by Ken Grimes
That’s where all of a sudden I went off the cliff, because I didn’t have to fake it anymore. I tried to use my girlfriends as a way of controlling it, using them as a kind of governor to throttle back on my consumption. That would work temporarily, then we would break up and I would step on the gas. I used my first job out of college as a control mechanism; I would just party on the weekends, but that made me miserable.
Then I crashed.
6
MG
Stopping
The number of drinks I had every evening is a bit of a blur (how surprising!), but I’d guess four or five martinis. And one has to consider who’s making the martinis. One of mine might equal two of any bartender’s.
I did this drinking before dinner, always, never after. I never wanted to drink afterward. And I always ate dinner. One might ask, If you only drank during cocktail hour, what’s the problem?
How long is your cocktail hour?
I stopped drinking between Christmas and New Year’s—to be more exact, on New Year’s Eve. But wait a minute: I stopped before, before, the magic hour of midnight, New Year’s Eve. I stopped despite a dinner date at a swank restaurant. Why didn’t I allow myself that one last wonderful binge, like any sane alcoholic would do?
Because I told myself it would be better not to turn those last wee hours into some grand drama of martyrdom and sacrifice. In other words, don’t lend the occasion too much significance. Better not to allow alcohol center stage; better not to clothe it in such gorgeous raiment that I would let it precede me to my table. No, let it walk around in rags, let it be refused admittance to the dining room. Sorry, Stoli, not this time. Goodbye, Grey Goose, go fly in somebody else’s airspace. Henceforth, I will walk in on the arm of sobriety. I will refuse to attach a lot of importance to drinking.
As if I could. The notion that any alcoholic could attach too much importance to drinking only shows how naive I was.
Naive and arrogant. I didn’t wait until New Year’s Day to stop, because I insisted upon having a handle on drinking before I even knew what a handle was. I had no idea what I was up against. I was, admittedly, extremely proud of myself. And you should be proud of yourself, considering what you’re placing on the table; just not as proud of yourself as I was five minutes after I’d stopped. Wait at least half a day before you’re proud of yourself.
Arrogance got me through both New Year’s Eve and the week that followed. I remember walking past a bar in Georgetown, looking in, thinking, Oh, you poor guys, look at you, finding the only happiness you can in booze. How pathetic.
But then the next week, after I’d been kicked out of Arrogance, Inc., I was back at that bar with my nose pressed up against the glass, mouthing, Please, sir, another helping of gin, please.
There’s something simple about drinking: You can stop only by stopping. “How do I—?”, for an alcoholic, is the wrong question, because there is no “how.”
“You’re saying that I’m supposed to stop something so entrenched in my psyche I can’t tell where the drink on the bar ends and the rest of me begins?”
That’s right.
“—the one thing that makes my entire life supportable?”
Yes.
“—that’ll get me through those boring parties?” (Or lively ones.)
Right.
“—and without something to put in its place?”
Because there is nothing to put in its place. Nothing substitutes for your drug of choice, for the substance of an addiction. What would you put in its place? Food? There is nothing that the bartender can put on the bar, or the waiter on the table; nothing cooked up by Jamie Oliver or Julia Child or all the chefs at the Bellagio that would make up for the loss of a dry martini.
You stop by stopping.
Intelligence has nothing to do with it. Understanding has nothing to do with it, which is the reason psychiatry has never had much luck with alcoholic patients. Alcoholics Anonymous might be considered a “how to stop.” But even there, it isn’t “how.” Although the twelve steps might look like a directive, I don’t think they are; the steps are simply supportive (which is not to diminish their importance). The twelve-step program is not a way of toning down your drinking; it is not a method that tells you how many drinks to have and in what proportion and at what time and with what ingredients. That’s because the twelve-step program is not a methodology but an ideology: The intent is to change your life. It is not telling you how best to drink but how best to live.
You might compare it with dieting. There is every manner of recipe advising you how to take the pounds off: what to eat and how much of it, all the substitutions you can make for high-fat food, how much of this to consume and how much of that. Dieting is a methodology, with hundreds of new variations coming out every year. Its instructions, its recipes, are precise.
There’s no recipe for ending an addiction. Unless you consider this one: Here is a glass. It has vodka in it. Do not pick it up.
• • •
In the Kolmac Clinic, there was one rule: If you decided to quit treatment, you would come for one last session and tell the rest of us “Goodbye-and-why-I’m-leaving.” This was never a popular assignment for those who were quitting.
The reason the quitters gave was always the same: “Since I’ve been here, I’ve learned that I can control my drinking,” or some variation on that theme. “I believe I can take one or two drinks now without slipping back into my old ways.”
No, you can’t.
Such reasoning always astonished me, since it was precisely that inability that landed the person in the clinic in the first place.
Ah, yes, I can take one drink . . .
The blessed first drink that goes down like fire stolen from the gods (and you can bet they’re looking forward to payback), the deliverance, the relief from the sharp-edged day, from party anxiety, from boredom outside and in-, from the empty night.
