by Ken Grimes
But solitude is necessary much of the time. Without it, I think I’d be made up of Post-its, sticking a bit of myself upon anybody or anything that happened along.
• • •
Here’s my favorite anecdote about identifying an alcoholic. It might be apocryphal, but I think it did happen:
Dean Martin, Ronald Reagan, and William Holden decide to go for a drink. They walk into a bar. They have a drink. Then Deano and Bill agree: “Let’s have another.”
Ron says, “Why? We just had one.”
Based on that evidence, you may not be able to argue that Dean and Bill were alcoholics, but you can bet the farm that Ronald Reagan was not.
“Why? We just had one.”
That “why?” is a dead giveaway. “Why?” I cannot imagine myself asking this question in a million years. I cannot imagine myself asking the question even now, after all of this time, were I dumb enough to accept the first drink. “Why?” is not an alcoholic’s question. “Where?” would be more like it.
If you were in that bar, who would you want to be sitting next to?
Me, I’d want to be wedged right between Deano and Bill. Cheers.
4
KG
An Introduction to Recovery
After I had lived in New York City for two years, my mother offered to help me move out of my tiny coffinlike apartment over an airshaft. My roommate and I shared about 150 square feet. He slept on the pullout couch in the living room/kitchen, while I crammed my miniature water bed into an eight-by-ten room.
My mother’s mysteries had just started to appear on the New York Times best-seller list. She had put me through several private schools and college with her shrewd buying and selling of real estate. She volunteered to buy an apartment in Manhattan that she would own, on which I would pay the maintenance. It was a real gift for me on my eighteen-grand-a-year salary.
I found a real estate agent to guide me through Greenwich Village. The romance of Bob Dylan and the Beats and the renegade status of the Village was my poke in the eye to the typical post-college drunken frat boys who lived on the Upper East Side.
I trudged through the Village with my real estate agent, trying to find the best deal possible. It became clear to me that I wasn’t the only one looking for parentally aided rebellion—everything was out of my price range. I slowly made my way north to Chelsea, a forgotten neighborhood that hadn’t been gentrified.
Chelsea was the home of one of my favorite bars, Peter McManus, a hundred-year-old establishment on Nineteenth Street where you could sit and smoke and drink for hours without any irritating yuppies or dance music. I had spent many hours in the grand old Irish joint, with its delicious beer, a huge oak bar, massive mirrors, and surly bartenders. I needed to live in this neighborhood.
I found a very small one-bedroom apartment three blocks away and started making regular treks to Peter McManus. I was happy.
When I told my therapist why I’d moved to Chelsea, he paused and stared at me.
“Ken, don’t you think it’s strange that you picked a place to live because it was close to your favorite bar? Most people don’t make that their number one priority when they look for an apartment.”
I was speechless. There was no answer. No one had ever been this blunt.
After moving into that new apartment I was handed my first real assignment at the publishing company, a book on Adult Children of Alcoholics, a new concept. I heavily identified with the different stories, and reading it released a torrent of blame toward my parents, which conveniently excused me from taking responsibility for my own actions.
But it stirred something in me about my own drinking. In a moment of honesty, I went to the Employee Assistance Program and told the counselor a fraction of the truth of how much I drank. She insisted that I call a therapist who specialized in alcohol and drug addiction.
I called the therapist, and for the next year and a half, I fought with him about going to twelve-step meetings and why I had to quit drinking and smoking pot. He worked with me to see that my obsessions weren’t natural. I refused his entreaties to attend twelve-step meetings and denied that my drinking wasn’t normal, even for a twentysomething Manhattanite. He patiently put up with me as I rambled on about my girlfriends—or lack thereof—my parents’ drinking, my problems at work, and my general unhappiness.
I finally capitulated and reluctantly took the phone number of a guy my age in recovery. I went home to my apartment, picked up the telephone, and called. I had an hour-long conversation with a guy who was a year younger than I was, seemed pretty cool, and assured me that you could have fun without getting hammered.
