and sandwiches. He lied when telling the truth would do. And since no one could trust him and he was broke, he always, always lied about money.
Gregg lied about everything. He didn’t seem to know the truth.
I believe Gregg could never be himself in the world. He thought he needed to be better, brighter, more handsome, more clever, funnier, smarter and nicer than he acted. He believed that lying about himself would make other people think more highly of him.
The opposite happened, of course; he never seemed to recognize this. He just kept lying about everything to everyone.
For me, though, lying is tantamount to physical abuse. Even during my addiction, I wanted to be honest. The only thing I lied about was my addiction.
Lying breaks trust, and I learned through this relationship that trust was the only thing that actually matters in a relationship. Without it, there’s no chance for a relationship to survive.
Eventually it didn’t matter why he lied. I just wanted to get away from him.
I made a reservation to take a short vacation with Gregg, as though that were something we could afford. Neither of us had a full-time job. Rather than see this as a hindrance, I considered it an opportunity.
“We need $400,” I told Gregg. “I need you to pay for this. Can you do that?”
“Of course,” Gregg said, kissing me. He often kissed me after lying; it sealed the deal for him. If I kissed him back, he knew he’d gotten away with another one.
“Seriously,” I said. “This is important. Four hundred dollars by next Friday, otherwise we can’t go.”
“Four hundred dollars,” Gregg said, “okay.” He kissed me again.
I asked him during the week if he had the money yet, and he assured me he was working on it. He never answered questions about how he would get the money, where it would come from, whether or not he’d be doing any work. He just kept telling me not to worry about it.
I assumed he was selling drugs or something else that I would happily condone if it meant we could go on vacation. I didn’t question Gregg’s methods.
On Thursday night, we packed and got ready to go. This consisted of putting toothbrushes in a plastic bag with some cigarettes.
“Do you have the money?” I asked before I could get any sleep.
“I’ve got it,” he said.
“Can I see it?” I was getting wise.
“I’ve got it!” Gregg said, offended that I would doubt him.
“Cool,” I said.
We went to sleep in my tiny efficiency apartment on the pullout sofa bed from my grandmother, waking many hours after sunrise for our trip.
I woke up gleeful, and went into the bathroom.
Gregg woke up less gleeful. When I walked out of the bathroom, he was in full-tilt panic mode.
“It’s gone!” he screamed. “The money is gone!”
I walked to where Gregg was standing next to a fold-out chair that I’d crammed in front of my interior door. Gregg had flipped the chair upside down and was standing in the space between the chair and sofabed.
“What are you talking about?”
“I put the money under this chair last night,” Gregg wailed, “and now it’s gone! Somebody must have come in here in the middle of the night and stolen it!”
“You put it under the chair?”
“Yes!” He was almost in tears. “It was right here! Someone must have broken in last night! It’s all gone!”
I looked around at my minuscule apartment. There was a 16-inch path at the foot of the bed that led to my back door, and no way in or out of the front door because of the chair. There wasn’t even room to walk.
“You’re saying that someone came into this room without waking us up….”
“Yes!”
“They came in and randomly looked under this chair …” I flipped the chair back for emphasis. “Then they found four hundred dollars and walked out without waking us up?”
“They must have!” Gregg wailed. “It’s all gone!”
It was as though Gregg believed this ridiculous story. In his mind, maybe it was completely true.
“You put all the money under the chair,” I sighed.
“I did!” Gregg screamed. “It was right here!”
“The money was not there,” I said. “It was never there.”
“I swear on my mother’s grave!” Gregg said. Briefly I wondered if his mother had actually died.
“Get out,” I said. “And don’t come back, ever.”
“I swear it was …”
“GO.” I said.
Gregg left, and stayed gone for a long, long time.
Gregg and I woke up one day and still had some acid left.
At $3 a hit, and because I had not yet built up any resistance to LSD, leftovers were common.
“Can we just do it again, please?” I asked Gregg. I just wanted to be high.
