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To this day—over a decade later—I still don’t know why that particular night on September 23rd, 2010, became my last night of drinking. All I know is that it did.
I was three months shy of turning twenty-eight. Living in Oakland.
Here is the basic story, the routine and embattled version I have been telling for what seems like my whole life. I was born and raised in Southern California, ninety miles north of Los Angeles. I come from an upper-middleclass family. Mom was a nursing teacher; Dad was a computer engineer. We had privilege. Between the tiny, nearly invisible cracks in the perfect, polished exterior, there were shafts of sickness filtering through, piercing the sunny rooms of my childhood like a switchblade poking at my face. Anger started young. Drinking began sophomore year at a Catholic, college-prep high school. Soon drugs. Girls. Fast cars. Arrests. Punk rock. Violence.
I moved around California a lot. Ojai. Ventura. Santa Cruz. San Diego. I was trying to outrun myself; I was trying to show my parents my rage by symbolically—and at times very literally—attempting to destroy myself. I met and fell in love with a pale-skinned, freckled, red-headed woman in San Diego. We laughed, enjoying our dangerous youth. She was twenty, I twenty-four. In 2008, after traveling Europe together for five haggard weeks, we moved to our mutual dream city: San Francisco. We found a tiny room in a five-room apartment we shared with others. We found crappy jobs. She waited tables; I drove a delivery van for a medical clothing company; I still have the image of spattered blood on blue hospital gowns seared into my consciousness. It may have been a symbol for my life back then. We drank thumb-jugs of Carlo Rossi almost every night. We leapt the two-foot gap out our second-floor window and held each other on the apartment complex roof, grinning, young, in love, watching the red Golden Gate Bridge to the north, often half covered in a thick shroud of mystical fog.
In June of 2008—five months after we moved to SF, and a year-and-a-half after we first started dating—she left me. I was a disaster, she said. I drank too much. I was moody and mean. Her older sister, who lived in Seacliff in the Outer Richmond District, not far from Robin Williams’ old house, had told her that I was “an eccentric drunk.” This enraged me then. Now I know, of course, that she was right.
Once, before we moved to the city, my ex’s sister had a big Spanish Paella party at her apartment on Clement Street. My girlfriend’s mother had gone to Spain with her best friend in the seventies and had remained close; her mom’s friend’s daughter had then become best friends with my ex. The tradition carried on; my ex and her best friend planned to go to Spain to study Spanish later that year. My girlfriend’s whole extended family was there: Aunts; uncles; cousins; mother (father had died in the nineties). There must have been thirty-five people there.
And then me.
Everyone who attended had been asked to bring a bottle of wine. Dozens of bottles appeared. Like my father, when I got nervous back then I drank. What else could I do? It was my meat; my medicine; my spiritual salve. It was a sort of foreplay which often came before destruction. I couldn’t explain the violence in me back then; the rage. And it was rage; not just anger. It always seemed directed towards my mother. Specifically, her. She had, in my mind, been asleep at the proverbial parental wheel when I was growing up. (Growing “sideways” felt closer to the truth.) Later, of course, I would take full responsibility, grasping that I’d felt deeply wounded and had made choices, which had led me down a dark, emerald path of chaos.
At the party I started drinking as people arrived. I felt awkward and uncomfortable, like an outsider, as if everyone were just waiting for me to be exposed, to be found out to be a fraud, to suddenly explode, bursting into flames in front of everyone. Why, I wondered, was I so afraid? So self-conscious? So intense? I didn’t have any answers, and so I drank.
The only thing I recall consciously after that was myself standing in the center of the kitchen, my ex a few feet away from me, and what felt like her whole family surrounding us. There was loud chatter, a low white static noise with the volume turned up. Something—I remember this—clicked inside of my mind and suddenly I leaned over to the counter, set my glass of Chardonnay down, and said something nasty to my ex. I don’t remember what it was. Only I do remember—precisely and vividly—the immediate silence of the room. Every person became a statue. My heart pumped like a fist against my chest. Electricity raced down my whole body, each nerve trembling. I saw fear in my ex’s eyes. Her blue eyes loud against her pale skin. Her red hair seemed like blood; her freckles like spattered paint.
The next thing I recall, before I passed out, was leaping towards her, enveloped by her entire family, and shoving her to the ground. I yelled something at her—again, I don’t recall what—and then everything went black.
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