Daisy

I don’t know what causes addiction. I don’t understand why some people can stop after one or two and some people can’t stop until the entire bottle is empty. I learned early on in my twenties that I fit into the latter category. I loved getting drunk.

I grew up in the church. I got saved when I was 10. I read the entire Bible when I was 10. I memorized Bible verses and earned patches that were sewn onto a vest they gave to all of the kids in Awana. The other kids at Awanas were rich. They went to the private school there at the church. My mom drove my brother and I up to the church every Wednesday night in her beat up Oldsmobile. The kids were a clique, and no one talked to me. But I found God there. And God filled every empty space in my heart and gave me a purpose.

I always felt different from everyone. I always felt like I was on the outside, looking in. I made it through middle school, junior high, and then high school living a holy life. I studied, I worked, and I went home and read my books and watched my movies. I wrote a lot of stories. I always wanted to be a writer.I wanted to live this romantic life. I wanted to fall madly in love, and travel the world. I wanted to go to college and get out of my hometown. And that’s what I did. Though I went to college only 20 minutes away from my hometown, I got married after my junior year of college and we moved to Wisconsin right after we graduated to start a new life.

Jesus is my Lord and Savior, but when I got drunk when I was an extremely unhappy twenty-year-old newlywed, booze became my savior. Booze made it possible for me to pretend to be happy, to put a smile on my face, and to function. No matter that I would fall asleep on the couch most nights. No matter that I couldn’t remember entire hours of my life. No matter that I kept passing out in my bathtub with the water overflowing, candles burning down to nothing, and empty wine bottles overturned on the linoleum floor.

By the time I was 24, I was suicidal and in therapy once a week with a “severe alcohol dependency” diagnosis. I was sick in the head. I was sick of the long winters, sick of wanting to die. My entire family moved from Arkansas to Florida, which is where we were all from originally. I went to visit them in December. When I left Wisconsin, it was barely 10 degrees and there was a foot of snow in the ground. When I stepped outside of the airport in Tampa, the humidity in the parking garage instantly made me feel warm and safe. Driving over the Skyway Bridge over the vast bay, the glittering blue water, gave me a reason to want to live. I remember thinking living in Florida would solve all of my problems. How could anyone be miserable in such a warm, sunny place?

I called it quits on my marriage, packed what I could fit into my car, and drove from Madison to Macon, Georgia. From Macon, Georgia, I drove to Bradenton, Florida where I lived with my grandparents for the first year. That was 2016. During the drive across the country, I drank an entire bottle of Patron that my coworkers had given me, and beers purchased at various gas stations along the way.

My grandparents were convinced that I was sober, but I hid the bottles in my laundry, under the bed, or in the closet. I would take shots straight from the bottle, and go on long jogs around the neighborhood at night, admiring the wide open night sky, all the stars.

I started dating a couple of guys at work. We’d meet up at a dive bar after work, play pool, smoke cigarettes, and drink pitchers of beer. I laughed at their crazy stories. One of them became my boyfriend, and we were a match made in hell, but that is not this story. On Sundays, I cleaned myself up and went to church, usually with a splitting hangover. I got involved in church. Even became a volunteer there. Made some friends who genuinely cared and tried to help me. But I was so angry at God. I was just so angry.

And the years went by.

They were a blur. After a year living with my grandparents, I moved into a trailer that my mom and her boyfriend owned. It was a really nice trailer, not like trailer parks in other parts of the country where people make meth and hang their laundry outside on a clothesline. Florida has nice retirement communities with trailers that are new and well taken care of. I lived in a 55 and over community. I was not supposed to live there, but everyone turned the other way. I only had to pay the lot fee for rent which was cheap. I was barely making any money and was stressed about getting nowhere in life.

No career, no stable boyfriend, a car that was breaking down all the time, and an ever growing alcohol problem. I managed to get sober for 6 months after my boyfriend and I broke up after a nasty public breakup at Busch Gardens, where we were both so drunk and fighting in public in front of families and kids, and security came to separate us. Again, another story for another time. But after that, I got sober for a short amount of time.

