Dear AA,
I know this is what most people refer to you as, even those who don’t have a drinking problem, but I think at this point I truly know you well enough to feel justified in referring to you as such, rather than using your full, formal and somewhat clumsy name – Alcoholics Anonymous. That certainly doesn’t roll easily off the tongue. Especially when you’re drunk. The alliteration alone will kill you after you’ve knocked back a few.
But we really do have a storied and tumultuous past. I’d go so far as to call this a love/hate relationship – with an emphasis on the hate.
It was first suggested that I attend one of your meetings back when I was in college. I only lived in the dorms for two years. But during those four semesters I was sent to the school’s counselor for alcohol violations five times before that final spring semester I lived there was over. Every semester I tried to throw a huge party in my room – on our very dry campus – and inevitably would get caught and sent to the counselor. I was also sent to him because of one night I was especially drunk, tried to sneak in a group of strangers I had met at a bar, and then yelled at the security guard and flipped him off when he wouldn’t let us into the dorms.
And let’s not forget the night I came home wildly drunk, a few weeks after 9/11, muttering something about planes and bombs and refusing to sleep. My roommate had to go to the security guard booth and tell him that her roommate was batshit crazy and panicking about the end of the world. I didn’t get sent to the counselor that time, but the people in charge of residence life did send the campus deacon to check up on me. The next afternoon I woke up, bleary eyed, possibly still drunk and in the clothes I had worn out the door the previous morning wondering why there was a deacon at my door. We wound up having a spirited discussion about Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut.
But the counselor and I came to know each other pretty well. His name was Bob. He was a nice enough guy, considering he was the bane of my existence. He had a Mr. Clean haircut, a misplaced bushy mustache underneath and he handed me the same papers every time I walked into his office. I kept each batch up until a few years ago, when I realized I didn’t need several copies of a diagram about how alcohol affects my motor ability, or a list of the reasons people drink. I know why people drink. I used his photocopies as a checklist.
Every time I sat in his office, he’d suggest I go to an AA meeting. I’d roll my eyes and say maybe, though I never intended on it. Sometimes we’d sit in silence. Sometimes he’d ask me questions I either wouldn’t answer or would reply to with a joke. After the second time I was sent to see Bob I said to him, “So, should we schedule our meeting for next semester ahead of time? I think Thursday afternoons are good for me. I already made my class schedule for the fall.” He wasn’t amused. He didn’t have much of a sense of humor. I thought I was funny. And whenever I saw him on another part of campus, I’d run the other way and hide until he passed. I never went to AA and eventually I moved out of the dorms. I have my suspicions I wouldn’t have been invited back anyway.
Then, about two years ago, my girlfriend at the time kind of tricked me into going to an AA meeting. I say kind of because she told me her sister had to go to an open meeting for a psychology class and was scared to go alone. Now, this was true, but she also had ulterior motives. At that meeting, I sat next to a very tall, professional looking man in his ‘50s. We talked about basketball throughout the entire meeting. I have never watched a professional basketball game in my life, and sure, I played basketball my freshman year of high school, but let’s be honest, I’m under 5 feet tall, never knew the rules and often fouled out of games the few times they actually put me on the court. So I’m not sure how I had such a lengthy conversation about the sport. After the meeting, on our way out, my girlfriend said to me, “So, maybe you should grab a schedule from that table just in case…” I ignored her and walked out the door without even looking at the table of pamphlets.
Then about a year later, when I was working at a reporter at a community newspaper, I voluntarily went to a meeting on my own. Newspaper people are notorious drunks. There was a bar and grill down the road from our office where at any given time on any given day you were guaranteed to find at least one person who worked at our newspaper group drinking a beer and writing at the bar. And all hell would break loose when a group of us went anywhere together. Those were some of my best and worst nights. Those were the nights I wouldn’t make it home. Those were the nights I had to call for a ride and leave my car in a strange parking lot somewhere overnight.
Working as a reporter also allowed me to have an incredibly flexible schedule. Sure, I’d spend some of my nights covering local village board, planning board and zoning board meetings, but there were days I also wouldn’t even wander into the office until 3 p.m., just to leave an hour later to hit happy hour with my friends and coworkers. I lived with my girlfriend and she’d grumble every morning about having to work so early. I’d sleep late, watch TV, hang out with the cats and manage to get all of my work for the week done in about one day. And, often I’d drink – you know, the best way to get rid of a hangover is to just drink some more.
One afternoon I looked away from the TV and saw how many beer bottles littered the living room floor. For the first time, I was horrified by what I was doing to myself.
I stood up, and because I felt I wanted to hear it out loud, slurred to myself, “That’s it. I’m going to AA!” I stumbled over my shoes that were lying in the middle of the living room floor. I went online and looked up the schedule. There was a meeting in 15 minutes and it was an open meeting, which meant no one would pay any attention to me. I could just go, get my feet wet and proceed from there.
The meeting was in Sea Cliff, a village not far from where I lived. I rushed to get there and hoped I wouldn’t get pulled over, thinking, though, that it would be ironic if I did. Sea Cliff is tiny, maybe one square mile, but I somehow managed to get lost and was 10 minutes late. When I pulled up to the church, I figured I could sneak in the back mostly undetected. I pulled open the heavy door and it closed behind me with a loud thud. The group of six people, sitting in a circle, all looked up.
“Um, I thought this was an open meeting…” I was disheveled, probably reeked of alcohol and I’m sure my eyes were bloodshot, making me look like a completely mad person.
Turns out AA hadn’t updated their schedule online yet. The meeting was no longer a nice, comfy open meeting; it was a closed Big Book discussion. The Big Book is the AA Bible – and it’s probably close enough to the real Bible as well, with all the talk of higher powers and whatnot. They invited me to stay anyway. If nothing else, alcoholics are very welcoming and gracious hosts. They read passages from the book. I zoned in and out.
Afterwards, a woman named Liz approached me. “Have you been drinking today?”
“It’s possible.”
She nodded and asked me if I wanted to go get tea. She drove us to Dunkin’ Donuts and bought me a drink. She did most of the talking. I don’t remember what she said. When she dropped me back off at my car she asked if I was OK to drive. I assured her I was and she wrote her phone number down on a scrap of paper. “Call me any time.” I thanked her and the second she drove away I crumpled it up and let it fall to the ground. I went to the store and bought some beer. I passed out on the couch before my girlfriend got home from work.
Another year passed. I moved to Boston. I broke up with my girlfriend. I don’t need to recap my short time in Massachusetts in great detail, but I wound up in the detox unit of the Somerville Hospital for a week. They held AA and NA meetings every evening after dinner. These were my least favorite part of the day since I had long ago decided that I resented the religious aspect of AA. But they forced everyone to go. My first night there, they set up the chairs in the conference room in a circle for the meeting, something I’d never seen before for such a large group. In the middle of the circle was an empty chair. “That’s for every alcoholic and addict who’s out there on the streets somewhere, or who just can’t be at a meeting today,” said one of the gruff men, obviously hardened by life, who ran these meetings.
I raised my hand. “I hardly think that every addict and alcoholic who can’t make it to this meeting could possibly all fit on that one chair.” My new buddy, Marc, also in detox for alcohol, started laughing. This got the group of druggies from the local high school, who were there for popping all kinds of pills, started, and eventually everyone from the unit was laughing. The man glared at me. And later I refused to hold anyone’s hand and pray at the end of each meeting.
When I got out of detox, I entered into a pre-cursor to an outpatient rehab program. I had morning group sessions – not AA related, thankfully – three times a week. I eagerly went to them because it meant I didn’t have to be at work. They made me pee in little plastic cups and talk about my plans for the day and whether or not I had wanted to drink the day before. I also had a one-on-one session with a counselor, Stephanie, twice a week. She found me amusing and told me she thought I was brilliant. She also suggested I get a real psych evaluation and said she had a crazy hunch that I might be bipolar. Personally, I think they just tell all the addicts that. But I often caught her trying not to laugh at the jokes I would make.
