“Ummm . . . Not to drink?”
Wrong answer.
“You can’t just say that you aren’t going to drink again. You need to be in a program for recovery,” he told me. “For most people, that means going to AA meetings at least once a day at first, staying away from the people, places, and things that might trigger you to drink, and finding new activities to substitute for drinking. Think about the things in your life you gave up when you were drinking. What are some of those things you’d like to do again? How would you like to live the rest of your life, starting the moment you walk out of here?”
What kind of question was that? It was like this guy didn’t realize that, for me, coming to detox had been a huge, humiliating step. I pretended to think for a long time, then responded. “I think I’d like to just go back to the way things were before I started drinking all the time.”
“Okay, but it isn’t that simple. We really recommend that you try to do ‘ninety in ninety’—that’s ninety AA meetings in ninety days.”
I looked at him like he was suggesting that I give up my apartment, quit my job, and take a vow of celibacy.
“I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on this—don’t go to bars, don’t drink, and have a good support system. I have a lot of friends who know I’m here, and they’ve promised to keep me accountable.” Plus, I said, I had just started seeing a therapist who knew I was trying to quit drinking, or at least cut back, and I would definitely make an appointment with her the moment I got home.
Of course there was no therapist. There hadn’t been for months. I had started going to someone, Janine, the previous year, but our visits were sporadic, because I would usually cancel. When we did meet, I talked about my relationship problems, issues at work, my past. I don’t think she even knew I drank.
The detox director wasn’t buying it.
“People in your situation often don’t get a second chance.” He meant people who show up to detox voluntarily, before they’ve suffered any serious losses. “You should take this one.”
Then he pressed a list of AA meetings into my hand.
* * *
—
I arrived home—Nick’s home—to a house overflowing with flowers and cards from friends. “Let me know if there is ANYTHING I can do. I am HERE for you!!” said one from Stephanie. Another, from Sarah, read, “Congratulations on taking this huge first step. Welcome to the rest of your life!!” Strangely, none of my work friends had bothered to write.
I didn’t want to sleep in an empty house, so I asked Stephanie to stay with me for my first few nights back home. Actually, I had asked Tiffany first—she was my best friend, after all—but she didn’t have the time. “Ugh, just so busy with the paper—let me know if no one else can do it! So proud of you,” she texted. I stared at the screen. Huh. That seems kind of rude.
Well, it didn’t matter that much—having a chaperone around the house was just my way of demonstrating an abundance of caution. I didn’t feel the slightest bit tempted to drink.
My five days in detox had made me realize how much I had let myself go, and I craved physical activity in a way that I hadn’t since college. I invited friends I hadn’t seen in months along for strenuous hikes in the Cascade Mountains, rode my bike seven miles to work and back, and started lifting weights again. At work, I filed copy at a furious pace, like I was making up for all the times I’d come in at eleven, so hungover I had to take a nap on Josh’s couch at three just to get through the rest of the day. Or the times I’d failed to show up at all.
“I feel like I’ve gotten a new chance at life,” I told Josh.
“I’m really glad to have you back,” he said. And I was, too.
Twelve
Anything but AA
Iknew I was supposed to have some kind of ongoing support. I also knew, after reading up on the 12 steps and talking to a few people who were “in the program,” that it couldn’t be AA. The deal breaker—dependency on “a power greater than ourselves”—was right there in step 2. I didn’t want to trade dependency on alcohol for dependency on a God I could barely convince myself to believe in. I needed a way to reclaim my own power.
It wasn’t as if I were alone in my dim view of 12-step programs. Everywhere I looked, there were stories debunking the “myths” of AA. “Sorry, AA doesn’t work,” The Huffington Post declared. Slate promised shocking details about “the pseudo-science of Alcoholics Anonymous.” Psychology Today decried “the dogma of 12 steps.”
