Don’t Drink and Don’t Die

As I have written previously, when I first stopped drinking for a time, I could remember my past and what had happened when. After approximately 18 months of sobriety, I drank again and didn’t stop for another five or six years. When I stopped, I had lost the ability to sequence things and know when they happened. That ability has not returned.

It’s not anything as dramatic as brain damage, I’m pretty sure. It’s only during that time that I don’t have odd memories and long periods I can’t account for. The reason, I think, is that I spent those years in just about a constant state of being under the influence of alcohol, inasmuch as that was possible for me to do.

I know I was still in high school when I achieved my first prolonged period of sobriety. I stopped drinking, and I went to AA. I followed the AA program to a large degree. It will be useful for me to try to remember and delineate what was right and what went wrong. When I tell my story at a meeting, I always have in mind the chronic relapser and the person who struggles again and again and again. That was me, and I eventually got it together.

But at first, after a few false starts, I did stay sober for some time. I was so young. It’s not common to see such young people at meetings. It’s not easy to fit in when you’re that young. Unfortunately, there are even people at meetings who do not want teenage girls there. At times I was discouraged and made fun of, though rarely. In general people were wonderful, and I did speak the universal language of the suffering alcoholic. I’ve also always thought it is special and telling that although I was young and vulnerable, I was only taken advantage of once, and that was when one of the dirty old men pillars of AA society grabbed my breast. It was awful and terrible, and it was the only time someone in an AA meeting ever did something like that to me.

I was at a young people’s meeting early on, and the topic was the first step. Although I had good grades and the intelligence to earn them, I could not comprehend the concept of the first step. I said so, and there was a young woman at the meeting who gave me her phone number.  She said she identified with me.  I asked her to be my sponsor, and she accepted.

Elli was a driven young woman.  She had about a year’s sobriety at that time.  She rented a room in someone’s house, and she worked as a secretary in a lawyer’s office and was putting herself through school to become a paralegal.  She had a boyfriend, Kristoffer, who probably doesn’t need any more mentioning than that.  Elli was a tough sponsor, and I’m still grateful to her and for her influence on me.  To be continued . . . .

The first time I stopped drinking, I could tell my story and know what had happened when.  Next time (this time), I lost that ability, and it hasn’t come back.  I can’t confidently say what happened before I stopped drinking, after I stopped drinking, in high school or in college.  I figured the most honest way to tell about it would be to write what I remember.  Maybe that way I can sort it out a bit more. I don’t think the time line is terribly important.

So sometime in high school I started drinking a lot.  I have a few memories of being drunk.  Once, for example, I remember laying my face on the mat of the wrestling cage.  As an potentially interesting side note, my first year in high school, which would have been 1976, was the first year my school district made gym class co-ed.  This was not a good thing.  I don’t know if it started out that way or became that way, but by the time I was in high school, some sports were segregated and some were not.  Wrestling was segregated, although I think that prior to my time, girls probably didn’t have to take wrestling at all.

Anyway I do recall the time I was supposed to be stretching or what have you, but I was too drunk to stay upright.  No one ever caught me drinking or being drunk in high school.  I often drank around my period, which was the reason I started anyway.  I also remember taking a purse to the bathroom.  Kids smoked in the bathrooms at that time.  I did that, but I also drank in there.

All my high school drinking was solitary.  All of it.  There were kids who drank and did drugs, but I wasn’t remotely friendly with them.  At least one of them had been my “best” friend in fifth and sixth grades, but we weren’t friendly anymore.  The kids I was remotely friendly with were the good a smart kids, or the “cooties,” but they didn’t drink.  The social drinking I did only involved the guy across the street, who I was sleeping with, and my family, on holidays.  I also snuck pot with the guy across the street, and drank and smoked pot with some of my cousins on my father’s side of my family.

I remember some of the kids who got very messed up with drugs and alcohol.  One guy, who was never the brightest, suffered some kind of obvious brain damage around then.  There was a girl who mixed alcohol and tranquilizers and who went into a coma.  Last I heard, which was a long time after high school, she never came out of it.  There were random locker checks in school, when they would hold a fire drill, get everyone out of the building, then not let us back in while police checked random lockers.  The drinking age was 18 at that time, so some high schoolers could legally drink.

This was an affluent area.  It’s now one of the most affluent areas in the country.  There weren’t gangs (that I know of), or violence of any kind.  But there were drugs and alcohol, for sure.  Still most kids went to school, hoped and planned and tried to graduate, didn’t often get pregnant in high school, got a very good education there.

