Today, we drop our first batch of “Last Worst Night” check-ins, a series where we explore some of the darkest moments at the end of your drinking, using, eating, or cheating days that led you to truly believe that you had a serious problem. Again, these are not supposed to be rock bottom stories. We’re talking about some of your more, hmm, colorful indiscretions on the way down.

We have a few entries today, but I want to space these out over the next couple months—— and also I’d love to use several in our upcoming “Small Book” compilation that will be released in 2027. Ready? I thought so.

Here’s the prompt again: Do you remember that time you crapped yourself at work? Or fell asleep on the train to Coney Island covered in two sloppy pizza slices? Or ruined (another) relationship because you got all messed up, forgot you were engaged. and then went home with the woman who hosts Trivia Night on Thirsty Thursdays?

What exactly do you remember about your Last Worst Night?

Tell us all — anonymously, of course. Let’s find some connection in our dereliction.

Be sure to send your entries to [email protected]

​SUBJECT LINE: LAST WORST NIGHT

​Please make entries 250-300 words max.

ALSO: We only have a couple of weeks left for our Spring Member Drive. —AJD

By The Small Bow Family Orchestra

My sisters and I were chronic bedwetters. My father would set his alarm for 2 a.m. and march us to the bathroom for mandatory bladder voidance. There were four of us, so a mini line would form in the hallway outside our one bathroom under the watchful eye of Dad. Acceptance was for losers, at least in the mid-1970s.

On January 1, 1993, I was shaken awake by a PATH train conductor in Jersey City, New Jersey. The train was empty and my pants were wet.

“Last stop, party boy,” he said. There was gentleness in his eyes but the familiar terror bloomed anyway, consciousness clanging to life like an old radiator. I had a urine-soaked 10-dollar bill in my front pocket, so I hailed a cab for the 10-minute ride to my apartment in Hoboken. I began the task of reassembling my evening.

I’d been looking forward to the New Year’s Eve party in Manhattan. I’d even committed to pacing my drinking so I wouldn’t wake up with wet pants on an empty train in Jersey City.

I left my apartment around 8:30. I talked to some people on the PATH train. It’s gauzy after that: a bodega. A pretty girl. Some type of confrontation. A party hat.

Then, Jersey City.

My nights went into the dark room and not everything came back out. As I rode home, the driver sniffing the air and glancing at me in the rearview mirror, the thought emerged that perhaps I needed help. It tried to gain purchase, to fully form, but was shouted down again by the chorus.

It would be another three years before I got sober.

What sticks as my last worst night is pretty tame compared to some bad nights that came before in a lot of ways. It was the beginning of Covid and my sister is a doctor, and young healthy people died from Covid and she’s young and everyone acts like she’s healthy but she has a serious chronic health condition she manages with necessary monthly infusions. I kept getting shitfaced and then calling or texting her how much I loved her and how worried I was for her in what could only be a very . . . unsettling way. The last really bad night I did that then drove drunk to someone I care about’s home as well. I think I hit what felt like a very dangerous, vulnerable low to people I couldn’t stand losing in my life, whether that be through them distancing themselves from me, or me self-isolating from them. What I did would be enough; if they were willing to still be there, I owed it to them and myself not to make the same mistakes again for as long as possible. I’d also probably thank years of being in recovery from other disorders and my own brain that we [my brain and I] could get there.

I had many bad nights throughout my years of active alcoholism. I was, from the start, a blackout drunk and rarely remembered what had caused the bumps, bruises, open wounds, or the wet pants I was in. I once woke up in a sleazy Bowery motel room that was no bigger than a jail cell with a massive wound on my head that I didn’t notice until everyone was staring at me in the coffee shop across the street!

The worst night and, ironically, the best night was when I came out of a blackout in the police station just in time to hear the officer reading off what my brother and I had done to a cab driver who picked up his friend. Nobody was riding free in a cab he was paying for, my brother said! We beat them both up.

Now, I was always a peaceful person and would never hurt anyone intentionally. Evidently, that peaceful person turned into a monster while drunk!

