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me!
    Alcohol was miraculous. Like in Harold and the Purple Crayon , I had drawn an escape hatch in a wall and plunged into another world. Drunk, I’d finally felt comfortable in my own skin. I’d had wild adventures. For a minute, I had been cool. Then I had woken up in bed as if transported by faerie magic. This was an earth-shattering discovery.
    As a child, I had pinwheeled through various imagined futures: I would be a knife thrower, I would be an undersea explorer like Jacques Cousteau, I would wail on guitar like Slash. Now I had found it. My father was a nuclear physicist. My mother was a mom. Alcohol was what I was supposed to be. I would do this again as soon as possible. I would do this all the time!
    After Lon got a solid chewing out from my mother, my main connections for alcohol were Bernie, a homeless schizophrenic Vietnam vet who occasionally tried to grope me, and Pinhead, an ex-Marine who had been kicked out of the military. He had a tattoo on his stomach of a flying penis and testicles ejaculating a winged drop of semen with a single blue eyeball.
    I pounded a liter of white zinfandel and fell down a flight of stairs. I chugged a magnum of champagne, swallowing the cigarette butt someone had tossed into it. I got drunk on vodka and came home covered head-to-toe in poison ivy. I climbed one of our neighbor’s apple trees with a bottle of Sambuca and drank until I fell out. I lost my virginity later that year on the floor of Lon’s bedroom with four other people passed out around us. I remember the dark fake wood paneling and the orange shag rug and not much else.

    By the time I was fourteen, my mother had given up trying to control me. She tried to ground me, but what could she do—stop me as I was walking out the door? I was over six feet tall and strong, powerful as I was naive, juvenile and hardheaded, abrasive and arrogant. My dad was rarely around, traveling constantly for business. Igot in daily screaming matches with my mom and Tatyana and got shitfaced at every opportunity.
    I breezed through my classes with minimal effort, squeaking by at just above C level. I had finally learned to fight back when picked on and had been suspended from school for fighting so often that I faced expulsion for my next offense. My hairy legs sprawled out from under my desk into the aisles, my gangly arms hung over the front. Once, I stood up, and the desk-and-chair came with me. I almost made it out the door wearing it before the study hall teacher stopped me.
    High school’s arbitrary social codes were as meaningless as they were constricting. Champion sweatshirts, button-down shirts, and lettermen jackets? I felt like I had walked into an Archie comic book. Why the hell must you roll the cuffs of your jeans? I wore the same clothes two or three days in a row, sleeping in them so I could sleep later. My classmates’ dreams were hollow, their concerns pointless. The girl I liked wanted to be a dental hygienist! It was all beneath contempt. I had two friends, a couple of guys in my grade who shared my passion for alcohol and my distaste for everything else, and that was enough for me. I carefully set about mocking, offending, and alienating everyone else.
    There was nothing I couldn’t overpower or outsmart, no game I couldn’t cheat or manipulate, no system I couldn’t beat. Childhood was claustrophobic and demeaning, a truncated, dependent existence. I was so done with all this. I had nothing else to learn from my parents. I was ready to go out into the world. Okay, I had to learn how to drive, but that was it.
    In the beginning of my sophomore year, my two friends suddenly stopped talking to me. A week later, our house was vandalized: “GET OUT COMMIE” and a huge swastika in fluorescent orange spray paint. It was as baffling as it was hurtful. We were not Jewish, or Russian, or communist, or socialist. Was it a response to the immigrant last name I hated so much, the