I’ve always been drawn to train tracks. Train tracks provide the illusion that there’s something new and beautiful, somewhere better than wherever I am.
So I walked down a berm from the dilapidated town to the tracks, still too detox-drugged to be fully functional, only barely drunk enough to do something stupid.
I’d made the spontaneous and momentous decision that, like a hobo in an ancient movie, I would hop on the next train that passed. I’d ride it until it stopped. I would never return.
I stood on the tracks, smoking a cigarette, planning my haphazard escape. I considered my dismal surroundings: gravel mixed with broken bottles, cigarette butts, crushed food boxes; abandoned industrial buildings with broken windows, graffitied doors, bricks crumbling; a deserted caboose rusting on a parallel track. I imagined the lumbering train and envisioned my one, perfect leap.
I finished my cigarette. I waited.
I didn’t have to wait long. In the distance, I felt, heard – then saw – a freight train rumbling toward me, its yellow engine pulling a line of cars as far as I could see.
I moved back only a couple of steps, needing to be close, ready.
As it rolled closer, the horn blasted. Could the driver see me?
I stepped back another two feet. I was still so close, I could almost touch the tracks. And then, as though I’d had no warning, the train was there – the engine past me, the train cars so close, their wake whooshing with such force, I nearly fell into them.
I crouched in the gravel quickly, trying not to fall, my body low enough to see behind the wheels as they passed. I scanned the row of train cars, looking for my opening, and saw that they were all closed. Would there be a space between cars? They were just boxes with wheels, no Frosty the Snowman slid-open doors through which I could pounce, no easy-grab ladders on their sides.
And the train was going fast – so fast! I’d thought it would be slower, easier, calmer than it was, and instead it was barreling through so rapidly I could see the brown, metal wheels blazing past me – and the noise! The train was so much louder than I’d anticipated, and I was right there, right within its grasp, the clackety-clacks and the squeals deafening as I crouched and watched and waited.
And then I knew, quite suddenly, that it would be easier to throw myself beneath those wheels, just one simple movement away, than it would be to jump onto that train.
I decided it was time to die.
My stomach lurched and churned; I closed my eyes and felt the roar, inhaled the dust and metal, wind whacking my hair into my face. And then I opened my eyes and watched, every fiber of my being alive and knowing that in one split second, I could be gone. The chugging sounds mocked me: You-Should-Be-Gone-You-Should-Be-Gone-You-Should-Be-Gone.
I absorbed every sound, every pounding movement, every smell, staring intently, purposefully, visualizing my death. I thought about my head under the weight of those wheels, my body thrashing and pulled along, a minuscule twig dragged forcefully by the monster that was this train.
I stared straight ahead, deciding, waiting, considering. My stomach never stopped fluttering, aching to the point of nausea. Was it fear? Or knowing?
Suddenly the train was gone, and I was still there. Still crouched beside the tracks. Still alive.
After a few minutes, the rumbling subsided. My shaking subsided.
I stood up and walked back toward the city, alone, with no discernible follow-up plan.
I felt higher leaving detox than I was when I went in, thanks to the horse tranquilizer they kept shooting into my rear end. It was a very unpleasant shot, and an even more unpleasant feeling. I was lethargic and dazed and could hardly hold myself upright, even after sleeping for several hours in the detox.
But now I was free. They’d told me that if I wanted to stay in their detox, I had to be knocked out the entire time. And I was livid.
Having no say over what I do with my own body is my least favorite thing.
Alcoholism had robbed me of that say for ten years, but the blame went elsewhere. As I raged out onto the streets of Braddock, I fell into an emotional spiral that started with raging at the nurses and ended with diving into a bottle to kill myself. Before my eyes had adjusted to sunlight, I was seeking the nearest neon Budweiser sign.
I walked inside and asked for a draft before realizing that I had nothing: no money, no cigarettes, no lighter and – worst of all – no driver’s license.
“Can I see some ID?” the bartender asked, having never seen me before.
I reached into my back pocket and then said, “I’m 27. But I left my license at the hospital across the street.”
“No ID, no service,” he said apathetically.
Maybe I won’t be able to drink, I thought. But I was furious, and fury drove me right out that door and back into the hospital, up the four flights of stairs, back to that nurse’s station where I had to sign numerous forms before they would give me what was rightfully mine.
Even in my dazed condition, it took everything I had to hold myself back from diving over the wall and throttling all the nurses.
But I restrained myself. I signed the AMA papers. Finally, they gave me my stuff and I went straight back to the bar where the bartender begrudgingly sold me a beer. I used my Chase credit card, which I’d acquired as a sober Chatham College student, to pay for the very, very cheap beer. Being poverty-stricken, I’d been using credit like money for about a month.
After two drafts, I fell off my bar stool. I was still so high on librium, the beer made me absurdly unsteady.
Pulling myself from the floor back onto the stool I yelled, “Another beer, please!”
“You’ve had enough,” said the bartender. “You’re too drunk. Ya gotta go.”
“I’ve only had two beers!” I cried. “Where am I supposed to go?”
“I don’t care where you go,” said the bartender. “But you can’t stay here. Do you need me to call the cops and have you removed?”
I stared at him, my jaw agape. In all of my years of drinking, I’d never been thrown out of a bar – and now I was getting thrown out because I was too high on detox drugs.
“No,” I mumbled.
I plodded back out into the sunlight and found a payphone. I called Ronnie.
“I know you’re drinking,” Ronnie said. “I’m not going to hang out with you if you’re drinking.”
“But I just – “
“No,” Ronnie said. And he hung up.
I couldn’t call anyone; I couldn’t go home. I was too high to be served alcohol, and nowhere near drunk enough. I had no money, four cigarettes, and nowhere to go. So I just started walking down the gray, empty streets.
When I saw the train tracks, I suddenly knew exactly what I needed to do.
I had a cold tray of food waiting for me when I woke up in detox. I didn’t want it. I could hardly lift my head off the flat pillow. I was barely hungover and somewhat thirsty, but I felt dizzy and weak and fuzzy, like I was still on drugs.
I hadn’t done any drugs in days, so this confused me. I felt higher in detox than I’d been on the streets.
I wandered out the door and down the hospital hallway, to a communal room with couches. I was hoping something would be happening, that I could find someone to talk to, that the group schedule would start soon. But no.
Two men were sitting there, staring blankly at whatever blathered on the television. They didn’t look up when I walked in, so I walked back out. The hallways were bare. Other than the TV, there was no noise. I went back into my room and stared out into the very gray world. I felt beaten, exhausted, desperately bored.
I had no idea how long I’d been there, what day it was, what time it was, or what I was supposed to do. I nibbled on the crackers from my tray, staring dazed through the window.
I’d been awake for maybe an hour when the nurse came back. “Drop your pants,” she said.
“I don’t want another shot,” I said. “It knocked me out!”
“It’s supposed to knock you out,” she said. “It keeps you from going into DTs.”
“But I want to be awake,” I said. “I was sober for almost three years and I only had six beers before I came here. I want to get better.”
“Drop your pants,” she said again. “You can get better while you’re sleeping.”
I did as I was told. It hurt like heck, again. And within minutes, I was asleep. Again.
When I woke up the next time, who-knows-how-long later, it was mid-afternoon. I had no idea how long I’d been there, no idea how long yet to go, but my head was spinning from whatever horse tranquilizer they kept giving me. I did not want another shot.
I walked to the nurse’s station and begged: “I am awake. I’d like to stay awake and not get any more shots in the butt. I’ve already had two of them and they just make me dizzy and tired.”
“How long have you been here?” asked a nurse.
“I have no idea!” I wailed. “I’ve been asleep the whole time!”
“Well if you’ve had two shots, you’ve probably been here two days. That means you’re due for another shot.”
“I DON’T WANT ANOTHER SHOT,” I said loudly. “What other options do I have?”
“You don’t have any other options,” she said. “If you are detoxing here, you will get another shot.”
Exasperated, I tried begging. “I am detoxed. I am fine. Please, please, please don’t give me another shot.”
“You don’t have a choice,” said the nurse. “Go back to your room and wait for the nurse.”
