Let's be perfectly clear here, when I lived in the condo I was the mad woman upstairs, as differentiated from the mad woman below the stairs (Just ask Jack (or Aaron)). And while I used to drink to forget, and forget I did, now I forget to drink. Or, really, I don't forget I just don't drink any more, booze that is. Oh, once I was prolific at the practice. I came from good stock, i.e., my alcoholic mother who suggested to me, among other things, that I take up smoking to relax, which I did, smoking, but I didn't, relax. Only a drunken mother would impart that sort of advice and only a potentially drunken daughter would follow it. I recall my 18th birthday. The drinking age way back then was 18. My father, enabler that he was (and damn good at it) gave me a can of Stroh's beer (the breakfast of champions) in a mug that said BULLSHIT on it. He also gave me a pound of sweet cherries and a pound of Germack's natural pistachios in the shell (of which he ate most). Thus started the drinking. This also disputes the notion that there is no such beast as an alcoholic Jew.
I recall, or maybe not, my End of the World Party at the Honors House, University of Detroit. My first taste of tequila. I must say I got shitfaced, missed my afternoon class, sobered up enough to get home by 5:00 and recused myself to an early bedtime due to a touch of the flu (brown bottle type). Weekends in the winter at UofD we went to the basketball games and then down to Greek Town for dinner. I was either high (which made watching basketball all the more engaging) or soon to be drunk on wine at the restaurant. Oh, I was a good drunk, never feisty or mean (not like now, eh, Jack?). Back as an undergraduate (and in spite of getting high most days I graduated in three years Summa Cum Laude) I smoked more marijuana than I had potent potables. Graduate school was another story. Friday afternoons a group of young professors would take the graduate students out drinking at the Olde World where we would consume massive quantities of beer and bread. Falling down drunk and walking back to the dorm was an adventure. But everywhere I went as a graduate student there was alcohol. So I smoked and drank my way out of the Ph.D. program in four years. Not quite record time but close to it.
Out of school I worked odd jobs for a few years, afraid that I would never be able to get a decent job without a Ph.D. I worked at a local book bindery. We worked four ten hour days and got paid every Thursday afternoon. We then went to the Green Door with other dropouts from various MSU graduate progams for ten cent hot dog night. By then I had switched from beer to the more robust drink of choice of my father, Jack Daniels, straight-up. Fewer calories and more delicious. From there I went to become Molly Malone, the song stylist at Moriarty's Pub in Lansing. $25 bucks a night and all the beer I could drink (they lost money on me). Next stop in my storied career was pumping gas for three years, all the while thinking I could never get a better job given my drinking proclivities.
But, sound the trumpets, I did, through a friend, get a job at the library that I never though I would get. In spite of the new job and the thrill of not pumping gas any longer or being robbed at gun point on a regular basis, I was officially depressed most of the time and drinking to forget. In fact I was self-medicating for being bipolar. By 1989, five years into my tenure at the library, I was made the authority czarina. And by then the serious drinking had started and I was on some antidepressants that enhanced the effect of the alcohol. Some days I did not merely come in hung over, I would come in still a tad drunk from the night before, sucking on cans of Coke to get rid of the headache and cotton mouth. You know, the kind of drunk the night before where you have to keep one foot on the floor to keep the bed from spinning. More and more depressed and usually unable to sleep without help I would come home from authority czarina-ing and grab my bottle of Stoly from the freezer and have two or three mighty slugs. Then go lay down and catch a buzz with the cats.
Once I received the bipolar roller diagnosis I did stop drinking for a time. Fast forward to the move to the condo, hastened by my last tenure in the Owosso Stress Unit and trouble at home. Seems PJ, and you know who you are, wanted me out of the house or for me to take over the house but that never was a real option. Saddened by the ending of a relationship and sadden by their serial monogamy with everyone but me I left what had been my home for fifteen years. Granted I may not have been the catch of the year but they drank with me and as often but they didn't have the alcoholic gene marinating their brain and soul. By then my mother had been dead two years, a victim of her alcoholism. My pal Jerry mentioned he needed a neighbor and the rest, as they say, was hysterical. Once I got the condo, for some unfathomable reason, I started drinking again with my buddies Sam Adams and Gentleman Jack. I would turn on the stereo, crank up the volume and listen to Mozart's Requiem and cry like a baby. Then one night, drunk on my ass, I took an overdose of Lithium. That was January 6, 1997. That was my last drink. I ended up in the hospital and in a psych ward.
My dad came up to see me shortly after I was released. I owned my alcoholism and while he drank around me it was never to excess. He could never understand the reason for the suicide attempt and frankly neither could I. He kept laying on me how it was a sin to commit suicide and I really didn't care. I was sober, angry that others could drink in moderation and that I never learned moderation. An addictive personality. Well, at least I had a personality.
Sober now for almost twenty years (and a non-smoker for thirty years) (and happily rid of PJ as well as a few other "well-meaning friends") I am still envious of people's ability to drink in moderation. Now, with all the craft beers and craft whiskeys, all this good stuff and I can't touch it. I can't start sobriety all over again from square one just to have a taste of Sleepwalker Imperial Stout that smells so delicious.
Lesson learned. Moving on. Staying sober, in spite of myself. Forgetting to drink. No longer the mad woman upstairs. And the mad woman under the stairs? She lives on in memory, like PJ, like the others, everyone who thought they knew me but didn't. No, they are not dead, just relegated to memory, now that I can have one, a memory that is, and move on.
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