The problem with my drinking is that I know way too much about addiction. I read up on this from a brain science perspective and found out that addiction happens when you do not feel normal without your drug of choice. Apparently, the drug changes your brain chemistry so that you feel down when you do not take your drug. Even thinking about that drug sends you into withdrawal. Your body undergoes a balancing act. Your mind thinks alcohol and your body gets ready for alcohol, so then it starts up the systems that would typically destroy the alcohol. So when you are addicted, your body kind of battles itself. This process is out of your control. In fact, it only takes a Bud Light commercial to pop up during the timeout of the basketball game to start the withdrawal process. It only takes a Bud Light commercial to knock your brain out of normal. I see hundreds of Bud Light commercials. Then I ask myself, am I still in control? Am I addicted?
Before I got to college, I did not think this question would ever pop up in my mind. I have no history of addiction in the family nor was I prone to drinking while I was in high school. But college brought something new into the picture and blurred the image of a “drunk” in my mind. A drunk should be a middle-aged man with a dark five o’clock shadow and greasy hair, a man whose clothes wreak of whiskey as he slowly rots out of our collective sight and memory. He drinks to forget his children and wife that he lost to the bottle and his life faded into the blurry gray light of a morning after a long night spent drinking. Now, though, I see beautiful, wealthy people all around me who take to drinking often and hard. These people have potential and only 20 years of life behind them, yet, here they are, reaching blackout and getting pulled away in the stretcher to the ambulance and all the way to the emergency room. When I first got to school, I wondered why they were drinking so much. I wondered what they wanted to erase through alcohol and what could possibly be going on with them, these people adored since childhood and primed to go to prestigious universities and win awards and find lucrative careers. In just a few weeks, my image of a “drunk” went from a middle-aged man passed out in the park to a sorority girl in a sun dress who smells like the latest Victoria’s Secret perfume and sparkling pink moscato. She lays on the couch in a fraternity lounge basement. She has blacked out. I know her too. During the week she sits two rows in front of me in Chemistry 101 and she likes to wear that sun dress to class sometimes. I asked her about her weekend when I saw her the following Tuesday and told her that I hoped she was okay.
“I was fine,” she responded, “blacking out is fun.”
I asked her what she could possibly mean by fun.
“Makes me forget for a few hours about how bad I am doing in chemistry and how I am too stupid to be in pre-med,” she answered with a sarcastic, knife-edged tone that could only mean that she was being dead serious.
“Well, why do you still want to be in pre-med?” I asked as I looked down at my shoes, trying to ignore the way she called herself stupid. She wore the same Victoria’s Secret perfume from last Saturday night.
“Because I have to be a doctor,” she answered immediately.
“Why do you have to be a doctor if it is making your life hell?”
She thought for a moment, shrugged her shoulders and said back, “It’s just what I came here to do. I don’t want to quit what I started.”
It was the most I had ever talked to her to that point, and I do not recall ever speaking to her again. But I remember this conversation because she was the girl who let me in on the ways of college drinking. She told me about the kind of release she got from drinking, the escape from her doubts and her self-hate. She only felt comfortable in her own skin when it was numbed and warmed by each incoming glass of sparkling wine.
“In just a few weeks, my image of a ‘drunk’ went from a middle-aged man passed out in the park to a sorority girl in a sun dress who smells like the latest Victoria’s Secret perfume and sparkling pink moscato.”
I think we Americans have a very wrong idea about release. We subscribe to this notion that it only takes one wild weekend night for the necessary resolution to the stresses of the week. We refer to this as catharsis. Once the cathartic behavior ends it somehow signals the return to normal from a guilty, shameful state. Yes, we are ashamed of feeling too good and afraid that release is probably a sin. God forbid we stay in our release too long. “Have your fun while you still can,” they said to me about going off to college. “It will be the best four years of your life.” What about the rest of the lifetime? Is it all a metaphorical comedown? I know, unfortunately, at 19 that catharsis does not work out in practice. Four or five crazy years of college do not “hold you over” for the rest of your life. Release only leads to the need for more release. Release provides the positive reinforcement for more release. Popping the top off a lager or uncorking a bottle of red takes a few seconds, and for the rest of the night the simple action of consumption retrieves reward. It achieves instant gratification. And you keep going until the gratification becomes too much to handle, and your body expels its drug of choice and sits you back down into your chair and gives you a talking to about the real world, like your parents did when you were young. I am talking about the times when you drink so much that you vomit. In these moments, you begin to wonder if there is something else out there, a better form of release.