To supplement this program, I decided to go to AA meetings, figuring, hey, it’s better than nothing. At the first one I went to, in the basement of a Baptist church in the always sketchy Central Square, I spotted an attractive girl across the room – dark hair and lots of tattoos – a welcome distraction from the real reason I was there. She looked up and caught my eye and gave me a friendly smile. Excellent, I thought.
I zoned out during most of the meeting, occasionally sneaking glances at the hot girl. No matter how helpful it was supposed to be, I just hated AA – higher power this, higher power that, 12 steps, blah blah blah.
When the meeting was over, the hot girl came over and introduced herself. Her name was Jen and she was six months clean. We chatted a bit. She asked about how I wound up there. I told funny stories and flirted with her, naturally. She gave me her number before she left. I was pretty pleased with myself until I remembered that her giving me her number meant nothing. AA is like a cult. So sucking more people into it is the way of AA members. I threw her number out before I even left the building and I never went back to that meeting, though I tried another one out, this time in Malden, the next day. I got so angry at the end, when they tried to make me hold hands with those standing nearby and say the Serenity Prayer that I walked out in a huff.
Somehow, a month later, I wound up back in New York, just as impulsively as I’d wound up on Boston in the first place. I told Stephanie I found a job back home and started in two weeks. “Who finds a job in another state and makes plans to move in just two weeks?” she asked.
“I suppose I do. It’s kind of similar to how I wound up here in the first place, though I did that in about a month and a half.”
“Tiffany, remember last week when we talked about impulsive behavior?”
I remembered. “Screw that. I’m moving back to New York.”
She did everything she could to try to convince me to stay and enter the real outpatient rehab program. “Please deal with this before you make any major life decisions. If you hate your job that much, then quit. Get a job at Starbucks. Get a job at a bookstore. Get any low stress job that will give you health insurance so you can keep coming to see me.”
But I wouldn’t have it. “You’re lucky I’m going to continue to keep coming here over the next few weeks as I get ready to move.”
On my last day, she was visibly upset and told me how disappointed she was that she wouldn’t get to work with me anymore. She told me to keep in touch. I bet she says that to all the addicts. I took her business card, but I never called her.
Back in New York, I acted like Boston hadn’t even happened. I caught up with friends and made new ones. I drank. I had assorted sordid adventures. And I told those stories the next time I went out drinking.
Eventually I began to feel horribly guilty about my behavior. But there was no way in hell I was going back to AA. I was done with the God mumbo jumbo.
And I discovered Smart Recovery – a thinking man’s AA, I like to refer to it as. Instead of turning yourself over to a higher power, Smart Recovery holds you accountable for your actions, forcing you to evaluate your decisions and figure out why you made them in the first place. It was more than listening to a room full of sketchy people telling sob stories. It was actual work. I mean, they even gave me a worksheet to fill out when I got there. These people took their shit seriously. Screw AA. They’re a bunch of whiny babies who put themselves completely in the hands of God or their higher power or Satan or whoever. I mean, really, take some responsibility for yourself.
But, of course, I stopped going. And just yesterday, because these Smart Recovery meetings are so far from where I live – about an hour each way – I decided to go to an AA meeting, the tried and true.
I knew it was a bad idea from the start. My GPS got me lost – in my own town – and took me to a completely different road from where I was supposed to be. But I was determined to make it there and wound up being only five minutes late.
And who do I wind up sitting next to? The boyfriend of my ex-girlfriend’s best friend. I’d only met him once and he gained about 50 pounds since I had met him – his neck fat was bulging and he was sweating profusely – but it was him. I never looked at him and hoped he wouldn’t recognize me at all. I don’t think he ever did. But I figured if he started talking to me – seriously, all AAers do is talk to people – I’d give him a fake name. What would my fake name be, I wondered to myself, while someone was talking at the front of the room about their experiences with alcohol.
They passed around a basket for people to throw in whatever amount of money they wanted to donate to the AA chapter. I ignored the basket as it was passed in front of me. I only had a $20 in my pocket and they certainly weren’t getting that. Besides, if I wanted to be surrounded by people talking about God and have to throw money in a basket, I might as well just go to mass with my grandfather on Sundays.
Then, the moment came where I finally had it with you, AA. A woman a few rows in front of me talked about how happy she was that her life is now completely in the hands of God, how she couldn’t be responsible for her own life.
I gritted my teeth and forced myself to not raise my hand and completely lambast everyone in the room. I could actually feel the anger in me rising. It made my chest hurt. I didn’t want to be there.
I left as soon as the meeting was over. The sun was still out and it felt like a typically nice summer day that was calmly winding down. The church bells rang. It was 8 p.m. A year or so ago, I’d be heading to the bar, but I was going home.
As I started my car, I saw everyone else from the meeting standing outside the main entrance, smoking cigarettes and chatting like old friends. Jesus freaks, I thought, and I realized I had actually parked my car in a circular driveway, blocking the road for others. Good thing I’m the first to leave.
AA, I think it’s time we entirely severed ties. It’s obvious that neither of us gets anything out of this completely dysfunctional relationship and one of these days I’m just going to say something rude to people who are just trying to make their lives better for themselves. And that will only make me an asshole.
So, I guess I’ll suck up the drive and head the hour west for Smart Recovery once or twice a week. The gas money is worth my sanity.
Tiffany
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Dear Port Jeff Village,
Is it just me, or am I getting super lame in my old age? (Or, as my friend Jon would say, lamesauce; Jess, on the other hand, would say Sir Lames-a-lot. Use whichever you prefer, or neither. It’s up to you.) I mean, just last week I had a 21-year-old call me old and I increasingly find myself opting to stay home in order to nap or watch American Idol because I’m simply too wiped out to leave the house.
And last night was the worst of all. I had plans to meet up with Jon at Tara’s, a pub, as you know, within your jurisdiction, where, he tells me, they sell burgers for $1. If you really feel like splurging, for an extra buck you can add cheese. As a vegan, none of this is appetizing to me at all. My point is, it was a quiet day at work and I should have wanted to meet up with one of my best friends for a couple of hours afterwards.
Instead, I took a nap when I got home. When I woke up, I was groggy, feeling anti-social and knew the idea of my going anywhere was a lost cause. But I didn’t really want to ditch Jon. I figured I’d accomplish the most important task I had planned for my day – finding the title to my crappy, old car so I could sell the heap of rubble for a quick few hundred bucks the next day – and then determine whether or not I felt like getting out of my pajamas and heading to Port Jeff. (I’m not driving the crappy old car around, by the way. My grandfather recently gave me one of his old cars, a shiny red Hyundai with incredibly low mileage that’s much newer than the one I’m currently trying to unload. In its heyday, whenever I borrowed it because said crappy car was busy being, well, crappy, I referred to it as the Grandpa-mobile, with its Support Our Troops ribbon-shaped magnets and bumper stickers that said things like, “My Grandson Is A Marine” or “Keep Christ in Christmas.” The only remnants are a tiny magnet on the driver’s side door that says “I Heart America” and the U.S. Navy floor mats under the driver’s and front passenger’s seats.)
Anyway, things went from bad to worse as I was searching for my car title, which I still haven’t found. I recall thinking to myself when it arrived in the mail after I moved back to New York, “This is a really important paper, Tiffany. Make sure you put it somewhere extra special so you don’t lose it.” Well, I hid it from myself so well that I can’t find it. And it’s not the first time I’ve done something like this. I lost my title in Massachusetts and had to order a new one. I’ve lost numerous bills I probably wasn’t planning on paying anyway, and also lost a W-2 once. Needless to say, I’m organized.