I knew it then and I know it even better now, that the drinking I was doing was disordered and sick from the absolute start.  It went so quickly from a want to a need.  It went so quickly overboard and over the edge.  I’m grateful it was like that, because it brought me to the end that much more quickly.

It’s somewhat unbelievable to me now. At 16, I knew I was an alcoholic and out of control (of course I understand now that this is stating the obvious). I didn’t know much about alcoholism or Alcoholics Anonymous. I really don’t know how I thought to call them. But I did. I know I assumed AA would attempt to teach me how to drink moderately.

So I looked it up in the phone book, and I called.  This was 1979.  There were no computers, no internet, no caller ID.  I do remember taking a book out of the school library that dealt with alcoholism.  That was how we gathered information back in the day.  Quaint, and slow.

My phone number at the time seemed to people like a commercial number.  It was one number off from a local golf course, which was a pain on Sunday mornings when people called to make a tee time.  It was something like 676-1000.  Anyway when I called the AA hot line and spoke to the woman answering the phone, she said she would get someone in touch with me and would call back.  When I gave her my phone number, I remember that she didn’t believe me.

I’ve lost the details of what happened between that call and my first meeting.  I know it was a few days away from the call.  I know I had a babysitting job, and Isabel covered that for me so I could go to the meeting.  Among the things I didn’t know at that time was the fact that there are AA meetings all over the place all the time.  I often wonder, when someone talks about being directed to a meeting by the answering service, why they are sent to meetings that are days away rather than as soon as possible.

My first meeting took place in the church pictured above.  It was in April of 1979, about a month before my 17th birthday.  I walked into that church drunk.  I couldn’t handle an AA meeting sober!  There was a greeter there, George.  He was an old guy, and he had the greeting job for years until he died.  I remember being at an anniversary celebration for that group after George died, and his wife attended in honor of him.  She was tall, German, all dressed in black.

That church had several meetings going on at once.  There was a beginners AA and several alanon or alateen meetings.  I went to the beginners in the church library.  After the meeting got going, the smoke was so thick you couldn’t see the other side of the room.  Washing ashtrays was a newcomer job, and it wasn’t a small job at all.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t say much at that meeting.  Some of the friendliest people turned out to be some of the flakiest.  But basically, everyone was very nice, and when I told them of my drinking problem, they told me they understood.  And I believed them, I believed that they did understand.  I never lost that belief.  I hold this as one of the keys to my long time sobriety.

I was surprised to see old people there.  I thought that all alcoholics were like my father, and I didn’t understand how they could live that long and be alcoholic.  I was surprised that AA practiced abstinence.  I was probably disappointed.

I talked to people, got phone numbers, got a sponsor.  Not at that first meeting, but at one of the first.  I drank a few times after getting a few days strung together.  One “slip” I recall happened after I took cough medicine.  It’s a trigger!  It made me drink!!  I began counting days on a calender.

So I got a shaky start on my lifetime of AA.  By the time it was my 17th birthday, I had begun what would be 18 months of continuous sobriety.

Alcohol worked for me for a very short time. I set out to be slightly drunk all the time. I liked that much better than being stone cold sober. Doesn’t everyone?

I had a few experiences where I enjoyed the effect of a little alcohol. Then quickly, very quickly, I regularly began going too far. Then I went too far every time.

It would go, for example, like this. Home in my room after school (I was in 11th grade), I would begin drinking and plan to get buzzed and do my homework. I would drink a bit, watch TV a bit, and mean to work. Then I would think that the alcohol wasn’t hitting me fast enough, I must not have taken enough. Then I would drink more. Then the room would spin. Then I would call someone in an emotional pit.  I might write something goopy on my typewriter.  Often, when I would lay down, I would get the spins.  At times when this didn’t quit, I would try to go with it and not open my eyes.  I remember the sensation of being on a tipping axis, skipping there like a record (vinyl).  I would pass out.  Lots of nights I woke up or came to in the middle of the night, parched and dehydrated.  I remember the sensation of getting cold water in the kitchen and drinking and drinking.

