Drunk Mom (2 page)

It’s always this way.

I wonder if I should call the man who hit on me in the elevator on my way to the party. I guessed he was in his forties, with a nice suit on, an expensive suit, a silk tie. He looked like the kind of man who wouldn’t be worried about doing cocaine with a stranger. And he could probably get more. He looked like the kind of man who could get more cocaine. More of everything. There was a vibe about him, something like a halo of owning expensive things, like an I-don’t-need-to-give-a-fuck halo, he was that sort of man. Moneybags man. He said he was in sales. He asked what I did.

I could’ve picked a few things. I could’ve lied. I can’t remember why I told him that I was a new mom. I suppose I just tell people that all the time.

I can’t remember why he annoyed me. Maybe how insistent he was with his stupid card, looking at my chest and belly as if he wasn’t being challenged by the idea that a baby just came out of the woman he was imagining having sex with. Maybe this only made him want to have me more.

I don’t call the man. I walk and smoke.

I love it. I love smoking. I want to smoke more.

Eventually I have to take a break, because I’m starting to have trouble breathing. I hate taking this break. All I have in my head the entire time is the red glowing tip, the swirling smoke, the white cylinder consumed by the red, turning grey, black.

After what seems like nothing and forever at the same time, the cocaine rollercoaster finally starts to slow down. I’m thinking about doing more but I’m good, I’m good.

I’m good now.

I walk all the way home from the museum. It’s a long walk. I’m trying to walk away from
wanting
.

I wonder how long cocaine stays in breast milk.

At home, my sister is asleep on the pullout bed in the living room. Sleeping, she looks twelve, even though she’s twice that age. She’s my first baby. I want to kiss her on the forehead as if she were a baby. I blow her a kiss instead. I worry my cigarette-cocaine-booze smell will wake her up. She is pure. Nothing like me.

I turn the light on to see my way up the stairs, memorize them before I go. I turn the light off, climb the stairs, hold my breath.

I close my eyes. The afterlights turn into flower shapes under my eyelids. Flowers in my head. Flowerheads.

I open my eyes. Let them get used to the darkness. And then I see the top of his head, the little fist like a flower bud. He’s only an infant, still closed to the world in his few-months-old form, so fragile with soft skull, neck that holds his perfect head away from me. Because, thankfully, he’s turned away from me. I couldn’t bear to see his face right now. I hear him breathe. His breathing so delicate, rose petals falling.

He is asleep in his crib. In the meadow of pillows and soft toys.

I think of kissing him on the forehead. The notion is so strong that my mouth waters.

I don’t kiss him. I can’t go near him right now. It’s poison.

I’m poison.

It’s torture to watch him and not touch.

There’s nothing I want more in my life than to go near him.

No, that’s a lie. There are other things that I want more—of—in my life.

I tiptoe back down the stairs, in the familiar darkness.

My lungs are expanding. There’s a wave of clarity going through my head like an electric zap. I don’t want it. I want the zap to go away, I want to stay unzapped, high.

But I can feel myself sobering up. I don’t like it. Soon, I will be folded into a knees-to-chin ball of fear. My throat is tightening already. And my nose is rooting like the baby’s mouth for more.

The house is asleep. Outside, the beginnings of a new day are in the making. It’s still too early for birds but I swear I can already hear them fussing around in their fucking nests.

I can’t face any of it yet.

I grab my wallet. I lock the bathroom door just in case.

T
he cocaine hangover is a bit of a surprise. It’s dull. It’s dullness all over my body and a stuffy nose. I forgot this part.

I blow my nose over and over for the good feeling that I’m getting rid of the stuff in it. I’m not. Cocaine is ingested into the bloodstream right away. There’s nothing you can do to get rid of it.

How do I know this? Before bed, I Googled until 4 a.m. to read about cocaine and breast milk and found out that it stays in the system anywhere from twenty-four to seventy-two hours.

Seventy-two hours. Christ.

This morning I had to go out, all bleary, stuffed-up and tired, and buy more formula. I tried to recall what it was like to be twenty-five and full of energy after a night like this. I remember experiencing the world in two dimensions, as if depth washed out completely, leaving everything looking like a cardboard cut-out of itself. It was bizarre to me that I used to be able to do this night after night. That’s what twenty-five was like.

I shake and open the can of premixed formula. I pour it into a bottle, heat it up under hot running water.

The baby falls back asleep after the first few gulps.

At the door, on her way out, my sister asks me how I am.

I say fine.

Her eyes say, No you’re not.

She says, Okay. Are you going to be okay?

What do you mean? I’m the big sister. You can’t ask me that.

She says nothing.

I’m just kidding. Jesus.

Okay, she says. She doesn’t say much more. She’s being distant this morning.

What’s up with you?

Nothing. I’ll call you later.

After she leaves and after the second feeding, I decide to take a bath. I want to wash off the dusty dullness.

The bruises on my breasts are fading. They were dark, almost black in some places. After this prolonged break they’re getting lighter. I have to be more diligent about this, I tell myself. Who knows what kinds of damage he’s doing. Sometimes I get too tired to move his mouth back onto a nipple. Before the bath, I squeeze the nipples to relieve all the milk that’s stretching and filling up under my skin, making my breasts rock-hard.

I watch the thin streams of pearly fluid shoot, explode against the sink. I feel sad, defeated. What a waste.

But I quickly snap out of this thought. It’s not a waste. It’s poison. It’s all poison, poison going down the drain.

He starts to cry as soon as I lie down in the bathtub. He has the worst sense of timing. He cries as soon as I sit down to a meal, when I need to shit, do my makeup, have sex, when the doorbell rings, when I take baths. He stays silent and content when I surf the Net in boredom, does nothing when hours stretch into megahours.

