I first got drunk at 12 YEARS OLD. Young perhaps, but it was Soviet Moscow, where my dad was stationed as a journalist in the 1980s. I wasn’t very good at drinking, though I tried. When I was 15, I was arrested three times for public drunkenness, twice in one day. Back home, while I was still in high school, a litany of drug and alcohol violations got me kicked out of boarding school – with the final incident just hours before my valedictory, my father the keynote speaker (nope, no daddy issues there). At varsity, the morning I was scheduled to clock in for a new job on campus, I woke up behind the wheel, on a freeway in another state, facing the wrong way. Several years later, I…