“No!” I said. “I’m not doing this again! What else can I do?”
“You could leave AMA,” she said.
“What’s AMA?”
“Against Medical Advice,” she said.
“Then I guess I will do that,” I spat. “I can’t fucking stay here if I have to get another shot!”
I looked around at the very blank faces behind the nurses station, ignoring my pleas, not hearing me. And then I looked for an exit sign.
I didn’t bother with an elevator. I went straight for the exit sign and pounded into the stairwell, leaving detox behind.
When I finally realized I was not able to quit drinking without professional help, I wanted the plush comforts of rehab to help me get away from alcohol. But after Gateway told me about the 14-day restriction and the waiting list that would take nearly a month to get in, I felt desperate.
And unlike during my prior rehab, I didn’t have insurance.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said at an AA meeting. “I really want to stop! I was so much happier when I wasn’t drinking but now I can’t get through even one day without alcohol. I need rehab!”
“You could go to detox,” someone said. “Hospitals have to take you if you’re drinking and you ask for help. And they’ll give you insurance when you walk in so it’s free.”
Free detox? This sounded too good to be true. “What do I have to do?” I asked after the meeting.
“They won’t take you if you’re not drunk.”
That’s my kind of restriction, I thought.
I went home and asked Louise for help. I didn’t want them to take my car again.
“Can you drive me to Braddock Hospital?” I asked. “I need to be drunk before I go.”
Louise sighed, frustrated by me and the chaos of our living arrangement since I’d started drinking.
Finally she said she would drive me to detox. “This is a one-time deal,” Louise said. “I won’t do this twice. So you better do what you need to do this time.”
“I will!” I said. Then I proceeded to drink an entire six-pack in order to be drunk enough to go to detox.
Louise dropped me off outside of Braddock Hospital. “Don’t forget to tell them you need insurance,” she said – then she drove away, both dismayed and hopeful.
I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork for my “free insurance.” The state of Pennsylvania provided it to people like me who had no job, no money, no way to pay for care. (I have no idea if this still exists.) Then they took me upstairs to the detox wing, where they took away my cigarettes, my lighter, my driver’s license – basically everything I had – and dumped me in a dark room alone.
The bed had no sheets. The chair was stained. Even after six beers, this felt gross.
Someone entered wordlessly and put one stiff plastic sheet and a thin, torn hospital blanket on the bed. I sat on the windowsill and stared into the gray day. Braddock was crime-ridden, rat-ridden, addict-ridden. The whole city looked dingy, bleak, dying.
This didn’t feel like the rehab with the bluebirds and goldfinches.
A nurse came in and said, by way of introduction: “Drop your pants.”
“What? Why?”
“I’m giving you a shot.”
“What shot?”
“Librium.” I had never heard of librium. They hadn’t even asked me about my drug of choice yet.
“I would rather have the shot in my arm, okay?”
“This one goes in your butt. Drop your pants or I’ll drop them for you.”
I pulled down my pants. Fear clenched every muscle in my body.
I’ve since learned that clenching doesn’t help with the extreme pain of a shot in the butt. “OW!” I screamed, butt muscles excruciatingly throbbing.
“Take a nap,” she said and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.
It hurt so badly, I thought I would never recover. I was rubbing the sore spot and whimpering to myself when, with barely a second of warning, I flopped onto the bed and lost consciousness.
I slept for many hours.
Since I was hanging out in the local sober club while I was drinking, I attached myself to a tall, red-headed Irish biker who also hung out at the club.
We played pool together, and the jukebox, and smoked copious amounts of cigarettes. It was just like being in a bar. So when the Irish biker decided, after 18 months sober, that he wanted to go out and drink too, I just sort of wandered out the door with him.
Together we visited bars I’d never frequented, which were just like all the other bars in the world. We got drunk for a couple of weeks together, had some sex, and I even met his extremely large Irish Catholic family, who didn’t seem to care that he was not sober.
My family cared, but they had moved to Washington, D.C. so I didn’t mention my transgressions to them. And I didn’t answer the phone if I was drunk and my parents called. They had no idea that after I’d finally rebuilt their trust in me, I was watching it drizzle away like water leaking from a plastic bag.
