28 Seconds

by Michael Bryant

  Other famous recovering alcoholics: Sir Anthony Hopkins, Sir Elton John, Raymond Carver, Stephen King, Robin Williams, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Betty Ford, Eric Clapton, Joe Walsh, Johnny Cash. The list of those who died from alcoholism or addiction is much longer. John Barrymore, George Best, Richard Burton, David Byron, Truman Capote, Raymond Chandler, Peter Cook, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Errol Flynn, Alexander Godunov, Ernest Hemingway, William Holden, Billie Holiday, Jack Kerouac, Veronica Lake, Joseph McCarthy, Jim Morrison, Chet Baker, Franklin Pierce, Edgar Allan Poe, Jackson Pollock, Hank Williams, W. C. Fields, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse.

  The list of politicians and artists who’ve done battle with alcohol is long enough, and star-studded, but that’s no surprise. Alcoholism is everywhere and politicians cannot escape it by virtue of their station. Almost one in ten men, and one in 25 women, are alcoholics. That’s true for Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

  The cost of alcoholism is profound. Most are surprised to learn that alcohol is more costly to our society than tobacco. (Yet governments around the world are increasingly supporting efforts to denormalize smoking, through advertising prohibitions, health warnings, class actions, and massive taxation; not so with alcohol consumption.) Moreover, the devastating effects of alcoholism on families are impossible to quantify.

  Neuroscience is still in the process of explaining the cause of alcoholism. As the late (alcoholic/addict) David Foster Wallace summed it up in Infinite Jest, “addiction is either a disease or a mental illness or a spiritual condition (as in ‘poor of spirit’) or an O.C.D.-like disorder or an affective or character disorder….”* For most of those afflicted, the great (and alcoholic) American writer William Faulkner may have put it best: “God damn! Why do I do it!?” The answer for most alcoholics, right down through the generations of human experience with grapes, hops, and distillation, is that they don’t have a clue.

  It remains the case that recovery from alcoholism and addiction is rare. Most who need help never seek it. So many of those who do seek help do not end their days clean and sober. It is a fatal affliction for those who suffer rather than recover. And it serves up an utterly undignified end.

  That’s why March 7 is the most important day on my calendar each year. And March 7, 2006, just weeks shy of my 40th birthday, was maybe the most important day of my life.

  The first time I got drunk I was about 9 years old. I was babysitting my little brother with my best friend, Doug Stark. We opened the doors of my parents’ liquor cabinet. The first clue to my drinking lineage was right before my eyes. The cabinet was enormous. It held dozens of bottles; almost all were nearly empty. We sipped on a few liqueurs and some rye. Then I tried a beer. It was Labatt’s Blue in a brown stubby bottle.

  Then we went down to my room, lined my door with a wet towel, opened my window, and smoked one of my grandfather’s Colts. It was a wonderful experience. And it grew increasingly more wonderful in my teens and early twenties.

  The second half of my drinking career would get progressively worse. That’s the way of alcoholism. It always gets worse. The pathology is as predictable as it is pathetic. It’s good, and then it gets very bad. There is recurring drunkenness that, just like William Faulkner, even the drinker can’t explain. People get hurt. Damage gets done.

  The first time I felt addicted—like I truly needed as opposed to wanted alcohol—was the summer of 1986. I was 20 years old. All summer, I’d come home to my parents’ basement, after working the night shift as a janitor at BC Transit. I’d bought a beer fridge and filled it. While listening to music or watching TV, I’d have a few, which was probably rounded up to five or six, then go to bed. It was a beloved ritual.

  One night, I opened the fridge, and it was empty. My stomach clenched, my heart pounded. I broke out into a cold sweat. I tore apart my garbage-dump of a bedroom searching for a beer. Finally, I found a warm Rainier Pilsner in an empty pizza box. I drank it immediately. I vowed to never allow myself to run out of booze again.

  So began my obsession. When I wasn’t drinking, I was fretting over my supply.

