Alex

My cue to disengage should have been the minute “I’m a flight attendant” came out of his mouth.  Flight attendants are trouble; period.  I; however, didn’t really have any expectations and was simply enjoying the attention.  He was beautiful.  My complete cup of tea.  Handsome.  Flirty.  And his sidekick was hilarious – I may have liked her more.  Her and her exposed twatt. 

So, after Martuni’s he called for an Uber to come get us.  Ii didn’t come up for like 15 minutes.   While he fought with the driver over the phone, we stood at the corner and Hilary and I sang Amy Winehouse.  She’s a huge fan apparently.  The Uber wasn’t coming so we cancelled it and we walked up to the Mint and took my car.  The minute that we get into the car, the “flat tire” signal came on.  Really bitch?  Fuck.  I pulled over just to check the tires, but none were flat. 

The divine parking goddess understood my distress and saved me a spot right outside Badlands. Dude didn’t want to take his coat in so he left it in my car.  The bar was crazy packed.  They removed the dance floor corrals from before, so now the dance floor and the mob sort of expanded.  Everyone was drunk.  It’s really hard to go to places like this when you are drunk.

We got in line to get in, it was already like 1:15.  Paid our $3 cover.   Somehow, the minute we walked in, Hilary disappeared.  I was sort of looking for her, but dude was like “don’t’ worry about it.” – must be some form of unspoken BFF coding that had told him that she had left. 

Alex and I danced.  We kissed.  I could tell he was eyeing the other boys.  There were plenty of cute young drunk boys.  He kissed good.   I was simply enjoying just that.  Then he leans over, after two more beers which mostly ended up on the floor, and he asks me “What are you trying to do?”  I understood the question, but I pretended that I didn’t understand because it kind of caught me off guard.  He clarified his inquiry with “Are you trying to be a whore or are you trying to be good?” 

Part of this new sobriety cycle for me includes abstinence from poppers, pot and promiscuous sex.  I need to solidify my being.  I don’t need some external essence to be unbalancing  my focus.  With that said, if he had taken me home, I would have gotten naked and probably sucked him off or something… because you know how our morals and standards all get thrown out the window when we meet a hot man.   I mean, even at one point he took a long chug of his beer and he leaned closer to me and I thought he was going to kiss me and share the beer, and  I was like… Oh fuck it.  It didn’t happen, but the reality is that I probably would not have pushed him away with “I’m sober”, which I had already communicated earlier.

Anyhow, so I solidified my stance and I told him that I wasn’t trying to be a whore.  So, he kind of rolled his eyes a little and responded by telling me that he just got out of a long term relationship and wasn’t looking for anything serious; but that I was attractive.  Ummmm… Thank you?  He went to abandon his empty beer glass and I figured I’d wait for him on the dance floor.  He didn’t return.  I saw him from a distance talking to a cute guy.  Then they started grinding nearby.  This took no more than 30 seconds.  A few minutes later, the bar is getting ready to close and the lights come on.  Since I still had his jacket, I figured I’d hand it over… I should have kept that bitch!!  It was a nice jacket 

I stopped by and told him that we needed to get his jacket and to meet me outside.  So, I exited the bar  and stood there waiting for his ass while these packs of young queenie black gays were trying to pick fights with each other and the bouncers were trying to herd us down the sidewalk.  When he finally came out, he was with a different boy – cute, too young and totally drunk.  I gave him his coat, told him I wish Hilary had made it home safely and he ensured me she was fine and that he would send me video.  Video of what?  It was awkward and meanwhile, the little twink is standing by all territorial and shit. 

 

So, I got into my car with its “flat tire” dashboard light on.  Man.  I pulled off on Market outside Wholefoods to check the air pressure.  My left driver’s seat tire was at 24/32,  so I pumped it up – while some crazy cracked out person was yelling at me in gibberish and I could not understand a word he said.  Although, I think he was just really drunk and he had missed the BART and he was trying to find out if I was going over the bridge, but I didn’t even try to understand nothing.  I just wanted to get home.  So, I finished up and got back on the road, with my ego and my feelings being held together by the strings of the symphony. 

To end this story, while we were walking to the car, a homeless man passed us and Alex asked Hilary if she would fuck him for 100 dollars.  She said no.  So he raised it a little, she still said no.  Then he said, “fuck I’d do it for $20”.  Lol lol lol.  So, I said “I got a dollars!!”.  And we laughed and Alex said no, not for a buck.  And Hilary replied with “Why not?  You gonna do it anyways, might as well make a dollar!!”   That was funny; but I guess that was the moment when the night’s events were kind of foretold to me, so that when they happened, I wasn’t really surprised.  Maybe I was going to get fucked, for free – and I ruined that possibility by respecting myself… and I’m glad I did.  I’m beyond all this now, I am too “almost forty” to keep on playing the game. 

