Worse for Wear: Chapter 1, Part 2

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

“You’re goin’ to rehab, Adrian.”

“What?! I thought we had worked this out?,” I replied to Cathy, by then my AA sponsor of two months. “When did you come up with this?”

I loved to argue with Cathy over her AA tenets, but this time, I was dead serious. No rehab.

“Listen, while you were out, I sat down on the Internet and found a couple of rehabs that take your insurance. See?!” She handed me two printouts of places in Southern New Jersey and Eastern Connecticut. Vowing to never spend more than a day in Jersey, I picked up the Connecticut paper. “Stonington Institute,” it read. “Rediscovering Life.” But wait a minute, I had already sort of rediscovered life in New York Alcoholics Anonymous. What had changed in the time that I left Cathy’s apartment for an errand to the Post Office, thinking we were pushing forward, to my return and this rehab business?

“I don’t understand. What’s with the about-face?”

“I think you need more help than I can give. If you don’t go, then I can’t be your sponsor.” There it was: emotional blackmail. Cathy wielded it well. We went to a meeting and then I considered my options that night while I listened to the distant traffic sixteen floors below her tastefully decorated, one-bedroom in a doorman building, unable to sleep.

I had started my latest binge the previous Thursday night, having not received a second interview for a job I desperately wanted. By then, having been “in the rooms” of Alcohol Anonymous for nearly three months, drinking hardly held any joy for me, but I nonetheless picked up hoping for some relief. I was already drunk after two beers, however, when I normally should have just had a nice buzz going. I passed out after a finishing a six and woke up the next morning with a terrible hangover, which I soon cured with another beer, then another, then another until I passed out again. Coming to at eight on a Saturday morning, I realized I forgot to pick up a prescription on the West Side and I sipped more beer as I looked at the pouring rain outside and contemplated my next move. Drunk by the time I left my apartment an hour later, I called my crazy, Syrian friend, Kendah, to arrange to meet her for breakfast and stumbled on to a C Train. After I dropped off the prescription for my psychiatric drugs, including one for the ever essential Ativan, I walked across 9th Avenue and sidled up to the bar at Flight 151, where the waitresses and bartenders were still cleaning up from the night before. I soon spotted my favorite bartender.

“Heeeeeeyy, Rachel. How are you? How’sssss the writing?”

“Good. Going well, thanks,” Rachel replied, looking at me, eyebrows raised.

“Hey, could I get a Coors Light Draft?

“Uh, don’t you want an O’Doul’s?” she said, referring to my usual beverage request.

“Nope. I’m not doin’ that anymore. I’ll have a Coors Light please.” It was not even 10 am. Kendah wanted to meet soon in the East Village – four or five avenues away, but I still had drinking to do. I guzzled three beers in 30 minutes, then walked out of the bar into a ray of misty sun – the calm between the downpours on a humid summer day – and picked up my prescription. I called Kendah and told her I was headed her way. But halfway through the Village, I dove headfirst into another blackout and somehow decided to get back on the C at West 4th and go home to Brooklyn. Eventually awaking at the Nostrand stop, I wobbled off the train and emerged out of the station into another downpour, not knowing where the hell I was, only that I had clammy hands, racing thoughts, sweats and a desperate taste for more beer. Sipping a tall boy from the closest bodega, I walked due West toward my Brooklyn beacon – the Willamsburg Savings Bank Clock Tower Condominiums – relying on what I thought of as my spot-on sense of direction to guide me back to my apartment. When I eventually found Lafayette Avenue, then South Portland, then my door, then my key, I collapsed onto my bed and fell asleep, exhausted from my journey through the boroughs. I woke around eleven to watch Saturday Night Live, drink a few more beers and take my Ativan. Thirty minutes later, I was out, finally putting to end a waste of a day.

The next morning, I awoke early again – my curse for using alcohol as a sleeping aid – and remembered that I had an appointment for breakfast with my older brother, Jim, then a date with the local flea market to try to maintain a fledgling antique business I had started with a friend months before. As I looked out my bedroom window, the sun – always glowing a brighter hue of yellow after a day of rain – seared my eyes and pierced my temples. I reached for another Ativan, swallowed and laid back on my pillow for a few minutes waiting for it to pulse through my veins and hit my brain. Damn Ativan never worked as fast on the hangovers as Zanax, I lamented, reaching for the Bud Light by my bed. I swallowed down a few gulps and felt the alcohol wash over my body, releasing my constricted veins.