  As this twisted logic came to settle into my twisted brain, as the disease began its work on me, there was a sliver of recognition that my reaction to an empty beer fridge was abnormal. This lingered for a nanosecond, then flew away. For about 20 years.

  At the University of British Columbia, the distance between the pub and the hospital is approximately 400 metres, which was a good thing for me. As a student I occasionally wound up in the emergency ward, intoxicated to a dangerous degree.

  I awoke in the hospital one day in 1989, shivering in a postoperative fog, having just had my appendix removed. Waiting for me was a surgeon and an anaesthetist. They’d been waiting for a while, and if you know anything about hospitals, you know that doctors and anaesthetists don’t wait around for much.

  Barely conscious, I listened to them silently. I was shocked by what they said, even if I wasn’t surprised.

  “You have a drinking problem,” a female surgeon in her forties said without emotion. “Your tolerance for anaesthetics is at a level consistent with alcoholism or drug addiction.”

  The anaesthetist chimed in: “I would give you a very large dose, and then your body demanded more. If I hadn’t kept pumping you full of [the anaesthetic], you would have regained consciousness and the pain would have been unbearable.”

  “You need to do something about this. You’re too young to be—”

  “Look, I gave you enough anaesthetics to kill a horse,” he said, a couple times, and then they left.

  I couldn’t wait to tell my drinking buddies. It seemed riotously funny to me. But on some level, I must have been worried by their warnings, so I raised it with my family doctor at the time. Unfortunately, he dismissed their diagnosis out of hand.

  The summer before I left for law school, I began to notice that my roster of friends was depleting. I chalked it up to people moving away, getting on with their lives, but the truth was a little harsher. My UBC friends had had enough of my drunkenness.

  One night I was awakened by a flashlight in my face. I was clueless as to where I was. I could smell ambulance attendant on the man’s hand as he pulled up my eyelids. I remember hearing: “He’s alive. Yep, he’s alive.” This got relayed to someone via a radio. I heard it again. Or maybe it was an echo in my brain.

  I’d passed out, on my back, in a bush on West 41st Avenue, near Larch Street, having been ejected from the BC Transit bus for reasons I can only imagine.

  Five hours earlier I’d taken off my chicken costume and thrown it at Barney Bentall and the Legendary Hearts, on stage at War Memorial Gym. Halloween. I was now wearing shorts and a UBC Boxing Club t-shirt, stained with something foul. Someone driving by had telephoned 911, reporting a dead body in a bush.

  “Either you tell me your address and show me you have the cab fare, or you’re spending the night in a drunk tank,” they said. “You could have died here, you know. Aspirated on your vomit, lying on your back like that.”

  I was unable to speak a coherent sentence, but I found some ID in my sock, with my address on it. I was delivered to the Sigma Chi house and passed out in the hallway, never making it to my room.

  I was aware that I drank just a little more than almost anyone else in the fraternity. But I was heading off to Osgoode Hall Law School soon. Then everything would be better, I thought.

  At Osgoode, I began drinking alone with a frequency that marked a rite of passage on the pathology of alcoholism. There was nothing social about my alcohol intake now. In fact, it was antisocial. It just seemed necessary for my survival.

  I’d brought a small black-and-white television to Toronto from my fraternity house, and rented movies from the corner store that would be conducive to black-and-white viewing. I remember watching a bunch of Woody Allen movies, and The Godfather many times. And drinking beer. Lots of beer.

  One night, I called my only friend at law school at the time, Joe from Timmins. He was a tee
totaller, he said, because there was a history of alcoholism in his family. Joe was generous and hilarious, and would become a great friend for life.

  “HELLO!” Joe had a very big voice. Think Jabba the Hutt.

  Whatever I said was so slurred that he couldn’t understand, but he wasn’t laughing. After many efforts, I told him I was worried that I “drank too much.” Joe called me the next morning to talk about it, and would inquire after my drinking, on and off, until I sobered up 20 years later.

