My rock bottom was at a Josh Groban concert. This is not a metaphor. It was the last time I ever drank alcohol. I blacked out drinking music venue beers the size of a baby’s head, and ended up with two black eyes and a broken nose. I also pissed myself, my super power back then. Sarah McLachlan was the opening act, which I found mildly offensive. She’s a headliner to me. I cried when she performed; I took a selfies of me crying. It was the last thing I remember doing. I was sitting in a lawn chair in the grassy nosebleed of the BB&T Pavilion on river in Camden, New Jersey, formerly the Tweeter Center, now, according to Google, the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion—whatever that means. Below is a photo my mom took and still has on her Instagram, because I don’t think she knows how to delete posts:
A venue with so many names, passed around like a sick animal that no one knows what to do with, just like Camden itself, the city where I was born. In the photos I’m sunburnt and hysterical with food on my face. My parents, who I was home visiting from New York, and attended the concert with at the request of my mother, are just off camera, watching me in increasing dread, knowing what was coming. This was exactly seven years ago.
I don’t remember the rest. I don’t remember heckling Josh Groban while he spoke between his songs. I don’t remember my parents extracting me before the elderly people sitting around us in the lawn section placed me under citizen’s arrest. I don’t remember being stuffed in the car by my mom as I yelled obscenities at traffic police, or trying to jump out of it on the highway minutes later, or breaking my face. I came to as my dad helped me into the shower to clean off my piss and cool my body down, like he was helping his newborn break a steaming fever, or guiding his ancient father who forgot how to clean himself.
My drinking and drugging career was 13 years of trying to turn myself into a Dutch bog mummy. I felt older at 15 than I do now at 34, married and on Propecia. When the booze and drugs left my blood, and MDMA craters in my brain began to fill in like it was high tide, I realized I’d never be fully healed. Just partially. Partially is good enough for me. Partially gives me more life. More gravity. Not high or drunk—rocketing through time—but slow and agonizing. I’m grateful for slow. Grateful for agony.
I sound like Alanis Morissette, but there are worse things to sound like. I am Alanis in the Thank U music video, a naked body with no parts. Just blurred. My hair covering my tits. Strangers approaching as I stand muted and serene, clutching my shoulder and bowing their head, as if to say, "No, thank U, for not wetting your bed four nights a week, or wetting a stranger’s bed with him in it and then convincing him that he was the culprit, or leaving unopened foot long Slim Jims around your bedroom like long-forgotten land mines. Thank U for no longer leaving dear friends any choice but to write a strongly worded email to you voicing their concern for your corporal and spiritual well-being, or shrieking while another friend all but breaks down your apartment door to check on you because you were drinking in a robe since 2 PM on a Saturday and then, around dusk, decided to snort Adderall your other friend left on your closet shelf that was piled up with clothes you bought from Amazon but never took out of the package. Thank U for no longer waking up on the floor of an apartment in the building across the street from where you lived—not knowing how you got there, but feeling relieved that you were still wearing your clothes and didn’t get murdered, or worse, seen by the person who lived there. Thank U for no longer passing out next to the entrance ramp of the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore, where your parents had to carry you out to the side yard of the shore house they were renting and hose you down while you puked and your family’s now-deceased Schnoodle dutifully licked your wet face—the kind of cosmic grace that only a dog can show you. Thank U for no longer letting your drug dealer mistakingly call you “Corey” after deciding that if you were to correct him, he’d get mad at you and no longer sell to you.
It’s understandable that you were codependent with your drug dealer. He was a nice man.
♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️