Sunrise Cocktail

SUNRISE COCKTAIL
                                                 
         “So why do you think you did what you did? If it’s not because of your father, then what is it?”
         “I don’t know.”
         “Theresa, in order to get help, you need to understand what caused you to do what you did.”
         “I don’t know.”
         This went on for about a half hour, once a week, for a month.  Until she got sick of, my ‘I don’t know’ answers but she claimed I was cured.  This was one of my many punishments for going to school totally wasted, so far gone that to this day I can only remember bits and pieces.  Along with being humiliated, suspended for a week, grounded for life, I also had to see a school counselor for my ‘drinking problem.’  Every week she’d try to pry something out of me, anything that she could use to ‘figure’ me out.  She said she was trying to help me but it was also her job, so how much did she really care?  All I was to her was a number, the next teenager she saved, a notch on her little belt.  She couldn’t save me because there was nothing wrong with me.  I didn’t feel the need to tell her anything because there was nothing to tell.  Why couldn’t she understand that some times people do stupid things and there isn’t always a deep rooted, sub-conscience problem that needs to be fixed?  I don’t think up until that point.  I had ever disliked someone that much.  She was always trying to use my father as the scapegoat for why I drank.  He was a heavy drinker, and had his problems but I felt at the time, that there was no connection.  So I wasn’t going to use him as a reason for why I came to school drunk.  She seemed to be upset when I  wouldn’t give up any information on my father.  It was like she woke up every Thursday saying, “Today is the day that I will get her to say that her father would drive around drunk with her in the car.”  She would try to get me to say things that weren’t true, she would bring up certain situations and when I would respond to it she would then turn it around by making it like it really happened and she would then ask,
         “Well what did you do then?”
         “I didn’t do anything because that has never really happened to me.”
         The session would end and I would dodge for the door to get the hell out of there as fast as I could.  The whole counselor thing was to save the school’s butt not mine. 
         The one thing that I was sorry about was the fact that I was caught.  Of the 500+  ninth grade students going to William Paca Junior High at least 1/3-1/2 went to school drunk that year, but I was the only moron that got caught.  See it all started when I decided to add a little spice to my O.J, by adding vodka.  Then I would walk about five blocks away to my best-friend Toni’s.  We would share my morning cocktail and straighten each other’s hair and then off to school we went.  Until one morning I had no O.J, so the genius that I was poured the vodka into my 20oz. container filling it almost to the same spot it normally came to with both liquids in it, but as I said there was only one liquid in it that day.  So there I was drinking like a champ, until I’m flat ironing Toni’s hair and I started to not be able to see her hair, everything started to become blurry.  So I ran to the sink dumped out what was left, rinsed out the container and then fill it up with water and started to drink that.  By this time we were supposed to be going to the bus-stop, but I am realizing that I’ m too drunk to go to school,
         “Stay at my house, no one is going to be there, Kenny will be at work all day.”
         “Yea, but what if he comes home, he scares me, and besides the school is going to call my house and then I’m going to be in trouble, I have to go to school.”
         This along with getting on the bus are the last things I absolutely positively remember.  After this there are only flashes of memory, and what friends and teachers have since then told me about my incident.  The things that I remember are as follows:
         On the bus ride to school I was hanging all over some kid whose name I can’t even remember now.
         Once at school I couldn’t remember my locker combination, I had a crowd of people trying all the combinations that I shouted out, none of which where right.
         Then I remember being in the girl’s bathroom, but I don’t know what I was doing in there, most likely throwing up.
         Next, I remember being in the nurses’ office, laying down on the bed that was alined next to a window and I kept spitting in the little space between the bed and the window.  When I wasn’t spitting, I was babbling on about why I drank so much, all of the reasons were bull, but I was drunk and they wanted answers.
         The next thing I remember after this I was home in bed and it was about four o’clock in the afternoon.  My friend Toni woke me up, and I was yelling at her, telling her she wasn’t my friend cause she had told the nurse about me.  She told me it was the only thing she could do because I was totally incapable of being left alone.  Then she tells me that my mom is downstairs waiting, and she wanted to talk to me.  So I got up and it hits me, I’m still drunk.  ‘How in the hell I’m I going to talk to her, I’m still trashed’.  Once downstairs I again gave twelve million reasons on why I did what I did.  She knew I was still drunk, got fed up with me and sent me back to my room.
         I fell asleep again only to be woken up by my mother telling me she was going to her friend’s house and that if I left my room she would kill me.  I waited for her to leave, went downstairs and downed a handful of aspirins to stop the marching band banging around in my head.  Then I called Toni to find out what had happened at school that day.  I couldn’t remember and I needed to know, what I did.  After the recap I went back to sleep. 
         It wasn’t until the next day that I realized how serious my situation was.  Since I was suspended from school, and grounded my mother didn’t trust me to stay at home, so she made me go with her to run errands.  She first stopped at a deli to get cigarettes and  next to the deli was the post office, so she asked me to drop off a few letters.  Before I got out of the car I pulled down the visor to look in the mirror and almost fainted when I saw my eyes.  There were bloodshot and red.  Apparently I had broken every blood vessel in my eyes from nonstop vomiting, but I do not remember throwing up once.  My mother went on to tell me that I had alcohol poisoning  and the only reason that I did not end up in a hospital was because I kept throwing up.  She said that most people have to have their stomachs pumped and that it can cause brain damage along with a whole list of other things.  Before this, I had never known anyone to have alcohol poisoning, I just thought drinking was for fun.  To do whenever you wanted; morning, noon, night.  No one was supposed to get hurt. And contrary to the counselors belief, I thought there was no reason for drinking other fun.