Background

The first time I quit heroin and meant it, I switched to vodka and orange juice. The vodka was filched from my mother's liquor cabinet, late at night after she had passed out and would no longer remember how full the bottle was when she'd fixed her last drink of the night.

After two or three drinks, I felt sufficiently competent to face the facts of my existence, to wit: I was 25, divorced, bankrupt, and several weeks into the aftermath (or so I thought) of an addiction that had robbed me of a lot of things that didn't matter anyway, as well as the only one that DID matter: my fiance, JP. Even the vodka couldn't take the edge off THAT memory--his eyes widening as he took the needle from his arm that night, then his gasping struggle for breath as his throat closed, the heavy sound as he fell to the floor...the voice of the policeman coming into the holding room where I was cuffed to a hospital bench, telling me "He did pass." His official time of death was 11:10 PM, they told me later.

After five or six drinks, when I looked at the back of my hands, I would see two parallel lines of livid scar tissue, reddened now by alcohol: putting my hands together I could read the time, the first minute of my "new, improved" life--11:11. By that point in the night, of course, nothing would matter except the things I couldn't obliterate. Eventually I would pass out, into troubled sleep, smack-haunted dreams.