But it didn’t take a searing exposé in The Atlantic (“The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous”) to convince me that AA didn’t work. All I needed to know about “the program,” as its adherents reverently call it, was right there when I walked through the door for my first meeting, about two months after I got out of detox. I could tell right away that I had nothing in common with the earnest, bright-eyed women who greeted me that first day at the Capitol Hill Alano Club. They were “happy”—insistently so—and therefore delusional, because no one was happy. Certainly no one I had ever met.
I stayed anyway—not because I wanted to, but because I was out of ideas. Everyone said I needed to try something new, and sitting around listening to a roomful of lesbians babble on about how they feel “happy, joyous, and free” certainly qualified. (And why were there so many lesbians in AA, anyway? As I learned much later, my first “home group” was a women-only meeting marked “LGBT” in the meeting book, not that I bothered to check before plopping my butt resentfully in a seat.) For ninety minutes, I struggled to stay awake as the women talked about problems that struck me as so mundane they had no right to complain about them. How was I supposed to care that someone’s ex-girlfriend might be using again, or about a “rough patch” another lady was going through at five years sober, when I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go another five days? Some of the women sounded like they’d been through a lot—one talked about how she only started coming to meetings to get her license back after her third DUI; another said her last relationship ended when her ex got drunk and burned her with a cigarette—but here they were, declaring themselves “grateful” to be alcoholics. What the fuck could that even mean? It was like saying “I’m so grateful to have cancer.” And yet everybody nodded in sympathetic recognition when the lady with the cigarette burns delivered this week’s tale of woe. “When I first got sober, I was on, like, this pink cloud,” she said. “But lately, it’s like nothing ever seems to go my way. I know drinking only makes problems worse, never better, and it’s not that I’m tempted, but it sometimes just seems like God is testing me: ‘You said you wouldn’t drink, no matter what. How about now? How about now?’ Anyway, I’m grateful to be here. Thanks for letting me share.”
I listened to the women’s words, rolling them over in my mind like a new language I couldn’t figure out how to translate. Grateful to be here in this room, with its glittery rainbow-flag banner and fluorescent lights, instead of—well, literally anywhere else? Grateful to be an alcoholic instead of a normal person, who can go out for a couple of drinks and not have to shut down the bar? And “God” who? I grew up around plenty of religious nuts—Sandy, the girl in Sunday school who was convinced God told her she was going to be an angel; Leticia, who started the flagpole prayers at my middle school—and I didn’t come all the way to Seattle to meet more of them.
Suddenly, someone “tagged” me and it was my turn to speak. My voice caught in my throat. “Hi, um, I’m Erica,” I stammered. They stared expectantly. “And I’m an alcoholic.” “Hi, Erica,” they responded in unison. Shit. This was harder than it looked. “This is my first meeting, and, um, I don’t want to be here. I’m not sure I belong here. You all keep talking about how you’re ‘grateful alcoholics,’ and that doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m not grateful. I’m pissed. This sucks.” I found myself choking back unexpected tears, and paused until the silence ached.
“Uh. That’s it.” Pause
. How did the other women make this stop?
Oh yeah. “Thanks for letting me share.”
“Thanks, Erica.”
I felt like I had accidentally said “I love you” to a total stranger, or posted my diary online for everyone to see. I wiped my tears and fumed, fumed and tried to shrink all the way down into my fuzzy wool jacket. What kind of organization manipulates people into sharing their deepest secrets, then forces them to hold hands and say a prayer, followed by a ridiculous chant?
“Keep coming back, it works if you work it, and we’re alllllllll . . . worth it!”
As I headed for the door, chin tucked in my collar, my anger was replaced by embarrassment—not for myself, but for the women in the room. If joining AA meant turning into a cliché-spouting zombie—“Don’t give up five minutes before the miracle happens!” “Meeting makers make it!”—I wanted nothing to do with it. After accepting unwanted hugs from several strangers, who all chirped, “Keep coming back,” I backed out the door and down the stairs, determined never to return.
That shit might work for people with no sense of irony, but not for me.
No thanks. I’ll find another way.