I was astounded. I quizzed him on how you could go to a Martin Scorsese movie not loaded, a party and not get fucked up, meet a girl without a beer in your hand?
He answered all those questions and uttered the last words any alky wants to hear, “So, why don’t you go to a meeting with me tomorrow night at eight?”
I mumbled a yes and dropped the phone on the receiver.
The next day, I thought about the meeting constantly during work and took the subway uptown with dread to the appointed address. I approached the church and saw a dozen people in the entryway talking, smiling, joking. I tried to avoid them and scooted downstairs, where the guy I had spoken with somehow seemed to know who I was—was it the wild eyes? The sweaty brow?
I remember nothing from my first meeting—most people don’t—but I do recall recoiling in horror when the people beside me reached out to hold my hand and chant a prayer. Wait a second, what’s with the praying? Isn’t this supposed to be nonreligious? I’m an atheist.
That was it. I hated this program. I ran to a pay phone on the corner and called my best (actually, my only) friend and blurted out that I had just been to a twelve-step meeting.
He responded neutrally. “Well, I hope that doesn’t mean we can’t have a beer every now and then.”
• • •
As I progressed in early recovery, I slowly came to understand that the questions for all recovering alcoholics are not how we arrived at our sorry state and who’s to blame but why we continue to create a hard-knock life for ourselves while sober. What does the twelve-step literature mean when it describes a life that is “happy, joyous and free”? Is that something I really want? My mind says yes, but the rest of me, that emotional core inside me, isn’t so sure and would prefer to burrow into a cocoon of negativity.
A recovery friend of mine once said, “I went to the doctor to have my blood checked—”
Another friend interrupted, “And it came back negative!”
It came back negative, because I am negative, even as I stare at the positive accomplishments in my life. Simply staying sober for over two decades is a singular achievement.
Still, I seethe at the petty injustices and my unmet needs as proof of the world’s ultimate injustice. I never got enough, never had enough, never will get enough. Not only is my middle age the winter of my discontent, it’s often my every waking moment of discontent. What banishes the discontent? Meditation. Running. Going to the theater. Absorbing nature and its beauty is a kind of relief. But the thing that sits inside me, waiting, lurking, I can’t let it off the leash because it’s part of me.
Many years after I got sober, I was at a cocktail party with my fiancée, and an acquaintance accosted me to discuss his problem with alcohol. He asked, “Ken, you seem to have done it. How? What did you do? What can I do?”
Not having shared with him that I was in recovery, I paused and thought, What the hell, I’ll tell him the truth. “What did I do? Let’s see, I went to a couple thousand recovery meetings, went to individual therapy for ten years and group therapy for seven years, and I’m still taking boxing lessons for anger management.”
He gave me a startled look, said nothing, and disappeared back into the party to get another drink.
5
MG
“I’ll Be Back on Monday”
I imagine the K
olmac Clinic was familiar with the “I’ll be back on Monday” dodge.
People who walk through the doors of a rehab clinic, especially outpatient, probably do it under duress or in desperation. They’ve just come off a weeklong bender or gotten arrested or lost their job, their house, their life, and figure they’ve got to fix this. Now.
Except that after a sobering half hour or so of talking to the doctor or counselor or therapist, “now” has a funny way of dragging its feet into “later.” And “later” never comes around at all. So the potential candidate for clean and sober does not come back on the next Monday or any Monday until he goes on another hair-raising overdose that doesn’t kill him and resolves into another “now” arrival at the clinic. This time maybe he stays, but probably he doesn’t.
The look that Dr. Kolodner gave me as I told him I was going out of town for the weekend but would be back on Monday made me wonder how many people returned. I’d have bet they were few.
Me, I’m reliable. He wasn’t impressed. All Dr. Kolodner seemed to know was that once out the door was one time too many.
“I’ll be back,” I said, and rose.
