by Tippy Rex

It’s not social anxiety; it’s anxiety about unlacing my complicated shoes and angling into someone’s narrow apartment only to realize, too late, that I am at a terrible party. The host has already seen me, the bouquet I brought tossed dry on top of the refrigerator. It’s a dry party. Of course there is nothing to drink; I am sober, and the host is sober, and most of the guests are sober. But it’s eleven in the morning, and no one has made coffee. There is only a can of Folgers sitting on the table with eight adults crowded on the sectional couch like commuters on a bus. There are too many people here to all have a place to sit, but also too few to stand without feeling like I’m qualifying for an audience, so I squat, and attempt to pet a dog called Eustice. Eustice is not interested; I have no food, but someone has dropped a container of sprinkles, and the host is bent double with laughter, and I gamely try to join in although the dog licking the floor is more concerning than funny. A lone griddle smokes; the text message said this was a pancake party, but only the kids have pancakes. The adults drink from their personal Nalgenes and later one of them will text me to say that she had a lot of fun at this bad party. I stay for 45 uncertain minutes, and when I announce my departure, the host gives me a lingering hug. They think I am leaving because of social anxiety, but I am leaving because this party sucks.

I’m angry; I want a refund of my forty-five minutes. I want an apology. That party was bad, but it’s over now. Why am I still upset, days later? I know how to care for my inner child, the one who was left out and laughed at and neglected. But what about my inner alcoholic? She is 23, young enough to be my daughter. We are no longer the same gender. She wears blackberry lipstick and rabbit fur and her PVC pants sit below her hip bones. She crackles with disorganization and fun, and she bounces on the balls of her thigh-hi stockinged feet every time someone says party. I am sober, long sober, and it’s a better, happier, more stable life, but it’s less fun. The parties suck. They subtracted the alcohol, but forgot to add something to replace it.

My wife is good at parties. She makes a signature mocktail for the sober folks. There is enticing food and dessert and no one gets a bill at the end (I went to a sober karaoke birthday party recently and got a request for $8 to cover my share). For my 49th birthday, my wife hired a zoologist to bring a vanload of small animals over to my apartment. Instead of passing a joint, my friends passed a hedgehog called Quilliam around. Afterwards we all went out back to watch my wife attempt to crush a watermelon between her muscular thighs. It was fun.

But maybe to someone, platters of birria tacos and a kinkajou encounter is not their idea of a fun time. I don’t know. Maybe it’s not the world’s responsibility to reward my sobriety with a carousel ride. Maybe it is my responsibility to promise my inner alcoholic that I will stop dragging her to parties that I know, in advance, will suck. I attend these parties because 12-step recovery drills into you the importance of “showing up.” But what if I show up for her?

Fun is not the point, but fun is also not irrelevant. There’s an infuriating, nicotine-yellow sign in one of the basement meetings I attend that reads SOBRIETY CAN BE FUN, and people in recovery will insist that they are having more fun now, or at least the kind of fun that they can actually remember. That may be true, but why are so many of my sober fellows bad at hospitality? This week was April 20, so I went to a 420 party thrown by a California-sober friend of my wife’s. My sponsor, undelighted, hit me with the chestnut about how if you keep going to the barbershop, eventually you’re going to get a haircut. Which never made sense to me, just like I am puzzled by the aphorism about the foolishness of going to the hardware store for oranges. Expecting your withholding family to treat you with love is more like going to a grocery store, where there should be oranges, but where there never or very rarely are oranges, and expecting oranges. Other people’s grocery stores have oranges! It’s all very unfair, which my sponsor tells me are the most useless words in the English language. But when I go to a party, I still expect orange– juice, even if there’s no vodka to go with it.

My wife observed at my last birthday party that my friends, who hail from either the yoga studio where I teach or from recovery, make these parties cost-effective: “Your yoga friends don’t eat and your recovery friends don’t drink.” But she always makes sure that there is plenty for everyone to eat and drink, both of the NA and A variety. If she is making goat biryani and there is one vegan coming, she’ll make a pulao. If someone is gluten free, she’ll make sure there’s a flourless dessert. It always touches a string in my chest — that she will go to that much trouble to make sure that a lone alcoholic vegan with a nut allergy who may or may not have been an absolute pain in my wife’s ass on at least one occasion feels taken care of. 

Alcoholism, I have heard, is a condition of stubborn emotional self-regulation. No one is going to take care of me, so I better make sure that I arrive at the party without an appetite. Anything can be a BYO situation if you’re terrified to depend on other people to take care of you. But a party, like a 12-step meeting, like a family, like any gathering of dented and damaged and delightful humans, is a collection of nervous systems and an invitation to opening up to the possibility of care and belonging. And so when I leave, hungry and frustrated, and my wife offers to come by with our son to bring me a special sandwich, one that has all the things on it that I like, I say yes please. And we eat outside in the sun, and the party is absolutely perfect.

Tippy Rex’s creative nonfiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, X-R-A-Y, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Atticus Review, and Lunch Ticket. Their work has received support from the Vermont Studio Center, the Tin House Summer Conference, and the Gulkistan Center in Iceland. They hold an MFA in fiction from Columbia University.