I’m definitely high on some nostalgia vapors right now, writing and reading about old friends and lost connections, and it ultimately brings me back to whatever FUN times I used to have getting shit-faced, the FUN times before the terrible, terrible times, whenever the full ignominy officially began.

Today, for example: Memorial Day weekend down the shore. I wondered, if there was a time-travel app on my phone, would I use it to bring me to, say, 1995 and let it rip for the weekend? Drive drunk in a golf cart and piss on the dunes, all that. But also: If you relapse during time-travel, does it even count?

Anyway, today, we’ve got some readers (who happen to write) sharing with you some more of their Last Worst Nights that they wish they’d never remembered. —AJD

By The Small Bow Family Orchestra

My brain feels like a dumpster library of last worst nights. It took me four years to get sober and this happened during year two. It wasn’t the last time I drank that year. It’s the last night I spent in the place where my drinking tipped from recreation to reaching for oblivion. I still get the urge to escape in recovery. Writing this highlights something I’m holding onto — I have amends to make.

In my early twenties, I lived in a coastal city known for its water views. I picked up substances there, spent time in ERs, left, returned, left again. I swore I’d never go back until, after nearly a year away, I did. My roommate and I drove up for an overnight trip. We ditched my car at an old co-worker’s house and met friends at a bar. My roommate slipped away at midnight. Everyone else left at two. I went to an afterparty with a friend of a friend, talking fast and dancing faster around a stranger’s house to music played over an aux cord. Hours passed and a guy called out to me across the living room, “Hey, nobody knows you or wants you here.” I bolted out the back door into the 10 a.m. sun, lit a cigarette, and cried in the alleyway. Then I started walking. I wasn’t even halfway to the water when my old co-worker’s SUV pulled up, all the windows down and my roommate in the passenger seat. They’d been driving around looking for me.

Not the last, but definitely among the worst. Also not a night. 

Went home from the bar with an older stranger. 

In the morning, I was stranded at his place so he had to drive me home from his fancy suburban house . . . to my dorm. Yes, I was a college freshman and had been in a blackout. 

After I got out of the car and started to walk away, he yelled, “If you have a kid, name it after meeeeee . . .” and pulled away. He knew full well that I had no idea what his name was. 

I went on to drink 8 more years. 

Over Labor Day weekend in 2012, I got together with friends for a birthday celebration. Four of us gathered to pregame before meeting up with the birthday girl, and I made sure to eat dinner so I wouldn’t get too crazy. Shots and beers turned into martinis and chaos. I have photographic evidence from that evening to prove that I was around for a while at various places until I shared a cab with one of my buddies.

I came to in the rain, mud in my ears, no idea where I was. I struggled to get up off the ground, then I threw up, and staggered on finally realizing that I was in a public park in Akron a few blocks from my house. I found out later that my friend was dropped off first, then the cabbie drove me home. No idea how or why I ended up passed out in a park. I last remember being at a sports bar with a huge draft mug of beer. After that, my hazy memories stop.

I lost my purse and keys, so I had to pound on my door to wake up my boyfriend to let me in the house. It was 7 a.m. I was so fucked up that he was sure I had been drugged and rushed me to the ER. In my hospital bed I shivered uncontrollably while struggling to stay awake under the bright lights as doctors and nurses milled about. Just as I thought, I had not been drugged. It was simple: I couldn’t stop drinking. I was sick in bed for three days after that, and it wasn’t until I almost killed myself in a car crash the following May that I would get sober.

My last dark night was a day, actually. Spouse and I settled in at the airport for a flight out. Never one to avoid a buzz whenever possible, and my strategy for combatting the shitty experience of air travel is to get blackout high, so I pop my controlled prescription substances then hit the alcohol kiosk across from the gate, sneaking another legal intoxicant.

After the flight landed, my spouse was telling me I was borderline incoherent in the departing gate area, and they smoothed it over with the bystanders. It hit me pretty hard that I had almost become an unwilling viral internet star due to my behavior, and I needed to change my coping strategies.

On the return flight, I promised myself I wouldn’t drink, and did fine until the flight attendant mixed up my Sprite with the next row’s vodka/soda. (The passenger never noticed.) I took that as a sign that the universe wanted me to keep intoxicating. Okay, business as usual then.

Two weeks later, on a workday, I regained my senses in a hospital exam room with my boss on one side and my spouse on the other.

Two days after that, I went to a treatment center for an assessment, entered detox on the spot, and haven’t had a drink or drug in 8 years.

It’s so funny I had so much shame around being a piss drunk, I legit thought I was the only one in the world. Typical. I tried to pawn it off as a medical condition . . . god I’ve stuffed all this shit . . . I mean my closest friends called me Master P, because I peed on all of them at some point during my booze bag years. I slept on the floor or on an air mattress for about 6 of those years . . . I once wasn’t let onto a flight to Hawaii because I had gotten blackout on the ride to the airport and passed out and pissed myself. I peed on one-night stands, I peed on partners, I ruined friends’ couches and dog beds, you name it. Cell phones fried. Between leaving them in cabs and peeing myself, AT&T thought I was running an insurance scam and canceled my account. I remember waking up on the L in Canarsie since I had taken it back and forth, god knows how many times, itchy, stinky, damp, too numb to be ashamed. Still, my bottom was high. Twelve years and counting. I used to have this fantasy about a supercut of CCTV footage of me blacked out in NYC. Nightmare fuel. 

On my Last Worst Night, I got shitfaced alone on cheap wine at an Airbnb in upstate New York. It was summer 2020, and I’d been cooped up inside, not really partying but definitely drinking. This was my getaway, away from the eyes of my more high-functioning then-partner, and I was going to take advantage of it. Naturally, my hankering for cocaine led me out into the night. The town was quiet and small; it was a Tuesday. No one at the bar I wandered into seemed like they’d know where I could score. I wound up approaching a group of people hanging out on a bridge over the train tracks, some of whom seemed to be unhoused. I bought them a six-pack, and they asked if I was a cop. I assured them I wasn’t, and seemingly to prove a point, wound up smoking crack with one of them (I think; I have a fuzzy memory of this and found a crack pipe in my purse the next morning). Later, I exchanged $50 for a smashed pile of Altoids in the cellophane wrapper of a pack of cigarettes, believing it was coke. I identified its true minty contents only after trying to put some up my nose. I’m glad they took my money. I vaguely remember stumbling back to my Airbnb in the dark while a man yelled my name; I have no idea why he was yelling at me or who he was. A few weeks later, finally sick of my own bullshit, I quit booze and coke. I’m almost six years clean.

fin

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN