Dad: ONCE A WEEK? Oh. My. God. Ryan, that’s veering into alcoholic territory.
Me: What? No, it’s not!
Dad: It’s abnormal. No one is drinking that much.
Me: Yes, they are. My drinking is fine, Dad!
I was telling the truth. I’ve been imbibing for ten years, and even though I’ve had brief periods of heavy drinking, there’s never been a problem. My mother is an alcoholic who’s been sober for years. I’ve accompanied countless friends to A.A. meetings for moral support. I know what alcoholism looks like, and it’s not me, hon. My father, however, was convinced I was raging too much. After our little chat, he surprised me a week later with some “proof ” that I was spiraling out of control.
Dad: Ryan, I’ve been thinking a lot about what you claim to be a normal amount of alcohol for kids your age to consume. As you know, The Dad loves to research . . .
Me: Oh God. What did you do?
Dad: Nothing major. I just interviewed a group of kids your age about their alcohol consumption.
Me: You’re lying. That would require a level of crazy I’m almost positive you don’t have.
Dad: I did, and all of the kids I talked to thought getting drunk once a week was excessive.
Me: DID YOU INTERVIEW MORMONS?
Dad: No. These kids were normal. Just like you.
Just like me? As if. My father’s “data” was bogus and clearly pooled from sexually active LARPers. Still, his meddling into my relationship with alcohol caused me to reflect on my sordid drunk history.
It all started when I was a senior in high school and took a sip of cheap champagne. It reminded me of the Martinelli’s I used to have on New Year’s Eve with my parents, and I loved it! I guzzled down the entire bottle and got completely white-girl wasted. When you start your love affair with alcohol, your mind always goes to excess. Why settle for drunk when you can black out, puke on someone, and have a great story to tell the next morning at breakfast? The goal is to get out of control and become the talk of the party. “Oh really? You had sex in your best friend’s mom’s bed and then vomited all over it? Well, once I was so blacked out I peed in a litter box!” That really did happen to one of my friends. She peed in a litter box. I was there. I saw it. It happened. I saw some other weird things, too. Once I watched a girl sob uncontrollably while making out with her boyfriend in the middle of a house party. Everyone pretended not to notice and danced around them, which is pretty darn polite for a group of seventeen-year-olds. Another time I witnessed a cake fight break out at a birthday party, which completely destroyed the tiles of whoever’s house it was. Then, taking a page from the movie Stand By Me, everyone started puking rainbow-colored pieces of cake. It actually looked kind of pretty.
This all happened during the first phase of drinking, when alcohol still looked like a goddamn beauty queen and hadn’t shown us its ugly face yet. We’d get blissfully fucked-up, do something insane, and face zero consequences. In fact, you’d have an army of friends around you supporting your decisions and making sure you’re okay.
“Do you need to puke?” one concerned friend would ask. “I’ll pull your hair back when you vomit.”
“No, I will!” another friend would interject. “She’s my best friend! Let me do it!”
The last time I vomited from drinking I was lying by myself on the cold bathroom floor with no one to bring me saltines or water, and only then did I finally have to admit to myself that times had changed. Like, remember when we didn’t even get hangovers? Maybe you’d wake up after a bender and be all, “God, I want to eat a burrito!” but you’d never have the kind of days where you’re completely debilitated and can’t move or eat until 7:00 p.m. Those come later when you stop believing all the amazing things alcohol had promised you—when parties feel like Groundhog Day and sex isn’t as exciting and puking is an unfortunate nightmare instead of a badge of honor. When you’re a teenager, you want to make things happen, because everything in your life feels so boring. You’re desperate for something, anything, to come along and make you feel like you’re in some fabulous teen movie. Fast-forward to ten years later when your life has become so bizarre and overwhelming on its own that you wouldn’t dare add to the weirdness.
Things were better when we drank for the right reasons. When we wanted to feel close to each other and have new experiences and make new friends. Granted, the experiences weren’t always great, and the people you befriended could be total nightmares, but it didn’t matter. You could handle the disappointment. I remember barreling through so many parties determined to make the night my bitch. The lure of possibility would keep me going from new person to new person, hoping to make a connection. Finally, I’d meet someone, exchange some banter, and think, “Wow! You’re so cool. I want to know more!” Four shots later, I’d blow my load and declare us new BFFs.
“I fucking love you!” I screamed at this girl Samantha, whom I had met thirty minutes earlier at the chips-and-dip section of a house party in college. The two of us instantly bonded over our love of LiveJournal and boys who didn’t text us back. High off our newfound closeness, we then proceeded to take 42,069 whiskey shots.
“No, you don’t understand. I’m obsessed with you,” Samantha slurred back at me. “Give me your number, bitch. We’re going to get brunch in six hours!”
“I fucking love brunch,” I yelled.
“Fuck yeah, you do! Brunch besties!” Samantha squealed before dragging me into the living room so we could dance to “Fuck the Pain Away” by Peaches.