I went home from the police station devastated and couldn’t even speak to my family, I just curled up in the basement and tried to sleep. A dream or vision of my future came to me. Friends in AA call it my Ebenezer moment but there were no ghosts of Christmas, just jails, hospitals, and an early death. I remembered a neighbor next door who had offered to help me if I ever wanted to get sober and called him. It was like the weight of the world came off my shoulders! I had been to AA before but it was always for someone or something else, my uncle, my mother, the cake and cookies at reformatory meetings. This time it was for me!

As a bonus, the judge in that arrest must have had clear knowledge of AA. At my first hearing, I told him that I was going and he postponed my hearing for a month. He asked me if I was still attending meetings the next month and postponed again for another month. He did this for nearly a year then dismissed the case entirely and wished me luck!

That was a long time ago and life has just gotten better. There have been bad times but nothing that a drink would ever solve.

Not my last worst night but the last time I pissed myself in the bed, I was in San Francisco for some friend’s 40th birthday celebration. My wife and I had an Airbnb with another couple. I had been in and out of the program for a few years but with no consistency. I convinced my wife that I could drink this weekend because it was a special occasion, blah blah blah. First night there, after drinking all day, including sneaking in several half pints of Smirnoff from the grocery store around the corner, I passed out fully clothed in bed at 2 a.m. Woke up around 4. My clothes are soaked. Luckily, I had passed out lying face up, so not much had gotten to the sheets (I was lying on top of all the covers). So I got up, stripped down, hid the soaked clothes in the corner behind my suitcase, and got back in bed. No harm done.

But the worst part was the next day, when I had snuck off early in the morning to the store to make my mostly vodka, with a little Gatorade, concoction. I drank half and hid it in the bushes outside the apartment. Everyone met up at the park across the street later that morning. I snuck over and retrieved the rest of the Gatorade bottle to finish at the park, only in the middle of the get-together, my wife asks for some of it in front of everyone. I freeze and have no choice but to hand it over. She takes a big gulp and visibly has to choke it down before giving me the look that I am sure is recognizable for any alcoholic who puts their significant other through this. Not of anger, but just sadness, her heart breaking into pieces as the curtain gets pulled back and we both know we have to end the dance of me pretending I am in control, her pretending she doesn’t know I am gone, and me pretending I don’t know she knows. That was 3-and-a-half years ago. I am finally 6 months sober, and whenever I get the idea that I may one day be able to drink like a normal person, I just think back to that look on that day, and then go back to the apartment to stuff my piss-soaked clothes into the bottom of the suitcase, hoping sht not’t notice the smell.

My alcoholism got worse during the pandemic. To adjust for less frequent work or friend related meet ups for drinks I used “errands” (grocery store, hardware store, gas, car wash, etc.) as a means to get my buzz on. My wife had asked me several times to get an assessment from a nearby rehabilitation facility and after answering the questions (admitting to drinking maybe half of what was actually consumed) I informed her that I was a “high functioning heavy drinker” and not to worry — never mind that I’d led my father’s intervention a dozen years before he died (he was sober for those last dozen years). 

It was a Saturday and our kids had to be taken to various sporting events and parties and we’d coordinate who took whom to where. Around 7:30/8 I returned home and my wife asked where our then 6-year-old son was and I froze, couldn’t remember if it was at one friend’s for a play date or another’s for a sleepover. She left and picked him up and when she got back she said she had arranged for me to stay at an AirBnB nearby.   

The next morning I looked in the mirror and finally admitted I was powerless.

My Last Worst Night was when I hit rock bottom and quit drinking the next day, but there were so many embarrassing bodily betrayals before that. In fairness, I was also betraying my body by filling it with massive amounts of hard liquor on a daily basis. My digestive system has never been fully functional for most of my life and of course alcohol made it worse. I almost scheduled an appointment with a gastroenterologist, not even thinking that alcohol was exacerbating my bowel issues. One day I arrived at work as usual, dressed and acting like a Normal Human Being rather than After Work Alcohol Binge Drinker. That morning, a co-worker next to me asked “did someone accidentally step in dog poop?” There was no dog. I had shit my pants at work and it was running down my pants. I made up an excuse that it must have gotten on me when I walked my dog before work and went home to change. 

Sadly, you may still shit your pants once you get sober (no comment). But you don’t have to blame an imaginary dog.

fin

ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN