Fourteen
Self-Delusion
Nick and I had been trying, tensely, to make it work. He had quit drinking around the same time I did, partly from fear that he might be an alcoholic and partly from concern that I probably shouldn’t be living with a bad example. Our relationship mellowed into a kind of détente—a strained accord between two people who had never really gotten to know each other without drinks in our hands. It was working, sort of—we weren’t fighting as much anymore—but we seemed to be on a treadmill, biding time to see who would fall off first.
When I met up with Nick the evening I drank those two minis of tequila, he could sense right away that something was off. “Please tell me that isn’t liquor I smell,” he said. “Of course not!” I responded a little too loudly, linking my arm through his. “It’s probably just my hair spray or something. You know I don’t drink!” It didn’t feel like a lie. I had quit drinking. Except this once.
A few days later, I decided that since nothing terrible had happened, it would be okay to drink again. Why should I deny myself, now that I had proved I could have a couple without going on a bender? I knew I could handle it. I also knew that my friends wouldn’t understand—not after I alarmed everybody with that rash trip to detox—so I would have to drink in secret, and carefully. White wine and vodka, never anything brown. Always have plenty of gum on hand. If gum is unavailable, eat something with a strong aroma, like baba ghanoush or garlic bread, to mask the smell. Look people straight in the eye when you talk to them; don’t be shifty. Don’t talk too much, or too little. Wait a while before drinking more to see how you feel. Don’t forget to eat.
I didn’t consider this return to drinking a “relapse.” For one thing, there were so many rules! Drinking a pint of vodka over eight hours, or a bottle of wine over the course of a full day of hiking in the woods, seemed so insignificant compared to the days when I was missing work and passing out at people’s birthday parties. Besides, I wasn’t doing it all the time the way I had been, back when I had a drinking problem. Weeks would pass at a stretch before I crossed the threshold of the liquor store, or paused to browse the aisles in the vast wine section at the supermarket before casually dropping a bottle in my shopping cart.
That I drank in secret was everybody else’s fault, not mine—everyone had overreacted to my weird behavior a few months back, and now I had to do penance for that by hiding bottles in my bag at work, or in the back of the closet in the spare bedroom, where I knew Nick would never look. Sure, I got “busted” a couple of times, when I drank too much, but those were isolated incidents. Nick caught me passed out in the dining room, a plate full of uneaten mac and cheese congealing on the table. Josh held my gaze a little too long, and asked point-blank, “Are you sure you haven’t been drinking?” Mom held her tongue when I called her, sobbing, at odd hours, lamenting that I’d never have any money or that Nick was off at another conference, doing god knows what. If those were the worst things that ever happened, was it really fair to say I had a drinking problem? If I held it together most of the time, then who was I hurting?
Drinking alone, in the secrecy of my separate bedroom, relieved me of the need to pretend I was normal. There, I could try “controlled” drinking without anyone else watching and judging—bringing home only enough wine to get me buzzed, or the smallest bottle of vodka on the shelf. But drinking makes you forget that you have a drinking problem. The first sip settled in my stomach like a warm welcome; the second whispered, “Just one more won’t hurt”; and by the third, there was so little left in the bottle I might as well finish it off—and then, of course, I would need to go out and get another, just in case. Motivation slipped away almost unnoticed when I was drinking—the ledger in which I’d planned to track my drinks the way I’d once tracked how many cups of unbuttered popcorn I had eaten stayed empty as a sheet of paper in the printer tray.
I decided again that I needed to stop drinking—this time, on my own. Searching online, I discovered a booming subculture of relapse prevention counselors, people who promised to give me the tools I needed to get through life without alcohol, or even to drink like a normal person. I settled on Ken—an open-faced guy with wispy blond hair and a curio cabinet full of five-hundred-dollar eyeglass frames—because he didn’t use labels like “addict” or “alcoholic,” and because I found something reassuring in his soft, lilting voice. Also, he took my insurance.
