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In the early 1990s when was caught in the grips of addiction, I roamed the Lower East Side of Manhattan with the sole mission to stay loaded every minute of my life. At Houston Street and Avenue A was an apartment building called “Red Square.” On the roof was a statue of Lenin and a clock with misplaced numbers. Painted near the clock was the phrase “Waste Not A Moment.” The statue and the clock are still there, but the phrase that antagonized me while I wasted my moments is gone.
Those wasted moments of my early 20s can be traced back to the day I discovered how easy it was to break into my parent’s liquor cabinet and began mixing not-so tasty drinks for the other neighborhood children. Of course, being only in elementary school, I didn’t understand that “mixing” drinks, meant mixing with “mixers” – like soda. My concoctions featured gin mixed with the rum and the vodka, etc. I stood at the bar mixing away and telling jokes while my peers sat on the couch bristling and chattering in the excitement of being “bad.” It was fun. Whether the drinks tasted good was not the point. I reveled my new “Dean Martin” identity much more than the one I truly held of a very sad little girl secretly taunted by the feeling that her mother didn’t love her.
When my parents eventually discovered the raided liquor cabinet, my older sister took the fall for my offense. I suppose that as far as my parents were concerned, I was too young to even be on the list of suspects. I can still hear my sister pleading her innocence as I sat on the couch listening with my mouth shut.
It didn’t take long before what started like an occasional toe in the water transformed into a daily ritual. For me, the phrase “getting ready for school” meant smoking pot through a makeshift tin-foil and toilet-paper roll bong while dangling my torso out my bedroom window. My mother sat smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table, staring into the curio cabinet while “golden oldies” blasted on the AM radio. On her way out the door for work at the local post office where she was the head clerk, she would bang 3 times on the wall to tell me it was my turn to leave and go to school. I HATED the banging and had repeatedly asked her to call me by name rather than bang on the wall. The BANG-BANG-BANG made me feel even more powerless and the lack of love and connection more profound.