I tore my place apart last night, looking for this title. In doing so, it forced me to organize the Rubbermaid container full of paperwork that I’ve been ignoring for quite some time, basically the entire year I’ve been back in New York. This was quite overwhelming. And by the time it was over, I definitely wasn’t in the mood to go out.
And I just felt lame and old. Maybe I’m depressed, I thought. Or maybe I have an iron deficiency. No worries, though. I’m going to try some supplements – iron, vitamin D, St. John’s Wort – and see what happens.
But remember the good ol’ days, Port Jeff? The days when I’d visit often and could stay up all night and be awake by 8 the next morning, scarcely noticing that I’d gotten only two hours of sleep, if I slept at all. (Not to say my relationship with sleep is much better these days. We’re something akin to “frienemies” and will likely always stay that way.)
When I worked at Borders, one of the first outings I went on with my work friends was to Tara’s. I showed up underage and drunk – not the first time it happened – and the bouncer wouldn’t let me in. So I stood on the corner, with each of my friends taking turns watching me while the others drank inside as I shook the hand of every stranger who walked down the street, introduced myself and wished them a good night. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever actually been inside Tara’s.
That same summer, I found myself often hanging out in one of your many parking lots, generally with a bottle of booze, usually empty or in the process of being emptied. And one night I saw a werewolf.
I was drinking Black Haus in the parking lot just north of Tara’s and The Village Pub with The Legend, The Polish Girlfriend and my best friend at the time, Rich. I took a swig straight from the bottle (it was my bottle, after all, everyone else had their own drink of choice) and stopped dead in my tracks when I saw something dark and possibly furry in the distance down the residential street that separated the parking lot from the bars.
I threw my bottle into the woods, because I’ll be damned if I would let a werewolf steal my alcohol. And I yelled, “Weeeeeeeeeerewolf! Werewolf! Werewolf! Werewolf!” while running in the opposite direction of the werewolf, towards the main street, which was crowded with people and full of cars looking for somewhere to park. Lots of people stopped to watch me sprint down the road, including a rather confused policeman whose only response was to scratch his head and give me a befuddled look, or so Rich told me later. I was just grateful I wasn’t arrested.
My friends had to hop in one of their cars to look for me and picked me up about a half mile down the road. We went back to look for the Black Haus, but it was nowhere to be found. I was pretty pissed off because I figured the werewolf had gotten what he had wanted in the first place and had taken the bottle when I fled. Werewolves have excellent night vision, so I’m sure he was able to immediately spot the bottle wherever it had haphazardly landed in the woods. My friends, however, insisted there was no werewolf, told me I should never throw alcohol in the woods – or anywhere – and that I had probably just made some homeless man very happy. But luckily, my friends offered me some of their alcohol. I blacked out later and when they took me home they left me propped up on my front step, knocking on the door, thinking my parents would hear it. Except, they didn’t, and I spent a few hours on those steps, until my mom realized I wasn’t in my room and came outside.
And who can forget that one Halloween I spent on the downtown strip near the waterfront?
Rich dressed up like The Crow and hoped he would win an award at the costume contest being held at the bar we were heading to. We walked into the bar and there were five other guys dressed up as The Crow, all looking just as sullen and depressed about their unoriginal costume. I was dressed up like a pirate – hat, eye patch, beard I drew on myself and, of course, the most imperative accoutrements of my costume, the flask full of vodka, that had GROG written on it in Sharpie, and my plastic, children’s sword that made swashbuckling noises and said pirate phrases when I pushed the button on the handle.
Miffed that he wouldn’t win a prize, Rich decided we’d leave and head to a party at another bar he’d heard about. On our way out, I see another pirate. Me being a bit tipsy I decide to address my comrade. “Yarr! Ahoy there fellow pirate.” I raised my sword towards him as a symbol of piratical respect. He turned to me, looked me up and down, and said, “Well, ahoy to you too, but I’m a vampire, not a pirate.”
Oh well, I thought, next bar. Unfortunately, we forgot the name of the next bar. So we decided to call it Bartleby the Scrivener’s, even though I don’t think either of us was a fan of Herman Melville. And naturally, we forgot that was a made up name and kept asking random people we passed on the street, and even a cop, where Bartleby the Scrivener’s was.
Naturally, we never found the bar, but we did go to another one. We walked in on a costume party for gay men. We shrugged and ordered a drink anyway. At the bar I stood next to a flaming gay man who was dressed as a Christmas tree that was decorated in lights that actually lit up. Two of his friends were dressed as gifts. As we drank, we chatted with some of the guys there. Many of them were amused by my sword.
How I managed to have nights out like that night after night after night, especially during the week, I can’t even tell you. It makes me realize exactly how old I have gotten. I can handle one such night, maybe two, if the first one isn’t too crazy, and usually only on a Friday or Saturday. Some days after work, I’m too lazy to even take a drive down to the bookstore, which is only half a mile from where I live.
So what is it? Am I old? Depressed? Can I even blame an iron deficiency for my apathy towards leaving my house again after I get home from work? Well, I guess all I can do is give the supplements a shot and let you know how it works out. If they do work, though, I’ll make sure I pop by some night after work and we can catch up.
Tiffany
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Dear Boston,
With today being St. Patrick’s Day and one of the East End’s largest parades taking place last weekend, I got to thinking about my six-month, self-destructive stay in Cambridge – and not because your basketball team is called the Celtics or because of your large Irish-American population, and not even because of the many booze addled adventures I went on during my short stint in your fine city. No, St. Patrick’s Day makes me think of you because it actually marks exactly one year since I moved back to New York.
Boston, it’s not that I don’t love you – I’ve always loved you – but I moved there impulsively for all the wrong reasons. Mostly, the move north was a passive aggressive attempt to break up with a girl who I don’t think I really wanted to be dating in the first place.
Now, mental health has never exactly been my forte, but really, my time in Boston was one of the most disastrous periods of my life. I’ve always been a very social person and a rather heavy drinker, but that was magnified ten-fold – it’s hard to believe that was even possible – once I moved to Massachusetts. My new job was at an e-marketing company, far outside my comfort level – not only is my background in journalism, but my best friend to this day refers to me as a Luddite. Though the job gave me far more financial comfort than writing ever did and likely ever will, I hated it. I’d always had an anxiety disorder, but this job brought it to new levels, mostly because, simply put, I sucked at it. I’m not exaggerating even a little bit. I was terrible at it. And I don’t like doing things I’m not amazing at.
Don’t get me wrong, though. There were some good times. I saw lots of great music on a regular basis. I loved to go to Red Bones, a bbq joint where I couldn’t eat a single thing, during the week when it was quieter and drink cheap PBRs while I wrote in a notepad at a table in the back of the dimly lit room. I could easily take road trips to places like New Hampshire and Maine. There were fun drunken adventures with strangers. I was living near one of my best friends. I met a lot of good people. And I reconnected with a friend from high school. I’d often go to a bar by her house, with her and her boyfriend, where we’d all flirt with the cute waitress and I would try to take over the jukebox with blocks of Bob Dylan songs that people would inevitably override. (Oh, but one time I got them all – I put on “Alice’s Restaurant,” which runs over 18 minutes long. And you can’t override a song while it’s playing.)
On top of drinking at bars, eventually I was going through several bottles of vodka a week. Soon after that, I was constantly drinking, from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed, if I went to bed. And if I could fall asleep, I was waking up every half hour or so, often gasping for air and trying to recall the bad dreams I still can’t remember. If I drank too much, it hurt. And if I didn’t drink, it hurt even more.
