Quitter

by Erica C. Barnett

  There’s a famous quote that AA detractors use to illustrate how histrionic people in “the program” can be: “We are people in the grip of a progressive illness whose ends are always the same: jails, institution, and death.” (The quote actually comes from Narcotics Anonymous.) I thought it was histrionic, too, until I didn’t. I never ended up in jail, but I sure came close, and there were plenty of times I could have died. And by 2010, I had already begun what the AA book refers to as “the weary round of sanitariums and hospitals,” a phrase that came to mind every time I checked myself into a new emergency room.

  The first time I ended up in the ER for withdrawal, a few months before I moved out of Nick’s house, I was slow to catch on to what was happening. I took the bus to the hospital and walked up to the triage desk in a state of near delirium, convinced I had come down with some kind of terrible flu. The symptoms all fit the bill—heart palpitations, excessive sweating, dehydration—until a nurse asked me how much I drank. “Six drinks a day? Sometimes eight?” I didn’t even know when I was lying anymore. Instantly, I saw the narrative shift, watched the ER nurses’ expressions change from concern to something like scorn. Just another detoxing alcoholic, taking up a bed. “We’ll get you some fluids and get you out of here in a jiffy,” a nurse said, newly curt. As I laid there, grateful that I didn’t have to do anything for at least a few hours, someone jammed a wide-gauge needle in my arm, then hooked me up to an IV that led to a yellow “banana bag” filled with vitamins and electrolytes. After an hour or so, another orderly came in, pulled the catheter from my arm, and announced, “I’ll get the social worker” to no one in particular. This was the start of the weary rounds: an hour in a bed with an IV in my arm, followed by a stilted conversation with a social worker about my drinking. Yes, I’ve tried AA. No, I don’t want to go to rehab. Yes, I have a support system at home. Now can I go?

  Again, I tried to stop drinking—not through therapy, which I had dropped, nor in “the rooms” of AA, which I attended only sporadically—but on my own, white-knuckling it for a few days or weeks at a time while insisting to everyone who knew me that I wasn’t drinking at all. Again, I failed. Again and again, I found myself at hospitals, where the emergency-room nurses and doctors often treated me like a malingerer, not an emergency. With all my obvious advantages—an apartment, a middle-class job, a strong personal safety net—it made no sense that I kept ending up in hospitals, tethered to an IV line. Once, I was moved to an inpatient detox after the doctors clocked my heart rate at 243. Another time, I checked in at 8:00 A.M. and checked out at 5:00, arriving back at home in time for dinner, full of electrolytes and with a fresh bottle in my backpack. The ER visits started to feel like a routine part of life—check in, get a couple bags of IV fluids, send the social worker away. People can live this way for years and years, because alcohol tends to kill you slowly rather than all at once. I lived this way for a very long time. Lots of people are living this way right now.

  Two thousand ten came and went; then 2011. The medical bills piled up, unopened. Eighteen hundred dollars isn’t an unthinkable amount of money to most people making a middle-class salary—a mortgage payment, or a week’s vacation—but it might as well be $18 million when you’re eating potatoes for lunch at the end of each pay cycle. It was easier just not to look.

  Sometimes, weeks would go by when I would drink only on weekends—always in secret, the bottle stashed away in my closet or purse, comforting me with its sloshing weight—and sometimes, I could make it through for a while without drinking at all. Other times, I would steal away two, five, ten times a day, gulping room-temperature wine in the stall at work and brushing my teeth with my fingers. Over and over, I quit or slowed down, then plummeted back toward bottom. Over and over, I lost a few more things—another thousand dollars, my phone, a bit more of my dignity—then, as if it were inevitable, pulled out of the spin.

  PubliCola went through a series of upheavals as we struggled to finance a site focused on local news and politics—always the hardest kind of content to sell to advertisers. Eventually, we were bought by a local glossy magazine, and suddenly we had bosses, magazine assignments with hard deadlines, and an office where we were expected to appear, more or less during normal business hours, every day. We didn’t have to worry about making payroll anymore, but I was somehow more stressed out than ever. Maybe if I wasn’t busy all the time, I would have time to talk to Ken, who was still, throughout all this, technically my therapist. Maybe if I wasn’t drunk all the time, I’d be able to figure out why I wasn’t happy.

