After life on Fayerweather Street, I got a job writing newsletters at a commodities firm in downtown Boston. I didn’t know a single thing about commodities or futures but quickly became an “expert” in the eyes of the shady salesmen. In truth, my ignorance in finance wasn’t the only thing I was hiding back then. There was also my growing addiction to alcohol and the forbidden love affair with a fellow group therapy patient.

THIS IS PART 6 of a SIX-PART STORY

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

It’s hard to say who was more in trouble with booze, me or my new live-in boyfriend, Carl. Our relationship, I think, was based on the pleasure we both took in drinking large amounts of alcohol and chit chatting late into the night. We would buy big cheap jugs of wine and go through them, pouring glass after glass, in a matter of hours. How much fun this was for us! Slurring our words, we’d wax poetic on a report I was writing or a situation that had come up for Carl at work. Jofka would have been put to bed much earlier in the evening, so we’d be free to act like the drunken fools we were, repeating the same stories over and over again, knocking over plates of food, sometimes even falling down. One night I tripped coming out of the bathroom, which was situated at the top of a back stairway leading to the back yard, and fell down the whole flight, landing at the bottom and looking around, perplexed. What had just happened? I was in a drunken stupor, so I didn’t really understand. All I knew was that I’d damaged my hand and my thumb (which was sprained) really hurt.

That’s the way things were, night after night. After a while, I tired of the whole situation and broke up with Carl. The endless drinking had gotten to me even though I, myself, was a terrible drunk. Once he was gone, I missed him; we’d been lovers and good friends and all my friends adored him, but I somehow had the sense to know the relationship was doomed from the start because of the way we both abused alcohol.

And yet, we remained close. We’d been in the same therapy group almost the entire four years I’d lived in Cambridge. We’d started on the same exact day and by some weird synchronicity we left on the same day, two active alcoholics who sat on the sidelines and rarely contributed.

No one in that group knew I drank till I passed out every night or that I drove drunk or that I had debilitating blackouts that caused me to have no memory of how I’d gotten home from a party or where I’d parked my car.

No one knew that Carl and I had had a love affair or that he had the same agonizing problems with booze that I did. It should have been obvious from the baggy-eyed, hungover looks on our faces, the somewhat graceless way we moved our bodies. But no one guessed. The therapist leading the group seemed particularly clueless and the fact that he didn’t pick up on the troubles of two of his more damaged clients was a real indictment of his skills as a psychologist. Looking back, I wonder why I stayed in the group so long. I certainly didn’t get much out of it. One of the members, an engineer in his early thirties who had trouble coping with depression, took his life swallowing a bottle of pills one day, the therapist calling each of us and saying in a subdued voice that Eric had killed himself. This was shocking, but I continued on for a few months. The last day I was in the group was the last day I ever saw Carl. As I said before, it was his last day too, and we kissed goodbye in the parking lot, holding onto one another for a few moments before parting for good. 

Cover Image: Kelly Sikkema

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