There’s a pic of me and my girlfriend Cheryl. I think it was my birthday 3 years ago, I’m mocking her duckface and holding a cigarette.
It’s weird to see myself holding a smoke. Even though I smoked a lot.
I started quitting a year ago.
I was away and I haven’t really seen much of my friend’s for the last couple years, so they forget that I quit. I smoked for 30 years. A year is barely a drop in the bucket of time.
Cheryl is coming home tomorrow.
“When I get back we can have a bottle of wine” she said.
“Babe, I quit drinking, remember?”
I didn’t know my last drink was going to be my last drink.
And honestly? I don’t exactly remember what it was.
Logic dictates it was really shitty whiskey at a really shitty strip club I was working at before the end of the world.
They had $2.50 bar rail Tuesdays and I know the Tuesday prior I had gotten tipsy and weepy. So I decided not to work Tuesdays anymore.
So it was probably a shot or 2 the following week. Some time in February.
I would not have chosen that for my last libation.
And really? I should have stopped after the blackout in St. John’s where I wasted a night having a pukefest whiskey meltdown and was totally mortified.
But I didn’t.
Habits are hard and I hated the place I was working.
Hate is not a good reason to drink.
I drank more than I should have in high school. I was very violent and acted out badly. I destroyed property and friendships. I decided smearing toothpaste on a boy’s bed was a good plan. Threw a can of frozen orange juice at my other friend’s head and left a hole in the drywall. Thank fuck I missed.
That didn’t stop me.
I got really bad alcohol poisoning on a snow day during our grade 10 exams. My girlfriend’s mom was at work and we got into her cheap vodka and did clock shots. One shot every 5 minutes. We were 15 and didn’t know any better. Started at 11. By quarter after we were wasted but it hadn’t hit yet so we kept going.
I have flashes of recollection wherein we decided walking downtown was a good idea. I feel like another, more sober friend or two had shown up to help, but I honestly have no idea.
I was told I knocked over a magazine rack in one store. They called the cops. We had gotten to the other end of the street by then and I was attempting to order food before the cops showed. We ran out the back door and I almost tumbled down a 150-foot embankment into a river. I vomited on the cop’s shoes and was put in the drunk tank. My dad had to leave work to pick me up. And the cop’s shoes were waiting in a plastic grocery bag for me to clean when I finally stopped feeling sick 3 days later.
That didn’t stop me either.
I dropped out of high school on and off from 15 years old til I was 18. I gave up on school and worried about working and paying rent. I had a good job. Worked in a restaurant. Loved it, made decent money and it was kinda like a dysfunctional family.
Cue the Christmas party.
I was bartending, fairly good at it. But then I started drinking. And then I almost threw up on my boss’s girlfriend.
Then I quit.
And I quit for a long time.
I didn’t have another drink until my 24th summer.
I was in Montreal, at a fetish club and the owner’s girlfriend gave me Goldschlager on the rocks, just to sip. And I liked it. First drink I ‘d had since that Christmas party 5.5 years prior.
Amazing I held on as long as I did. I was a waitress at a strip club for a year prior, never drank. Started stripping, never drank, the boyfriend I had at the time was a raging alcoholic, didn’t drink with him. He actually got so drunk he shit the only pair of pants he brought to Montreal; they were leather too. That might have kept me from drinking now that I think about it.
Wait…
I did get insanely alcohol poisoning drunk one more time, with him, trying to keep up doing shots of Jager. I drank a bottle of the stuff. That was enough to keep me clean for a couple more years.
I never really started drinking until a few months after he and I broke up.
I was bad for a bit, then better, then bad again, then I quit dancing and drinking at the same time.
And so it went.
Couple years of a slow decline into stripping and drinking. Then cold turkey out of both, then back again.
I was never a social drinker. Just at work. And when I was settling into being single and living alone, I had a few whiskeys every now and again to take the edge off. But, I’d been living with a barely functioning alcoholic prior to that and after a year of drinking together after supper, it had become a habit. I see that now.
All habits can be broken.
I decided to try 30 days no meat, no alcohol the day I left for Florida last year. I had a tiny bit of both. But nothing to affect how much better I felt. Then I went back to Newfoundland and blacked out for the second to last time.
That should have been the end of it too.
But as it stands, I don’t know when my last drink was, and I don’t know what it was. And I don’t really care. I am just glad it’s over.
I have been actively trying to quit for over 2 years now.
I decided to stop trying and just do.
I know when my last cigarette was. I got semi peer pressured into having it and it tasted like death. Haven’t had another since. It was a Marlboro and I was looking out over the ocean after a really nice dinner with my roommate and the anarchist farmers.
And here I sit, almost 6 months later, at the end of the world. Full liquor cabinet downstairs, cartons and cartons of cigarettes and I don’t want them.
The day Wolf messaged me and said ‘okay, I quit drinking’ it was like this huge weight was lifted. And I decided to quit too.
It was the last nail in a coffin that had refused to stay shut and buried for 30 years.
And I wasn’t alone.