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There is a point when you are no longer drunk, you are saturated.
In February 2002, Logan, Utah, a small, college town near the border of Idaho, had record-breaking low temperatures after a record-breaking snowstorm. Twenty-four inches of snow fell in less than twenty-four hours.
The temperature gauge read thirty-four degrees below zero. After a certain temperature though, it’s just cold. You can add qualifiers — really cold or freezing, but it all goes back to numb hands and feet and a new worry about not being able to feel your face. But that’s the point, isn’t it?
Numbness.
Schools were cancelled and most of downtown was closed. Our heater broke.
Dishwater froze in the sink. Three warm sweaters, several cups of coffee, and a few glasses of wine kept me warm. The next morning when I poked my head out of the covers, I saw confirmation and condemnation marbled in my cloud of breath.
A few days later, despite the apocalyptic weather, I drove twenty miles to my boss’s birthday party where I had thirteen shots of vodka, two glasses of wine, a coffee and Kaluah’s, and nothing to eat. The year before I didn’t drink it all — complained that it was all anyone was interested in doing. At the party, a yoga instructor told me that twenty-three is a year of change.
She didn’t say anything about abnormal levels of self-destructive tendencies though.
You make friends who throw great parties who have big back yards and a full bar. You stay at a hotel for three weeks in July for your job. They have happy hour with a kind bartender who has an echo in her mind, so that when you order a single, she gives you a double. Then when you dare to order a double you return to your room and prepare your things for the six a.m. wake-up call, because you’re nothing if not organized.
You drink an entire bottle of red wine at a going away party because you couldn’t figure out why you’re celebrating good friends moving away. You go to a birthday party at ten o’clock at night after waking up at dawn to drive to Salt Lake City for a lecture from a spiritual leader. You don’t eat all day, and the host refills your drink every time it dips below the half way point. You find yourself facing a future of one mundane task after another and start to understand that alcohol makes everything more intense — even editing engineer reports.
I’m saturated; I have bad timing. I gave up on religion just as church going went up. I drink in the midst of sobriety. I drink in the midst of tragedy. I take it upon myself to entertain, to expose my false confidence for a cheap laugh.
One of the women at the party thought I was a minor who had come in to escape the cold and pilfer free liquor. It’s all true except for the part about being a minor. I told her I was twenty-three and a half. Another woman sitting next to me said twenty three and a half is the earth’s axis of rotation as well as the southern latitude of the Tropic of Capricorn and the northern latitude of the Tropic of Cancer. This must be my Henry Miller stage of development.
Outside, I smoked a cigarette, unable to feel the cold anymore. Square blocks of yellow light framed the evening street. They marked who was home but not much else. Their curtains closed, the blinds never opened. Light only escaped through the edges.
Edges don’t terrify me, as long as they’re wide, wide enough to write in, wide enough to get away from someone else’s text and anchor yourself. It’s the lack of edges that worry me. Not enough room to wander. Not enough teeth in the key to unlock the door.
I ask my older, and supposedly wiser, friends how they can be sober when visages the color of dirty snow pervade our vision. No answer will satisfy me. Alcohol quenches everything because I think it does. Because it has to.
I read alcoholic case studies with transcripts from AA meetings. Alcoholics are natural born storytellers. I sabotage my narratives. They all had a bottom. My older brother Dave tells me I’m not ambitious enough, and I want to write him a letter to tell him my goal is to hit bottom by my twenty fifth birthday.
My boss called me up and thanked me for coming. I told him I felt like a jackass. He said “You made everyone fall in love with you. It was great.”
I take it upon myself to entertain, to expose my false confidence for a cheap laugh.
I do not know how alcohol became my Golden Means, the perfectly proportioned hedonistic elixir, or how I went from drinking one or two beers a night to nine or ten shots of hard liquor. I could blame it on self hatred or boredom or an all consuming fear that a sense of security would never be within my grasp, but I don’t. The impact never worried me. Falling was too satisfying.
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