Four Days – A Look Back Part I

I have four days left of my 20s.

 

Let’s take a look back at the last decade of my life (wavery dream sequence begins):

 

TWENTY: I got drunk for the first time at 20.  This is something I can admit even to my parents without shame, because it was the most rational, thought-out, goody-two-shoes experience I’ve ever had.  My roommates and I decided, after a couple of years of watching our friends around us party down, that we wanted to “know the enemy” with regards to drunkenness.  But we wanted to be in a safe place, experiencing it together, supporting each other.  Once we hit 21, we reasoned, it would be expected that we know how to handle alcohol.  We had to get it figured out before then so we wouldn’t be taken advantage of by all the more experienced folk out there.

 

I am serious about this, people.  I have never been a rule-breaker, and in those days every single decision I made was a torturous balance sheet of theoretical absolute morals vs. practical living in an imperfect world.  I am surprised I did not develop major ulcers because of my daily struggle with How To Behave Like A Good Girl in All That I Do While Also Not Being Eaten Alive By The Big Mean World.

 

So.   Roommates and I.  A planned get-drunk experimentation session in our basement room.  Somebody’s older boyfriend agreed to buy for us.  We asked him to get something “girly,” something gentle, and when he rocked up with a big ol’ bottle of Everclear, the sweetly naïve group of us were like – cool!  It’s clear, so it must be girly!  This should be so fun!  Giggle giggle.  Some sort of fruit punch was the mixer, and we slowly, methodically, very carefully began to get sloshed.  And sloshed we got – I remember having the best time negotiating the hallway and seeing how the walls, like, moved and stuff.  It was just us four girls, and we had a truly great, and even perhaps wholesome?, time learning about how it feels to be drunk, and cross my heart and spit in your eye I did not get drunk again for a whole year.

 

TWENTY ONE: I moved to Australia and lived there for most of my twenty-first year.  A lot happened that year.  It was a good year.  I write about it often.

 

I worked as a waitress in a coffee bar/Italian restaurant that was open to the Manly Beach front.  The only thing between me and the waves crashing onshore was a small strip of pavement and about a gazillion people in bikinis or board shorts.  Although my boss was a foul-mouthed Italian who made the job a challenge for my shy and unassuming 21 year old self, I stuck it out for 6 months.  It wasn’t a bad gig.  He paid us lots of bonuses.

 

One spring day, it was pouring outside.  Nobody was in the restaurant.  Not a soul was on the street, save a handful of pigeons crouching under our overhang.  I was listening to Moby: Play on the sound system – we were a very COOL eatery, you see – and just staring through the proscenium arch of our shop’s open front into the rain, daydreaming about breaking up with my loser boyfriend, or thinking about traveling the country again, or some other such moody meditation.

 

Enter Stage Right one wheelchair-bound man, a fixture at the Manly Beach boardwalk (they called it the Corso.)  His body was gripped by some kind of debilitating muscle-wasting disease.  He steered his electric chair with two fingers.  He was unable to turn his head or lift his arms beyond his chin.  He sold pencils and other knick-knacks to tourists, which obviously didn’t make him a millionaire, but he got by.  Even though he couldn’t talk, and his severely compromised body made me nervous, I waved at him and gave him a (forced) cheerful hello every time I saw him.  I did not buy his pencils.

 

In this little mini-play, he wheeled his chair through the driving rain into my field of vision.  In his gnarled hand was a cup of hand-cut fries from the fish and chip shop down the street.  They were getting totally soaked and cold, as was he.  He stopped next to the huddle of pigeons at the front of my workplace, dumped the fries on the ground in front of them, sped off Stage Left as they swooped upon the soggy bits in a frenzy.  My boss came out and made me chase them away, even though we had no customers.  I looked down the Corso, but couldn’t see the wheelchair man.  I wanted to make him a coffee to go.  I wanted to give him something.

 

The boss let me go early, and I opened my brilliantly colored umbrella and stepped through the puddles to my bus stop, and caught the bus, and went home.  My loser boyfriend was watching t.v. and drinking beer, his accustomed post 10am activity in those days.  He asked me how my day was.  I described the little scene I’d watched.  He said “Yeah?  What’s the point.  Pigeons is just flying rats anyway.”  Then he turned back to the screen.

 

I folded up my umbrella, and carefully put my tips away in the drawer where I kept my money, and then sat next to him on the couch and stared at the t.v.