“Okay,” he said. We had the high drama moment of putting the tabs on our tongues and then … waited.
I started to shake. My heart started to race. I saw little trails behind my closed eyelids, but nothing else happened.
I wasn’t happy with the heart-racing thing. “This doesn’t feel right at all,” I said. I wasn’t high. I was just … jittery. “Why am I shaking?”
“That’s just the Strychnine,” Gregg said.
“Strychnine?!?”
“Yeah, they use it to make acid,” Gregg said.
“Well I want it to stop!” I nearly screamed.
“It will,” he said.
As if.
It didn’t stop for at least two hours. Meanwhile I did not have any kind of fun. I just sat around panicked. I was afraid to smoke because I was on poison, and my heart wouldn’t stop racing, and I was pretty sure I would kill myself if I even lit a cigarette.
Eventually when my heart stopped its incessant pounding, I walked to the bar, where I got drunk and forgot I was not-high on Strychnine.
Another day, though, I decided that streaking was a lost art. “Let’s all streak to the mailbox!” I yelled, tearing off all my clothes and racing to the mailbox, feeling the wind in my hair, my breath strong in my chest, my feet grazing the pavement as I ran.
I ran two blocks – and back. It was awesome. “Who’s next?” I asked upon my return.
Everyone just stared at me. Running on LSD was awesome, and running naked was awesome. I have no idea why nobody else wanted to try it.
Another night, Gregg and I went out with Barry and Kim, the neighbors who lived in the apartment next door. Barry and Kim were getting married the next day and they wanted to do something really fun, so we all went out together and got wasted in a parking lot by a lake.
The party ended when Kim found me having sex with Barry in the front seat of the car, which I had never done before and certainly hadn’t wanted to do the night before their wedding.
But I did.
Barry and Kim still lived next door to me after they got married, but Gregg and I didn’t party with them anymore. Another two acquaintances disappeared from my life.
Little things were happening that separated me from the other people in the world. I had no idea that my daily “normal” was “beyond wasted” for most people. I didn’t know that some people spent time sober. I didn’t know that everyone wasn’t doing exactly what I was doing … except that these little things kept happening.
I lost my keys. I left Kitty outside in the snow. I tried to make chicken marsala but drank all the wine. I puked on the walls in my kitchen. I puked in my bathtub and slipped on it when trying to shower. I burned my couch, my mattress, my carpet, my pillow. I slept through a job interview. I went to a job interview without shoes. I went to the bar without shoes.
As long as I kept drinking, these little things kept happening.
I fell head over heels in love with Kurt the moment I laid eyes on him. He stepped out of that car at the gas station and I thought, Oh my GOD, where have you been all my life?
Then I thought, Do you have any cocaine? We’d been waiting for hours for him to appear, so we were thrilled when he pulled out a little baggie and sold it to us.
Then he disappeared into the wind.
Gregg told me that Kurt was the mayor’s son and a junkie. This made me love Kurt even more.
When the Grateful Dead was in town in June, Gregg and I went downtown to the Civic Arena – with Kurt. We didn’t have any tickets to the show; we went into town to party with the Deadheads.
The Civic Arena parking lot was mayhem. It was swarming with tie-dyed wannabe-hippies, some who had just pulled up in their VW minibus and poured out onto the asphalt. A hundred boomboxes all blasted bootleg Dead concerts. Drugs were visible everywhere, as though Grateful Dead tailgate parties were immune to the law.
Everyone was dancing.
Kurt and I walked together, admiring the crowd. Gregg followed us like a lost puppy as we explored.
Kurt didn’t talk much. When he did, his voice was soft but intense. “Do you hear the sirens?” Kurt asked.
I stopped walking and listened. Sure enough, far in the distance, I heard sirens. “Yes,” I said, astounded by Kurt’s brilliance at locating the distant wails in the midst of such chaos.
“Stay far away from those,” he said, still walking.
I caught up quickly. “Why?”
