Memoryplay I: The First Drunk

The first time I got drunk it was a Tuesday. I was a senior in high school.

My morning routine from the time I was eleven until I left for DePaul University consisted of a 5:30 a.m. wake up call, breakfast on the run, and a sometimes hours long bus or car ride to the magnet schools in downtown Jacksonville that had sucked all the strong students out of their neighborhood schools in the mid-nineties.

I had no alarm clock. Each day my mother would creep in a little before or after dawn, depending on the time of year, and rouse me with a head scratch and her adorable persistence that yes, I had to get up now, and no, I could not take a mental holiday. I never stopped asking, and she rarely gave in. I miss that now, the gentle waking of adolescence, when I hear my insistent alarm screaming at 7:00.

This Tuesday was very usual. I woke in the dark, joked with my mother, showered and consumed a breakfast of chocolate milk and a bagel. My father was up and out of the house early, well before dawn, to catch a flight somewhere, some work related trip, one in a long line from my childhood. I drove to the arts school that hid me from normal kids for four years and went to my first period film studies class after stopping for a large coffee and pastry from Panera. The class consisted of watching movies that our ex-priest (and, I suspect, gay) teacher, and all around badass, Mr. Price selected from his personal collection, strung along with loose, wonderfully superfluous lessons, the only necessary one being that there were more films to watch then the hetero-normative bullshit shuttled to the boonies' local AMC. I suspect that Stephen Price's triumph was training Southerners to embrace the subtitle. It was a tremendous class. They fired him a few years later for assigning a book in an English class that pissed off some Baptists. Another good teacher bites the dust.

Between the early morning movie watching and excess coffee and bread, senior year was when I gained my freshman fifteen, carrying them with me to Chicago when I left Florida in August 2002. I don't remember what we were watching that day. Honestly, I may have slept through it. I was stage managing the school musical from 3-6 everyday, and going to rehearsal for a local production of Hamlet from 7-10 before the long drive home. I was walking scenery. After a few weeks of that schedule I was also the walking dead. And pissed. My family was going to a wine tasting at our friends' restaurant that night. I was going to miss it.

I didn't really care about missing the alcohol. I'd never really seen the appeal, but getting to the food at Sliders was worth killing a transient. A feisty one, even. There would be gumbo, god damn it. Gumbo.

I roused at the bell ring. The more I think about it, the surer I am that I slept through class that morning. I tried to only sleep through the movies I'd already seen, so I'm going to hope I didn't miss anything. I grabbed my shit and walked out the building to my next class, hearing a snatch of conversation on the way out about something something New York.

I met my best friend Brad next to the obligatory high school portables, and we made our way to Acting A. As seniors, we were allowed to supervise the freshman acting class for a grade. It sounds like more of a gimme than it was. The head of the department taught the class and she rarely had the time or inclination to care about the newbies, electing to direct the fall musical and smoke endless Virginia Slims while sitting in her Audi with the door open so lackies could hand her coffee unimpeded and teach her curriculum. She wasn't in her automotive alley throne as Brad and I passed by, so we held out hope that perhaps she would be running class today and we wouldn't have to make something up or play theater games with fourteen year-olds. There are only so many times you can watch children mime making a milkshake and care.

As we walked into the black box an automatic wave of pissyness washed over me. The kids were sitting around watching TV instead of warming up. I readied for a solid rant along the lines of, "When I was in acting A, I was always fucking warmed up!" when I noticed that they were preternaturally quiet and staring at the image of a skyscraper on CNN.

And then the first tower collapsed.

The rest of the day is a blur. Desperately trying to find out what flight my dad had taken out of Jacksonville. Was he anywhere near New York? No, he'd missed the flight by five minutes. Not being allowed to leave school. Watching the news in Government & Economics. Leaving school without permission when the banner at the bottom of Fox News announced that all the malls in Duval County had closed and a girl next to me yelled, "God damn it! I wanted to buy a dress!" Informing both plays that I would not be attending rehearsal. It was not to be. Crying listening to NPR on the way home in my '88 Volvo Station Wagon. Crying with my family while we watched Tony Blair's masterful sound bite that today we were all Americans. Crying without memorable surroundings.

The enormity of that day. So large that we use numbers to name it instead of words. 9/11. The ten between them left out because we may still fall through the zero's hole and perish. Reaching out and feeling in the dark for the tenuous connections we'd believed sound the day before. Everyone at their worst. Everyone at their best. Dickens, you magnificent bastard.

The community in Atlantic Beach, FL, seemingly so far removed from the attack, responded in the Southern way. Those of us that had intended to attend the wine tasting at Sliders would still go. The dinner would not die. I would get to go. I wish I'd had no reason to skip rehearsal.

And that night, regardless of the fact that I did not like alcohol, did not like wine, I sat with my family and neighbors and drank like a unrepentant whore. I drained my mother's glass when she wasn't looking. We tossed back wine like it was an apocalyptic Seder, while no planes passed over in the sky.

At one point, reeling and ill, I fell out of the restaurant and into the parking lot, heroically making my way to our car. I lay on the roof and stared at the sky drained of mechanisms and harmlessness. It had never seemed so close. I took note of how it felt to be drunk, thick and separate, held apart from the world by warm fog. I would have no idea, the second time I drank, why I burst out sobbing after the first shot. Only later would I realize that I associated the taste of booze with those hard, tall numbers, themselves reminiscent of buildings.

I rarely drink these days.