I’d been drinking, and quitting, and drinking, and quitting, and drinking consistently for several weeks before my neighbor said, “Maybe you need rehab.”
My first instinct: NO. I can do this on my own!
But I loved rehab. I’d had such fun there! I loved the comfort of being fed regularly without having to buy or cook my own food. I loved playing chess with my rehab boyfriend. I loved groups where we talked about our innermost feelings. I loved the safety of being away from the temptation of drugs and alcohol. I loved meeting Abraham Twerski and getting pearls of wisdom offered as freely as sunshine. And my favorite day in rehab was the day I walked out – and ended up watching bluebirds and goldfinches in the woods.
I knew the bluebird thing was unlikely to happen again, but I didn’t want to go to just any rehab. I wanted to go back to Gateway.
So the Irish biker and I got good and drunk, and then we drove ourselves to Gateway to check in. Actually, he drove my VW Bug since I was too drunk to drive. Somehow we made it there in one piece.
We stumbled into the lobby laughing.
A stolid woman looked up from behind the welcome desk.
We yelled: “We want to check in!” and burst into hysterics.
She waited until we calmed down. Suddenly I realized that it was very, very quiet except for us. Finally she said, “We don’t have any beds available right now,” she said. “We can put you on a waiting list.”
“I need help now!” I wailed. “I need another 28 days clean! I was here in 1989, does that matter?”
I could tell from her face that it did not. “Things have changed a bit since you were here,” she said. “Insurance laws have changed, so you can only stay for 14 days now. And the waiting list is about three weeks. How did you get here?”
“We drove!” said the Irish biker.
“Then you’re going to have to get a ride home,” she said. “You can’t drive in this condition.” Then she confiscated our keys and made us wait until someone from the Irish Catholic family took us both home.
The next day, I got a ride back to Gateway to get my car, and put myself on the waiting list.
During the following week, I totally destroyed my chances of getting in.
After almost three years sober, drinking felt like being gutted, my intestines splayed on the sidewalk, my soul void of any life. I felt lost, empty, dead – and immediately, undeniably comfortable. I didn’t need to drink twice to know that I’d turned onto a path that would lead directly to my death.
So I went to a meeting, and I admitted what I had done. Everyone congratulated me on being honest. They welcomed me back, told me to keep attending meetings, asked me if I had a sponsor. I did all the things they said to do: get a sponsor, call her every day, read the literature.
But the stories I heard felt like they were completely irrelevant to my life. I couldn’t see the similarities between the people in the rooms of AA and myself; I could only see our differences. I was young; they were old. I was deep; they were shallow. I was smart; they were just sheep in a herd.
I was wrong.
But I felt unique, utterly alone, as though I were the only suffering alcoholic in the world.
In spite of spending years listening to people talk about how to stay sober, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I just kept going to AA – noon meetings, evening meetings, speaker meetings, discussion meetings, sober club meetings. I’d go in, sit down, share, listen. And then I’d get drunk again.
And then I’d go to another meeting. Then I’d get drunk again. I didn’t go to the meetings drunk, but I also didn’t stay after the meetings to talk to anyone.
I kept saying, “I don’t want to drink but I don’t know how to stop.” But I didn’t want help, either. I wanted the answer. I wanted to figure it all out in my head and then do that one thing that I needed to do to stay sober forever. And I wanted desperately to be happy every, single day.
But I couldn’t stay sober for more than two days. And happiness eluded me completely. I wasn’t happy drinking. I wasn’t happy not drinking.
All I wanted in the whole world was to crawl back into Paul’s arms. He had been my sober guide, my guru, my sponsor, my higher power, my everything. Paul was my life and when we broke up, my life was over.
I believed I had absolutely no reason to live.
At the same time, I didn’t want to die drunk.
I’d had a taste of sobriety, a couple of years where I’d felt hope for myself, for my future, for an adulthood that didn’t suck. I didn’t want to go back to being strapped to the back of a motorcycle so I didn’t fall off, or vomiting every hour so I could consume more alcohol. I didn’t want to go back to the emptiness that I felt every time I put alcohol into my body.
