Drinking during the day, drinking whiskey in the morning didn't seem odd to me, since I knew plenty of other people who did it. Most people I knew did it, because I had created a world of problem drinkers around me. The people I knew drank every single day after work in the same bars.
That fall, I returned to The Kilowatt with about half a year sober. Andy poured me a root beer, and I handed him some poems I'd written since he'd seen me last.
“What are you reading,” one of The Boys asked.
“Some of Bucky's new shit,” Andy told him.
“Who's Bucky?”
“This guy,” Andy said.
He looked right at me. No recognition whatsoever.
“Nice to meet you,” he said.
It hit me. He didn't know me. I looked around the bar at the rest of The Boys. There was Panama Hat, Guy Who Drinks Corona With Lime, Redskins Fan With Ponytail . . . I didn't know these guys. They didn't know me. They weren't my friends at all. They were random jerks at the bar. And I was a more random jerk from off the street.
So Life You in the Nads
First off, apologies for the decidedly male metaphor here. Gut Punch would work as well, but it doesn't quite have the same ring to it. The days of the Gut Punch are long over, any way; few people have been randomly socked in the midsection, but guys all around the world still know what a good racking will do.
Anyone who has partaken in playground violence understands the equalizer that is the Kick in the Nads. No matter how tough that bully is, anyone else can take him down with one well-placed Buster Brown.
I thought that if I quit drinking I'd let everyone down. They'd miss me. The bar wouldn't be the same without One of the Boys, would it?
In adult life, there are events that are unforeseen and shattering to the psyche. Usually it's the death of a loved one or a child, but it can also be financial disaster or any number of things. The event is so traumatic that it renders the eventee helpless and incapable of dealing with the rest of life. This is when a lot of people cross the line from having had a drink or a drug to becoming full-blown addicts.
Many addicts grew their dependence over a lifetime of poor emotional and social choices. The Nad Kick takes people who were otherwise successful in life and reduces them quickly. The Kickee's social group enables the bad behavior, since he or she seems to deserve to get drunk or high. No one blames him for a bender or prolonged depression. But the danger with dealing with a Nad Kick by using drugs and alcohol is that the depression sometimes sticks.
Ever have someone tell you, “Don't make a face like that, it might stay that way?” Or were you told that if someone slapped you on the back while you made a nasty face it would stick? Consider your depression the nasty face and a drug bender that slap on the back.
The physical part of your addiction will make an alliance with your misery; as long as it's okay for you to drink when you're miserable, then the part of you that wants the vice will keep you miserable so you keep self-medicating. Before too long, your physical addiction will be strongly tied into a dark emotional state.
It's hard for the Kickees in 12 Step. Most of the Steppers can't point to a specific incident to relate to why they started drinking. The Kickee can. The easy thing to feel is an addict's superiority complex. The others don't seem to have a real reason to be drinking; they seem to have been born addicts. The only bad things that ever happened to them were of their own design. Life for the Kickee was going great until The Event.
Clean and Sober Versus Straight Edge
When I first found the punk scene in the '80s, I felt like I was home. I had come out of a crazy religious upbringing that was either extreme fundamentalism or a mind-controlling cult. Neither part of my childhood appealed to me anymore. When I got around punks for the first time, I was relieved to find that there was a group of people who also hated society and couldn't accept what it had done to us.
I believed the government and organized religion were oppressing us. They worked hand in hand to deny us of our right to make our own moral choices about gay rights, abortion, and snorting coke. While cigarettes and alcohol were perfectly legal, marijuana wasn't, and you can make pants and paper out of marijuana. To show my protest against such abusive powers, I drank as much hard liquor as I could get my underage hands on.
But no party is complete without its poopers, and for me, those were the Straight Edge kids. The Straight Edge scene started as a response to Minor Threat songs, in which Ian MacKaye sang about not getting high, drunk, or screwing. I loved Minor Threat, but there was no way I was abstaining from drugs or alcohol. I was abstaining from sex, but that wasn't my choice—that was the cruel choice of awkward teenage pubescence. I was trying really hard not to abstain from that one. The Straight Edgers were obnoxious fucks who looked like skinheads and acted like militant Mormons.
Straight Edgers were notorious for ruining the good times of others. The classic move was when they'd knock the beer out of someone's hand at a show. Other more subtle moves would be when they'd ask for a hit off your contraband vodka half-pint, and then drop it on the floor on purpose. The most obnoxious move was the SE Cockblock. When you were getting up to talk to the unbearably cute punk girl, and were passing her your drink, they'd stand around and scowl. They were hard to fight, since they traveled in packs and they were completely sober.
Out of all the multitude of factions of the punk scene, there were those who drank and those who did not. The ones who drank were clearly the ones having the most fun. I went to parties in Oakland with all strata of punks and got entirely wasted. There was one legendary party for me in which my friend K___ got a 5-foot tank of nitrous oxide and her whole house sat around with the huge balloons, getting ripped all night. The kids who didn't drink or get high? I didn't know where they were that night, but they definitely were missing out.
But when I was sober, I never felt like I fit in. Looking back on it now, I'm sure that was the addict in me knowing I would drink or use anything as long as everyone else was doing it, and it would make me feel like one of the group. The East Bay Punx have their own styles of living, talking, and dressing. They have their own music, stories, and recreation. I never felt like I knew enough of them, no matter how many of them I met. I always felt like the new guy, even after more than ten years on the scene. There was a small circle of them who had broken down my wall, and I was afraid I wouldn't have them in my life if I wasn't drinking with them.
I had no idea that everyone at every part I went to wasn't getting as wasted as I was.
I didn't want to get sober and have to hang out with the Straight Edgers. Although by the time I was thirty-one, I didn't know many SEs anymore. Many of them didn't stay militant SE for their whole lives; they either started drinking at twenty-one or stopped giving everyone else a hard time about it. What I didn't realize is that there were plenty of Clean and Sober and Never Drank punks out there.
I had no idea that everyone at every party I went to wasn't getting as wasted as I was. I really believed that everyone else pounded back shots and beer to get to blackout heaven, and did drugs like cocaine to help them drink longer. There were people around me the entire time who either had never had a drink or had quit for good.
Even now, I sometimes have people come up to me and tell me how wasted I was at a party the weekend before. I have to tell them, no, I haven't had a drink since 2002. They