One day I couldn’t take it anymore. For the first time in my life I set up an appointment with a therapist (who wound up being a children’s psychologist), hoping she could prescribe me some anti-anxiety medication. Off-handedly, as the conversation about my anxiety winded down, I mentioned “wanting to do something about this drinking thing.” When she asked how much I drank and how often, and then heard my answer, her response was immediate and emphatic – detox. Who knew that it’s dangerous to drink constantly for months and then suddenly stop doing it? To be honest, the idea had been in the back of my mind, but I was hesitant when she suggested it for various reasons. Still, I found myself being let down Cambridge Street by this sleight, blonde, affable, Eastern European woman to the Cambridge Hospital, where they had an alcohol and drug detox center.
I thought I was going in to find out how the whole thing worked, but I gave them all my vital information and found myself adorning pages with my signature. I stupidly said to them, “OK, I need to go to work and find out when I can partake in this shindig.” But I signed the papers. I was going immediately, though I had to wait for a bed to open up at the Somerville Hospital in the next town over in about an hour or so. And panic struck.
I was led to room number 4. The walls were padded, reminding me of the walls of my elementary school gymnasium, and there was a panic button near the door. For a brief second I contemplated trying out those padded walls, wondering what exactly they would do for me if I ran head first into them, then realized these people at the hospital didn’t need any more reasons to think I was crazy.
As I waited for a nurse to come to my room, I realized I needed to get in touch with my job. But I didn’t know the number. So I had to sign onto instant messenger on my cell phone. The only person signed on was my first girlfriend, from high school. I messaged her telling her I was in detox for about a week and needed her to look up the number for my job so I could tell them I wouldn’t be coming to work. I also remembered that I had a date that night and texted the girl, saying, “Hey. I’m in detox. Can’t hang out tonight. Call you in five days.” My chest was pounding and my pulse was racing. I could hardly breath.
Eventually the nurse came in. She looked like Margaret Cho. Bonus points for that.
“Do you have any suicidal thoughts?” She asked. “Do you think you might hurt yourself?”
“Who the hell doesn’t ever have suicidal thoughts?” I replied. “Besides, I probably have a panic disorder, which is really a blessing in an ugly disguise. I’m so afraid of death and pain (they top my 200+ list of fears), that I could never actually hurt myself.”
She laughed, then caught herself and stopped. “Do you have any weapons on you?”
“No, they checked my switchblade at the door, about when they took my keys.”
“Are you bleeding from anywhere that we don’t know about?” I must’ve looked puzzled, because she added that people were often brought to the detox center with stab wounds, didn’t tell the doctors, were taken elsewhere for treatment of their addictions and would bleed all over the place.
I guess she didn’t want me to make a mess. “Nah, I’m not that hardcore.”
Eventually, the bed in Somerville became available. They told me I could drive over there myself and handed me my keys back.
“Really?” I asked.
Really. This didn’t seem right to me, though. How would they know where I went after I left the hospital? I might never even show in Somerville. But they gave me directions.
I was tempted to go home, but figured if I did I would never actually head to the hospital. So I didn’t go back to my place, even though I really wanted to get some clothes and pet my cats. Plus, I wondered, would they send the detox police after me?
So I did what any self-respecting addict would do in such a dilemma: I got a beer and a burrito. I also went to CVS and bought a notebook. Other than that, I was at a loss as far as what else I should do. If I got there too late, the bed would be gone, given to some other person who wanted to try to improve him or herself, or at least was mandated by the court to do so.
When I got there, they took my keys, ID, debit card, phone and money from me. They threw them in a clear plastic bag. They made me change into hospital scrubs and threw my clothes in the same bag. But they let me keep my notebook.
I was given a tour of the detox unit, and then shown my room, after they took my blood pressure, which was high. The whole place was incredibly surreal. Patients in scrubs walking around with a dazed look, shuffling their feet; a med cart a nurse pushed around several times a day as they doled out rations; and a room where the meds were kept that even had a metal shutter. Basically think of every movie you’ve seen about rehab or a psych ward – Girl Interrupted, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, etc. – and you have the Somerville Hospital detox unit.
I met my counselor for the week – Bernie, a woman in her 50s, a recovering addict and alcoholic, with a ruddy complexion and a no nonsense attitude. But she was softer than she let on, and always kind to me, telling me, “You’re a writer. Walk away from this and use it to your advantage.”
During one of our daily morning meetings, Bernie caught me eyeing the ceramic fruit bowl full of mass cards on her desk. “Those are for my Charlie boys,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of them come through these doors over the years, but they don’t all make it when they get out.” Softly, almost to herself, she added, “I love my Charlie boys. It breaks my heart to lose any of them.” I was only in Boston for another month after I got out of the hospital, but I thought about that bowl every time I rode the T and it went aboveground, crossing the Charles River.
But my first morning and afternoon there were spent drugged up on whatever the heck it was they gave me. When I first got to my room, I read a fiction issue of The New Yorker (which I later stole from the hospital, and then promptly lost during my move back to New York, ironically) for about five minutes until I fell asleep. I didn’t wake up until dinner.
Food was an issue though. Being a vegan, I needed to order special meals. And my meals always arrived about 30 minutes after everyone else’s. I called the kitchen on a daily basis – “Are you sure there isn’t any egg in this?” “Are you sure this wasn’t cooked anywhere near meat?” The workers in the kitchen, if they didn’t hang up on me, probably lied to me when they assured me my food was vegan. So I only ate what I was certain about, and drank a lot of juice. Back in my room after my first meal there, in the margin of the first page of my notebook I scrawled the tentative title for an essay I wanted to write about my stay at the Somerville Hospital – “It’s a Bitch Being a Vegan in Detox.”
As far as prescription drugs go, the most I’d ever taken was antibiotics. Actually, I’d taken codeine once before after I threw out my back only to discover I was allergic to it and never touched anything in the opiate family again. I rarely even ever took aspirin or any other mild pain reliever. I’d never been on so much medication at once, and found it hard to believe they gave those lovely, little red pills to a roomful of addicts. But the med cart came around dutifully three times a day, and if you needed anything else all you had to do was rap on the window of the med room and the nurse who manned it would most likely give you whatever you needed.
And, of course, there was an interesting cast of characters, which kept me busy as I filled the pages of my notebook every night before the sleeping pill kicked in.
There was Lisa, a short, frail woman in her 40s who had been a heroin addict most of her adult life. She was the sweetest woman, though. She spoke fondly of her daughter and granddaughter, who lived in Ohio. If she got clean, she said, she could go live with them, smiling widely every time she spoke of this plan. When she smiled you could see she only had three front teeth, which clung stubbornly to her gums despite her being so malnourished from many years of drug usage. At night, during our downtime, she’d read those trashy magazines you find lining the racks in front of supermarket registers and speak knowledgeably on the lives of random celebrities.
Georgios was a 40-something Greek man with diabetes, resulting in a nearly gangrene foot that, at the time, doctors were contemplating hacking off. He had a thick accent, spoke in broken English and was often groggy because of his medication. People could hardly ever understand him, but once, in a lucid moment, I heard him say, “One time, I buy ounce of coke, I have million friends. Once coke gone, no more friends.” One night his roommate woke up to find his bed empty. The roommate found Georgios, a known sleepwalker, asleep while sitting at a table in the common area with a cup of coffee in his hand and the coffee machine running.
Pushing 50, Tommy, a large, bald, brash Italian man who was originally from New York and had spent much of his life in jail, on the streets or in rehab, had frequent outbursts at the many group meetings held every day. But he was really a nice guy who just didn’t know how to cope with his problems. He’d tell me raunchy and outlandish stories from his time hanging out in New York City during the ‘70s and ‘80s, at places like Studio 54 and The Pyramid Club.
There was also a clique of 20-year-olds who had attended Somerville High School together. They were all there for heroin and Oxycodone, which is apparently a big problem in their school district.
There were many more, but my best friend in detox was Marc, a 40-year-old alcoholic, who looked more like he was 30. There were so few people there for alcohol compared to drug addicts, so the two of us stuck together.