This is a story about one of those moments. In fact, it is the story about the most recent time this happened to me. Last Friday night, my buddy and I made the three hour trip up from Winston-Salem, NC to Lexington, VA to stay at his place. We tried to escape the blanket of anxiety that hangs over the college campus. So we had the idea to play it low-key for the weekend: watch movies and relax. We decided not to bring any women up with us; it was just a guy’s weekend. I looked forward to the opportunity all week long to go to some place secluded and just write without distraction. We got off Virginia route 11 and made our way over to the supermarket to buy a six pack, some chips and a take and bake pizza before finally settling in at his house. His house was dark and vacant due to the fact that his family spends most of the year living in Germany. We got inside and popped the pizza in the oven, and I whacked the top of the bottle on the table and listened as the cap exploded off onto the floor. Thus began the long night ahead.
There is nothing like the first sip of beer. On the couch next to a fire the beer wets the tongue and stings the pallet with just the perfect amount of metallic taste. I found that hints of coriander and orange peel danced on my tongue (just like the label said they would). In the moment of drinking I blocked out all external stimuli. Drinking becomes an end in itself at moments like that. I lift the bottle, drop the liquid on my tongue and lower the bottle to the coffee table. Then repeat over and over again until it becomes like a rhythm and I hypnotize myself into feeling safe. I am safe from my anxiety for a little while.
Then the taste fades and the bottle empties and the hypnosis is over. In this cadence I look out to the living room and the world around the bottle. I glance at my phone and read a message. “Pray for Paris,” it reads. I look online for the meaning of this and find this headline: “Multiple Paris Terror Attacks Leave at Least 120 Dead.” I do not understand the way I feel in the moment except that an overwhelming fear takes over me, but another message pops up to distract me. My mother writes: “I am so sorry to tell you this, but the dog is not eating. He can’t move. Going to the vet on Monday. May have to put him down. Will talk later.” I put down the phone and look over at my friend. He is looking down at his phone while he texts his girlfriend. I get the feeling that there is somewhere he would rather be, and I do not blame him. He has someone to hold onto, someone he desires and wants him back. I felt those same things once and I know that he does not leave those feelings once he leaves his lover’s side. He carries them with him. He carries the memory of some Thursday night two weeks ago when he lay in bed with his girlfriend and looked at her face smiling back at him and said nothing. He had no worries; he just breathed and admired. I want to be him in that moment.
My mind wonders back to campus. Girls walk by me with their freshly-washed blonde hair and the essence of strawberries hits me and makes me light-headed, like the first drag of a cigarette. I will tell you, inhalation is the fastest way to the brain. The smell ignites my mind’s eyes and hands, and they imagine intimacy with a beautiful-smelling woman. I have to get with them, I think to myself. But then I think back to the end of my last relationship when she told me that she ran back to that “friend” of hers because I hurt her so bad that she could not believe what happened and she needed him, she said. She needed all of him. And I sat there with my face all numb as I looked at the message on my phone and after all of the arguing and crying all I could think to ask was whether the sex with him was better than it was with me. She just said that she was sorry that she brought it up. She told me she did not mean to hurt me by it. But I did not care at that point what she said to me anymore. I just needed reassurance. I just needed to know if I was good or not. I still wonder this and I cannot escape the thought that maybe I am not good at sex, and I know how irrational I am for worrying about this. “Just let it go. You’re fine. You’re fine.” “Why does it matter?” But when those girls pass me by I feel my hands clench up and my teeth grind together and I just get a feeling like I need a beer to get rid of this heat that covers my whole body. I get tired of my thoughts and reach down for my six pack. So much for not bringing women with us for the weekend.
“And I sat there with my face all numb as I looked at the message on my phone and after all of the arguing and crying all I could think to ask was whether the sex with him was better than it was with me.”
I turn my attention to the TV. A war movie plays and I see some guy from Quincy, Massachusetts pull a piece of shrapnel out of his side. I think about what may happen in the next five years and acknowledge that it could be me someday in that guy’s position, lying on some rocks in Syria or somewhere pulling a metal shard out of my chest and screaming as softly as I can so that the enemy does not hear me. I bet that guy wishes he could have a beer in that moment. How’s that for a dying wish? Just to have a beer. I look down at the coffee table and the six pack is empty.
I ask my friend if he has any more liquor in the house, and he gets the bottle of rum from his sock drawer where it was hiding from his parents all summer. We pour it into glasses and cover it with Coke and lime juice and make jokes about how we are drinking like revolutionaries. The taste is sweet and comforting, like nursing on mother’s milk. I take in three or four or maybe more than that and begin to not feel my face. I begin to not feel anything. My friend and I stumble outside into the cool November night and light up cigarettes as we march down the street at three in the morning shouting “Cuba Libre!” at the top of our lungs. All the neighborhood dogs wake up and begin barking at us as we walk with burning lungs through the cold wind looking for a place to sit down. We find a pile of leaves laying on the side of the road and fall into them. We look up at the stars and wonder if we had ever seen a sky so clear before. I tell my friend that we are made of stardust, the aftermath of a supernova that exploded five billion years ago.
According to scientists, it took the massive heat of a supernova to create the heavier elements necessary for life.
“The stars make me feel small and insignificant when I look up at them,” I said.
