Part 33 (Drink)

With the renovations on our house pretty much finished, which had up until then kept me busy since losing my job, I was hit withe the perfect storm of idleness as Conn had been transferred to Cork as part of his training and then my party buddies in Jo and Noreen had both become pregnant at pretty much the same time. Both these pregnancies were strange in themselves as Jo privately admitted that she had no idea who the father was and Noreen who was still very much in a relationship with ex cellmate girlfriend refused point blank to reveal the fathers identity. Either way both of them sensibly retreated away from the party scene which was a big loss for me. While I was happy for them being pregnant I was sad that it wasn't me, myself and Conn had talked about having a baby and i had went as far as coming off the pill but nothing had happened, admittedly sex with Conn was lets say infrequent but I had had unprotected sex with a good few guys without anything occurring so I kind of knew within myself that all was perhaps not working as it should for me.

I had up till then kind of been seeing a guy who was a buddy of one of Jo's workmates so with everyone otherwise occupied i started to see a lot more of Brendan.

Brendan was/is probably what would be called a functioning alcoholic as he would start drinking as soon as he finished work every evening and continue till bedtime but still have no difficulty getting up in the morning for work. So as he didn't seem to mind having me as a drinking buddy I started to join him more and more. The only issue with this was that I was an absolute rubbish drinker and would be well drunk after only a few vodkas. Having the addictive personality I seem to possess I learned to adapt, I would drink, get sick then keep drinking. The downside of the plan was firstly i rarely remembered the previous night and secondly the hangovers the following day meant I was a write off until i started drinking again.

All this led me into conflict with Conn as if he ever called me I was either dying sick or pissed drunk and when he was allowed to come home he invariably found that I was on the missing list as from Friday evening till Monday morning I was drinking. I think being honest now it suited me to lose myself as Conn was seeing a guy and although i was kind of fine with this I didn't really want to be around the two of them. Conn's big beef was that we had spent a fortune on the new house but I had now gone full circle from being a manic house cleaner to now not lifting a finger to do any household stuff other than the bare minimum to keep myself some way presentable. Part of the reason for this was that hangovers and cleaning really don't go but the other reason was that i really didn't want to make the house comfortable for them, I suppose in one way i objected to him bringing his boyfriend to the house as i never brought anyone back so if the price they paid was to clean up my mess then so be it was my thought process at the time.

Sex with Brendan was obviously drunken and tended to happen at random time and places (whenever he could get it up i guess), pub toilets and alley ways seemed to be the norm, It was always hazy and i don't recall it being much fun, also with the way I was and how drunk i would get I had a tendency to get passed around the other bar bums which as you can imagine was just a great experience. Drink i quickly found was worse than heroin for sinking me into ever lower depths and a couple of instances that happened within weeks of each other focussed my mind to calling time, the first was a the anger and shouting of a young mum as she arrived at a bus stop in the middle of a very wet day to find me being humped by i think Brendan inside the bus stop. The girl held nothing back as she called me every name under the sun (she was totally correct), the second was when I woke up from a heavy day/night of drinking and found myself lying naked in the back of a car, I never found out who's car it was or how i ended up there but it was a busy pedestrian street and people had noticed me lying there as i saw a couple of grinning faces as I awoke, the only item of clothes i could find was my t-shirt so i had no choice but to get out of the car with it on and try my best to pull it down over myself, what made it worse was the quiet words spoken to me by an old lady who came to my rescue by donating her coat and calling a taxi to bring me home, as we waited for the cab she took my arm and asked did i really want to be like this, her words just went right through me and i never saw Brendan again after then, I doubt he was ever sober enough to notice.