I was 13 the first time I drank so much the bugs stopped. A high school party at Chrissy Olden’s house, a senior, whose mom worked overnights at the truck stop and embarrassed the customers by not being embarrassed to lose a solid 10 minutes rambling over the register about who wrote what in her yearbook in 1971. I was sitting in the middle of the living room on a corduroy couch telling Katie Mathews, the only other 8th grader there, something about the temperature of music. Somewhere there was a DJ holding his finger under the faucet of the party. Every few minutes I’d be handed a bottle of something that razored my tonsils all the way down. If someone had told me it was nail polish remover I would have believed them but I would not have stopped drinking the red off of my heart. Do you remember the first time you knew you were absolutely safe? I stumbled into the bathroom and locked the door behind me so I could smile as wide as I had to without anybody knowing I had to. The mirror was caked with Aqua Net. There was enough hair in the sink to mistake the drain for a pet. The last person who had vomited in the toilet had missed the toilet. A year prior, just before my grandfather swallowed the worm of his life, he leaned his yellow face into my terrified eyes and made me promise to Never go near the bottle. Nobody had to tell me that booze was a terrible way to die. But this was a party, and I was person for the very first time. You won’t know what I mean unless you’ve been there too. The bugs drowned till morning. Say what you want about addiction. I pulled the hair out of the drain with my hands. I took it home. I gave it a name.
Andrea Gibson’s “PARTY”