When the End Is Nigh
HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED when I returned to Toronto. I failed to pay my tuition on time and was asked to leave my fashion design college. They said I should think about exploring “other avenues for my talents.” To celebrate the end of my college career, I got very drunk with some unsuspecting classmates and dragged them to a male strip club. After I finished impressing everyone with my ability to guzzle multiple nine-dollar Long Island iced teas in just over an hour, I tripped and fell down two flights of stairs and rolled out onto Yonge Street. I think I may have attacked one of my companions when she came back to my house, where she was supposed to be staying. This is only the dimmest of memories. She was gone when I got up, and I never heard from her again.
When I awoke I found three small plastic flasks of vodka, one hidden in my purse, one in my coat pocket, and another tucked into my winter hat. I had no recollection of buying them. This was happening more and more. When I came to after one of my binges, I would find alcohol stashed everywhere. There would be stray cans of beer in my dresser drawers, airplane bottles in my shoes, and mickeys in random pockets of my knapsack. I was terrified that I’d have to stop drinking once I’d started. For some reason, this booze hoarding didn’t strike me as unhappy housewife/bad dad alcoholic behaviour, because I was drunk when I bought the backup bottles and so it didn’t count. Also, judging from the untouched evidence, I never seemed to remember them after I tucked them away. I was like a smelling-impaired dog burying a bone, not like a true alkie.
Having washed out of a not terribly demanding college, an amazing feat on its own, I began drinking alone and going out by myself with no money in my pocket. The alternative was to stay home, alone and sober, and that would have forced me to acknowledge that I was an unemployed fashion school dropout, basically hiding out in my student co-op, waiting for someone to realize that I was no longer a student. There had always been at least one part of my life I could control. I might be a mess on weekends, but during the week I was as tightly wound as a new Slinky. I made sure my shoes matched my shirt and my purse. But even that control was slipping. There were fewer and fewer functional moments.
I started coming out of blackouts (it felt like suddenly sobering up) in strange, dingy bars in unfamiliar parts of the city surrounded by people I didn’t know. Usually sketchy-looking men. I’d seen The Accused. I knew this was a pretty terrible idea.
Another unwelcome development was that I’d started trying to off myself almost every time I got drunk. My attempts usually involved giving my wrists a close shave with a plastic razor while sitting slumped on the bathroom floor, tears running down my face as I cried silently. I also took to wandering into the little park across from my house and waiting for the Scarborough rapist (later revealed to be the horror show called Paul Bernardo) to come and get me. The park was about the size of a large area rug, and I would stagger outside and lie on the single bench plunked down in the middle. When sober, I, like many women in the Toronto area, was afraid to go out after dark. But drunk, I was capable of anything.
I proved totally incompetent at suiciding myself, but when I sobered up I started to worry that by some unlucky fluke I might actually succeed.
This drastic escalation in my drinking took its toll. When my housemates would go out for breakfast the morning after a party, they usually asked if I’d like to go along. I never did because I couldn’t. While they were eating cheap eggs benedict and talking about their escapades from the night before, I would be huddled out on the third-floor fire escape, smoking, every muscle shaking independently and uncontrollably, and doing my best to ignore the mild DTs that I’d started experiencing every time I sobered up from a binge. I ignored the flashes of movement that darted in and out of my peripheral vision; the dark figures descending the walls and swooping flashes of birds in the hallways. None of it was real.
It was very hard to pretend that I was still having fun.
Even more devastating than the physical trauma my drinking was causing was the collapse of the barriers that I’d erected to keep my drinking life separate from the rest of my life. Probably no one, even back in high school, had any idea how much I drank or how it affected me. Part of that was because I kept such a tight lid on myself when sober. I was shy, as noted, and profoundly uptight. When I got drunk I came across as more hyper or crazy than drunk. I spent all my sober time trying to make up for my drinking time.
