LORE DROP 001: 15 Years

Hello friends. I’ve gone by a lot of names over the years. The magic of the internet, right? They told me not to show my real face, so I spent most of my youth showing fake ones. You can call me what you like – PK, PDK, Alec, Randy, Simon, Fancy, Luxe, Aesop, Mark, I’m probably forgetting a few past that.

But however you know me, these days, my friends call me PK, and I’m an alcoholic. And I don’t want to drink today, so I wrote a lore drop about it.

Fifteen years ago, I woke up in jail. If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’ve probably heard me start the story like this before. But it’s important, because there’s no glamour in it. There was no glamour in my life at all. I’d spent the last few years in my own head as a free spirit, doing as I pleased, free from convention. The lies you tell yourself and all.

I started drinking shortly after my 18^th birthday. My friends were throwing a party, and I decided I would party as they did. I’d gotten my acceptance letter into college, my grades were good enough, and I was tired of being a responsible human being, or at least a rough approximation of one. So I went to my friend’s house, a place that’s since been bulldozed to make way for a strip center with a Five Guys, and took nine (9) shots of vodka in an hour. Don’t ask me why nine was the number. Don’t ask me why I had to do it in an hour. I just decided that was the one. If I was going to drink, I was going to DRINK. It’s the only way drinking made sense to me, then and now. It’s the only way most things make sense to me. Why half-ass anything?

Some of that goes back to stuff with my brother. Autistic non-verbal. Not the broad 2020s definition of autism where folks have jobs and apartments and quirks, but the special-ed, remove-power-of-signature-in-court, nobody-wants-to-help old school autism that scares people. I got object lessons at an early age that nobody was coming to help, and in fact a lot of people work very hard to make sure they never have to think about The Other. And he was never going to be able to do much for himself. He’s not making sandwiches, he’s not paying bills, he’s not much for the intricacies of baseball. I know what “I can’t do anything to make my life better” looks like, and I internalized that and became the biggest tryhard you’ve ever seen.

All of that was to say, if I’m going to drink, as I said, I’m going to get rip roaring drunk. I’m going to burst into tears because I don’t know how to make people’s lives better in the way I want to. I’m going to make out with a girl who would later get hooked on heroin and die of an overdose two years later. My first drunk didn’t go great.

My first drunk ended with me hung over on the bathroom floor of my home, having gotten home by dubious means, with my father standing over me as he was leaving for work.

“Been drinking, son?” he asked me.

“Yes sir,” I replied.

“You ever gonna do it again?”

“Probably, sir.”

“Well, alright.”

I didn’t lie to him. Honesty was never my problem when it came to chemical abuse. I made it clear what I wanted. I wanted to obliterate myself in a direct fashion. No cocaine, no heroin, but whiskey and weed were in play. I had friends who dabbled in the rest, and their stories were instructional. They also weren’t mine, so I won’t dwell on them.

But it also created an interesting bubble. We all considered ourselves artists. I could write. (I can still write, but I have trouble with making time in middle-aged work-a-day life.) My friends could make music, they could make visual art, and they could get themselves good and wasted. And we all worked very hard on the getting wasted part. And at a certain point, if you’re not that kind of person, you’re going to drift away from that kind of lifestyle. You’re going to hang out with people who live other lives. So it creates a bias of sorts, because the people who are still around are the people who think like that, ingest like that, obliterate like that.

There are many tales of what should’ve killed me, what should’ve gotten me thrown in jail, what should’ve stopped the train, but didn’t. I was becoming The Other in my own way. And since I could talk fast and smile wide, people were more than happy to pretend that whatever my mess was didn’t constitute an emergency on their part. So my choices continued apace, bigger, more audacious, more irritating to people who had their own lives to lead.

At one point, I’d woken up in the parking lot of a church. I had no idea how I’d gotten there. I found out after the fact that after a particularly spectacular night of boozing, my friend wanted to get home to a place about 50 miles northwest; we stopped at a rest stop on the interstate so I could pee, and what actually happened was that I vomited, passed out on the throne, and had to be walked back to my car. My friend then drove me back to his house, conveniently next to the church, and left me sitting in the shotgun seat to sleep it off. That freaked me out. I swore off liquor. And I succeeded in not drinking alcohol for a year or two, in fact. I didn’t fix anything else underlying about my existence, but at least I wasn’t blowing my wad on booze. I still smoked, I still had ideas about how the world was bullshit, but I hadn’t fixed the common denominator of said bullshit world.

