Blackouts and Breakdowns (21 page)

After the meeting, I left in my usual
dine and dash
fashion.
There was a lot to take in from what I had just heard and I needed some time to reflect and smoke about ten cigarettes.
I may have stopped drinking, but my smoking had taken on a life of its own.
Perhaps I was replacing one with the other, I was smoking as if someone had told me it was now a healthy thing to do. As I lit up a cigarette and walked down the street, I heard someone following me.

“Hey!” Michael yelled.
“Wait up.”
I turned around and saw that Michael was running toward me.
I stopped and turned around to face him, inadvertently blowing smoke in his face. “What’s you name?”

“Mark,” I replied.

“I have seen you coming around for the past few days. I am assuming you are new.”

“Yep. Day four.”

Michael’s eyes lit up.
“That’s great.”
He opened his arms and pulled me into a huge bear hug.
What the hell was wrong with all of these people?
Why were they so happy all of the time? Was there some sort of punch everyone was drinking except for me, and if so, was it filled with vodka?
“You remind me of myself at your age.”
This was surprising as I had not said but two words to him and he didn’t in fact know my age.

“What do you mean?” I said dragging on my cigarette.

“I saw you in the meeting,” he replied.
Oh shit.
What was I doing?
Picking my nose? Farting and not knowing about it?
“You sat there – did not say a word and ran out of the meeting as soon as it was over.
You probably think this whole program is bullshit don’t you?”

“Well…”

“You do. I am sure of it.”
Could this guy read minds?
If so, he was right on the money.
“I did too when I started. I sat in the room thinking ‘what the fuck are these people talking about?’ I didn’t think I belonged and I thought that everyone around me was weird.
But if you stick with it, I promise, it will change your life.”

I looked at him and saw what he would have looked like, had he kept drinking the way he told the group he had been.
Thirty years of drinking a bottle of scotch every night would probably have done a number on him.
His hair would have most likely been gone.
His eyes would have been sagging and most likely would not have had the physic he presently had, but a huge beer belly.
I looked into what I imagined drunken Michael’s face would have looked like and realized that if I kept drinking the way I had been, I would have ended up looking like a complete mess.
I needed to stop drinking for my vanity if nothing else.

“Just keep coming back,” he said. “Anyone can do it – and we are all in this together.”

I felt like someone finally had my back.
He told me to take his number and to call him if I needed anything.

“Why the fuck do people keep giving me their numbers?” I asked.

“Because like I said we are all in this together.
Whatever you are going through now, someone has most likely gone through it before.
Alcoholics help other alcoholics because no one can understand what you are really feeling except someone who has gone through this shit before,” he replied.
Finally, someone explained to me why I had all of these first names with last initials in my phone.
These people were here to help me.
It was starting to make some sense.
I thanked Michael and we hugged.
All of this hugging was tiring me out.
It was time for another cigarette.
As I lit up, I noticed Bunny McDougall and Palmer Courtlandt, walking down the street in the other direction.

“Hey, Michael,” I asked. “What’s with those two?”

Michael looked towards the two people I had hoped most to befriend in the group.
“Oh, the daughters of the American Revolution? I don’t know,” he said.
“They have been in the program since the British invaded D.C. and burned down the White House.”
He laughed and turned to walk away.
I was so happy that Michael had talked to me.
I felt that I now had a real friend in the program and could succeed in this.

I had used alcohol to deal with people and soon realized that everyone around me was beginning to annoy the absolute shit out of me.
People were not even doing huge things to irritate me. Stupid shit like holding up the subway or looking at me the wrong way aggravated me to no end.
But the worst was waiting tables. Anything that anyone asked of me seemed to be a huge inconvenience.
“May I please have some salt?” a customer would ask.
“Why don’t you get it your fucking self?”
I would think. People seemed to be even more demanding than usual, but it wasn’t true.
No one was asking for anything out of the ordinary.
After all, I was there to wait on people.
It seemed as if the world was against me, but on that day, I was pushed a little too far.

I went to the cafe after my meeting and it seemed to be business as usual.
Boring, homely people were sitting around talking about politics, hoping that someone was eavesdropping on their conversation and thinking they were smart.
I was waiting on a lovely couple with whom I had made my usual jokes with.
They were soon joined by a little Asian woman who could have fit in my pocket, and her huge six-foot-three inch black boyfriend.
Talk about an odd couple, it was like the Notorious B.I.G. had just rolled into the restaurant with Mulan.
They sat down and I took their order.
I walked back to put their order in the computer and walked by their table once more, heading to another table when the Asian woman stopped me.

“Is my food ready yet?” she asked.

“Are you serious?”
I replied. It had been less than a minute since I had last seen her.

“Yes. I am really hungry.”

“Well, they actually have to cook the food so it takes some time.”
She winced and I walked away to take another table’s order.
As I was walking back toward the cute couple and their obnoxious friends, Mulan flagged me down again.

