It sounds funny to say it but, I actually remember the first bad thing I ever did.  I don’t know how old I was, young though, before kinder garden.  I took a cookie from the drawer where my mom kept them.  The reason I remember this is the feeling of surprise I had when I got away with it.  I guess I must have thought that she counted them or something.  This was the first dishonest thing I ever did and by and large I went on to be a reasonably straight shooting youth.  Needless to say in my many years of addiction honesty hasn’t been a major tenant for me, more of an irregular subletting guest, passing through on a schedule dictated by circumstance.

One of the moments from treatment that I hope will stick with me forever is a line from a morning lecture.  The speaker was one of the counselors there, a short round woman with the look of an affluent hippy.  She was a great lecturer, for one, her history included stories about things like, after years and years of stealing expensive coats from department stores, she went to make amends and ended up helping the loss prevention team reform mall security. Or, how her (or it might have been a friend of her’s) had painted on the ceiling of her bedroom “Relax, your in your own bed” to help with the mornings following black outs.  The line I’m thinking of though, was this.  She was talking about how true recovery comes with what we do when no one else is around; with out this kind of self honesty in place the addict has little chance of long term success with sobriety.  “I’ll just do it because no body will know.” She would stop here, scanning the audience, “when the fuck did I become no nobody?!”  She very well might have sworn too, she liked to do that kind of thing; it goes over well in a lecture hall full of junkies.  It struck me though, that self degradation was implicit in being the only witness to my crimes and somehow I had become unimportant enough that I no longer had to behave in front of myself.

For me (and many other people I have heard speak about it) using is fraught with a delusional contradiction.  Every time I drank I was shooting for a very certain experience, a kind of jovial ease, a sense of fundamental well being that smoothed the abrasive quality of the world.  Inevitably what I received looked very different from that.  The search for that perfect amount of inebriation would leave me emotionally, physically, and socially crippled.  Last Saturday I was listening to a man speak about this and he told the story about his first two times getting drunk.  The first time was euphoric; it came with all of the qualities that he pursued into the face of total calamity in later life.  The second time, he told us, ended with him covering his parent’s kitchen with rye, rum and instant noodles that, only moments earlier, had been the contents of his stomach.  This was my story as well, my first time getting drunk involved a beach, just the right amount of tequila, and my brother’s older friends.  The only frustrating piece of it (in retrospect, the saving grace) was that the booze belonged to other people and thus I had no control over how much I had.  My second time was geared entirely to prevent that problem.  It involved two of my friends, a park bench, and a gallon of Vodka with something like a thimble full of root beer for a chaser.  What fascinates me about my second time getting drunk is the marked similarity it bares to the drinking late in my carrier, some sixteen years later.  That night, I blacked out very quickly, woke up alone in a ditch, was left with a few puzzle piece memories, and spent the following days making up outrageous lies about my many injuries (really, you hurt your knee playing football Casey, really?).  Although that one evening did put me off drinking hard alcohol for many years, I did make it back around in time.  What I love about hearing my story told by someone else a couple days ago was that he made a cognitive leap that I never had, that those first two evenings of drinking exemplify the massive dis-congruent nature of my addled mind.  Every time I drank while looking into the face of calamity, there was a part of me that believed I would end up back on that camp fire lit beach, feeling jovial and in love with life but, with out fail, for many years now, the only place I ended up is very ill in a ditch.