It’s at least as good as holy water. You relax and become not exactly another person but a better version of this one. Who would not want to hold on to that feeling? You’d have to be mad not to want to. So here comes the tray with the fresh drinks, and you take one, which is the second one, the one you told yourself you weren’t going to have. A little later, the third one steals in on little glass feet.
You can fool around with recipes. You can set limits for yourself. Perhaps you’ll become a weekend drinker. You can try it, but it probably won’t work, or not for long. Indeed, it only prolongs the misery. If you start weekend drinking, you’ll still have five days to get through, and you’ll spend them waiting for the weekend.
The weekend becomes the only time you feel alive. It’s Friday. Let’s live! So you spring the cork or pop the top or twist the cap. This will work, you think. And for a while it does. For one or two weekends, or a month or two, or even six months.
But listen: What of the wasting away of the rest of the week? Of those blighted five days? The five days you can hardly wait to end, to get to the weekend.
There are any number of variations on this theme: “I only drink at parties,” “I only drink after dinner,” “I only drink during the Sunday game,” “I only drink to unwind after work, especially on Fridays, with the other working stiffs.”
The problem was that I couldn’t stop. I decided not to drink on any given night. I tried to do this any number of times. Sometimes it worked; more often it didn’t. A few times I told myself I wouldn’t drink for several days. I was back to drinking within forty-eight hours. I wouldn’t have lasted a week in the weekend-drinking scheme. The question was not whether I was an alcoholic—I was pretty sure of that—no, the question was, did I want to be?
Why stop? My health was in no immediate danger; drinking wasn’t affecting my writing output. So why stop? Because I couldn’t. And if I couldn’t, something other than my own dimwittedness was in complete control of me. Thus, my inability to stop began to outweigh the pleasure of drinking.
Which is not to say that
drinking was ever an unvarnished pleasure. The first drink was the comforting balm that would have lulled Odysseus if he’d hung around in the land of the lotus-eaters; he knew he would never get back to Ithaca.
The next couple of drinks had me spiraling upward. Every problem solvable, everyone approachable, every book writable. That would be half the evening. After that, the other half, a downward spiral. You’ve heard it a hundred times: Alcohol is ultimately a depressant. But there was something positive even about the depression: insight. Insights in this swamplike thinking would be awfully insightful. Feelings would be honest, searing.
Or at least that’s the way it felt.
Even if all of the insight and honesty were real, I’d wake up in the morning and be the same old me with the same old problems. All of that expansive thinking was as airy and fluttery as a hummingbird’s wing. Not that I couldn’t remember it, but it meant nothing.
I wasn’t the smartest girl in the room after all.
• • •
How do you stop? There are several routes.
You can join A.A.; you can go to a clinic; you can see a psychiatrist; you can align yourself with the group that believes you can control drinking through “management.”
The first two work; the second two usually don’t.
It’s simple why the first two work: They tell you to stop drinking. Period. Stop, and then we’ll talk about it.
Stop.
You can choose to see a psychiatrist for reasons other than drinking. I had my coat pockets full of psychiatrists, the last one for over fifteen years. Alcoholism was only one of the topics, and it ran out rather quickly, since he didn’t think I was an alcoholic. (No one did except me. And the director of my clinic.) There’s the hope that you might uncover the reasons why you drink. But it won’t help much even if you do.
People seem to think if you’ve identified a problem, you’ve licked it. You’ve seen the light; you’ve had an “Aha!” moment. That might happen, but you haven’t licked it. After all, why should the problem be solved simply because you’ve identified it? You can understand why you do something, but that doesn’t take away your need to do it. It’s the need you’re hung up on.
You don’t stop drinking by analyzing;
You don’t stop drinking by understanding why you do it;
You don’t stop by thinking about it or “reasonably” deciding to cut back;
You stop by stopping.
This is bad news. It’s hard to think you can’t somehow nibble around the edges of the problem, maybe suck on the lemon twist or the olive; that maybe you can cut this quitting into workable parts.
There are no workable parts. You might think the twelve steps are workable parts. But they’re meant to strip you of your ego, your old self; they don’t strip the glass from your hand. The only requirement for membership in A.A. is the desire to stop drinking, not the stopping itself. If the glass falls to the floor, that’s a by-product.
There is an advantage in accepting this: It lets you off the hook for searching out some plan or trick to get you to stop, that will convince you to stop, that will talk you into stopping. There is no trick.
That old ace in the hole is, simply, stop.
7
MG
Cauldron, Bubble
I never knew the strength of alcohol’s embrace until, midway through my childhood, Mrs. D. came along. My mother had inherited a summer hotel from her father, and Mrs. D. helped her run it.
Although my family had produced all kinds of sots, neither my mother nor my father was a drinker. But along came the business partner, Mrs. D. (which is what we called her), and boy, could she drink. And she did it in style: always dressed for cocktail hour, always primped and powdered. Every evening at five, I could hear her approach across the cavernous dining room, announced by the rattle of ice cubes in a pitcher and glasses on a tray.
When I was in my early twenties, that came to be a sound as welcome as the theme of The Twilight Zone—which was where we wound up, back in the office behind the front desk. We always sat there in case a potential guest should require lodging.
