The Archaeologist of My Souls: 1 in 8.3 Billion
Episode 9: How I Clocked Sister Boom Boom
Content warnings: This podcast contains discussions of childhood sexual abuse, addiction, violence, death, and trauma. But it also full of profound love, transformation, and hope. Listener discretion advised.
Christmas Eve 1994, and I'm fleeing San Francisco like some discount spy, except
instead of state secrets I'm carrying vodka bloat, more trauma than a Lifetime movie marathon, and one suitcase that reeked of failure and Marlboro Lights.
My eviction notice was basically a holiday card from hell: "Season's Greetings, you're fucked!" My friendships were held together by drunk dials at 3 AM and the shared delusion that we were still having fun instead of slowly killing ourselves together. I was crushing 1.75 liters of vodka every night before 8 PM—not because I was celebrating,
but because I thought I was classy. Like I was hosting happy hour for one, except the bartender was me and she hated my guts.
But this wasn't partying. This wasn't even living. This was medical-grade numbing, self-administered to shut up the screaming in my head about 28 dead friends, lovers, and family by age 29. I was dealing with my brother's murder—some teenager tweaked out on speed for a week decided to stab Eric in the heart three times with a
fourteen-inch Bowie knife, and somehow I was supposed to just keep breathing like that made any goddamn sense.
I was living without family. Dad hated who I was and made sure I knew it every time his voice crept into my skull. Mom was a ghost in another country, sending postcards from a life I wasn't invited to. So I poured drinks like bandages, not because I believed I
had some disease called alcoholism, but because alcohol was the only thing that actually worked to make the pain stop.
For me, drinking wasn't some moral failing or genetic curse. It was survival. How to stay alive with no tools, no words for feelings, no safety net. I didn't know how to say
"I'm drowning in grief" or "I can't carry this much death." So I did what any terrified, broken kid in a grown-up body does: I drank until I could breathe without sobbing.
The cruel joke? I made it. That's the punchline that still cracks me up in dark moments. I stayed alive long enough to deal with the wreckage. Most people I loved didn't get that chance. They overdosed on meth, died of AIDS, drank themselves to death, or just vanished into the Castro fog like they never existed.
I had a friend whose lover was dying, and the lover begged him to end it. So my friend held a pillow over his face until he stopped breathing. Mercy killing dressed up as love. When he told me over coffee, hands shaking while he lit cigarette after cigarette, I realized this was our world now. Death wasn't something that happened to other people. It was what we had for breakfast.
My roommate was dying too. AIDS had hollowed him out until he looked like a skeleton wearing skin, but he was still kind, still funny, still more human than most healthy people. Meals on Wheels came every day with food he couldn't keep down. Maybe a month left, probably less.
And in the most selfish, addiction-fueled panic of my life, I just left.
I packed one suitcase, left my keys on the counter of our fully furnished apartment— TV still on, stereo still playing, dishes still soaking—and I disappeared. No goodbye. No explanation. No forwarding address. I don't even know if he found my note, or if anyone ever walked back into that place. I never found out what happened to him.
That memory still cuts through me like glass. Because I was dying too. Just slower, with the luxury of pretending I had choices he didn't.
But survival is ugly. It's selfish and human and awful and completely necessary. Sometimes saving yourself means abandoning someone who can't be saved. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is refuse to go down with the ship.
Some guardian angel—one of those people you never figure out how you deserved— got me a bed in rehab in Boston. January 2nd, 1995. Peak alcoholic reckoning season,
when every detox center in America is packed with people who suddenly realized their New Year's resolution needed to be "don't die."
You've never seen anything like addicts detoxing the first week of January. It's like dropping a dozen emotional toddlers in a church basement and telling them to learn how to walk and share feelings at the same time.
Day one, I was shaking so hard I thought my bones were trying to escape. Threw an ashtray at a nurse who just wanted to take my blood pressure. I sweated vodka and self-hatred and four years of chemical warfare against my nervous system. Withdrawal wasn't just physical—it was existential. Like my body was finally calling in every bill for damage I'd been ignoring for years.
Then therapy. Group sessions where we sat in circles pretending that talking about feelings would fix what alcohol had successfully numbed for years. Individual sessions where counselors with kind eyes and fancy degrees tried to convince me I wasn't completely broken.
First, I tried to outsmart them. I'd spent years perfecting manipulation, so I figured I could charm my way through rehab like I'd charmed my way into drinks, into beds, into situations that should have killed me but didn't.
Then I tried to argue with them. I had theories about addiction, about trauma, about the difference between self-medication and self-destruction. I was very smart and very articulate and completely full of shit.
