In my youth I flirted with alcoholism.
One evening I snuck out of my parent’s house. At twelve years old I was quite limber, so flinging my leg up and out my bedroom window along with the rest of myself was the easiest thing in the world. I’m a stealthy guy, the kind vastly overestimating his ability to move through my environment without sound, and I tiptoed across our time-savaged deck. It awaited a sanding and resealing and as a young man in the house, it would be my job to do someday. But not tonight.
I sparked a smoke in the midnight moonlight, flung my leg up and over my tragically speed-impaired bicycle and set to the pedal. My destination this Saturday night was the home of a pretty girl I attended school with who had, I think, invited me to kick it without the suffocatingly stupid supervision adults offered. To a young boy, there is nothing more welcome nor terrifying.
Pedaling two blocks north through residential streets veining my old haunts and home, I ducked offroad along a dirt trail snaking through a pitch-black patch of undeveloped earth. I walked this trail every day after school, so absolute darkness was no deterrent to a kid solemnly intent on misbehaving. Not that familiarity is required.
A half mile later, I emerged in the neighborhood next to mine. Deeply shadowed, the ever-present evergreens of Washington State grew thicker here and blotted the sky. Streetlamps picked up the slack, improving visibility and risk of capture. But again, this route was a short one. Furiously rolling three blocks west, I ducked off the streets onto another dirt trail for the remainder of the journey.
A three-mile ride later, I pulled off the dirt and onto the asphalt of yet another neighborhood. A duck down a side street and a pull up into a driveway and I’d arrived undetected and unharried. I dropped the bike on the lawn and waddled with near-teen energy to the front door. An older couple, maybe sixteen years or so, sat on the porch smoking cigarettes. I asked for one without hope.
“Sure, man,” the boy replied. “I’m not Jewish.”
I had no idea what that meant. I hadn’t asked him if he was cut or offered a deliciously dangerous ham sandwich. I asked him if I could have a smoke. His girlfriend seemed to know, though. She punched him in the arm, which just served to force a wider grin from the annoyingly antisemitic yet charmingly charitable twerp. I guessed the girl on the porch was my girl’s sister. Well, not my girl. Not yet. I still needed to charm her.
I headed inside and there she was, obviously beautiful and not-so-obviously dangerous. She held a bottle of what turned out to be cherry vodka in one hand and a pint glass in the other flanking a grin which, in my older age, would have set alarm bells ringing. Instead, my stupidly inexperienced heart set to racing in that evolutionarily adaptive way which precludes rational thought or self-preservation when faced with a member of the opposite sex.
She poured me a glass of the red devil’s brew and we sat to chat about school, music, how pretty she was, how abjectly average-looking I was - things have since taken a turn for the ugly on my part - and what that idiot on the porch meant by declaring he wasn’t Jewish. We determined he was just an idiot on the porch.
Occasionally, I’d take a big pull from the deep red elixir in my pint glass. No matter how much I drank, it always seemed to be full. Curious, that. Not only was this girl pretty and smart, but she seemed to be a witch as well. A real, honest to gods damned witch with power over alcohol.
And I don’t remember anything else. It’s gone. Pieced together by others, a picture emerges, but it’s like having someone describe a particularly intricate painting to you over the phone. See, that’s the problem with drugs and booze and such. You must, by necessity, become a truly trusting person in order to pursue alcoholism whole hog. The events of your life must be described to you by others as if you weren’t there.
My first reclaimed memory was laying fully clothed in the shower. The water blasted into my bleary eyes and up my nose into a brain grumpily pregnant with a sudden and entirely unwelcome consciousness. I must have flung my leg up and over the lip of the tub and just fallen in. The tub was familiar, I was home apparently. I wondered how. But at least I'd gotten away with it.
Until my father's voice asked me, “Feeling all right? Hope so, because you'll be sanding the deck today.”
“What happened?”
“We found you and your bike laying in the driveway.”
“That’s so weird. Last thing I remember was saying my prayers before donning my sleeping cap and settling in for a sober and peaceful rest.”
“Is that right?”
“In fact, I think I’ll head to bed now.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” my father shared. “Get up and get comfortable with the sound of power tools.”
I groaned and sunk further into myself in the tub, letting the water soak into every part of me, mouth wide open as usual trying to catch some hydration. Unfortunately, my father really was right there threatening me and not just some phantom. He was so right there in fact, the water turned as icy as that young lady’s attentions were forever more after that night. I yelped, jumped upright, and flung my leg up and over the lip of the tub and promptly slipped, pressing my stupid face into the floor.
Eventually, I was herded outside into a blinding summer morning. A power sander was placed in my hands and I set to work inducing a nausea in myself I have not yet matched over three subsequent decades of poor decisions since. Sixteen hours, give or take, the scree of a motor and the unique scream of flayed wood boards filled my ears. Sawdust filled my mouth and caked all over my face.
As I knelt there with my power tool, sweating cherry vodka from every pore, I considered what in the hell had even happened to me. I came to the conclusion nothing had happened to me. I’d simply done it to myself. I’d heard drunk people don’t remember things, but I certainly hadn’t experienced it. The idea I’d moved through the world, completely unaware of what I was doing, was novel at the time.
It was a decidedly uncool feeling. I don't want to trust people to tell me the truth about me.
I puked all over the pristine deck. Freshly sanded, of course, but not yet stained with water-seal. Nor had we stained it with vomit-seal. Not that I can recall, anyway. That stain remained like a merit badge for blackouts.
So, before my father could see the mess, I flung my leg up and over my bicycle, rode to a nearby busted up and abandoned car among the trees behind some houses no one else seemed to know about, and settled in for a nap. The kind where your body doesn’t walk around talking, vomiting, and destroying your chances at finding love.
Sic vivitur.
Text Zeke please