by Ken Grimes
I called his office, and instead of a bored receptionist, a nurse asked how I felt. I told her I had stopped drinking and my neck was frozen, and she got me in to see Dr. Sarno the next day.
Dr. Sarno evaluated me through an extensive question-and-answer session, looked at my neck, and told me that he thought I had TMS. He explained that it was caused by suppressed emotions, the principal emotion being anger. He had me complete some written exercises and read his book. Within ten days, my neck was fine.
The following summer, after a year of sobriety, I quit smoking, only to be greeted by an explosion of anger. I had no idea how smoking cigarettes had masked my emotions. Even without alcohol and pot, as long as I could smoke those Marlboro Lights, I was okay. The minute I began to feel sad or frustrated or off-kilter, lighting up a cigarette made it all float away in a puff of smoke.
One day I wandered back to my office with a guy from my lunchtime twelve-step meeting. We talked about the first year. I said, “Man, I really didn’t think I could do it. I didn’t think I would make it. It was so hard.”
He stopped, looked at me, and said, “Yeah, that first year was hard, but I’m warning you, the second year is much harder.”
I wanted to kill him. Thanks for letting me enjoy my sobriety “anniversary.” That was on top of the two-page hate letter that had just arrived at my office from a woman I had recently broken up with. She had five years of sobriety and was technically breaking the rules by dating someone with under a year, but she forgot that in her vitriol.
A month later, on one of the hottest days of the summer, I was walking down my block in Chelsea. I stopped to look at the broken glass on my street from a smashed car window, and I opened up a pack of cigarettes. I had tried to quit smoking numerous times when I was drinking, but I couldn’t do it. I hadn’t tried yet in sobriety; I had been too frightened to quit drinking and smoking at the same time.
I started to light up and felt an immediate revulsion. It was so hot, I didn’t want to smoke. But I had the urge. It reminded me of drinking: not wanting to but having to. I threw the pack in the trash, and I haven’t smoked a cigarette in twenty-one years. I had a flirtation with cigars in the mid-nineties when they were trendy, but I had to stop smoking them, too, because they made me sick to my stomach. Not that I didn’t keep trying, even after they made me feel terrible.
I detoxified from cigarettes by returning to chewing tobacco. I would chew at Random House, spitting tobacco juice in an empty Pepsi can while Pulitzer Prize–winning authors were wandering the halls.
The chewing tobacco helped quell my physical urge to smoke but not the anger and frustration I felt more and more often. It blew straight out of me like a volcano. I broke two phones in my office by slamming down the receiver so hard, the plastic cracked. Once I broke the metal and plastic case surrounding the keyboard on my typewriter.
One day a coworker saw a hole in the wall near the floor, and she asked me, “Did you do that?”
I turned red with embarrassment. “No, why do you ask?”
She just stared at me and said, “Why do I ask? Because kicking a hole in the wall is exactly the kind of thing you would do.”
I told my therapist these stories. He became visibly alarmed and told me to hit a heavy bag at the gym. “You need a safety valve.”
I took the suggestion (after I stopped drinking, I was able to take suggestions) and found that I liked hitting a heavy bag while thinking of all the people who pissed me off, from the bullies who tormented me, growing up, to my father, who abandoned me.
Soon just hitting a heavy bag wasn’t enough. Within three months, I was taking lessons at the legendary Gleason’s boxing gym in Brooklyn. My trainer, Angel, moved me along quickly, to the point where I was ready for my first bout, against a forty-six-year-old money manager renowned for being the oldest man to win a professional fight in New York.
Angel made two mistakes: First, I didn’t have a mouth guard. Second, my opponent was insanely aggressive.
I guess the “old guy” wasn’t ready for me to fight. I stepped in and rained jabs, rights, and hooks at his head and stomach, pushing him back against the ropes. He quickly regained his composure, counterpunched, and decked me with a clean uppercut that I never saw coming.
I landed on my back, my head bouncing against the canvas floor. Angel jumped into the ring, completely pissed, as the old guy danced around me, shouting, “Yeah, that’s how it’s done!” in his guttural Brooklyn accent.
