My name is Nan and I`m an alcoholic.
I haven`t got a single excuse for being one. I come from a stable, affectionate, middle-class, Middle Western family where drinking was considered a civilized, graceful accompaniment to social occasions, always done in moderation. There are no alcoholics in my family. I am not shy. I have had a fulfilling career, many friends and, in my second marriage, a great love.
But I became an alcoholic anyway.
I was a boring drunk. I never wept, or got sick all over people, or threw things. I rarely became ugly or maudlin. I did not undergo any truly dramatic personality changes. I became another, blunted self.
I went to sleep a lot. Sometimes I would wander off from a party for a refreshing hour`s nap in the guest bedroom and then return, wondering why the other guests were looking so embarrassed.
When I was young, I could drink anybody under the table. I was always the one who drove friends home, held their heads when they threw up and put them to bed.
I began drinking seriously when I was 22, just out of college and beginning my career as a newspaperwoman. My generation of newspaper people consisted of two-fisted drinkers. In the circles I moved in, drinking was not just socially acceptable, it was an emblem of maturity.
Looking back on my drinking career, I believe I crossed the invisible line into alcoholism when I was about 33 years old, shortly after I married my second husband, Stanley Levey, a man of moderation in almost all things.
Because I loved him, I could not bear for him to think badly of me. I tried to control my drinking, or to hide it by sneaking drinks. By the time we married, I was using any pretext to take a drink: when I was happy; when I was sad or frustrated; when I was on the road and lonely; when I was surrounded by friends in familiar places.
And I always needed that extra Scotch-the glass of whiskey and soda that got darker with each passing year-to send me off to sleep at night.
When Stan died, after 10 years of marriage, a part of me was fatally wounded. And with his death the last control on my drinking was off. His traumatic heart attack and subsequent deterioration already had accelerated my drinking.
For several months after his death I drove suicidally while drunk. One day I realized with horror that if I went on, I would kill or maim somebody else. I stopped driving while drunk. But I didn`t stop drinking. I took taxis or had friends drive me home or stayed with them overnight.
My newspaper sent me to Paris in January, 1973: a wonderful advance in my career.
Professionally, it was exciting. Personally, I was achingly lonely so far from friends and home. Soon, however, I fell in with a terrific bunch of drinking buddies. I was writing and reporting well, I thought, but it was becoming harder. I was struggling at the typewriter, taking hours to do stories that I used to finish in 45 minutes. I often lunched alone at a little restaurant near the office called Le Sportsman, so that I could read all the Paris newspapers and drink in peace.
Being a drunk in a good job in a beautiful city was as sordid and shaming as it would have been in squalid surroundings. I began taking a whiskey or two in the morning, rationalizing that it would get me through the day`s tensions. I bought bottles at different shops in my neighborhood so nobody would know my true intake. I felt utterly alone with my guilty secret.
Finally, late in 1974, loathing my obsession and terrified that it might cost me my job, I went to my doctor at the American Hospital of Paris.
”I think I am becoming an alcoholic,” I told him, ”and it is beginning to damage my life and my work.”
He offered to put me in the hospital for a week ”to dry out,” and added, ”I`d like to send some people up from A.A. to see you.”
The next morning a friendly, attractive young American couple entered my hospital room. They were from Alcoholics Anonymous. I do not remember a word they said, except that there was a meeting twice a week at 8 p.m. at the American Church of Paris on the Quai d`Orsay.
I attended several A.A. meetings, sitting with a dozen others around a table to tell my story. I did not find it strange in that sympathetic company to say, for the first time, ”My name is Nan and I am an alcoholic.” But I was not ready.
Soon I began to make excuses, the most powerful being that 8 p.m. was my deadline hour for filing stories to New York. I would not admit to myself that I could have written most of my pieces by early evening.
The months that followed were full of remorse and confusion. I did not go again to A.A.
”I have the willpower to stop myself,” I thought.
