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I got drunk for the first
time when I was eleven. I was new at my synagogue, and some of the girls
who took me in snatched some bottles of wine from the kitchen and we gorged
on them beneath the flickering beauty lights in the women's restroom.
By thirteen I drank whenever possible. Wine at dinner, stealing gulps
of vodka from the freezer, whiskey from the cupboard, beer from my friend's
older brothers. Things progressed, my drinking habit wasn't about being
a a sneaky bad ass and whispering to my preteen friends about knowing
what liquor tasted like, it became social. That need to feel bad ass was
still there though, and the piece of me that likes to wallow in gender
crisis gave in to my competitive boyish side, and I took it upon myself
to out-drink the manliest of men (which I more that often could). Only
once did this in-your-face drinking attitude of mine go wrong, and that
involved an entire bottle of Jack Daniels and a beer chaser.
Never had I given my love of alcohol the pleasure of being called an "addiction."
It was something I liked to do, I could control it, I never threw up,
and my actions were more or less intelligent. When I craved the juice
I attributed it to being bored, to adolescent need, to anything but a
mental (and even physiological) addiction. Jokingly I'd been called an
alcoholic, even pasted the label across my own face, but all in jest.
There were periods where it just wasn't available, and I survived alright,
wanted it, but I dealt. When it became routine again was when it got bad.
Morning cap, night cap, water bottle in my purse. It was the cold of winter
I was wanting to evade, not life, glug glug glug.
My latest heavy drinking binge started around New Year’s after breaking
up with my boyfriend (sorry to the fans, even the likes of abominable
Ms. Bekka can become a walking clichè). In the early stages of
our break-up I drank angrily, and in my drunken fits I made the mistake
of giving myself up to the closest gorgeous face, successfully doing much
more damage than I intended – not that I wanted to cause any damage,
but you know how it goes. The habit of drinking away my hangovers went
back into my agenda. The pages of my usual notebook empty save for occasional
notes on what I'd drank (I like to keep track) and angry doodles. A few
weeks later after worried conversations and knitted brows, not to mention
the disgust I saw in people, particularly people important to me, when
they knew I was drunk the teeth on my mental gears finally found a fit
and knew that this needed to stop. Ceremoniously I poured my entire stash
down the drain of my shower then scrubbed myself raw, for the first time
not being drowned, but tossing the squirming, tied off, villainous bag,
into the river myself.
As usually happens when an inexperienced criminal tries to kill off some
pest by throwing them to their doom, some twist of fate (in the pest's
favor of course) allows them to escape, crawl to safety, recuperate, then
go back to their dirty work. Words wouldn't do the sinking feeling in
my stomach any justice in describing what I felt when I announced I was
three days sober. "That's....good, Bekka." Kind words belied
sceptical eyes, void of worry now, pupils adjusting to let in the right
amount of light to experience this pathetic lush is all her fading glory.
Three days, that's only 72 hours. The hours ticked on, days, weeks, but
no longer. About two weeks ago, in another fit of insanity and anger I
found myself at a party with a single intention: to get drunk. And get
drunk I did, with the assistance of 15 shots of vodka, two screwdrivers,
a margarita, and four cans of beer. Waking up a day and a half later I
couldn't believe I was still breathing, still pumping blood, still feeling
anything. Instinct told me grab a glass of wine to calm my nerves. No,
what the hell, no. Despite their longing for the sweet kisses of Gordon's
and Whaler's, I've kept my lips busy elsewhere, and my gaze averted. The
last time I touched anything alcoholic was to take this photo, and hope
that it got my feelings of drunkenness across.[B]
BEKKA BJÖRKE
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