  The problem was, who would I be if I wasn’t drunk all the time? The version of me that jumped naked into a hot tub at a New Year’s Eve party that year was wild and uninhibited, but the “real” me was as insecure and tongue-tied as a twelve-year-old getting catcalled by a group of boys. The last thing I wanted was for anyone to meet the clenched, scared person I really was. I drank, I told myself, because I didn’t know who I would be sober, because I was too shy to open up to new people without a buzz, because I didn’t want anyone to see how terrified and self-loathing I really was.

  But really, more and more, I drank because I had to.

  Eighteen

  Toxic Superpowers

  I didn’t admit to anyone just how out of control my life had become—of course I didn’t. Instead, I told myself I was this close to having the situation in hand. Starting now, I would drink only in secret. Starting now, I’d drink only with people who didn’t know I had a drinking problem, in bars and neighborhoods where I was unlikely to be spotted. But despite all the contortions I went through to pretend I was normal—I’m fine, this is fine, everything’s fine—it didn’t work. When I drank in secret, I always drank too much, and someone would say the dreaded words: “Have you been drinking?” And when I tried to drink “normally,” around normal people, I became acutely aware of how little space alcohol occupied in other people’s minds. Did you know that some people will pay for a glass of wine and then leave it half-finished on the table, or order a Coke instead of a second round? I sure didn’t. Everyone else seemed to be able to regulate their drinking, just by not thinking about it, but when I didn’t think about it, the first drink disappeared in one greedy gulp. I learned to monitor the level of alcohol in other people’s glasses and try to slow myself down to match their pace, miming their actions like a Christmas-and-Easter churchgoer pretending to know the words to the hymns. Eventually, I figured out that the easiest way to drink “normally” was to have a little extra on the sly. Usually, I’d just keep a pint bottle of vodka in my purse, but when that wasn’t feasible, I’d sidle up to the part of the bar farthest away from my companions, order a quick double bourbon, and pay with cash. Once, I excused myself from a movie, walked out of the theater, and dashed across the street for two quick shots at a dive bar called the Mecca. Five minutes later, I was back in my seat, breath freshened with two sticks of gum from my pocket. See, this isn’t so hard.

  Some alcoholics say they decided to get sober after some monumental loss—a husband, a job, children taken away by the authorities—but that wasn’t my story. Quite the opposite. Once I had lost Nick, there was no reason not to drink like I wanted to—no one snooping through suitcases or checking the recycling to see if I’d shoved a bottle under the pile of soda cans and magazines. So, in that dim apartment with its sliding-glass doors that looked out to a balcony I never used, I drank. I drank to get through the weekends, napping on the couch and binging on Big Love, and I drank to get through the week, when I had to face Josh and his suspicious questions. I drank through high fevers and bronchitis, and I drank before and after investor meetings, when we’d try to convince rich friends to fund our struggling website. I drank through a scary bout of menorrhagia, which is when you have a period that won’t stop, both before and after visits to the doctor, who thought I might need a blood transfusion. I kept drinking after I mysteriously lost my sense of smell, which my ear, nose, and throat doctor
told me sometimes “just happens,” and when my blood pressure started to climb, alarming my doctor, to whom I still lied about how much I drank.

  I didn’t drink all the time, but when I did, I drank prodigiously: two or three liters of wine a day, or a liter of wine and a pint of vodka, which is quite a day’s work, and a tough secret to keep.

  The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism defines binge drinking as drinking enough over two hours to have a blood alcohol content of 0.08 (the legal driving limit in most states), which works out to about four drinks for women. Using standard drink sizes and a blood alcohol content calculator, I was drinking as many as seventeen drinks a day—enough to put a typical one-hundred-thirty-pound, five-foot-seven woman in a coma. And yet, I functioned. I carried on with work, wrote stories, conducted interviews—noticeably blurry at times, for sure, but never so wasted I couldn’t stay vertical. Tolerance is a kind of toxic superpower—as the body and brain adjust to having alcohol around, it becomes possible to drink more and more without getting drunk, and it also becomes harder to function without a base layer of booze. After a while, the period you can go without alcohol—without going into withdrawal—becomes shorter and shorter, and eventually you’re drinking all the time, the way junkies shoot up every few hours just to stay well.