(Previous versions of the story I’ve just told had me inside the church. This was a lie for dramatic effect. Being a drunk usually goes hand in hand with being a good storyteller, and sometimes that story is more fun when it’s not true.)

But then an old college friend asked me the most dangerous question – “have you ever tried drinking like a normal person?”

I found out many years later that she’d asked me that question because she was insecure about her own intake. That’s the magic of the disease. The crab bucket of not wanting to feel like we’re the defective ones.

And I was defective, of course. I never thought to myself, “Man, do I have it made.” By the age of 29, I had run up a radio career, burned it down to see if I could do something else with my life – and I could! I could be extremely broke and very drunk! – and spent my years during the Great Recession living in a bachelor pad with the first rule being “we don’t have enough beer.” I had a roommate who would go toe to toe with me, and we burned our lives down magnificently. People were starting to not answer the phone when I called. I knew things were going wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on how to turn it around. And it never occurred to me how drastic the changes would have to be in order to have the life I pined for – a life where a pretty girl wanted to stick around for longer than a few months, a life where I had enough cash to wander around and see the world, a life where I could experience the outside world. But my life was getting smaller and smaller. Eventually, it was in a roach-infested shoebox of an apartment, where nobody cared about the funny smells from my place because they had their own funny smells downstairs. If the police were in a standoff with my neighbor downstairs, it meant I had to go to the diner and have a few drinks and wait it out. Not my problem.

I couldn’t afford the shoebox after awhile, either. Slept in my car for a bit. A friend of a friend got me a room in his apartment. He had cats and I was allergic, so I hid in my room with the door sealed to keep the dander out.

I had a checking account with a minus sign and a comma. At -$1,000, my credit union wouldn’t even let me overdraft. So I would write the rent check, drop all the way down, take my little checks from my little jobs I could scrounge up, slowly build the bank account back up to zero, then write the next rent check. I thought this was sustainable until my ship came in. And of course, I always had a little cash left over to buy my next bottle. (Since depositing the checks at the credit union meant feeding into the abyss, the 1% cambio de cheques was an important stop in my errands.)

On October 22^nd, 2011, a friend of mine got married. I went to his reception in my only suit, got trashed, insulted the DJ who’s girlfriend I’d stolen two years prior, and skipped the reception to go to My Bar and continue the festivities as I was accustomed to doing. The bar had My Bartender, who’d charge me for my first shot of Old Crow and then let me drink my fill. The bar had one straight woman in it, who I flirted with and then made out with in an alley before I received a text that she was married to a Marine. “Well, that’s one way to go out,” I thought to myself.

I didn’t want to kill myself. But I was okay with dying at that point. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do to make my life better, and I was making choices that clearly were leading to jail or death. And that wasn’t so bad. I was dreaming up stylized versions of my funeral where people were sad at my passing, but everyone would quietly agree that I deserved it.

I didn’t go home with the Marine’s wife. I tried to drive to my workplace, an AM station where I worked as a board op just to keep my hand in the game, or so I imagined. A Virginia state trooper saw me drive by, and on came the lights.

How many drinks had I consumed? “Enough,” I said. So that’s what the officer wrote down on the form. Somewhere in Virginia, before enough time had gone by for the paperwork to be shredded and burned, that’s what my DUI arrest form said. Number of drinks: Enough.

Again, honesty was never the problem. Action was the problem. Changing was the problem. I wanted to be a defiant rebel against anything and everything and do things my way, and the world didn’t much mind that to a point, it turns out. I didn’t get a great enemy to rise up against, I didn’t become a martyr for the cause of the freedom to do and say and think what I pleased. I was just another guy in the back of a van getting carted to jail for letting my self-destruction break containment.

There was a kid with me in the van. College kid, popped for underage DUI with a way lower threshold. He was certain his life was over. And I laughed and told him he’d be fine. Nobody cares about these sorts of things. Just stick with me, kid, you’ll be fine.

You’ll be fine?!

