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.