  The irrationality of a heavy drinker is hard to overstate. It goes with you everywhere, makes you take insane risks because you think you’re invincible. At least, that’s what drinking did to me. It made me jump in a car with a stranger late one night, after the bus driver had woken me up at the end of the line. The buses wouldn’t start up again for three more hours, and walking home—a good four miles—wasn’t an option. Neither was sleeping at the bus stop. So I walked to the street, held out my thumb, and hoped for the best. A man pulled up in an SUV, rolled down the window, and asked where I wanted to go. “Home,” I told him. “A few miles that way.” He opened the door, I hopped in, and the night rolled by outside.

  By accident, he was the kind stranger I was looking for. He didn’t make small talk or tell me it wasn’t safe to be standing out there, at the corner of Rainier and Henderson, so late at night. He didn’t hit on me or flirt or offer me a cigarette. He drove me home, waited until I unlocked my door, then drove away. I should have learned that night that I’d been lucky, and that I might not be so lucky again. Instead, I learned: Don’t fall asleep next time; you might miss your stop.

  Most of the time, though, I wasn’t hopping in cars with strange men. I was simply existing. People who aren’t addicts often think addiction is a constant party. In conversation, they talk about how they know how to handle their liquor, and in public policy debates, they argue that we shouldn’t fund services for people with addiction, because they’re the ones who choose to spend their lives having fun instead of being productive citizens. What they don’t realize, but I do, is that whether you’re living in a tent along a greenbelt or an overpriced apartment in the city, the life of a chronic alcoholic or addict is the opposite of a party. It’s work—a dull, tedious, endlessly repeating cycle: obsess, seek, score, consume, do it again. Periodically, this oppressive circuit (bed, liquor store, job, liquor store, bed) will be interrupted by health scares, embarrassing incidents, and altercations with people who don’t understand your imperative to self-destruct. Sometimes, I got busted with a bottle in my bag. Sometimes, I woke up on a damp mattress. Sometimes, I ended up in a strange part of town, wondering how I got there and how I was going to get home.

  During that blurry half-decade when I was drinking in “secret,” my best days were the ones I spent quietly in my apartment, alone in my depression and anxiety and despair. The best things got was when I didn’t embarrass myself, piss anybody off, or pass out somewhere other than my home. The worst things got—well, that’s hard to quantify. Was it the time I woke up in the hospital after walking into the emergency room in a blackout, tubes attached to my arms and my clothes in a pile on the floor? The time I showed up at work too wasted to string together a sentence, and Josh had to glare daggers at me through the editor’s office window, warding me away from a meeting where he wouldn’t be able to protect me? The time I got into a fight with a ticket agent at the airport and told her belligerently, “I am GETTING on that PLANE!”? Once one of those things happens, you start running out of excuses. Once all of them do, rock bottom becomes a moving target.

  There’s a passage in AA’s Big Book that describes a man whose “disposition while drinking resembles his normal nature but a little” and who is “always more or less insanely drunk.” This guy squanders his talents in “a senseless series of sprees” and does “absurd, incredible, tragic things while drinking.” I remember reading that passage (drunk, of course), and thinking, “This guy really gets me!” before taking another swig from the bottle at my bedside. Of course I was squandering my talent—I was an alcoholic! Of course I did absurd, incredible, tragic things—my life was absurd, incredible, and tragic! Alcoholics are self-destructive, so it makes sense that they self-destruct. My life was a tautology from which I could not escape.

  And so, like Big Book author Bill Wilson himself (and countless alcoholics before and since), I soldiered on like a champ—throwing up in the office bathroom, babbling incoherently at editorial meetings, and fighting with Josh in the stairwell near our cubicle, where I’d occasionally confess to some small sliver of the truth. Yes, I’ve been drinking. No, I haven’t been doing it often. Yes, I’m going to a meeting right after work. Yes, I’ll get my story in on time. Don’t worry. Don’t be mad. I promise I’ll make it up to you.

