Lush by Kerry Cohen

Author:Kerry Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2018-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

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§ From her memoir More, Now, Again (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002) about her addiction to Ritalin.

Eleven

I quit drinking for a week.

Not too long after Bob and Alex had their dalliance in the car, I left for ten days to teach at the low-residency MFA program where I was faculty. Low-residency means that the faculty and students meet for ten days, twice a year, to teach and learn from workshops and plan for the coming semester. One of my colleagues and I shared a house, a beautiful short-term rental that was owned by an artist couple. The house was all blacks and pretty greens and ceramics. The backyard had a pond with adorable koi that came rushing to the edge when people came by, hoping for food. I wanted to appreciate it. I intended to. But by the third day, we had completely trashed the place with empty wine bottles and beer cans and coffee cups overflowing with ashes and cigarette butts.

I kept thinking someone doing better than me deserves to be staying here, because I was not doing okay at all. I woke every day around eleven or noon. I made coffee. Sometimes I showered. I thought often of exercising. That would be good! I didn’t eat. Around one in the afternoon, I started drinking and smoking. I avoided texting Bob who, when I did text, answered with one or two words. Very rarely did he contact me first. He was angry with me because by his own choice, to appease me, he had asked Alex not to join him on a camping trip while I was away. I felt like I was being punished, but for what, I didn’t understand. Wasn’t he the one who had cheated on me? So what if I drank too much! Couldn’t he have some compassion that I was doing my best? The pain between us was still so raw. The awareness of that was like a clammy film on my skin. I buried my days at the residency in wine and cigarettes.

One night at a bar, I stepped outside to smoke, and a fed up twentysomething bouncer followed me and grabbed the wine out of my hand.

“Hey, fuck you!” I yelled. Then, to my friends, “Fuck this place.”

We moved on to the next place, but when one o’clock in the morning hit, a couple of servers told us we all had to get out.

“I can’t finish my wine?”

“Not unless you want to get arrested.”

“What is wrong with this town?” I yelled. I slammed down my drink and stomped from the bar.

Another night, we gathered in the backyard of the rental house, and I stood up, pointed my finger at one of our students, and verbally destroyed him for suggesting gay men were female inside.

I was losing it, one drunken day at a time. Not quite what the AA people had in mind for that maxim.

By the fifth day, I woke in my room, shaking and weak. Briefly, I

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