by Susan Juby
The only social interaction I got was when I went out on Friday or Saturday night with a boy named Ben. He was also from Smithers and had moved to Salmon Arm at the same time. He was a couple of years older, and I’m not sure why he hung around with me. I guess he was finding the new town lonely, too, although I’m sure he was nowhere near as unpopular as I was.
He would pick me up in his parents’ old Subaru and we’d drive aimlessly around town. He would smoke joint after joint, and I’d consume one or more of the bottles of homemade wine that his parents made and stored in their basement. He’d get high and I’d get alcohol poisoning, the symptoms of which included mild blindness and a whole lot of oblivion. I often stayed overnight at his house.
Ben and I never hooked up romantically. Neither of us had any interest. I existed in a fog of misery and disconnection and just wanted someone to get obliterated with. I assume it was the same for him. It was the most functional relationship I’d had with a boy up to that point.
After a few weeks of my highly restrictive and nutrient-free diet and my habit of drinking myself into a rot-gut red-wine stupor once a week, I started to display the early symptoms of scurvy. My gums, never the best thanks to iffy oral hygiene and long-term braces, as well as drinking and smoking, began to bleed freely and often at the slightest provocation, such as when I opened my mouth, which luckily, I did only to eat instant noodles and drink wine. Naturally, I decided that the only thing that could save me from complete mental disintegration and dental disaster was the love of a good dog.
I knew it was risky to introduce a pet into my packed social schedule of one blacked-out evening per week with a boy who was likely also in the grips of a devastating depression. But I became obsessed with the heartwarming image of a dog, probably some sort of collie, waiting for me at the limits of the school property. We would walk home together, and all the other kids at school would see how devoted that dog was and realize they were missing out on a good thing by not hanging around with or even talking to me. My cousin, who went to the same school and was still trying to hire someone to beat me up, would also realize that I had many excellent qualities, even though they weren’t immediately apparent. A dog was definitely the answer to all my problems!
I got so wrapped up in my fantasies of dog companionship that the lines between imagination and reality blurred. I wanted a dog so bad it felt almost like I already had one. I was that committed. They say that serious drinkers and druggers stop growing emotionally at the age they start using. This couldn’t be true because I didn’t start drinking when I was six, but that’s exactly where I seemed to have stopped maturing.
I was devastated when my godfather informed me that I could not get a dog while I was living with them. For some reason my aunt and uncle seemed to think that a girl who wouldn’t come out of her room, who stared for hours at a poster of Billy Idol, and who refused to eat anything other than instant noodles was not ready for the sort of serious responsibility dog ownership entails. I cried for days. At least it felt like days.
“But it’s not fair!” I screeched.
My uncle said, not unkindly, “Life’s not fair. You know that, right?”
The impact of his statement threw me back in my seat.
Life was not fair. Not fair!?
What the high holy hell kind of a thing was that to say to a person?
It remains one of the single worst pieces of news I ever got.
I was so upset that my aunt and uncle became alarmed, and when I changed tack and asked for a rabbit, they caved.
This was a mistake.
As anyone who has ever known a rabbit can attest, they are not noted for their affectionate natures. Well, maybe some are, but only when great piles and heaps of attention are lavished on them by very special owners. I was not a special owner. I was a chronically immature young alcoholic in the midst of some indeterminate personal breakdown.
At the pet store I chose the most exotic-looking bunny, because looks are important. Not the looks of one’s gums, necessarily, but the looks of one’s accessories, pets, and posters. I got a jet-black minilop-eared rabbit that, after long consideration, I named Valotte, after Julian Lennon’s first album. I thought my rabbit’s name would mark me as a serious music lover, touched by the greatness of the son of a former Beatle. No one got the reference because Julian never really took off, so I changed the bunny’s name to Strummer, after The Clash’s Joe Strummer.
Strummer’s main talent turned out to be crouching in a baleful black ball and producing thousands upon thousands of small round poops. He did not enjoy snuggling and struggled and scratched me when I attempted to hold him. If I persisted for too long in my attempts to “gentle” him, he pooped on me and sometimes peed.
He did nothing to help my floundering self-esteem and in fact may have made it worse. It turned out that being the owner of an unfriendly rabbit was not the social stimulant I’d imagined. There was no way to even show my classmates that at least one creature liked me because (a) I was too old for show and tell, (b) Strummer wouldn’t allow me to hold him long enough to get him to school, and (c) I would have looked like a complete ass trying to lug his enormous cage down the hill to the school building.
A month or so after getting the rabbit that was supposed to change my life, I decided to move again, this time out of my aunt and uncle’s place and in with my grandmother. Reluctantly, I brought Strummer with me.
What I really wanted was to go home to Smithers. I realized that the problems I had at home weren’t about the town, where I was sure I still had friends, even if they’d kept a low profile during my time as school pariah. The problem was Salmon Arm, which had sold me a bill of goods about how fun it was. That classy summer drinking? Total bullshit. I didn’t get one bit better at drinking. I repeatedly asked my mother if I could come home and she said no. She said I had to stick out the school year.