Angel yelled at him, helped me up, and told me he was sorry about the mouth guard. He added, “Look, man, it’s the punch you don’t see that knocks you out.” I staggered off to the showers and got dressed. My jaw ached, and there was a ringing in my ears for the next two days.
I was undeterred. Next Saturday morning, I was back, with the cacophony of bells ringing their three-minute rounds, the thwacking of the heavy bags, and the gunfire rotation of the speed bags. In the corner, amateur wrestlers practiced diving off the ropes onto each other with a sudden crash. I loved it. I realized that Norman Mailer was right: Boxing is hard, not because you have to overcome your fear of getting hurt, but because you have to get over the fear of hurting someone else.
A few years later, I almost broke my nose in a white-collar boxing match at Kingsway gym in Manhattan. Another uppercut, this time right on the nose. I didn’t go down, but the referee stopped the match when the deep-mahogany-colored blood from my nose spattered onto the canvas floor. I wandered back to the locker room, where my only solace was a visit by ex-heavyweight fighter Michael Grant. He said, “Hey, man, you gotta move your head. Gotta move your head.”
That was many years ago, and I still have to work to contain my anger. Now I realize that my feelings were the tail that wagged the dog. I couldn’t live with them. Other people seem to manage fear, loneliness, and disappointment without having to kill them with a chemical or raging at someone or something. It’s as if I were born without the ability to process certain feelings, and I’m still overwhelmed by them today.
It’s too easy to pin all the anger on my father’s disappearing act or my mother’s alcoholism. A degree of pain will be with me forever. It’s more formless than that, to be restless, irritable, and discontent unless I’m getting my way all the time. So I go to a meeting, or meditate, or talk about my current predicament to a friend in recovery. I’ve come to realize that no matter how I feel, I shouldn’t take it too seriously, because three hours from now, I’ll feel differently.
I didn’t know that when I was drinking.
What I felt is what I was.
24
MG
Relapse Dessert
Except for two occasions—both of which I count as accidental (although others might not)—I didn’t have a drink for a decade.
The first of these errant drinks was a martini on the rocks disguised as a glass of sparkling water that a flight attendant served me by mistake. I’d ordered a Pellegrino, so it was an easy mistake to make. For both of us. I took a drink, and ah! Was this an old, familiar taste blooming on my tongue? But I ordered a Pellegrino . . . should I take another sip to be certain it isn’t? I mean, could I be wrong? Is this drink mineral water and it’s only my imagination that says it’s gin? I should taste it again, perhaps.
Yeah, sure. It requires such a lot of tasting to spot the difference. Well, I didn’t, bless my little alcoholic heart. Good Lord, anyone with even a smidgen of ability to rationalize could have had that drink down her throat without any debate. Like a heart attack: If you think you might be having one, don’t stop to figure out whether it is or isn’t. Call an ambulance. If you think you might be drinking a martini, don’t call the flight attendant, she’s the one who brought it in the first place. If you’ve started drinking, just carry on. Might as well, since a relapse is a relapse.
But oh, no. That year I spent in the clinic—more like two—well, let’s say that extra nine months, yes, those months have closed the happy escape route, the languorous pat
h I may never walk again. The steel jaws of the Kolmac Clinic really closed around my own poor jaw (clang-clang!) to the point where I couldn’t take even one forgivable sip.
The flight attendant whisked back up the aisle, carrying a tray of potent-looking drinks that sent up fumes of every liquorish scent imaginable, the high note being rum. From my single sip of gin had blossomed a whole seductive drinking world; the sip had almost dropped me down in the gardens of Combray with Proust, whose spoonful of tea and madelene had the town and all of its associations springing up around him. Yes, Proust had his way of seeing that drink of tea through to its end. And his end was glorious.