He was a truck driver who had been to every state but North Dakota and refused to ever visit Long Island, claiming he would get lost, despite my telling him there was only the Long Island Expressway to contend with, for the most part. His hands shook significantly whether he was sitting still or making a motion as simple as lifting a cup to his mouth. We shared our drunken stories (he actually thought I was younger than I was and had been forced into detox by my parents, but was thoroughly impressed when he heard some of my stories) and checked out the younger women in the facility together. Knowing that I was taking notes about everything that happened, whenever something weird happened or someone said something funny, Marc would yell over to me, “There’s chapter 5!”
And we promised we’d keep in touch and go to meetings. (Interestingly enough, when we decided to break our sobriety together a few weeks after we got out, he was mistaken for someone else and arrested before he could even meet up with me. The next day, when I finally heard from him, the story of his arrest the night before somehow led to his telling me that he’s a Nazi, with a large swastika tattooed across his entire abdomen and chest, and that he and his group of friends founded the Aryan Race youth movement in Southern California in the ‘80s, inspiring the movie American History X. Or, you know, so he says.)
Our daily schedule was fairly regimented. Wake up. Get your meds and have your vitals taken. Have breakfast. Then lectures and meetings before lunch, followed by more lectures and meetings. After dinner, there was always a nightly AA or NA meeting, which I hated. It was like a non-stop after school special. But we’d have some down time at night.
The meetings were often uncomfortable, as they wanted everyone to participate and I hate speaking in front of a group, let alone speaking about feelings ever. At the end of every day, they’d ask you to rate your day on a scale of 1-10. Sometimes if people had a decent enough day, they’d arbitrarily give it a 10, when it should maybe have only been given a 7. I refused to ever give my days a very high rating though, because, I rationalized, once I got to a 10, the only place I could go from there is down, there’d be nothing left to work for.
But addicts and alcoholics are generally a depressing bunch, so there weren’t many who rated their days a 10. In fact, many meetings ended in tears, yelling and screaming, sometimes chairs were thrown. And these people had no problem telling uncomfortable and awkward stories to a roomful of strangers.
Vincent, a man in my group, told us about how he kept a jar of 1,000 marbles at home, each marble representing the rough amount of Saturday nights he had left in his life. Every Saturday, before he started drinking, he threw one out. He said people would ask them why he threw them away. Others would tell them it was depressing. But he said he does it because he likes to watch his life slowly fade away.
By Thursday, the people who had started out the week with me slowly left for further inpatient treatment – Craig, a member of the clique of Somerville High grads, had gotten into a center in Pittsburgh; his girlfriend, Crystal, was heading to a six-month program in Western Massachusetts; Marc was looking into a rehab center in New Hampshire. We were like high school students awaiting their college acceptance letters, hoping they got into their first choice school. And when you heard that someone got into the rehab program of their choice, you were happy for them, but anxious to find out where you were going.
But I was headed nowhere. Ironically, because it was my first time in detox I couldn’t go to an inpatient rehab center, only outpatient. Only after several visits to the Somerville Hospital detox center would I qualify for inpatient treatment. Health insurance works in funny ways. So as everyone else walked out the doors, escorted by a nurse, soon I was one of only a handful of those who had been there since Monday left. By then they started bringing in some homeless addicts they had rounded up in Central Square for the weekend, and I was glad I was leaving that day, as several of them looked fairly unsavory. (I swear one of them looked like Charles Manson.)
It was freezing outside when I finally left the hospital. I hadn’t worn my coat in days. It was heavier than I remembered, almost foreign to me, and I felt like a child trying on her parents’ clothing. I drove the familiar streets home, but felt like I didn’t recognize anything.
I was in my apartment for all of 15 minutes when I started to feel anxious and decided to go for a walk. I crossed over Massachusetts Avenue, which separates Cambridge and Somerville, and headed towards Davis Square. It was late afternoon and the sky was overcast. I passed one bar I sometimes drank at, then another, stopping in front of both to look in the front windows and think about how I couldn’t go inside.
Before I left, Bernie told me that ¾ of the people who go to detox or rehab eventually start using again. I didn’t want to be one of those ¾ people, at least not the same afternoon I was released.
When a job in New York worked out quickly and easily, I couldn’t turn it down. Walking around Cambridge and Somerville, passing up the places I would formerly frequent, I felt empty and unlike myself. Sure, I was sober, but I knew my stay in detox and the outpatient program I started would always hang over my head.
So, you see, Boston, this is why I had to leave you. Not because I don’t adore you, but because I would be constantly followed around by my stay at the Somerville Hospital. Hell, it’s even followed me to New York, where I try hard to not be one of those ¾ people and don’t always succeed. But this just goes to show that sometimes there is some validity to the saying, “It’s not you; it’s me.”
Who knows, though? Maybe sometime in the future, perhaps even sooner than later, I’ll hop on the $15 Chinatown bus and come visit you. Then we can act like the old friends we are, have a good time, and forget about those six months.
Tiffany
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An Open Letter to God
Dear God,
I wasn’t sure if you knew this or not, but there’s a church out by me, on the eastern end of Long Island, that’s been advertising its new web site, itpaystoquestiongod.com. I’ve heard the ads on local radio stations while driving and seen pieces written about it in local papers.
The whole concept is this: You go to the site, you type in some big, huge, burning question you’ve been meaning to ask God (well, you), and then the church donates $5 to one of four, pre-selected, local charities. Now, even to an atheist such as myself, this sounds all well and good. I was even contemplating going on and plugging in the question “What’s the difference between supper and dinner?” just so a local charity could get five bucks. Then I figured I’d just write to you directly, bypass the middleman, and use the money on cat food.
So I ask you, what is the difference between supper and dinner? Is it a cultural thing? Perhaps a geographic thing? Does the answer vary from country to country? If you don’t know, then I don’t think anybody will. Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered with this letter at all and just gone straight to Wikipedia.
Writing this to you as a mostly atheist (and yes, I know this makes me sound like the people who call themselves vegetarian but still eat fish and chicken) I realize I’m writing to a fictional character (it’s ok though, I have, after all, written to dead people and corporations before). But what a fucking character you are. In fact, you’re not only most likely the most well known character in all of literature, but you also seem to elicit more passion from Bible readers – whether it be hatred or pure adoration – than any other protagonist from any other book. Though, I suppose you’re more of an omniscient narrator than the protagonist. But then this passion spills out from the pages of the Bible and into real life. Think of how many crazy things have been done in the name of a fictional character?
Now, this is the thing: Atheism scares me just as much as God/religion. Because, as a mostly atheist, if I’m wrong, then I’m screwed when I die. I might have been the nicest person to walk the planet – you know, helping old people cross the street, taking in stray animals, turning the other cheek, etc. – but as soon as I say I don’t believe in God, then I imagine Hell is the only place I’m heading.
As a Catholic school graduate, having read quite a bit of the Bible and having spent far too much time around nuns and other religious folk, I know how vengeful you can be. I mean, Sodom and Gomorrah? You dislike their sexual preferences and practices, so you threw some fire and brimstone their way. Sure, you gave Lot, a good man in your divine eyes, and his family the chance to escape these damned cities. But you turned his wife into a pillar of salt when she turned back to look at Sodom as they fled! That’s not cool. And the story of Noah? The human race pissed you off as a whole, so you drowned those suckers. I mean, come on, you didn’t even attempt to have a Town Hall style meeting first? Your immediate reaction is to wipe them out? This does not bode well for modern society, with 2012 fast approaching (you know, assuming I’m totally wrong and you exist).
And let’s not even talk about the Book of Revelation. When I took a class called Passion, Sin and Miracles, which studied the Bible as literature, when we got to that segment of the course I had to use my allotted absences to avoid having to read it. And when it came time to choose a final essay topic, I avoided anything involving the apocalypse and instead wrote about apocrypha.
