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.
It isn’t easy to explain – even to a sober alcoholic – why Alcoholics Anonymous works, or how it helps keep people sober for a week, let alone a lifetime. So I didn’t understand it.
I’d gone to meetings – off and on, usually with Paul – for three years. Thanks to meetings, I knew the basics of the program: read, call sponsor, work steps, more meetings. Blah, blah, blah.
Meetings didn’t really help me, though I had no idea why. I thought AA was ineffective, when the problem was definitely me. I wasn’t going to AA to get better – to feel better, to think better, to be healthy and happy and have a future.
I was going to AA because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. So I did only the bare minimum in AA.
I knew I was supposed to read the AA Big Book which, to the best of my recollection, held about 200 pages of gibberish and a bunch of stories. I only read the stories.
I knew I was supposed to call my sponsor, but I’d stopped calling my sponsor after determining that I was smarter than she was. So really? I didn’t have a sponsor. I didn’t even know why I should have a sponsor, since she was just another AA person. And why did I have to call another AA person when I was doing fine on my own?
Except: I wasn’t doing fine on my own.
I knew I was supposed to work the steps, and I had done some of that. I had read about the steps in the “12 and 12” – AA’s book that detailed each of the steps and traditions, and why they mattered. I read them whenever I thought I needed to know something about them, and then I forgot whatever I read. So I guess I wasn’t really “working” the steps, whatever that meant. I just knew what they were. They had something to do with a Higher Power and I believed in God ever since the shooting star so I figured I knew what I was doing.
Except: I didn’t really know what I was doing. And after Paul and I broke up, I didn’t have a soul to talk to about that.
I thought having (almost) three years sober meant that I had my act together, I could teach other people with all the wisdom I’d acquired (from Paul) and I could stay sober all on my own (because I was still sober) and I could do whatever needed to be done for the rest of my life without any help (even though I desperately needed help) because I absolutely, positively had to stay sober no matter what happened, and that included breaking up with Paul.
Except: breaking up with Paul was the worst thing ever.
In AA, they talked about building a foundation. That foundation, they said, is important. It’s what sobriety is built upon.
I had no idea what that meant.
“Foundation” meant: I needed to meet people. Get to know them. Share with them. Tell them how I was feeling – really – and call them – often – so that when everything fell apart, I would know where to turn. I’d know what to do. I’d know who could, and would, help me get through things without picking up a drink.
I knew a few people from meetings, but I didn’t hang out with them. I didn’t talk to them outside of meetings. And I didn’t turn to them for help when I needed it.
My entire “foundation” of sobriety was Paul.
And Paul was gone.
After student teaching, which was a disaster that ended well, I got a job as a teaching assistant at a Head Start preschool. I played with the kids and tied their shoes and served their lunches while the lead teacher did all the teaching.
When that preschool lost its funding, we teachers lost our jobs. I landed at a daycare, where I fell in love with all the kids and tried hard to be helpful. When my “help” included mentioning to a parent that her four-year-old might have ADHD, I was fired. (In my defense, the parent asked what I thought.)
So in May of 1992, I was unemployed again. I stayed up all night playing solitaire on my new computer. As a side profession, I created resumes for sober friends and found out (the hard way) to never accept personal checks.
I was still with Paul, blaming myself for anything I did imperfectly in our relationship.
I met a guy named Gary who, unlike Paul, was willing to stay up all night and talk on the phone. Every night we discussed philosophy and books and deep, meaningful stuff until the wee hours of the morning.
Meanwhile in spite of my lack of employment, Paul and I started looking at engagement rings. Kitty had been dragged back and forth between apartments for long enough; we were talking about making it legal. While Gary and I discussed existentialism and the meaning of life, Paul and I discussed taxes and houses and shared retirement accounts.
At the jeweler I found rings I liked, and Paul found rings he liked. The last ring I’d worn was a giant steel skull ring, so I liked silver and non-traditional. Paul liked traditional gold.
I groaned as Paul held a stupidly large diamond with a very traditional setting. “You’d get used to it,” he told me, unflinching. Paul handed it back to the jeweler and we left, unable to agree on what I might actually want to wear on my hand for my life.
Appearances mattered most to Paul.
“What about wedding rings?” he asked later as we sat on his couch talking, as we’d done so often for almost three years.
“What about them?”
“Well you wouldn’t just be wearing an engagement ring,” he said. “We’d need to find matching wedding rings, too, and our wedding rings would need to match the engagement ring.”
“Can you wear a silver wedding ring?” I asked, still stumped about the process. He hadn’t yet proposed.
Paul grunted. “It wouldn’t be my first choice.”
I stared at the wall. Paul sat silently.
“Are you ready for a wedding?” he asked. “Do you think you’re ready to be married?”
