Leaving la Vida Loca
AFTER I’D BEEN GOING to meetings at the church near my house for about a month, some of my paranoia about being relentlessly pursued by the sad old people who went there abated. First of all, they weren’t that sad. Or old. They were actually sort of age-appropriate and seemed to have their own friends and lives, which was more than I could say. Second, I noticed that all the advice they’d given me so far had been good. Don’t drink one day at a time. If you don’t pick up the first drink, you won’t get drunk. First things first. All those mindless slogans were surprisingly helpful and not so mindless as I’d thought. Then there was the fact that even though some of my fellow meeting-goers were sort of depressing to look at, due to their advanced ages, and some were straight up annoying and talked for too long about things that were not interesting to me, I seemed to leave every meeting feeling better. For an hour or so, anyway. And that hour was a much-needed break from how I felt the rest of the time, which was volcanically angry. I wasn’t sure how long I’d be able to stay sober. At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted to, because as soon as I stopped drinking, I developed a bad case of clenched fists and a hateful heart.
When I stopped drinking, I was prepared for life to become deadly dull. Fun, as I’d known it, was over. Forever. There had been a lot of good times. Some of the adventures I had when drinking were outstanding. Booze enabled me to be and to do a lot of things I couldn’t on my own. Drinking cut through the fear and the awkwardness. But then it turned on me. The sweet spot, somewhere between drinks two and four, disappeared, and if I drank or tried to get high I would get unpleasantly, paralytically drunk after the first sip. After years of having nearly superhuman tolerance, I suddenly had none. Even drugs didn’t seem to work.
The twin fears of being dead and being bored are, for a lot of people, so closely intertwined they are pretty much the same thing. Almost everyone I’ve spoken to who sobered up in their teens and twenties (and many who did so after) were convinced that sobriety would be only marginally preferable to being dead. That was certainly how I felt. I wasn’t quite ready to die, but I had very low expectations for the rest of my life.
So I was prepared for dullness and stultification. What I wasn’t prepared for was the rage that consumed me when I sobered up. Being angrily sober was so exhausting that I even tried some of the other things that were suggested in the meetings.
Ask for help in the morning and give thanks at night, said the people. I tried it and it seemed to work. I wasn’t too clear on who or what I was asking, but that didn’t seem to matter.
I wasn’t religious and never had been, except for that year I had myself transferred into the local Catholic school because I thought converting would make people think I was gifted. The nuns had mostly been cranky old birds who treated the few white students in school completely differently from the native kids, which was good for no one. On frigid winter mornings, when the temperature dipped to twenty-five or thirty below zero, the nuns invited the kids from the reserve into the school for a warm breakfast, assuming that they didn’t get fed at home, which in some cases was probably true, but in other cases was straight-up insulting. The white kids, no matter what their home situation, were made to stay outside until the bell rang, huddling behind white humps of buried playground equipment and hatching race-based revenge fantasies. The nuns seemed to have a special gift for stoking resentment among the very young, which, in that town in that time, was not needed.
Partly as a result of my early conversion and subsequent abandonment of Catholicism, I’d always found religious people both weak and intimidating. The certainty of the faithful bugged me. Their sense of belonging made me feel worse about myself.
But for all my prejudices, I wasn’t opposed to asking the powers that be in the universe for a little help. What could it hurt? I was a thoroughgoing hypocrite in most matters: why not with God?
By Week Four, which was by three weeks the longest I’d gone without getting drunk since I was thirteen, a terrible reality about sobriety was beginning to sink in. I’d thought that I’d stop drinking and my inner nice girl would finally, at long last, emerge. I was convinced that the only thing standing between me and upstanding citizenship was booze and the occasional bump of cocaine. Once I quit drinking I wouldn’t be such a hag any more. I wouldn’t blow up at people or hate them quite so much. I also hoped I wouldn’t hate myself quite so much. Sadly, when sober, I seemed to be the Bitch of Ages.
It turned out that drinking had been the only thing that stood between me and a stark awareness of how crappy everything was. My roommates were unbearable. As the sole sober person in the house, I became acutely aware of how thoughtless they were. Coming home at all hours! Making noise! Leaving the empty juice jug in the fridge! Fucking animals! Never mind the months I’d spent coming home, late and loud. Maybe I’d been a bit of an asshole when I was drinking, but I had an excuse. I was an alcoholic. I bet none of these other inconsiderate bastards could say that!
