PREV:
Part 1 - My First Drink
I woke in my bed. No Molly. I called to her. No response. I walked through the house. Still no Molly. But I did find a good number of her clothes. And not just minor articles like a scarf or jacket, but critical parts, like, uh, her dress. I was going to the Coors Classic bike race in Boulder that afternoon, so I jumped into the shower before my ride came by. When the hot water hit my body, I recoiled in pain. In looking down, I saw three cuts on my left chest with dried blood below them.
A few days later, I stood at Molly’s bedroom door holding a paper bag filled with her clothes.
Hi.
Hey.
So, sorry about the other night. Honestly, I don't know what happened.
I think you got drunk.
Yeah, I guess I did. But I mean, I don’t remember much.
You didn’t miss much worth remembering.
I was worried when you weren’t there.
You didn’t look qualified to drive me home, so I called a friend.
Right. Good. Sorry about that. I brought your clothes back.
Thanks. You can just leave them there.
With that, she turned back to drawing on her paper. Those were the last words Molly ever said to me.
From the moment I fell down the stairs until the moment I woke up, I have zero memories. Well, that is not entirely true. There are two fuzzy five-second fragments, but aside from that, it is all lost time. What the hell happened? We were doing great. We were laughing. Talking. Having such a wonderful time.
I wish I could report that that is the last time that happened, but it was not. It didn’t happen hundreds of times, but it did happen more than ten. I would drink. At some number of minutes after that, I would stop remembering. Then I would wake up somewhere and work to learn what happened in the missing hours.
It is worth mentioning that this is not a situation where this happened to me after drinking eight beers or four shots. This could happen to me after one or two beers (depending on when I last ate) or a single drink of something harder.
Not all of the nights went fully unreported. I would get snippets here and there, but never a full accounting—the people I was with were drinking too. But there were more names that would go in the Molly column. Things were going well, then I drank, and that was that.
I had two things going against me.
- This is what people my age, the people I was running around with at least, were doing—drinking often and drinking lots.
- I assumed that what happened to me was what happened to everyone.
It wasn’t until I shared this with a girl I was dating (who obviously hadn’t drank with me yet) that I learned this was not everyone’s experience. After asking a few questions, she casually said that I might not be able to metabolize alcohol, which is why it was having this amplified effect on me. Intrigued, I asked what this meant. She explained that there are people who have reactions to alcohol. Some people are allergic to it. And some people have zero ability to process it at all. She said if I were in the can’t-process-it camp, then it means I’m the cheapest date out there because all of it is like one hundred proof to my body.
Further, she said there are some ethnicities (asian and american indian) that can struggle with alcohol. Since I am adopted and have very intentionally sought not to learn anything about my racial makeup, AND seem to be a bit of a mutt and carry common characteristics from numerous ethnicities, it is a fair supposition.
Some might think learning this information would immediately right the ship, but remember, I was nineteen years old and these were all new experiences, and again, that is just what the people I spent the most time with were doing, and it was assumed in a number of ways that I would be doing the same.
NEXT:
Part 3 - My Last Drink 