I swore off drinking repeatedly. I could not keep my resolve for more than a week. I was so depressed I was almost incapable of action. The morning drinking got worse. I needed booze to still my trembling hands and give me the impetus to get out of bed and to the office.
I went home to New York in August, 1975. I stayed miserably sober for weeks at a time and then went on secret two- or three-day benders, smuggling bottles into my room and locking the door behind me. My editors, notably the executive editor, Abe Rosenthal, were sensitive and understanding. They saw me teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown. They could sense I was close to cracking up, but they did not know the drinking part of it.
Early in November, 1975, Dr. Howard R. Brown, the director of my newspaper`s medical clinic for employees, told me authoritatively and kindly that I was an alcoholic. By this time I was almost certain that I was, but my shame was such that I denied it.
Dr. Brown suggested that he put me into Smithers, an intensive rehabilitation center in Manhattan that had achieved a remarkable record of success with alcoholics. The treatment inside the residence would last one month.
My gloom and despair lightened. It looked like a lovely place. I said I would go to Smithers.
The next Monday, the morning of Nov. 10, 1975, I sat on the edge of my unmade bed. I was due to enter Smithers at 3 o`clock that afternoon. I toasted myself from a soggy paper cup brimming with Scotch, luxuriating in self-pity. I was on my way to a fancy drunk tank.
”So, Nan,” I said to myself, ”you have come to THIS.”
I kept putting off my toughest decision at Smithers; how to tell my 83-year-old mother.
My counselor and the patients in my therapy group insisted that I be candid with her and tell her the real reason that I could not be at home with her in Rockford, Ill., for the Thanksgiving weekend.
Finally I telephoned her, burbling on with false enthusiasm about the wonderful place I was in. Mother cut through my effusions and told me how happy I had made her by finally facing my drinking problem. On Thanksgiving Day I called her again from Smithers to apologize for not being with her.
”Nan, dearest,” she said, ”you have given me the greatest Thanksgiving gift of my life.”
I considered myself a model Smithers patient. I met every challenge seriously. I did not shirk my homework; I threw myself into my first encounters with group therapy; I made friends with almost all the other patients. In a foretaste of my future experience with fellow alcoholics in A.A., the patients proved to be my most effective therapy and support.
I made a plan for living on the outside that, I hoped, would protect me from the pitfalls that I correctly imagined would lie ahead. I was proud of myself and very confident. I had been told that Smithers graduates had a better chance of succeeding in their sobriety than those who struggled on their own directly into A.A., simply because of their month-long total immersion course on how to stay sober.
The day before I was released, I asked to see my medical record, which contained the staff`s prognosis on my chances of making it. I read their conclusions in private.
They thought I would drink again.
One counselor wrote that it was likely that I was treating the Smithers experience as ”just another assignment,” and that I would leave it behind me, as I had so many reportorial adventures, to go on to fresh excitement.
I was gripped with rage. I raved to myself that what I had regarded as the most courageous act of my life had been greeted with disbelief and contempt.
When I was able to control myself I thought, ”I`ll show them . . ., I WON`T drink again.”
I never will know whether the staff gambled that because I was a reporter I would be one of the rare patients to know that I had the right to see my confidential medical record. They also may have gambled that my enormous resentment at their prognosis would pay off the right way, fueled by my obvious will to win.
Smithers had taught me that resentment was one of the alcoholic`s worst enemies. Without their teaching I could just as well have said: ”I`ll show them-I WILL drink again.”
I am convinced now that the final kick in the teeth Smithers gave me was the healthiest graduation present I could have got.
On the morning of Dec. 8, 1975, I said goodbye to Smithers.
That night, armed with the meeting book that lists the days, times and places of hundreds of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings every week in Manhattan, I went to the group that met each Monday in the parish house of an imposing Gothic church on upper 5th Avenue.
The hospitality committee of my fellow drunks welcomed me at the door with smiles and handshakes. Their warmth swept away my timidity.
