by Paul Hina
other plans today?"
"No. Nothing. Except our meeting later."
"Then let's hang out."
"Hang out?"
"Yeah, we'll find some stuff to do together to keep you're mind off the drinking."
"Don't you have a job or something?"
"Yeah, but I'm given a lot of freedom there. I'll just call and let them know I won't be back today."
"You sure?"
"Yeah. If I can keep you sober for one more day, it'll be worth it."
"What'll we do?"
"For now, let's just have some coffee."
"Okay," she says, and he wonders what he's gotten himself into. Instead of telling her how he's been feeling, and letting her know that it would be best if she found another sponsor, he's used her vulnerability as an excuse to spend more time with her.
"What kind of work do you do?" she asks.
"I'm a software developer."
"Oh, an employed computer geek, huh?"
"That's right."
"Anything I might've heard of?"
"I don't know. Maybe. I created, independently, an app called Designated Driver that tells you how much you can legally drink based on your state, your sex, weight, and—"
"I have that app."
"I'll bet you do."
"I do."
"Yeah, it's sold pretty well. Extremely well, actually."
"Well, then, if you built it independently, what are you still doing working for someone else?"
"I like my job. It gives me something to do, keeps me from having too much downtime. Downtime is dangerous in recovery."
"It certainly seems that way."
"What do you do?"
"I used to be a financial adviser."
"Used to be?"
"Yeah, when the market tanked in '08, I wasn't quick enough to hedge some of the bad bets I'd made for my clients. All the signs were there, and, had I been sober, I would've seen the warning signs. But I wasn't sober. I cost a lot of good people a lot of money. So, to get through the guilt, I increased the amount I drank to get myself through that period. In fact, I've been drinking my way through every day since then."
"I've been looking for someone to advise me on where to put my money. I'm getting to that age—"
"Right. What are you, twenty-seven? Twenty-eight?"
"Twenty-eight, yeah."
"I don't think I'd be your best bet. I've lost too many people money."
"Everyone who was invested lost money during that mess in '08. That was a historic financial collapse. You can't blame yourself for that."
"Still, you would be better off—"
"I'd trust you."
"You're the only one left."
"I'm where it begins."
She smiles at him. "Are you this nice to everyone?"
"I think so. I hope so," he says, self-consciously, suddenly wondering if his friendliness might have crossed into flirting, if he's unconsciously being over-eager.
"So, if were going to be together for awhile, you might as well tell me about yourself. I know what you do, you make apps that tell people how they can legally drink and drive."
"Very funny," he says, "though sadly that is probably the most successful work I've done."
"Of course it is. It's useful, and it's simple."
"Maybe," he says, and they're silent for a second, searching for something to say.
"So, how'd you get started in the program?"
"Ugh, that's a long story."
"We've got all day."
"You really want to hear that?"
"If you don't mind telling me about it."
"My story won't be nearly as interesting as Tom's."
"God, I hope not. My weak sobriety couldn't handle another Tom story."
"Where should I start?"
"Start with when you started really drinking."
"Well, I started drinking in high school, but nothing unusual—pretty tame stuff. I didn't start drinking heavily until college when I met this girl, Kelly."
"Sure, blame the girl. It's always the girl."
"I'm not—"
"Kelly? Isn't that the girl Russell was talking to you about yesterday?"
"I'll get to that."
"Sorry. Yeah, I'll shut up now," she says, sitting back in her chair.
"I had drank some, probably no more than average for a college student. I drank on the weekends. Binge drinking usually, but nothing out of the ordinary. We, my friends and I, would go from one party to another, drinking into the night. But once Monday rolled around, I was sober, and would be for the rest of the week. I never let drinking get in the way of my class work. I was a serious student, and I took my classes seriously.
"Then, when I met Kelly at a party early in my junior year, she introduced a whole new dynamic to the college party. It was like the party followed her. She was the party. She had this energy that made it seem that, no matter what the occasion, it was always an occasion to drink."