But I didn’t know how to stop. Every day I would wake up and say, “I’m not going to drink today.” And almost without fail, I would pass out on my face drunk every night.
Sometimes I would play Atari instead, watching the clock until 2 a.m. when the bars closed, then breathing a sigh of relief that I’d made it through a whole day.
Then I’d get up, go to a noon meeting, and end up at the bar before dinner time, staring into those dead eyes that greeted me every time I looked into a mirror.
I was convinced my life was over. I was 27 years old.
I’d spent three years in the real world – going places, doing things, finding out what I enjoyed about life. During the same time frame, Ronnie hadn’t done anything different: same factory job, living with his parents, not dating, no new friends, no hobbies.
Ronnie’s unchanged behavior reminded me of something I’d learned in rehab. Emotional growth stops as long as drug/alcohol use continues. Emotionally, Ronnie was the same teenager he’d been when I’d known him in the 1980’s.
To be fair, I hadn’t matured much in three years, but maybe a little.
And as he got drunker, Ronnie started blabbing about Larry.
“You weren’t the only one who cheated,” Ronnie said. “Larry fucked some girl in her truck on New Year’s Eve.”
New Year’s Eve, I thought. When I was in Europe, calling Larry every 15 minutes, he’d had sex with someone else. Then Larry took the Camaro because I’d cheated on him.
I realized with sudden clarity that Larry had never been my destiny.
After the bar closed, I went back to the sheepdog. My buzz felt insufficient but I hadn’t done anything stupid. When I woke without a hangover, I thought: I don’t have to drink! I can just smoke pot!
I felt a tinge of guilt, but no regret.
I didn’t mention my brilliant idea to my family or my neighbor or anyone in AA. I didn’t mention it to anyone except the sheepdog.
And Ronnie.
When I met Ronnie at the bar the next night, he brought cocaine and pot and shared both with me quite regularly all night long. I never wanted to stop doing cocaine. For three nights, Ronnie was my best friend in the world. For three nights, we got high and played darts and arcade bowling and I slowly started to sink back into unreality again.
At one point, I made a bet with Ronnie that I could beat him on the bar’s bowling machine. “If I win,” I said, “you have to go to an AA meeting with me.”
And then I won. In fact, I got 10 straight strikes which is virtually impossible.
I had a blinding flash of the obvious: God is still with me. And: Ronnie needs AA, too.
So Ronnie went with me to an AA meeting. Afterward, as we all held hands and prayed and said “keep coming back,” Ronnie said, “never again” and ran for the hills.
I made it three glorious days without drinking, with only pot and cocaine to sustain me.
On Day Four, I realized I was going to have to tell people: my family, friends in AA. And I didn’t want to admit I’d relapsed until I had one of those wine coolers.
So I met Ronnie at the bar and ordered a beer. I drank until I couldn’t stand up, and I sure couldn’t drive home. Ronnie took me back to his parents’ house where we had sex on the floor and passed out wrapped in each other’s arms.
I was brutally hungover in the morning. I’d heard that mouthwash cured a hangover – so I drank half a bottle of Ronnie’s parents’ Listerine. It made my hangover feel fuzzy.
Driving home was hard.
Ronnie was blissful about our burgeoning relationship but I knew I was in trouble. I told him I had to get sober again. Ronnie said he’d never quit drinking, so our “relationship” faltered immediately.
That night, I went to an AA meeting. Suddenly I wanted to stop drinking more than anything in the world. But I could not quit.
I wanted to.
I simply couldn’t stop.
Lacking Atari, I tried to find solace in dog sitting. Instead, I discovered alcohol in a kitchen cupboard.
“I don’t drink,” I said to the sheepdog. I stared at the wine, gin, vermouth, whiskey. “If I did drink, I wouldn’t drink these. Yuk.”
I took the cap off the Jack Daniels and inhaled deeply. My eyes automatically closed as I was transported to a biker bar in 1986. The smell emanating from that bottle conjured the scents of leather and oil underneath the whiskey. It was like a time machine.