Well, I had mine, and mine was anything but. That was why I had it. Not that I invented this way of seeing things, no. As far as I’m concerned, the best way of keeping yourself from having the second drink (or even the paltry second sip) is seeing the first one through to its end. Although we know the scenario, how it can end in total drunkenness and crazy behavior; how it comes with blackouts and hangovers; how we can end up facedown on floors and sidewalks, still we stop short in our imagination. When alcoholics think of that first drink, they see the look of it, the liquid silver of vodka, the velvet brown of a beer or a bourbon, feel it in the mouth and throat, and stop short. Having glamorized the first drink, you don’t think of the second, the third, the fourth that you would drink, too, and on to the end: depression that comes with yet another failure to control the drinking, and so on. You don’t think of all this when you visualize that first drink: You don’t see it through to the end.
This is what has kept me from drinking, seeing a drink to its inevitable end. I don’t think of the first drink and then stop. No, I know where it leads.
• • •
The second alcoholic event took place in a cozy French restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard (these scenes are indelibly engraved in the mind, while all of the others—ocean? dunes? gingerbread houses of Oak Bluffs, white brick of Edgartown?—fade away). On the dessert menu was zabaglione, one of my all-time favorites. Yum.
It arrived in a glass as tall as an iceberg, and I dug right in. My eyes opened smartly. How had I forgotten one of the chief (and there are only three) ingredients of zabaglione is marsala wine? This chef didn’t hold back on it, either. After I tasted it, if anyone thought I wasn’t going to eat the rest—ha!
My nose fumed delightfully. It was good to the last spoonful. Or the last drop. And don’t think I didn’t order it again the next time I patronized that restaurant.
Yes, I would give up the zabaglione about as soon as I’d give up the nitrous oxide that made my visits to the dentist such a positive experience. People questioned this at the clinic, the wisdom of the nitrous. Getting a root canal with the aid of nitrous oxide, I said, is better than sucking on balloons at a Grateful Dead concert, isn’t it?
These were my only lapses. Did they qualify as relapse? Though I doubt that accidental sip did, I’m not so sure about the dessert. To make zabaglione, one tosses egg yolks, sugar, and marsala wine in a pan and cooks it over hot water, a double boiler, or some such pot. Cooks it. Now, if it actually cooked the wine, that would mean the marsala’s ability to have me sliding from my chair to the floor and passing out was negligible.
Supposedly, in cooking, alcohol burns off. At least that’s the received wisdom, and that’s what the clinic said. But I did a little research and found that it depends on how you cook the food that the alcohol is added to—boil? simmer? bake? flambé? In some cases, you burn off only 10 percent; in other cases, 85 percent. Since zabaglione isn’t supposed to cook much (it would scramble the eggs), I couldn’t work out how much alcohol would be tossed to the wind. Of course, one takes into account how long the dish cooks. For zabaglione, it seems to take forever; one has to keep whisking and whisking away at this custard so it doesn’t separate. (Given all of that effort, one needs a drink, finally.) Although the custard doesn’t really simmer, since it’s off the heat, it stays heated up for a long time.
Naturally, I did this research only after I left Martha’s Vineyard, lest it jeopardize my visits to the restaurant.
What, then, constitutes a relapse? I believe at least one of our group went off on a bender, and we allowed as how, yes, that sounded as if he’d relapsed. But a woman in the group relapsed with one glass of sherry. That seemed a terrible waste of a relapse, as it wasn’t even her tipple.
When I heard the relapse rate is 75 or 80 percent, I was stunned. How on earth did relapsing pass me by? Eighty percent! I doubt those relapses were occupied with a dish of zabaglione.
I found it irritating that the clinic didn’t make more of a fuss about the relapse rate. They easily could have framed it in the sense of: “Be prepared!” I would have taken it in the sense of “Let’s go!” If there’s 80 percent of anything, I’m in line for it. I had to hear this statistic after eleven or twelve years of sobriety, after the parade had passed on by. I thought the relapse rate was more like 2 percent, or perhaps 5 percent, meaning hardly anyone ever relapsed, and if I did, the shame visited on me would have me standing in a corner like that poor fellow at the end of The Blair Witch Project.
How is it that I overlooked the fact that when I left the clinic (in a huff, probably) after my first stint, I, well, relapsed, didn’t I?
