Nirvana on 10 Drinks a Day

It’s 1993. 

I'm slogging through Columbus rush-hour traffic, tapping nervously on the steering wheel, my tie loosened in the soggy August heat. Cobain screams from cheap speakers, the faithful cassette old and wobbly.

I'm worst at what I do best / and for this gift I feel blessed.

The tapping turns into pounding: I just risked my life to swerve into the lane that suddenly stopped moving. Crap. Late to my own party.

My dad doesn't say anything when I walk in. They've already started eating, and since nobody starts eating until Dad says it's time to eat, it's clear he's pissed. He's been angry his whole life, and he's never once said, "I'm angry."

I slide into the seat next to my daughter. Her blouse is buttoned at the throat, and with her permed hair and milky complexion, she looks like Molly Ringwald. She also looks worried.

"You're shaking," she whispers to me between bites of Mom's meat loaf.

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I'll start this off without any words

I got so high, I scratched 'til I bled. 

Love myself better than youI

know it's wrong, so what can I do?

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This is our last family dinner before I move to Florida on Saturday. The last time I’ll see my daughter for I don't know how long.  My parents are getting old—it may be the last time I see one or both of them ever. I'm late. And I'm drunk.

I'm not drunk drunk—I just had a few scotches with lunch, took a nap, and woke up five minutes before I was supposed to be here. My ex used to call it passing out, but I always thought she always complained about my drinking because her parents were alcoholics, and she took it out on me.

I really hated myself that day, but I didn't know it.

There was this Self-Loathing program that had been running in the background for so long I had pretty much gotten used to it. The only thing that turned down the volume was alcohol.

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I got this friend, you see

Who makes me feel and I

Wanted more than I could steal.

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Every single night for 15 years, I began the same quixotic journey. I didn't want to get drunk; I just wanted to get there. That space, that blessed place, where I could finally breathe. I found it most nights, somewhere in the first few drinks. Sometimes I was there for an hour or two or three, but it never lasted as long as I wanted it to.

By bedtime, I wasn't there anymore—ever. I was stumbling and shaking and aching and afraid I would never sleep again and wondering how wretched I was going to feel in the morning. I would take one last, long pull off the bottle before I laid down, hoping the end to this day came quickly.

About three a.m. every night, I woke to ferocious pounding at the door. Self-Loathing slipped between the sheets beside me, and we shared the silence for an hour or two. Counselors call it he drinker's hour: a few hours after you pass out, your blood sugar plummets, slapping your ass into consciousness. Eyes wide shut and unable to sleep. Groggy and jittery at the same time. Wanting to crawl out of your skin but unable to move

And every morning, I vowed not to drink that day.

After a decade of broken promises, I returned to a group of people who had what I wanted. Before, they had always seemed way too religious for me and way too happy, like Pharrell Williams had taken over the Women's Christian Temperance Union. They made sobriety seem so uncomplicated—there was none of the existential masturbation and faux intellectualism of which, in my drunkenness, I had become so enamored. They told me to try not drinking one day at a time. 

Simpletons. They have no idea how complex I am.

I don't remember much about my last day of drinking—it came and went with the same numbing monotony of the thousand that preceded it. And I don't know why I picked that day to ask for help. Someone at the meeting suggested that I had a "spiritual awakening," which pissed me off, again.

Every time I heard the word "god," I wanted to kill somebody. Then an old hippie surfer named Johnny told me that g-o-d stood for "group of drunks." That, I could live with.

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I'm worst at what I do best

And for this gift I feel blessed. 

Our little group has always been

And always will until the end...

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That was 29 years ago this month, and for about 10,600 days at a time, it's been working. Our little group is still together. The faces and the locations change from time to time, but when I walk in the door, smelling the aroma of coffee and hope, I know I'm home.

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