Here Comes a Regular
On becoming a teenage barfly.
Hold my life until I’m ready to use it
Let’s start in the middle. It’s the summer of 1997. I’ll have a nervous breakdown in a few weeks, but that hasn’t happened yet. I’ve just finished my second year in college, and I’m spending the summer washing dishes after breakfast in a dining hall with no air conditioning and transcribing VHS interviews of Holocaust survivors in the library in the afternoon.
Since I got to college, I’ve mostly hung out with townies — first some skaters and punks, like I used to back home, and now a bunch of regulars at the only dive bar where townies and students routinely mix. I’ve been in love with this guy Alex1 since last summer, but he’s off and on and mostly just drunk, so it’s not like I’m pining away or anything. But one Friday night, as the bar is closing, he turns to me and says, “Let’s go to the Cape.” I’ve never been to Cape Cod, and I love the beach, so of course I say yes, and an hour or so later, we are on our way to his family beach house, unexpected by his family, in the middle of the night.
We hit the Sagamore Bridge around dawn, and Alex cracks two beers for us to drink. He says he always drinks a beer when he officially crosses onto the Cape, and so I take the other can of High Life. I am 20 years old, and it is the first time I have drunk alcohol while driving a vehicle. An hour later, we get to the house, immediately make bloody marys, then hit the beach. At some point we stop at a liquor store — a handle of vodka for him, a bottle of gin for me. For dinner there are kabobs — maybe scallops, I can’t remember — and we keep drinking. I try to match Alex drink for drink, but by 10 p.m., I am ready to pass out.
I wake up at 3 or 4 a.m. as Alex crawls into bed next to me. He’s so drunk he can barely talk — that’s Alex, all right. In the morning, I notice his handle is almost empty. I barely drank half my bottle of gin. I can’t remember now whether it was that morning or the day before, but at some point, Alex tells me something like, “See, you’re not a real alcoholic, you can’t even dream of drinking like I do.” And then, hungover as hell, I drive back to our town in time for Alex to make his shift at the fancy French restaurant where he works the line.
For years after, the memory of that trip ranked high on my list of perfect days. Fresh saltwater, a guy I was crazy about, impulsive travel. And for too long a time, those words stayed by my side. I wasn’t a “real alcoholic.” I was just a student slumming it and drinking way too much for a few years, because I was depressed, because I didn’t fit in, because my dad had died. I could quit whenever I wanted to.