  At the time, all my classmates were reading cases and writing case summaries. I had begun to research the locations of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The problem was, I was still debating in my mind whether I really was an alcoholic, or whether I wasn’t just overreacting to a bit of bad luck.

  The meeting I attended was somewhere in Toronto. I don’t remember where. I was terrified of being spotted, which is absurd considering I had no friends in Toronto of which to speak. I recall nothing of that first meeting other than that the makeup of the crowd was not what I had expected. It was a mix of successfullooking people and those who appeared to be down-and-out. That’s all I remember. It was a long time before I’d return.

  Near the end of my drinking career, I was ruining everything. I was missing the experience of the babies growing up, and I would have missed everything after that had I not stopped.

  I was ruining Susan’s life. She’d never complained about my drinking until the last year, and so, really, she saved my life. Not for the last time. And she somehow knew just what to say. Rather than preaching to me, or demanding changes, she just told me what it was doing to her.

  She was embarrassed for herself and for me, when I was intoxicated among friends at social gatherings. She felt alone, she said, even when we were together, because I simply wasn’t there anymore. In that, she nailed the essential ailment of the alcoholic—estrangement from the human race. I was never present, always emotionally elsewhere. Unavailable. Inaccessible. Drinking, drunk, or recovering from being so.

  Susan felt pity for me, as I tried to sleep off hangovers, missing weekend mornings with the kids. Or as I lingered over cocktail creations rather than tucking them in at night. Or as I slurred my words during their bedtime story.

  For the final year of my drinking, I’d wake up every morning with a hangover that felt like I imagined chemotherapy would feel. I would lean against the shower wall, a creaking sound echoing in the bathroom, as I breathed, and often I’d just lie down, always alone, in the shower.

  I was completely out of sync with Susan. She’d usually be gone for work when I was in the shower. In the last few months, I was getting in to work at 9 a.m. or so. For the Attorney General of Ontario, this was the equivalent of taking a sabbatical.

  On the job, I was squeezing ideas out of my head like they were the dregs of an empty toothpaste tube. When I was first appointed Attorney General, I’d have several crazy ideas a day, and a few per week would be worth pursuing. By the end of my drinking, I hadn’t had a new idea in months.

  During my morning shower meltdown, I’d ponder what I’d said to myself the morning before: I really need to do something about my drinking. But by sundown, I’d be looking at my best friend: a martini, Manhattan, gin and tonic, rum and ginger beer with bitters, Scotch and soda, bourbon and soda, white wine, red wine, champagne, vodka, and finally just bourbon or gin or vodka or rum. Whatever it was, I had only one requirement: that there be lots of it.

  Near the end, Susan was making it clear that she was not satisfied with what her life and marriage had become. Again, her gift to me was not judging me at all. She just told me the consequences of my actions, which I never doubted to be true.

  I knew there was a limit to how long I could look at Susan every morning with a saggy hungover gaze as she described to me the evening before, as if it were a play she’d watched but I’d missed. Each day, I’d vaguely promise to do something about it.

  “I’m going to go see my doctor.”

  “When?”

  “Today.”

  “You said that last week.”

  “Okay, true, but …”

  Weeks would pass. I would wake up to hear her weeping.

  “I’m going to go see my doctor.”

  As I said it, I heard echoes of promises past.

  “Shit.”

  “Will you call him right now for me?”

  To keep the peace, I finally did. To my dismay, I got an appointment that very day.

  My G.P. asked how much I was drinking.

  “Daily.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A bottle of wine a night? Or the equivalent?”

  “Yes. No. Sometimes more. Usually more. But my tolerance is dropping. I’m getting drunk quicker.”

  “How are you functioning as an … Attorney General?”

  “I don’t know. I just am. I’ve got lots of help. I mean, Churchill saved the free world as a drunk; I can do my job. I’ve avoided being drunk at work or in public. I usually just drink at home, or at a friend’s. But always eventually at home, alone.”