“Cops,” Kurt said.
“Oh, right.” I made a mental note to always listen to Kurt.
A guy with a brown floppy hat and a full beard jumped in front of us; he pulled out a huge roll of LSD and waved it in Kurt’s face. The guy was a bit frantic.
Kurt stopped walking and stared at the guy until he settled down. Finally Kurt said, “No thanks.”
We had only walked a few more yards before a young, blond girl in a similar floppy hat held up a strip of acid tabs as we walked by. Kurt reached out and snagged 2 tabs off the bottom almost without stopping. He smiled at the girl and put a tab on his tongue.
“Thanks,” Kurt said. He ripped the second tab in half and put one half on my tongue. He handed the other half to Gregg.
Within minutes, we were dancing in the parking lot, too.
After nightfall, Kurt bought a huge joint and we shared it outside under the stars. Life was glorious.
Until it wasn’t.
Suddenly a dragon swooped down from the night sky, nearly tearing off my head.
“WHAT WAS THAT?” I shouted.
Kurt mumbled something to Gregg. The music was suddenly too loud, the sky too black.
I ducked from another screaming, flying hallucination. “WHAT’S GOING ON!”
“That joint must have been laced with PCP,” Kurt said.
“WHAT?!” My terror was palpable.
I’d seen the videos in health class. People died on PCP, always.
Kurt put one hand on my head. “Just relax. It’s like acid.”
“Really?” My heart slowed a little; I breathed. “It’s like acid? I love acid.”
But it felt like very glitchy, unpleasant acid.
For me, the party was over. We sat on a curb and waited for the PCP insanity to fade.
Eventually, we all went home. I did not do PCP again.
With therapy included, my weeks now looked something like this:
MONDAY: Get up, kill hangover with a liter of Diet Coke, shower, and put on khakis. Go to a temp job. Drink with Gregg after work until the bars close, have sex and/or pass out.
TUESDAY: Drink a liter of Diet Coke, maybe shower, put on yesterday’s clothes. Go to temp job. Leave at 1:45 for therapy (pre-authorized by the temp job); drive back to work by 3:15. Drink after work with Gregg….
WEDNESDAY-FRIDAY: Same schedule, different day. Drink even more on Friday because, well, it’s Friday.
SATURDAY: Wake up at 10 a.m. and turn on Pee Wee’s Playhouse. Wait patiently for the Penny cartoon. After Gregg rolls a joint and we smoke it, gaze like an insane person at the nuances and brilliance that has been created just for my enjoyment. When My Little Pony comes on afterward, watch it as though it details the deepest secrets of the universe. (It probably does.) After watching TV, take a two-hour nap. Get up and get/do acid, if possible. Do cocaine, if possible. Stay high until well past sunrise on Sunday. (Backup plan if no drugs: drink copious amounts of alcohol until puking/passing out is inevitable.)
SUNDAY: Sleep until well past noon. Send Gregg to 7-11 for Sunday paper with weekly classifieds. Send out cover letters for anything related to television (exceedingly rare). Then go to the bar and drink until it closes.
*********************
Obviously, Saturday was my clear favorite day. I had my own version of a cartoon party, then – on a good day – did acid or cocaine or drank until I dropped.
Some days, there was no acid to be found. Given that it is completely illegal and was incredibly dangerous, it could be hard to find.
But if there was no acid, I would whine like a toddler in the grocery store who’s not allowed to buy a candy bar at checkout.
I wanted drugs like a baby wants candy. And I did whatever I could to get them.
Sometimes Gregg would disappear for a couple of hours, coming back with nothing.
Sometimes we would go together to get drugs by hanging out at the gas station.
Based on Gregg’s latest information, we would walk together to the other side of Swissvale – a mile, maybe two. Then we would stand next to the phone booth at the gas station and wait for whichever drug dealer happened to be “on his way.”
Sometimes we were waiting for LSD, sometimes cocaine, sometimes pot.
