by Ken Grimes
The “addictive voice” of Rational Recovery seems to me to be similar to the internal sentences of rational emotive therapy. This is a school begun by Albert Ellis, who coauthored a guide to rational living with his colleague Robert A. Harper. Its thesis (and I know this, since I was a client of Dr. Harper) is that one is not made unhappy by the actions of somebody or something else, but by the internal sentences we construct that insist we should respond as if these actions reflect truth. Your daughter, say, calls you a bitch, says she loathes you. Dr. Harper would say, “That’s not your problem, it’s your daughter’s. You’re making it your problem by listening to what you’re telling yourself in your head: that you must be unhappy because of what your daughter has said.” Rational emotive theory has a lot to do with this “must” reaction.
It would take near-heroic detachment not to react to your daughter, but what Harper says is probably true. By “react,” he means you shouldn’t feel desolated, since the words are hers, not yours. What you’re likely doing, in this mental process, is making the words yours. What I found to be the only difficulty with this therapy is that it needs reinforcement (like all therapies), and that means going to the therapist. Either the therapist or your own constant policing of your responses to emotionally charged situations.
The internal sentences are like the addictive voice of Rational Recovery, The AV tells you you need a drink. You tell the AV, no, I don’t. I imagine this dialogue continues for a while until one or the other voices cashes in its chips. What’s the difference between doing this and the usual old stuff of telling yourself, I need a drink! No, I don’t! Yes, I do! Don’t drink! Drink!
People generally are driven not by reason but by emotion, so that “rational” behavior—i.e., “recovery”—has a very long row to hoe, in that you are supposed to be able, in the simplest terms, to talk yourself out of your addiction. I just don’t see how you can.
How can you drink rationally? Rationality has nothing to do with drinking. Although a ton of books pressing for controlled drinking would disagree with me, I think there are only two kinds of drinkers: nonalcoholics and alcoholics. For the first group, “rational” as a word to define drinking is meaningless, simply because a social drinker, a drinker who is satisfied after a drink or two—drinking is not a problem. For the second group, “rational” didn’t get you to where you are now, so why would it get you out of it? “Rational” is just another word in the service of “control.” The nonalcoholic doesn’t think about control. The alcoholic thinks about it all the time. It’s what he’s trying to do but can’t.
Moderation Management is a program that would disagree with me because it believes that there are many drinkers who are only “problem drinkers” and who, if the problem is caught in time, can avoid addictive drinking. I think the person who believes he has a problem, really does. “I’m not an alcoholic, only a problem-drinker” sounds like a dangerous assessment.
Promises to oneself: “I won’t drink until five”; “I’ll stop for a week [a month, a year].” The point is not whether one keeps the promise but that one has to make the promise in the first place.
Let’s say you can do it, that you can monitor your drinking, apportion the drinks to a few a day (“Ten beers and I’m outta here!”), that you can stop after one drink at lunch, or even stop drinking at lunch altogether, or allow yourself no more than three drinks—one an hour—at a party. Do you want to? Do you want to go through life having to police yourself, to undertake this kind of surveillance? What sort of deliverance from sobriety is that? I mean, three lousy drinks spaced out. The only thing worse is one or two, and that’s unthinkable.
A good friend and fellow drinker, Leon, was told by a doctor that he would have to restrict himself to two ounces of alcohol a day, i.e., one decent martini. Leon’s reaction was to say if that was all he could have, why not just stop altogether? Remarkably, he did. This is the same Leon who would meet me at the end of the driveway with a martini in each hand. (We had a contest going: Who could get the martini to the other person quickest?)
The trick is that it’s better not to have the first one. It’s the first that wakes everything up, like the little lights and raucous noise of a pinball machine.
For the person who is not addicted to chocolate, one truffle is satisfying. For an addict, well, just hand me the box and pretend we never met. For an alcoholic, there is no such measure as “one martini.” One martini is a contradiction in terms.
Rational Recovery does not believe in alcoholism as a disease. A.A. does; accepting it as a disease is crucial to getting well. I don’t care whether it is or isn’t a disease; you have to take the same steps to overcome it.
A lot of A.A. dropouts take up some form of moderation. I would assume they do it because a lifetime without drinking is unimaginable—and, I’m sure they would add, unnecessary. But people who join groups to get help must feel they have a problem (well, an issue) with whatever the group espouses.
If you think, no, you’re not an alcoholic, just someone who has a drinking problem, why not solve your own problem? You tell yourself you need to cut down. So cut down. But isn’t that the problem? You haven’t been able to do that. Thus, you hitch up with a program that’s designed to let you keep drinking. Now, that’s a program any alcoholic could live with!
There are obviously drinkers who can do it; if there weren’t, the moderation groups would have gone out of business. There are also drinkers who can quit without attaching themselves to any group or organization. They can stop by themselves. It’s harder. And it’s rare.
If Leon did it—old drink-at-the-end-of-the-drive Leon, then maybe you can, too. But don’t bet on it.
12
KG
A Round of Pints, Please
Whatever I thought my future held changed the day I graduated from high school, when my mother had to pick me up from the local police precinct. I had been busted for drug possession with my girlfriend and two best friends. My aunt and uncle drove my mother. The shame I felt was overwhelming, and I cried endlessly when I got to my room in the basement.
