Few pairings in life are as sweet as alcohol and sex. They go together like chocolate and peanut butter, like coffee and cream, like anal and cocaine. Okay, maybe sweet isn’t the right word but you get what I am saying. I’m an alcoholic and there is no doubt about that but it could be argued that my drug of choice is sex. Because no matter how thirsty I was, I never interrupted an evening of carnal passion—or even mediocre pity sex—to make a run to the liquor store but I have certainly left enough bars to go fuck a stranger.
Speaking of strangers, it’s hard to talk about sex and alcohol without addressing the phenomenon of sleeping with people you don’t know. Plus it’s just one of my favorite topics. The lack of intimacy involved in anonymous sex is a beautiful thing but, much like LSD and Ben and Jerry’s, you really shouldn’t do it past a certain age.
Of course, there is no time machine more efficient than booze. As my dear friend Mary Patterson says, if you drink enough, you will get beer goggles for yourself. After six Jack and Gingers, age, like everything, is irrelevant and blurry.
Now, I know it’s slightly different for men. You guys aren’t plagued by countless walks of shame with all that mascara and lipstick smeared down your face for the morning joggers to gawk at. And even if you are, it doesn’t seem to bother you that much. Men don’t tend to shudder when they smell the familiar combo of Taco Bell mild sauce and some guy’s balls (unless you are straight that is). Women, on the other hand, have been taught to feel deep shame around our sexual exploits—unless you were raised by my mother, who always told me that virginity was something I should get rid of so I could start living my life.
But one of the gifts of sobriety is that once we take off our rosé-colored glasses, we don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore. Random sex with strangers kind of falls by the wayside—or it should. It didn’t really work that way for me. Anonymous one-night stands were what I loved, what I lived for—they were my reasons for getting up in the morning, especially if I was in some weird guy’s bed. Casual encounters weren’t part of some collective collateral damage from my drinking; they were arguably my reasons for drinking. You can thus imagine my dismay when I realized how unpleasant it was to sleep with a stranger without being drunk. So I did what any newly sober alcoholic would do and I refused to accept it.
Thirteen days after my five-year sober anniversary, my best friend Jenna came to visit from San Francisco. Since Jenna had been my adolescent partner in crime in Boston for all things sex, drugs and rock and roll in the hay since we were 14 years old, anticipating her visit felt like getting ready for Halloween. I’d pull out the trunk full of my old slutty clothes, scour my make-up supply for anything with glitter and buy condoms. It was understood that when Jenna came to visit, things were going to get kicked up a notch. Forget all my conservative Sober Sally friends in LA; Jenna liked to party Boston style—which was all in, all night and unprotected (the condoms were merely a formality).
But as old habits die hard, new ones—like your best friend joining Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous—seem just as difficult to adapt to or even remember. But she was quick to remind me of this fact when I picked her up at the airport dressed in a patent leather body suit.
“Please don’t tell me you are taking me to an S & M party,” she said. “I really can’t deal with that right now.”
You would think that being in the middle of your sex inventory would make a gal want to break out a whip and ball gag but apparently, Jenna didn’t feel like doing much except eating Fudgsicles and reading my tarot cards. Still grossly uncomfortable with my own sobriety and the “lady like” behavior that was supposed to go with it, I felt myself trying to crawl out of my own skin. I needed to do something.
“Listen,” I said, “I am not saying we need to reenact my 21st birthday and strap a dick on until someone calls the fire department, I am just saying maybe we could pop into this dive bar down the street that serves Diet Rockstar and see what’s doing. I mean, I don’t drink and you don’t fuck, how bad could it get?”
“If it’s not going to get bad, what’s the point?” she asked, completely outsmarting me.
“To see if we can do it! Just go to a bar, enjoy the atmosphere and have a good time,” I said, realizing at that moment how desperate I was to have to lay my addict manipulation tactics on that thick. I mean how selfish and horny was I to put my best friend’s recovery program in jeopardy just so I could take advantage of a loophole in mine? I had assumed she and I would do what we always did and act out together but with her sexual sobriety pulling the plug, it highlighted just how enslaved I was to my own disease.
But thank God, I didn’t have to beg. She agreed to throw on a simple feather boa and check out the local scene.
