Recovery Despite Rehab

.): It was the night of the annual ceremony, a party held by the honor majors on campus once each year. The highlight, a drugged-out festival of the season, and all the students knew it. This group of remarkable students, all 4.0 honor roll students who designed custom majors using the universities' pre-existing curriculum. Nearly every student had made the honor roll, and they all had a master's thesis in partying and drug experimentation. I gravitated immediately towards this crowd because of their intelligence, as most were opposed to the fraternities' hard-drinking antics. I had just discovered the wonders of cannabis, albeit from the same crowd. The counterculture was in full bloom on the campuses. Long hallways covered in spray-painted graffiti featuring naked women adorned in tie-dye textural patterns along the walls. Bob Marley posters on every floor, every dorm room enshrouded in the distinctive aroma of weed smoke. The cops never stem from the overflowing tidal waves of drugs flowing through the Bernardino strip. If the cops ever arrested a Palm Springs drug dealer, no one became even remotely phased, as a new dealer would replace them in milliseconds. A narcotics trader had set up a shop this evening. He dealt with LSD, Adderall, cocaine, heroin, and pounds of marijuana straight from the dormitories. His customers ranged from environmental studies to major potheads, honor roll students shooting up blow cut with drain cleaner, to super senior burnouts who ate blotter acid for supper at all hours of the night. He wore a fleece-lined jean jacket, complete with zippered pockets to keep his weed stash secure. Not that he would need to hide it. I stumbled into the lobby, already bellicose, and drunk off my ass. I had finished my leftover bottle of Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum and helped myself to five Corona Extras from a passed-out Alpha Xi Omicron sorority girl. The girl had wealthy parents, so there was always beer in her fridge. She loved nothing more than wearing skin-tight clothing while hooking up with several frat boys to display confidence in her image, drinking herself into a coma every night until she would hook up using the same tired lie, "I'm on birth control!" Would sleep with any man who had a bar tab or a fake I. D and had developed a notorious reputation around the sorority circuit in Palm Springs as "the Quickie Queen." Despite her promiscuities, this woman was far from unintelligent. She was the first chairperson of the Alpha Xi Omicron sorority. She had donated hundreds of dollars to charitable causes, combining a B. An in Environmental Science, with a B. An Environmental Policy Management. Her dream was to become a Solar Cell Technician. Her philanthropic vision became progressively harder to balance as her drinking steadily spiraled out of control. Not that she was anywhere near my league swimming Michael Phelps' laps in the bottle. I entered the dorm, Primus blasting on a surround sound stereo. Several students were celebrating top marks on their midterms by sparking up Kush blunts in the hallways. I was right at home. I swaggered about into the dealers' room, already so loaded that I was having trouble standing up, let alone forming coherent sentences. The gang was all present as I polished off two of my five hijacked beer bottles and struggled not to fall through an open window onto the sidewalk. The dealer was busy smoking a joint next to another student, a music major who combined his love of music with anthropology. His goal was to create music mixing heightened social awareness with binaural beats to induce trance states of consciousness change in his audiences. He remained stoned off his gourd and in a business model of partying until you overdose. Eyes bloodshot red, he had the innate ability to laugh at a marathon of Cat Internet memes as if they were the secret of eternal youth. Two drunk sorority girls next to him were dancing from an old BOSE speaker to Katy Perry, lip-syncing the vocals to Roar, as the dealer rolled up a carton of fresh marijuana joints. One girl was seven feet tall, with a sandy blonde hairstyle and emerald, green bloodshot eyes. She wore a bra strap so poorly constructed that she had to keep retying the sash on as it fell off her countlessly. If she had been dancing topless, not one student would bat an eye. Some students would even masturbate in the hallways while drunk on tequila as a hazing ritual to gain entrance into several Greek fraternities. The Greek fraternities in Palm Springs had no problem overcharging regular students ten to twenty dollars apiece to get into their exclusive parties. Mainly to horde all the women, bottles of smuggled liquor, and great drugs to themselves. I was a saber-tooth tiger of drunken stoned madness; no restrictions could remotely hold me. I somehow never felt I gained a tolerance for the stuff because the first drink did me in every time. My burgeoning PTSD exacerbated with every glass I took, but the numbing disinhibition I received from alcohol made it very easy to rationalize my self-destructive excesses. The other girl was at the beginning of a drunken buzz. She was short and portly but fair. She had long flowing purple eyelashes with dimples the size of craters, an ample waist and ripped holes in her jeans, thick curves, with penetrating brown eyes and a golden smile. Next to a wooden table covered with ashes, roaches, and cigarette butts were several shot glasses of vodka, an entire bottle of gin, and three large plastic zip-lock bags filled with top-shelf weed. The short girl was enjoying herself as she belted out, "I GOT THE EYE OF THE TIGER!!! DANCING THROUGH THE FIRE!!! YOU'RE GONNA HEAR ME ROAR!!!" Not that I cared to be tact to the female species karaoke dreams while staggeringly drunk and unable to take my eyes off the mountain of weed on the table. I focused my eyes with a look of sarcastic contempt to hide my insecurities.