All Faculty Excerpts

Sloppy: Or Doing It All Wrong

This is an excerpt from the essay "Proud Alcoholic Stock" from Rax King's collection, Sloppy: Or Doing It All Wrong.

***

The first time I ever got blackout drunk, I stabbed somebody. Oh, lighten up. It was a gentle stabbing. We were sixteen, and my friend Darby was performing that disgusting graphite pencil magic trick that kids did before the advent of Snapchat, clicking the button on the pencil until the lead tip was long enough to drive through the callus of his palm. Over and over he poked as we watched, mesmerized by the foulness of the act. Then—I have no recollection of my crime but multiple witnesses recounted it for me later—I yelled “BOOOOOO-RING!” and snatched the pencil from him and yes, fine, stabbed him a little. Who cares! He pulled most of the lead from his leg that very night. He didn’t end up needing a trip to the ER like we thought. It only took a round of antibiotics to stamp out the infection he ended up getting. So what if he has one measly chunk of lead permanently lodged in his thigh! The world is full of far worse injustices than one measly chunk.

In AA meetings, some alcoholics describe their early intoxications with unmistakable relish, those moments when life felt warm and gooey-magic for the first time and they longed to live as these delicious people forever. Not me. Today I can joke about my brief foray into the stabbing arts, but Lord, I hated myself when I first heard what I’d done. I was horrified to picture the secret girl who lived inside me, this stabbing fool, less a party animal than a party golem who feared neither socializing nor consequences while her sober self feared both. Yes, I was horrified, but I wasn’t surprised. See, this girl—I’d been expecting her.

***

You can learn more about Rax and her writing here.