It Can’t Take Away Your Birthday
Vol. 2, Issue 21
My friend Ry had been a fall-down drunk ever since we were kids. Like, actually falling down. I've seen him tumble down a few sets of stairs, wipe out on a sidewalk, tip ass-over-backwards on a chair, spill out of a moving golf cart, and, one time, lose a shoe as he tumbled into the Trevi fountain in Rome.
After almost 30 years of sometimes painful pratfalls his doctor finally prescribed him the Naltrexone shot for his full-blown alcoholism. But he didn't like it. Ashamed and exhausted by the prospect of another round of nauseating shots, he said he'd find another way. Maybe he'll do the meetings or something, he said. Not a great time to get sober, but that's all anybody can do: try.
When we were seniors in high school, Ry's drinking was fairly controlled in a very adult fashion, mostly because his life was so adult-like compared to every other person in our school. He took care of his father who was wheelchair-bound, courtesy of a massive stroke, and was guardian to his young niece. Ry also took over some of the part-time bookkeeping duties for his family's billboard business when his older brother became estranged. Still, he was one of the most well-adjusted people I knew, unencumbered by teenage stresses as well as adult ones.
His go-to drink was a Diet Coke and Jack Daniels; he used to drink it out of one of those big suppertime glasses found in all suburban kitchen cabinets back then, which he'd fill to the top with no ice.
One time he showed up to school completely smashed. He'd taken most of the school day off and had a couple of his 'special' Diet Cokes but he forgot he had a student council meeting. As president, he couldn't miss too many meetings lest he'd lose his job. He showed up half in the bag and some of the other council members knew it so they insisted he leave before the school intervened. They were nice about it, though. Everybody liked Ry.
He left his car in the school parking lot that time, and as I drove him back we smoked Camel Wides with the windows rolled down in my Ford Probe. I asked him if he was worried and he looked out the window, exhaled some smoke, and in that funny voice of his said, "What are they gonna do? Take away my birthday?"
It was the coolest thing, I thought then. I always attributed that line to him, but I googled it before I wrote this and it turns out Louis C.K. has used it a couple times to rile up the small audiences at his covert comedy shows post-Canceling.
I just love the bitchy imperviousness of that line and every interpretation of it: No matter what, you can't touch me. No matter what, I'm gonna have a good day.
Or my favorite: You've taken something, but not all of me.
****
A fun fact about the Hogan Trial most people don't know is that the $115 million verdict in his favor was handed down on my birthday.
On March 18, 2016, I turned 42 years old and I was forced to stand there emotionless as the jury of my peers destroyed Gawker.
“Did the defendant prove they made a good faith effort to show that posting the video was lawful and of public concern, NO.” The more the jury awarded Hogan, the distance between myself and my former life grew chasmic. In those moments, I thought of Ry and that line.
What are they gonna do, take away my birthday?
For a minute there it looked possible, but my birthday was spared.
Being on trial is just a terribly dehumanizing experience. If (and when) I expressed human emotion at some of the absurd things Hogan's legal team dreamt up we'd get punished for it, even if they were straight-up lying.
It was even more uncomfortable because I was very newly sober, too. Not exactly counting days, but for sure counting months, so the whole spectacle was a type of 4th Step dinner theater for me.
Imagine being forced to sit there (or stand) saying nothing, doing nothing–entirely poker-faced as the Gawker lawyers demanded–while a troupe of vituperative maniacs in dark Men's Wearhouse suits rattled off reasons why you're a terrible human. That combined with the vacant, punitive stares from the jury still makes me queasy. One guy with a serious-looking military haircut had his arms folded and hateful eyes on me the entire length of the trial. I tried to catch his attention and telepathically let him know that, "no, sir, I actually do not believe it's okay to publish a sex tape of a four-year-old on the internet," but not without losing my poker face.
After the Powerball-level award tally was finally over, Nick sturdily tapped my leg and assured me “We’re gonna appeal," which suggested that no matter what, we were in this together.
But when we walked out of there together (together!) to confront the media scrum on the courthouse steps just like in the movies, he turned to me and said, "You don't want to stand there with us do you? You certainly don't have to."
A rhetorical question, but I sensed his tone was full of erasure and coldness so I hung back.
When I got back to my hotel room at the end of that horrible court day, all the lawyers had signed a birthday card for me which was slipped under my door. That night they sprang for a big seafood dinner for "the team," and as they passed bottles of wine back and forth across the table I stayed lost in my phone.
*****
My sobriety calculator read 5.22 months–160 days. My Facebook page was a surreal mix of my name highlighted in stories about Gawker's huge loss, some with accompanying photos of me shell-shocked and sad-looking in a bunchy blue suit. Then there were the reflexive Happy Birthday!!! messages from former high school classmates, having received reminders that today was that day, clueless about the comic timing and dissonance of it all.
After dinner I took a walk around downtown St. Petersburg, Fla., chain-smoking and reminiscing about my 41st birthday the year before when 50 people showed up for a surprise party at a bar I once loved and we all got super-wasted. That was the peak of my using so anyone who brought me a gift, gifted me drugs. I got molly, Adderall, coke, and one person brought me mushrooms enclosed in a rectangular, plexiglass cube. I took so many drugs that night I vibrated for three straight hours.
Later on in the night, when the party was full of slurry and wild-eyed guests with large pupils, I watched the mushroom cube get knocked off the bar and kicked around on the floor, and it reminded me of that early scene in Temple of Doom when Indy's chasing that antidote ricochetting all over the cocktail club dance floor. Anything Goes....
During my walk, I debated the party's historical significance: Should that birthday be a good memory or one that should be eternal-sunshined in case it triggered some sort of nostalgic craving for a relapse? I thought that one was a good birthday, but I was suffering so much from all the drugs and depression at that time in my life that the context was changed.
The dramatic show trial and the public humiliation would certainly qualify my 42nd birthday as a bad one, but I remember feeling pretty okay walking past all the NASCAR T-shirt shops and noisy alt-country bars simply because I knew the worst was over, the odds favorable that there would be no more birthdays like those two again.
The trial took something, just not all of me.
I never recovered those mushrooms, by the way.
*****
So how does this year's pandemic birthday rank? I haven't been to a meeting in a little while so I've got some punch-the-wall dryness, but I've been meditating more–25 minutes in one sit last week!–and the self-quarantining was basically already in place due to our new baby anyway.
Our world has changed. Next year's birthday won't look or feel anything like this one does. Remember that's always the natural lineal path: year after year, the world looks different than the day you were born.
To offset my dryness and lack of meetings, my outreach calls have doubled. My one fellowship friend, whom we'll call "Bob" to protect his anonymity, is on the late side of 60, but as of last Tuesday he was still practicing his daily routine as he normally does: multiple 12-step meetings, coffee dates with friends, and–here's what I found most alarming–the gym.
He said he was rattled, but not ready to stay home yet. He had this wonderful bright-side outlook and then he said something that will stick with me forever.
"This is a first in my lifetime where all the world is suffering together over the same thing. It's quite beautiful if you think about it."
I know it sounds a bit morbid, but I interpreted it as a shared communal moment, that along with the suffering a new empathy rises above this moment like a mist from a faraway summer lake. I keep thinking about it–in between the longer hours at home and changing diapers and meditating and worrying–and it makes me believe, just for a minute, that maybe, just maybe, it's gonna be okay.
– AJD
Love, The Small Bow
By AJD/EZ/LJK
Illustrations by Edith Zimmerman.
Illustration by Edith Zimmerman