At one point I wrote a sappy description of all this and asked my psychology teacher to comment.  He said I was in danger of becoming an alcoholic.  Another time I had a vivid dream I asked him about.  I dreamed that I was at my grandparents’ summer house where I spent all my summers growing up, and where I largely stopped going as a teenager.  Most of my mother’s family would go there on and off all summer.  I was in the rowboat, not far away from the dock.  There was a girl with dark hair (my hair was fairly light) just beneath the water.  I reached in to grab her, but I couldn’t reach her.  Her body would shift away from me on the slight current my reach had caused.  I maneuvered the boat and  tried and tried, but I couldn’t get her. The psychology teacher told me that both girls were me, the one in the boat and the one in the water, and that I was trying to save myself.

Also when I was 16, I got back in touch with my father’s family. I had not seen them for years. I don’t believe there was a feud or anything like that between them and my mother, I think it’s just something that everyone let slide. My father was the oldest of five, and his two younger sisters had seven kids between them, with me born somewhere in the middle. That gang of cousins and family and belonging was potent to me.

I visited them and stayed with them, and looking back, I think I was over emotional and clingy. I loved being with them. A funny memory that just came back to me involves a time my mother got drunk there and I refused to go home with her. I called my sugar daddy across the street, and he came to get me.

I asked one of my aunts about my father, and if he had been an alcoholic. His official cause of death, or the cause of death they told to me, was pneumonia. I think fatal pneumonia hides a multitude of sins. She said that he was an alcoholic, and I know it stressed her to admit that to me. She also told me that as a child, he had been hospitalized with spinal meningitis. She said that all the other children on the ward died, and that the disease may have weakened his system, so that he couldn’t drink. She also said that his job as a boxer may have weakened him, since I guess he would have suffered blows to the liver.

Around that time, I went on a sort of anti-alcohol campaign. At my 16th birthday party, I actually poured out the drinks of some of the relatives who would tolerate it.

So, I started drinking. I had an actual goal, which was to be slightly drunk all the time. I’m fortunate in that the time frame during which this worked and was pleasurable was very small. I was too young to buy alcohol. I had gotten a hair cut that required using a “mister” to frizz up my hair (this was the 1970s). The frizzing didn’t last long, and the empty Fantastic bottle sat on my dresser. I filled it from my mother’s endless supply of sangria or white wine. She always had a gigantic bottle under the sink or on the basement stairs. When I babysat, I took some of their hard liquor to add to my bottle. So I drank a hideous mix of whatever I could get. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t there for the taste.

This came following my short lived anti-alcohol campaign. I had not been educated about alcohol or alcoholism by anyone, and I had just a little knowledge I had acquired on my own. I’m such an alcoholic, I did a classic thing without knowing about it. I set rules for myself and guidelines that I could not cross. I mentally listed what would make me alcoholic, and at which point I would know I had a problem. And like I said, I was 16, and didn’t know much about it.

Again, I can’t really remember in what order things happened. I will need to look at the 18 months of sobriety and what that entailed, but it’s hard for me to know what lead to it. One thing I’m fairly certain of, I drove my car with my best friend, Isabel, in it while I was under the influence. That was a biggie for me. I was such a child, I was driving her to the pet shop to get hamsters. I was such an alcoholic, I wasn’t able to keep my promise to myself for even a short time.

Some time after I was 17 and before I was 19, I had 18 months of continuous sobriety through AA.  During that period of sobriety, when I spoke about my story, I remembered in what order and at what times different things had happened.  After those 18 months, I drank, and I continued to drink for roughly five more years.  When I again became sober, the time which has continued until now, I could no longer order things or say what happened when.

So, two important events, both happened when I was 16 years old.  I think.  I don’t know which happened first.  I know the course of these events continued along a corroded thread until I was almost 22.  I don’t really know the meaning of the way they occurred together for those years.  I don’t even know if there is a meaning.

The easier one to write about is my first drink.  Although film evidence suggests I did drink a bit as a toddler, my first noteworthy drink occurred when I was 16.  I had very painful periods and massive cramps.  This was in the days before Ibuprofen.  My periods would debilitate me and I would lay in miserable pain for a day or two.  My mother, never one to give sympathy when someone doesn’t feel well, (one time when I thought I would keel over from heat exhaustion she said that would make one less mouth to feed at dinner), would go to work and I’d think I’d probably be dead when she returned.

One day she offered me a nonprescription pain killer.  She put rye whiskey in a glass of cola.  I drank it.  I didn’t like the taste.  I have never liked the taste of alcohol, not even a little bit.  It always tasted to me like poison, like gasoline or nail polish remover might taste.  I drank it down and I laid on my bed, and time passed and I felt sleepy.  Then I had a thought that would change my life, that would define my life and would threaten my life.  I thought

It hurts just as bad, but I don’t care anymore.