Her firmness on the subject had one good effect. When I finally got to go home to Smithers in June, I was, for the first time ever, grateful to be there. I put the increasingly sex-crazed Strummer into our chicken coop, where he spent his time attempting to hump any hen who came near him. I was ready for another fresh start now that I had my hometown in perspective. Still, I told anyone who asked that I had a fantastic time in Salmon Arm. I displayed pictures of all my new friends, most of whom I’d barely known. I made it sound like I was doing the town of Smithers a favour by returning.
A month later, after a few more drinking episodes, I was again making plans to get the hell out. The problem was obviously the small-town environment. What I needed was a major city in order to really shine.
9
Quit All This?
PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK if anyone ever said anything to me about my drinking, and the truth is that no one did. Well, almost no one. Once a bouncer at the local cabaret watched as I picked myself up after my legs went out from under me a fourth or fifth time as I tried to leave the dance floor. This happened quite a bit and helped to explain why I was usually covered with bruises.
“Why do you always get so drunk?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.
His words rattled around in my head for a long time afterward. Why indeed? In truth, I didn’t know how to drink any other way. I genuinely couldn’t see the point of moderate drinking. The whole goal of drinking was to get wasted. Really wasted. Drinking and blacking out gave me a much-needed holiday from myself. And sometimes, it was extremely fun. In my last years of high school, I had many friends and we had excellent adventures when we were drinking. From the outside, it probably looked like I was having a great time. But inside I felt the same as I had in elementary school when I was the target of any kid with a lunch box–cudgel.
Right from the start, I knew I had a drinking problem. But I thought of it as my cultural and environmental legacy as much as part of my genetic makeup. Most of the people I knew drank. Old people, young people. Really young people. Some people drank even more than I did, although most didn’t attrac
t as much negative attention as I did.
In Smithers in the 1980s it was more unusual not to drink than it was to be a serious drinker. At least, that’s how I remember it. When someone couldn’t handle their drink or drugs, we said they were “screwed up” or “assholes.” Or possibly “sluts” or “losers.” We didn’t think they were drunks or addicts. The only people who were officially drunks were the semi-homeless people (all three of them) who drank at the picnic tables on the stretch of grass in between the government building and the library and the older guys glued to bar stools seven nights a week from five until closing and the middle-aged ladies who showed up at the liquor store the minute it opened. They were drunks. The rest of us, especially those who were young, were “partiers.”
That said, I sensed that there was something different about the way I drank and the way my friends did. Most of us got loaded regularly, some of us blacked out often. The difference between me and the others was my mysterious super-ability to piss people off. People noticed me when I was drunk. Many observers thought I was a little mentally unbalanced. I had an uncanny knack for saying and doing exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. If someone had just lost a parent in an accident, I was likely to make a speech about how people needed to brush off adversity and be independent. If someone had a physical disability, I would bring it up in a way that was just indirect and inappropriate enough to make everyone uncomfortable. I’d make jokes about prison rape to people whose boyfriends were in jail. I was a complete asshole, but an inadvertent one. My friends used to issue cautions to me before we went out, the way you’d warn a kid not to touch anything before heading into a store. “Now Susan,” Charmagne would say, “I hope you’re going to have a good night tonight and not say anything to Jill about how her uncle was just charged with molesting her.” Having a good night meant not getting into a fist fight or antagonizing an entire team’s worth of rugby players by casting aspersions on the size of their penises. Having a good night meant not taking off my clothes at the first opportunity or falling down into random bodies of water. When I managed to avoid these things and the myriad other hazards that litter the heavy drinker’s landscape, my friends would be amazed. “Wow! You were really good last night!”
I tried to be good when drinking. I really did. I even wrote notes to remind myself. The notes said things like “Don’t call [ex-boyfriend/someone else’s boyfriend] at 4:00 in the morning.” “Don’t tell so-and-so that her loser boyfriend is cheating on her and ask her why she didn’t see it coming.” “Don’t hit anyone.”
I would pay close attention to how I processed the first couple of drinks. Usually, I was in such a state of roiling anticipation that I started out shaky and lightheaded. The first drink settled me down. The second one lightened my mood. When I went to the bathroom, usually after the second drink, I’d sit on the toilet and do a quick self-check, a sort of alcoholic insight meditation.
“How are you doing?” I’d ask myself. “You upset about anything? Nervous?” I was extra-vigilant for signs of excessive paranoia or unreasoning anger.
This little check-in rarely helped. I’d start out cautious and aware of all the many things I wasn’t supposed to do. I would stick by my plan to drink nothing harder than beer or ciders. I wouldn’t mix drinks and I’d leave the hard stuff, including the cocaine, strictly alone. But by drink four I had no defences. I did cocaine so I could drink more. I took speed so I could drink more. But drugs were never the main event for me—booze was.
