PREV: Part 4 - The Dry Life

I’ve won many lotteries in my life. The top five, in order:

1. Being born (and put up for adoption instead of the other on-the-table option)
2. Being born healthy
3. Being adopted by my mother
4. Meeting and marrying Marty
5. Not killing anyone while driving a four-thousand-pound car, blind drunk

I once led a book discussion with a group of college kids. In the book (The Other Wes Moore), the author talked about life-saving moments of luck in our lives. I shared my drinking and driving story with the students as an example of mine. I asked them to think about how their lives would be different if their moment of luck had played out in another way. Would they be in this room? Would they be without trauma? Would they be living free? Would they be alive? I still become grateful, reverent even, when I think about surviving that experience without incident. I wonder about the infinite ways my life would be different had the universe not spared me on that day.

Decades later, one of my teen children asked me how old I was when I lost my virginity. I told them I didn’t know. I told them that I could tell them about the first time I remembered having sex, but not the first time, or even several times, that I actually had sex. How’s that for knocking some of the sheen off any idealized visions they held of their father?

Speaking of my children, if there is a single benefit that came from my experience, it is that it prevented my kids from jumping into that fray too early or with careless abandon. We were always open about my condition and told them they may have it too. They didn’t even have to pretend to be an alcoholic. They got to say, "Yeah, my dad’s broken and I might be too, so none for me."

As for how different my life would be had I been unable to stop drinking in my early twenties, I cannot fathom the delta. I'm not going to iterate through all the ways my life would be worse. There's not time. It would suffice to say I would likely not have survived the last three decades. In our early married life, Marty was telling her mother how bad I was with money and the problems it created. In an effort to appease her young daughter, she said, “Well, at least he doesn’t drink.” Mama Nat has no idea how much truth was packed into that simple statement of fact. And I can’t tell you how grateful and fortunate I am that she doesn’t.

FIN

PREV: Part 3 - My Last Drink

My exit from drinking went off about as elegantly as it began. But this is life, no. Figuring things out on our own by trial and error tends to be clumsy by nature. Why would we ever expect otherwise? The first hurdle was the guy, usually the loudest in the room, who finds it unacceptable for anyone not to be drinking if they were. They wouldn’t have it and would grab you up and not let you go until you had a beer in your hand.

It took me a little bit, but in time, I learned to just accept and hold the beer. That bought you some leeway. But then, if you weren’t raising it enough, that might get the notice of someone, again, usually the loudest guy, and that would also not do. So then I learned to get the beer and, at some point, excuse myself to the bathroom or an empty kitchen where I could pour out the beer and replace it with water.

I ran into some situations where I could not lean on my sleight of hand and decided to just stand my ground, saying I didn’t want any and not take any. As an adult in this day and time, you’d think this strategy would be perfectly solid. But to a twenty-year-old in the late eighties, running with the crew I ran with, it was like trying to pass Canadian quarters at the arcade.

Then I stumbled upon the only thing I found to work on every person in every setting with one hundred percent effectiveness. Think of it as a solution to a riddle. What is the only thing you could tell a loud, drunk guy to get him to stop badgering you about a drink? The answer is to tell them that you are a recovering alcoholic. Curiously, not only will this quiet down the drunkard, it will give them a level of respect for you in that, look, this is something I was soooooo good at, even as a twenty-year-old, that I had to stop doing it. It’s like the drinking version of being registered as a deadly weapon. Then, still curiously, that same loud clod will not only stop harassing you, they will become your protector, threatening anyone who comes near you with a drink.

While technically I am not an alcoholic, because I never really developed an appreciation for that genre of refreshment, I gotta think I fall on some ven-adjacent circle that gives me partial rights to the club.

NEXT: Part 5 - Life-Saving Luck

PREV: Part 2 - The Morning(s) After

I was living in the basement of a friend’s family home one summer. I was about to start at a new university and didn’t have a place to live. This family was kind enough to let me stay with them until the school year got going.

On a Saturday morning, I met a group of friends at a park to play basketball. We played in the St. Louis swelter for a few hours. During a break, I asked if anyone had brought anything to drink. I was directed to a cooler to the side. In it was a sea of floating cans of beer. Desperately thirsty, I pulled one and drained it quickly.

