The alarm sounded and I let it buzz for a minute or two before turning it off, rubbing my eyes, stretching, scratching, yawning, and standing up and getting out of bed. I was tired. Eight full hours of sleep and I felt like I could go for at least another sixteen hours. Those four hydrocodone pills I took before bed mixed with the half bottle of liquid codeine really did me in.
I stumbled into the kitchen and went through the cupboards. Nothing edible but my roommate’s energy bars. I grabbed an energy bar and tore it from its shiny wrapper, broke off a piece, and put it into my mouth. The flavor was peanut butter but tasted more like anti-freeze and stale cat shit and the texture was all dusty cardboard. I spit out what was in my mouth and threw the rest of the vile deathbar into the trash bin. I didn’t understand. People loved these things. Clearly I wasn’t made for this world or clearly I wasn’t a person.
It had been four days since I’d had a drink and I was not happy about it. Four days sober on top of having the worst fucking head cold imaginable and St. Fucking Patrick’s day and loudmouth smarmy fucking American pigfucking college children traipsing around the streets drunk as if they were really Irish and partying one night a year like they were. Fucking tourists.
If blacks or Mexicans or Arabs had a holiday like St. Fucking Patrick’s day they’d be called niggers, wetbacks, and camel jockeys even more than they are now and such a holiday would be barred and banned in the states.
I hated my life. I hated everybody in my life. I flat out fucking hated everything. Everything and everyone. All the girls I knew were sluts, drunks, druggies, and whores and all the guys I knew were soulless macho closet homophobes who acted like nice swell fellows while the ladies were in the room but quickly turned into raging testosterone-filled gang-raping imbeciles high-fiving over what pussy they had fucked or were going to fuck. A bunch of fucking phoneys, fakes, and liars. I was clearly tired of the whole scene. I had had enough.
I stepped out of my apartment and down my front porch steps safely, without spraining an ankle. Stef was waiting outside of my house exactly where she said she’d be.
"Matt, I’ve been calling your goddamn phone like crazy! Don’t you ever answer that thing?" she said.
"Only when I know it’s the FBI calling to take away all my rights, babe..." I called out, before rushing over to Stef and putting my arms around her body, which was slightly chunky, but far from overweight. Certainly not the body of a supermodel, but she thought she had it all. Stupid girl.
We walked down to the diner and stopped in for a breakfast consisting of two eggs over medium with rye toast and American fries and several coffees. I smothered nearly my entire plate in ketchup and Stef made faces like she was gagging as if I were going to try and force her to eat off my plate.
"Okay! You can knock off the overdramatized bullshit, like fucking NOW! So I can scarf my slop down and fucking enjoy it, got it? Jesus fucking..." I barked out.
Stef just rolled her eyes and mouthed a trite and rehearsed ‘what-ever’ at me slightly before cramming an egg white sloppily into her mouth while failing to recognize the grease from the eggs dribbling down her chin. Disgusting, but I let her eat on.
I had met Stef just weeks earlier at a punk show. I was pressed up against the wall with two tall cans of Old Style in my hands and visibly unable to stand without the help of the wall. I recall her coming up all dark hair and glasses and bouncing breasts and commenting on my Discharge t-shirt. After drowning several more beers and talking and flirting with her I remember nothing. Black. I woke up the next day on a couch in a strange apartment with Smiths and Cure and Bikini Kill posters plastered all over the walls. I checked for my ID and my wallet and my money and my keys and they were all still there in my pants which were in a ball on the floor beside the couch where I’d slept. I walked around the apartment, stumbling and falling about before finding my footing. My head was still swimming in alcohol and I felt like I’d been beaten with a ball bat. I heard noise in a room to the far right of me so I poked my head in the doorway and there was the girl from the show from the night before.
"Good morning! I thought you might sleep all day. It’s 4 pm, already. You hungry? I made pancakes." the girl told me.
