I drank a pint of Smirnoff vodka in the space of 4-6 hours last night. This is not remarkable as a daily intake, but guzzling it like that leaves me feeling weak and somewhat nauseated. And this is how I often felt for much of last year. My sleep cycle would get disturbed, I’d go 24-36 hours with no sleep at all, so then I had to guzzle some more v, and maybe take a Trazodone, to catch a few hours. And the Trazodone made me sick, often enough, even if I took just a half. So I’d be sick in bed here for most of the morning, maybe early afternoon, and Moki was just as sick or sicker. I think on my worst days we were working through a 1.75 or liter of v, so if I got up at 3 in the morning there’d still be a fair amount of rotgut on the counter. Moki would demand vodka, first thing in the morning, and always wanted paper towels, which he coughed or retched into. These retching spasms had been going on for a few years.
There was a time in the fall of 2015 when my system was seldom free of demon spirits. I might wake up with a hangover, and still a load on, maybe gulp a drink and go to the gym. Not an ideal energy drink. Early in 2016 I’d run into Dr. Dan coming back from the gym (at that time we were both NYHRC) and tell him I thought I really had a problem. And his response was pretty much, “Oh yes, well let me take you to a meeting. Lots of people in the club [a running club we belonged to] are alcoholics.” So, a Sunday night AA meeting in the basement of a church on the UES. After that it was mainly the 12:30 lunchtime “Foglifters” and “Beginners” meetings at the First Presbyterian Church. After which I’d cross the street and take pictures of myself in the reflective walls of the Trump Tower lobby.
And after a few weeks of this, I looked pretty good, felt pretty strong. Then I got a strange contractual job where everyone was disorganized, and that gig died after a few days. It concerned pharma and pharma advertising and a pharma prescription app, so you know it just had to be awful. On the bright side, I got paid for that week, and for several weeks following. This was due to my employment contract with the RHT recruiter. So with that and a previous string of temp jobs in 2015, I had enough earnings and employment to file for unemployment benefits, which I gladly took for 6 months. At one point in the summer they stopped unexpectedly. I discovered when I was missing 4 or 5 weeks of benefits. Turns out I’d been checking in on the UI site with a VPN set to Germany. Well you can’t get unemployment if you’re out of the country. So then I had to prove I’d been in the country all the time. Had to scan my passport, including visa pages, and upload it. A week or two later a fat deposit hit my bank account. And then, another few weeks after that, the unemployment gravy train stopped for good.
Anyway, when I lost that terrible job in February 2016, my husband and I decided to console ourselves with a liter of v. So I was drinking again in March, April, May. End of May, I went back to the Presbyterian church. This time I was going to get lined up with a sponsor, and be serious. The likely candidate was a 70-year-old Englishwoman named L*rn* K*lly. She had white hair with a pink forelock, and had once been semi-famous as the first woman auctioneer at Sotheby’s. She gave me her number. How nice. Then she stopped coming to the rooms. After a week or so we learned she’d suddenly dropped dead from a heart attack. Clearly the alcohol-free life is not beneficial to the cardio-vascular system: that was my first thought. L*rn* had a big funeral up at St. Ignatius Loyola, and beside me on the bus and in the pew ahead was an acquaintance from college, DWD. Turns out he was an old friend of the deceased, via AA, like many of us at the funeral. L*rn* was commemorated with a few short remembrances, mainly focusing on her retirement years when she went to Calcutta to work for Mother Teresa.
But I didn’t drink, through June, July, August, early September. I made 100 days. I look great in most of the pictures from that period. Not so good before and after. I confess I was not entirely free of psychotropic substances in this period. I found an old vial of Ritalin, a Moki prescription, and for a few weeks would mash some up on a hand mirror and inhale it through a straw. A mild buzz. When it ran out I tried doing the same with pseudoephedrine, but no luck.
My birthday rolled around in September, and Moki and I celebrated with a lunch and many drinks at the AC. I have not gone dry for more than a day or two since then, over seven years ago.
It’s time to try again now.
Back to Dottie’s on Monday. It’s like a continuation of the holiday season. I brought some split-pea soup I made (she thought it was an awful lot, but it’s about 1/4 of the actual batch) but we didn’t eat it. No, we ate turkey-provolone-dijon mustard sandwiches on toast. Delicious. Her computer problems seem to have been worked out (I turned off her notifications, which solved the junk-notification problem). She prodded me to clean the apt immediately, and sell off anything I could. Or, “When in doubt, throw out.”
But because I’m going through the Moki stuff painstakingly, I’m able to discover long-lost items such as his Irish passport. Now, I could get Irish/EU nationality, but I’d actually have to live in Ireland for a year. It didn’t used to be that way; they tightened the rules about 15 years ago. Also, there are pictures from 1979 of Moki and Miss Kipper in Ireland. And slightly more recent ones of Moki with friends in England, along a canal, and what looks like Eton. Old address books and lists of friends’ phone numbers from the 70s, 80s, 90s. I thought I was nowhere in there, but then a 619 number for M**** (misspelt) showed up, probably from early 1991. There’s a business card from when he was EVP for the Indiana Pacers, and a big sports-page story from Oct. 1979 about him being summarily fired.
Very cold and wet yesterday. Didn’t go to church or gym. Perhaps today. Didn’t call A.T. Perhaps today.
I’m feeling a little better now…must fetch my tea. I will be non-alcoholic, to all intents and purposes, going forward. I remember when I first stopped drinking, in November 2015, I was fine for the first few days, but then I went out to Santa Cruz and had a beer with Greg and wine with dinner and lunch. I believe I got roaring drunk on vodka martinis while waiting for my flight at SFO. I had a lot on my plate then. Bloomberg job interview coming up, and the AAA arbitration which I believed would go swimmingly, and up to a point it did, but my complaint was denied because the arbitrator depends on big corporations to pay her way.
A half-hour later (12:04). I called A.T. She was nice. I told her I had a fever of 101.4º. I’d just taken my temperature with the digital thermo, last used on Moki back in September or October. Going to take it again now… 100.8º. Does not feel like a cold, feels like oncoming flu. Or mono, though I haven’t experienced the tremendous fatigue yet.
Going to get that photo of A.T.’s father and mother and some woman, an aunt perhaps. Also the news story in Ancestry where Ellen Moira appears. Also send her another Moki and Mother in Falmouth.
I touched on the unpaid cremation fee. She was pleasant about that. I said I’d call back in a few days.