Twenty minutes later, one of the people said that given the heat, they were headed to Harper’s pool. About a mile into the drive home to get my trunks, I approached an underpass that went beneath some train tracks. As you enter the brief tunnel structure, there is a cement median about two feet wide dividing the two sides of traffic. When I came to the median, I somehow got my car straddled over it, so the driver's side was in the lane of oncoming traffic, and the passenger side was on the right side. I remember repeatedly jerking the steering wheel to the right, trying to get back in my lane, and was confused why it would not go as the wheel kept hitting the median (which I was not fully cognizant of).

Next thing I know, I wake up on the floor of my basement bedroom. I think back, and the last thing I remember is fighting with the steering wheel. I walk up the stairs and open the front door.

This house I’m living in, which is part of a standard suburban neighborhood predominantly made up of families with children, is set up on a little hill. By the street, they have created extra parking spots with some railroad ties and gravel. I drove through the gravel, over the railroad ties, through their front yard, and my car was sitting six feet from their living room’s bay window. The driver’s door was still open, and the parking brake was engaged. I scanned the street to see if there were people taking in this unexpected scene. Thankfully, there were none. I got in and rolled the car back onto the street and properly parked it.

I then got out, still looking around suspiciously, and moved to the front of the car. There I knelt down and inspected the headlights and front grill. I was looking for blood and hair. Thankfully and miraculously, there was none.

NEXT: Part 4 - The Dry Life

PREV: Part 1 - My First Drink

I woke in my bed. No Molly. I called to her. No response. I walked through the house. Still no Molly. But I did find a good number of her clothes. And not just minor articles like a scarf or jacket, but critical parts, like, uh, her dress. I was going to the Coors Classic bike race in Boulder that afternoon, so I jumped into the shower before my ride came by. When the hot water hit my body, I recoiled in pain. In looking down, I saw three cuts on my left chest with dried blood below them.

A few days later, I stood at Molly’s bedroom door holding a paper bag filled with her clothes.

Hi.

Hey.

So, sorry about the other night. Honestly, I don't know what happened.

I think you got drunk.

Yeah, I guess I did. But I mean, I don’t remember much.

You didn’t miss much worth remembering.

I was worried when you weren’t there.

You didn’t look qualified to drive me home, so I called a friend.

Right. Good. Sorry about that. I brought your clothes back.

Thanks. You can just leave them there.

With that, she turned back to drawing on her paper. Those were the last words Molly ever said to me.

From the moment I fell down the stairs until the moment I woke up, I have zero memories. Well, that is not entirely true. There are two fuzzy five-second fragments, but aside from that, it is all lost time. What the hell happened? We were doing great. We were laughing. Talking. Having such a wonderful time.

I wish I could report that that is the last time that happened, but it was not. It didn’t happen hundreds of times, but it did happen more than ten. I would drink. At some number of minutes after that, I would stop remembering. Then I would wake up somewhere and work to learn what happened in the missing hours.

It is worth mentioning that this is not a situation where this happened to me after drinking eight beers or four shots. This could happen to me after one or two beers (depending on when I last ate) or a single drink of something harder.

Not all of the nights went fully unreported. I would get snippets here and there, but never a full accounting—the people I was with were drinking too. But there were more names that would go in the Molly column. Things were going well, then I drank, and that was that.

I had two things going against me.

1. This is what people my age, the people I was running around with at least, were doing—drinking often and drinking lots.
   
2. I assumed that what happened to me was what happened to everyone.

It wasn’t until I shared this with a girl I was dating (who obviously hadn’t drank with me yet) that I learned this was not everyone’s experience. After asking a few questions, she casually said that I might not be able to metabolize alcohol, which is why it was having this amplified effect on me. Intrigued, I asked what this meant. She explained that there are people who have reactions to alcohol. Some people are allergic to it. And some people have zero ability to process it at all. She said if I were in the can’t-process-it camp, then it means I’m the cheapest date out there because all of it is like one hundred proof to my body.

Further, she said there are some ethnicities (asian and american indian) that can struggle with alcohol. Since I am adopted and have very intentionally sought not to learn anything about my racial makeup, AND seem to be a bit of a mutt and carry common characteristics from numerous ethnicities, it is a fair supposition.