"Ugh... no thanks. I mean thanks, but how’d I get here? I’m sorry, but I can’t remember your name. I’m..."
She got to it before me "You’re Matt! I’m Stef. After we were talking last night you were too wasted to walk so my girlfriend gave us a lift back here. You were already passed out so we just put you down on the couch and you slept like ten hours. You got up in the middle of the night and pissed in the radiator vent..."
"Oh fuck! I’m real sorry. I was so fucked I probably had no idea." I told her.
"Yeah. I kind of figured..."
"Well shit, I need to get home, but is there anything I can do to make it up to you? Ya know, for pissing in your radiator and for the lift and all..." I asked.
"Absolutely.", she handed me a piece of paper with a number scrawled on it "Just give me a call sometime, ‘kay?"
We had been conversing on the phone for a week or so and at first I thought this may turn into a romantic little scene. She’d be my girl and I’d be her boy. Cute. But as time went on and conversations got deeper it became pretty clear to Stef that I was an alcoholic and it became pretty clear to me that I didn’t really like this girl much, that she was kind of motherly and overbearing, but she beat talking to the walls. At first I denied the accusations but then slowly she was able to convince me that I may actually have a bit of a drinking problem. Stef herself was a recovering alcoholic and was still attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings twice a month. We’d agreed to meet up for coffee on one sunny Saturday afternoon while I was very hungover and she had guilt-tripped me into stopping drinking for a few days and go to one of these AA meetings with her. I was not looking forward to it, but hell, I’d try anything once, especially if it got this girl off my ass or maybe got me some ass.
After we finished breakfast we caught the train and headed somewhere off into Uptown. I hadn’t spent much time in Uptown and it became even more clear to me now why I hadn’t spent much time there. Uptown is the fucking pits. Full of mad and unbalanced motherfuckers. Stef clearly belonged here. Not me.
We walked up to a beat to shit storefront with an AA sign out front welcoming one and all. Christ. We walked in and the scene was worse than I’d expected. The meeting began and Stef and I sat silent. Some jackoff with a moustache and comb-over named Bill or Rob or Jim or Mac got up to lead the meeting telling us all about himself. He was boring. I wanted to jam my ink pen from my left pocket straight into his eye socket and fucking twist.
Shortly after Bill or Rob or Jim or Mac or whoever that fleabag twat was that wasted ten minutes of my life whining about his problems some overweight white woman with bags under her eyes got up to tell her story. Hers was typical. She had it all and lost it. Husband, house, car, children. She put on a little weight and hubby started fucking around on her with the floozy down at the local bar. She walked in on it all one night and started pounding back the booze and didn’t stop. She was divorced shortly after, lost everything including the children and now sold her ass on the street to make ends meet or to keep on boozing so to speak. Real class.
Another guy got up and I tuned him out. His pants were clearly soaked in piss and though he was obviously homeless he carried himself like a blue-blooded Englishman, dashing and daunting fox-like across the room as if the dumb son of a bitch were dancing in a ballet.
"See? I told you this would help you. Isn’t this amazing? It just makes you want to get your life on track, you know." whispered Stef into my ear.
"Amazing?", I thought. "More like a complete fucking waste of time. What the fuck have these pricks got to offer me? Nothing! I don’t want to stop drinking. If anything these people are the reason why I drink."
With those thoughts in my head I got up, shoved the crazy homeless blue-blood out of my way and headed for the door. Everybody jumped up at once and Stef shouted and asked frantically where I thought I was going.
"To get a fucking drink! Fuck you all!" I yelled.
With that I walked out, got back on the train, took it into Logan Square and went into my favorite bar. I drank back five or six beers there before walking home to crack open a twelve pack of Milwaukee’s Best. Maybe I did have a drinking problem. Maybe I didn’t. Who’s to really say? One thing’s for sure though, if I was going to quit drinking it would be my choice and it would be on my own terms. Not anybody else’s.