We would stand there and watch the cars go by. We’d wait and wait and wait and wait and wait. Sometimes we waited for two, three, even four hours. We’d smoke cigarettes and lean on the phone booth and stare at the cars.
I was like a heroin addict in desperate need of a fix. I’d wait forever, just wishing for the drugs to appear. The only difference between me and any other homeless street junkie is that I still had a place to live.
Sometimes we’d be there for an hour and I’d give up. I’d go to the bar – and Gregg would always tag along. It never occurred to me that Gregg didn’t have an actual deal in place.
Gregg would use the phone on occasion to call the drug dealer. I never talked to the dealers myself, so maybe there was no one on the other end of the phone.
Then, one day, a long black sedan pulled up and a rail-thin, dark-eyed man stepped out to sell us some cocaine.
Therapy let me attack my underlying issues instead of gnawing at the symptoms of addiction. It was like drinking water for a dehydration headache instead of merely taking aspirin.
But I didn’t know this. For me, it was just a new thing to do. So I walked into Dr. C’s home sometime in mid-summer, 1988.
“Come in, come in!” said Dr. C, as though he were welcoming a long lost friend. I was not a long lost friend; I didn’t know this guy. And I sure didn’t want to go into his house.
Dr. C was a short, weasly, bearded fellow with dark hair and dark eyes and an impish smile. I hated him instantly.
I hated everyone instantly.
But I believed this was how all therapists looked, this was how they all acted, and this was the only therapist I would ever know.
“I’m finishing up a phone call,” he said. “I’ll be with you in one minute.” Dr. C disappeared.
So I stood in his living room and looked around. It was cluttered and dark and not my style at all. I assumed we’d be going to an office, but no.
He breezed back into the room: “Sit down! Sit down!” he said.
I glanced at the wooden chairs covered with blankets and pillows. Yuk. I sat on the couch and sunk too far down. I hated this man and I hated his house.
He smiled at me anyway. “So, what are you here for?”
I considered this. I was only here because my parents wouldn’t give me any more money, but I didn’t want to tell him that.
“I’m here because my parents wanted me to talk to you,” I said.
“Okay,” said Dr. C. “About what?”
“I have no idea,” I said. And I didn’t.
So Dr. C asked me some questions about my life: my job, my living situation, my “partner” (he couldn’t mean Gregg) and my family history. I didn’t mind answering his questions. In fact, I had more things to say when my hour was over and I had to leave.
“Do you want to do this again next week?” he asked, as though we’d just had a standing lunch date.
“Um, I guess,” I said. “I have more things to tell you.”
“Okay!” he beamed. “I’ll see you at the same time next Tuesday!”
I walked out into the sunshine and thought, Huh. Therapy’s not that bad.
And the next week, I went back to see Dr. C in his dark living room, again and again and again. I told him everything I could tell him about my life, about my history, about my wonderful childhood and all the horrible things that had happened to me since then. I never once lied to him, and I was always a little sad to stop talking at the end of my hour.
One day I showed up and told him about a weird dream I had, and we analyzed it together. “Dreams just represent different parts of you. So if you have a dream about Joe,” he said, “you give me the top three adjectives you would use to describe Joe and those are the parts of yourself that you’re dreaming about.”
“Does that really work?” I asked.
“Well, let’s find out,” he said. And from that point on, in addition to regular chit-chat, we analyzed every single dream that interested me.
It became more fun for me to be at therapy than anywhere else in the world.
I didn’t even realize that I always went to therapy stone-cold sober.
It was the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday. I’d just realized I had no money to do laundry or eat, and I was hoping this would garner some sympathy from the one person who loved me in the world.
“Mom?”
“Kirsten?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
I could feel my mom tense, even through the wire. I’d tried to stay away from my family since Europe, so I wasn’t sure how much she knew about my life since I’d been fired.
“How are you?” she asked, already knowing.
“I’m okay,” I said. “I’ve been doing temp jobs and stuff.”