“But it has to make you feel good too,” he said as he drew from his cigarette. “We are kind of miraculous, man. I mean, just think what would have happened if those stars didn’t explode.” He stopped and tapped the ash off the end of his smoke.
We get to talking after that about our future, but we decide that it will work itself out and we leave all discussions of it at that. For the rest of the evening, we pretend we are revolutionaries. We have won our right to lay drunkenly in the neighbor’s leaves. No one could reach us out here; our phones had been dead for a long while. We called ourselves free creatures and under no circumstance were we to relinquish this freedom to anyone or anything.
But a chill caught me and we had to leave our pile of leaves. I walked back inside and lay on the bed on which my friend’s brother slept over the summer. His brother had stuck those glow-in-the-dark stickers on the ceiling that look like stars and I stared at them for a while, trying to get them to stop spinning. Something was in my throat and it would not come out as much as I tried to cough. My skin felt cold and my cheeks flushed and I knew it was time to get on my knees and crawl to the bathroom. I leaned over the toilet and down went a steamy collection of pizza and potato chips that burned my esophagus and landed in the water with a loud splash. A lull in the action ensued and then the second bout began. The liquid that fell was sweet like rum, and I realized that it was actually rum and Coke because it could not have been more than 20 minutes since my last drink. But it came to pass and I thought that everything that was inside me left. Then, out of nowhere came a rush of blood to my head and another shockwave passed through my body and then released into the toilet. This time it was only water. All that was left inside was my essential life-giving liquids, and I couldn’t even keep hold of them at that point. A calm came over me and I got from the hollow feeling inside of me that the sickness had passed.
I looked into the mirror and saw bloodshot eyes stare back at me. Those eyes, no longer under the influence, were left to see reality. I turned to look at my immediate surroundings. I leaned against the sink in a bathroom that was way too bright with fluorescent light and wreaked of pizza and liquor, and I could not leave out of fear of vomiting all over my friend’s bed. I was trapped in there with a sore throat and thoughts of the long drive back to campus the next day. I felt a bit like those artificial stars bound by adhesive to the bedroom ceiling. Those stars are not incredibly free. Those stars cannot roam around the universe and explode into a spectacle for all the drunk revolutionaries lying around outside on a Friday night. I eventually made my way out of the bathroom and stumbled my way back onto the bed. I laid on my back looking up at those stars, and I began to realize that my body had not rid itself of alcohol, but that the alcohol had rid itself of me.
“So when the anxiety becomes too great, we easily free ourselves of this control with a sparkling wine or a handle of rum. Yet this freedom is so fleeting; it is literally flushed down in the toilet once it has run its course. This is no freedom.”
I woke up the next morning to the dim, gray light that shone between the curtains of the bedroom window and a throbbing headache. I walked out to the kitchen, paying special attention to opening the bedroom door quietly so as not to wake up my friend, but I found him already sitting at the kitchen counter working on something for a class. I drank a large glass of water and popped a couple frozen waffles into the toaster oven then turned around and said good morning.
“Morning. How are you feeling?”
I shrugged my shoulders and grunted.
He looked back down in his book for a little bit and then looked up as I was picking my waffles out of the toaster with a fork.
“I was thinking about something you were saying last night about those stars,” he said trying to cut through the bit of awkwardness that hung in the room like the smell of vomit in the bathroom.
I struggled to recall the conversation. Then I realized that I had been staring blankly at my friend for a long time, so I said, “You’ll have to remind me.”
“You said something about feeling small and insignificant, and I agree with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like with all the craziness happening in the world, I mean with Paris and stuff, it’s hard to see how much college kids like us could do about it,” he responded. Then he paused for a minute and said, “It’s like all we can do is just sit here and watch it. I don’t know.”
He looked back down in his book again and then right back up at me and said, “And who’s to say that we won’t be sent off to war in a few years. It’s like you can plan and plan and you still don’t know what life will throw at you.”
I just turned my waffles around in the maple syrup on my plate and sat there silently.
I know how my friend feels: small and insignificant. He hates that. He, like so many of us in college, want to have that plan and see it through to the end. The future we want seems up to our control; we already got into one of the best colleges. We have been given the best foundation we could get. But we have to hold two conflicting thoughts in our heads: we want to know what is going to happen, but we know that we cannot know just what’s going to happen. We feel the greatest anxiety because we see lives falling out of line with our plans. So when the anxiety becomes too great, we easily free ourselves of this control with a sparkling wine or a handle of rum. Yet this freedom is so fleeting; it is literally flushed down in the toilet once it has run its course. This is no freedom. This is no lasting relief from the anxiety. The kind of freedom I need instead is the revolutionary kind, the lying in the leaves kind where I feel so small and insignificant and so far away from all that. This release is hard to find but is exactly the hair of the dog that I needed that morning after that Friday night when there seemed to be no escape from the blanket of anxiety that covers me.