And those 6 months were the most productive months of my entire twenties. I applied to be a high school teacher and was surprised to get the job. I thought I had finally found my purpose in life, and I dove into my work. Teaching became my life. Lesson planning, teaching the lessons, researching, grading papers. It was creative and time consuming. But the students pushed me. I wasn’t emotionally stable enough to be a teacher. I was an unhealthy 28 year old teaching 17 and 18 year olds.

During my first month of teaching, I discovered that one of my students and her ten year old sister were being sexually abused by their father. I was teaching a unit on Shakespeare, and I required all of my students to keep a journal. One night, I was reading my students’ journal entries late at night, and her entry made me catch my breath. By then, I was drinking again. I had relapsed from the stress, and I had gotten back together with my crazy ex-boyfriend. We broke up again, but it left me an empty shell of myself. And then this journal entry.

I had to report it to the police. The girl and her sister were pulled from their home. I didn’t see the girl in my classes anymore after that. Many of my students were normal, bright, and hard working. But the handful that pushed me, pushed me too far. And it crushed me to fail at something that I wanted to be good at. Teaching is an extremely cliquish job. The other teachers did not like me. My students were always getting into trouble, and me and my students were the talk of the school. I quickly learned to avoid the teacher’s lounge and ate my lunch in my classroom. We had endless “teacher development” meetings that we had to attend. During one of the meetings, the story of my student who was being sexually abused by her father came up, and the administrators were trying to warn teachers the importance of being a mandatory reporter, and I was sitting there, I couldn’t breathe, and I started crying. Like, sobbing uncontrollably in a roomful of a hundred teachers and school administrators. I stood up and ran from the room. It was one of the most humiliating moments of my life.

I knew I was falling apart. I would leave school around 3PM and head down to Gulf Gate most afternoons to hang out with my mom at her shop. My mom had pursued her dream of opening her own store, it was a cute little thrift store in Gulf Gate, which is an artsy neighborhood in South Sarasota, and I would hang out in her little thrift shop talking to her, grading papers, and talking to her customers. And we would always drink.

One of the regular customers who came in was a woman around my mom’s age. Let’s say her name was Karen (it wasn’t). Karen was going through a hard time. She found out that her longtime boyfriend was drugging her. They would have a few drinks together, she was a heavy drinker, she would fall asleep, and thought nothing of it. He was slipping stuff into her drinks and sexually assaulting her while she slept, filming it, and posting the videos and photos on porn sites.

She found the photos and videos and turned it into the police. He was arrested and her life fell apart. She had to move out of her house, and she was having an estate sale. My mom and I went over to help her set up. It was a Friday night. It was in the spring of 2019. I was wearing my clothes that I had taught class in, my dress and some black ballet flats. I followed my mom to Karen’s house, and when I pulled up into her driveway, I saw a guy my age with long brown hair and a flannel shirt hanging out on the front porch of the house.

He had brown eyes and a shy smile and said “hey,” and I was a goner. I spent the next few hours setting up tables of stuff for the estate sale flirting with…let’s call him Jack. We had a bottle of cheap whiskey and rum. I don’t remember what we talked about. We were all drinking a lot.

At one point, Jack and I were unpacking Christmas decorations onto a table, and he just looked at me and said, “I don’t really know how I got here. What are we doing here?” And for some reason, that was the funniest thing in the world to me.

Jack’s dad was there, my mom, my mom’s boyfriend, Karen, and a couple of other people. We were all helping Karen set out her stuff and pricing them. She was a mess, drinking too much, crying and falling down on her driveway. But what happened to her was horrible, and we were just trying to help her.

Jack kept the mood light throughout the night, and he stayed close to me. He joked about the fact that he was wearing Karen’s son’s clothes. “I’m wearing a 13 year old’s clothes right now.” Karen’s house was down in south Sarasota near the Gulf Gate public library. Her house was a 4 mile walk to Point of Rocks, which is an area on Siesta Key Beach.