You would think someone with half a decade of sobriety wouldn’t still have a favorite bar—but I did. It wasn’t because I planned on drinking again; it was because I refused to let go of my old life. I knew I couldn’t drink—countless mornings spent trying to figure out where I was, how I got there and where my left shoe was proved that—but I sure as shit wasn’t going to throw in my dozens of right-shoe only stilettos for a Snuggie and a long-haired tabby. I would fight that fight to the bitter end.
The interior of the bar was, well, I really couldn’t tell you because it was so dark—just the way I liked it. There is no better way for a sober person to feel not sober than to make her eyes fight to try and see what is in front of her. It was perfect. After grabbing two energy drinks, Jenna and I found our way to a booth and settled in. I did my best to make it seem like I was upholding our agreement: just two old friends grabbing a drink and enjoying the atmosphere of a super dark, rapey bar. Nothing to see here boys, just a couple of former wild and crazy gals perfectly satisfied with each other’s company.
In Los Angeles, you typically have to bat men over the head and drag them to your table to get them to talk to you. I am not sure what it is about sunshine and bumper-to-bumper traffic that causes the insecure men of the world to flock here—or maybe we just weren’t as hot as we thought we were. Regardless, we were certainly surprised when these two moderately attractive guys (in pitch black lighting mind you) began to hover around our table.
“Do you guys want to sit down?” I asked without thinking. I looked at Jenna and she didn’t flinch.
As soon as they slid into our booth, I could see that they were at least five years younger than us. Not my usually cup of tea but when you are trying to fill a black hole inside your soul, it’s amazing how much this kind of thing doesn’t matter.
“So what’s your story?” Jenna asked, using her standard opening line. It was always a cute way to invite men to talk about themselves but also be clever and funny if they had it in them. These men—sorry, boys—did not. Not only did they have the combined wit of a doorknob but they didn’t appear to have lived much of a life before this evening. One was from Tulsa and the other was from some place I missed because I had mentally fallen asleep from boredom.
“I work at UPS,” said the blonde one sitting to my left. This perked me right up.
“Seriously?” I said, “like you wear the brown uniform and everything?”
“Even the socks are brown,” the other one said and they both cracked up. Clearly, the whole brown sock phenomenon had been quite the side splitter between them. Jenna and I exchanged a look of shared pity for this pathetic pair. We couldn’t believe we were in the entertainment capital of the world talking to the two most uninteresting humans God had created since 1981. But one thing was for sure; we were going to sleep with them.
After a couple of 16 oz. diet rocket fuels and what seemed like six hours but was probably 45 minutes, we gracefully cajoled our undynamic duo into a cab.
It was all fun and games until we got to their apartment. The place looked exactly how you might expect a person’s living quarters to look right before he hung himself. The carpeting was that old harvest gold color from 1970s and was matted down and splattered with so many stains you’d think it was inhabited by an epileptic with a coffee addiction. The overhead lighting was harsh and seemed florescent, like we were about to be interrogated by God about why we hated ourselves so much. Their furnishings consisted of a couple of beanbags, a milk crate and one mattress on the floor with just a towel on it. The sober visualization gave me instant acid reflux.
Had it always been this bad and we had just been too drunk to notice or had we just simultaneously hit a bottom the way we once simultaneously took the Branson’s twins virginity that summer after our freshman year of college? Whatever was happening here, it wasn’t good but neither I, with my five years of half-assed sobriety, nor Jenna, with her five minutes of SLAA, knew how to get out of it. So we did the only thing we knew how to do: we blew them and got the fuck out of there.
Waiting for cab was out of the question so we walked (in sobriety, I never lost a shoe). The first couple of minutes were dedicated to confirming what we had been nonverbally communicating with each other for the past hour.
“Oh my God, that was fucking disgusting,” Jenna said before the front door of the den of iniquities had closed.
“Ugh, I know,” I responded. “I would need an anti-depressant just to live within a five-mile radius of that apartment.” I knew full well that my revulsion had less to do with the shit hole our two victims lived in and everything to do with the consequences of my unwillingness to let go of old behavior. Then Jenna said it:
“This isn’t working anymore.”
The words just hung there, unable to be swatted away or accepted. But it was the truth and I hated her for having the balls to put it out there.
“Nope,” was all I could muster and it was the last word we exchanged on the 25-minute walk back to my house. Soon the shame of the night’s shenanigans would fade away but if I was lucky, the memory of its consequences would remain forever in my file of never agains.
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