Jessie

It was hard not to feel like it was a middle finger aimed directly at her. 

 

Jessie was less than six feet away—only Ryan and Silas stood between her and the kitchen counter “bar”—when Con came blitzing in, poured whiskey into their solo cup, and shot it back. Right in front of her. 

It was so Con: on the surface, avoidant, but underneath, a coded fuck-you. On the surface: progressive, free-thinking. Underneath: normative to all kinds of old-fashioned bullshit. Like revenge. Like not ever examining a trauma response passed down through generations of Irish and Irish-Americans, namely, to get shit-faced and not to talk about it. 

Jessie recognized this playbook, the Get Shit-Faced and Don’t Talk About It Playbook, from her father’s side of the family. More accurately, from her memory of them, since she’d been in no-contact mode with them for over half of her life, at this point. Complete absence was the one forum in which her father really shone. Silent and invisible was also the best look for her grandmother and uncles, that she could recall. 

When her dad was sober, he ranged from a grouch to a prick. When he was drunk, he ranged from a violent psychopath to a beached squid. The real danger moment was when you thought he’d gone legless, but he was actually just dormant, capable of springing up into violent psychopath mode at any moment. All in all, it was a bad look for an alcoholic. 

One time, she had been creeping through the living room, thinking he had passed out and the coast was clear. But as she tiptoed by, he surged up at her, arms tilting for a grapple. Only his legs didn’t work well enough to carry him, and he fell down, writhing on the carpet. His fury was nuclear. Jessie skirted the claws of his hands, and only escaped bruises, that time, because he split his own shin open on the coffee table. Watch out for the half-squid, she told her brother, later. She always tried to make a joke of it, if she could, for his benefit. She wondered now if that had backfired. 

There were worse run-ins with her drunk father, but that one kept coming back. Partly, it was the jump-scare: a real horror-film move. But mostly, she kept getting reminded of it by the occasional violent, partially-restrained EDP. Usually, Emotionally Distressed Person didn’t begin to cover it. Legs and arms would be strapped into the stretcher, but their howls would still dart at her, as she tried to treat them in the back of the ambulance. She didn’t blame them. They hadn’t chosen to become half-person, half-squid. Well, sometimes they had. There was that man last month, who wasn’t even high on something so much as low on it, feral, who kept yelling about how he was going to fuck her so hard she would travel back in time. How far back in time, she wanted to ask, because that might be compound punishment. But she stayed silent. Obviously, she didn’t want to make matters worse.

PCP, the cop accompanying them had guessed. That checked out from her experience as a paramedic, and before that, as an EMT, but she didn’t know first-hand. Thankfully. Even in her reckless years, she had always stayed away from really hard drugs. The whiff of their gasoline scent suggested that, if she followed it, she might never resurface. But somehow, alcohol seemed different. Her father’s example wasn’t enough to settle the question, at first. She convinced herself—or else society, media advertising, peer pressure to conform, loosen up, Have a Good Time etc. convinced her—that she could be moderate with her drinking. Maybe she would take after her mother, the model of singing Fleetwood Mac into the mouth of a wine bottle and dancing around the shotgun kitchen.

 
She did not. 

But the memory of life with her dad did accelerate her moment of clarity. She’d gotten into some kind of physical altercation with her then-boyfriend. But it wasn’t that they were both bruised, or that she’d apparently broken the spindle on one of his two ‘kitchen’ chairs, or even that she didn’t remember how any of these things had happened. It was that he said to her, “Jesus, Jessica, it’s like you’re a totally different person when you’re drunk.” That was it. She was only twenty-five at the time, but the delineated rays of enlightenment split the clouds. Although it felt less like a “higher power,” and more like she was just smart enough to put together the whole 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle and see that the image was her, as a fucking squid. If it took every other poor fuck until their forties or fifties to figure it out, that was their journey, but she wasn’t going to waste her life.

She also dumped the boyfriend. Talk about delusions.

But it was hard, as a paramedic, constantly strapping in people who were OD’ing or needed their stomachs pumped or were having some kind of drug-related psychotic break. Especially when those people were frequent fliers and she saw them again and again. It wasn’t just being faced with addiction, it was being bodied with it. Hefting their torsos and slinging their floppy limbs, like they’d become waterlogged with their own substance abuse. Her decaying empathy had more to do with the pandemic, though, than being sober. Every healthcare worker in New York City had enough trauma from that year to fill a gigantic Scrooge McDuck style vault. 

