22 days down/9 days to go
How about that? Days to go in the single digits!
I have another insight as to why I enjoy drinking. Drinking helps me stay out of my brain’s sub-basement. It’s a dark dusty room of my mental house where scary scenes are constantly playing on a creepy old-school projector. This week, the theater of my subbasement has brought me Scenes From My First Drinking Experiences, director’s cut.
Considering how much I relish the sauce, it may be hard for you to believe that I didn’t start drinking until I was 19. In high school, my parents worked day and night to ensure that I’d be isolated from my peers. (For all the plays I was in, I never once attended a cast party.) If I went out to rehearsal or work or even for a walk around the block, my breath, clothes, and hair would all be sniffed for any whiffs of cigarettes or booze or even minty freshness which would obviously mean I was hiding something.
Not that my parents had any reason to think I wanted to drink. I really didn’t. My father and grandfathers and numerous uncles are all alcoholics. I’d spent a lot of my young life watching drunk people behave in ways that embarrassed and scared me. Being the paranoid person that I am, I assumed I’d be an instant-alcoholic if I was lucky enough to avoid death by alcohol poisoning.
As I planned my freshman year at NYU, I voluntarily signed up for the “health awareness hall.” It was the ninth floor of Brittany Hall, a beautiful old Greenwich Village hotel to which I remain inordinately emotionally attached. (FYI, the study lounge in the former penthouse of this awesome building was a speakeasy during prohibition. I used to think I could hear the phantom ice tinkling in ghost glasses as I read there.) Anyway, we on floor 9 pledged not to drink or do drugs. And I really didn’t. My freshman 15 came from pizza and falafel, not beer.
Almost instantly upon my arrival at NYU I became infatuated with a boy I worked with at my job at the campus art gallery. Our flirtation cooled somewhat when I told him that I never drank. He flat out told me he could never date someone who didn’t drink. I think he started drinking around the time he started on solid foods. At 18, he was already quite the accomplished substance abuser. I idolized him. I was unstoppable in my quest to make this guy my boyfriend. Bad personality, bad influence be damned. I would not be deterred.
We went on our first official date in October of our sophomore year. I had lost 20 pounds over the summer (yay mono!) and I felt his will crumble like a beer can under the unstoppable force of mine. (Here’s a free dating tip for all you single people out there: if ever you need to campaign for a year to get somebody to date you, that person is too stupid to warrant your attention. People who don’t like you have bad taste. Move on.) When we were finally almost officially together, I started drinking. It seemed necessary to seal the deal.
In fact, I clearly remember the first time I was really drunk. He had taken me to this party with a group of his friends (who all hated me, unbeknownst to me then) and then sort of left me in a corner. A girl friend of his who was also in love with him proceeded to get me incredibly, stupidly drunk by faking niceness and acting like were becoming fast friends.
As I was being hauled by my almost-boyfriend down the steps and out of the apartment building with all the tenderness a bus boy might show a sack of potatoes, my head kept thumping against the brick wall of the stairwell. “This sucks,” I said. In the morning, I was treated to my first ever hangover and a sinking feeling that I should walk away from this asshole. Later that afternoon he tried to “cure me” with a bagel and beer. “Ah, see he really cares!” What is a gut instinct compared to the incomparable romance of both liquid and solid carbs?
I didn’t extricate myself from that situation for three more years. (And by extricate, I mean get dumped.)
So now, as these sad scenes flicker before me in my brain subbasement, not only do I acutely feel the frustration of wanting to rewrite the script, I can’t help ask myself if a lot of my beliefs about drinking go back to that time. Do I still believe that drinking is cool? That if I don’t drink people won’t like me or think I’m weird? That I can’t be fun or lovable minus booze? How might I be different if I would have instead dated one of my neighbors on the health awareness floor? And, most of all, how can you rewire your brain, unprogram the irrational stuff that’s been firing away in your neurons for 15 years?