We finished up for the night, and my mom and her boyfriend gave me a look before they got into their car to drive home. By then, it was probably 11 at night. I was buzzed. I needed to go home. I didn’t know these people. I had just met Jack. “You coming?” My mom said to me. I looked at Jack. Jack looked at me. “I'm going to stay here for a while,” I said. I hugged my mom and watched them drive off. It was just me and Jack, then. Karen was passed out in her room. Jack’s dad was somewhere else in the house, passed out too.

“I want to go to the beach,” I said. “I love going to the beach at night.”

“Let’s go,” Jack said.

“I’m way too drunk to drive right now,” I laughed.

“You want to walk to Point of Rocks?” Jack said.

“It’s 4 miles away,” I said.

“Do you have anywhere you need to be?” he said, smiling.

And I’ll be damned, but that’s all it took for me to start walking in the dead of night, in a dress and ballet flats, to the beach with a complete stranger. I didn’t even bring my wallet. I just had my phone. Hell, maybe I didn’t even have my phone. I never go anywhere without my purse because I am a type 1 Diabetic and need my medicine. But I didn’t think about that in that moment. I just remember we started walking. The stars were really bright that night.

He was a beautiful storyteller. That’s what made me fall in love with him. As we walked, he told me how he knew Karen, how she was like a mother to him because she was best friends with his dad. He talked about how he had grown up in this neighborhood, and he pointed out some of the houses and told me stories from his childhood. Looking back, it could've all been bullshit, I don’t know.

We were about twenty minutes into our walk when we were crossing a bridge over a ditch. I’m pretty sure we were taking a shortcut through someone’s private property and trespassing. We stopped. I don’t know why. He sat down and looked up at me. “I just got out of prison two days ago,” he said. “Does that make you want to turn back?”

Of course it didn’t. We continued to walk towards Siesta Key while he did all of the talking. I was still drunk. He told me all about how he was a heroin addict in recovery, that he had been busted for robbing a Target to get money for drugs, that he had a daughter he hadn’t seen in two years, and that his ex-wife wouldn't let him go near her. All he wanted to do was get back on his feet so he could get his daughter back.

It was a long walk. Around 8 miles total. There and back took us several hours. I remember we went out to Point of Rocks, the tide was really high, and we stood on concrete steps in the water and he kissed me while the waves crashed all around us. We walked back to Karen’s house, my buzz was starting to wear off, I was shaking really bad, and the walk back seemed to take an eternity. I was starting to feel really tired and scared. But then we got back to Karen’s house. It was 4 in the morning. He laid down on the couch and looked at me, but I went home.

As I drove home, it occurred to me that I did not have his phone number, or his last name. I decided that was for the best. “This was fun, but that’s all it needs to be. Let it go,” I told myself.

When I woke up the next afternoon, I had a FB message from him. He knew my last name, and my last name is very uncommon. I was easy to find.

We connected. He was using someone’s computer to contact me. He didn’t have a phone, a job, a car, or money. He was staying at Karen’s house with his dad until the estate sale was finished and the house sold. He said he was going to start looking for a job but he wanted to see me.

We started seeing each other. He started crashing with me at my trailer, and we got drunk together. He’d been in prison for two years, so we had fun going to the beach, the local museums, the parks, and different restaurants. We would walk to this dive bar near my trailer all the time and hang out there. We got to know the regulars and the bartenders.

He told me about how he used to be a semi professional baseball player before he became an addict. He was also a professional gambler and bowler. He told me that before he got injured bowling (which was how he got hooked on painkillers) he used to go to the Greyhound racetrack in Sarasota and play blackjack and win big. It was all bullshit but I ate it up.

He said when he was married he worked at a car dealership and made tons of money, but he lost it all when he got hooked on painkillers. He said he and his buddy would go get high when they were supposed to be at work. Then he started getting high all the time, including when he was driving his baby around town. That’s why his wife took his daughter and left him.

I was still teaching at this point. He’d hang out at my trailer all day on my laptop while I was at work. Jack had taken over my entire life without me realizing it. He was basically living with me after two weeks of knowing each other.