For the next few years, I would show my face in “the rooms” another ten or twenty times, usually when I was trying to convince my worried friends that I was doing everything humanly possible to get sober or stay that way. (Sometimes, I’d even bring them with me: See what I put myself through? Now do you believe that I’m willing to go to any length?) I figured it must have been pretty convincing: No one would willingly spend an hour trading platitudes with a roomful of strangers unless she was really trying.
Looking back, I would remember the years when I was first trying to get sober as a relatively stable time, but that’s only in a rearview mirror distorted by everything that came later. At the time, I felt like I was losing the trail back to the life I had planned out since well before college, the breadcrumbs disappearing behind me as I moved further and further off the map.
Thirteen
Just Don’t Drink
My friends—Josh, to whom I’d said I would die if I kept drinking, foremost among them—couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t just go to AA. I needed an endorsement—a real-life drunk or junkie who had gotten clean on his own and would sign off on my choice to forge my own path. So I wrote to Chris, a friend of Josh’s who had gotten sober a few years back, asking for advice. “The AA programs around here really turn me off. It’s not just the God stuff—it’s the idea of permanently embracing powerlessness, if that makes sense,” I wrote.
“Anyway: There’s an all-woman outpatient program in Seattle, A Positive Alternative, that has a good track record. It’s based on healthy choices and self-empowerment (plus meditation, naturopathy, and nutrition—did Josh mention I’m a bit of a hippie about that stuff?), which appeals to me, but if I wasn’t convinced it was a successful program, I would just go to AA.”
Chris responded right away. “That makes a lot of sense. There is a great deal about AA that I found baffling and irritating at first. Particularly this notion of letting go in order to maintain control. Say what? I think what I’ve learned since is that I very much have agency in my life, but I’ve kept sober with the help of others, especially folks in AA.” Then he told me I should go to ninety meetings in ninety days.
Ugh. This again. As if I had two extra hours in my day just waiting to be filled by a new obligation.
Chris continued: “Meditation, nutrition—all good things! Perhaps you can check out the program and AA meetings. I have met many people, from all walks of life, who have all gotten great things out of AA. It’s very hard to explain. You will not become a Moonie.”
Which, of course, is exactly what a Moonie would say.
A Positive Alternative seemed like a good fit for other reasons, chief among them the fact that they didn’t let just anybody in. Unlike AA, which is open to literally anyone—street drunks, Bible-thumpers, joiners who think their only option is to “surrender” and come to meetings for the rest of their lives—this group was aimed at critical thinkers who wanted to reclaim control, not relinquish it. The program bragged that almost none of its clients were court referred—the “slip signers” who tended to sit in the back of the room at AA meetings and leave as soon as they could get their court slips signed—and all the counselors were professionals with an MA degree or higher, which meant they knew a lot more than your typical AA member about the scientific, hard reality of addiction.
Perhaps most important, A Positive Alternative didn’t allow men, whose stories I couldn’t bear to listen to anymore. Besides the Friday women’s AA meeting, I had been to a couple of coed meetings, and it was pretty clear to me that guys had just two reasons for showing up: to hear themselves talk, and to keep women in their place. Guys who were going through a bad divorce, guys who were under restraining orders because they beat the shit out of their girlfriends, guys who were there because their wives were threatening to take the kids, all told the same story: “Things were going along fine until a woman came along and screwed things up.” At one meeting, a man who had just gotten out of prison complained that his real problem was the woman who had put him there, by reporting him to the police when he smacked her around. (The rules against “crosstalk”—responding to or addressing other members directly—prohibited anyone from telling him that he was the one who was being an asshole.)
Men dominated AA meetings the way they dominated boardrooms, gym equipment, and the seats on public transportation: They shouted over women who tried to talk (in many meetings, the person who shouts the loudest—“I’M BRAD, AND I’M AN ALCOHOLIC!”—gets to share), and they got away with ignoring the time limits that were supposed to give everyone a chance to talk. As they did in every other venue on the planet, guys at AA meetings seemed to think it was their birthright to take up more than their share of space, and bully women into silence by complaining about the “bitches” who were making their lives miserable.
