Across three successive Fourth of July weekends in my early 20s, I drank until I succeeded in completely losing myself. By that third Independence Day, I had a DUI and not much else. Those three holiday weekends added up to a sad, pointless three-act play. None of it stopped me from being a career alcoholic well into my thirties, though. I was in grad school at Arizona State, living a second childhood. When you’re from Ohio, just living in the desert was an endless vacation. Palm trees and pool parties. Year after year, my friends were getting progressively younger and my studies were taking a backseat to all of the drinking I apparently hadn’t accomplished in my undergrad years. I hadn’t gotten it out of my system. I was 1,800 miles away from home and, best of all, free.
Or so I thought.
Fourth of July weekends were the perfect backdrop for me to really let loose with my drinking. There were countless apartment-complex barbecues and poolside get-togethers to choose from. No one was judging. Better yet, no one was paying attention. It was the perfect secular drinking holiday. No churches required. It was simply summer’s midway point, so the people around me seemed to be kicking it up a notch, as if to really squeeze every last drop out. Looking back, this was just my brain telling me to really bring my drinking “A” game. Summers were also brutally hot in Phoenix—the sort of brick-oven heat that blasted through my body as quickly as I tried destroying brain cells. The heat seemed to do something awful to a Midwesterner like me: it kick-started something dark inside me that I’d spend the next fifteen years trying to shut down.
Almost as quickly as I arrived at ASU, I was drunk-networking without even knowing it. I spent the better part of the year auditioning drinking buddies. I made sure to have a bunch of them, too. That way, I could always count on someone to go out on any given Tuesday night. By the time that first Fourth of July rolled around, I had a lot of drinking dates. I wasn’t visiting friends—I was just visiting a half-dozen excuses to drink. I don’t even remember eating at the parties—I just remember putting down Fat Tires and Negra Modelos in the shade. I went to three different parties that weekend and ended up having to apologize twice afterward (I apparently got into an intense, belligerent argument with a woman who kept insisting that REM was getting worse as a band). Later that night, I accidentally kicked over someone’s indoor decorative water feature. By and large, not the worst Fourth of July weekend I’d have.
The second Fourth of July is when shit got real. A bunch of us decided to go rafting, so we rented some inner tubes. We even bought an extra one for our cooler of ice, booze and beer. We spent all day lazing on the Salt River, slowly drifting past sun-blasted canyons and cliffs. Amazingly, I wasn’t getting all that drunk. I was hydrating with the beer. It was just kind of normal. The people around me were amateurs, though. Still, I managed to get an epic sunburn that took two full days to show up—the kind where you can feel the sour sting of it deep in your cells before it even starts turning red. I was tired after four hours in 110-degree heat but I wasn’t done. The Fourth of July was a call to arms, goddammit. My alcoholic brain told me I had to keep that magic momentum going. By that afternoon, I’d thawed out all the frozen parts of my better judgment and it was just a mad river of bad decisions after. Two hours later, I found myself sitting on someone’s roof, watching all of the fireworks displays in the valley at once. All around us, they were going off. I was perched on a chair two stories up, completely wasted. I’d later pass out on an inflatable alligator in the pool. Thanks goodness someone coaxed me to the couch so I didn’t drown.
The following Independence Day weekend, I’d somehow earned a degree with honors. That said, I was drinking every day and didn’t have a career. I was 25 and lost. The party was over. So my dad flew out to Arizona to retrieve me. A welcome-back party in Ohio was planned with all my friends for the Fourth of July. I attended that welcome-back party with the sort of show-off gusto that only true alcoholic assholes can muster. I demonstrated all kinds of new skills. I asked people if they were daring me to drink tequila straight from the bottle (nobody was) and I did. I poured shots and then drank all the extra ones nobody asked for. I slammed beers. I drank margarita mix. I spouted nonsense and talked as if my life had been somehow amazingly better in Arizona. Being in Ohio was just a temporary delay before I went back, I lied. I drank more. And then I tried driving. People hid my keys, which simply pissed me off. I finally found the keys when nobody was paying attention and, minutes later, I scored a DUI. The true brass ring. In three Fourth of July weekends, I’d finally become a certified drunk.
But I didn’t stop.
What’s ironic is that my true alcoholic drinking was actually done in private—not in the jackass-showmanship I trotted out for the Fourth. Holiday drinking was just collateral damage, much like when that robbery in the movie Heat goes sideways and the shooting spills out into the streets of LA. Even after I got married and had kids, I didn’t slow down—I just hid it better. Neighbors might have noticed I was drinking beer all weekend long, but they certainly didn’t notice that I’d added vodka to my soda bottle while I watched the parade with our kids. Later, whenever the fireworks went off, I was so out of it that each concussion screamed through my wine-soaked nerves and set my teeth on edge. It was draining.
My first sober Fourth of July was a welcome reprieve from all the planning, scurrying around and secret-sipping I had to do. It wasn’t exhausting anymore. I could enjoy it. The Fourth may be a celebration of our country’s independence, but it’s also (for me) a quiet celebration of how I’m no longer owned by alcohol. Each and every Fourth is now a reminder of just how far I’ve come and how I’m truly, genuinely free.
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