Of course, she treated everyone the same. That was her job. Every life was equally worth saving. But when it seemed like the patient might have had some choice in the matter, it hit her differently. Did they decide not to get a vaccine “for personal reasons”? Did they decide to call EMS for a paper cut or because they ran out of ibuprofen (both things she had personally witnessed)? She had more sympathy when the patient’s choice was to drink that second bottle of vodka, but some deeper part of her thought, Yeah, but I chose not to.

Because that was helpful to her: it was her choice. She hadn’t jibed with AA, partly because they put God into every damn thing. But mostly, the powerlessness of the worldview bummed her out. SMART Recovery, on the other hand, was about relying on herself, on her own terms, and her own ability to make decisions. Plus, it was based on science, with actual advances that had been made in the fields of behavioral therapy since, oh, say, 1935. And you went through the program and were out, rather than being doomed to an entire lifetime of guys trying to thirteenth-step your ass.

For all of these reasons, it was important to her that her partner, whoever that person was, didn’t abuse substances. She had enough of that in the first half of her life, and at work, and at the bars where she sometimes played, and the general fucking fabric of society at large. Why was so much of American life constructed around consumption of addictive, mind-altering substances, as if you couldn’t otherwise stand the person you were choosing to spend time with? Even the simplest meet-ups centered caffeine. But she couldn’t just refuse to socialize. If she did, the only time she would ever interact with civilians would be for their real or concocted medical emergencies, and she would go full misanthrope. A party, every once in a while, helped. Especially if she could see a person she loved, like Celeste—one of her few friends who was sober, young, cool, and not a first responder. Going to a party hosted by a sober person, even if there would be a lot of drinking, was always easier because she knew she’d have an ally. Celeste wouldn’t shove wine in her face. And, as the party went on, she wouldn’t be the only person with their head above the sea-level of stupidity.

Like, for example: it was helpful to be able to trade a glance with Celeste across the kitchen when Con, having shot back their whiskey, doubled back and grabbed the whole bottle of Bulleit and took it with them. Didn’t say hi to her. Didn’t say hi to anyone. A child. An absolute child. Like two six-year-olds in a trench coat. Except it was a jean jacket, and neither of the six-year-olds had the native IQ to know that a jean jacket wouldn’t even cover up the top child, much less the bottom one. Yeah, Con was younger than her, but she was way more mature when she was twenty-eight. Of course, that was part of the whole issue. That, and Con not understanding Jessie’s boundary around needing her partner not to drink. She couldn’t have that at home. Not that they had lived together, but it couldn’t be in her most personal space, in general. It was different for Celeste, who didn’t seem bothered by Theo having a drink, or hosting a party where everyone devolved into muppets in a washing machine. But then, Celeste was an actress and an SAT tutor, she wasn’t face-to-face with the worst of it in her job. And it seemed like her mom’s alcoholism was high-functioning and agreeable. By comparison.

She looked across the kitchen for Celeste, but found she was gone. Maybe someone new had come in, and she had to be on door duty. Hosting parties was so overrated. At her elbow, Ryan was emoting about Bros to a small group that looked about 70% into it. The screen of appearing to listen had been useful, until Ryan wheeled on her.

“Did you see it, Jess?”

“No.” 

“Oh my god, Jessie! How could you not? The first totally queer principal cast in a movie, ever? You have to support your community, come on!”

She wanted to say: What a surprise that the first queer principal cast still centers cis white men.

Instead, she said: “I’m always working. I don’t have a lot of free time.”

“Jessie’s an EMT,” Ryan explained, proud and incorrect. 

“Oh my god, how is that?” gasped a young man she didn’t know.

“It’s like a comedy open mic in Gowanus. Only there are more people laughing. Excuse me.”

Gesturing with her solo cup, she snaked her way around Ryan’s audience to the part of the kitchen counter lined with bottles. Fuck, she wanted a drink. Still. Even ten years sober. It was like seeing the eyes of the beast glinting in the flashlight beam, beyond the chainlink fence. Looking on the bright side, at least Con had taken the Bulleit, which had been one of her favorites. On the other hand, Con’s whole vaudeville act in here was what they’d call the activating event that made her want a drink.

But no. If she’d made it through 2020 sober, no way she’d let this stupidity get to her. Except, of course, that she’d already filled her cup with ginger ale, without restocking the ice first. A fluid mechanics rookie mistake. Annoyed, she slurped room-temperature ginger ale from the lip, trying to make room.

Suddenly, from the hallway came the sound of feet pounding the hardwood floor. What was the chance that this was Con-related? Given that at least half of the people at the party were actors, musicians, artists, and other Free-Spirited types, she’d put the odds at…59%.

But she barely had the time to settle on that number before she turned to look through the hall door and came face-to-face with Con.