I was unusually tender—still fuming at John and Nick and all the other men who had disappointed me, by leaving in the morning or failing to call or being less than what I needed to fix myself—and I needed a safe haven where men wouldn’t interrupt or judge me.
I signed up.
But I only lasted for a couple of meetings. I had a million different reasons. I didn’t like the counselor, a heavyset woman who wore her gray hair in a messy braid and tried to strong-arm me into disclosure with nosy questions. How much do you drink? Why do you drink? Why do you want to quit? At least AA lets you sit in the back and just listen, I thought. Also, the cost of the program—about a thousand dollars a month, all out of pocket—was tough to swallow, especially after I’d gone without drinking for a few weeks and started thinking of better ways to spend my money. It wasn’t exactly convenient, either. Unlike AA meetings, which at least were everywhere (and free), A Positive Alternative was in a neighborhood across town from my job and apartment, and making the meetings meant missing other stuff—important things integral to my work, like city council meetings and campaign events. Worst of all, the women in the meetings—middle aged, sturdy, well-to-do—were nothing like me at all. Their idea of problem drinking was probably finishing a whole bottle of Chardonnay before their husbands got home and hiding the bottle under the Reader’s Digests in the recycling bin. They would never understand how hard-core I’d been, how many times I’d headed out for an after-work drink with friends only to end up passed out in some stranger’s bedroom, then sneaking out the door in the morning with my shoes in my hand, hoping he didn’t have my number.
Fucking lightweights.
Not drinking was easier than I had expected. All I had to do, it turned out, was not drink! Weeks went by, then months, without much of a problem. I didn’t crave alcohol, nor really miss it, except when I tagged along with coworkers to the bar across the street—the same bar where I had nervously nursed a
glass of wine during my job interview for The Stranger—and tried to match their mood as they drank their real drinks and I clutched a sweating glass of soda water, hoping nobody asked why.
It was the life stuff that tripped me up. Contrary to what I’d expected would happen, things didn’t magically get better at home; if anything, they seemed to be getting worse. The stuff I used to ignore or save up for the next drunken rage—the dirty dishes piled a foot high in the sink, the pile of clothes, the dying garden that I had spent dozens of hours building, alone, over the previous summer—was all still there, only now I had no way to push it off to the periphery of my awareness. Nick was still Nick, I was still me, and the things that bothered me about my life were all still there, more present than ever. I needed to move out, or fix the relationship, or quit my job. I needed to fix my credit and start saving money and go on vacation and buy a car. I needed to repair absolutely everything about myself.
Who could deal with all that? Maybe my real problem wasn’t drinking, it was the stuff I drank to avoid. Maybe it would be okay to drink, just a little. I had shown that I could quit; maybe that was a sign that this was the one place where I actually was in control. Maybe I didn’t really have a problem.
I decided to test my theory on a crisp late-fall afternoon. Crunching through the leaves, toward the liquor store I had spent the last three months crossing the street to avoid, I felt almost giddy, like I was meeting a long-distance boyfriend I hadn’t seen in months. Walking through the familiar doors, I scanned the place for acquaintances who might know I’d quit—worst case, I could always grab a lime and a bottle of seltzer and say I didn’t have time to go by the grocery store—and when I saw the coast was clear, I grabbed two airplane bottles of tequila from the plastic spinner and plunked six dollars in the cashier’s hand.
Outside, almost giggling with anticipation, I ducked into an alley. Click click click, went the tiny cap as its metal teeth ripped apart. Glug glug glug, went the amber liquid down my thirsty throat. Within thirty seconds, I had downed both bottles. The warm clarity of a pleasant buzz hit my blood before my brain had time to process what I was doing. Oh, hi, old friend, I thought. I’ve missed you.
Quitter Page 11
