My first job in sobriety was as a waiter/barman at a really beautiful spot with a riverside view. Everyone in my life was worried about me working around alcohol—my friends, my family, my therapist, my AA group—but I did it anyway, mostly out of spite.
I had done the thing many slightly autistic men are capable of, and simply “flipped a switch” in my brain concerning alcohol. I had just decided that I would never drink it again because I didn’t want to die.
I didn’t know why I didn’t want to die. I used to joke that it was because I wanted to play Elden Ring, which hadn’t come out at this point (2019), but looking back I think one of the main reasons I didn’t go through with my idle threats of suicide (I’ve stopped doing this, mostly) was actually so I could play Elden Ring.
If reading that makes you think I’m pathetic, then this blog probably isn’t for you, and you’re better off leaving now before it gets a whole lot worse.
This job was relatively easy. The place got super busy and was staffed mostly by girls in their teens and twenties. I was an outlier as a recovered alcoholic in his thirties, and as a result, even though I was on minimum wage and technically just a waiter, I ended up doing a ton of stuff above my pay grade, as well as being something of a listening ear for a lot of the girls’ problems.
As such, they liked me for the most part, although I think my odd nature made some of them pretty uncomfortable.
At this early stage of sobriety, my mind was still a little bit fucked up. They say it takes a few years to really level out, get your brain chemicals back on track, etc. I was also still on antidepressants at this point. I think the combination of new sobriety and these SSRIs kind of did a number on me.
I shouldn’t have gone back to work, I shouldn’t have been around alcohol, and I definitely shouldn’t have been serving the public.
The owners of the place I had worked for in the past—although they were happy to have me back (because I was a good worker)—were flabbergasted by my sobriety and couldn’t fathom it whatsoever. It’s a testament to my previous status as a “functioning” alcoholic that they had never considered that there was anything wrong with me.
The fact that they drank and did a lot of drugs probably played a factor in this opinion also. When you are in hell, you cannot see other people burning.
Of all the girls I worked with, only a handful were an appropriate age for me to be engaging with in any kind of sincere fashion. I had stopped sleeping with teenagers when I hit 30, which I secretly congratulated myself for as though it was the ultimate moral sacrifice of the modern age.
In truth, I just didn’t want to deal with the social fallout of age gaps any larger than ten years my junior. Men are already walking targets; I didn’t want to give anyone any free ammunition.
Of this handful of potential “GFs,” I liked one the most. Even though she was kind of deformed-looking, she had a little bit of alcohol fetal syndrome about her and a very tall forehead. She did own a chihuahua though, which I liked a lot.
Once I decided I was going to try and pursue this girl, I made sure I was hitting the gym at least three times a week. I had regular haircuts, high skin fade with a grade 3 on top, jarhead style. And I also made sure I wore decent trainers, jeans, and a watch alongside the t-shirt the bar provided.
These are the basics that a lot of men surprisingly neglect—they’re the groundwork. If you can’t lift, get regular haircuts, and wear decent clothes, you’re fucked, no matter how good your “personality” is.
After a few months of having my shit on lockdown like this, I decided one day to make the move. I asked her if she had seen the new Detective Pikachu movie, an animated Pokémon movie that I had wanted to watch at the cinema. She looked confused and said she hadn’t.
I saw my opportunity and asked her if she maybe wanted to catch it with me sometime?
I’ll never forget her face. She was unable to control her visceral reaction, which manifested in a downwards look of disgust, like I had just dropped my brand new Levi 501s and curled out a huge footlong turd right in front of her.
She declared that no, she was okay, she didn’t want to go and see Detective Pikachu with me, and made her exit from the conversation.
I played it off to my co-workers within earshot that I wasn’t bothered, but inside I was fucking pissed. She owned a chihuahua—was that not like a fucking in-real-life Pokémon? Didn’t she like cute little creatures?
This movie was full of them. I decided she was a fake fan of small cute creatures, even though she owned one.
I later made a couple of jokes about stealing her chihuahua since she didn’t like Pokémon, but they went down poorly, and I realized the whole effort was a lost cause.
I had been rejected—my first advance towards a woman in months, the first of my sobriety—and it had ended in total calamity.
I decided to send a few photos of this girl to some group chats I was in, to try and gauge where I went wrong. Was she out of my league? Was I out of her league? Should I have tried my luck with this girl?
The results were inconclusive, and mostly people just edited the photo in horrible ways and called her a cunt.
One guy kept adding height to her forehead and then posting the pic, a bit more each time, until it towered over her like one of the Twin Towers. He kept going until it breached the earth’s atmosphere and reached past the moon.
It was extremely funny, and good editing on his part.
In the final image he posted, the forehead had reached heaven and God was refusing it entry on the grounds that the girl had rejected my invitation to view Detective Pikachu.
The guy must’ve done at least five very high-effort edits of the same post. That’s a real fucking friend right there.
I quit the job when one of the managers hid in the beer cellar and drank alcohol while it was really busy in the restaurant itself. She was probably being paid twice my wage, and while I was running the restaurant and doing her job, she was drinking fucking Aperol Spritz and pretending to stocktake while just playing on her phone.
I had changed—irrevocably—though the supposed big bad hospitality industry hadn’t. It was still as shit as it had ever been.
I also still haven’t watched Detective Pikachu to this day. I haven’t been able to bring myself to.