The next morning, I signed on to Facebook and saw that Samantha had already tagged me in a bunch of unflattering pictures. “UM, I THINK I FOUND MY SOUL MATE?!!” read one caption. It was a blurry photo of us hugging on the bathroom floor. I clicked on Samantha’s profile, expecting an Internet presence similar to mine, but instead I got a shrine to basicness. There were Bible quotes sprinkled everywhere, FarmVille requests, and unclear ex-boyfriends. I untagged the photos immediately and never spoke to Samantha again. It was obvious I’d been wearing white wine–spritzer goggles and had the friendship equivalent of a one-night stand.
When I wasn’t drinking to make friends, I was doing it to get laid. In my junior year of college, I hate–hooked up with a boy for four months, but not one of those times was sober. I don’t remember a single thing about the sex. His dick could’ve been two inches or a foot long. I have no idea and, more important, no interest in ever knowing. I didn’t like this boy, and I don’t think he liked me. And even if I did have feelings for him, I’d probably still need to be drunk to initiate a hookup. I was new at this, and any kind of intimacy felt too real. Being numb was the best way to feel something honestly.
After college, things changed, and it was no longer chic to be a random shit show. You couldn’t drink two-dollar wine and pee in the street or scream at your boyfriend anymore. Everyone is too paranoid they don’t have their shit together that life has become a pissing contest over who’s grown up the most. “Oh God, the things I used to do in college . . .” your friend will tell you, sipping some white wine at happy hour. “Wow. Just wow!” Hold the phone, sister. College wasn’t that long ago! Why are we trying to pretend that we’re reformed soccer moms? Everyone is still a hot mess. Don’t tell me about how great your job is going. Tell me about how you cried last week in a Duane Reade because you were taken off health insurance. That’s more relatable.
A few years ago, I met up with a friend whom I used to party with back in college. When we saw each other, he immediately tried to do damage control. “Man, those were some crazy times. I don’t rage like that anymore,” he insisted. Meanwhile, I was thinking, “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. You’re about four drinks away from calling your coke dealer.” And I was right! A few drinks in, coke got mentioned, and in the blink of a twitching eye, he called his guy to score some blow. “Oh God,” he sighed, hanging up his phone. “I can’t believe I’m doing this!” Um, I can. You’re a twenty-four-year-old buying coke in a Lower Ea
st Side bar. The world is not going to fall off its axis.
When his coke dealer came, I got into a time machine back to 2007 and found myself doing bumps in the bathroom at some disgusting bar I hadn’t set foot in in years. Then, to add icing to the very mature cake, we ended up getting caught by a bouncer and escorted out of the bar. My friend looked at me with a sheepish grin on his face, apologized for the night going south, and quickly said good-bye. I never saw him again. That night I learned that the more someone tells you they’ve changed, the more likely they are to still be getting kicked out of bars for doing coke. You can only really grow when you start being honest with yourself about who you are in the first place.
Don’t treat life like it’s a race. Also, don’t ever do coke. Maybe it was the shit back in the ’70s and ’80s, but now it just makes you shit. You might already know that, though. Millennials have pushed drugs like coke back in the closet, only allowing them to reappear occasionally in a discussion about recovery, but everybody still does them. People aren’t supposed to know that your road to adulthood has been paved with eight balls instead of long-term relationships and cute brunches with your friends. Go on the Facebook page of a heavy drug user and you’ll see an online identity that’s been carefully curated. There are pictures of her smiling with her family on vacation or hiking some canyon in Los Angeles. Then you meet her in real life and discover that she’s a wild partier who’s snorting pills in her living room and getting wasted every day. My generation is the first to be in charge of their image. We call the shots and tell you how to feel about our lives. It doesn’t matter if what we’re projecting is phony. If someone believes it, that makes it true.
When I go on Instagram and see people at SoulCycle or snuggling in bed with their dog and significant other, I feel like an insta-loser. I know they’re doing what everybody else does, which is cherry-picking the brightest moments while hiding the dark parts, but it still makes me feel bad about myself. I want to institute an Internet honesty day where people tweet and post pictures of what they’re really doing. “Just had a delicious brunch (you saw the amazing photos earlier, right?), but now my hangover and IBS have set in, so I’m lying in bed feeling vaguely depressed. Here’s a photo of the weed I’m about to smoke . . .” I think it’d be a cathartic exercise. Everyone could see the giant disparity between the lives we feel like we’re supposed to be living and our day-to-day reality. Then maybe by realizing that we’re all secretly struggling, we wouldn’t feel like such failures.
I used to do a fair amount of drugs. It was during a time when I equated coolness with self-destruction. I thought that if something didn’t hurt me, it wasn’t worth doing. It took me years to realize that not only was this a terrifying way to live but I also should stay the fuck away from mind-altering substances because the two of us don’t get along. I was the person who smoked pot and then became paranoid that UFOs were going to come down to steal my soul. I was the guy who took Adderall to study but got distracted looking at his desk lamp for six hours. Nothing demonstrated my ineptitude at taking drugs more clearly than the time I took Molly. I had tried this “pure” form of Ecstasy once before, but it didn’t work. I just felt kind of warm and dumb, which is how I feel most of the time anyway. Never one to get discouraged, I bought some more from another dealer and decided to take double the dose at a friend’s birthday party. This is a stupid, stupid thing to do—each batch of drugs has a different level of potency—but I wasn’t thinking. Like my deceased queen Aaliyah once sang, “If at first you don’t succeed, dust yourself off and try a lot more Molly again.” So, the night of the birthday party I dissolved a ton of Molly in some water and drank it up in the bathroom of a bar. Then I waited to feel different. And waited. Twenty minutes passed and I still felt sober.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked my friends who had also taken Molly. “Why isn’t this working?”