All I can say is, I’m glad I went to that restaurant and had that zabaglione before I went back to the clinic. After all, they’d nearly ruined my trips to the dentist.
25
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Fathers and Sons
I don’t know if some kids wake up in the morning and suddenly know exactly what they want to do: “I want to be a doctor. I want to be a lawyer. I want to be a dentist.” I do know that no one wakes up and says: “I want to be an alcoholic.”
I’m descended from a line of men from Georgia with a poor track record of husbanding, fathering, and controlling their drinking. My paternal great-grandfather was told at the turn of the century that if he didn’t quit drinking, he’d die. He promptly went out on a bender and fell over dead at the age of thirty-eight. He left a widow and eight children—the second to youngest being my grandfather—and although my great-grandmother remarried eventually, she was turned mean by her circumstances. She was legendary for her tobacco chewing and for horse-whipping any child who got out of line.
My grandfather hated her and ran away to join the army when he was seventeen, forming a love-hate relationship with the armed forces that lasted the rest of his life. He was defiant of authority and conformity yet in love with travel and adventure. When my grandmother wouldn’t sign the papers to let him reenlist during World War II because he was the sole provider for their four children, he promptly found a way around that with the Merchant Marines. The Merchant Marines didn’t require her signature. He spent the last year of the war ferrying materials to England and sailing around the world.
Some of my grandfather’s brothers and sisters drank, but no one as much as he did.
Frustrated with his life, hemmed in by his family, an active alcoholic who was clinically depressed, he killed himself at fifty-two. In 1949 he put his head in the gas oven in the kitchen. He addressed the suicide note to my father, the youngest of four and a freshman at a small liberal arts college in Tennessee. My grandfather survived longer than his father did, but he still left behind a widow and four children between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two.
Among my father’s three siblings, he was the only alcoholic, although the damage done by his father’s suicide reverberated through the whole family for decades. The two surviving sisters blamed their mother for their father’s suicide, treating her abysmally, not visiting her except for perfunctory holiday stopovers. My grandmother persevered. She took it all stoically and even laughed about her daughters’ selfish behavior. After she survived the Great Depression by picking cotton while her husband went north to look for work, nothing could shake her.
On May 29, 1990, I sat and stared at a photo of the grandfather I never knew, an imposs
ibly young man gazing hopefully in his World War I–era army uniform. I wanted to follow his path. I stood up, walked two steps over to the kitchen—it was a New York City apartment—opened the oven, turned on the gas, and stuck my head in. I lasted for five seconds. I pulled my head out, turned off the gas, and went over to the window—I lived on the tenth floor—opened the window, and threw one leg over the sill. I looked down at the garbage cans piled up in front of the basement door behind my building. I sat and looked at the Empire State Building shining white in that never quite dark New York City sky. This lasted less than ten seconds. I pulled myself back in and sat on the couch, disgusted that I couldn’t even kill myself.
My life was over. I was twenty-five years old.
My connection to the men who preceded me began with my parents’ separation and then divorce. I was under two. My mother left my father because his drinking and erratic behavior were affecting her mental health. He eventually left the small college in Maryland where they were English teachers, and went to graduate school at Indiana University.
I was too young to remember my mother kicking my father out of the house, but I do have vague memories of visiting him a few times when he was still drinking. He never got another full-time teaching job. He was irregular with employment and child support until he landed the alcoholic’s dream job, with the Red Cross—all drama and no commitment. For three years he traveled across the country, playing the hero—flying into disaster sites for two to four weeks at a time, helping the locals during the day while drinking heavily in their bars at night.
Even being single, with no responsibilities, could not save my father from his own alcoholism. He got sick and tired of being sick and tired and got sober in Baltimore in 1970. He magically reappeared in my life when I turned six, with no explanation, and tried to make up for lost time. There was no explanation for his absence, no mea culpa, nothing. I was too scared to ask any questions in case he went away again. I just tried to forget not seeing him for years, and buried the anger so I could enjoy any attention he gave me. I couldn’t talk to my mother about it because she was still angry for what he’d put us through. I sensed an internal wall about those years that I couldn’t break through.
