Читать книгу Still Standing - Bucky Sinister - Страница 12

I was standing in line with a fellow 12 Stepper in a supermarket. This homeless guy gets arrested for shoplifting a bottle of vodka in his pants. Being alkies, we're fixated on the detail that it was Royal Gate vodka, the cheapest swill they carried in the store. Being alkies with a few years sober, we consider ourselves armchair psychologists.

“Look at that guy,” my friend said to me. “Poor guy's esteem is so low he doesn't think he deserves to steal anything better.”

“Nah, I don't think so,” I countered. “He's been drinking that swill for so long he has some kind of emotional loyalty to it. He actually wants that more than anything else.”

“Hey, man,” my friend yelled out to the guy being searched by a security guard. “Out of all the liquor in the store, why did you steal the Royal Gate?”

The guy looks at us like we're nuts. “Because it was on sale.”

Okay, that's nothing more than a joke, and you're free to tell it like it happened to you. But the reality is that we were one of the two addicts: the one who does whatever's cheapest and most available, or the one who does the same stuff every time.

I loved the consistency of alcohol. It's in the same place during the same hours for the same price every day. A pint bottle is the same size every time you get one. It's never cut with something else. There's always more when you run out.

I hated when the drugs ran out, trying to get more. It is fun when it shows up in front of you, when someone you know has an eightball of coke or a bag of pills or whatever, but trying to find more when that runs out was maddening to me. It would cost different prices; it would be of varying strength; I couldn't take it. I couldn't even enjoy the good stuff because I would retroactively resent every time I'd gotten lesser quality stuff in the past.

I loved the consistency of alcohol. It's in the same place during the same hours for the same price every day. There's always more when you run out.

I liked doing the same thing every day, even when it wasn't fun. It was the same, and there was something comforting about that to me. After a chaotic childhood, it was nice to feel like I had control of the world, even if that world was a fifth of whiskey and watching TV.

We love the routines of acquiring, using, and recovering. It answers so many questions in our lives. There are three things to do, and we can do them over and over.