I get out of the bathtub—my body feeling broken, mangled from the night before—and I stumble toward the laundry room which is a nursery, which is a laundry room, which is a nursery.

The open mouth is one big scream. The baby is a lung being robbed of air.

My breasts pulse painfully and gently in response, in their own instinctive scream.

I lift him up and he grabs for them. With his eyes shut, a wrinkled face with a horrible grimace on it, he looks like a frantic, blind old man. He’s a frantic old man grabbing for young tits.

I gently move his hands and he twists his body as if in pain. I give him his bottle with formula. He sucks hungrily. His eyes remain closed.

My boyfriend is coming back later. He calls and says he can’t wait to see his little family.

Little family, that’s us.

But before my boyfriend gets home that evening I leave the house. Outside, still stuffed-up and cocaine-hungover but already shaky with anticipation, I pick up the pace and I start to sing. I sing to my baby in the stroller and I sing that we are doom-doom-doomed. But it’s a happy
song. Well, not that happy, but it’s not like I can do anything about where I’m going right now—even though I know I should not go there—and I feel like singing because I’m excited. I’m excited about where I’m going.

Over the canopy of the stroller, I can see the top of the baby’s blue too-small hat. A friend’s mother made the hat but she has passed on, so I always think of death when I look at this blue hat.

Out of respect—for death? for my friend’s dead mother?—I make the baby wear the hat all the time and don’t dare exchange it for a bigger one. It has a shiny marble of a button so that the side flaps can sit tightly over the ears when you button it up under the chin. The flaps push his cheeks a little forward and with the blue pompom on top of the hat and those big, round pink cheeks my infant looks ridiculous, like a caricature of a baby.

If nothing else, think of him in his blue hat, says my boyfriend later on, maybe even that evening when we talk about my drinking again. I understand what he’s doing. He wants me to think of Frankie in the hat, looking cute and helpless, and he thinks that this will stop me, the image of him.

But nothing stops me these days.

O
h, in case you’re wondering: I’m not a cocaine addict.

I prefer to drink.

You found me in the middle of my story and I happened to have just found a baggie of cocaine in that bathroom.

But honestly, I prefer drinking.

I prefer drinking to anything in the world: sex, food, sleep. My child, my lover, anything.

I love to drink. Sometimes I think: No, I
am
drink.

It’s like my blood. Even before I get it, I can feel it in my veins. I’m not being poetic—I can actually feel it in my veins.

It’s gold. It’s like little zaps of gold going through me, charging me, starting me up.

When I drink, I fill with real gold and become god-like.

So I’m not a cocaine addict. I’m a drunk.

I had been a drunk for a long time. I stopped drinking for a time, and
then I started again.

I believe that you’re never cured of alcoholism. I use the word
cure
but it is not strictly a disease. Go to any AA meeting, watch or read anything about addiction, and sooner or later you will hear the word “disease.” But it is not a disease. Disease implies you can maybe cure it. In my opinion it’s closer to a condition or, perhaps, a habit you can’t unlearn completely once you stop it. Even if dormant, it is ingrained in you.

For example, my first language is Polish. I don’t use it often yet I will never unlearn it. When needed, I can speak it fluently, just like that.

I’m always going to be a speaker of the language of alcoholism too—if I relapse, picking up right where I left off, catching up to my last number of drinks with an extra drink to top it off, my vocabulary expanding.

People also tend to mistake alcoholism for drinking: “I’m going to slow down. Cut down on my drinking.” Okay. You do that. But if you’re an alcoholic, you can’t do just that. Alcoholism is not drinking, just like hemophilia is not bleeding. You can’t slow down, cut down on your alcoholism. You can’t unlearn its language. You can stop using it and forget some of the words, but you still know it. With drinking too, you can stop drinking and hope it’ll stay stopped. Alcoholism is a habit, a permanent condition of having the habit—like this
wanting
is, at least in my case. Sometimes the wanting gets too strong and I run. I run with it, run so fast I’m out of breath, and then run even faster.

I relapsed when the wanting got particularly strong.

To relapse means to “suffer deterioration after a period of improvement.”

There was a period of improvement when I became sober for the first time, at the age of twenty-seven. But before that, I was the kind of drunk girl who ran so fast with it, drinking, she could never catch her breath.

I was the girl who danced barefoot on tables or sometimes fell asleep
with her shoes on, or sometimes lost a job or a relationship. I was the type of tragic girl that boys would try to fix, or try to drink with although only until they’d had enough, and there I would be, moving apartments yet again only to move in with another boyfriend who claimed he’d be better at fixing me.

I always had three drinks to your one, I always prepared for a night out with a bottle of wine, always opened another beer at 4 a.m., after coming home after a night of partying.

But it’s easy to hide your drinking in your twenties, when many of your peers seem to be bent on oblivion too, when comparing hangovers is par for the course. Except that I kept quiet when people discussed having blacked out as if it was something unusual. It happened to me all the time. And I too shook my head in disbelief when a friend would do something silly while intoxicated—steal a garden gnome, climb on a roof, make out with not-his-girlfriend. Look at that guy! Guy, you really need to cut down on your drinking!

Me? You couldn’t catch me. I juggled friends and environments. Except for those poor boyfriends, there weren’t that many people who witnessed my demise. It’s easy to flit from party to party, from event to event when you’re full of life in your twenties. It’s easy to drink in your room before you go out to flit—the people you keep around you in your twenties are new to it all. They are new to friends drinking in their rooms or friends in Emergency because of alcohol poisoning. And they are flitters as well; we all flit, trying to catch up with each other and outflit each other too.