That ended quickly. Even in my despair, I began to figure out how to get out of the situation. I had been caught, which was a drag, but I wasn’t going to stop partying. I just needed to be more careful. So what if my mother had watched me receive my diploma or my uncle had hosted a graduation-day lunch for the family at his house? I was buzzed, cocky, and feeling superior to everyone. I was a happening guy who was going to college. My cousins weren’t, poor bastards.
That feeling of entitlement quickly disintegrated. My arrest was combined with losing my driver’s license and my girlfriend telling me that her father wouldn’t let her see me anymore. My lawyer said I must get a summer job immediately, no matter how demeaning, to show that I was serious about cleaning up my act. I survived forty hours of community service at a YMCA swimming pool, by teaching mentally challenged kids how to play Frisbee. I tacked on to that a job of selling newspaper subscriptions door-to-door with some junior-high kids and our forty-year-old chain-smoking, van-driving, dentistry-challenged crew boss who was married to the best salesperson on our team—an eighteen-year-old blond girl who had run away from home. It was the worst job I ever had. We preyed upon old people who had no one to talk to and tried to sweet-talk them into multiyear subscriptions of a weekly newspaper that they clearly didn’t need.
My attorney finally brokered a deal with the chief of police, who decided not to pursue any legal action against me. As a seventeen-year-old minor in an era when teenage drug possession was still relatively new, I received a slap on the wrist and was free to leave the state and attend college.
It was a long, hot, boring summer that culminated in a thirty-year-old guy beating me up at the park in front of my friends after an Ultimate Frisbee game. He was even more competitive than I was and kept jawing at me, so I decided to deliberately outplay him for kicks. He became so enraged that, after the game, he started punching me. I didn’t fight bac
k. None of my friends stopped him, they stood and watched. I ran to my car and wept as I drove myself home.
My mother could see that I was miserable and did her best to help. She asked if I was interested in leaving the U.S. and going back to England to work for her friend Charlie in London. He had called her to offer me a job working in the cake factory he managed in the North of England near Newcastle. She had vague intimations that Charlie was a “character,” but what she didn’t know was that Charlie was associated with the English mafia. They had met a few years earlier at one of the pubs she frequented while doing research for one of her mysteries.
I was in awe of Charlie. The previous Christmas, the three of us had tied on a hilarious drunk in London, where he regaled us with tales about his coterie of disreputable friends. I leaped at the chance to get out of the country and leave my problems behind. When I spoke to Charlie on the phone, I was able to put together, despite his thick Cockney accent, that he could get me a job at a factory he ran in northern England.
I had planned to attend the University of Iowa in the fall, but now I had some hazy notion that I would start the following spring. The week before I left for England, I got a telephone call from the admissions office, telling me they were looking forward to seeing me in the fall, wanted to sign me up for orientation, and needed to talk to me about student housing.
“Actually, I’m going out of the country this week, so I won’t be there this fall. I’m planning on coming for the spring semester,” I said to the man on the phone.
There was a pause on the other end. “Ken, when were you planning on telling us? School starts in eight weeks.” I could tell this guy couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and frankly, neither could I. It hadn’t occurred to me to call and let the college know I wouldn’t be showing up.
“Look, kid, we’ll keep a spot open for you in the spring. Let us know in a few months if you still want to enroll.” He hung up.
I was tempted to bring some weed with me to London because I knew it was not as plentiful there as in the U.S., but I decided that being on the wrong side of the law once in the past two months was enough. When I got off the plane at Heathrow and went through customs with nothing to declare, a customs guard looked at my passport and said, “Mr. Grimes, this way, please.”
Always polite, the customs guards gave a running commentary as they searched my bag, went through every item I had, opened up my vitamins and counted them, checked my wallet, patted down my clothes, and had a guard dog sniff me and my belongings, all while asking my business, my age, where I was from, what I planned to do in the UK, and whom I knew there.
They escorted me to a holding cell with several shifty-looking undesirables. The customs guards were unimpressed that the only phone number and contact I had was Charlie’s father, so they let me sweat it out while they went to call him and see if he knew me. I wondered if my being arrested the month before had put me on some kind of Interpol list, or if they just didn’t like bleary-eyed American teenagers without parents or a school group to vouch for their intentions.
After letting me cool off for several hours, the customs guards came back, apologized for the delay, gave me my belongings, and pointed to the exit door.
Cockney East Side men had run organized crime in London for decades. Charlie had ties to these men. He convinced his boss, Peter, to hire me as a stock boy/forklift operator in a frozen food factory he owned up near Scotland. Peter was the real article, or at least he appeared to be. An organized-crime figure who had gone legit, Peter claimed to be related to one of the gang that pulled off the Great Train Robbery of 1963. Peter liked to curse, drink, and show off his money.
Charlie felt a connection to me that stemmed from his own knockabout youth. He wanted me to be his sidekick in northern England, where I was even more out of place than he was. He also wanted me to spy on the other employees to see who was stealing the frozen cakes and apple pies. Considering what they were paid, Charlie should have been happy they didn’t steal the milk, eggs, and flour as well.
