Читать книгу Leave the Light On - Jennifer Storm - Страница 16

2 LYRICAL RANTS

KATHY WAS, HANDS-DOWN, MY ABSOLUTE BEST FRIEND throughout my early twenties. We met during high school when I had a job at a local low-end clothing store for teens. She was my manager and was a couple of years older than I was. We both had a love of partying that we recognized in each other during early Saturday morning openings when we would both stumble in hung over as hell. We would glance up at each other and exchange the same glassy-eyed, nauseated expression, which made us fast best friends. We attended rival high schools, so we didn’t know many of the same people. It was nice to have a friend outside my inner circle.

Ours was the annoying kind of friendship where if we weren’t in each other’s immediate company, we were glued to the phone talking endlessly about anything and everything at all hours. The only time we would break from conversation was to shower before meeting up with one another, and I am pretty convinced that if I’d had a phone in the shower, we would have been talking then too. It got so bad that finally my parents got me my own phone line in the house. Kathy also had her own line, so that freed us up to talk incessantly. We talked about everything girls our age talked about: clothing, fashion, boys, friends, relationships, work, dreams, etc. We analyzed everything together and wouldn’t have dreamed of leaving the house to meet up without getting verbal acceptance of what we were wearing that night. At that time, she was the closest thing I’d ever had to a sister. We trusted each other with everything in the way only young girls do.

I was never physically attracted to her, as I had been with some of my other best friends. Not because she wasn’t a beautiful girl, but because it just wasn’t there for me. She was truly my best friend and that was it. We started hanging out every weekend, then eventually that began to bleed into the week, and then we were partying hard-core all the time. Kathy and I could party it up just as hard as any guy we knew. We held our own in any situation and got hammered together to the point of oblivion.

One time we decided to hit an all-day beer-tasting festival, where you buy a twelve-ounce glass and walk from booth to booth trying a variety of ales and microbrew beers. It was like a candy store for an alcoholic. Although beer was my main drink of choice, mainly because of accessibility and cost, I wasn’t a huge beer fan, and I had never really ventured beyond the cheap shit we could afford to drink in high school. When we wanted to really be tacky and tie one on, we traded up for a forty-ounce malt liquor, with Crazy Horse or Colt 45 among my favorites. So this was new territory for me, and I was excited! We arrived around 11:00 a.m., about an hour after I had woken up, and we bought our little glasses. I was pissed that they only had twelve-ounce glasses; I mean, who the hell drank from a twelve-ounce glass unless it was to do a shot of something? I never went for anything below sixteen ounces, even when I was drinking wine. Yeah, I was that kind of classy drunk; I drank my white zinfandel from a sixteen-ounce beer stein. I was hot—not!

We started hitting booths like kids at Halloween, going from booth to booth and sucking down beer, barely tasting the bitter microbrews we were slurping down. After all, we weren’t connoisseurs there to savor the aroma and taste; we were there to get drunk quickly and cheaply. The booths were set up in a circle, with about twenty different breweries present. Intermixed with the breweries were traditional German food vendors serving bratwursts and sausages. That meant for a vegetarian like me there was nothing to eat, which was just as well because I was filling up on beer quickly and the yeast was beginning to bloat my stomach.

In the middle of the food and beer, a makeshift stage featured several bands playing throughout the day. By 1:00 p.m., Kathy and I had hit every booth and were dancing our drunken asses off in the middle of the festival to a cover band belting out “Sweet Caroline.” Kathy and I were infamous for getting extremely loaded at clubs, pushing our way to the front of the stage like mad groupies and dancing around like absolute fools. We were bouncing off people all around us, but most of them were just as loaded as we were so they didn’t mind. We began our own mini-mosh pit while singing at the top of our lungs: “Sweet Caroline, badda dum, good times never seemed so good. So good! So good!” The band ended its set after the song, and Kathy and I collapsed onto the stage with our arms around one another in fits of laughter.

The crowd began to disperse back to the various booths around us. The band’s crew was pulling equipment off the stage, and I was shamelessly flirting with a stage crew dude when I heard Kathy’s drunken voice boom out of the speaker next to my head. She sang, “Sweet Caroline, badda dum, Kathy is feeling mighty fine, badda dum, and Storm’s right behind, badda dum.” Kathy had a gift for twisting song lyrics to fit the situation we were in. These lyrical rants always sent me into hysterics, and this time was no different. I was drunk on my ass, lying on the stage, holding my stomach, rolling around, and laughing so hard that tears were streaming out of my eyes. After a verse or two, one of the band crew came up to us and politely removed the microphone from Kathy, who slurred a couple of choice swear words at him before finally giving up and collapsing down next to me.

That was typical of our friendship—we were always hammered and always making asses out of ourselves. We spent countless hours in front of the mirror at home making sure each strand of hair was in place and our makeup was done to perfection, and we were always dressed to the nines; but no matter how hard we tried to keep it together, every night we would end up total messes—drunk and falling around, getting as dirty as kindergartners on a playground at recess. The next day we would call one another and compare beer-induced wounds. Kathy was fond of wearing skirts with stockings and would always wind up with a big blowout in her knee from stumbling to the ground. We would often sit in the car outside nightclubs burning a big bowl before entering the club. When we got out of the car, I would look over and she would be gone. I would hear giggling coming from her side of the car and stumble over only to find her lying on the ground after busting her ass on the way out of the vehicle.

She was a riot, and I loved hanging out with her. She was crazy, and she didn’t hold back at all. She loved her booze and loved her pot, which gave us incredible but shaky common ground to stand on. Kathy never did coke and wasn’t into that scene at all, so that was where we differed a lot. I never told her about how much coke I did. Even when I was high around her, she never knew because she was always just as fucked up on beer or pot. At the nightclubs we went to, I sneaked off and did lines of coke off the toilet in the bathroom and then rejoined Kathy at the bar just in time to slam back another lemon drop, her favorite shot. She was never the wiser, and after she left the bar to head home at closing time, I left to hang out with a different crowd. While Kathy got up to go to work the next day, I was still out partying and blowing off work.

I tried to maintain my friendship with her after I moved to State College. She came to see me in the hospital before I left for rehab, and I knew she couldn’t put words together to explain how weird she felt as she saw my bandages on my wrists, but she never judged me. She just wished me luck and said, “Do whatever you gotta do to get better, kid.”

I would see Kathy on my frequent weekend trips to Allentown, but things were weird because she was still out partying. Although I would meet up with her at the local hangouts, it just didn’t quite fit me anymore. I really tried to go to bars and pretend I was having fun with everyone. I would have moments of good conversation or a couple good laughs, but they were always followed by my friends reaching the point of intoxication, and then something in the room would change for me. It was as though with each shot and beer they drank, my friends’ souls and spirits would slowly leave their bodies. They would appear strange to me, slurring their speech and saying random things that made no sense, yet they expected that I would laugh or respond. But I just couldn’t “get it up” for them to laugh on cue. There was no verbal connection whatsoever. I was left feeling blank and hollowed in their presence.

The worst was when people would stumble up to me and ramble on and on about how proud they were of me for being able to be there and not drink. In their own drunken stupors, they would gush over me about how noble and amazing it was that I wasn’t drinking. It always made me feel completely uncomfortable and speechless. I usually just nodded, gave a big smile, and said, “Thanks,” while I was screaming inside.

That happens still to this day every time I attempt to masquerade out in the land of drunks, which I have done less and less as the years of recovery have piled up in my life. But when I do, it always strikes me as the most hypocritical of all compliments.

Sometimes I wanted to blend in so badly, to just be what the world defines as “normal,” that I did some stupid shit that could have gotten me in serious trouble.