I hadn’t had a drink in almost three years.
I put the cap back on the bottle and went back to typing. I’d been freelancing for my dad, transcribing interviews for his new higher education work in Washington, D.C.
When I tired of transcribing, I wrote pitifully sad poetry that no one would ever read.
In spite of the gut-wrenching sadness in my poems, I felt utterly numb, like a trauma victim in a corner. Since I didn’t have my Atari game set, I typed and typed. Eventually I finished the transcript.
Now what?
I was still dog sitting. I didn’t bother going to meetings or calling a sponsor, or even visiting my neighbor, Louise. I fed Kitty quickly, twice a day, then went back to the sheepdog. I was purposefully 100% alone.
And that’s why I thought: I should get some pot.
It wasn’t as though I’d ever had a problem with marijuana; in fact, I gave up pot for several years during my active addiction. I was an alcoholic. I had a problem with cocaine. I had a problem with LSD. But I had never, ever had a problem with pot. I didn’t even like pot.
Call Ronnie, I thought.
It had been four years since Larry, and equally as long since I’d talked to my old friend, Ronnie. Ronnie always had pot. And I still remembered how to spell his last name.
So I found Ronnie right there, where he’d always been, in the phone book.
Ronnie’s mom answered the phone. He still lived with his parents at age 42.
“Hello?”
Ronnie’s voice sounded terrifyingly familiar, like a warm blanket made of horse hair. After all this time, he was rightfully wary of me. “Why did you call me?”
“I miss you!” I replied, pretty sure I was lying.
“I’ll meet you at the bar,” Ronnie said. “But not if you’re going to drink.”
“I don’t drink,” I said to Ronnie. The sheepdog was, again, my witness.
When we met, Ronnie had the giant, goofy smile on his face I remembered so fondly; he seemed genuinely happy to see me.
I was terrified. I faced a world that existed only in my memory: a dark, smoky purgatory where the emotionally dead come to sit.
I was ogling the wine coolers. They’d only recently been invented. I’d been sober, so I’d never had one.
“They suck,” Ronnie said. “Anyway you don’t drink. Let’s smoke a joint instead.”
I was happy to leave the bar and go to Ronnie’s truck. Pot was, after all, the reason I was there.
He lit the joint as though it were a normal thing to do.
I was shaking. But I took a long, deep drag. I coughed.
Ronnie laughed.
Instantly, three years’ worth of anxiety and pain vanished. I felt overwhelmingly, spectacularly normal.
Finally, I thought. I feel good.
It felt like I’d been transported – after three years of being lost – to the place I belonged.
Immediately, desperately, I started chasing that “normal” feeling again, although I would never, ever catch it.
With nothing better to do, I tried out my new/used Atari game set. I plugged in a tank game – no idea what it was called – and I drove that tank with my joystick controller as though I were on a mission to save the world.
I sat on the floor, three feet from the television. I pushed the joystick to the right, holding it with a death grip, so my hand hurt constantly. Video games were far more simplistic in the 20th century, so nothing really happened in my game. I just drove the tank. I pushed the joystick. The tank rolled. I pushed harder to make it go faster; it rolled at the same speed.
I kept playing. I didn’t stop playing until pre-dawn, when I would simply lie flat on the floor. Going upstairs to bed was too hard.
I did this night after night after night. I didn’t do anything else except smoke cigarettes.
During this time I called the vet because Kitty’s nose was randomly changing colors, from gray to pink and back.
“That’s usually a sign of respiratory issues,” said the receptionist.
That’s all I needed to hear. I didn’t smoke in my own house again, ever. Kitty’s nose stopped changing colors and she lived to be 18.
Meanwhile I didn’t do anything that was suggested to me to stay sober. Too depressed to leave the house, I just drove the tank.
I used the tank game to numb myself, to pretend that I had zero emotions. Thoughts of Paul would creep in and I would shake my head violently to make them disappear. I focused on the tank. Other than making the occasional peanut butter sandwich, I did nothing else. I just drove the tank. Over and over and over and over and over and over.