Ken specialized in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which teaches you how to identify the thoughts that lead to negative actions, then talk back to those thoughts before they turn into destructive behaviors. CBT is thought to be especially useful in dealing with addiction and relapse prevention, because it’s a way of trapping dysfunctional thoughts (I can’t deal with this bullshit without a drink) and modifying them (I have dealt with bullshit without a drink, and I don’t need one to get through this bullshit now) before you act on them (I don’t have to have a drink). CBT is common in rehab, but it’s also useful in all sorts of regular life situations—think about all the times you’ve been angry that a partner or friend “made” you angry, then consider all the assumptions, beliefs, and judgments that went into the conclusion that the other person caused your anger. Ken taught me to work on that stuff, too. After a year with Ken, I was an expert on CBT and how it worked; even if I decided to drink anyway, at least I knew why, and that it was a choice that no one else was forcing me to make.
The best thing about Ken was that he was forgiving. If I had told Ken, “I went on a binge last night, had sex with a stranger without a condom, and crashed my car into the front of my apartment building,” he would have looked at me over the top of his blue-rimmed glasses, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Well, that was yesterday. How are we going to get you back on track today?”
The worst thing about Ken was that he trusted me not to lie to him. I could come into his office after downing half a bottle of wine, bullshit for an hour, then leave with a packet of homework and a plan for staying sober another week. Based on what I told him about my drinking—a fantasy I spun in which I had quit drinking for good when I went into detox, wanted to make sure I didn’t relapse, and needed help figuring out what to do with all the free time I had now that I wasn’t drinking—we wrote up a treatment plan, which summarized the issues I needed to address within the next year. The plan included “problem statements” and “methods” for addressing them. “Problem: Erica’s stress in the past year spiraled into heavy drinking with associated problems. Connected with this, Erica reports a history of a ‘racing mind’ and a related ‘drive’ to avoid boredom. Having gotten sober, she wonders, ‘Do I want to quit, or control it?’ Method: Commit clearly to a period of abstinence (a year?) and clarify what you want to learn (e.g., dealing calmly with others) before deliberately exploring appropriate boundaries with drinking.”
It should have said: “Problem: Erica drinks too much and lies about it, even to her therapist. Method: Stop drinking. Not for a year. Forever.”
Of course, I wouldn’t have accepted that prescription either, any more than I truly believed I couldn’t control my drinking like everybody else did. (Tiffany drank every night, but did she puke in the bushes or pass out in the other room in the middle of a party? Of course not. She held her liquor like a lady.) CBT is great for people who suffer from negative thoughts—I know I did—but it doesn’t work for relapse prevention if you can’t even relapse because you’re still drinking. And it requires that you get honest with yourself.
That was a problem. Even when everyone close to me was telling me I was out of control, I still thought I could find an “out.” What if I drank only on weekends, or only outside the house? What if I set a drinking budget and kept close track of how much I was spending? What if I only drank when I was alone? What if I got really into something other than drinking, like yoga, gardening, or meditation? Controlled drinking didn’t work, drinking alone just got me wasted faster, and I discovered that
it’s possible to garden and do yoga drunk, too. By midsummer, my garden was overrun with vegetables I’d planted in meandering, tipsy rows and I was known in class as that lady who always fell down during Tree Pose.
Nonetheless, I thought I’d figured out my problem. It wasn’t drinking—it was self-control. All I needed to do was reclaim the kind of willpower I’d had in high school and college, when I quit drugs and drinking altogether, or in my twenties, when I could have a couple and call it a (boring, drama-free) night. Such is the human capacity for self-delusion.
Fifteen
Eighty Miles an Hour
Every blackout ends with an assessment: Where am I? How did I get here? Did I hurt anyone/pee my pants/embarrass myself?
Similarly, every blackout begins with a decision: I’ll only have one more. Eating will just dilute the effect of the alcohol. Fuck it, I deserve this.