Some might think learning this information would immediately right the ship, but remember, I was nineteen years old and these were all new experiences, and again, that is just what the people I spent the most time with were doing, and it was assumed in a number of ways that I would be doing the same.

NEXT: Part 3 - My Last Drink

The summer before my senior year of high school, I worked at McDonald's. As is the case at most McDonald's, I imagine, they employed a curious cast of characters. There was Rand, who used every break to go to his sun-faded Camaro and get high. He often fell asleep in the hidden spot beneath the pine tree behind the building. Sending a runner to wake him up if he did not return was an actual work assignment at the Campus West McDonald's. Another employee was amazingly named Joe Dice, or at least that is the name he applied for work under. In some ways, that feels like all that needs to be said about Joe, but in case you need a bit more. I got hired on the same day Joe did. The manager sent the four of us new hires to the bathroom to try on our magenta polyester pants. When Joe dropped his shorts, we all learned that young men named Joe Dice do not wear underwear. Thankfully, no patrons felt the need during those unexpected ninety seconds. And then there was Molly.

Molly was cool. Cool as in Molly had, what I was told by another employee, a Polish Mohawk. This meant the sides and back of her head were shaved, and the top was left really long and flew about unpredictably. Molly had this give-no-shits approach to things while still being both kind and competent—doubly so when put up against the likes of Rand and Joe Dice. Next to Molly, I was the squarest square in the mix—triply so when competing against the likes of Rand and Joe Dice. But this did not deter me from throwing all seventeen years of my flirting arsenal her way. If you asked me, or anyone watching the awkward dance, if a single one of my missiles hit her battleship, confidence would have been low.

One day at the end of her shift, she bid all of us unfortunates farewell, as she passed me, she handed me a slip of paper. It was a pulled bit of register tape and said in a fun scrawl, 'McMolly' with a phone number beneath. She flashed me those eyes and wordlessly continued her exit.

I didn't even have to knock on her home's door when I picked her up. Before I had time to get out of my '76 Volvo station wagon, she was striding down the sidewalk and slipped into the car. After a few pleasantries, she asked about the plan.

I thought we might get some food.

I just ate.

Oh, well, maybe we could see a movie.

A movie, really. That's what you want to do?

Uh. Well.

Didn't you say your parents were out of town?

Before I could answer, she reached into her voluminous shoulder tote and hefted out a large, clear bottle filled with an equally clear liquid. My entire knowledge of drinking could have fit in the red metal cap that poked out of Molly's clenched fist. I'd seen people at parties mixing drinks with orange juice or sodas. I asked if we should stop and get some of those things. Her reply, "if you want", stressing the word 'you'. Yes, I want. So we stopped at a store and I got a bag full of diluters.

I was struck by how quickly we settled in at my home's dining room table, the conversation flowing as easily as the pours from Molly's bottle. I tried multiple combinations from the bank of drinks I had neatly lined up on the table, looking for a blend that softened the liquid's bite. Molly tried exactly none of them, and I found no magic mix. In this setting, I was able to see Molly in much more detail. Less the rough polyester and fry vat sheen, she was beautiful. Zero makeup. No tan. Her skin was so light it seemed translucent. She was stunning. I remember wondering what she would look like with a more conventional haircut and attire, if it would make her more striking or maybe less so.

We were laughing and sharing embarrassing stories. If someone walked in on the two of us, they would have thought we were long-time pals, given our easy rapport. I repeatedly fought back the disbelief that I was out with Molly, a girl who had several guys at work, ten kinds of twisted up, including Rand and Joe Dice, but here she was with me.

My dog started barking in the backyard. From my chair, I pulled the sliding glass door open and called for her to come inside. No dog. More barking. I called again. Still no dog. Annoyed at the interruption, I walked onto the back deck and called her more emphatically, including a slap of my thigh. She came to the bottom of the deck's stairs but did not come up. She held her ground, now barking at me. Even more annoying. I took the first step down to collect her. I never touched the second tread because my body just pitched forward, and I fell down the wooden steps.

NEXT: Part 2 - The Morning(s) After