  “What do you want?”

  “A therapist that specializes in this stuff.”

  He referred me to the late Dr. Max Himmel, a psychiatrist. I would not call to make an appointment, however. Nor would I tell Susan about the referral. Mercifully, she didn’t ask that night, and I fabricated a story about getting the thumb’s up from my family doctor, and more tests forthcoming.

  In November 2005, I received another warning, this time from a great friend. Les Scheininger had been my political godfather since the beginning of my Ontario political career. He’d run for MPP himself, and was a past president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Les always had a stable of politicos whom he mentored. I was lucky to be one of them.

  “I have something I want to say…. It’s not easy for me to do this.”

  I figured either he had cancer or he was going to tell me that I was drinking too much.

  “People are noticing,” Les said, “that you’re … They’re noticing that you’re in your cups a lot. In public. Like last weekend …”

  I quickly defused the matter.

  “That night was an exception,” I said. “But I appreciate …”

  It took a lot of guts for Les to tell me what he did. I was full of excuses.

  “I’m just saying that people are talking about it,” he said again.

  I was filled with shame alternating with denial. Really? No. Who? Never mind. I didn’t really want to know.

  In the coming days I would resent his diagnosis, but later on I would come to see it as a life-saving gesture on his part. I ordered no wine at our lunch, but had an extra mickey of Scotch that night, seized by the juggernaut of self-loathing and pity, with a shot of self-righteousness for good measure.

  Then, on New Year’s Eve 2005, I had one of the worst binges of my life. I awoke on the basement floor, face to carpet, fully dressed, with a distinct, very distinct, sense of amnesia. I did not know where I was, even as I looked around the basement of my own house.

  After five minutes staring at the ceiling, I got that much. But I couldn’t remember anything else. I didn’t know the date. I didn’t know anything other than that I was in the basement. And that it had to be bad.

  Coming up the stairs, the pungent scent of alcohol preceded me. In the kitchen, I found a newspaper that gave me the date. New Year’s Day, 2006. Susan filled in the rest of the blanks. We’d been at the final night of Le Select Bistro’s tenure on Queen Street West. Most of the people in the back room, which we’d taken over, were her colleagues in the music and legal industry. I’d had to be carried out to a cab by the restaurant’s owner, Jean-Jacques—and we weren’t leaving voluntarily.

  That afternoon (I’d slept past noon), no ultimatums were made. No promises were made. But she wanted my commitment to never do it again. I provided it. But I had no idea if it was a promise I could keep.

  On January 4, 2006, I
walked into the office of Dr. Max Himmel. I’d called to make an appointment and was offered something in February. Then, a cancellation and a call back. It was the first of the lucky breaks, or little miracles, that guided me on my way.

  His office was at Bay and Bloor, an intersection that would later figure large in my life. The first time I went, in my overheated self-centredness I feared the paparazzi would be lying in wait in the lobby. They weren’t.

  “Why are you here?” Dr. Himmel asked, after we’d sat down across from each other.

  “I want to moderate my drinking.”

  “Well then,” he said. “We will work on you moderating your drinking.”

  Dr. Himmel, who I did not realize was dying of cancer at the time, knew perfectly well that abstinence would be my only real hope. He eventually referred me to a fellowship of recovering alcoholics whose program is based on abstinence. Had Dr. Himmel told me on that first visit that I needed to abstain from drinking permanently and start attending meetings regularly, the first visit to his office would also have been my last.

  “What’s moderate, for you? How many drinks a week?”

  “A week?!” Pause. “Two or three a night would be moderate, no?” It never occurred to me that social drinkers seldom had cause to keep count of their drinks.

  “Which: Two? Or three? A night.”

  “Two,” I said.

  “Two it is.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s it for today,” he said.

  I was a little stunned. Maybe he had another appointment. I was hoping to talk about myself a lot and was disappointed.

  Then, he raised his finger: “Except for one thing,” and his eyes brightened and he smiled.