Then I broke down and sobbed until I couldn't see, couldn't breathe, couldn't pretend I was handling any of this with grace. Childhood trauma poured out of me like pus from infected wounds. The sexual abuse. Eric's murder. The silence I'd been swallowing for decades to keep everyone else comfortable. Rage that felt big enough to burn down cities.
My mouth became a faucet for everything I'd been too terrified to say out loud. And somehow, miraculously, the people listening didn't run. They didn't tell me I was too much, too broken, too far gone.
They just nodded and handed me tissues and said, "Keep talking."
So I stayed. Turned 31 in rehab, which wasn't exactly the birthday I'd imagined when I thought 31 would find me successful and sophisticated instead of institutionalized and learning how to live without chemical assistance.
After three months, I graduated. "Graduated" is generous. I stumbled out like a newborn giraffe in combat boots—completely reborn but still not house-trained. I had no idea how to function in a world where feelings weren't immediately medicated away.
I had to learn how to make eye contact without trying to manipulate someone into giving me what I needed. How to speak without slurring. How to eat without crying. How to sleep without passing out. I didn't even know how to grocery shop sober—I'd stand in produce staring at apples like alien artifacts, overwhelmed by choosing food to put in my body.
No job. No home. Fifty dollars, a garbage bag of wrinkled clothes, and the ability to cry at absolutely anything. I was a freshly detoxed ball of raw emotion and manic gratitude —not Instagram gratitude, but the kind where you sob because someone holds a door and you remember humans can be kind.
I cried at vending machines. I high-fived squirrels in the park. I wept at how blue the sky looked when you could actually see it clearly. Complete mess, but a sober mess, which felt like the greatest achievement of my life.
That's early recovery. Gratitude that borders on hysteria. Laughing and sobbing at the same time because you made it. Somehow, against all odds, you're still here. Your heart's still beating. Your lungs still work. You get to try again.
Thirty-one years later, my sober life is quietly beautiful in ways I never could have imagined when I was drinking myself toward an early grave. I have mornings full of silence that isn't terrifying. I have people who know the worst about me and stay anyway. I have peace that doesn't come from bottles or pills or anywhere outside myself.
I sit on my stoop in Brooklyn with coffee and just breathe. I feel things—not performative healing emotions, but real feelings that move through me like weather. I grieve when I need to grieve. I rage when rage is called for. I laugh until my stomach hurts. I forgive people who don't deserve it because forgiveness is something you do for yourself.
I screw up regularly. I try again daily. I'm still learning how to be human without an instruction manual.
Every day I don't drink is a quiet miracle I refuse to take for granted. Sobriety didn't just save my life—it gave me a life worth saving. It gave me the ability to be present for my own existence instead of spending every moment trying to escape it.
Do I miss vodka? Not even a little.
Do I miss the chaos, the drama, the constant crisis that made every day feel like survival? Not for one second.
But do I miss dancing shirtless on a box at 2 AM while CeCe Peniston's "Finally" blasts through club speakers and some beautiful stranger licks my neck and asks my name?
Absolutely.
Like that one Saturday night at SoMa—might have been the Pleasuredome, could have been anywhere, they all blurred together in a haze of poppers and bad decisions. The usual suspects were there: leather daddies who looked like they could bench press a Buick, twinks fresh off the Greyhound from Nebraska, fan dancers voguing like their lives depended on it, and enough kinksters to stock a medieval torture chamber. This
was our community, our chosen family of beautiful freaks who all knew we might be dead in two weeks, two months, or two years. Those were literally our odds back then, but fuck it, we were gonna dance.
I remember going out. Check. I remember dancing. Check. And that's where my memory decides to take a little vacation, because apparently I blacked out harder than a power grid in a hurricane.
It wasn't until the next morning—me lying on our futon like roadkill, head pounding like a techno beat—that my roommate filled me in on the evening's festivities. And honey, it was a doozy.
"Morning, sunshine," he says, way too cheerful while stirring his coffee. "Sleep well?"
"Like the dead. Why are you smiling like that? And what time is it?"
"It's 6 o'clock."
I squinted at the window. Light blue sky. Could be dawn, could be dusk. When you're a professional alcoholic with a side hustle in biker meth, time becomes more of a suggestion than a fact.
"AM or PM?"
"You're serious right now?"
"Dead serious. The sky's that weird blue color and I haven't been sober enough to tell time properly in months."
He just stared at me. So I did what any reasonable person would do: I picked up our rotary phone and dialed 0.
"Operator, this is going to sound insane, but I need to know if it's 6 AM or 6 PM."