Even during my worst days in Toronto, I’m sure no one I lived with had any idea how sick I was. This is one of the odd things about a certain kind of binge drinker. I didn’t drink during the day, generally, and I usually did it with others, so it wasn’t as obvious as it might have been. But when my drinking began to infect my sober life in a way that even I, with my bionic powers of denial, couldn’t ignore, the end was nigh. The weight of my drinking life was like a house I’d been holding up. It had finally gotten too heavy and was slowly crushing me.
For a few months, my main employment between binges had been holding down a couch in the living room with one or two of the engineering students who never seemed to attend classes. When I was not too hung over, I ate pillow-sized bags of salt and vinegar potato chips. When I was sick, I huddled in my room under many blankets and tried to control the tremors in my hands. When the shaking subsided, I came out and slouched, lumpen, on the sagging sofa in the dark and watched hour after hour of Star Trek, wishing fervently that I was aboard the Enterprise.
After I’d been out of school for a few months, I somehow got a job at a yarn store. When people asked how I landed it, I told them it was because of my “fashion background.” That was a lie. A friend of the family had told the owner that I desperately needed employment. The owner, a somewhat scattered, eccentric woman who wore floor-length sweaters with metallic bits sticking out all over the place, very kindly hired me, in spite of the fact that I couldn’t knit. Not one stitch. Knitting was one of the courses at my fashion college, but I’d dropped out before we got to it.
When I got back to being gainfully employed, it was a huge relief. I’d had a job since I was fifteen, and while I was no one’s idea of a prize employee, my jobs had allowed me to delude myself that I still had some control over my life.
Working in the tiny storefront, the walls lined with wooden cubbyhole shelving, was like slowly suffocating for eight dollars an hour, eight hours a day. The shelves bulged with yarn. The store was probably cozy during the winter, but in the summer when the temperature regularly soared past thirty degrees and the relentless humidity made it feel at least ten degrees warmer, the airconditionless store was a lanolin-smelling inferno.
The only thing that made it bearable was my co-worker, Calvin. He was a small, delicately built man, a gifted knitter, weaver, and spinner, although I knew this only from what people said about his work. He was also refreshingly embittered. He was scathing about most of our customers and about the world at large. But he was never anything but kind to me.
Calvin was the first out gay man I’d ever met. He’d been a dancer in the National Ballet as a young man when he was young and had starved himself to make the cut. In the process, he’d developed a severe case of diabetes. Every so often he would lapse into a coma and have to be rushed to the hospital. He was my favourite person, partly because my personality was almost sunny compared to his.
We’d sit sweating at the front counter. Calvin would irritably twitch a Chinese fan in front of his face as though swatting away wasps. When asked, he’d show me the difference between knitting and purling, although he clearly didn’t care whether I could do either. When a customer entered the store, his eyes glittered malevolently behind his round glasses. If it was one of the dealseeking older Italian or Polish ladies from the neighbourhood, he’d be furious in his contempt.
“There are no bargains here,” he’d say, shaking in their faces the ball of twenty-dollar silk that they wanted marked down to three dollars. “NO BARGAINS!”
If the customer was one of the cool young women wearing belly-baring outfits of black leggings, cut-off jean shorts, cowboy boots, and tank tops, he’d sit and silently judge them as they moved through the store. When they were gone, he’d mutter things like “Some people really shouldn’t wear tights.”
If he really had it in for someone, he’d ask me to serve them.
When I wasn’t stocking shelves, I spent my time knitting back and forth on pieces of remnant yarn. This, combined with the fact that I worked in a yarn store, led customers to believe I knew something about knitting.
“I’m curious about this pattern. Can you show me where the cable stitching moves back into stocking stitch?” they’d ask.
I didn’t want to admit that I was more likely to start spontaneously speaking Farsi than I was to be able to interpret a knitting pattern, so I would carefully study the sheet of paper or book and make a lot of faces meant to indicate fierce concentration. After the two of us had been standing around long enough for it to get embarrassing, I’d say something like “This is kind of a weird pattern.” Or “Jeez, I’ve never seen one like this before.”