I thought about my job, my minimal sobriety, my general immaturity. I thought about Gary and our late night phone calls, about playing video games all night, about summers off as a teacher, about vacations and unemployment and commitments.
I felt trapped, confused, absurdly young, like a princess randomly tossing aside a crown.
“Actually,” I ventured, “I don’t think I’m ready for marriage yet.”
The statement just popped out and landed in front of me with a thud.
Paul didn’t miss a beat. “I think that’s the only time you’ve been honest about that,” he said.
We sat in silence for a long time.
Finally Paul said, “I don’t know what we’re doing then.”
I thought I would marry him at some later date, when I was more prepared.
But I said, “Do you think we should break up?” I couldn’t make that momentous decision alone.
“I guess so,” he said.
Paul and I went on vacations together. We went to visit the new AMA Motorcycle Museum in Ohio where we watched the world’s dullest light show and laughed about its seriousness. We went to a cabin in the woods and watched deer in the snow from the kitchen window as we sipped hot cocoa. We went on long, woodsy hikes and tiptoed through waterfalls, splashing and giggling.
We went to Ocean City, Maryland, and strolled the boardwalk. The wind was wild there and we couldn’t swim, having arrived right after Hurricane Bob visited. The waves were so high, lifeguards warned us away from the water.
In the afternoon, Paul and I argued about something, no idea what. I stomped down the boardwalk, the wind painfully whipping my hair into my face. I was so frustrated by the gales that I stormed into a random stylist and said, “Just cut it all off!”
For the first time since infancy, my long red hair vanished. It barely covered the nape of my neck. I hated it instantly; I wanted to cry. I felt cold, bare, ugly. I didn’t have enough self-esteem to pull off this boyish style.
I wiped my tears with the back of my hand and walked into our hotel room.
Paul gawked.
I blurted: “The wind was awful so I chopped it off.”
He spoke cautiously. “Can I be honest?”
“Sure.”
“This is the first time I can honestly say that I like your haircut.”
The first time???
“I hate it,” I said.
“I love it,” he said. “You should keep it short.”
Paul maybe didn’t care about what I wanted or how I felt. But I kept my hair short – having no choice to make it grow faster – and when my sister got married in October, I still had that awful short hair.
Paul and I were in my sister’s wedding. Before we walked together to our places supporting the bride and groom Paul asked me, “Are you ready for this?”
It was my sister’s wedding, our presence a mere formality. Yet Paul was concerned about how we would appear on our 10-yard walk down the aisle.
Paul was always extremely concerned about appearances, as though anyone cared.
Paul once said I was the least pretentious person he’d ever known. I had to look up the word “pretentious.”
I still have no idea if this was a compliment coming from Paul.
For example, I missed my black leather jacket, which I’d tossed after getting sober. I told Paul about how cool I’d felt, how strong, in that jacket.
So when, for Christmas, Paul bought me a brand new leather jacket, I was conflicted. It was soft, supple leather … but it was brown, with a bright red lining inside – expensive, and probably Paul loved that jacket. But after two years with me, I thought Paul should have known I preferred black leather.
I wore the brown jacket anyway. My hair was short because Paul liked it that way. I didn’t realize I was sacrificing my own identity because I cared more about Paul’s opinion of me than I cared about finding my own identity.
I was still waiting for Paul to propose marriage.
Instead he said, “Don’t you think it would be better to wait until you’re 60 to get married? Then you could do whatever you want for your whole life, and still have someone to take care of you when you’re old!”
I laughed; I thought he was kidding.
At almost 60, Paul married a woman 23 years his junior – his first marriage.
(Paul didn’t marry me.)
During summer of 1991, before I started my student teaching, I decided to follow my dreams. I’d always wanted to be a rock star. The fact that I had virtually no talent and could barely play the guitar didn’t matter to me. I dreamed about becoming famous. I wrote a million songs – two or three that didn’t suck. I wanted to sing.
In the days before the internet, only one thing was required for me and my brilliant songs to be discovered. I needed to sing in Nashville, Tennessee.
So I packed my purple duffel and my guitar and bought a bus ticket to follow my dream. Paul was too busy to follow my dream with me. So I hopped on that bus alone.
The trip was excruciatingly long; I slept most of the way with my guitar between my legs so it wouldn’t be stolen. I awoke long enough to think, Wow, Fort Knox! Then I went back to sleep. Eventually the bus dropped me in Nashville.
At the bus station.
With my guitar.
Imagine how many stupid youngsters arrive at the bus station in Nashville carrying a guitar.
I expected a neon welcome sign pointing me toward the nearest talent agent, but everything was dark and dingy. I had no idea what to do next. I hopped in a cab and rode to Music Row, where I wandered through gift shops and bought myself a Randy Travis magnet.
I found a hotel with a shuttle to the Grand Ole Opry. I hopped onto a bus full of blue-haired ladies; everyone gawked. This was not the hotel shuttle, so I took another cab.
I was the youngest person in the audience by five decades.
The next evening I scoured a flyer: “Open Mic Nights!” I grabbed my guitar and caught another cab to a little strip mall nowhere near Music Row.
I may as well have been buying pizza instead of planning to sing.
I sat at one of the plastic checked-clothed tables and plopped my guitar by my feet. I was so scared, I could barely move.
I hadn’t publicly sung sober since middle school chorus.
I waited hours. I heard lots of people singing before a man got up and said, “Okay! That’s the end of Open Mic Night unless there’s anyone else who wants to sing!”
Confused and without thinking, I leapt up, grabbed my guitar still in its case, and jerked toward the stage. The guy watched me walking forward, smiling.
“I want to sing,” I choked.
“Okay!” he boomed. “What’s your name?”
“Kirsten,” I said.
“Give it up for KRIS-tin!” he said as I strapped on my guitar.
Everyone else played two songs, so I played two songs that hopefully didn’t suck. My guitar was out of tune from traveling and I played so fast, my shaking voice could barely keep up with my over-zealous strumming. In four minutes, I was done.
There was a smattering of applause from the few people who were still there after Open Mic Night. I half-smiled as I packed up my guitar and headed back to my seat where – I realized – there was no longer any reason to sit down.
I took a sip of my Diet Coke, left some cash on the table, and walked outside to wait for my cab. Then I rode back to my hotel and slept until morning.
When I got up, I took a cab back to the bus station and went home.
I can tell people: “I sang in Nashville.” Because it’s true.
Somehow I did not become famous.
Paul and I studied together. He was working toward getting his MBA anyway, so I felt right at home sitting quietly in his living room, working on homework. On weekends we’d get takeout chicken salads from the Village Inn and chat about the ways of the world as we munched on our lettuce.
I felt really grown-up and sophisticated with those chicken salads, but I needed to pay for school, for rent, for food.
So I got a job working for the garage-sized video store near Paul’s house, where we rented movies. I just walked in and asked for a job, and the very, very, very old guy behind the counter said, “Sure. You can start tomorrow.” And that’s when I discovered all the movies that I hadn’t seen – which was, pretty much, all the movies other than the handful I’d seen in high school.
I spent a great deal of time devouring videos during my early sobriety. But I also learned a valuable lesson, again, about how my idealism conflicts with real people.
One day I said to my boss, “I don’t drink anymore.” I giggled. “I’m an alcoholic!” I giggled again.
“You’re not an alcoholic,” he said.
“I am!” I said. “I even went to rehab! I’ve been sober for more than a year!”
“I don’t believe that,” he said. “Alcoholism is just an excuse for people who don’t want to quit drinking alcohol. They’re just weak. Anybody can quit drinking alcohol. It’s just willpower.”
My eyes grew wide as I stared. “I couldn’t do it,” I whispered.
He ignored me. Or maybe he couldn’t hear me. He was, after all, ancient. “It’s like cigarettes,” he continued. “I quit smoking cigarettes one day and never smoked again. People say it’s so hard to quit, but I quit! You just have to know what you want out of your life and make it happen.”
“I don’t think it’s willpower,” I said, fighting back tears. “I really tried to quit smoking, too, and I couldn’t do it.”
“You can do it,” he said. “Anybody can. And that’s that. There isn’t anything else to say about it.” And he walked into the storeroom, effectively ending the conversation.
I got a second job shortly after that and eventually, when I’d seen all the free VHS rentals I thought were essential, I got a job working two 12-hour shifts at Montefiore Hospital, walking distance from the hospital lab where Paul worked – although he worked weekdays, and I worked on Saturdays and Sundays.
My new coworker was not only young, but self-confident and friendly. She was happy and self-assured without being arrogant. I’d never seen anything like it.
I thought everyone was a mess, like me.
“How did you get to be so … happy?” I asked her, genuinely curious. “Didn’t your parents mess you up?”
She laughed. “My parents are great,” she said. “And I think I was just born this way!”
She blew my mind. I learned from her how to be a friendly person, though I was definitely not born that way. It was very much a learned effort to treat my coworkers and the hospital patients with respect and care.
But I did learn. I learned from both jobs that (1) I was kind of weird in how I thought about the world, and (2) I could get better at dealing with people if I really tried.
Still, I preferred holing up in Paul’s living room and talking to nobody other than Paul. I felt validated, simply because someone so smart and wonderful liked someone as lost and discombobulated as me.