This story starts during a trip to Texas, the same year I went to detox, when I had plenty of vacation time but nowhere to go. I was traveling alone. I tried to avoid bringing guys back home, because I didn’t want my parents thinking I was going to settle down, and because I didn’t want the guys I dated to get in fights with Mom and Dad over their conservative political beliefs, a fact that perhaps says more about the kind of guys I dated than it does about my parents. It was hot in Houston, and I was sitting in my mom’s home office in the old guest bedroom, chattering away about how terrible The Stranger was, and how much I wanted to leave. Familiar territory. But this time, instead of delivering the usual lines about how they didn’t deserve me (Mom’s go-to: “Dan is such a sexist!”) and I could do so much better, she swiveled around in her chair, put a hand on my knee, and demanded: “When did you start drinking again?”
I tried to look incredulous. “I didn’t! I don’t know why you would say such a thing!” Faking indignation, I actually became indignant—how dare she suggest that I had a problem, that I couldn’t handle my liquor like everybody else on the planet? Why did she always have to treat me like such a child? Why wouldn’t she just leave me alone and stop hassling me with all her nosy questions?
Why, indeed. Maybe because I’d been acting off-kilter ever since I landed, ducking into the airport restroom with my luggage to swig from the vodka I had taken to carrying with me every time I traveled. Maybe because I had spent half the trip sleeping, passed out in a vodka coma in my childhood bedroom. Or maybe because my breath smelled like the floor of a bar, strong enough to make my mom scooch her office chair a few feet away during my monologue.
I was fine. Why wouldn’t my mom believe I was fine? “I’m going out for a run,” I huffed, and headed out the door.
I made it all the way to the new liquor superstore that had just opened in their neighborhood. Reeling from the heat, I plunked two items on the counter: an ice-cold bottle of water, and a fifth of Absolut. Back outside, I wandered across the street, to the parking lot of the day-care center I had attended as a kid. Stooping behind a low wall with a sign that read LA PETITE ACADEMY, I gulped a bit of the water and poured the rest in the grass, then poured the vodka in the water bottle, careful not to spill a drop. I took a swig from the bottle, retched quietly as my stomach ejected the liquor into the water-soaked dirt, then tried again. The liquor stayed down. Fuck my parents. This was normal. I was normal.
There was not a single thing wrong with me.
I left Houston two days early, pulling out of the driveway in a rage. Jesus, why does Mom have to be so suffocating? On the way to the airport, just before the entrance to the freeway, I stopped at another liquor store and grabbed two more bottles of vodka, tossing one in the backseat of my rented PT Cruiser like a Coke I was saving for later. The other bottle went straight into the cupholder. Fuck this. I was off.
Four hours later, I opened my eyes. My hair, my clothes, and the car seat were soaked in sweat, and it was immediately obvious why: The midday sun had turned the car into an oven, and my seat—reclined and pushed back as far as it would go—was in what you might call the “broil” position.
Every blackout ends with an assessment. Easing myself up, I unfastened my seat belt, rolled the seat back into the upright position, and looked around, blinking hard. To my right, across a vast asphalt emptiness, was a Home Depot. To my left, a freeway. By my knees, the bottle of vodka, still in its cupholder. I lifted the bottle by its base, saw an inch or so of precious liquid left, and finished it off, tossing the empty in the back. Okay, so I drove here, I thought. But where is here?
How did I manage to park?
How have I not been arrested?
I pieced it together using a road map and freeway signs. I had driven, all right—but I hadn’t gotten very far. Currently, I was parked just south of the East Freeway, the main road that leads from Houston to Louisiana, about thirty-five miles from my parents’ house. I was still about twenty-five miles from the airport, and had missed my flight, but I was safe. No one had called, no one had seen me, no one would ever know. People who believe in miracles point to stories like this as proof that God is benevolent and concerned with human affairs. Miraculously, I drove 80 miles an hour in a blackout without hitting anybody. Miraculously, I did not get pulled over. Miraculously, I had the presence of mind to leave the freeway and find a safe place to park. Miraculously, I did not get caught.
