part0029

I’m fourteen and at my friend’s pool party. Her whole family is there. We’ve stolen booze from our parents’ liquor cabinets and as usual I’m the drunkest. I love how uninhibited I feel, how socially skilled! Goodbye Corporal Dork, hello Colonel Charisma! My mind is always awash in stories, but they are more exciting when I’m drinking.

The story I come up with partway through the evening is that it would be fun to pretend that I can’t swim. The plan is the product of a Drunk Mind, so it’s not completely coherent. For instance, I have not worked out an explanation for why I have been swimming like an ungainly otter for most of the night. No matter. The main point is that I will be dramatically rescued from near drowning, and that will be enjoyable for everyone. When the time feels right, I walk along the edge of the pool and tip sideways into the water. No one notices. I float facedown and wait for someone to rescue me. The shouts, when they come, are intensely satisfying. Someone hauls me up and out of the water and makes sure I’m breathing. Exciting!

The whole saved-from-drowning thing goes over so well, I pretend-drown myself two or three more times. The third time, I hear someone say maybe they should just let me die already. Someone else notes out loud that the butt of my white bathing suit is see-through. I’m sure people were staring, openmouthed at my antics, but I didn’t notice. I’m in the middle of a compelling Drunk Mind story and have no time to worry about what’s happening around me. While I am being hauled out of the pool yet again, I hear my friend’s handsome older brother ask his parents: “What is wrong with that girl?”

Excellent question. What is wrong with me ?

I am nineteen and finally allowed to drink legally in Canada. Am quickly turning into a baby bar star. This particular night, I fall while leaving the dance floor of the local nightclub.

The handsome bouncer, new to our small town, helps me up. He’s ridiculously fit, with biceps that strain his T-shirt sleeves. His blue contacts are slightly out of alignment with the dark eyes beneath. His Chinese accent is barely detectable but delicious. Unfortunately, he’s so new to the scene that he doesn’t know not to be direct.

“Why do you always drink so much?” he asks, setting me back on my feet.

I stare at him. I’ve turned into a blackout drinker but am in the midst of an unmerciful moment of consciousness. Thoughts flash through my addled brain like electrical shocks.

#1: God, dude. I can’t believe you just asked me that! Why don’t you just punch me in the face while you’re at it?

#2: I can’t drink less. Trust me. I have tried.

#3: Look, I’m learning to drink like a normal person. Any day now I’ll get it.

I say nothing and go to the bar to get another drink.

I am twenty. I have moved away from my small town to one of the biggest cities in the country to attend college. The problem isn’t my drinking, which is admittedly a little messy and excessive. The problem is my environment and people being all judgmental and causing me artistic stiflement . I can’t thrive in a backwater where everyone is trying to hold me back and whatnot. I’m convinced the stimulation of an urban setting will set me free from my drinking and everything else.

Six months later, I have to quit my fashion design program because I have spent every cent of my student loan to buy alcohol and drugs.

To mark the last day of classes, and the end of my plan to become a costume designer for film and TV, I take an innocent classmate to a tacky male strip club near our school. There I get poisonously drunk on Long Island iced teas. The dingy club is located up two steep flights of stairs. On our way out, I fall down those stairs and end up lying in a heap in the street. I am badly bruised but I get up and keep going.

The next afternoon, a roommate knocks on my door and asks if I’m okay, which feels nearly as bad as when the hot bouncer asked me why I drink so much. I’ve spent all day hiding in my bed and smoking on the fire escape. I can’t control my full-body shakes and I’m seeing things that aren’t there.

Am I okay? I honestly don’t know what I am anymore.

It’s a week or so later, Christmastime, and I’ve gone back home. I haven’t told anyone that I’ve dropped out of school. Instead, I attempt to play the role of ultrasophisticated city person visiting the quaint village of her youth. I wear peculiar wide-legged plaid pants. My skin has turned the color of liver failure, and I hide it with a lot of foundation.

I plunge into an endless round of drugs and drinking. On New Year’s Eve, I get in a fight in the worst bar in town, and me and my plaid pants are thrown out onto the snowy sidewalk by the bouncers while the band watches in amazement. I lie on the cold sidewalk for a while, momentarily shocked sober. The feeling of crusty snow against my cheek is almost enjoyable.

It’s spring and I’ve been back in the city since January. I start drinking in the early afternoon even though I promised myself a few days before that I was going to quit. The last episode was bad, a lot like the episode before it and the episode before that. Somehow, each incident is fractionally worse. In fact, I’ve been trying with all my might to quit, but it’s not working. I keep not quitting. I am unable to remember that I want to stay sober. I don’t get a chance to think about whether I’m going to drink. I just do. It’s terrifying, like my entire being has been hijacked.

A couple of hours later, I get separated from my friends when we change bars. I’m wobbling my way along a major street, alone. In the last couple of months, my ability to stay mobile while seismically drunk has started to fail. I’ve always fallen a lot but was famous for leaping up and acting as though nothing had happened. No more. Sure enough, as I stagger down the street, my legs go out from under me and I hit the ground, hard, and roll over onto my back. I can’t figure out how to get up, so I just lie there like an overturned turtle. A drunk one.

Crowds of people walk around me. Most avoid looking. Others gaze down, faces filled with pity and a hint of revulsion. I am the kind of drunk girl that people walk over.

It’s July and I’ve finally asked for help. It’s come from all sorts of quarters. I’ve been sober for three weeks. I’m twenty years old and this is the longest I’ve stayed sober since I was thirteen. I wake up in my bed to see sunlight streaming in through the battered blinds. I get up and open them and stand there, basking in the warmth of the new day. A strange buoyancy fills my chest. I realize it’s hope.

“I can’t do this. I’m going to pass out,” I tell the patient woman who has by this point spent countless hours listening to me bitch and moan and confess and cry and sometimes laugh.

“If you faint, we’ll pick you up,” she said. “It’s not like you haven’t fallen before.”

It’s been many years since that night, and I still fall sometimes, but at least now it’s not because I’ve had too much to drink. And there’s always someone there to help me up.