Sobriety, Year XVI--Part I

These photos were taken a few days ago. Welcome to my present. But it's the time of year to go back. And go back we shall. Every year, I write one of these.

A little over a week ago, I walked into the Starbucks I've been visiting for my entire career of driving Limousines; about ten months...and got a surprise. A friendly girl behind the counter remembered me. From a long time ago. Stay with me, this gets interesting.

I'd been feeling sorry for myself. Nothing exceptional, just the usual: Pulling my face back in the mirror, berating myself for my weight, my job, my BMW runs a little hotter than I'd like it to, my novel isn't finished, the keyboard on my laptop is screwed up, I have to dye my hair to cover up the grey now...ad nauseum. I should be MORE, I said. I should be BETTER, I said. And then something happened.

"Olive Garden?" implored the friendly girl behind the counter.
"Yes, I worked at the Olive Garden. Glendale?"
"No, Torrance."
That one hit me like a brick in the head. Oh my god. Seventeen years ago, in the pits of my addiction, I worked at the Olive Garden in Torrance, CA as a waiter. I was in an unhealthy relationship, had a miserable life...and an addiction to Crystal Meth and alcohol that was killing me.

I'd lost my friends, my family and a job I really liked. In a few short months, Crystal Meth had taken everything.

"It's me, Ava," she said. The smiling girl behind the counter said she'd thought of me just about every day and even told her friends and family, boyfriend included, about me. She told me details that only someone who knew me could know. And I found it amazing that she recognized me. With age and weight gain, I've assumed for about ten years that I'm unrecognizable. Apparently not.

The mind is incredible in its ability to protect us from misery and misdeeds. My brain whirred slowly, opening the huge barn door I'd closed on that era of my life. Olive Garden, Torrance was a blur. I can't tell you how long I worked there, just that I had. I started getting little pieces. Like the time I almost drowned. It was a trip. Here was someone who was serving up my past along with my Venti Bold with a splash of ice cubes, while warning me that someone was about to steal my laptop (he was).

As I left the Starbucks and returned to The Beast, a gargantuan vehicle I drive for a living, I was left with the second to the last thing she said to me:

"THE LAST TIME I SAW YOU, YOUR FACE WAS ALL BUSTED UP AND YOU WERE COVERED WITH BRUISES, AND THAT'S THE LAST TIME I EVER SAW YOU."

If you read nothing else in this blog, that statement says it all. My current reality is eons away from nineteen-hundred and ninety-four. The reason my face was "all busted up" and I looked like a leopard was because my wonderful boyfriend had broken my nose, fractured my face and other neat things the night before. Meth. He beat the shit out of me and then left on a plane to El Salvador the following afternoon. Because of my drug use, I didn't dare go to the hospital.

The last time Ava saw me, I likely had Fuckhead #1's blue Hyundai, which he left in my care while he was gone, sobbing profusely about what he'd done to me the night before, telling me he was going to get professional help and wouldn't return until he was better. He returned something like a month later and "better" lasted two days.

I used to stand in the lobby of the Olive Garden with Ava, anxiously awaiting FH1 to pull into the driveway and pick me up. God knows what lies I told Ava about him to make him sound wonderful.

"You used to tell me all about how he'd fly you all over the world..." she said, smiling.

The lies I told. I wish. He was ashamed of me and never took me anywhere. One day Ava and I were walking through the Del Amo Mall. Thanks to her cracking my memory banks open, I remember this vividly: We were strolling and looking around. I was high, Ava now tells me she didn't know. FH1 used to volunteer with the developmentally disabled. Here he came, walking with a group of them. We were right at Vie de France, which would be my last job before going to rehab. Anyway, I gave him a discreet look, which he required because he was a latino ex-marine closet case...and he walked right by, pretending not to know me. I never told Ava, who probably hadn't ever gotten a good look at him. He'd never come in the restaurant or bothered to meet any of my friends. I was devastated, but kept it all on the inside. I think I successfully hid this stab in the heart from her. It was easier to paint the unrealistic picture of my prince in the blue Hyundai coming to whisk me away.

I remember putting a governor, if you will on my relationship with Ava. It wasn't because I didn't like her, I thought she was fabulous. It was because she fell into the category of people I used to hang out with, "clean" people. I now hung out with "dirty" people, sleazy, drug addicted scumbags. I didn't want to expose her to someone like me. She was plucky, smiling, fresh, all the things I used to be. At twenty-five, I was tired, hosed out, drugged out and ready to die.

I rented a nasty, roach infested apartment at PCH and the Harbor Freeway, far from everything I knew. I did it for the "$140 Move-In Special." You get what you pay for. I took one co-worker named Lorraine to see it and she wouldn't walk in past the front door. I showed it to Ava and she saw the flipside of the empty apartment with some blankets thrown on the floor of an alcove (I spent a total of about 8 nights there). She smiled and gestured, telling me what I could do with the space. This was as far as I let her into my life. Because I figured showing her an empty apartment didn't carry much risk. Ironically, the one night FH1 did stay there, we just did drugs and he broke my face and left me covered with bruises. Fond memories.

Ava, thank you for helping me realize just how good my life is today. I'm sorry I disappeared without so much as a word. I didn't think anyone cared and I'm touched that you did, and that you've thought of me so much over the years. You can't put a price on that. Cracking my head open to that time of my life wasn't bad, you helped me access some gratitude I desperately needed the day we re-connected.

I have a beautiful home, health, a BMW AND a Mercedes...I'll say "classics," an awesome husband, great pets, real friends who I can count on for anything, sanity...and I'm going to be sober sixteen fukken years! Yes, that boy was skinny. No, he didn't pull his face back in the mirror. But he was dead in every sense of the word.

I'm going to write part II of this blog in a week. Stay tuned...