“I have no clue,” my friend Jenny said, her eyes rolling to the back of her head. “I feel AMAZING.”
I looked over at my other friend Angela, who was googly-eyed and talking animatedly to a stranger. I was the only one who wasn’t rolling!
“I don’t get it,” I said, throwing my hands up in defeat. “This drug is one fickle diva.”
Molly must’ve heard me talking shit about her, because at that moment everything started to feel like fireworks. My brain turned into an orange that was getting its pulp squeezed out, my skin glowed like an orb, and anything I touched felt like someone was fingering my prostate.
“False alarm, guys! I think Molly’s here!”
“Yay!” Jenny giggled, sounding like an excited toddler. “Let’s go mingle.”
Jenny and I bounced around the bar like two pinballs, talking to everything and everyone. It was like Molly had pressed the fast-forward button in my brain and given me the attention span of a gnat. At first it felt spectacular, but then it got a little too cray cray. I was over the music creeping into my bones and banging pots and pans against my brain. I just wanted life to go back to the way it was before. Unfortunately, when you take Molly, it’s about a six-hour trip back to normal. Putting that pill in your body means you’ve made a commitment to being fucked-up.
Frazzled and growing more anxious by the minute, I hopped into a cab without telling any of my friends and hightailed it back to my place. The drive back felt like I was on a magic carpet ride. The seats turned to mush, the radio tickled my ears, and the big New York City skyscrapers looked like dancing Legos. I had no sense of time or place. Before I could lick my lips and grind my jaw, I was already around the corner of my apartment.
“Okay, Ryan, you made it,” I told myself in a soothing voice. It was Saturday night in the East Village, which meant that Details magazine subscribers and their bozo girlfriends were everywhere. I tried to escape them by going into the bodega to get a bottle of water, but walking was proving to be a difficult journey for me.
“Must. Get. Hydrated,” I whispered, making it through the entryway of the bodega.
“Hey,” the bodega guy, Tommy, grunted at me from behind the counter.
“Hi,” I whispered, grabbing the nearest bottle of water and plopping it down at the checkout.
Tommy took one look at me and said something you never want to hear when you’re on drugs. “Do you need to go to the hospital?”
Even though I was sweating off half my body weight and could barely walk, it never occurred to me that I might actually need medical assistance. But if someone wants to call you an ambulance, it seems unwise to argue.
Tommy came out from behind the counter and made me sit down on a milk crate while he called 911. I couldn’t hear what he was saying to the dispatcher, but I did catch the words, “I don’t know. He just looks really bad.”
Freaking out on Molly is confusing because part of you is going nuts with worry and the other part is just really high and happy and wants to suck on a lollipop. Your thought process is, “OMG, I think I’m dying. This totally sucks. Wait—who does this song? I want to dance!” As I waited for the ambulance to come, random drunk people stumbled into the bodega and saw me bopping my head and smacking my lips on a milk crate and burst out laughing. You know shit’s bad when people who are barely conscious look at you and say, “Wow, that dude is fucked-up.”
A few minutes had passed, and there was no sign of an ambulance. Growing impatient, I asked Tommy what the holdup was.
“I don’t know,” Tommy shrugged. “You try calling them.”
I found the concept of having to call my own ambulance deeply offensive. “No, Tommy,” I scoffed. “You do it. It was your idea!”
Tommy sighed and called 911 again. This time I was able to catch the entire conversation. “Yeah, hi. I just called for an ambulance fifteen minutes ago to come to East Seventh and First Avenue. Where is it? It’ll be here soon? Uh, okay.” Tommy hung up the phone and told me to hang tight.
I was horrified. I had ordered pizzas that came quicker than this ambulance. Luckily, my ph
one rang and jolted me out of my half-rage, half-Ecstasy spiral. It was my friend Carey. I answered as a wave of love and appreciation crashed onto my brain.
“Hey, Carey, I’m so happy you’re calling me right now! How are you?”
“Hey, Ry, I’m around the corner from your apartment. What are you doing?”
“I’m sitting on a milk crate in my bodega rolling on Ecstasy.”
“WHAT?”
“The bodega guy thought I needed an ambulance, so he called me one. It should be here soon.”
“An ambulance? But you sound fine!”
Carey was right. I did sound relatively fine. Sitting on the milk crate for fifteen minutes had chilled me out, and now I was actually feeling pretty good again.
“I know, but it’s already been called. I can’t just leave.”
“Yes, you can. Ryan, ambulance rides cost, like, $4,000. Just leave now and I’ll meet you at your place in two minutes.”
Seemingly on cue, I started to hear sirens. This was it. I could stay and spend the night in a hospital or I could go home and watch Carey give me a DIY light show in my living room. I stood up from the milk crate.
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