Jason Schneiderman

I lay down in the road to see the stars more clearly. I laughed a tequila shot through my nose onto a man trying to pick me up at a club. I decided I had to translate Akhmatova at that very moment, and woke up my host family by searching loudly for her collected works. I threw up in someone’s bed, again through my nose, which may be a theme in my drunkenness. I called my friend’s green card marriage a green card marriage for the entirety of a party, despite her insistence that her gay husband was her husband and that her family was not a ploy or a trick or a legal fiction. Each time I stopped drinking so heavily, for a year, two years, three years, and I’m not admitting to much here, a handful of stories across two decades, the moments I thought I ought to drink a bit less, and yet it bears saying that every weepy drunk considers himself a kind drunk; every mean drunk considers himself an honest drunk, and every handsy drunk considers himself a flirty drunk. And is it so terrible, the joys and regrets of drunkenness, if they’re just a one off, if they don’t become a habit, if we can disappear and come back? I’m not sorry I saw the stars from that gutter, though my sober sympathies lie with the sober driver who was furious that I had almost made him a murderer. What I remember best is those stars, and how they were as beautiful as any stars could be and how much they meant to me with my inhibitions stripped, and how well I can still see them now.