I loved England. I had lived there for six months when I was ten years old and had gone to school in Hampstead. I spent multiple summers there with my mother from the time I was eight until I was twelve. We visited countless stately homes, manor houses, castles, and museums, and drove through the countryside as it changed from calm to mysterious to forbidding. Those early, happy experiences in England had deeply affected me.
At the age of seventeen, all I wanted to do was drink pints and pints of Guinness and smoke pack after pack of John Player Special Black cigarettes. On a trip to Ireland several years later, I vaguely remember going to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells again—my mother had taken me there as a child—but what I really remember was how fresh the Guinness was in Dublin. I loved Guinness more than anything. The strike of the wooden match to light my cigarette. The hush in the darkened pub, the murmuring voices, and the light reflected from the mahogany walls. The dark, rich, bitter beer that slid down my throat like ice cream. Guinness was a spiritual experience.
• • •
Charlie arranged for me to move in with an ex-con nicknamed “Tiny” for his diminutive size. Tiny was about 140 pounds, with a lined, baggy face, and lived in a very tidy, small two-bedroom council row house with a TV and no backyard. He lived in a small town in northern England not too far from Newcastle. Tiny’s fourteen-year-old glue-sniffing son, who lived with his teenage girlfriend in a nearby housing council flat and aspired to be on the dole, was a frequent visitor.
Tiny and his friends schooled me in how to drink like a man. I drank Guinness, bitter, ales, anything but lager (what we drink in the U.S.), which was considered a woman’s drink, and no half-pints; those were for women as well. I quickly learned how to drink without throwing up or falling down.
Tiny was a very kind and gentle chap. Like most of the local men, he was unemployed and very much at peace with living on the dole. All of the manufacturing jobs that employed Tiny and his mates—the coal, auto, shipbuilding, and heavy-manufacturing jobs—had disappeared in the 1970s. Labour Party stalwarts and Margaret Thatcher haters, these men drank, argued, and fought among themselves constantly, particularly at the pub. The ones who were married cheated on their wives, or claimed they did. Masculinity was measured by how much you could drink and if you could fight. At my favorite pub on the tiny Main Street in the village there was a standard joke—“That’s not sawdust on the floor, that’s last night’s furniture.”
All through high school, I had worked very hard at drinking without throwing up. Alcohol was more difficult to purchase than marijuana for a teen in suburban America, but with the kegs and six-packs we successfully bought, I tried to figure out how to pace myself so I could drink a six-pack or more without puking in the woods or in somebody’s parents’ house.
To be in some remote village in the UK with very little to do but drink with some of the local teenagers didn’t appeal to me. Drinking with men five, ten, fifteen years older than I was fun. They accepted me, spoke to me as an equal. I had never drunk this way before. It was obvious my usual limit of six to eight beers would have to be raised. By the time I left England at the age of eighteen, I was a stone-cold alcoholic able to drink ten pints of beer in one stretch.
On any given day, everyone met at the first pub, prepared for a serious bout of two to three hours’ drinking, minimum. For a Friday or Saturday night, the pubs closed at eleven P.M., so we gathered early after dinner, drank until the pubs closed, then went to someone’s house to continue drinking. The drinks were bought in rounds: In a group of six, each man would go to the bar and order six full pints and return to the table with the tall, thick glasses that widened as they went up and filled to the very rim with a light dusting of foam. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, a pint was between eighty pence to one pound twenty pence, so the unemployed could still afford to get drunk. If women were present, it got more complicated—and expensive—since they weren’t expected to pay.
British beer is not warm or even room temperature. It is cold. Not cold, in that fake Budweiser American-commercial way, but cool and delicious. After the beers were placed on the table, someone took out a pack of cigarettes and offered them around. Drinking the cool draft of strong ale with its careful mix of aged hops and barley, while smoking throat-crackingly strong cigarettes, was something I could do for hours and hours.
One night at the more upscale pub down the street from my usual haunt, a couple of friends from work joined me for a night of carousing. As the night progressed, I noticed one of our legendary fisticuff experts, “the Hulk,” staring at us. An aging, unemployed bruiser with a head the size of a keg of ale, he kept glaring at us from across the bar. I knew he wasn’t mad at me, but for some reason, he didn’t like the look of my friends. He had grandly forced his beautiful young daughter to go on a date with me the first week I was in town, an embarrassment for both of us, since she had an unemployed boyfriend who kept her occupied when she wasn’t working at the factory. I wisely kept my hands to myself, and although Hulk was disappointed that I couldn’t dislodge his daughter’s suitor, he appreciated me for being a gentleman about it.
As I saw the Hulk approaching us, fear shot down my spine. I was terrified he was going to headbutt them, known locally as a “Geordie hello.” He asked my friends where they were from, and before they could reply, the Hulk grabbed one by the back of the head and slammed his own forehead into the guy’s nose.
The blood exploded across both men, and everyone in the bar rushed up and kicked us outside. I stood in the doorway and looked at my mates and shrugged. They nodded and shuffled off. It was not an uncommon night.