I had jury duty on a Monday, and I had scheduled the day off at wrok to go to jury duty. But he pressured me to skip jury duty. “It’s like a three day weekend for you! We could drive down to the Keys,” he said. “Don’t go to jury duty. Let’s get in your car and drive down to the Florida Keys. We can sleep on the beach.”

I ended up skipping jury duty, but we didn’t drive down to the Florida Keys. We spent the day getting drunk at a tiki bar on the water.

After a few weeks, Karen sold the house that she had lived in with her boyfriend who was now out on bail awaiting his sentencing. Jack and his dad had to move on. It didn’t occur to me that they were homeless, basically. Jack and his dad went to Lake Placid. Jack’s grandmother had some land in Lake Placid with a trailer home on the land. So the two men went out here to live and try to find work. Jack’s dad was also unemployed. I kept in touch with Jack, he always found a way to use his dad’s phone or someone’s computer to call me or message me through Facebook.

Then he invited me to come out there for a weekend, so I drove out to Lake Placid one night after I got done teaching. The orange blossoms were blossoming and it smelled amazing. The countryside in Florida is beautiful. Their trailer was a total bachelor pad. When I pulled up, Jack and his dad were drinking beers outside, playing darts. There was a huge bonfire going. Jack and I sat next to the fire that night drinking while he played the guitar for me. The stars were so bright out there in the country. I got rip roaring drunk and don’t really remember much else from that weekend, but I remember being convinced that I wanted to move to Lake Placid by the time I left there. It was a cute little town.

We kept that up for a few weeks. Jack found a job at a distillery making cash under the table working outside cutting sugar cane for the distillery. He would work outside all day long in the hot sun and then go home to the trailer and message me or call me from his dad’s phone. Or maybe by then he had a phone from the money he was making at the distillery, I can’t remember.

He had all these grand plans. “I want to talk to the distillery owner about making me a marketing manager. I could do their social media pages for them and go to all of the liquor distributors in the area and increase their sales.”

We sat at Starbucks one Saturday in Sebring so he could work on his marketing pitch for the distillery, and I applied for jobs because I knew I couldn’t teach much longer.

“I don’t think I can do it much longer,” he said to me one night when we were talking on the phone. “This is a bad environment for me. I’m trying to stay clean, but my dad and his friends aren’t making it easy for me. I’m starting to get stressed. I feel like I’m living in isolation out here.”

One weekend when I went to visit him, his probation officer made a house visit. We had to wait for her before we could go out. She finally pulled up the gravel driveway in her silver sedan, got out of the car, and walked up to the trailer. She took it all in, saw me, and I had a weird moment when she looked at me, like I wanted to explain to her who I was. But the moment passed, and she wrote some notes on her clipboard and left.

And there were times when he needed to do check ins at the jail, and I would drive him there. Hanging out in the jail while he did his drug tests and met with the parole officer was depressing.

“You can move to Sarasota and stay with me,” I told him. “You might be able to find a better job.”

“I have a felony. I can’t find work anywhere,” he said.

But he moved in with me. And we rented an apartment together. It was all in my name, but he promised to pay me half of the rent in cash. He got a job with a construction company as a framer. They were building a mansion out on Anna Maria Island. I would drive him to work every morning, drop him off on the island, and then drive all the way to my new job out in Lakewood Ranch. It was exhausting. He always got rides home from someone.

It worked for a few weeks. I introduced him to my family. They all came over to our new place for dinner. Jack told me he missed having a dog, so we went to the Sarasota Humane Society and adopted a Carolina dog that he liked. She was tan and had huge ears that stood straight up. He said she looked like his old dog, Honey. I named her Daisy after one of my favorite novels, The Great Gatsby.

One day I came home, and he was home from work. He said he was sick. He didn’t go back to the framing job. He laid around the house for a while. He gained a lot of weight in a short amount of time.