But the scariest story of all is the story of Job, who was actually one of your most devout followers. Instead of a pat on the back, you turn him into nothing more than a plaything one day when you and the devil wager on exactly how much it would take for Job to break down and renounce his faith in you. Boils, plagues, killing off his children, taking away his wealth. And all for no reason other than your amusement.
After first reading about Job in middle school, that’s when I knew exactly who I was dealing with – a God who destroys because he can, for no rhyme or reason. And the nuns and hyper religious, lay religion class teachers didn’t really help either. They’d try to tell you, basically, be good, or else. I mean, they’d sugarcoat it with colorful picture books of Bible stories, hippies playing the guitar, fun activities (I vaguely recall making a lamb mask out of paper plates and cotton balls and then crawling around an altar during mass at summer Bible camp) and the rewards of heaven.
But for me it always went back to Job: If you feel like smiting me, I will be smote, no matter how awesome I am.
Where, I ask you, is the incentive to be a good person? It’s all simple psychology. If there’s a piece of cheese at the end of the maze, a carrot on the end of a stick, well, then I’ll be going in whatever direction you’re trying to make me go. But you made your mistake by including the story of Job in the Bible. It just showed me – and I hope it showed others – how arbitrary and tempestuous you are and that clearly I could do whatever the fuck I wanted, because you were coming after me no matter what I did.
This was my reasoning when I entered high school – an all-girls’ catholic school I affectionately refer to as lesbian boot camp. That’s about when I also started to think of the Bible as nothing more than a work of fiction, no different from Greek and Roman mythology (can you imagine taking Theogony by Hesiod literally?), a good summer read.
So I drank. I swore (I’ve probably taken your name in vain on several occasions). I cut class. I stopped going to church every weekend so I could sleep late. I came out of the closet without fearing fire and brimstone (though let’s face it, I was never really in the closet, it was more like a cubby hole.) I basically went down a list of the Ten Commandments and crossed each one off as I broke them.
For the most part, this is how I live my life to this day, with no fear of retribution in the afterlife for all my worldly foibles and misdeeds.
But there is that nagging doubt in the back of my mind, because I don’t think anyone can ever be entirely certain about anything. I’ve never been one to think any possibility was a sure thing. So there’s that .01 percent of myself that’s thinking, “Oh shit, if I’m wrong I am totally screwed for eternity.”
With that, I’ll let you get back to work, assuming the 99.99 percent of me is wrong. But if I am wrong, can you get back to me on supper/dinner question? You have my e-mail address.
Tiffany
PS Are you there, God? It’s me, Tiffany. Can you please not kill me in my sleep for writing this letter?
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Dear Linens ‘n’ Things,
This past weekend, rather than a wild night out in Manhattan and Brooklyn, I stayed on Long Island and grabbed some tea with a couple of my friends. Don’t let how low-key that sounds fool you. It was a good time.
First, we tried to go to a café in St. James. However, when we got there, we discovered it was open mic night. It’s a pretty tiny place and every seat was taken, so we decided to go elsewhere.
Besides, letting me watch an open mic night is usually a pretty bad idea, since 99.99% of the performers are fairly cringe-worthy (at least on Long Island) and I have a bad habit of saying anything that pops into my head without thinking. It’s a terrible, but often hilarious, combination. Once I went to an open mic at a coffeehouse in Wantagh where this skinny, nerdy dude with an acoustic guitar, calling himself My Mother’s Boyfriend, or some other egregiously emo name, took the stage. He was awful. I can’t recall what I said exactly, but I mocked him to my friends the entire night, unaware that he could hear me up on stage. He gave me the dirtiest look when I left. And in high school, my best friend worked at a bakery with a cafe attached, where they’d often host open mic nights for music and sometimes comedy. That’s where I learned that musicians don’t like it when you yell “American Pie!” or “Free Bird!” at them from the back of the room.
Then, I remembered there was a café in Kings Park that I had been to once, but we drove up and down the Main Street strip a couple of times and saw nothing. It must have closed down.
So, though I had been avoiding going there – because I’ve spent way too much time there in my life – my friends and I wound up in the café of the Borders Books and Music in Commack, where I worked on and off for a couple of years during college.
But as I walked into the bookstore, I looked across the parking lot and noticed the empty Linens ‘n’ Things storefront. I couldn’t help but smile to myself. Ah, Linens ‘n’ Things, my longtime archnemesis, you have finally fallen.
The store was lit up, what few shelves were still actually standing were obviously empty and workers were inside taking down fixtures. I’d forgotten that you were going out of business, as I hadn’t thought about you in a long time. Well, that’s not true. I thought about you once recently. A few months ago, when my grandmother was dying, I went on a quest to find her a meal tray that fit over her bed, and even, though begrudgingly, stopped by a Linens ‘n’ Things to look for one. (Dying grandmas trump vendettas.)
But I’ll never forget that first day we went to war, Linens ‘n’ Things.
I often opened the café, meaning I’d get in around 9 a.m., hastily perform only the most necessary tasks for the café to be ready when the front door opened, then spend a half hour sitting on the desk in the kitchen reading. Rich, my best friend/supervisor, was usually right there alongside me reading comic books.
There were signs all over the place advertising that your latest store was set to open across the parking lot from us and your staff, during the month prior to the store’s opening, as they stocked it and got it ready, came into Borders daily for coffee as soon as we opened at 10 a.m. At first they were nice, friendly even. One woman even invited me to the store’s grand opening and handed me a coupon.
But then one day it all went sour – lame pun intended. The general manager of the Linens ‘n’ Things ordered his usual large coffee. As I handled the orders of his coworkers, he went to put milk and sugar in his drink. He came over and told me the whole milk was bad. The store had just opened and the milk I put on the counter came from a brand new carton with an expiration date more than a week away. So I told him there was nothing wrong with the milk, it was all in his head, and to deal with it. I didn’t believe in wasting food.
I also never believed in the saying, “The customer is always right.” I was always right. This led to several memorable altercations with customers over the years, including the time the cops had to be called when I was threatened by the massively obese mother who was part of an obnoxious group of customers we called “The Family” (I later learned she was called “Three Chair Woman” at the Barnes and Noble down the road) because I wouldn’t brew a fresh pot of coffee a half hour before closing.
When I refused to get him more milk, he infiltrated my territory. He walked behind the café counter and poured the milk out down the sink himself. Naturally, I freaked out and kicked him out from behind my counter. The woman who had invited me to the grand opening and given me coupons mimicked me in a high pitched voice. This was not the way to get fresh milk from a barista.
Eventually, the guy sucked it up and used the skim milk and they left after we shot each other some more dirty looks.
But I was incredibly offended. And I do not let things go easily.
So, even though I saw some people approaching the café, I put up a handmade sign that read, “Be right back,” and without asking if I could, I went to the break room. Dave Juan was sitting there alone, reading. I grabbed his book from him, put it on the table and declared, “Dave Juan, this is war with Linens ‘n’ Things!”
He adjusted his glasses, gave me a look of complete understanding and nodded. “Oh, ok, it is.” Then he picked up his book and started reading again.
That was the first day I went to Linens ‘n’ Things on my lunch break. And I went there every shift I worked, sometimes even on my days off when I was waiting for my friends to clock out.
Sometimes I’d switch signs in the store around, putting sale signs near items that weren’t actually on sale. Sometimes I would move the entire stock of one product to the opposite side of the store. I unmade all of the fancy-looking bed displays. And other people I worked with got swept up in this retail war and would spend part of their lunch breaks trying to sabotage Linens ‘n’ Things as well.
Then there were the prank calls. We’d prank call you every day. Your phone number was even saved in my phone. That was the summer we learned that Malibu rum and Blackhaus tasted awfully good when mixed with the blue granita drinks we sold. So when we clocked out, we’d mix drinks in the parking lot and call your store, asking you to search for completely ridiculous items, from plungers of a specific size to lime green curtains to melon ballers.
