There Was This Tree, Part 1 (Adventures in Temporary Enforced Sobriety, Part 3)

There was this tree and we used to climb it, and I think we could fit half-a-dozen into its miscellaneous gray branches. I have no idea what kind of tree it was. But I can tell you where it stood — between one of the dorms and the building where the college radio station was housed — and I can tell you that one night, very late, we ordered a pizza that was delivered there. This was in the time before cell phones, so one of our friends, an older guy who was not inclined to climb trees late at night, ordered it for us from the dorm phone. I remember he said he had a little trouble convincing the guy of the delivery location, but the drivers for Gumby’s were generally up for whatever so the pizza found us just fine.

A year before this I don’t think I’d ever climbed a tree. A year before this I was still in high school, still 99% imagination and 1% activity. Those first two years away from home — age 17 to 19, from freshman orientation until I met my first real boyfriend — I recalibrated. Or maybe I just straight-up calibrated myself to the universe for the first time: I got myself a nickname (the previous ones had stuck to me like tar, better for bullies to get a hold onto), started shopping at thrift stores, and tried anything you put in front of me. Except for my family and one very dear friend, I did my best to ditch the barely-there person I had been prior.

I suppose it was then that I started down the lightweight but persistent party-girl path that I’m taking a breather from now — a path made clearer by making it blurrier. It was definitely some electric mix of freedom and strangeness and chemicals that allowed me to finally leap from inside my head to outside of it, to be able to use the friction between wanting to be different and wanting to be liked — a contradiction that had doomed me in small-town adolescence — as fuel for a journey into who I eventually became. My memory of those first few years after I left suburban NY resides more in my senses than it does in my brain: how everything was juicy, distilled, a tincture of friends and adventures and, yes, terror and sadness and confusion, all wrapped up in a humid knot of the unknown, lit by that curious golden light of central Florida dusk and the occasional hurricane sky.

It was definitely the first time that I’d had a solid, mixed-gender group of friends. One of my regular running crew back then was this guy from the panhandle, Rob. I don’t remember how we met, but he lived in the dorm across from mine and, at some point, he became one of the four or five people I was always hanging around. The bands he listened to and wore shirts from were, frankly, terrifying, in name and execution: Nuclear Assault, Screeching Weasel, G.G. Allin, The Mentors, GWAR. But he weighed about the same as me, probably 100 pounds soaking wet, and he had soft, long, golden hair that would later inspire a common friend to say, “I love how he wears all that black metal stuff but he looks like the maidservant from Amadeus.” And, since we were all music heads, none of our circle ended up listening strictly to the same kind of thing that we started out with. Those days were a swirl of the Meat Puppets, the Church, Butthole Surfers, the Beatles, Bongwater, and sometimes — in Rob’s car — the same cassingle of “Bust a Move” over and over again. When I got pneumonia, it was Rob who took me to student health services, where the nurse took one look at the two of us, tiny and exhausted from staying up all night too many nights in a row, slid a copy of The Karen Carpenter Story into the VCR in the waiting room, and pressed “play.”

If you can’t tell from the technological references, that was a long time ago. Rob left school in 1991. I got some jobs in record stores and restaurants, got myself a serious boyfriend, started DJing for the college radio station that stood near our tree, broke up with the boyfriend, eventually graduated. I moved to California and back to Florida again, started a writing career, moved back to California. Played in bands, wrote a lot, traveled a little. Lost one parent, got married, got a dog, lost another parent. Last Halloween my husband and I went back to Florida to attend the wedding of my best college girlfriend, another bosom buddy from those heart-filled early days. But we lost track of Rob. He moved back to the panhandle 25 years ago and, last I heard, had gotten really into the Dead. I wondered about him a lot but, even with the decades of internet on our side and my ever-stronger Google Fu, I never had much luck tracking him down. He’s got a pretty common name, so it was a little beyond my skills as a non-private-eye, non-collection-agent-type person.

But back in 2014, I found someone on Facebook who I thought might be him — a guy living in Austin and playing bass in a metal band. Rob hadn’t played an instrument when I knew him, and this man’s profile photo had hair obscuring his face. But that hair was long and kind of blond, and the age seemed right. So I wrote him a note which, of course, went into Facebook’s mystery hole, a.k.a. “Other,” a.k.a. “Filtered,” a.k.a. the place where reconnections to old friends go to die. Shortly after that I sent him a friend request, to no avail. A year-and-a-half later, I wrote him again. Nothing.

And then this March he accepted my friend request. And he sent me a message: “Holy fuck!! Yes that's me!” We exchanged messages, caught up and, a few months later, he wrote me to say his band would be playing Oakland in late September. They were going to be playing Ozzfest in San Bernardino the night before, but he hoped to be able to hang out a bit since it was a Sunday — if Ozzy and Co. didn’t exhaust them too much. I made some cocky claim about “challenge accepted”; we used to get into all that trouble back in the day, after all. I could step to Black Sabbath on my home turf. Of course I could.

That was about a month before I found out about the TB. And the antibiotics. And the sobriety. By the time his band rolled into town, I hadn’t had a drink in a little more than three weeks. The show was to be at a dive where my husband’s band had played not that long before, and the bill was heeeeaaaaavy. In the months leading up to the show, I fretted (in an excited way) over what to wear; but in the weeks leading up to it, I fretted over how to get through it without a drink.