  I wasn’t fine. I had a fresh three-inch scar on my shin from the time I missed the bottom step while getting off a bus on the way to a meeting I was supposed to cover, and a litany of mysterious ailments as long as my arm. High blood pressure and my lost sense of smell were only the warning signs; by the time I was in my mid-thirties, my body started breaking down. Fainting spells. A chronic cough. A blown eardrum. A torn esophagus. Blurred vision. Restless leg syndrome. Constant tremors. Night sweats and terrors. Psoriasis.

  A few of my physical problems could be written off as medical mysteries—to this day, I’m prone to strange maladies and Google-proof symptoms—but all of them were exacerbated by the drinking. Especially the psoriasis, an autoimmune disease that causes red, patchy scales on the skin. My dermatologist was quite clear on this point: If I stopped drinking, my symptoms would improve; if I didn’t, they would get worse. I didn’t stop. Over six months, exactly what she had predicted came to pass: “Oh my GOD. What happened to your arms?” people would ask me, concerned and transparently horrified. “Oh, it’s not contagious, it’s just psoriasis,” I’d apologize, tugging on my sleeves. “It’s an autoimmune disease. Nothing I can do about it.”

  Instead of swearing off booze, I swore off clothes that showed a single unnecessary inch of skin, and bought professional-grade body concealer—the stuff movie stars use to cover up their tattoos. Short skirts and sleeveless dresses, my uniform during Seattle’s brief but glorious summers, were out; long pants and hoodies were in, even when the temperature edged above eighty. I remember covering the 2012 election in long sleeves—sweating, apologizing for sweating, hoping that no one was watching me sweat. My dermatologist ran me through the gamut of treatments: steroid creams, retinol, prescription-strength shampoo, and therapeutic tanning, but nothing helped—my tanned, moisturized, vitamin-enhanced skin still looked like the surface of Mars. On my list of reasons to get sober, “stop looking like a burn victim” was somewhere behind “keep your job” and just above “get out of debt,” and all were equally unattainable.

  Nineteen

  Play the Tape Forward

  People love to talk about the “moment of clarity”—that fabled instant when an addict finally makes the decision to stop drinking forever and truly means it. I’ve had that moment; I know it well. Unfortunately, what I’ve discovered is that, like rock bottom, moments of
clarity can happen over and over, and you can keep drinking right on through them. I had a moment of clarity when I passed out on Josh’s couch, and another when I realized I had no desire to garden, cook, or eat—three of my favorite pastimes since college, when I spent hours kneading flour into gluten to make vegetarian “chicken” or experimenting to see which seeds would make the crunchiest sprouts. After each moment of clarity, I vowed to change everything, and as soon as the moment passed, I had a drink. Tomorrow. I’ll fix it tomorrow.

  But even when I couldn’t stay sober for more than a day or two, I was starting to see glimpses of a way out. I was learning what worked and what didn’t—not universally, but for me. When I tried to drink moderately, I learned that I couldn’t—that first drink opened up a well in my body that a thousand more couldn’t fill. When I tried to get sober on my own, I discovered that I needed some kind of support. When I spent months scribbling CBT call-and-response notes in my diary—“Thought: I don’t need to be at this meeting. Response: Everyone here seems happier than me so maybe they know something I don’t”—I learned that I could talk back to my most insidious inner voice, the one that said, “It’ll be different this time.” And even AA taught me a couple of things: First, before buying that first drink or bottle, I should “play the tape forward,” to the part of the story where I’m lying in bed at home, bottles shoved out of sight, with the walls closing in around me. And second, people do recover. Even hopeless drunks like me.

  Today, when I tell people why I quit drinking, they often respond, “I had no idea you had a problem,” or, even better, “Are you sure?” People who say this are inevitably acquaintances, never close friends; if you really knew me, it was obvious. That’s why I tried not to spend too much time around people who knew me. Every relationship had an expiration date. Even the most self-absorbed guys eventually wondered why I never seemed to be able to keep a commitment, or why I was throwing up in the bathroom.