Then, we got ballsier. We started prank calling you from the phone in the café while we were working. The best was the day we had Renee – the blondest, whitest girl I know – call the store to place a fake sexual harassment claim against the manager, whose name, we had learned, was Tim. When asked for her name, she paused, “Ummmm…” and then said, “Lynette Johnson.” Then a page came over our store’s loudspeaker that the café had a call and we hastily hung up the phone.
A few days later, one of our managers (the coolest person in the world who was also somewhat mentally unhinged – she once tried to make me snort sugar through a straw and one night, after mixing alcohol with her medication, chased me through an Applebee’s and flashed me in a bathroom stall) told me she had gotten a call from Linens ‘n’ Things that some of her employees were prank calling them. She wasn’t mad, and, off the record, thought it was funny when I told her the entire story, but she suggested we stay far away from you for a while.
It had been a valiant effort on our part, but with one phone call from your manager, I had been defeated.
But now, years later, I have moved far, far away from the infuriating field of customer service, which, many will tell you, is certainly not my forte, and Borders, despite having its share of financial difficulties, is still standing. So as I stood outside Borders that night, about to get some tea with my friends, the immature 19-year-old in me couldn’t help but feel a little smug as I looked at the empty Linens ‘n’ Things across the parking lot. Because perhaps I lost that initial battle the day your manager called my store to complain, but it was obvious I had won the war.
Tiffany
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An Open Letter to Napoleon
Note: The following letter is actually about six or seven years old. I wrote it for a creative non-fiction class when I was in college. The professor asked us to write a letter to a family member or an historical figure. The result was a lot of weepy letters to dead relatives or angry tirades at estranged parents. I, however, wrote a letter to Napoleon.
Dear Napoleon,
I know next to nothing about you. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I do know some very general information about you, such as a few specifics about your quest for world domination. But still, it’s not much (my scary high school global history teacher, S. Pat, would probably not be happy to know that I didn’t walk out of her class retaining more information. Then again, I did skip her class every few days.) Still, for some reason, your name comes up in conversation fairly often.
I coach the girls’ varsity soccer team at my old high school, an all girls’, Catholic school. Your name came up when I was talking to some of the girls - who I actually had played with when I attended the school - at practice the other day. Actually, I was trying to rush them out of the gym, where they were messing around with various items in the athletic director’s office, including, as usual, the wheelchair, and out to the field for practice. Sandi, a senior on the team who will most likely be the valedictorian of her class, told me she felt that I have a Napoleon Complex. I suppose she felt this way because a) I’m rather short, b) I was ordering them around, and c) she thought I was on some kind of a power trip. To this I retorted, “So I remind you of a midget from Corsica who more or less wants to take over the world?” (Sorry about the midget crack.)
But, to my surprise, Sandi informed me that you were actually 5’6”, which is nowhere near the size of a midget. I thought you were at least a few inches shorter than that, based on how you were depicted in cartoons.
First I thought Sandi might possibly be wrong, but quickly realized this wasn’t likely. As I said, she’s a smart girl and the future valedictorian of her class. What I don’t understand is why people depict you to be so short. Sure, 5’6” is short for a guy, but I thought that back when you were alive people were generally much shorter than they are today anyway. Just look at the doorways of old houses. Even I’m amazed at how short these doorways are, and I’m just under 5’.
So, since the day of this conversation, I’ve been baffled by the fact that people consider you to be midget-like when today you’d really just be slightly less than average height. Back then, you probably were average height.
I thought about this a lot in the days that followed the conversation. I told everyone I knew about how you weren’t actually a midget. No one seemed as interested in this fact as I was. But I was fascinated nonetheless.
Then, one day I was struck by what can only be considered divine inspiration. I have no musical ability, so obviously I’ve always wanted to start a punk band. And every good punk band needs a good name. Coming up with band names is actually a talent of mine.
Recently, the frontrunner has been Corporate Apples, or, a variation of that name, Terence’s Corporate Apples. It would be a tribute to a friend and former co-worker, Terence, who was fired from the bookstore where I work. Around Christmas, in an effort to boost morale, the corporate headquarters of our company sent each store a box of fruit every week. On his break one week, Terence grabbed an apple – a bruised and waxy apple, because corporate sends its employees only the best – from the box, which was on the break room table, and took a bite. Someone informed him of where the apples came from and he said, “Ew, I don’t eat corporate apples,” before throwing it out.
The next day, our manager called him into her office and asked him if he had a “corporate mindset” and really wanted to work there. She told him to take some time to think about it. Well, he didn’t need much time. When he went on his lunch break shortly after that discussion, he bypassed the box of apples, walked out the front door and never came back. I was at the register when he walked out. He flashed me a big grin, said, “See ya!” and gave the security camera by the front door the finger. After the store closed that night, we found him smoking a joint in his car.
I’d also like to name a band The Lori Veljis after my friend Lori Velji, really for no good reason at all. I told Lori Velji I wanted to do this and I believe Lori Velji appreciated the sentiment.
After my conversation with Sandi, I decided the obvious thing to do would be to name my non-existent punk band after you. Would I call it The Napoleon Complex? Perhaps I could call it Napoleon and the Bonapartes, or I could keep it simple and just call the band Napoleon. I can see the fliers for my band now: Napoleon – French dictator. French pastry. American punk band.
I already have some ideas for songs, written, of course in a rather rudimentary style, three chords, all that jazz, mostly because of my limited - aka non-existent - musical ability. I can’t sing. I can’t play an instrument (“Hot Cross Buns” on the recorder doesn’t count.) And I certainly don’t know how to write music. Clearly, this band is meant to be.
Anyway, I plan on writing a song called “Give Me My CDs Back (You Bitch)” and an ode to Angelina Jolie, “You Seem Kinda Crazy, But You’re Hot (So I’d Still Sleep with You If Given the Chance.)” There are a few other ideas knocking around my brain, perhaps a song about my love of Blackhaus, or western Massachusetts.
Now that I have a name and some song ideas out of the way, I’m faced with a mini crisis. While I do own a guitar – in fact, for some reason I own two – I’ve already told you that I neither know how to play them, nor do I know those obligatory three chords. Maybe I need some guitar lessons? Maybe I need to break out my recorder? Maybe I need to dye my hair blue again and get a lot of piercings?
And then, along with my band, I will begin my quest for world domination. Thanks for the inspiration.
Tiffany
PS – This letter was written years ago. You should probably know that I never took those guitar lessons. I also don’t have my elementary school recorder still, but I bought a cheap wooden flute from a hippie up in Woodstock and, as it turns out, “Hot Cross Buns” and “Three Blind Mice” are the same song. Obviously, the Napoleon project went nowhere.
I did, however, dye my hair blue and get a lot of piercings.
I also, somehow, now have three fake bands.
The Glorious Svens, where each band member has Sven in their name somewhere and wears a fake mustache on stage. Over many, many drinks my friend Schnitzel and I plotted the entire course of our band’s career – from our first show to our fake rockstar feud with Gordon Gano of the Violent Femmes (in fact, we wrote a song called “Gordon Gano Gave Me Herpes,” but you should have seen what he said about us!) to the VH1 “Behind the Music.” We made a Myspace page and venues started offering shows. We contemplated getting on stage entirely wasted to see what happened, kind of like a performance art piece, but we decided against it.
Then there’s Retarded Fish Babies, which I have yet to do too much with.