“That’s good!” My mom has encouraged every tiny step I’ve ever taken for my whole life.
“Yeah but I don’t have any money to do laundry.” I laughed a little, hoping to get the point across without asking for money.
“Are you drinking?”
I calculated my response. I was doing acid as often as I could get my hands on it, and I was smoking pot in the mornings to alleviate my horrific hangovers. So I felt like I was drinking less often. (This was not true.)
“A little bit,” I said. I didn’t mention the drugs.
“We can’t give you any money,” my mom said.
“Well even five dollars would …” I started.
“We can’t give you any money,” she said again. Her voice shook.
My guilt was overwhelming. I was sorry I called but I didn’t hang up. I didn’t want to give up just yet.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said. If I bought a 12-pack, I’d be broke. I felt lost and hopeless.
“The only thing we can do is to send you to therapy,” she said. “We would pay for therapy for you.”
“Therapy? What do you mean?”
“We would pay for you …” Mom stopped, breathed, started again. “We can pay for you to see a psychologist.”
“A psychologist? Why would I want to do that?”
“That’s all we can do for you,” she said.
I sat silently on the other end of the line. I didn’t want therapy. I wanted five dollars. I wanted beer. I wanted anything that could take me out of feeling like I did right now and numb the pain that no longer had any discernible origin.
“Therapy.” I sighed.
“Would you be willing to go to a therapist?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What would I have to do?”
“You’d just sit down and talk to somebody,” my mom said. Then quickly: “And we would pay.”
Sit down and talk to somebody, I thought. How hard could that be?
I was still thinking when my mom repeated: “Would you be willing to go to a therapist?”
“I guess,” I said. “What do I have to do?”
“We’ll make an appointment,” she said. “You just go.” Then she gave me the name and address of a man who was, I was sure, the only therapist in the entire Pittsburgh area.
My mother must have been holding onto his information for a long time, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know then that he specialized in addiction, or that my parents had talked to him beforehand. She called a few days later with my appointment time.
Meanwhile I still didn’t have any money for beer, and it was getting late in the day. I needed to get that 12-pack.
“Okay thanks,” I said, somewhat disappointed in the result of the call. They’d never not offered money.
It was the first time my parents had denied my incessant cries for “help” … and the first time they actually helped me.
One day, when Gregg wasn’t around, I left a bar with a guy I didn’t know. I wanted to go to Tubby’s, a few blocks away. We left in broad daylight, needing those flaming shots before lunch.
We got into the stranger’s car to get to Tubby’s faster, even though it was less than a mile away. This made sense to me at the time. Always let some other person drive. That was my motto.
We were both wasted.
We were in the car for maybe a minute when the guy turned in the wrong direction.
“Where are you going?” I asked politely. It was early enough that I didn’t think I was slurring my words. “Tubby’s is that way.” I pointed backwards and turned around in my seat, as if looking for the bar. Without a seatbelt on, it was easy to sit completely backwards and use the dashboard as a backrest.
“It’s cool,” he said, laughing. “I know a better place.”
“Tubby’s is a great place,” I said, facing front again. I started to panic a little; I didn’t want to go too far from home.
“It’s good to try new things,” he said, hitting the gas a little harder. “You’ll like it.”
You’ll like it?
Suddenly I felt gripped with an overwhelming terror that was not sufficiently squashed by my alcoholic intake.
I had a barrage of flashbacks reminding me very energetically why I shouldn’t be in a car with a stranger: sweaty bodies, fists in my face, “take this!” … shadows towering over me, “shut up!” … and now some voice suggesting “you’ll like it” when I already very much did not.
I sat up straighter and demanded very calmly: “Let me out.”
The stranger laughed again. “It’s okay!” he said, maybe genuinely.
But he didn’t stop the car.
I could barely breathe. I don’t know this guy, I thought. I don’t even know his name and they’re going to find my body in a ravine.
“It’s NOT okay!” I managed. “Let me out!”