I don’t know if you’ve ever had an activation in the back of your mind. Some would call it God consciousness; others might refer to it as intuition. When I was a teenager, I gave him a name just so I could have an internal dialogue and not feel like I was schizophrenic. That voice had been quiet for a long time, probably because I’d drunk him into submission, probably because he’d scared the hell out of me once he’d gotten the floor to filibuster me during a particularly intense LSD trip in my early 20s.

You’ll be fucking fine?! Come on, man. You’re in the back of a police van. Your life, as you knew it, is over. It’s done. You can’t tell anyone that it’s going to be fine. You can’t tell anyone anything. Whatever you think you’re doing, buddy, you’re not. It’s over. It’s done. You. Are. Done.

I listened to that voice for once. There were powers above me (namely, the power of the state) already making sure I had the freedom to do nothing more than what they wanted. And now, something else was intervening. Call it what you want. I certainly won’t enforce any ideas of the God of Abraham/Jesus/Muhammad or anything to that effect. But it was something that wasn’t my own will and desire.

I was given one phone call from the jail. They let me keep trying since nobody was picking up. That was kind of them. But nobody picked up. Because nobody wanted to deal with a phone call from PK on a Saturday night. They knew it was more trouble than it was worth. So I went unanswered until I got one, and only one, response. My father.

He didn’t get me until the late morning. By then, it was close to noon. Everyone else in the drunk tank had been released in whatever manner they had access to. The only people left were me, in my suit, and another man, tanktop and jeans, covered in blood from his nose to his abdomen. “How did you get here?” I asked him. “No idea,” he said. “How about you?”

I lied. “Me neither.”

So we talked about what we chose to reveal about our Saturday nights, and hoped we’d get out in time for the early NFL games. Keep in mind, this is 2011. I was talking about looking forward to seeing the Buffalo Bills. If you know anything of the Bills in that era, it wasn’t exactly appointment viewing. But I’d made a ritual of going to a bar and ordering my bespoke Bills themed drink, The Great Depression. (At least I took the bus to and from that bar.)

I got out first. My father was unimpressed, which, you know. Fair.

“This is the first time, and the last time,” he said to me, as miffed as any father would be picking up a grown-ass man from the drunk tank. “What are you going to do about it?”

And the activation from last night was still there, still buzzing in the back of my head. It wasn’t a hangover. “I don’t know, Dad. I just know I can’t keep doing what I’m doing.”

I’d spent years of my life feeling like there was a meteor over my head, as most driven-but-aimless American males probably do. It’s the opiate of end times thinking, in a way. Just one problem – the meteor wasn’t over my head. The meteor was me.

I’d been hurting people, to put it mildly. I thought I’d just been hurting myself, but I’d driven folks away not just with my intake, but with the person my intake was amplifying. The anger, the fear, the toxicity had been pooling at my feet for years, like a guy who knew the car needed gasoline but didn’t understand where the gas pump went. So the gasoline just poured all over my waist and legs. And I got used to the smell of the fumes while others ran away, knowing full well that a stray ember, a match, any old thing could set the works alight.

But today, fifteen years ago, I was trying to figure out where the gasoline went. And I couldn’t even think that loftily. All I knew, in my heart, was that I Was Done. The voice had made that clear. It was time to think differently, and I didn’t know what to do next. So I was open to suggestions.

This is where AA comes into the story.

They weren’t waiting to pounce like Mormon missionaries in the Walgreens parking lot. (Yes, I’ve passed them more than once in my current town, and I find it fascinating that they chose that specific place for their hunting grounds. Then again, with traffic surrounding every exit, I suppose you’ve got a captive audience. Way to go, Mormons!) Nobody frog marched my ass into a meeting. But a coworker of mine, one who happened to be an up-and-coming lawyer, had suggested I give it a go. “The judge is probably going to send you there anyway,” he added. “So you may as well go in on your feet.”

Here’s the kicker: I was willing. As I said, I was open to just about anything. And the thing about The Program of Alcoholics Anonymous, from what is now fifteen years of working my way through it: it doesn’t work if it’s a college course. You don’t get a B+ in AA and then move on with your life. There’s more to do. Not drinking? I’d done that. But what I needed more than anything was another way to live, and I was ready to give that other way an honest shot.