"By this time, I had been sharing a house with Chris and Tracy—they're the ones that own the software business I work for now. Kelly had stayed with me the night we met, and quickly became a fixture at our house. It wasn't long before her and I were the last two standing at most of the parties we went to, and we started to have all these late night adventures. At least, to me, they were adventures. And we became inseparable.
"This is the way things were throughout my junior and senior year. There was a party pretty much every night. And if there wasn't, we made our own. Kelly had moved in after a couple weeks. But it wasn't as if I had asked her to move in. At least, that's not the way I remember it. She just started staying over all the time. My room started accumulating more and more of her things, and we were just together after that. There was never any broad declaration of a relationship. Our being together was just something that happened. We never really acknowledged it. There was no grand romance leading up to our living together. It was just like our chemistry, our merely being together, made us wild, and that wildness made us seem, at the time, like a perfect match.
"We were constantly chasing the next party, the next fun thing, the next good time. In the back of my mind, I always thought that the wildness would stop after we graduated. I mean, Chris and Tracy were already building their post-graduation life. They were scouting talent and setting up clients for their development business. Lucky for me, they had asked me to work for them as their head programmer. So, at least, I had a job lined up after graduation. And it wasn't a job I got out of pity. Even then, I was a really good programmer. Lord knows if I would've been able to graduate if I hadn't been such a natural coder. If the work didn't come so easy to me, there would've been no way I would've graduated. Honestly, I sleepwalked through my senior year. I have no idea how I did it.
"But seeing Chris and Tracy plan their life made me think that Kelly and I would create a similar trajectory. I thought we would start building a life together. Maybe, even, get a house, buy stuff to put in the house. You know, I thought we would carve out a section of the stereotypically suburban life for ourselves. And I was okay with that. But it never happened. We just never stopped chasing the good time.
Most of our friends had left campus by then, and the ones who hadn't—like Chris and Tracy—were pretty much done with chasing parties. They were chasing bills, looking for ways to save enough to start a future family. Kelly and I were just pretending that this stuff didn't exist.
"Nighttime drinking gave way to daytime drinking. We were having our own parties, just for the two of us. Music and alcohol flowed easily in our apartment all day long. Then when the evening rolled around, we would move on to campus. We would search out parties, and if there were no parties, we would go to bars. We made new friends, started a second college life. Every night was a late night with last calls and after hours parties. Everything that we had done in college, we doing then too.
"But the amounts we drank, and what we were drinking, had changed over time. What was once beer in college b
ecame rum and cokes or vodka tonics. What started out as just 'having some drinks' became 'let's get drunk.' And it wasn't until we were making daily trips to the liquor store that it even occurred to me that there might be a problem.
"But this was our life for years after college, pretty much the same thing every day and night. We'd drink and drink at home until we went to a bar or a party, and then we'd drink until we'd forget. I can't say what Kelly was trying to forget, but I think I was trying to forget the fact that days were passing unnoticed, and I just wasn't happy. It never occurred to me that it was the drinking that made me unhappy, and I'm still not sure that it was the drinking. At the time, I thought everyone I knew, every 'responsible' person I knew, seemed so empty, and that accepting that emptiness was what the American adult experience was supposed to be, and that only inherently empty people were able to accept the dullness of that life. I so desperately wanted to be filled with something," Sam says, and trails off for a second.
"God knows what happened most of those nights with Kelly. For me, nearly every night ended early—at least consciously. We'd often wake up not knowing where we were, who we were there with, what we did to get there, or how we acted once we were there. These were scary mornings, but not as scary as the days I woke up freezing on someone's porch or lawn, or, worse, lying on some random sidewalk off-campus, which I'm ashamed to say happened to me more than once."
"Why do you think you continued to do it?"
"Like I said, in a larger sense I was trying to forget, but, mostly, I did it because I liked it. I liked the way drinking made me feel, at least in the beginning. I don't know. I used to think it was to keep up with Kelly's drinking, but now I know that a drunk always