I feel bad that I abandoned you at Martuni’s.  That’s bullshit.  And I’m sorry.  I kind of lost my head a little. I was having and I wanted the night to continue.  But seriously Jose, I mean, they were both 27 and drunk as fuck.  I am 39 and sober.  Like, what real dynamic was there? 

 

I drank.

There are Two truths to be shared.  One:  I wanted to get vulnerable up on my soapbox and put this out there before word got out and you heard it from some another source.   Two:  I had been looking for an excuse to do it, or someone to enable it.   For the past two months, I had been surrounding myself with people, places and context that would facilitate and encourage me to. 

I drank last Sunday.  Two beers.  If you ask me what motivated me to do so, I would say that I don’t know, that it was entirely a conscious decision to drink and that it was uneventful and totally under “control”.  But in reality, all of the activity and turn of the clockworks and the grinds took place behind the scene, in a dark little place where the evil resides and orchestrates its wrong doings – deep, deep in the brain and the heart, or somewhere in between.   (However, I do know that the emotional stir began when my boss got unexpectedly terminated back in February; this event became the event that would snowball into a giant unmanageable emotional avalanche.)

Sunday, April  17th, was both a good and a bad day.  Good because the weather was gorgeous and I was in the company of good people.  Bad day because I opened up a tinny tinny door that leads to a “slippery slope”.  My first response was “eh”, you know.  It was nothing.  But I felt it; I felt the all-too-familiar evil stir from its slumber.  However little the alcohol may have been, it fueled it – it gave it the power it needed to begin to rise.  I heard it ask me for more.  I felt it stretching its stiff body.  I heard its bones pop as he began to move.  The only two things that kept from engaging it were my ego and the other alcoholic next to me who I watched transform right before my very eyes as he swallowed drink after drink – our conversation went from a “Hello” to hearing him describe the addiction-damaged relationship he upholds with his wife, which was literally a regurgitation of my very own story with my ex. 

So, now the challenge for me is to not only start from scratch with the calendar count of my days sober, but to take my sobriety journey to a deeper level.  It’s one thing to quit drinking and remain abstinent to it, and it’s another thing to dig deeper into understanding why you drank the way you did, and why you did the things you did and why you got the way you did when you got drunk.   And so, the next stage is for me to grab a better understanding of that underlying layer of the other me.

 So, here I am.  Day two of my new sobriety.  Do I get a chip? 

April 1st 2011 - It was no joke.

On April 1st of 2011, my then-partner and  I closed escrow on the house in Concord.  It was no joke.  A few weeks later after that we would be totally moved out of our apartment in San Francisco and supposed to be starting our new lives in our new home.  We had so many plans and had made so many resolutions to each other and ourselves - we wanted to change.  We knew shit between us was not okay and probably saw the house purchase as an opportunity to start a new - but in reality, it was more of a way of attempting to run away from our problems, not realizing that going to such a far away place from the city would only magnify our emotional states.  I know that I began drinking a lot more and I also started staying in the city a lot with friends; it was my way of dealing with the loss of San Francisco, but what I didn't see was that in this process I was also neglecting my home and my partner and we grew apart very quickly.  A year later, we separated and I set up on this other journey that seems to have started yesterday but that truly began 4 years ago.  Where did time go?  Where am I now?  Who am I?  Why am I here?  Where do I go from here?  Time has lapsed in such a way that I almost can't  account for it, because I really don't know were I has gone.  My ex is a total new person whom I can barely recognize and to whom I have little in common with.  Five years with him and then four without him and I still think about, even though separating was probably the best thing to do... You know, people find themselves in relationships that are simply convenient, not necessarily romantic or happy; but simply... functional.  I don't know what my relationship with my ex was.  Sometimes I want to label it as convenient, because it's easy to find some rational that justifies the failure; but when I allow myself to dig deeper, I remember the happy and meaningful moments and I then I have to be honest with myself and accept that I loved him dearly; more than I ever said and more than word could capture.  I have a history of self sabotaging, and I know that a huge part of my relationship failing had to do with my working to ruin it, because "I don't deserve goodness in my life."

Well, I didn't really know what I wanted to write.  But I needed to write something.  I wanted to capture that fact that I've been aware of the date.  My five year anniversary in this house.  Can you believe it?  I simply do not know what to make of it.