There’s a quiz, you see. If you go to the website, or you get a pamphlet, you can do a quiz about whether or not you’re an alcoholic. And back in my dry phase, that sounded like a blast. At the time, it felt like one of those old-school Facebook/Buzzfeed quizzes where you’d find out what Harry Potter house you belonged to. And I wanted that. Lord, did I want to be judged at that point in my life. I’d just made it back from a trip to Florida to help my high school best friend save his relationship, and I’d gotten blasted on $5 beer buckets in Orlando, then lost my glasses on the interstate as they flew off my face as I attempted to pee out the window at 80 MPH.

I took the quiz. I wanted to know. I wanted the quiz to say that I had been sorted into the House of Alcoholism. YOU BOY, the heavens thundered in my fantasy, YOU HAVE BEEN DEEMED A REPROBATE.

The quiz did not bring me a thunderous reply. I was not given a Harry Potter house. I was given the most infuriating answer I could have been given, from my perspective at the time. What did the quiz say? “Maybe.” Maybe I was an alcoholic. It’s possible. But only I can say for sure if I’m an alcoholic.

Thing about the first step: it’s been horribly misconstrued in popular media. In all my years, only Doctor Sleep got it right (and that’s because Stephen King famously did his own first-party research) – it’s not about admitting you have a problem. Any jackass can do that. I should know, because I am, in fact, that jackass. It’s about admitting powerlessness over the substance. And people get hung up on that word all the time, and understandably so. Admitting powerlessness in general isn’t something most people do. Me? If I have a drink, I want another. If I have a puff, I want another. There is no limit. I will drink until the little red light in my mind turns off. I will smoke until my mouth settles in a Joker-esque death rictus. That’s who I am. No half measures. If I have two drops left in a bottle of apple juice, I will move my entire body around to get those last two drops out.

So here I am, staring at that quiz two years prior, not having been judged, and ending up attempting to Drink Like A Normal Person. And now that I had awoken in the crater that myself-as-meteor had left, I understood the quiz just a little better. I was ready to say something for sure. And in that first meeting, I said it fairly simply: “Whatever I am, I’m a hot mess.”

I’d taken a bus to a lyceum off the main drag. The snack table was practically a full craft services table. Pastries galore, coffee, tea, and the best hot chocolate I’d ever had in my life. An old lady asked if I was looking for the meeting. I nodded. She told me I was in the right place. She was the first of many to say precisely that. And as I told the folks who I’d been, what was happening, and how absolutely lost I felt, there was one united response:

They knew how I felt, and they thought they could help.

Another thing about AA: nobody makes anyone do anything. If you want to try it your way, everyone’s going to let you do that. Even hardline book thumpers will let you follow your free will wherever it may go. If it works out for you, they’re happy for you. If it doesn’t, they’ll suggest the way that worked for them. It was a helptful example I’m still integrating into my own day to day life. (Some days are better than others.)

A third thing, related to the second thing: when I read through the book – and I had a lot of time to read the book, because my license was suspended, and a thing you have a lot of time to do when you can’t drive is read on a bus – I never saw anything that said I had to get a sponsor, or that I had to wait any given amount of time to do one step or another. So I went for it. The book told me that what they did was get after it at once. So I did. I was convinced that my life was unmanageable, and I had plenty of proof of that, so that’s Step One sorted. Willing to believe in that nebulously-described Power Greater Than Myself? Sure! I never doubted the existence of such a thing, because I’m not about to go out there suggesting the human race is as good as it gets. I’ve met the human race. I’m part of the human race. Nah, man. Not us. Not me either. The earth’s axis is not where my big toe is set. There’s something in the universe that is more powerful than me.

There’s a Third Step prayer in the book. I didn’t use it, because that’s not how I talk. “I offer myself to thee to do with me as thou wilt.” That wouldn’t be authentic. That’s me invoking someone else’s incantation. That’s not a relationship with a higher power worth having. If we’re going to start over properly, if the voice in the back of my head is actually going to be connected to something, it needs to be a real relationship.

So I was honest.

“God, my plans are trash,” I said to a cloudless night sky. “What’ve you got?”

I’ll tell you about those some other time.