One day, some guy from the sober club came to my house with his motorcycle. He said I could ride it, so I did. I hopped on without a care in the world and I drove helmet-less up and down the brick streets of Oakmont.
When I stopped driving the real-life motorcycle, which was nowhere near as easy as driving the 2D tank on Atari, I realized that the guy was 6’3″ and I was only 5’4″. When I put my feet down, they didn’t reach the ground. The motorcycle fell over and landed on my left leg, wrecking the bike and leaving me with second- and third-degree burns that needed to be treated with pain medication and rest.
“Rest” meant driving the tank.
“Pain medication” meant I felt high in an unwanted way. I stopped taking medication after two pills.
When the motorcycle guy came back celebrating one year sober and asked me, “Do you think I should get drunk?” I said I didn’t care what he did.
He got drunk.
Briefly I considered going to the bar with him, to “keep him sober.” I decided against it – in favor of staying home and driving the tank.
My neighbor’s friend Kathy, who had a sheepdog, needed a dog sitter. So I went to her house and stayed there for a bunch of days, hanging out with the sheepdog and sitting on her very nice couch. I worked on transcriptions for my dad who, with my mom, now lived outside Washington, D.C. I dog-sat and transcribed so I could afford to pay my rent.
The only thing I didn’t have at Kathy’s house was the Atari tank game.
And that, it turns out, was the missing element that drove me right over the edge.
I hadn’t meant to break up with Paul.
Having Paul in my life meant that I was worthwhile, that I was lovable, that I deserved good things, that I was a good person. Paul represented the whole world and with Paul, I was somebody. I was smart, decent, funny, beautiful. With Paul, I had a solid place in the world.
Paul was the first nice guy I’d dated since before my alcoholism determined my waking moments. It never occurred to me that there would be other nice guys to love me – the real me, not the one who lived only for Paul.
I’d gotten sober, stayed sober, hung onto sobriety sometimes by a thread, because I wanted to stay with Paul. Paul taught me everything I’d ever learned about living sober since 1989. He’d taught me everything I needed to know to live in a world that had flat-out rejected me before I knew he existed.
And now Paul was gone.
And here I was, alone again, without any road map for my future.
Without Paul, I had nothing. I’d spent so long living for him, aching to be with him, trying to be like him – trying to be him – that without him, I had no identity of my own. I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted or how I felt or what my future held. Paul was the reason I’d gotten up in the mornings. He was my soul mate, my best and only friend, my Higher Power, my reason for living.
This is how I discovered that I hadn’t done one single ounce of work on myself since leaving rehab. I’d only followed instructions from someone I worshipped.
I idolized Paul. He was my Everything. I spent a decade believing that my One True Destiny had been stolen, unfairly erased.
In 1992, I only knew one way to remedy the loss of a relationship: find another man.
So when Paul and I broke up, I went home and called Gary. And for the first time ever, Gary invited me over to his house. So within hours of the breakup, I was at Gary’s house, where Enya blasted on the stereo amongst two dozen lit candles. Minutes later I was having repulsive sex with a stranger, choking back my tears, knowing wholeheartedly that this was not, and never had been, the answer.
I just didn’t know what else to do.
An hour later I left Gary behind, ghosted him.
Finally, I grieved. I cried in my cereal in the mornings, choked down cold pasta in the evenings, tried to hug my eminently un-huggable cat in my spare time, cried myself to sleep every night.
One night Paul appeared on my doorstep. He walked inside and we embraced, both of us crying, sobbing, barely able to stand upright. We cried and held each other and cried.
“Isn’t it ironic,” he mumbled into my shoulder, “that the only person who understands this pain is the only person we can’t talk to about it?”
I nodded into his shoulder in agreement. He held my shoulders, looked into my eyes. As I leaned in to kiss him, he turned away.
“Stay,” I begged.
“No,” Paul said. “I just … I can’t … I just wanted … I’m sorry.” And then he walked out the door, and my whole life and all my hope went out the door with him. Again.
More agonizingly painful days passed.
I should have known I was in actual, definitive trouble when I spent my last $15 on a used Atari game set.
But I really didn’t know.