There was a pause. A long pause. Then this sweet woman's voice: "Sir, it's 6 PM on Thursday evening."
"Thursday? What happened to Wednesday?"
"I... I don't know, sir. Is there anything else I can help you with?"
"Yeah, do you know if I punched a drag queen last night?"
Click.
My roommate was doubled over laughing. "You just asked the operator if you assaulted someone. And it's Thursday, by the way. You've been unconscious for like eighteen hours."
"Well that explains the taste of leather and regret. And why do I taste leather and regret?"
"Your performance. At the Pleasuredome. With Sister Mary Margaret. You know, the one that happened five minutes after we walked in the door."
"I don't know who that is. And wait—five minutes? I blacked out that fast?"
"Honey, you were three sheets to the wind before we even left the apartment. Between the vodka and whatever leftover biker meth you'd been snacking on, you were basically a human wrecking ball in leather pants."
This was my life now. Wednesday night chaos that would make normal people call interventions, but for a raging alcoholic with a taste for old school speed, this was just another evening that ended with me face-down somewhere questionable.
"Well, she knows who you are now. You're probably gonna be famous in the Castro for all the wrong reasons."
"Start talking. And please tell me I at least showed you a good time before I became a cautionary tale."
He settled in like he was about to tell the story of the century. "Oh, you showed me a time alright. We walked in, you immediately spotted the bar, knocked back two shots of something that looked like liquid fire, then heard 'Finally' and got that look on your face like CeCe Peniston was personally calling you to salvation."
"Sounds about right."
"Then you spot these stairs and get this expression like you've found the stairway to heaven. Up you go, stumbling like a drunk giraffe, completely missing the fact that there's an actual drag show happening on that stage. Sister Mary Margaret—six feet of pure fabulousness, wig bigger than Texas, doing her thing for the AIDS benefit."
"Please tell me I didn't interrupt—"
"Interrupt? Honey, you joined the show. Uninvited. She's in the middle of her number, and suddenly there's this shirtless drunk white boy dancing next to her like he owns the place."
I covered my face with a pillow. "Kill me now."
"The crowd thought it was planned! They're cheering, thinking it's some kind of interactive performance art. Sister Mary Margaret, bless her heart, tries to work with it. Starts dancing with you, probably hoping you'll take the hint and exit gracefully."
"But I didn't."
"You did not. Instead, when she does this theatrical stage slap—you know, drag queen drama—your trauma response kicks in and you clock her. Full force. Sent her ass flying into the crowd like a sequined missile."
"Jesus fucking Christ."
"The entire club went silent. Three hundred gay men watching their drag mother get decked by some random drunk. And you? You just kept dancing. Alone. On stage. To nothing, because they'd cut the music."
"How long did I keep dancing?"
"Long enough for security to have a whole conversation about the best way to remove you without getting punched themselves. You were up there swaying to the silence for a solid two minutes before they figured out a game plan."
I wanted to disappear into the futon. "Tell me someone got video."
"Oh honey, this was 1994. But trust me, this story's gonna live forever in Castro folklore. You're gonna be the legend who knocked out a Sister at her own benefit show. And all before our first drink was even finished."
"So much for showing you the scene."
"Are you kidding? That WAS the scene. Pure Wednesday night alcoholic performance art with a side of accidental assault on drag royalty."
"Speaking of performance art, remember Christmas?"
"Which Christmas? They all blur together in a haze of bad decisions and church wine."
"The one where you hadn't slept in a week because of that meth bender, and suddenly it's Christmas morning and you're like 'How the fuck did that happen?'"
Oh right. That Christmas. I'd been awake for so long I thought Tuesday was a person's name. Time had become this abstract concept, like algebra or sobriety. One minute I'm tweaking in my apartment, grinding my teeth to dust, and the next minute there are Christmas carols playing and I'm having an existential crisis about the passage of time.
"The stores were all closed," I said, the memory flooding back. "No booze anywhere. I was dying."
"So what did your brilliant mind come up with?"
"Church wine. I figured they served wine at Christmas service, right? Like, big glasses of the good stuff to celebrate baby Jesus."
He snorted coffee through his nose. "You thought communion was an open bar."
"Listen, I was desperate and hadn't slept since the Clinton administration. So I drag my tweaked-out ass to this fancy Episcopal church, thinking I'm about to score some quality sacramental wine. Maybe a nice Cabernet. Something with body."
"And?"
"I sit through this entire service, shaking like a chihuahua, waiting for the wine portion of the evening. Finally, communion time. I'm practically drooling. The priest comes over with his little cup, and I'm ready to down that whole thing."