“It would be better to come to the group tonight.”
“Well, I’ve already made plans to go out of town.”
“Can’t the trip be postponed?”
“No. I didn’t realize you’d want me to start going to sessions right away.”
“Yes, I do.”
He unnerved me a little, but I was impressed by his intensity: The man really, really did not want me to walk out that door. I felt almost ashamed for doing it. I’d known him for fifteen minutes, and I already felt I was letting him down. His look was almost poignant in its distrust, not of me but of drugged promises.
I knew I’d be back. He didn’t. The thing was, I hadn’t been shoved through the door by someone else—by a relative or an intervention or a cop or a court order. I’d come on my own. Great, I could hear him thinking. She who comes on her own can leave on her own.
I was back on Monday.
• • •
The Kolmac program required my presence for three hours a day (or evening) of group counseling/therapy, five days a week. This lasted for eight weeks, but over that period, the number of days per week gradually decreased. This amount of time did not strike me as unreasonable. There were other choices, A.A. being one. Another was an inpatient clinic that would have had me there around the clock for four weeks.
Before I decided on Kolmac, I arranged an interview with an inpatient clinic, the usual twenty-eight-day stay (which I’ve always thought absurdly short). This was a posh place near Leesburg, Virginia. It was lovely; it looked like an antebellum mansion, a beautiful house in a green world of lush grass and live-oak trees.
The young woman who showed me around the elegant rooms informed me of the schedule the patients were supposed to keep: regular group meetings every day, individual meetings with therapist or psychiatrist, and time-filling projects of a recreational nature such as art or pottery.
Dread. All I could think of was my mother’s nursing home and sitting with her in the “art” exercise group. She would paint already formed pitchers and vases in pastel colors. It was close to a paint-by-numbers exercise. My mother had been, among many things, an accomplished watercolorist. What she was doing now was so far beneath her abilities, it made me want to weep.
I said to the young woman, “No, that sort of arty exercise I don’t want to do. I can spend my time writing. I’m a writer.” I seemed to have forgotten I was entering a world of nonnegotiation, where “don’t want to” wasn’t in the playbook.
She looked displeased. Then she astounded me by saying they preferred that patients not bring to this experience anything they’d been doing before.
“Like shooting up? Yes, I can understand that.”
Brief smile. No, anything. Do nothing that you did before to pass the time. To do what you did before coming here might hinder recovery. What you did before got you into the mess you’re now in. She didn’t say it, but that is the commonly held belief.
That ended that interview.
As I drove off, I thought hers was a very poorly thought-out response to the situation. She must have thought so, too, because in a few days, I got a call from her saying it would be all right if I wanted to write in my “spare time.”
I thanked her but said I had already signed on to another facility, an outpatient clinic.
• • •
I hated the round robins of the first hour of Kolmac clinic meetings. I asked the counselor who led our group why information gathered in this go-round-the-circle way (the kindergarten circle, I didn’t say) couldn’t as easily, and to better purpose, be gathered if we spoke spontaneously.
Because we have to make sure we check in on everyone. Presumably, not everyone would speak if not called upon. Fair enough. But I didn’t believe people in the group wouldn’t speak unless spoken to.
That first hour was, if not an actual time-waster, a time-killer. I was a teacher for too long not to know what time-killing was. I’d done it often enough in class, going through some bit of writing or exercise I thought basically meaningless because I had to get through the hour. We were committed to the clinic for two hours at a shot, and the hours had to be spent.
The second hour, in which we spoke spontaneously, was the one in which disappointments, unhappy home life, traumatic incidents were revealed. In that second hour, silence sometimes fell. I always liked the silences. All of us sitting there, sharing it. I felt the experience was more real than a lot of the talking. One doesn’t fake a silence.
