My time as a loser - August 4, 2006

I was twenty four and broken. I had no job, no life, nothing tangible to speak of it you didn't count my addictions to multiple substances and poor credit rating. I was attached to others. That's how you knew me. "Oh she's that weird friend of so-and-so who gets really drunk at all the parties and events and acts like an ass." I was generally liked by people, only because they could look at me and say "Wow, my life is not that bad."

I had a misshapen helmet of hair. It was skewed. I would cut it myself, some sort of expression I'd invented to express how unhappy I was that left the cutting to my hair instead of my flesh. I wore beat up salvation army clothes, because the cost of new clothes could be appropriated toward procuring more substances. Fashion was pretty conformist at that moment in time. Britney Spears was everywhere, and everybody looked just like her. Except me. My closer friends were the kind of people who took on human projects, social philanthropists, and they would be really blunt with me and say, "You look like shit." I would always answer the same way:

"Good. Because I feel like shit."

No one could understand this, my willingness to be a loser. I didn't understand it myself, but I knew I had to do it. I knew it was necessary.

It was early summer, maybe. June, but every month was same to me, as was every day I'd have to get up, shake off, get aspirin, go to the couch, watch television but not pay attention to it for ten hours and then go party. Every day, I climbed the very first rung. I was crashing at a friend's time share on Long Boat key, drinking for days on end, till noon the next day, taking speed so I could stay up and drink more. I was profoundly broken, profoundly lost. The year before, I was the youngest creative director in sports marketing history. I had to remind people of this a lot, because I had no other value as a human being. "I was once great! I was great last year!"

I said this to my drinking pal, Doc, at the margarita social the time share was throwing. We sat at a table littered with plastic cups. People were mingling, sipping lightly. They were laughing and chirping in straw hats and billowy sundresses with flowers on them, dangly charm bracelets and leather flip flops, doing that thing they do at parties: casual socialization. The thing I longed to do someday without feeling like my face was on fire.

Doc growled "Shuuuuuuuuuut up," and messed my already disheveled helmet further. I didn't try to straighten it, because what was the point, really? He got us more drinks. He liked me because he was an alcoholic and I was an alcoholic. That's it. He was an anomaly, caring/uncaring, selfish/unselfish. Or is that an oxymoron? I didn't know, I was drunk. I had an excuse to not know. I perceived him to be my best good friend, because I was desperate to be understood.

I was all wrapped up in myself, entangled you could say, because I wasn't a functioning person. My face was on fire, yes, but on the inside, somewhere infinitely opposite to radiation, I was calmly moving forward. I was very aware of myself and the space I took up in the world. Too aware. I felt that no one should be cursed with the job of having to touch me and kept everyone at bay. At the same time, I felt like I would die if no one touched me, just slip away. Was I even real? Nothing said so, not an employer, a lease or the government. They hadn't heard from me in the form of income tax in a year. I was confused like Doc but more ephemeral. An oxymoron with bad hair.

That night went the same way all nights went, the same way all days and weeks and months did for two years. Doc and I drank till the sun came up, shouted, howled, begged for catharsis. His fiancée would pad out of her bedroom in the night and scream at us. He would follow her off to bed and sex her back into his fold. I would pass out or drink more, pontificate for as long as I could remain conscious. On the nights I spent drinking with Doc at the time share, I would go to the beach and watch the sun come up.

This is where the "girl becomes alcoholic, spirals out of control, dies in trailer" story gets confusing. I would go to the beach and sit in the sand, wet and cold though I didn't know it I was so drunk. I would be there for hours, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing, the spinning wheel of drunken emotions rolling full force, like the Price is Right prize wheel, beep beep beep, happy lonely angry.... The humps of manatees passing like organic submarines twenty feet out. My spinning wheel seemed to be connected to the color the sky was. It would start low at navy, and creep up to twilight blue, eggplant purple, poppy, rose, pink, orange, and somewhere between poppy and rose, my whole face would freeze, and my angst would be replaced by a blissful feeling of unopiated warmth, unexplainable without using clichés and trite "darkest before dawn" metaphors. This happened to me a lot during those years. A spot of light playing on the floor of a dark club made bliss. Storm cells perched on the bay made bliss. Palm trees at sundown were so pretty, I just couldn't kill myself. Palm trees were a reason to keep going.

Doc is apparently still an alcoholic, which makes me sad. I probably drink too much, but I have a steady job and book coming out, and the government knows where I am and considers me a friend. I experience more periods of bliss. I am a bit healed, I think, and I understand myself more, including my reasoning and comfort with being a loser for a few years. I was rebuilding. I abandoned everything to rebuild because it wasn't working the old way, and though it was painful, there wasn't a minute of it I didn't know the sun was always rising, somewhere. That took serious balls.

Posted by The Bunny at 12:05 PM

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Posted by: feisty_one at August 4, 2006 01:22 PM

Posted by: Emmaluscious at August 4, 2006 01:51 PM

Posted by: feisty_one at August 4, 2006 11:16 PM

Posted by: IrishPirate at August 5, 2006 07:55 PM

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