The Last Times I Partied Before Starting AA by Matthew Klam

The next night I'm in a bar that closes a few months later, but its floor was made of real grass and the air was choked with incense. People brought their bongos. I arrive around six with some people from the clothes store where I worked part-time, we have all taken clothes from the racks, tucked in the price tags. We all look great though I can feel my acne coming through the skin in the corners of my mouth. I have to squint to see. The medication thins my blood so my liver has to work harder and has less resistance to alcohol. I take my pill with tequila and sink down, gliding. I'm dressed for a fashionable wedding; I'm the zitty unmarried cousin.
I'm drinking tequila in a shot glass. I have a plan to treat my alcoholism: I'll drink slowly. Start with one per hour, and see how that goes. The problem is that after the second one I'm buzzed and don't care about my problem with liquor — in fact, it's the best thing I've got going for me. The chair next to me is glowing, it's empty for minutes, or maybe hours, until an African gentleman takes it, he's wandered into our group with a pitcher of beer. The party takes off from here. He keeps calling me "Cocheese." I have no idea what it means. Maybe "Problem drinker." I call him a gentleman because of his accent from somewhere. He's mashing limes with his giant hand, wringing them into our drinks. He has smooth black skin and with such long fingers that each one could have an extra joint in it.

Then things get vaguer. I have pulp from lemon in my hair. Taxi ride to the East side. The driver saying, "You look snake." What is snake? "You look fly." In the mirror of the bathroom of the next place I see that "You look snake" means the skin under your eyes is deep lizard maroon with purple and red dots. On my way out of the bathroom my African gent, who's been waiting for me, slams me against the wall and we kiss and I go up on my tiptoes and he sticks his hand between my legs and puts a finger inside my underpants so fast, his arm is like a rock hard branch and before I can get him off of me, the finger goes so far up me all dry and rough, with that damn long finger, it feels like metal on metal, like bright light in my eyes, and I push him away. I say, "Ouch, you jerk," but I feel like he left something sharp like a barbed metal ring inside me. I want to go home, I'm falling apart, but the thought of that place, the little lamp, other tiny mice singing tunes about cheese, the closet door pulled completely off its hinges, how can I go home?
      Back at the table, everybody's screaming, their faces caught between laughing and crying. More drinking. I don't think I see him again, that crazy African guy. The blackout starts at about nine or ten. From then until the next morning, I remember nothing, not one pink pimple on the faces of my friends.
      I don't know what parts of the rest are real but I have a vague recollection that all throughout that night I'm getting shoved. I think I'm fighting, bumping up against something and though I move through it blindfolded I don't give up, I fight like my brother Tom the fighter — and then I'm left alone.
      I wake up on a couch. The sun is baking the room, a room I've never seen before. I am waking at the site of a party, it's a house. Nothing particularly formal, but I seem to have slept amidst the action. I think of the house I grew up in, a very different house in a broken-down slate mining town in upstate New York, a stuffy box with a maroon cotton couch, a normal sequence of events: leaves turning into compost, library books on the kitchen table, the clean smell of liquor in cardboard cartons, the telephone pole wires resting on the low slanted roof over the kitchen, the deep scratches on the wood cabinet we keep the soda and booze in. My parents would not be up and about this time of morning. Still zombies. At that moment I want to tell someone: A child shouldn't die before her parents.
      I'm in my dumb borrowed dress and these heavy boots. I don't have my purse. I look around for it. After a while I give up. The purse is gone. I sit up and see a trench coat on the floor and a pair of legs coming out from under it. Across the room is a bed. I walk over there. Some bodies are underneath the sheet. I lift up the sheet and look at the body closer to me. It's not Mick Jagger, it's not a werewolf. It's just a shirtless guy I don't know sleeping with his mouth open in a look of broken amazement. He has hair growing in patches on his back, isolated squares not connected to hair growing anywhere else. He looks like he fell and landed that way. He looks like it hurts to sleep. There's a girl next to him, and on the floor beside the man there are crumpled up tissues and a bowl of yellow crumbs.
      In the kitchen it seems somebody tried to cook, or reheat something, a pot of beef stew. The edges are black and at the center it's liquid, the meat and onions a whitish gray, a wooden spoon stuck in it. Beside the pot of stew is an ice cube tray, with cigarettes stubbed out in the puddles. Beer bottles are everywhere. Caps skittle on the floor when I walk. I wonder what it costs to rent this place because by New York standards it's huge.
      It's bright as hell, the windows look out on a street of trees. In the empty room a small dog sits sweetly playing on the carpet, sniffing the floor, wagging its tail. The sun's coming up and I'm leaving, but it's playing with something, a piece of fabric in its mouth, and I say, "Come here, puppy." It's protective, nuzzling it, tossing the hanky around. The dog is trying to avoid me. Up close I see that he's holding a pair of underpants with blood on the crotch. Instinctively I reach for my own. I feel through my dress for the waistband, holy shit, I reach under my own dress and feel my underpants, I run my hand all around — not that I've ever lost my underwear before, nothing like that — I am so glad they're still on me that I actually lift up my dress in this room full of half-dead people and stare at my droodies. Before I leave I think, somebody will be needing this dog's panties. I lift my fist up to crush its head and as it freezes I lunge and rip the panties out of its mouth and leave them on the television set.
      I'm walking on the street. I don't recognize the street but I'm thinking, I hope I'm not in Queens. I don't know the trains out there. Please, I'm thinking, let this be Downtown, although something about the sky tells me it's not. I'm looking for the F train, until I cross the street to ask this lady what borough it is and she says,
      "Borough? This isn't a borough. You're in Philadelphia."
      The lady has just come out of a deli. She stands facing the light and holds a long bread in white paper and a grocery bag in the other hand. I don't know which way to walk. My purse is gone, I've got no credit cards or anything of any kind. No money in my boot. She straddles her bicycle. She spends a long time trying to hang the grocery bag correctly. I look around. The sun is out, day is here, I'm here with it. The lady rolls away. It's the first time I've ever been to Philadelphia.