But it didn’t feel like a miracle. All it felt like was an accident. People die in drunk driving crashes every day, as victims and as perpetrators. People with less alcohol in their system than I had get arrested every day. Nothing about my own survival made me special. All it made me was lucky—and ashamed.
The shame is what kept me from thinking too hard about the implications of my actions—what it said about me that I kept ending up in situations like that. I would contort myself into a pretzel trying to explain away the crazy stuff that just seemed to happen to me—I must have forgotten to eat that morning, or my wallet must have fallen out of my pocket, or I must have conked out at my desk because I had insomnia the night before. When the truth was, I drank too much. All my problems stemmed from that. But I wasn’t even close to ready to face that yet, so instead of thinking, I hit “erase.” I opened the second bottle, took a swig, and headed to the airport. I bought a new ticket for a flight that afternoon, and thought, Thank God no one will ever know any of this happened. I sat down for a Bloody Mary and gumbo in an airport restaurant and told myself, I’m safe. I crouched in a stall at the airport, and thought, I have to drink less. Never I have to stop drinking. Even when you’re losing your lunch in an airport bathroom, denial can be more powerful than the plain reality of the situation. “Are you okay in there?” someone asked from outside the stall. “Just a nervous flier,” I choked. All will be well all will be well all will be well.
On the flight back to Seattle, the guy seated next to me said I smelled “like a homeless person.” “Do you have any other clothes you could change into?” the flight attendant asked. She looked sheepish, and I wanted to help, but all my clothes were in my checked luggage, along with the leftover vodka. They found the man another seat. I could feel his contempt for me—I smelled like vomit and alcohol sweats—but I just didn’t care. All I wanted was to make it home, to collapse in the spare bedroom, fully clothed. Addiction has a way of shrinking the size of your ambitions. I made it home. I didn’t die. I felt like I had finished a marathon.
I told no one what had happened.
Sixteen
The Incident
After Houston, I spent a few months on my best behavior—not because I wanted to “get better,” as people like Josh and Nick insisted on saying, but because I needed to prove to them that I could. The time between drinking binges stretched out to weeks, and the longer those stretches lasted, the more Josh started to think that maybe I had really turned a corner. Throughout 2008, during walks through an Olmstead park that we called the forest, we had started to plot our escape from The Stranger. We talked and talked about
what we would do when we got out until the fantasy started feeling real. Our plan was to start our own local news and politics website—one that would combine the legitimacy of “straight” reporting with the perspective both of us had earned from years of covering our respective beats (his: the state legislature; mine: city hall). The site would be called PubliCola—Josh’s idea—after the nom de plume used by authors of the Federalist Papers. (“The first bloggers,” Josh insisted.)
Josh left first, and I took over as news editor, a position in which I now had four bosses, three staffers, and no authority. I wasn’t the best pick for a job that involved babysitting writers—I refused to spend hours debating every edit and cut—but it didn’t help that I was always finding out about things that were happening in my own section from people outside the news department. Oh, so Eli’s moving his desk across the office and no longer coming to news meetings? When was someone planning to tell me? Some editors can make up for a lack of authority with a soothing bedside manner, but not me—my style was more “bitch boss” than indulgent den mother, and I was always more than happy to rewrite the damn thing myself, a practice writers tend to hate. Management, I told people later, just didn’t suit me; I didn’t have the patience, I said, to sit around coddling writers in love with their own preciousness. But I was also spinning out of control again—drinking, yelling at writers, and fighting with Nick over everything and nothing. He had stayed out too late again. He was monitoring me too closely. He invited a beautiful younger woman to stay with him during a conference and here she was, sleeping in our bedroom like a guest of honor.
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