Some nights veered with no warning from a high-spirited silliness into a nightmare. Other nights things stayed light. Sometimes things started screwy and just got worse. I had many, many good nights while drinking. I had even more nightmarish ones, especially as time went on.
One thing I almost never did was try to quit drinking after I’d started. On a couple of occasions I was forced to, but stopping midstream was like crashing face-first into a jagged rock. I stopped drinking when I passed out or when it was incredibly late and we’d finally run out of booze.
Occasionally I would moderate if I didn’t think there would be enough alcohol to get drunk, but that was rarely the case at parties in my crowd. I only drank with other people, which was another thing that told me I still had things somewhat under control. But in truth, getting loaded was about getting out of myself. The last thing on earth I wanted was to spend more time alone with myself and my thoughts. Beneath it all, I was catastrophically lonely, even when from outside I looked fine (at least when I wasn’t drunk).
In addition to the notes, I prepared for other mishaps by bringing a toothbrush and toothpaste everywhere I went (as noted, I was an inveterate vomiter). Once an older woman whom I used to see at parties told me that one day I’d “learn how to drink like a grown-up.” Bringing a toothbrush to parties was as far as I got along that path.
The other thing that made quitting seem impossible was that I was too young. No one quits using and drinking when they’re eighteen or nineteen. At least, no one I knew did. I’d tried lots of times and failed miserably. I knew I could never do it on my own. Almost every time I got drunk (once or twice a week), I woke up sick, wracked with remorse, and vowed to quit. Drinking wasn’t worth the pain it caused. I would go around for a day or two in a state of shaky shamefacedness and wallow in abject humiliations, real and imagined. Example: the time I went to my friend’s birthday party and pretended to drown in her pool no less than four times in front of her whole family as part of a tragic bid for attention. I was incredibly sorry about that and everything else, and to atone I would never drink again.
But after a day or two, I’d feel better and people would start to forget the ass I’d made of myself on the weekend. Then my irritability and hypersensitivity would surface. The resentments and paranoia that I nurtured like Chia pets would sprout and grow so smothering that it became hard to breathe, much less think. A day or so later, I’d be at a party and have three drinks down before I’d remember that I’d meant to quit. There was no decision-making. I would get drunk with no thought of the consequences. I had a strange blind spot and could not make the connection between the messes I made when drunk and the need to refuse when faced with a drink. There was no power of choice. I knew instinctively that this wasn’t something normal people understood.
In grade eleven, I started telling people I was an alcoholic. I did this only when I was drunk. I guess I was practising saying the truth out loud. No one seemed very impressed or even very interested.
What I didn’t say is that I couldn’t quit on my own. Nor did I mention the long-term plan that was beginning to develop in the back of my mind. I knew there was one way to quit. I’d seen several people in my family do it. My biological father, my adoptive father, and an uncle had all gone into a self-help program and actually stopped drinking. Obviously, that was an extreme measure and one best left to older people and not young, vivacious people like me. But if things ever got really out of hand, I would try it. When I was thirty or so, engaged to be married to a nice man, and ready to settle into domestic bliss, I’d go to some sort of program.
In the meantime, when the bouncer said, “Why do you always get so drunk?” the only honest answer I could think of was one he wouldn’t understand. I felt like everything in my life—my friends, lifestyle, location, and age—pointed me in one direction. I always got so drunk because I had to.
10
The Crinoline As Life Preserver
GRADE ELEVEN WAS a turning point for me and for a lot of people I knew. Would I, like many of my friends had done, simply fade out of school? In my crowd, there was never any big announcement about quitting. We just simply … stopped … going. Dropping out was a process that started in grade eight and, for many, finished in grade eleven.
On the other side of the academic scene was the one group in our school who were absolutely certain to graduate. They were the kids who took a program called Directed Studies, developed and run by Mr. Lee. Directed Studies was designed to allow th
e gifted students to explore their many and varied talents; it enabled the smartest kids in the school to mingle with other similarly gifted young people (as though they didn’t already huddle together like the last survivors of some anti-intellectual rebellion). Anyway, in Directed Studies, or DS, as it was known, students got to choose a field of study and develop their own curricula. They went on retreats, presumably to discuss the trials and tribulations of being brilliant: “It’s gotten to the stage where particle physics (neuroscience, nanotechnology, etc.) simply isn’t enough of a challenge for me any more” or “I am so smart it’s actually sort of painful.” At the end of every year they gave a public presentation to show the school and larger community what they’d learned. At least, that’s what I’d heard. I’d certainly never gone to a DS presentation or given the program much thought. It was like the chess club, reserved for academic overachievers, the intellectual “haves and have mores,” as the second Mr. Bush might have put it. I was too busy murdering brain cells on the weekends with a combination of alcohol and pills and cocaine to be contemplating such a foreign country as Directed Studies.