I thought I had found the key to the universe.  I liked that feeling so incredibly much, I couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to be just a little drunk all the time. As the book describes it, I believe that I am a REAL alcoholic.  There was no line for me to cross, except the line between ignorance and knowledge.  There was no social drinking and no slow build up.  There was only before alcohol and after alcohol.

My trip down that hill was swift.  I’ll write about it next time I get back to my story.  For now I have to list the other thing I started doing when I was 16.  I started sleeping with - having sex with - the man across the street.  I was 16, he was 32.  I loved his wife as a friend.  I babysat for his children, two little boys.  I had not had sex with anyone before.

I don’t feel like listing details here.  I don’t know if I will, or if I should.  I think I know what’s important about this experience, at least lots of what’s important about it.  Central for me is what it says about my morals at that time.  I understand that I was a “child” and he was an adult.  I understand that he was overwhelmingly in the wrong.  I understand I was a victim.

I FEEL bad and guilty and pitiful.  I said yes to him, and to anyone who ever asked.  OK only he and one other guy ever asked, but still.  That’s maybe more pitiful.  I was caught in the attention.  I suffered terribly all the six years of that relationship.  I swore I would never again be involved in a triangle, in a cheating situation.  I believed my only road to happiness was through him, and through him leaving his wife and being with me.

Next time I’ll write how my drinking paralleled this situation in time, almost exactly.   It’s important that I understand that though they happened together and ended together, one did not cause the other.  Very important.

I know I should get on with it. I will. I want to summarize and try to understand where I’m coming from a bit better.

I was an only child of two young people from the suburbs of New York City. I had a supportive extended family. I moved to Long Island (still suburbs of NYC, but ritzier and more like the country) before I started school. My parents were the first in each of their families to go to college. My father was an alcoholic who died at the young age of 33 from alcohol. If you believe in degrees, I think it’s safe to say he was “severe.”

My mother remarried a few years later, to a man I haven’t spoken to, despite living with him while growing up, for over 30 years. When I was around 12 years old, I started engaging in self-destructive, attention-seeking behavior. Though I had had friends in the past, I didn’t really have any at that time, except for my best friend, Isabel, who I had known since I was 5.

My mother continues to this day to engage in alcoholic behavior. She does drink and she takes pills. In addition to that, I’ve come to see that there are ways in which she is still very critical of me and she expresses these criticisms to my partner and my adult children. I have other relatives who I believe are alcoholic.

I was smart enough. I had two health problems, severe allergies and bum knees, that complicated things, but not too much.

That’s all I can think of at this moment to summarize my life up until I was 16. It’s my personal belief that I was predisposed to be an alcoholic. Whether that’s by heredity or something else, I don’t know. It absolutely doesn’t matter one tiny bit. I am alcoholic. I can’t go back to not being alcoholic.

I’ve heard people at times attribute their alcoholism to this or that factor or experience. It doesn’t matter. Whatever anyone has gone through, there are others who have been through the same and worse, yet they don’t become alcoholic. The wisdom of the ages, my personal experience and the experience of countless others tells us beyond a doubt that we can’t go back to being “normal.” Even if there was a chance I could, I wouldn’t ever risk it. Even if there was no doubt that I could, I wouldn’t want to. That is the miracle of AA.

I’m going to draw a line between ages 15 and 16. At 16, as you’ll read later, I started some new, grown up, bad behaviors that I didn’t have at 15. Through junior high and the first grades of senior high I was a sick puppy. I tend to think that I was an alcoholic who hadn’t found the drink yet. I was mentally ill, no doubt about that. I’ve heard some say that adolescents are mentally ill by definition. I know I wasn’t alone in going crazy and going bad during those years.

After I turned 12 or 13, and went to the doctor for a yearly physical, I had gained substantial weight and not really grown. I wasn’t over weight at all, not till I was probably 40. But my body type was pretty set at short and small boned. I had first needed a bra at nine years old, the first one in my fourth grade class. That was not nice. As a result I really thought I had an overly big chest for many, many years. I really don’t, though on someone as short as I am, an average amount goes a long way.