"Oh no."
"He gives me a SIP. A fucking SIP. Like, barely enough to wet my lips. I'm looking at him like 'Excuse me, Father, but where's the rest of it?' And he just moves on to the next person with his thimble of disappointment."
"You didn't."
"I absolutely did. I stood up in the middle of communion and yelled 'Hey padre, you can fuck yourself with that wafer if you think that's gonna do anything for anybody!' Then I stormed out like some kind of deranged Christmas angel."
"You told a priest to fuck himself with the body of Christ."
"I was having a spiritual crisis! I thought God was holding out on me!"
"You told a priest to fuck himself with the body of Christ."
"I was having a spiritual crisis! I thought God was holding out on me!"
"Speaking of spiritual crises, what about Tijuana?"
Oh fuck. Tijuana. "Which Tijuana incident? There were several."
"The one where you woke up in the back of Marcus's pickup truck."
Right. That Tijuana. I'd blocked that one out so hard it took a crowbar to pry it loose from my brain.
"Okay, so I remember leaving San Francisco with Marcus on Friday night."
"And?"
"And the next thing I remember is waking up Sunday afternoon in the bed of his pickup truck, covered in what I really hope was just dirt, somewhere that looked like the surface of Mars if Mars had a drinking problem."
"You were in Tijuana. With no gas. No money. And no idea how you got there."
"Marcus was passed out in the front seat, and I'm looking around thinking 'Well, this is either Mexico or I died and went to the world's worst purgatory.' There's mariachi music coming from somewhere, it's hot as Satan's armpit, and I taste tequila, regret, and what might have been a donkey show."
"You didn't actually—"
"I have no fucking clue what I did! That's the point! I'm shaking Marcus awake like 'Dude, where are we and why do I have a sombrero?' And he's like 'Tijuana, and that's not a sombrero, that's a traffic cone.'"
"A traffic cone."
"Apparently I'd been wearing it like a hat for two days. Very festive. Very stupid. So we're stranded in Mexico with no gas, no money, and no memory of how we crossed an international border without passports."
"How'd you get home?"
"Marcus had to call his ex-boyfriend collect from a pay phone and beg him to wire money for gas. We sat in that truck for six hours waiting for Western Union, me still wearing the traffic cone because at that point it felt like commitment to the bit."
"And you made it back?"
"Eventually. But not before I tried to order a 'muy grande margarita' at a Pemex station and the attendant looked at me like I was having a psychotic break. Which, let's be honest, I probably was."
"And you made it back?"
"Eventually. But not before I tried to order a 'muy grande margarita' at a Pemex station and the attendant looked at me like I was having a psychotic break. Which, let's be honest, I probably was."
"Oh, and speaking of psychotic breaks, remember that night you decided you were a professional dancer?"
I groaned. "Which night? I had several career changes during blackouts."
"The one where you climbed into the cage at the Eagle wearing those ridiculous thigh-high boots and enough glitter to blind a disco ball."
Oh Christ. That night. "I thought I was auditioning."
"For what? Cirque du Soleil?"
"I don't know! I was drunk! Someone said they were looking for go-go dancers and my brain went 'Finally, a career opportunity!' Next thing I know, I'm climbing into that suspended cage like I'm some kind of professional entertainer."
"You were up there for twenty minutes doing what you thought was dancing but looked more like a seizure set to house music."
"The crowd seemed to love it."
"They were laughing AT you, not WITH you. And when you tried to climb down, you got stuck halfway and had to be rescued by two leather daddies and a bartender."
"That's not how I remember it."
"You remember it wrong. You also tipped yourself with your own money and thanked the audience for 'supporting local talent.'"
And that's how I learned that being drunk, delusional, and wearing impractical footwear does not qualify you for a career in exotic dancing. Some people discover their limitations through education. I discovered mine through public humiliation at gay bars.
Some things are worth missing. Some chapters deserve to be mourned even when you know they were killing you. The trick is holding both truths at once: gratitude for where you've been and relief that you're never going back.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I became the cautionary tale whispered in Castro coffee shops for months afterward. The drunk who punched a Sister. The monster who attacked gay royalty during a benefit show. The tweaker who told a priest to fuck himself with the body of Christ on Christmas morning. The idiot who woke up in Tijuana wearing a traffic cone like a crown. The delusional fool who thought the Eagle's go-go cage was an audition opportunity.
I was basically a walking public service announcement: "This is your brain on vodka and bad decisions."
Some things are worth missing. Some chapters deserve to be mourned even when you know they were killing you. The trick is holding both truths at once: gratitude for where you've been and relief that you're never going back.