And finally there’s the most real of my fake bands – Ghost Hole. Named after the Coney Island ride, rather than anything dirty that might have popped into your mind, Ghost Hole came about around 3 a.m. one night when my friend Jon and I came back to my place after a local show. He was fiddling with my acoustic guitar and I was drunkenly telling him the story of the holiday party at a Real Estate newspaper I used to work at where I nearly convinced a gorgeous Jehovah’s Witness girl to make out with me and then passed out on the A train the next day on my way home, riding it back and forth between the train line’s beginning and end, both in Queens. We realized that this was Ghost Hole. Jon on acoustic guitar and my telling embarrassingly true, but usually quite hilarious, stories. We have yet to have band practice, but one day we will. I’ve been working on pieces for it including “All My Girlfriends Are Straight,” “It’s a Bitch Being a Vegan in Detox” and “2012,” which is about my fear of the apocalypse.
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An Open Letter to Stephen King
Dear Mr. King,
I’m writing this letter to you as I am 1/3 of the way through your book On Writing. Being that I’m only 1/3 of the way through the book and have never read anything else you’ve written, I did question the logic of writing to you. But then again, I’ve never been one to subscribe to logic.
The truth is the only reason I’ve never read any of your books is no fault of your own nor is it because I’m a literature snob. The issue is simply that I’m a big wuss. My overactive imagination and anxiety disorder (I have a long list of fears that sometimes keep me awake at night, including the possibility of being abducted by aliens and the possible existence of God) means I wouldn’t be able to handle reading them.
I did see the “It” TV movie when it first aired, though, because my mom wanted to watch it. I was about 8-years-old at the time and seeing that movie, along with catching the campy, but nonetheless frightening, Killer Clownz from Outer Space on cable when my parents weren’t around one afternoon, instilled in me a sort of fear of clowns. I call it a sort of fear because I’m not afraid of all clowns, only select clowns. I could go to the circus and not get freaked out, but the second I saw a clown that seemed ominous in anyway – anything from weird looking teeth or a threatening look in his eyes could make a clown seem ominous – I immediately heard “We all float down here.” I still do. I’ll probably dream about clowns tonight.
I also saw The Shining when I was about 14 or 15, which was a terrible idea. It was a cold night, a couple of days after a snowstorm and a few weeks before Christmas, and my parents had some family friends and their kids over that night. The Shining was on TV and I watched it in the living room with my mom’s best friend’s son, who’s a few years younger than me, while the adults drank wine in the kitchen. He didn’t appear to be scared at all and his mother took him home before it was over. I, on the other hand, was a mess, but for some reason stuck it out to the very end alone. I’ve always been somewhat of a masochist. I was terrified of the idea of New England for years (though I eventually got over this, now love New England and even lived in Boston for a bit).
After the movie was over, I tried to find something else on TV to take my mind off what I had just seen. But as I channel surfed my way to the Disney Channel, I stopped on the local PBS station to watch a show that was just as scary as The Shining: A fundamentalist religious program where a manly woman (likely an ex-gay) was spouting passages from the Bible and preaching fire and brimstone for all non-believers.
I haven’t seen many people in my life that I could definitively say, “Ah ha! There’s an ex-gay.” After that terrifying religious programming, the only other one I’ve seen was when, on my way to a pez museum after a horrible trip to Hershey Park in the middle of the summer – meaning it was obscenely hot and the theme park was overcrowded with lots of gross people wearing very little clothing, which was also obscene – I accidentally stumbled upon the gay pride celebration in Allentown, Pennsylvania. A group of fundamental Christians were protesting at this Pride in the Park celebration (I still have the mug from the beer tent). The organizers of the event were kind enough to protect these protestors from angry gays. I was more amused than angry, though I definitely thought they were idiots. One girl had really nice pants and I thought to myself, “I would really like a pair of those pants.” She was carrying a sign that said something I’m sure was offensive and a bullhorn that she wasn’t using at the moment. So I asked her where she got her pants. She gave me a dirty look and turned away from me. Miffed, I said to my now ex-girlfriend as we walked back to the beer tent, “She is SO an ex-gay. I mean, look at those pants.”
But, as usual, though you wouldn’t know that about me, I digress.
I bought On Writing at the suggestion of a man I met in a Smart Recovery meeting after he found out I was a writer. He told me that in the book you write about writing and also discuss your recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. Being that I’m still only 1/3 of the way through your book, I don’t know exactly what method you used to cope with your addictions. So, if you don’t know what Smart Recovery is, think of it as a thinking person’s AA, except you rely more on reason and yourself and not so much on all the Jesus mumbo jumbo (sorry Jesus).
So, I ordered a mass market copy of On Writing at my local Borders. They had another version there, but let’s face it, I’m a broke writer and figured the $5 I’d save on a mass market copy was better off in my pocket than yours. And eventually I forgot I ordered it. And eventually it arrived. And the store forgot to call me. But when another book I had ordered came in, which the store remembered to call me about, On Writing was waiting for me behind the register.
Partially a memoir, partially about the craft, it’s an easy, enjoyable read on the genesis of your writing career (well, the first 1/3 is, I haven’t touched the rest of it yet). And I could appreciate it and connect with certain things, but I didn’t truly stop and go, “Hmm…” until near the end of that first 1/3, when you wrote about how you were drinking so much that before you went to bed you’d pour out any beer you had left in the house so you wouldn’t get up in the middle of the night and keep drinking.
This clicked in my mind and made me immediately think of my Law of the Disproportionate Amount of Beers. Most of my friends think it’s just an excuse for me to drink a lot.
But trust me, it’s rather scientific. I’ve tested it out myself many times.
The whole idea is that if you are drinking in your place of residence, and you want to take a break from drinking so much starting the next day, then by the end of the night the amount of beers you have left over (I suppose liquor and wine can be used in this equation as well) needs to equal zero. If you have too few or too many, then you’re screwed.
Basically, if you have ANY leftover you’ll just wind up drinking them the next day. But if you have too few, you’re apt to go out and buy more alcohol so that you have enough to get drunk. And if you have too many leftover, well you’ll go to bed knowing you’re going to get drunk the next day, but you can at least hope that perhaps by the end of the next night the figure equals zero.
I suppose this is a theory for alcoholics and not so much for normal drinkers. But it makes sense in my mind.
Anyway, more importantly, the greatest thing I took away from that first section, “C.V.,” you call it, came in the last couple of pages, when you discussed the relationship between alcohol and creativity. You said, among many things I needed to hear: “The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.”
This is something that other people have tried to tell me, but it failed to resonate because they were neither a. a writer/musician/artist/mime/performance artist/etc. or b. a heavy drinker. Hearing it from you, though, a popular and successful writer, albeit one whose style certainly doesn’t influence me, it had a bit more oomph to it.
My mom used to accuse me, in not so many words, of romanticizing alcohol, saying that I idolized people like Janis Joplin a bit too much. When she’d say things like that I’d always think to myself, “But if I wanted to be like Janis Joplin I’d be a heroin addict and would have drank so much Southern Comfort in my lifetime the liquor company would start sending me personal gifts for all of the free promotion I was giving them.” But I’m too anxious and paranoid to ever touch drugs and I only have one memory of drinking Southern Comfort and it involves puking out the door of a moving car.
You also go on to say: “Substance-abusing writers are just substance abusers – common garden-variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit… We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.”
My greatest fear has always been that without drinking I wouldn’t be able to write; I’d have no voice, no ideas, lose my energy. This has been one of the biggest reasons I’ve had a hard time quitting. But just reading those, barely, two pages of the first third of your book, now I’m rethinking that. So, knowing that, if I drink now, then it’s for other reasons entirely, not because alcohol is my muse. If anything, I’m way less productive when I’m drinking. My thoughts are muddled and all over the place. I can see the difference in my work when I’m sober.
So, Mr. King, you have unintentionally called my bluff and called “bullshit.” For that I thank you. Let’s see what I do with this information.
Tiffany
PS – Again, I’m only 1/3 of the way through the book, so it’s possible there might be quite a few postscripts.
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