The people in meetings were always talking about how sober people had to leave behind their “old companions.” Fine for them. They didn’t live with sixteen of their old companions. Also, they didn’t mind hanging out with each other, which I did. If I didn’t spend time with at least some of my old companions, I’d have no companions at all. I might have hated many of my housemates (for no good reason), but I wasn’t about to stop hanging out with them. As the loneliest, angriest girl in Toronto, I had zero companions to spare.
So night after night, I went to house parties and bars with other inhabitants of the co-op, which was made up of several divisions of houses grouped by the street they were on. I stayed sober. As was probably inevitable, at one of the parties a guy I didn’t recognize handed me a freshly opened beer.
“Peace?” he said, hesitantly.
Apparently I’d taken a little swing at him the last time we’d met.
I was so surprised that I took the can.
As I held the cold beer, a thought slithered into my head. I’ll quit drinking tomorrow. Tonight people are handing me open beer. I’ve been overreacting. I don’t need to quit. All I need to do is cut down. Or get married to someone who will help me cut down. Of course I was trying to rationalize having a drink. The interesting thing was that this was the first time I’d had the chance to do even that. Before, picking up a drink had been completely automatic.
I spent a good minute letting the thought spin in my head like a rotisserie chicken. Then I took a drink. A sip, really. Not my usual open-throat gulp.
Then, almost against my will, I found myself putting the can down.
“You don’t want it?” he asked.
“Nah, I don’t think I’m going to drink tonight.”
For him this was probably no big deal. For me it was the most incredible and unexpected thing I’d ever done. I had never turned down a drink at a party full of booze.
I walked around that party for the rest of the night in a state of barely suppressed astonishment.
I’d turned down a beer. It was a miracle!
Sadly, I didn’t make it very easy for the miracle to repeat itself.
I went to more parties sober than when I was drinking. I went to bars on $1 draft night, I went to house parties and wing nights. I faithfully attended Gin and Tonic Tuesdays, wherein my housemates wore bathrobes and cowboy hats and swilled gin and tonic on the porch. I did everything I’d done before except drink. I told my housemates I was “taking a break” and they didn’t ask any questions.
I was young, damn it. No way was I staying home or hanging out with the oldheads in recovery. I’d been sure that sobering up meant the end of all fun, and it was turning out to be true. There is probably nothing less fun in the world than going to bars and drinking parties when you are a sober alcoholic in early recovery. The events and atmosphere wore on me and rubbed raw my newly hatched sobriety. My mood continued to shade ominously from grey to black. No wonder I drank. Being me was a hideous nightmare. I was paranoid and awkward and horribly lonely.
In that frame of mind, I decided to go with my housemates on a road trip to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to attend a conference of student cooperatives. Our co-op rented a big bus, and even the lightweights who used to frown at my drinking transformed into extras from a beer commercial the minute we stepped aboard. It was a mobile party and I was trapped. The singing, the laughing, the drinking games. Sweet Mother of God, it all looked so much better than being sober.
I sat fuming as everyone around me got bombed.
“What’s your problem?” asked a nursing student with permanently bad breath due to her overly restrictive diet. She’d been the most judgmental of all about my drinking, the most condemning. Which, in my mind, meant that she should support me now that I was trying to be sober! Couldn’t she see that I was struggling here? I just couldn’t win with these people.
Without waiting to hear what my problem was or why I looked like someone about to take a large bite of a rat’s ass, she cried “Shot gun!” and proceeded to do a bad job of gulping down a beer in one long, slobbery, incompetent swallow.
Amateur, I fumed.
I was dying inside. All I wanted was to get loaded, to stop feeling vicious toward myself and everyone else. No one gave a shit. Even my closest friend, an older student teacher, wasn’t helping. She knew I was trying to sober up and had been quite encouraging. But she was pounding them back along with everyone else.
I fought the inevitable. I won’t drink, I told myself. I WILL NOT DRINK. I repeated this over and over until finally we hit Ann Arbor. There, we threw our belongings down in the basement of the co-op we were sleeping in and headed out to find dinner and go to the frat party we’d been told about.