Yet, it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t have my brother smelling the alcohol on my breath. But I couldn’t meet him without its warm haze to keep me comfortably checked out. Showered, toweled and teeth brushed, my hands still shook as I tried to stencil in a straight line on my eyelids and bulk up my eyelashes. A crack and a gulp – much better. In fifteen more minutes, I felt physically ready to walk out the door, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to cross the threshold, hoping that somehow I could make time stand still to drink for another hour. So I consumed in 15 minutes what might have normally taken an hour and began the mile-long walk from Fort Greene, my neighborhood, to Park Slope, sunglasses over my eyes and ball cap low.

By that time, I felt good. Whenever I drank, my entire perspective on life – on the world around me – changed. My cares vanished and I could concentrate on the moment ahead of me. Everything around me moved slower, almost lackadaisically. Strangers stopped, smiled, and even talked to me. The hue of the trees and the sky was richer, deeper. I absorbed everything around me, able to focus almost completely on one thing at a time. Moreover, I felt free to say – to express – the things on my mind: ideas, opinions, sentiments I had suppressed for years and years out of the fear of rejection. These were the feelings that kept me coming back for more. Feelings my brother couldn’t possibly understand – or maybe he could. He just wasn’t letting on.

“Have you been drinking again?” he asked almost immediately after I showed up on his doorstep. “Have you been fucking drinking again?!”

“Jim, let me explain, will you?!” I desperately needed something to eat, but I could sense he wasn’t about to take me out for brunch.

“You’re unbelievable! You’re fucking unbelievable, you know that!”

I nodded, yes. I knew.

“Do you know what lengths to which Sarah and I have gone to make sure you’re not on the street – to make sure you’re not homeless!”

I nodded, yes. I knew.

“Yet, you’re still drinking! Why do you keep doing that?!”

I nodded, no. I didn’t know.

Or at least, I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t explain the peacefulness, the state of blissful inertia to which alcohol brought me: the rolling black clouds and cool breeze that felt cooler as it blew through my window after the brunch sangria; the thin dusting of snow that looked brighter on the quiet Brooklyn streets as I walked from the bar to my little, loveable apartment on Lafayette; the tingling excitement that ran through my body as I made love to a beautiful woman, still buzzed from an Irish nightcap.

“Well, c’mon, let’s go!” Jim said. “You have a commitment – you’re going to sell this stuff.” He pulled out a folding table and two boxes of British china my friend’s parents had shipped her from England two months before. I reluctantly grabbed a box, grateful for the numbness in my extremities. We walked out the door, down the street to the flea market and set up shop.

“Do you think you could watch my spot for a minute while I run an errand,” I asked the nice lady selling costume jewelry in the booth next to me. It was blazing hot and the sickening, clammy, malnourished faintness had started to creep upon me an hour into my tour of duty at the Park Slope flea market. I needed calories – the alcoholic kind.

“Sure,” she said, “I’ll watch your things.”

“Thanks! You need anything from the store up the street?” I asked, grateful to have my reprieve and her blessing.

“Nah, I’m good.” Even better, I thought. More money for beer.

I leapt up, grabbed my wallet and headed down the street to “Slope Green Market,” the Asian market where they practically knew me by name, to pick up my two tall boys of Miller Lite that I figured would tame the hangover until I could go home. A few minutes later, I stood in front of the cooler staring at all my selections, looked at the money in my hand and opted instead for three tall boys of Coors Light, cracking one as soon as the little Korean women rang it up. I pounded it, then wobbled back to my spot, where, thankfully, all the royals had remained.

Through the rest of the afternoon, I tried – very unsuccessfully – to hide the beer from my prospective customers as I poured and drank more and more of it, trying to keep my level between pleasantly buzzed and drunk off my ass. A couple of people stopped and looked over my Prince Philip Wedgwood plates, and my Chuck & Di tea tins, but few bought. I had hoped to unload the entire box of it that Sunday, but as the sun drifted below the brownstones, Jim came back to find me sitting drunk behind a table full of it.

“Ok, you’re done. Let’s go,” he said, loading up boxes.

“Waaaaiiit, Waiiit. You’re moving too fast. I can’t keep up.” I stumbled as I grabbed for my last tall boy and tried to clandestinely drink it down.

I still don’t remember how Jim packed and transported the three boxes of British china and the folding table back to his apartment, but at some point he told me to “just sit here,” and took care of it. The last image of that day left in my mind is of my brother nodding his head side to side as he sat looking at me in his downstairs study, wearing an expression of sheer disappointment I might never forget. He then walked me to the door and shut it.

I returned to the Asian market to pick up my nightly supply of tall boys and drank one to right my sideways walk on the way back to Ft. Greene. The next day, I woke up and called Cathy.

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.

© 2010 – 2011, Adrian Margaret Brune. All rights reserved.