Worse for Wear: Chapter 1, Part 1

Editor’s Note: This is the first of three installments from Chapter 1 of the forthcoming serialized memoir, Worse for Wear, by Adrian Margaret Brune. To read Chapter 1, Part 2, click here. Chapter 1, Part 3 is here. For additional information on the collaboration with Ms. Brune, see the Atticus Books press release.

The bed felt harder than usual as I awoke with a shiver – and I didn’t remember that I had air conditioning in my apartment, or a fan kept at what must have been 50 degrees. After all, I could hardly afford to pay rent, let alone my electric bill.

I slowly raised one eyelid to look out to the left of my bed, noticing an illuminated window, the bright sun struggling to thwart the dark, miserably ugly curtains in place to dampen it. But wait; I had French doors to the left of my bedside, not windows and certainly not burgundy, navy blue and pink flowered curtains. And what happened to all the morning noise outside my apartment? Things were eerily quiet in this strange room.

Then I lifted my head from a flat, smelly cold pillow and rubbed my eyes. Though still half-asleep, I soon realized that my bed was not my own, cozy, colorful, full-size abode, but a small, mechanical twin with stark white, paper-thin sheets. Looking straight ahead, I saw not my television set propped upon my clothes chest, but a pile of cosmetics on a cheap dresser. And turning to my right, I noticed a large white lump turned on its side, desperately trying to squeeze every minute of sleep left in the fading night.

I checked my watch: 6 a.m. Right. What the hell was I doing awake at 6 a.m.? But moreover, where the hell was I?

I turned my head downward to make sure the rest of my body was there. I noticed I was still in possession of something familiar: my night clothes – old, blue Adidas pants and my Provincetown sweatshirt.

I lay back down and shrouded my face in my cheap bedding. Then I heard the noise that jarred me awake. “Good morning, ladies! Rise and shine! The van will be here in two hours!”

Christ. That’s right, I thought to myself. I’m in Connecticut. In rehab.

For the past three months – possibly four by the time I awoke in the small, stuffy, feet-smelling bedroom of the Stonington Institute’s Summit House – I had been waging battle with the stranglehold alcohol had on me. In the year I had sworn to cut back on my drinking, join a gym, see a therapist and hold down a steady job, I had buckled under the pressures of life in New York. By the time 90 days passed from New Year’s Day, a “gold” membership card to a pricey health club dangled on my keychain, a therapist’s name was in my Palm Pilot, and my byline started to appear weekly in a national magazine covering the self-important, yet pointless, public relations industry. But I was drinking all day, every day. I had taken three steps forward and ten steps back. Now on my third try to stop drinking, I wondered if anything would permanently turn my life around (secretly doubting group therapy, cautionary classes and living with seven other addicts would) and fantasized about a tall, cold, sweating bottle of Miller Lite, my daily dose of liquid relief.

Ten minutes from the time my left eye opened and gazed around the room for a hint of familiarity and Tracey, my loud, obnoxious, Italian bartender housemate shouted at us all, I was already visibly awake and the Ativan my doctor had given me to try and relax on the train had worn off. I sat up again and opened the door.

“Please shut. The. Fuck. Up.” I said as I put on my flip-flops and walked through the kitchen on the way to the shower after a night of tossing and turning.

“Why, look. It’s sleeping beauty!” she called after me in her thick, working-class Eastern Connecticut accent. “Whatsa matter, Sleeping Beauty?! Someone still detoxin’?”

“No one asked for your input,” I said, watching her pour her second cup of coffee. But indeed, she had me dead on. I was definitely in a detox – not quite as bad as I had been six weeks earlier, when I had detoxed for the first time at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. There, I shook so badly the first day, I could barely hold a glass of orange juice as I waited in the common room for the nurses to mercifully call my name for the Librium that would kill the withdrawal. Still my head throbbed with a dull ache, my face flushed pink and I wretched, knowing that with $2 and 24 ounces, I could feel like myself again.

“Yep, you’re lookin’ pretty rough. Maybe a nice shower will help,” Tracey informed.

“Yeah, just make sure there’s some coffee left when I get out. I feel like the waking dead.”

And already the events of the last few days had started flashing before my eyes as if I had, indeed, reached the bitter end of it all. I stumbled into the bathroom and turned on the water, as the memories started to flow through my head.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adrian Margaret Brune is a Brooklyn-based journalist and writer whose work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times and Chicago Tribune Magazine. In her free time, she writes autobiographical short stories and sells them in the subway tunnel at Grand Central Station. She blogs about her experience with the writing enterprise, Short Stories for the Long Ride Home, on Facebook.