I’d seen frats around Toronto and had always despised them and everything they stood for. Pastel-polo-shirt–wearing boys and girls who’d never known a moment of realness. I was offended at the notion that they had to create these annoying, artificial clubs to keep other people out. It goes without saying that I knew I was not and never had been frat or sorority material. This burned me deeply, despite my pretension of being above it.
The Victorian houses that lined frat row in Toronto were minor key compared to the places we saw in Ann Arbor. The Greeks in this university town were housed in imposing mansions fronted by rolling lawns lit up by massive floodlights. College kids, most of whom seemed to be clean-cut white boys wearing shorts despite the frigid Michigan weather, wandered everywhere. They were all, so far as I could tell in my fiending state, completely wasted. Every single person in America was fucked up. Except me. Which was unfortunate and ironic since getting fucked up was pretty much my only talent.
Everyone we encountered had a large plastic cup full of beer in his or her hand. God, how could I have been so wrong about frats? To think I could have been partying with these masters of the form for years now.
All at once, the combination of saturation exposure to drinking and insecurity about being a socialist co-oper in an ocean of wealthy, shorts-wearing, sports car–driving American preppies who had parties that involved hundreds of guests and dozens of beer kegs broke my resolve. I was going to get loaded. Really loaded. Just once more. I could sober up again when we got back to Toronto. I’d made it six weeks. That was enough. Tonight, I was going to party like it was 1989. Which, after all, it was.
My teacher friend and I went for something to eat before we entered the fray. Before parties, my eagerness to drink would make my stomach churn and I’d have to go to the bathroom ten times. This was worse. It was hard to breathe. Liz and I sat in the dumpy college bar with red vinyl booths and crumb-scattered table waiting for our food.
“Liz,” I said, nearly panting from some obscure alcohol-anticipation-induced nervous system attack. “I think I’m going to, you know.”
She stared at me, uncomprehending.
“I’m going to drink tonight.”
She looked stricken.
“Why?” she asked. “You were doing so well.”
I’d thought she’d be happy about my decision. I’d always been pleased when any friend who’d been dumb enough to quit drinking started again.
“It’s too hard,” I told her. And I meant it. It was too hard to be twenty years old, surrounded by booze on every front, and not drink. Sobriety was too hard. Being trapped in my head was a nightmare.
“We can go back to the house and take it easy,” she said. Was she pleading with me? This wasn’t what I’d had in mind at all. Even the drinkers didn’t want me back.
“I’m fine. I’ll just have a few tonight. I can quit again tomorrow.”
We went back and forth a few times about how she didn’t think I should drink, but I told her I’d made up my mind. It’s too hard, was my refrain. Too hard. I can’t do it. I won’t do it. I don’t want to do it.
Half an hour later we stood in the backyard of one of the enormous frat mansions in the long lineup inching toward the keg. My heart hurt from the Herculean effort to rationalize my decision. It was over. This sobriety thing was over. I’d made a brave and valiant effort, but staying sober was just too hard.
The line moved slowly. I could barely hear the top-forty music thumping over the blood sloshing in my ears as I tried to control my surging anticipation. I could almost feel the cool and wet of the plastic cup in my hand, taste the weak beer. Maybe someone would have some pills. Or a little blow. And beyond that, oblivion. A much-needed and relatively inexpensive holiday from myself.
The klieg lights could barely penetrate the inky black of the Michigan night. I was focused only on the keg.
Two giggling girls ahead of us, so young and normal-looking, so different outside than I felt inside, took their dripping cups of beer and disappeared into the crowd. We were up next. I stood with Liz, waiting to be handed a cup. I noticed they weren’t carding. Good thing, because I wasn’t old enough to drink in Michigan. The long weeks of grinding it out were about to end.
The guy working the keg whispered something to another guy, who climbed onto a crate and spoke into a bullhorn.
“Dudes,” he brayed to the milling crowd. “Keg’s dry! Party’s over.”
Around us a moan of disappointment went up, cheerful resignation, from all quarters. Except for me. I nearly went to my knees. It wasn’t disappointment that drove me there. It was relief.