My knee issues were pretty much resolved. I had big scars and lumpy knees, but they stayed in place and I was only really restricted from a few activities like skiing and kneeling. My allergies had moderated. I was still an only child, though more of my peers were fatherless by that time. I had fallen behind in school to the point that I was on the slow track for math and science by ninth grade. I redeemed myself and got back with the regular kids for those subjects, and the smart kids for English. I had no friends. I wasn’t despised or picked on, I just didn’t have friends. I had no one to sit with at lunch. When I sat with someone, they would let me sit there and talk to me. But that was it. They weren’t my friends.

One friend I do need to mention is Isabel (not her real name). I met her when we moved to the house in the suburbs when I was five. She was four, and she lived down the block. Back then, in the late 1960s, kids that young actually played out on the streets (we had no sidewalks). She was my friend then, and she’s my friend now, now that I’m almost 46 and she’s almost 45. We live a few hundred miles apart and we don’t see each other often. We have, through the years, because she stayed in our hometown and so did my mother, so I’d see her once a year or more often as I visited. She and my mother have moved, though, and I don’t know when or how I will see her next.

But back then, she was my friend. She actually covered my babysitting job so that I could go to my very first AA meeting. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

During the years in question, I cut myself. I cut my forearms and my face. At that time I had not heard of anyone doing this. I hid my razor under my jewelry box, and one day my mother dusted my furniture, found the razor and took it. Didn’t say a word. When I cut my wrist (not nearly deeply enough to really hurt myself), I said the TV wires had cut me. Her husband commented that those wires can cut like a razor. So she had told him. Still she said nothing to me.

I wrote a story for English in which a girl tries to kill herself. I was scheduled to see the school psychologist. When he asked me to draw a person, I drew a cartoon figure. I wouldn’t talk, I didn’t cooperate. Ditto with the school guidance counselor.

I thank God I found alcohol. The recovery from that has saved me in so many ways.

It’s Mother’s Day, and my mother and daughter are here.  My daughter graduated from college yesterday, which is why my mother is here.  My daughter hasn’t looked for nor found a job yet, which is why she is here.  We’re going to Disney as a graduation present for my daughter at the end of the month.  She’s worked at one or more jobs since she was about 15, sometimes against my will, so I’m not terribly worried about her not looking for work yet.  She also had the option of going straight to grad school, which she decided not to do.  I’ll guess we’ll see.  This isn’t much of a problem except for the blasted American dilemma of health insurance.  As of June 1, she’ll be on Cobra.  I’m grateful it’s an option and one we can afford for now.  I’m anxious that there’s nothing more permanent or doable for the long term in place.  And my son will hopefully be in the same boat two years from now, so the Cobra funds may be needed then.  Yuck.

Anyway, after graduation my wife and I were able to make it to our home group AA meeting.  The topic was anger, and at first I thought I’m really not very angry, rather I’m on a bit of a pink cloud from the graduation.  As I thought about it though, I realized that I had had two flare ups of anger over the past two days.  One involved my wife, and one my wife and mother.  They were quick, insignificant flare ups, and they were brought on by the stress of the situation - trying to balance the wants and needs of all the people involved in the graduation.  Lots of the group looked to me to ultimately make decisions about where we went and when and how.  I was already stressed by leaving my dog (long story) and my utter hatred of spontaneity.  Things went better when I told them to tell me where to be when, and to do their best to take care of the dog.  My daughter ultimately decided what to do after the ceremony (there’s a concept, having the graduate decide) and I was able to go along and be pleasant and try to push my dog anxiety away.

So at the meeting I was able to say that although these anger issues were there that day, they weren’t serious.  They didn’t threaten the relationships and all the relationships are pretty good.

At the diner after the meeting, to which my wife and son went with some people from the meeting, my wife told us how my mother had put me down during their car ride home from the ceremony.  This isn’t surprising or new.  I’m an only child.  I’m not the most stellar specimen you’ve ever seen.  I make plenty of mistakes, I’m average or below average in most ways.  My mother has always put me down.  Often, to others, she’ll talk me up.  But not to me or the people close to me.  She’s always liked my friends better than she’s liked me.  She likes my wife better than she likes me.  She likes my kids better.

What she told my wife about my faults was fundamental and cutting.  She criticized the way I have mothered my daughter, and she blamed my daughter’s mental health issues on me.