“Do you think my food is ready yet?” she asked again.

“Seriously?”
I replied.
“I have not even walked back to the kitchen yet.
You just saw me taking that other table’s order.
How could your food possibly be ready yet?”

“I don’t know.
I am just really hungry.”
The cute couple looked at me with that
we’re sorry
face, realizing that their friend’s behavior was a little ridiculous.
I couldn’t even justify her response with an answer so I just walked away.
I put the other table’s order into the computer and walked by the Asian girl and the cute couple once again and was stopped by the famished girl.

“Do you think my food is ready yet?” she asked once more.
This had all taken place in a time span of less than two minutes.
Unless the Iron Chef was in the kitchen that afternoon there was no way her food could have possibly been ready.

“You do realize they have to actually cook the food, right?” I asked.

“Yes, but I am just really hungry.”

I had enough.
Maybe the cute couple was not as nice as I once thought they were.
Maybe they were against me as well.
I looked at the Asian girl and was overcome with rage.
I had not taken a drink in four days and who better to take my anger out on than the little woman who apparently had not eaten at all this month.

“Maybe if you ask me one more fucking time, your food will come out faster,” I yelled.
She looked at me as if I had just told her she had miscarried her child.
I thought she was going to cry and I walked away.
What was wrong with this girl?
I told the kitchen to take as long as possible to prepare her food just to piss her off.
If I was suffering, she had to as well.
I could sense there was some tension between me and my once friends.
We did not speak much after I delivered their food, but they did leave me a huge tip.
I figured they knew I was having a really bad day.
I don’t know where all of this irritability came from, but I knew I didn’t like it. I was such a happy person before I stopped drinking, or at least I thought I was.
Now I was a walking train wreck.

I went home that night and tried to go to bed but I got a text message from Dr. Jake just before dozing off.

“Off to NYC tomorrow, keep up the good work.” It said.
That pissed me off even more.
I lay there and stewed until I finally feel asleep at 4am.

DAY FIVE

I don’t know why I let Dr. Jake bother me as much as he did for those first few days of sobriety.
He had set his alarm and broke up with me so that should have been the end of it. However, I am an avid watcher of soap operas and on TV, the characters in these shows tend to drag things on for as long as possible.
I thought that maybe things would work out for the two of us and we would get back together.
Either that or I would end up pushing him off of a cliff and having to plead insanity in court.
Either way, Dr. Jake was still in my life at that point.
I thought it might be a good idea to keep him around because he was, after all, a therapist and I could confide in him things I could not tell anyone else.
We had also dated so he knew me very well and would support me in my latest plan.
After all, he was present for most of my summer of binge drinking and saw how much I drank so I thought he might be supportive in my plight.

Dr. Jake and I were really not a good match.
He was a therapist in the Army and I was a waiter.
He had gone to school for several years and was really interested in what he did.
He also was going through a messy divorce with his wife and decided to put me in the middle of it.
He had just come out of the closet and was fascinated with the gay lifestyle, which he was just opening his eyes to see.
We would go out to bars and it was if he finally felt free.
Having come out several years prior, hanging out with other guys who thought the same was as I did, was not as exciting for me.
It was what I had been doing for eight years and the novelty of it had already worn off on me.
But every day was a new experience for him and he embraced it.
Once we ended our relationship, I told him that he needed to go out and experience life for himself and to sleep with as many people as possible.
I did not really mean that, but figured if he had gotten an STD or something, then he could fully appreciate the gay lifestyle.

I went to AA that day and listened to everything that was said.
Little orphan Annie was there again.
Today, she looked really sad.
I told myself that I was going to try and be nice to the people around me.
After all, we were there to help each other and I couldn’t possibly go on just taking help from people and not returning it.
During the meeting, the speaker, a woman named Jean, went on and told her story.
She was a scientist and a raging alchy.
Jean would go to work every single day and try to figure out what formulas she could mix with the solutions she had available, that would give her the same results as drinking liquor.
She managed to find one that didn’t kill her and she went on for about four years drinking potions in her lab.
One day she finally hit bottom when she almost killed someone with a mixture she had concocted.
She then went to AA and never looked back.
That was nineteen years ago.
She continued to take, what they call in AA, “personal inventory” and began to weed out the bad influences in her life.
Jean had pretty much gotten rid of everyone who was a negative influence in her life, including her old drinking buddies and most importantly, her ex-husband.
All of these people were bringing her down and having them around was hindering her recovery.
Now a majority of her friends were in the program and she had never been happier.

I was once again forced to look around the room.
Were these the people I was going to be associating myself with for the rest of my life?
Was I destined to share a three-bedroom house in Adams Morgan with Twitch and little orphan Annie?
That’s really an episode of
Three’s Company
that I would have skipped, but Bunny McDougal and Palmer Courtlandt could have totally played the Ropers.
After the meeting, I saw Big Gay Mike and he handed me a card.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s just a card for you.
To celebrate your first five days,” he replied.