(Okay, if I wait this one out, maybe I can enlist.)
Have you smoked marijuana fifteen times or more in your lifetime?
(Ummm, I’ve smoked that much in a day.)
Application DENIED!
Guess I won’t be joining the force anytime soon. Regardless, State College was a quaint, peaceful town. It truly was Happy Valley to me upon my arrival. I was more than four hours away from my former life in Allentown. Walking the streets, I had a freedom that felt incredible to me. Bad memories and potential dangers weren’t lurking around every corner. Everything was fresh and new and clean, like a crisp piece of white paper just waiting to be filled with adventures. I would later find out that avoiding downtown on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights after about 10:00 p.m. would serve me well, because at those times the streets were filled with drunken students and alumni celebrating the latest football win or drowning their sorrows over the latest loss—reactions that looked oddly the same. Otherwise, it was the perfect place for me to start my life over. It felt safe, for now.
I was flying high on what they call in early recovery the “pink cloud.” The pink cloud is a common place for many newcomers to land in the beginning of recovery, because it really is a different type of “high” to discover how wonderful life can be without chemicals. When you accept the realization that you never again have to live the way you were living in that utter darkness, it is amazing! You begin to feel alive again. For the first time, your skin is breathing. Your senses are awakened in a whole new way. Food tastes different, flowers smell pretty, the sky is just a little bit bluer, and the possibilities begin to seem endless. Everything is so new, so bright, so exciting that you feel like a little kid again, and in many ways, most of us are. Learning to walk and talk again in recovery is such an amazing gift. Tears are genuine, and they flow freely like rain. Feelings are actually felt in their fullest states. Music floats differently into the ears and sounds crisper, and lyrics make sense on a deeper level. Laughter is the real, heartfelt, stomach-hurting kind of pure laughter. Life is lived. A day has a definite beginning and end. Morning gives way to evening and all is remembered and experiences are wholly felt. Lips actually enjoy touching the cheek, while smiles splash across the face and are felt deep inside the heart. Blackouts aren’t an option; missing pieces of the night before isn’t a possibility.
I was loving everyone in the rooms of my twelve-step meetings, loving being alive, and loving my sheer existence. I had the innocence of a newborn and a naiveté that was out of sync with my past “been around the block, don’t mess with me” persona. A new lease on life was what I signed in rehab and it felt wonderful, as though I could breathe a huge sigh of relief because my past was miles behind me. My most horrible nightmares and trashy actions were left sitting on top of the mountain where my rehab was located or were hidden in my sleep or in my mind where only I could see them.
So I was free—free to begin a new life, to start over fresh and, I hoped, to not screw up royally.
KATHY WAS, HANDS-DOWN, MY ABSOLUTE BEST FRIEND throughout my early twenties. We met during high school when I had a job at a local low-end clothing store for teens. She was my manager and was a couple of years older than I was. We both had a love of partying that we recognized in each other during early Saturday morning openings when we would both stumble in hung over as hell. We would glance up at each other and exchange the same glassy-eyed, nauseated expression, which made us fast best friends. We attended rival high schools, so we didn’t know many of the same people. It was nice to have a friend outside my inner circle.
Ours was the annoying kind of friendship where if we weren’t in each other’s immediate company, we were glued to the phone talking endlessly about anything and everything at all hours. The only time we would break from conversation was to shower before meeting up with one another, and I am pretty convinced that if I’d had a phone in the shower, we would have been talking then too. It got so bad that finally my parents got me my own phone line in the house. Kathy also had her own line, so that freed us up to talk incessantly. We talked about everything girls our age talked about: clothing, fashion, boys, friends, relationships, work, dreams, etc. We analyzed everything together and wouldn’t have dreamed of leaving the house to meet up without getting verbal acceptance of what we were wearing that night. At that time, she was the closest thing I’d ever had to a sister. We trusted each other with everything in the way only young girls do.
I was never physically attracted to her, as I had been with some of my other best friends. Not because she wasn’t a beautiful girl, but because it just wasn’t there for me. She was truly my best friend and that was it. We started hanging out every weekend, then eventually that began to bleed into the week, and then we were partying hard-core all the time. Kathy and I could party it up just as hard as any guy we knew. We held our own in any situation and got hammered together to the point of oblivion.
One time we decided to hit an all-day beer-tasting festival, where you buy a twelve-ounce glass and walk from booth to booth trying a variety of ales and microbrew beers. It was like a candy store for an alcoholic. Although beer was my main drink of choice, mainly because of accessibility and cost, I wasn’t a huge beer fan, and I had never really ventured beyond the cheap shit we could afford to drink in high school. When we wanted to really be tacky and tie one on, we traded up for a forty-ounce malt liquor, with Crazy Horse or Colt 45 among my favorites. So this was new territory for me, and I was excited! We arrived around 11:00 a.m., about an hour after I had woken up, and we bought our little glasses. I was pissed that they only had twelve-ounce glasses; I mean, who the hell drank from a twelve-ounce glass unless it was to do a shot of something? I never went for anything below sixteen ounces, even when I was drinking wine. Yeah, I was that kind of classy drunk; I drank my white zinfandel from a sixteen-ounce beer stein. I was hot—not!
We started hitting booths like kids at Halloween, going from booth to booth and sucking down beer, barely tasting the bitter microbrews we were slurping down. After all, we weren’t connoisseurs there to savor the aroma and taste; we were there to get drunk quickly and cheaply. The booths were set up in a circle, with about twenty different breweries present. Intermixed with the breweries were traditional German food vendors serving bratwursts and sausages. That meant for a vegetarian like me there was nothing to eat, which was just as well because I was filling up on beer quickly and the yeast was beginning to bloat my stomach.
In the middle of the food and beer, a makeshift stage featured several bands playing throughout the day. By 1:00 p.m., Kathy and I had hit every booth and were dancing our drunken asses off in the middle of the festival to a cover band belting out “Sweet Caroline.” Kathy and I were infamous for getting extremely loaded at clubs, pushing our way to the front of the stage like mad groupies and dancing around like absolute fools. We were bouncing off people all around us, but most of them were just as loaded as we were so they didn’t mind. We began our own mini-mosh pit while singing at the top of our lungs: “Sweet Caroline, badda dum, good times never seemed so good. So good! So good!” The band ended its set after the song, and Kathy and I collapsed onto the stage with our arms around one another in fits of laughter.
The crowd began to disperse back to the various booths around us. The band’s crew was pulling equipment off the stage, and I was shamelessly flirting with a stage crew dude when I heard Kathy’s drunken voice boom out of the speaker next to my head. She sang, “Sweet Caroline, badda dum, Kathy is feeling mighty fine, badda dum, and Storm’s right behind, badda dum.” Kathy had a gift for twisting song lyrics to fit the situation we were in. These lyrical rants always sent me into hysterics, and this time was no different. I was drunk on my ass, lying on the stage, holding my stomach, rolling around, and laughing so hard that tears were streaming out of my eyes. After a verse or two, one of the band crew came up to us and politely removed the microphone from Kathy, who slurred a couple of choice swear words at him before finally giving up and collapsing down next to me.
That was typical of our friendship—we were always