When my alarm went off today, I opened my eyes one at a time, very carefully. So far, no pain. I eased up onto one elbow and waited for a hobnailed boot to slam into my skull from behind. Didn’t happen. Slowly, I sat up straight. Head felt fine. Stomach felt fine. Liver hadn’t lawyered up. A pod of throwing stars hadn’t exploded outward from my brain stem.

Hobey marched over to the end of the bed, hopped up onto it, and yowled officiously at me to come on and fluff up his kibble already. When I yawned and informed him that he could either eat the unfluffed kibble and like it or find another cranky spinster to live with, I knew I could form complete sentences in English again, without needing the help of every muscle in my body to summon the words and force them out in the proper order.

See, when my alarm went off yesterday, said alarm belonged to my cell phone, went off at the ungodly hour of 7 AM, and woke me from a cramped slumber in the back seat of my car. I used to sack out in Shadow’s back seat all the time, back in the day — I’d go to a party, decide I shouldn’t drive after all, make merry, and curl up for a few Zs until the sun came up, and then I’d wriggle into the front seat and drive off for a cup of coffee, and it suited me fine. I could shake that off, back in the day. Now shaking it off takes the whole day.

Years ago, when the world of alcohol-related debauchery spread itself before me dazzling and new, I could — and did — go out and have a few beers, go somewhere else and have a few more beers, rip an enormous bong hit that realigned a couple of outer planets, forget my name and which hand I wrote with and where I lived, sit on a couch and stare at a chest of drawers that I just knew would wait until everyone else had left the room and then pounce on me, listen with amusement to two girls in the doorway who really thought someone ought to check me for a pulse, get my shit together at three in the morning finally, walk across campus, fall into bed with birds beginning to chirp and leaves in my hair, hear the alarm go off at seven-thirty, get up, put on a sports bra and sneakers and whatnot, throw my hair into a ponytail, stretch, run a couple of miles with my roommate, cool down, come back to our room, shower, dress, gather my books, go to class, conjugate Spanish verbs for an hour, go to another class, participate in a discussion of women’s suffrage for an hour, go to another class, take notes on B.F. Skinner for an hour, go to lunch, and start planning that night’s poorly advised beer-centric fun over soup and a cheese sandwich. And I mean to tell you that I felt fine. I didn’t even drink coffee in those days. Didn’t miss class! Didn’t own aspirin! Didn’t feel a thing! Bright sunlight? No problem! Loud noises? No problem! Proving I’d done the reading by comparing the Green Knight to Milton’s Lucifer? No problem!

Yesterday? Problem.

Yesterday, I had to hang backwards out of the car to loosen my neck up so that I could face forward without positioning my shoulder up my ass. Yesterday, I took seven Advil before noon. Yesterday, I vowed aloud that never again would I try to use a giant jug of windshield wiper fluid for a pillow. Yesterday, I thought I might die, and the thought of dying filled me not with grief and dread but with a gentle, peaceful yearning for nothingness and quiet and dark and a nice soft coffin with a nice soft pillow and the nice soft white noise of bugs and worms and dirt and eternal dusk, and I crawled into bed at my parents’ house and murmured, “Okay, Death. Get it while it’s hot.”

Yesterday, trying to find my right shoe, I had the Danny-Glover-in-Lethal Weapon I’m-too-old-for-this-shit moment I’d hoped would never come, but come it did. It’s official. I am in fact too old for this shit.

My body can’t shake off a hangover like it used to. Maybe it’s because I don’t go out as much now, so I’ve gotten out of shape, but I never even used to get hangovers, for God’s sake. Later, I’d get a hangover, take three aspirin and drink a Gatorade, and feel fine. Now I need an Alka-Seltzer before I go to bed, nine hours of sleep, another Alka-Seltzer when I get up, twenty ounces of black coffee, a buttered bagel, a shower hot enough to melt steel, and no important human contact until nightfall. And I don’t just get a hangover now, either. I get a hangover, and then at around four or five in the afternoon, the hangover gets a hangover of its own, and all three of us sit in my apartment with the shades drawn and watch TV and sip water. I don’t have time for that. I have a site to run. I have an advice column to write. Negotiating a labor dispute with my own kidneys throws off my schedule for days. It’s not worth it.

It’s sad, in a way, but not because of the drinking itself — I’ve had enough boozy adventures to live off the fumes of reminiscence for the rest of my life, I think, and if I had to give up alcohol tomorrow, I could live with it. It’s the planning element that sort of bothers me. If I want to go out and hoist a few pints and wonder soggily where the time went and wander out of some pit on Stanton Street at dawn, I have to set aside the next day to recover, and it’s not the recovery; it’s that I have to plan for it, that I can’t just let This Is Going To Make A Great Story Someday, But Right Now I Have To Wash A Stranger’s Vomit Off Of My Ankles happen to me.

It seems like I write a lot of columns with that theme lately, mourning my youth at the ripe old age of 29, and I don’t know for sure where that wistfulness comes from. Maybe it’s because I don’t feel like I know the way any better than I did back then, but back then, I could just go every which way and see what developed. Now, I feel like I’d better have a plan — where to go, when, with whom, how to get there, a proper hotel room with a proper bed and a proper pillow — and I guess I miss the provisional aspect of my former lives.

Sitting on the lawn on Saturday with Bean and the Couch Baron as the dark came down, watching the ghosts walk by with babies over their shoulders, I thought about the nights I’d spent lying back on my elbows on various lawns, watching a game of Beer Fris, not thinking or worrying about anything. Then I woke up yesterday morning to overcast skies — thank God, because in strong sunlight I think I would quite literally have melted into the ground — and cleared the cobwebs and started to head out of town on Washington Road, and I remembered a similarly cloudy day ten years ago.

Peg and I both have boy tragedies unfolding and we want to escape, so we decide to blow town and hide out at her parents’ giant house down the shore. We drive down separately because I have to come back in a day or two and turn in an art history paper, but Peg doesn’t know the directions to write out; she only knows how to get there by feel, so I follow her in that big drug-dealer-y Mercedes of hers. It’s one of those May days in New Jersey where it’s not exactly cool but not exactly warm, either, and so humid and lush on the county roads that the air is almost blue. Peg drives way too fast, and the sky hangs really low to the ground getting ready to rain, and whenever she goes over a hill far ahead of me it looks like she’s just going to get picked up by the clouds. I step on the gas to keep up with her. We cruise through a chute of overhanging branches twenty miles over the speed limit and come out onto a little plain of farmland, and Peg slows down to let me catch up a bit, and I don’t have a thing on my mind except the road and the taillights ahead. Everything behind us is frozen in place, waiting for our return, like two movie stars in a crane shot.

Waiting for a light on Route 206 yesterday morning, I remembered that day so clearly, that feeling that the world would wait for me to figure it out. It won’t, as it turns out, but I keep trying — staying up late, looking for a sign. I never thought the sign would read “ginger ale, you idiot,” but perhaps that’s the point.

June 3, 2002

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