Category : Books-Non-Fiction

Sub Category : Biography

        This is an excerpt from my memoir of my past alcoholism and drug addiction. It takes place right after high school graduation when my drinking and drug use increased, making me a huge asshole and hurting someone I had truly cared about. Don’t worry though. Karma did catch up to me. That’s for sure. 


        I broke up with that girl after only a few weeks. Another broken heart. I was such a coward too, having done it in a text message. Any remorse that had seeped through the wall my addiction had built would ultimately burn and wither away from either the fiery shots of whiskey, a mixture of stomach acid with Valium, or the friction of cocaine and various crushed pills rubbing against the raw inside of my nostril. 
        This was only the beginning to my drunken tirade of assholedom. Thus began a brief stint of pursuing one-night hookups. Since every girl I’d slept with while in school had also been a girlfriend I’d dated, the nightly hunt was new to me. I was lucky only a few times, however. At every party, smoking, snorting, and eating anything that fucked me up always became the top priority, followed by finding more. If a girl was drunk enough to want to sleep with me, fortunately for her, I would be too stupid and preoccupied with narcotics to notice. 
        On the nights when I’d be drunk but conscious enough to want sex, one would still find me in the bathroom with the others who had stuff, snorting away the pain of rejection after either hitting on an ex-girlfriend or forgetting I possessed no game. 
        However my night went, it always ended the same: Watching the sun come up while my mind and body came down, with a constant feeling of utter misery that grew with the sun’s ascension. Having a problem never occurred to me, until I did something horrible to someone I truly cared about. 
        After a while, my close group of friends and I quit hanging out together. A few of them were off at college making new friends, but even the ones who stayed around had ventured off. I didn’t know if they quit hanging with me or if everyone had become sick of each other. I hoped for the latter and put it behind me because I had grown sick. Not of the group, but of one person in particular. Darren was the sole reason behind my branching away from everyone. 
        After I stopped calling him, I bounced around from my group to a group of kids from my class. A few months before rehab, I landed and stuck with a group of ladies I’d grown up with whom were some of the biggest fans of my previous jam-band. They were into everything I was: drugs, booze, and music. 
        In the summer of 2005, after my ride and the only two people I knew had went back home after the first night at Bonaroo Music Festival in Tennessee. I was shirtless with glow sticks wrapped around my neck and hands, still rolling on ecstasy after watching Sound Tribe Sector Nine play a six-hour set until the sun came up. Floating on Cloud 9, I talked to everyone that passed me while walking aimlessly through the massive campsites where any drug could be easily found. I heard my name being shouted in familiar voices but couldn’t identify who it was. I’d looked down and saw a group of six or seven girls I’d known from school sitting around me. I had walked right through their site and stopped right in the middle. After the surprise greetings I’d told them my situation, in which they solved by having an extra seat in their car. They saved me. 
        I stuck with them after that, spending consecutive nights together drinking and waking up next to one another (without ever hooking up). 
        Although they were cute and a blast to be with, there was never any secret intention behind being with them. Except for my subconscious need for a group of my peers to love me. We saw a few more shows together, including seeing Death Cab for Cutie twice. We shared many good nights together. Until one night, when I would lose respect and ruin my relationship with everyone. 
        While getting shit-faced at a Broken Social Scene show, where I’d gotten on stage twice, to the band’s annoyance, I hallucinated. I had forgotten about the bag of mushrooms Owen had given me before the show. There are bits and pieces I can recall of a group of frat guys wanting to kick my ass, being dragged out by the venue’s security guards, and the worried faces on everybody trying to get me out of there. The next thing I know, I’m at someone’s apartment drinking more and wondering, Where did Owen go?
        I spent the next morning driving home, casually trying to piece together bits of remembrance from the night before. It wasn’t anything I’d never done before. Nothing new; at least, that’s what I thought. 
        One of the girls whom I also adored and cared for, kept blowing my phone up. I never answered my phone the day after drinking until my hangover disappeared. Normally, it wouldn’t even survive the night, dying from a low battery. Not today. I let it ring thinking I’d call back when I was home. But then one of my guy friends called, I picked it up just to stop the incessant tune that kept playing. 
        “What?!” I screamed into it. 
        “Dude!…” He paused, leaving me in suspense before dropping the bomb of what I did that night. 


        I dropped the phone. An invisible entity riding shotgun must have backhanded me, for every bit of denial I had created in that small window of time faded into the actual memory of exactly that happening. That’s when the entity threw me one more in the gut. I yanked the wheel to the side, crossing over lanes and almost side-swiping a PT Cruiser. Right when I had two tires on the grass, I opened my door and evacuated everything leftover inside me before I could hit the hazard light. 
       Apparently, she wouldn’t do anything with me, so I lied to her with a fake promise of dating her if she would hook up with me that night. 
        This was the first time it occurred to me that I had a problem.