The back office was a narrow little room that housed a rolltop desk and swivel chair, where Mrs. D. sat; a black safe; and the bentwood chair I used. If a third party should join us, he or she sat on the windowsill. My mother would sometimes stop by and share a cigarette and some laughs, but not for long, since my mother actually worked.
There was another side to Mrs. D.: her inexplicable anger, usually directed at me. We’d pass each other walking through the dining room, and the air would crackle. One reason I hung out back there was to short-circuit the fury Mrs. D. felt much of the time, something that might erupt at any time except within the confines of the back office during cocktail hour. Get us in the back office with our old pals, Jim Beam and Gordon, and we could slip right back into being old pals. Even as an adult, I felt that frisson of fear when I would pass her on the steps or in the dining room.
Knowing this about alcoholism, knowing anything about it, would have saved me a lot of adolescent misery. I knew nothing because the word “alcoholic” wasn’t invoked to explain why someone was slobbering drunk; that was just “drinking too much.” One of the hotel guests falling down the stairs? “He drinks too much, tch tch.” Another guest yelling in the dining room? “She really should cut back on the cocktail hour.” Laughter. The concept of alcoholism wasn’t discussed. I have an idea that the word was as toxic as “cancer”—a word spoken in hushed tones, if at all. Alcoholism wasn’t on the table. Thus did we avoid staring it in the face; thus did we circumvent the awful mystery of addiction.
Mrs. D. did not have to be in the depressive stage of her drinking to go into one of her frozen rages; they could happen at any time. Alcoholic feelings persist even when one isn’t drinking. We say, “Thank God she’s sober today.” But she isn’t; an alcoholic is never sober in the sense that feelings disappear when the actual drinking stops. Mrs. D. was always in the grip of alcohol, whether or not she had a drink in her hand. And the rage was usually directed at me for some infraction of her vague and shifting rules. Sometimes I knew what I’d done, but more often, nothing was clear, I had to bet on what had caused her anger. I usually lost. She would not speak; she would not say what was wrong beyond the occasional “You know what,” if I asked her what I did. So it was like trying to second-guess a blackjack dealer.
Since Mrs. D. was furnishing a good deal of money to keep the hotel above water, my mother wanted to avoid an uproar, a sudden packing of bags and leave-taking (a thing always threatened and once acted upon, so the threats were not idle). My mother’s response to me over Mrs. D.’s massive unreason was “Just apologize.” “Apologize for what? I don’t know what I’ve done!” “It doesn’t matter. Apologize.” She was speaking to an extremely unapologetic person. I had to stand up for myself; nobody was watching my back. I tried to sit with my chair against the wall in case Mrs. D. walked into the room.
Yet she would do things for me that seemed a complete reversal. She bought her clothes at a pricey boutique (before that became such a nifty little word). One day she left a large box in my room. Boxes of high-end merchandise always have a luster and satiny feel that the cheap boxes don’t. From this one I pulled a truly beautiful dress that went to the floor. It was much too old for me, which was part of its charm. It was a blue-gray linen, very plain, unadorned except for some white beadwork around the square neck. I think its elegance came from its simplicity. It would be in style today. The more I think of that dress, the more I wish I had it now.
(Where do these things go? We wind up with a storeroom’s worth of things we’ve accumulated over the years that we don’t want, yet the things we prized somehow got away from us.)
Still, there was that anger, a boiling cauldron, taking very little inducement to overflow. Very little to anyone else, enormous to her, because in her state of drunkenness, things were incalculable. Eventually, the reason for the anger would come out, an
d it would be a strange brew she had stirred up, eye of newt, toe of frog, bits and pieces mixed from her distorted notion of what had happened or was happening. She might have begun with something resembling reality and then reinvented it by cooking it too long in the cauldron, by thinking and thinking about it. We can all turn a neutral and passive act into one bristling with implications and then go to work on the implications until we have worked out a whole little world.
With her, the entire machinery of alcoholism was at work. I recall once when she was in bed, sick but not too sick to enjoy cocktail hour (alcoholics are rarely that sick). My brother and his wife brought her a calla lily in a pot as a get-well present. She pointed a finger at them, accusing them of mocking her husband’s death thirty years before, when lilies had flowered at the altar and been laid on his casket. (In the several years she had been at the hotel, I had never heard her mention her husband.) It was a charge so far-fetched, only a paranoid would love it.
The overthinking of an incident, an imagined slight, perhaps, or an old conversation or chance comment invests it with a peculiar power. The bed, the pointing finger, the white lily made a scene out of a Poe short story; it was certainly Poe-esque in its paranoia. The “It” of alcoholism—call it the wolf, the devil, or one of Macbeth’s witches rising up within—you project on whoever is offered. In this case, it was my brother. He was the devil come to mock her dead husband.
• • •
And yet there were the back-office cocktail hours where Mrs. D. and I were thick as thieves. There was something larcenous about it, stealing time from the hotel business. Why should a couple of hooligans be hanging around drinking in the office when my mother was breaking her back in the kitchen?