The customers, to their credit, never pressed. They never demanded to know why such an incompetent was working in a knitting store. One look at Calvin, his lips pursed with hostility, and they simply left.
I really, really loved Calvin.
He never said anything when I had the shakes. He never commented when I came in reeking of beer and vomit, which I did at least twice a week. He made no disparaging remarks about my dead-broke fashions or untended hair. Even the day I got the unexpected visitor, he never said a word.
It happened one sweltering afternoon a month or so after I’d started at Yarn Inc. I sat at the counter, knitting back and forth on the same pieces of yarn I’d been torturing for the past several days. My process was to change colours every inch or so, make several unsightly mistakes along the way, then unravel the whole thing, encouraged only by Calvin’s comment about my “adventurous colour sense.” I knit like I drank, with a relentless monotony and uniformly poor results.
When asked, I told people my “thing” was going to be a pillowcase, because my “thing” was roughly rectangular. At least most of it was. Sometimes, when I got distracted or was extremely worse for wear, the “thing” came out octagonal or even oval.
On the day in question, Calvin sat behind me eating Chinese takeout from the place down the block. I was in charge of customer service, which wasn’t hard because it was nearly thirty-five degrees outside and forty inside the store and no one was thinking about knitwear.
I was therefore surprised when a slightly underfed-looking young man entered the store. The fact that he was male made him noteworthy. The fact that he was young and a trifle weaselly made him more so.
He walked right up to the counter. He had a question. Great. Just my luck.
“Hey,” he said.
“Uh, can I help you?”
“I know you,” he said. There was an accusing tone in his voice and alarm bells began to go off in every part of my body. As a committed blackout drinker, I worried constantly about running into the people I met on benders, people I had no hope of remembering when I sobered up.
I forced myself not to look back at Calvin, who I knew couldn’t help but overhear.
“Really,” I said, keeping it noncommittal.
“I met you last weekend.”
“Yeah?” I said. My heart thudded in an ominous way. A heart-attack-inducing way.
“Do you remember me?”
Oh Christ. Not this. Chances were that we’d been introduced by a mutual friend and exchanged two sentences. But we might also have talked the night away. We might have made out. We might have, god help me, had sex. We could have gotten married and adopted an orphan from Romania for all I knew. I was that kind of blackout drinker.
“Hmmmm,” I said. The layer of sweat that had lain on my skin all day turned cold and clammy.
“You don’t remember at all, do you?” he said.
As when pretending to understand knitting patterns, I attempted to look thoughtful. Like there was a chance I’d get the memory back. Or grow a new one.
“You told me you were a veterinary student,” said the boy, who had an insistent Adam’s apple that bobbed distractingly all over the front of his throat when he spoke.
I froze.
This was an unwelcome reminder that lately, when drinking, I’d taken to making up far-fetched achievements for myself, probably to compensate for the fact that my twenty-year-old life was beginning to feel like a bit of a washout.
Several times I’d employed the “This is the first time I’ve ever gotten drunk” lie, which served to make me feel like less of an alcoholic and more of a naïf. Then there were the career lies, which had begun shortly after I’d been asked to leave my fashion design college. I didn’t tell these lies in a fun, ironic way either. I told them when I was drunk with a dead seriousness that made them seem even more pathetic when I had the misfortune to be reminded of them later. I’d recently told a group of frat boys at a bar that I was an heir to a “small appliances fortune.” When asked which appliances, I suggested I was one of the General Electric family.
And now here I was confronted with the spectre of imaginary veterinary medical studies. The walls of my carefully compartmentalized life were coming down.
“Oh really?” I said, giving a sickly little laugh and trying to decide whether I should deny everything. Laugh it off? Brazen it out? Say the yarn store gig was just something I did when I wasn’t at the zoo working with the rhinos or doing pro-bono autopsies on road kill?