Without getting into it too much, through the years of my daughter’s struggles I have taken her to doctors and therapists a-plenty.  I have always asked them to please let me know if there was anything I could do better, do differently, stop doing or start doing.  I am not mother of the year.  I have never been. But …….. I really feel I’ve done a much better job than my mother.  She has always criticized me.  In all these years I have not answered her with a recitation of her own sins and lacks.  I haven’t yet.

So often I hear people say that their parents did the best they could with what they knew or had at the time.  I don’t believe it.  I wanted my children and made them number one in my life.  Still I could have done better.  And so often real parents were bad, or wrong, or careless or dangerous.  I don’t know why pop psychology says we must love and forgive.  Resentment against my parents occupies hardly any of my mental energy, but it’s there, and I don’t see how getting over it or denying it would help any.

At the diner, my son said he knows he had never been physically hurt by me, and I’m very grateful that that is his picture.  And not to derail this, the accusations are not that I was ever physically punishing or cruel.  Even the example that my mother has at times shown my children, her grandchildren, has been very bad, and I haven’t said anything.

The AA program only goes so far in helping us parent, I think.  But the legacy of behavior I have shown my children and given my children is so far superior to what I was given.  Because of AA.  My son said moderation would be the best example to give your children regarding alcohol, better than abstinence.  I told him that I cannot show moderation, and my example may actually change his life one day.

As I had this conversation with him and heard what my mother had to say about me, and considered what she has shown me through the years, I am filled with gratitude for the program, for my children, for the power to break away from that diseased and sick example.  My son, at 20, and my daughter, at 22, are so much healthier than I was at their ages.  I was actually getting sober at 22, having spent six years in a drunken hell.  I didn’t graduate on time, due to drinking.  I stopped drinking then and I started having them then and I feel that their health and happiness have been made possible by AA.

There must be something to this stuff, because I don’t want to write it and I don’t want to remember.  I picture who the people are who know me and read this and I imagine what they will think.  It’s all terribly silly.  It’s nothing I wouldn’t say at a meeting or to a close friend.

The first one is not as awful as the second.  My birthday party in I think third grade was a barbecue in the backyard.  Before my father died, he had grilled famous ribs for my birthday and other times.  My birthday falls around Memorial Day.  Maybe they were trying to keep a little of that atmosphere, but when he was alive, my parties involved relatives who wanted to get together and gab.  Third graders who spent all day with each other were not so keen to do that.

I have pictures of this party and I’m wearing outrageously floral, unfortunate pants.  Some of the girls are wearing ponchos, which were fashionable at that time.  My mother’s side of my family did attend.  My father’s did not.  The trauma for me involves the fact that beyond eating, there were no planned activities.  For a bunch of eight year olds.

Now I’ve raised my own children beyond the age of kiddie parties and believe me I understand that are a truly awful duty of parenting.  If I had my life to live over again, we would have had a no party policy, as I know some others had.  In my experience with these things, there are bound to be awful moments, if not an awful whole thing.  But why my mother didn’t plan any activities is beyond me.  I guess she probably didn’t think it through, and realize that eight year olds just don’t like food and each other enough to spend a few hours with food, each other, and nothing else.

So the memory there is more the memory of the feeling that everyone was dying of boredom.  My mother’s sister, my aunt, did pull it out of the awful by quickly devising a scavenger hunt.  The kids then ran around the neighborhood looking for ……. stuff.  Imagine doing that today?  Not likely.

The other awful party memory involves my birthday in fifth or sixth grade, or I may have combined them in my memory.  This was the time of the sleep over, and it was also a time when I had friends.  Two awful things.  Maybe three.  One was playing some kind of stripping game, in sleeping bags, of course, and threatening to (I hope we didn’t actually do it) deprive one of the girls of her sleeping bag.  I hope she’s over the trauma, since clearly I am not.  The other was a girl that we (it was my party, I should take total responsibility) invited just to pick on.  How awful.  Memories like this fill me with fear for people in general.  I’m a pacifist, as peace loving as I can be, but I participated in this.  I remember taking her glasses.  I know we did other stuff as well.

The third disturbing memory of the two parties during fifth and sixth grade may actually tie into my loss of those friends, though probably not.  The first year my mother’s husband totally lost his cool about the noise all night.  The next year, either my mother had told him to cool it, or he spent the night elsewhere, but he didn’t complain and I yelled at my friends all night to be quiet.

I’ll try to make some sense of this later, in terms of drinking, sobriety, and oldtimerishness.  Now I’m going to go somewhere to cry!