drink me

The last thing I remember is standing on top of the kitchen table with a huge glass of gin in my hand and yelling out to everyone, "Look at me! Look at me!" I should have this phrase printed on a t-shirt and wear it each and everyday of my life because it pretty much sums things up. Once I had everyone's complete, undivided attention, I drank the entire glass. It was a huge rocks glass, like a "bucket" glass and it was full of gin and I drank it all. I weighed about 98 pounds at the time. This one glass would have been bad enough in it self but this was like the third time I had done this little trick that night. Mag and I had been sitting around the kitchen table playing "quarters" with shots of gin for about an hour with two guy friends of ours who had been kind enough to pick us up at the end of her driveway after we snuck out of her house. Like I mentioned in my last entry, we broke into my house. My family was on vacation and I wasn't allowed to go with them because I was grounded for doing this. It wasn't hard to break in. Um, I may have had a key.

The main reason we wanted to go to my house in the first place, besides the fact that there were no parents, was that for some reason my mom kept a well stocked liquor cabinet. Big fat bottles of hard alcohol. It was strange that she did this because like me, my mom can not hold her alcohol and there is this hilarious story about my mom getting drunk on long island iced teas when I was about seven. Holy shit, I have to tell you that story, it's so funny. Much funnier than this one. I will tell it in the next entry. So, my mom rarely drank and when she did, it was a glass of white zin from the box in the fridge. This was good for us because she never noticed when the bottles went down.

Up until that night, my drink of choice was whiskey. We (my sister, Mag and I) would do shots of that sometimes when my mom was home even. Just sneak down after she went to sleep and sit in the kitchen, do shots and get silly. But this night I had grabbed a bottle of gin. Thank god it was the gin and not the whiskey because I still can not drink gin to this day. That disgusting pine needley smell is forever associated in my subconscious with the liquid that almost killed me. It makes me gag. If I had been drinking whiskey, it would be that wonderful sweet whiskey smell I couldn't stand and that would be just plain sad because... I do love whiskey.

I had learned some things about alcohol by this point like, A: not supposed to drink it and B: it gets you drunk. But I swear to God, no adult or peer had ever explained to me that if you drank too much, you could actually die. I had been drunk plenty of times but this night I was on a mission. I had just been dumped.

By about my third week in school I had started dating this super cool guy. Cool is such a relative term though, isn't it? It's amazing really, how quickly one can adapt their own personal perception of cool. Let's just say, by the time this story takes place, my bangs are HUGE. This cool guy I was dating was a junior. He was a wrestler. He had a mullet. No, seriously, he had a mullet and the bottom half was pretty short BUT HE PERMED IT. I'm not kidding. I watched him get it done once; a lot of guys did this. It's hysterical. Oh god, it gets better, he drove this like teeny low rider truck that was painted really bright mint green and had some sort of air brush design on the tinted window in the back. This truck had a stereo that would blow your brains out. We listened to Milli Vannili and Vanilla Ice.

So like I said, I'm dating this super cool guy with this super cool car and he dumps me out of the blue. I'm pretty sure it was because I wouldn't have sex with him. Then he goes and tells all of his friends that we did have sex and that I was really freaked out and crying and there was blood everywhere and his dad heard me screaming (we were supposedly in his bedroom) and walked in and saw everything and I ran away and now I won't speak to him. Total fucking lie - the whole thing was a complete fabrication. I confronted him in front of his friends, screaming at him, calling him a lying dick, etc. but they all just laughed and continued to believe him. The question is, why would he tell them this kind of a story? It sounds like he raped me. He's such an idiot asshole I can barely believe it. Later, my mom dated his father. No, I'm not joking. His dad was one of two eligible bachelors in the entire town and the other one was gay, so she pretty much had no choice. My mom dated his dad seriously off and on for years and I had to spend Christmas with this guy who had told this horrible lie about me, who I hated. I drew his name for secret Santa even. I got him an International News sweatshirt. My mom eventually broke it off when she moved back to California. This was after I had gone away to college.

It was after I drank that last glass of gin that I called this cool ex-boyfriend up on the phone. Apparently, I was raving at him, telling him to come over so I could kick his ass. Then I proceeded to call everyone I knew and tell everyone I knew to call everyone they knew and and tell them to come over because I was having a party.

And they came. Oh did they ever. It turned into a full on rager or, so I'm told...

I can't remember a thing beyond the "look at me" moment. I had only what Mag could remember and the clues left behind to piece meal together the events of the evening. The house was trashed. My mom's entire liquor cabinet was cleaned out. (Of course, she never replaced it - bastards!) We had this overlook from the upstairs part of the house, how to explain this... the hallway had like a section of the wall cut out so that you could look down onto the living room which had vaulted ceilings. People were jumping from that ledge down onto the furniture. Hanging from the ledge and dropping onto the couches. Some guy had cowboy boots on and he left huge black scuff marks all over the wall from where he was hanging. He also left huge scuff marks all over the kitchen floor. It must have been on purpose that he did this, the scuffs were so bad. Someone kicked my step brother's bunny cage really hard so that the entire side of it was bent in. The bunny lived (thanks be to GOD). Someone had sex in my mom and step dad's bed. Someone had sex in my bed. Someone took my step dad's gun out of the closet and loaded it. No shots were fired. THANK GOD NO SHOTS WERE FIRED. It was really bad but it could have been much worse.

Apparently, I was walking around like a crazy lunatic the entire party. At one point I was walking around with my pants around my ankles singing "Lucky Star" with a hair brush for a microphone. This was the story circulating at school the next day anyway. When I asked Mag about this, she said she thought that it probably had happened.

Eventually, the friends that had snuck us out realized things were getting out of hand and kicked everyone out. Then they drove us back to Mag's house. They carried me down the driveway. By this time, I was mostly passed out but I would go into periodic raving fits about things which no one could understand. I was hallucinating people and talking to them. They threw me in the bathroom and ran for their lives. Mag went to bed.

At about four am, Mag's mom woke up to the sound of me screaming. I was in the bathroom yelling at the top of my lungs, "Help me! PLEASE HELP ME!" She said that it sounded like I was being murdered. She got up out of bed, came down stairs and saved my life.

I was in and out of consciousnes; throwing up all over myself but dry heaving mostly. My breathing was really irregular. I would just stop breathing and she would have to shake me and scream at me to get me to start again. I was shaking and convulsing. She hung me over the toilet and pounded on my back and made me drink water. She almost took me to the hospital but finally decided I would be okay. At some point she got Mag up out of bed and started drilling her: where had we been? what did we drink? was she drunk too? etc. She drug Mag into the bathroom where I was - saying to her, "I want you to see this. I want you to see what alcohol poisoning does to a person" Mag pretended to be unimpressed but admitted to me later that it was indeed a horrific site to behold. I looked abominable, like a dying person. She said it had a profound effect on her. Although, not quite profound enough. I've seen her wasted so many times since then, it's not even funny.

I was hung over for about three days, really, really sick. Mag's mom drove us back to my house the next day to clean up the mess from the party. I remember lying on the linoleum floor in the kitchen with two buckets and a toothbrush scrubbing the scuff marks from the cowboy boots. One bucket was full of soapy water and the other was for me to puke in. When my mom called later that day to check in on me I had to tell her what happened. There was no way to lie my way out of it. I told her that once again, I had done something horrible and that her property had been destroyed in the wake of it. At least this time she believed me.