Muggy Saturday night in August. The air smells like asphalt. I drive for Uber and Lyft, whichever pings first. I’m beckoned to an address in South Roanoke: three storey house, immaculate yard, boxwood hedges squared off against the sidewalk. Four young ladies hike up the driveway from the back apartment, wearing leopard skin skirts, coal black pumps and gold. Wind-swept hair on a still night. They look like college kids, home for the summer and going back to campus soon. Have a few drinks first.
My car’s back seat holds three so one of the young ladies must sit up front. She turns and talks with her friends. They talk about beaches and guys and drinks I’ve never heard of, like Painkiller and Honey Bee. They’re going to the hot spot, downtown. The street’s lit up like daylight. The passenger in my front seat is last to get out, iPhone in hand. Aquamarine fingernails on my forearm. “I left you a tip,” then she’s gone. Leopard skirt swirling in the still night.
In high school I worked at Bonanza. We served the cheapest pieces of beef one could legally call steak. I was 16. The other busboys cruised after work, meaning they drove through shopping center parking lots in whichever car looked baddest, drank beer and looked for chicks doing the same. Did I want to go along, they asked. That was my first beer. I drank several, but didn't meet any girls.
My senior year, during the long stretch between spring break and the end of classes, five of us skipped school, got drunk, then (demonstrating our critical thinking abilities) went back to school. I walked into PoliSci as normally as I could manage. The teacher smelled me and sent for the assistant principal. Then she worked her lecture around to prohibition and suspension as a punitive measure. The principal called me into the hall, caught a whiff, and called my parents. That was the first time I quit drinking.
At 10:00 pm I get pinged to a condo complex in Northwest, every building perfectly rectangular, perfectly identical. My clients emerge one at a time, carrying plastic cups. “Leave your drink on the porch,” one says. “I’mma finish mine first,” says another. Eventually they're ready—two gals and a guy—dressed in light, loose clothes. All three take my back seat. The woman directly behind me wants to know what kind of car this is. Have I driven for Uber long? What’s my name again? Hers is Angel.
In college, in 1983, our student activity fees paid for keg parties each Friday night, held at the dorm’s ground floor. No one monitored how much anyone drank. We could show up at the bars later, halfway crocked for free. I favoured the dive joint with concrete floors and drains so they could hose the whole place down every morning. Our Halloween parties drew students from three states away. Every year, I swore off booze on November first and it lasted until Thanksgiving, when I went home for the holidays. Wholesome family time. My family is from Wisconsin—land of dairy cows, the beer that made Milwaukee famous and of the country’s highest per capita rate of alcohol abuse. All our fun family times included beer.
I take Angel and her friends to a club in the warehouse district, west of town. People lining the sidewalk, all dressed to dance but no one is moving. My passenger gets out and cuts the line straight to the door. Angel stops scooting half-way across my back seat and says, “Maybe you’ll drive us home, too.”
I turn around. She’s pretty, but I am older than I look. Before I can think of an answer, her friend’s head appears from outside and I catch the similarity. She takes her sister’s arm, pulls her out of my car, into the crowd.
My last binge was six months after my marriage ended. Separation gave me the opportunity and inspiration to drink as much as I wanted. I bought Scotch so cheap it came in plastic bottles.
The pings slow down. I have emptied the homes and filled the clubs. After midnight I’m called to an alley behind a restaurant; a lone guy stands outside, probably a dishwasher needing a ride home. But someone is sitting on the asphalt beside him. This is his friend, he says, who’s had a bit to drink. But his sister is waiting for him at that address. He begins to shovel his mostly inert companion into my car.
I inform him, “I don’t carry unconscious people. But I can call you an ambulance.”
He leans into the front seat. “Please, dude? His sister is waiting for him.” He winks. “She’s really nice.”
I meet his eyes, shake my head. “You need a paramedic, not an Uber.”
He curses, slams my door and half-drags his friend back wherever they came from. I go looking for respite at the Waffle House.
The final morning, I woke up to a nearly empty, plastic Scotch bottle and looked for where it must have spilled. It hadn’t. It was time to quit again. I was forty-nine. Life was, at best, half-way over. I knew that no matter how long I quit for, if I started again, someday I’d be right back here, deciding how long I needed to quit to prove that I didn’t have a problem. For the first time I told myself I was done. Never again. It was frightening. What if I couldn’t? What if some future self forgot this morning and all the other mornings and rationalised, yet again, that just one, with family—just one, having dinner with someone new—just one, after a long day in the mountains, just one was okay. The lie I had stolen so much of my life with. Just none this time. Never again.
The Waffle House waitress talks fast: her tongue can’t keep up with her thoughts. Throwing my ideas into her mix doesn’t help, but she doesn’t mind. She is unperturbed by her own word salad. I can’t keep up, but she gets my order right, starts jabbering with someone heading to the back room, and follows them there. The next booth over is occupied by a guy who weighs maybe thirty-four pounds, and most of it tattoos. I can’t discern his eyes from the ink and the metal. My waitress sets my plate down. Grease flows from the hash browns. I get the toast out of the way in time. She sits across from tattoo guy. They lean close, talk fast, low and enthusiastic, incomprehensible, like a mountain brook, only not as clean. The methamphetamine soundtrack.
Halfway through a pancake my phone pings. I hit decline and turn the app off. In an hour the clubs will close and they’ll all need another ride, too buzzed for rational conversation but that won’t stop them from talking. I’ll drive everyone who is still able to stand up safely home, ignore their nonsense and hope they don’t puke before they get out of my car. Driving on Saturday night helps me stay sober. At least these tweakers can still walk. Alcohol is the only drug society demands an excuse not to use.
It's been twelve years. The battle gets easier. I fought every urge and now my brain has caught up. It no longer pushes me to the fridge subconsciously whenever I get stressed. But I am the same from the outside. I see the change in people’s faces when I say I don’t drink. I know what they are thinking because I’ve been there: “He’s an alcoholic. Very volatile. One slip, and, who knows what might happen? I better find someone else to hang out with if I want to have fun.” But I have never declared myself an addict. I had a bad habit and I got rid of it, that’s all. Labelling people reduces them to easily defined categories we know how to handle, or to avoid. Labels are for jars. People deserve better.