We would drive back and forth to Lake Placid on the weekends sometimes, hang out in the country, make bonfires, and drive around the lake. And we spent the week in our apartment that I couldn’t afford. The first month came and rent was due and he didn’t have the money. We started fighting badly, then. I would get really drunk and I would say really mean things to him. One time, we were driving back from Lake Placid, and he got so mad at the things I was saying that he jumped out of my car while I was driving. I had to do a U-Turn and go back for him.

Then he started working at a marina, washing boats. He made a friend there. They would go out for beers after work.

I remember one time I came home, and he was outside our apartment walking around, looking really strange. When I asked what he was doing, he didn’t say anything, just went back inside. He always seemed to be sick. I didn’t understand how he could've gotten drugs, but I knew he must be doing drugs again. I was worried about his next check in with his parole officer because I thought if he failed his drug test, he’d have to go back to jail. One night, he didn’t come home. When I saw him again, it was like nothing had happened. When I asked him about it, he got defensive.

“I’m a grown man, I don’t have to check in with you,” was his excuse.

Then I looked at my laptop one night, and he’d been the last one using it, and he had left his Facebook account open. I read his messages. He had been messaging loads of people for different things, but mostly drugs. There were messages where he asked a buddy to bring girls and drugs to a motel to party. He was also messaging this married woman who lived in another state. I pictured him laying in our bed all day long while I was at work, doing these things, and something in me broke. But mostly, I just felt like the biggest idiot on the face of the earth.

I kicked him out of the apartment. I never saw him again. A few weeks later, the police came to my door looking for him. I honestly told them that I had no idea where he was. He reached out a few times, but I finally blocked him.

Now things got really bad for me. I was renting an apartment that was half of my monthly income. I didn’t have enough to buy groceries. So I started working as a cleaner at a luxury community up in Parrish. Five days a week, I showed up at 5:30PM or 6PM and cleaned the clubhouse and the patio area around the pool. It was a gorgeous clubhouse, and the homes in this community were half a million to a million dollar homes. I spent my days working as an administrator in an office, and then driving up to Parrish to clean the clubhouse.

I lived to work and worked to live. As the months went by, I was in survival mode. I didn’t talk to anyone or have any friends. I did have my weekends to catch up on sleep, but I would usually just get drunk all weekend long. I had my dog, Daisy, though.

Daisy was the only thing keeping me going.

Every day when I left for work, she followed me to the door and her face was the last thing I saw in the window when I pulled out of the parking lot. When I came home between my two jobs, she was always there at the door to greet me, with her tail wagging. She slept on the bed with me. She was my best friend.

My life felt so pointless then. I didn’t see any reason to live. I had failed at everything. I couldn’t pay my bills. I was pushing thirty. I had no friends. I had distanced myself from my family because I didn’t want them to see me like that. I hated people, in fact. I hated myself for being so stupid. I would get home each night around 11:30pm at night, pass out, and do it all again in the morning. I wanted to die more than ever. But I had Daisy. I couldn’t leave Daisy.

I thought about it a lot. I thought about taking her back to the Humane Society so that I could carry out my suicide plan. But the thought of sending her back there crushed me. We were so attached. I didn't want to betray her. Daisy had been abandoned at a kill shelter up in the panhandle. She’d had puppies, and then they had taken her right after she had her puppies to a kill shelter. The Sarasota Humane Society had transferred her from the kill shelter, which was how Jack and I ended up finding her. Daisy had been so sad when I first brought her home because she missed her puppies. Even though Jack wanted her and picked her out, Daisy became my dog.

Daisy saved my damn life. I couldn’t leave her. So I continued to get up day each day and work and live and sucked it up and got through it.

It took forever for things to get better, but they did. But it didn’t happen overnight. But each night, Daisy was thetre for me, laying at the foot of my bed. And she as the first face I saw each morning.

I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for that damned dog.

I share these stories because it reminds me of how far I have come to get where I am today, which is almost 20 months sober, in a stable relationship, in a home I can actually afford, working one job. My life isn't glamorous at all. It’s normal. And I am so fucking thankful for that. I will never take normal for granted ever again.