Alcoholism part 1: Binge Drinking

CW:

• Alcoholism

• Substance Abuse

This entry will provide the broad arc of the first stage of my alcoholism: the binge drinking years, which spanned roughly from 1999–2005, plus one anomaly in 2013. There were dozens of incidents over those years, but I’ll only touch on the most memorable instances in this entry.

The first time I got drunk, I was 19 years old. I’d had drinks before then, but only in small amounts: a beer with an older cousin once; a sip from my mom’s tumbler of scotch. I’d avoided alcohol, even though a lot of my friends started drinking in their early teens, because I had traumatic memories of my father’s alcoholism earlier in my childhood.

I was at a bonfire way out in a very rural part of eastern Upstate NY, only a couple miles from the Massachusetts border. My bff Mike brought me to it. I met some people that night who remain dear friends to this day.

I have a vague memory of people calling the bonfire the “Hillbilly Hoedown,” but I have no idea if that’s actually true. There was no live music and no one was dancing, but one guy did strip to his underwear and run around in circles while people threw empty beer bottles at him.

But I digress.

I got drunk that night and I fucking loved it. One could say it was intoxicating, haha. It made me feel free and happy and relaxed. I puked at two different points in the night and woke up with my first hangover (and it was dreadful), but I didn’t even care. I loved being drunk and that love never went away. If I was able to control my drinking, I’d still be loving it today.

Over the next few years, I became a binge drinker. I’d go weeks without a drink, then get together with friends and consume a truly heroic, staggering amount of alcohol.

Here’s an example. My bff Mike went to SUNY Cortland for school. He was cofounder of a local rugby team. One day, both the men’s and women’s local teams won their respective state championships on the same afternoon. The next weekend, the two teams threw one of the more insane parties I’ve been to in my life at the men’s rugby house.

Mike and I pre-gamed in the car outside the house for some reason. Sitting in that car, I drank ¾ of a flask-sized (375ml) bottle of Jameson and chased it with an entire six-pack of Guinness. Then we went in and continued to drink beers from the keg for several hours, before going to a bar and drinking for about another hour. Someone handed me a Bacardi O shot. It tasted so awful that I puked on the bar. We decided to leave maybe 10 minutes later when a Russian man threw up all over me.

We wandered back to the rugby house. On the way, I finished my Jameson bottle and tossed it carelessly over my shoulder into the street.

I have absolutely no idea how much alcohol I consumed that night, but in the morning, I was so out of it that I couldn’t even see straight. Everything I looked at looked like it was sagging toward me in the middle. It’s hard to explain.

Fast forward a year. I was hanging out with my usual crew in the backyard of my friend Matt’s house. Matt’s family owns an enormous property (300+ acres of wooded hills), and there was a large field with an extra large fire pit and some log benches around it. Matt and I made a half gallon of gin and juice, then drank the entire thing, glass by glass, meaning that by the time we finished, we had each consumed a pint of gin, which is around 10 shots worth. There were also cans of beer involved but I don’t know how many I had, if any at all. 

I woke up the next morning on the floor of a basement, so disoriented that for several minutes I thought I’d been kidnapped. I also had burns on my left forearm. It turned out that Matt and I had decided it would be fun to brand each other, so we’d put a hatchet in the fire and then tried to brand each other. I got Matt pretty good but the burns on my arm healed almost completely and are only visible today if I have a sun tan, which is basically never.

In March 2003 I woke up in a dormitory stairwell on a college campus 75 miles from my house. I have no memory of making the trip. My car wasn’t there, and I didn’t know anyone who attended that school at that time.

The next New Year’s Eve in 2004 I woke up in a parking lot in Boston and nearly died of alcohol poisoning. I thought I’d been kidnapped. I tried to fight my friends and smashed up the dashboard of my friend’s car, then was hung over for two days. It took me an entire day to figure out how I’d got to Boston, and I still can’t remember most of that weekend. Mike told me I’d drank more than he’d ever seen anyone drink before.

I was living in NYC the next year. On New Year’s Eve 2005, I came home from an excursion to see two beautiful women leaning out the window of my apartment. My cousin had brought them over, much to my surprise. They were two women about our age, cousins, who had just immigrated from Poland.

We all had a lovely evening. My cousin flirted with one of them and me with the other. My girl’s name was Marta, and she was lovely. We drank an entire liter of vodka together, shot by shot, and made out a bunch. I also had a few beers. At a certain point, I offered to walk her home. I got her home, gave her a kiss, watched her go inside, then turned around to walk home. Almost immediately, I completely lost equilibrium and fell over. I crawled home on hands and knees, three long blocks, across snow and ice. I don’t remember anything past the first block.

I woke up in the morning with my palms and knees pulverized from crawling on the ice. The knees of my jeans were shredded and the shins stained with blood. What followed was another two-day hangover: sweating, shaking, my head throbbing, vomiting until all that was coming up was bitter, blood-stained yellow fluid.

Marta moved to Toronto the next month and I never saw her again. My cousin married the other girl and now they own a house and have a 6-year-old son.

After that second miserable New Year’s Eve in a row, I vowed I wouldn’t ever drink like that again. And for years, I didn’t. It probably helped that I found out a month later that I had liver damage at the ripe old age of 25. Thankfully, it healed up, and even today my liver is considered healthy.

The last time I ever binge drank was in my early 30s. My family rented a little house not far from the ocean in Boothbay Harbor, ME. On our last night in Maine, myself, my partner Liana, my sister, and her husband of the time, went into town where the various art galleries were having wine tastings. We went to a rooftop bar where I had two shots of jalapeño vodka. Then we went to the various galleries. At each of them – I think there were 4 – I had an entire glass of wine. Then we went back to the house we were staying at, where Liana, my ex brother-in-law, and I drank most of a bottle of absinthe together. We all passed out in our chairs around the table.

The next morning, I couldn’t walk right. My vision wasn’t working well, either. Again, everything seemed to sag toward me. I was nauseous for at least 6 hours and my head throbbed with pain for the entire day.

The worst part of that experience was seeing how disappointed my father was that I had drank so much.

That’s the story of my binge drinking, in a nutshell. I will probably go into more depth on some of these individual stories at a later time. These are just some of the heavy hitters; there are scores of other examples I could write about.

The crazy part of all this is I don’t regret any of it. I don’t look back on it in horror or sorrow. I don’t wonder why I was so self-destructive – I don’t care. I loved it. I still love it. I love telling these stories. Some of my favorite experiences and best stories come from those out-of-control nights. They contributed to some of my favorite and most reckless adventures. They amuse me endlessly and I wouldn’t trade the experiences for anything.

But I am glad I stopped.