So, you want to know what I'm addicted to. I wish I could remember those great war stories I used to tell in AA. I was in great demand as a speaker--the right balance of humor and hair-raisingness. Stories like the time I found myself in a strange house, in a strange bed, with a strange man, and I was 17, which meant I had no money and no car and had to walk home. I walked a lot. In college, the only glimmer of sense that was not drowned or stunned by substances was the primitive instinct to stay alive by not driving. My party cry was, "Abandon car!" I drank for about 15 years, partying when I was younger, enjoying a drink or three alone in my late twenties to early thirties. I finally quit drinking--temporarily--because I confused drinking too much with being an alcoholic.

Then there were the intense, solitary moments with needles, a skill I learned at 18 from a junkie I was dating. I was an extraordinary teenage phlebotomist. My circle of friends would shoot up at parties, and the girls quickly realized that I could hit them cleanly and not leave their arms looking like they had had a serious accident, the way their boyfriends did. So I took over shooting up all my friends, and my obsessive cleanliness meant that I kept the blood borne illness that I'd caught from the junkie to myself. I shudder to think if I'd let some sloppy boy do the honors, as they wished. We might as well have passed around a chalice of blood. I, on the other hand, was as hygenic as a hospital--more, really, if you know hospitals. Then, one day I just quit. I got tired of it. I'm still obsessed with cleanliness.

Coffee was my interim addiction. You may scoff, but coffee is, for me, stronger than speed or cocaine. Coffee makes me brilliant. It writes papers, it even competes in athletic events and dances in parades. My secret doping regimen was to train for a women's powerlifting event, then have a half a cup of the dark herb before the event, after I got weighed. Added 20 pounds to my lift. I would not drink coffee before a Carnaval parade, where I danced with Escola Nova de Samba. Did that one year and had to run into a restaurant along the route, dressed in a tiny outfit that was largely feathers, to use the bathroom. So I would take a No Doze. I could dance for four hours on a No Doze.

Coffee had a dark side. It made me so tense that I had to drink alcohol as an antidote. I was so used to coffee--my Salvadorean family saw nothing wrong with kids drinking coffee--that I never realized that for me, it was toxic. It seemed more likely that I was an alcoholic. Coffee made me jumpy, irritable, even at times irrational. I would wait in line for the bus, thinking, "Just let some motherfucker say something to me.  A fight would feel good." This is not normal.

It was a medical myth that induced me to stop drinking coffee, because apart from some heartburn, I had not identified any problem with it. It was believed at one time that coffee raised the risk of pancreatic cancer. My father died of pancreatic cancer. I started drinking tea. No more psycho. It was a revelation. I gave up 12-step, which had been fun but was becoming rather one-note. I started drinking again and have ever since, averaging  two or three drinks a month.

I started smoking in high school. I used to think I was shy. I needed a cigarette in my mouth to justify my approach to the cool kids. Later, it was a drink in my hand. It was only after going to all those non-smoking, clean and sober parties on the AA social circuit that I realized that, not only was I not shy, I could, in a pinch, be quite lively. Still, everybody smoked back when I was coming up, and while some of my friends make the monumental effort to quit for their health, or because their dad died of lung cancer, or because they were pregnant, I was never motivated enough to break with it for good.

I mean, I smoked five or fewer cigarettes a day. I would go away for the weekend to do some hiking or swimming and not take any cigarettes, as they did not go well with healthy activity. A few times, I got organized and quit for a few years at a time. I usually had a good excuse to start again--I got sick with something that was going to kill me anyway, my mother died, my life partner didn't want to get married. And law school. Can't quit during law school. Actually, I allowed myself a couple more a day. Law school also feels like a disease that will kill you.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I didn't have any cigarettes in the house, and it was raining and I was in sweats, and I just didn't feel like getting dressed and walking the two blocks to the store, so I said, "Fuck it. It's too much trouble." I'm so addicted after 40 years of on and off smoking that it was too much trouble to walk two blocks to the store. If a cigarette had appeared, I would have smoked it because I really like it. But it didn't, and lethargy won, and I haven't had one for a couple of weeks. It was completely easy, which I realize is why I'm not scared to ever smoke, which is probably why I'll start again in a moment of blase self -indulgence. I never suffer withdrawals. At most, I'll think, "this is when I'd usually light up; glad that's over."  Who knows, maybe this will continue for a couple of years until the next tragedy.

I don't lack for tragedy, mainly my own at the moment. Not that I'm self-involved. My mother had Alzheimer's for 15 years. I actually quit smoking at the beginning of her illness because I wanted to preserve my health for her benefit. I started again when I got really sick from that thing that was in the needle 25 years earlier. But I kept taking care of Mom until her death. After she died, my long-term job, which I had only taken to be able to afford her care, seemed pointless. It had stopped being fun to work someplace where layoffs were substituted for productivity to impress the stockholders. Then one day, my whole department went on the chopping block and I quickly signed up for law school. Time to do something for me. A more normal person would have gotten a new hairstyle.

Law school is not a health regimen. It is not for the middle-aged, even those like me, an athlete/dancer who looks 15 years younger. I tell you, I look great. But I've fallen to pieces. The doctors keep patching me up and but they've hit a wall with this thing called degenerative disc disease leading to idiopathic scoliosis with stenosis. But there's been plenty they could do in the last seven years--9 different surgeries, and each with its lovely prescriptions of vicodin, codeine and percocet. That percocet was something else. I know they told me some stuff about my new hip, but I'm damned if I remember. I was really high, most of the time, for about three weeks.

The first time I took my post-surgical prescription, after a knee surgery, it was for boredom. See, I don't have normal reactions. I don't suffer post-surgical pain. Not even with a hip replacement. But long before the hip replacement, I found out that if you took the pills they gave you instead of tossing them in the bathroom trash, you would be less bored. So I started finishing the bottles, which anyone can tell you will lead to addiction. If you need it, the pain will mitigate the narcotic effect. I've experienced this with injuries that really were painful--you don't get high. But when you don't feel pain and you take the pills, you get nice and high.

Which is fun for a while, but it gets old. The percocet was so strong, I actually worried that I was going to miss the all-encompassing highs, the energy, the wittiness, the floating. Then one day I looked at my dwindling supply (not that they wouldn't have given me more if I asked) and said, "better save some--you never know." It took me about three days to forget about them. My lapses were nothing more than, oh, it's time for a pill, no, wait, I quit. The withdrawals consisted of a slight regret and the reassurance of still having a few for emergencies.

All of which is meant to illustrate a point. I am a totally impulsive, compulsive, weak-willed person who happens to have a physiology that does not produce strong addictions. The usual explanations for addiction--that the person lacks character, or self-esteem, or will-power, or support--fail to take into account that many of us are never faced with the monstrous task of mastering our minds so as to control our bodies. I suspect that many people who have never been addicted are like me physically--the addictions just don't grab hold. I take no credit for my take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward drugs. I'll try anything, and when it starts to bore me or become too much trouble, I'll drop it and not look back.

Maybe I'm addicted to physical exercise, or to helping other people, or to my cats (only two, I swear). I'll defer to those who know more about self-stimulating activities that do not involve drugs. Where some people can get addicted to non-drug activities, I've watched myself pick up and drop substances with a nonchalance that owed more to attention deficit than mental strength. I do not take any credit.