Girl Walks Out of a Bar by Lisa F. Smith Page A

sympathetic. All I knew in that moment was that I needed drinks, several of them. I needed to drink and drink and drink—all weekend—so I could take my mind off of what was going to happen to me Monday morning.

6
    â€œHow are you feeling?” Jessica asked. She was the first person I spoke to late on Sunday morning.
    â€œLike my liver is smoking a cigarette and wondering why I hate it so much,” I answered into the phone, still buried deep under my covers and nauseated from the taste of stale tobacco and residual booze in my mouth. When had I come home the night before? Had I brushed my teeth? A sour alcohol stench enveloped my bed.
    â€œYeah, it was a long night. Russell is already in the office. Poor guy.”
    â€œI don’t know how he does it. You married an airplane’s black box. Indestructible. Where did we end up last night? Tenth Street Lounge? Did you put me in a cab?”
    Blackouts from drinking weren’t uncommon for me. And blackouts didn’t freak me out the way they scared other people. Sometimes I blamed them on my friends for “forcing” me to do shots. Sometimes I blamed drinking on an empty stomach. Or, as in the case of the weekend after the meeting with Doug and Penny, I blamed the unfair circumstances of my life. That weekendI had to drink until my memory shut off. Who wouldn’t in my position?
    Of course I knew how risky it was to run around New York City in the early morning hours, blackout drunk. I could have experienced any number of disasters. I could have stumbled in front of an oncoming subway train, I could have died of alcohol poisoning, or I could have picked up the wrong guy who, unlike Kevin, could have made the choice to kill me instead of choosing to fuck me. I knew I should stop, but I couldn’t. Every time I swore this night will be different , that night was almost exactly the same.
    Jessica filled me in on the end of the previous night. “Tenth Street Lounge? No, we went to High Life after, so we just walked you home.” High Life was a bar only a block from my apartment, which made it one of my favorites, especially at the end of a late night.
    â€œSo, are you going to be okay for tomorrow?” she asked. “You’ve been railing about it all weekend.” I let out a whiny half moan, half grunt in response.
    Snippets of the night before began to come back to me. I remembered pontificating about the injustice of it all to friends and strangers in a string of bars. Instead of admitting to being an extremely well-compensated kid just out of law school, I painted myself as a poor victim who’d been yanked from my humanitarian work and forced to serve as an evil oppressor bent on screwing the public. And I certainly didn’t say out loud the real reasons for my self-righteous rantings: dread of having to work harder than I already did, aversion to having my drinking clipped, and, of course, fear of complete failure and humiliation.
    Jessica, on the other hand, seemed fine. She had not only made peace with our transfer; Russell had convinced her that it was a great opportunity.
    â€œYou heard Russell,” she tried again. “He’s going to help us. Get some rest. I’ve got to go. See you in the morning.” Great. Now even Jessica was sick of me.
    That day was a turning point. In the past, for Sunday drinking, I’d call Jerry or one of my other go-to buddies and set up a boozing brunch. If it was sunny, maybe Caliente Cab in the West Village for margaritas, and if the air was cold, maybe Carmine’s on the Upper West Side for red wine and fried calamari. We’d end up doing a bar crawl all afternoon and into the night. Other people were involved, so I considered it social drinking well within the lines. I would never sit home drinking by myself in the middle of the day. That was something an alcoholic would do. On this Sunday, the thought of entering the corporate building the next