I kind of spaced out with my feet half over the edge of the platform, playing with my balance. I kept leaning out over the tracks to look for the train coming. I was impatient to get home to that vodka. I paced along the edge of the platform, peering into the tunnel for lights. I don’t know what the G train has been like since-I haven’t taken it in a decade-but back then you could wait an hour for a train at night. I was impatient waiting for the subway at the Lorimer Street station. I kept thinking, If I can just drink enough tonight, I won’t need to drink again for the rest of my life. Maybe there was enough left to obliterate me. I knew I had a bottle of vodka at my apartment. I wandered in and out of bars, looking for someone or something to turn the night into an adventure, but all I found were a few more drinks. I figured my olfactory nerve was on the fritz, or maybe that SlimFast was working on me in mysterious ways. It was probably already three in the morning when I left my friends on Graham to go and “get into some trouble.” Somehow I had held down a job, but I was always hungover, cranky, and rude, insensitive to everything but my own bad mood. ![]() I liked to drink sake instead of coffee in the mornings. Whether I was drinking at a bar or alone at home, self-centered dissatisfaction plagued me. Apart from the SlimFast, this night, so far, was like any other night. I was broke, sloppy, depressed, angry, bloated, desperate, and addicted. “Let me buy this whole bar a drink!” But I didn’t. In fact, the whole bar smelled like doughnuts. “Why do you smell so strongly of doughnuts?” was my opening line. I remember that the bartender was an old Polish woman who could see that I was up to no good. Then we went to another bar, which I think was on Graham Avenue. The first few rounds of drinks were unremarkable, and I was bored with my girlfriend and her guy. ![]() I had never cared to do such a thing before. I thought it would protect my stomach from all the alcohol I was about to pour into it. There was something ceremonious about drinking that SlimFast, like putting on war paint. I remember stopping at Kellogg’s Diner to buy some Advil and a SlimFast, which I chugged on my way to the bar where I was meeting a girlfriend and a guy she was dating. In the late fall of 2006, I went out for what I knew would be my last night of drinking.
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