“Why would you tell me something like that?” he asked.
This guy was a nightmare. No one should ever confront an alcoholic about the idiotic shit she says while drunk. It’s like an unwritten law. Gossip about what a drunken whore she is. Dismiss her as a crazy. But don’t go confronting her directly. That is just not cool. In my circle, it was completely unheard of.
What was his problem? It didn’t sound like I’d punched him or anything, which was another thing I’d started doing to strangers with increasing frequency.
“Ha, ha,” I said. My face was on fire.
“That’s a really weird thing to do,” said the guy.
He should talk, I thought. No normal person would come in here, hounding me about things I’d said while drunk at a party. I was trapped, humiliated. On the verge of bursting into tears or falling off my stool and impaling myself on a knitting needle.
Suddenly, Calvin was standing beside me. He wasn’t very tall, so at first I hadn’t noticed.
“You want to buy something?” he asked my inquisitor. “No,” said the boy.
“Goodbye then,” said Calvin.
The boy gave me another sullen look and then turned and walked back out into the bright, dirty afternoon. Calvin rested a hand lightly on my shoulder before going back and finishing his lunch. He never said another word about my visitor.
That afternoon, when Calvin went to run an errand, I called a number in the phone book and asked where the nearest meeting was.
OH HELL, I guess there’s something else I should mention here. The visit from my unremembered acquaintance wasn’t the only thing that precipitated my call for help. Of course it wasn’t. There’d been seven years of traumas and humiliations connected with my drinking. But there was another final straw that I hesitate to mention because it sounds cliché or at least terrifically suspect, like the kind of shoddy psychologizing practised by some disreputable therapist on Law & Order. Many months after I made that phone call, I found myself attending a workshop about sexual harassment. I’d volunteered to write and implement a harassment policy for my housing co-op. This in itself was strong evidence of the personal changes I’d undergone. Previously, I’d have more likely been the target of such a policy.
At the time, awareness about sexual harassment was sweeping the campuses of North America. As minor-key social progressives, we at the co-op weren’t about to be left out. The course was conducted by a pair of Birkenstocked women’s rights activists from the University of Toronto. They told us about the circumstances under which most women on campuses are assaulted.
The rosy-faced woman with white-blond hair said, “It almost always involves alcohol.”
Her fellow workshop leader, nodded. “When women are drunk, they feel responsible.”
As I sat in the middle of the room, I felt a dreadful awareness settle over me. It was accompanied by an image of myself, wasted, as usual. I was sitting in someone’s bedroom in the house next door to mine. There were maybe seven or eight other people in there, some of whom were playing guitar and singing. I was legless, which was unusual. I’d always been quite ambulatory, even when I was very drunk. I was having trouble seeing and even more trouble moving. Somehow, I made my way into the bathroom, which was located up a flight of stairs. I managed to get inside, but before I could close the door, someone came in behind me and locked the door. It was the tall, argumentative guy who lived in another division of the co-op. I’d always made a point of avoiding him before. Something about him made me uncomfortable. His looming face was the end of the memory, which trailed off into a terrible, terrible feeling.
In the past, I’d had barely consensual intimate encounters, to put it euphemistically. It often seemed like less work to go along than to get up and leave. But this memory was of something very different. A few months after that workshop, I was at a Halloween party for the whole co-op. I happened to glance out the window and I saw the same guy carrying a limp girl into a taxi. She was dressed in a cat suit, and if she wasn’t passed out, she was certainly close. I pushed through the crowd and ran outside, but by that time they were gone. Was that girl his date? Had he picked her up at the party? What was in store for her? I had no way to know and no way to prove what I suspected.
Had I been assaulted or was my memory some terrible manifestation of all my ambivalence about the things I did and that happened to me when I drank? I don’t know. I will never know. All I can say is that after that night I could no longer pretend that anything about my life was manageable or controllable or safe.