I look back at all my drunken nights and can’t count on one finger a single one that stands out. They all come together in a blur, a long, significant blur.

It started when I was twenty-one and ended when I was forty-one. I drank almost every day from the time I was twenty-six to the day that I retired on August 15, 2019. I thought that was the date, but it was nothing official. I used to get blackout drunk with my friends in Hollywood when they were still around. We did shots of anything, and I drank mostly beers, domestic beers, not the fancy imported kind that really wasn’t imported. If you travel to Belgium and drink the Americanized Belgian beer, you’ll get ridiculed. My parents told me you’re supposed to drink a different beer over there. I’ll probably never fly to Belgium anyway.

But I drank whatever came my way like Long Island Iced Teas from a cowboy bar in West Hollywood because the cocktail came in a flower vase with a long thick straw sticking out of the top. The bar had a mechanical bull that I would never ride, and I wasn’t interested in anyone who rode the thing. All I wanted was to get obliterated because life was hard, and I wanted to make it easier.

When my friends went away when I was in my thirties, I was left alone to drink alcohol and smoke hash, mostly weed but hash sometimes. I had acquaintances, not friends. We would drink and get high together, but that was all we really had in common. I respected my time alone with my drinking but also would venture to the bar down the street from my apartment.

One night, when I was in my late thirties, I can’t remember what age exactly, I was crossing Hollywood Boulevard when a young dude on crack punched me in the mouth. It was a sucker punch. I was high already after smoking a spliff in my apartment. The kid walked away, still staring me down and cursing me. I never retaliated, which I should’ve done, but I was too dazed that a stranger would actually hit me at one in the morning on an empty Hollywood street. I continued walking to the bar because I wanted to drink into a blackout after what that kid had done to me.

I told everyone in the bar what had happened, and they were all amazed too.

“I just got punched in the face,” I said.

“By who?” they asked.

“Some kid on crack,” I said.

Of course it might not have been crack. It could’ve been acid for all I knew, or crystal meth. All the more reason not to have hit him back. The kid could’ve felt nothing and been a superhero with super strengths, and a punch to his jaw might not have even fazed him. He could’ve done something worse to me.

I told the bouncer.

“Where is he?” he asked. “I’ll take him down.”

But I couldn’t tell him. He could’ve been anywhere in Hollywood, sucker-punching other drunk fools like me, around the time when I quit drinking. I think less than a year went by when I ended up in rehab and reached an age where I couldn’t do it anymore.

I cringe at the things I’d done as a drunk, like the time I raised hell at my twenty-year high school reunion. I regret ever getting kicked out of a local bar in my hometown. I don’t talk to my high school alumni anymore, ever since that happened. It was a visceral reaction to the way my alums were acting that night, and the alcohol only freed my inhibitions to attack people the way I did. I don’t remember anything. People on social media had to inform me of what I did, and I wanted to hide somewhere for good.

I don’t have to worry anymore. Those days are behind me now. I stare reality right in the face and deal with it head-on.