He glanced at me, smiling, and laughed again. I stayed frozen, listening to the engine.
Then, just as the car went around a slow curve to the left, I lurched forward, grabbed the door handle, opened the passenger-side door, and threw myself out of the moving vehicle onto the pavement.
I’d expected to fly from the car onto the sidewalk; instead I thudded onto the street. I flopped around a little, then my body landed with a fallump against the curb.
I could hear the guy screaming “… fucking nuts!” before he squealed away, his car door still slapping the side of the car as it rounded another corner and disappeared.
He did not stop to check on my well-being.
For some reason, his car did not run me over me – nor did the car behind it.
I pulled myself onto the sidewalk, stood up, brushed some gravel out of my skin and, bleeding only a little, headed for Tubby’s.
Halfway there, I realized that the guy might try to find me at Tubby’s, and kidnap me again. So I walked to a completely different bar and hid in plain sight, drinking with other complete strangers.
I didn’t leave until the bar closed at 2 a.m.
I never saw that guy again, and it was the only time I ever jumped out of a moving car. For some stupid things, once is enough.
When I wasn’t at the bar with no name, I would drink at a bar called Tubby’s. Gregg’s friend, Tubby, was the bartender, and Tubby was always bartending. The only time he wasn’t was when he was in the hospital for an emergency appendectomy and, rather than being empathetic, I was pissed off about his absence. I don’t know if I ever knew Tubby’s real name.
Tubby’s had a bright red phone on the wall that served as a jukebox. I would pick up the phone and say, “Play Break on Through by The Doors!” And the person on the phone would say, “Okay, it’s on the turntable!” And then I would wait – or forget about it – until it played. It was like an early version of Spotify.
Tubby served flaming shots, which I dearly loved. He’d pour alcohol into a shot glass and light it on fire. I sat mesmerized, watching it burn, until Tubby doused the flame and demanded that I quickly down it.
This was my idea of great fun. I couldn’t afford flaming shots very often, but I would purposefully go across town to Tubby’s just to watch that tiny fire, as though they couldn’t be served anywhere else.
One drunken night I ran to the bathroom, barely in time to puke my guts out in the stall. This was not a new thing for me; I’d been vomiting in order to drink more for years.
But on this night, I puked for ten minutes then went back to the bar and said to Tubby, “Okay! I’m ready for my flaming shot!”
“You just drank it,” Tubby told me.
“No I didn’t!” I said. “I just went to the bathroom!”
“You drank it before you went to the bathroom,” Tubby said. “Look! Here’s your empty shot glass!”
There was, indeed, an empty shot glass, but I had no recollection of drinking that flaming shot. I had to pony up and buy another one, so that I could drink it while not in a blackout.
One night I was sitting at Tubby’s, wasted as usual, and a guy walked in to pick up a 12-pack. He waited next to me at the bar then, quite suddenly, exclaimed: “Kirsten!”
“It’s me!” I replied. The man looked vaguely familiar and oddly happy. I looked closer, completely befuddled.
“Robert!” he said, pointing to his chest. “From Seven Springs!”
I nearly fell off the barstool.
This was the man with whom I’d spent a beautiful night after nearly being gang-raped by his friends. Robert – my love – who’d dropped me off after Larry had left without me at Seven Springs ski resort.
I’d never expected to see Robert again, and I didn’t know what to do with him now that I had. I had adored this man and he was standing here, alone, next to me.
But Gregg was at Tubby’s that night, on the other side of me.
I glanced at Gregg, then back at Robert, who was wise enough to recognize that he was – again – a third wheel.
And again, this made me very, very sad. But what could I do? I was stuck with the person with whom I was stuck. Again.
I gave Robert a quick hug and felt my body flash back to rolling in the sheets, laughing all night. Suddenly I missed him like he was a dear friend, a long-lost love, even though he wasn’t.
I let Robert go and never saw him again.
I was so far beyond repair, I couldn’t even feel sad about it. Just empty and lost and utterly alone.