Eventually, it would be broken by one of us talking about something that had happened, or by a person saying he couldn’t stand the silence. I liked that, too; it was honest. What didn’t sound honest were the banalities, the bromides, the ill-thought-out descriptions of our time since we’d last appeared here. In a way, we were forced to come up with platitudes, the most popular of which seemed to be: “Well, I had a busy week.” Did this, did that. Yes, you did. So did I. So did everybody. But what aren’t we saying?
Funny, I never heard any of us say, “I had a shiftless week.” Or a bone-idle week. Or a didn’t-do-one-damned-thing week.
What I kept forgetting, or possibly never understood in the first place, was that the business at hand was to keep people from drinking. The aim was not to understand why what we did contributed to our need to drink—although understanding wasn’t discouraged; it was welcomed. The point was that understanding oneself was not the way to stop drinking, though it might make it seem less robotic. This point cannot be overestimated: The purpose of both the clinic and A.A. was to keep us from drinking.
I think many of the group members realized the purpose of these rituals was to keep them from drinking; if there were rules they didn’t especially like, they were perfectly equipped to put up with them. I seem to think any group gathering not held in church or Starbucks is group psychotherapy. That could be because I’d been to more psychiatrists than Woody Allen.
I love analyzing things—things, people, events, myself. I expect that’s why I couldn’t sit back and be calm and let it all wash over me. There were others in the circle as analytical as I was but were smarter about the purpose of this circle.
One day a couple of people in the circle were glowering at me as I banged on at yet another kettle of Kolmac fishiness. Finally, one woman said, “I don’t know why you stay. You obviously don’t like this. You’d be happier someplace else.”
I’d be happier? Don’t you mean you’d be happier? Are you that unaware and yet not dead? Nonetheless, I took umbrage at the general murmur of assent. Actually, I was shocked that I was being fired from my own group—forgetting again that this was not group therapy and I could be a danger to their sobriety, or so they might have felt.
Sobriety is a coldhearted game, make no mistake about that.
I’m not sure anyone even wanted to understand why he or she drank; they just w
anted to stay stopped. I don’t see how that’s possible, ultimately, unless you keep up the relationship with either a clinic or some other group, mainly A.A. That I didn’t think I could stay stopped was why I went to the clinic for so long, every week for around two years. (That and my horror of leaving anything—a place, a person, a house, a landscape.) Kolmac knew the danger, which was why they kept urging people to go to A.A. meetings.
So, off I went from the clinic. I don’t believe I had a plan. If I did, it was like that of everyone else who quit the clinic: not to return to the old drinking style.
It was some time—weeks? a couple of months?—before I drank anything at all. I started with a glass of wine. Then two. It was a while before I was back on vodka.
After a year or two and a nudge from my son, it was back to Kolmac.
In my defense, I’ll say this: Dr. George Kolodner and Jim McMahon (the cofounders of Kolmac) were wrong in thinking that my complaints about the group were an excuse to leave. This time I was in another group and I liked it. These people didn’t think I was a danger to them; they didn’t think I was trying to stiff them somehow; they didn’t think I was an albatross around their necks.
This time I stayed.
• • •
Alcoholics Anonymous’s prescription for success is ninety meetings in ninety days. If you can do that, you have a fighting chance at long-term sobriety.
I would imagine that anyone who attended a meeting every day for three months would be well on his way. Ninety meetings would make attending a habit, and anyone willing to go to ninety meetings in ninety days isn’t just dropping by to see if A.A. suits him.
I wasn’t that person. I really tried, though. All told, I went to perhaps twenty or twenty-five meetings. I went to meetings in Georgetown, Santa Fe, Seattle, Jackson, London, Martha’s Vineyard, and even Florence, Italy. Georgetown and Santa Fe, for the most part, since I lived in both places. The one in Jackson was about as far removed from the sunny slopes of Jackson Hole as one could get. The meeting took place in a church basement; it was a congenial gathering of guys in boots and Stetsons with tobacco-stained fingers and a couple of women in fringed skirts. Yes, that’s what they wore in Jackson.
