Late afternoon and already dark, I finished the book, had a few drinks mulling it all over, re-read the drinking parts again that night and decided to quit drinking.
The next morning, I wrote Leonard a long, crazy letter, and that night went to an AA meeting.
It was over, easy as pie.
Not quite two months later, maybe seven weeks without a drink, I’m eight days in a hospital’s psych ward, looking back real hard and close at a suicide attempt.
Drunk’s conundrum: Do I drink because I’m depressed, or am I depressed because I drink?
I got out of the hospital, came home, was reading the Sunday paper when I saw this good-size ad for a local hospital, all black background with a couple of simple white-lettered lines reading: “Whoever Called It the Blues Never Suffered From Depression.”
I cut it out and stuck it on my bedroom wall, a reminder. At the time, it explained a lot. I’d been suffering from depression for years and using alcohol as an anodyne, something to not make it hurt so much. I think it was Hemingway who called alcohol “the giant killer.” I’m not exactly sure what he meant by that, but for me, my giant was depression. I quit drinking, and soon there was no buffer between me and the giant, and suddenly its glare was tremendous, these moiling waves of blackness rolling through my brain, paralyzing me, making it hard just to breathe. It’s what William Styron called “darkness visible,” what he called “the mind in agony.”
It became hellish. You just can’t wake up every morning asking, “Do I want to live?” then waiting long for an answer.
I thought you went to AA just to keep sober, help keep you from drinking. I’d gone to a few meetings, and they were all right, but I wasn’t having any problems with not drinking, so decided it wasn’t for me and stopped going. I didn’t understand.
The week I got out of Candyland, Leonard wrote back a nice note, very positive, insightful. Among other things, he suggested I get a hold of a book by Dennis Wholey called “The Courage To Change,” in which he (Leonard) and others say things about drinking and not drinking. But my problem wasn’t drinking, it was depression, and I was being treated for it. I wasn’t drinking; I’d quit all by myself. Aside from your basic breakdown, I was doing all right. I didn’t need the book.
Then the urges started, maybe a month ago. Just out of the blue, back there in that canal between my throat and my brain, hair bristling a little on the back of my neck, the urge for a drink.
I had the minimal wit to go to the library and check out “The Courage To Change,” and the following is what stopped me. It’s written by a doctor-G. Douglas Talbot-and he’s talking about alcoholism as a disease:
Whether you become an alcoholic or not depends on genetic predisposition . . . . Nobody talks anymore about becoming an alcoholic. You don’t become an alcoholic-you are born one. You’re an alcoholic the day you get out of the uterus. You are like the Titanic, waiting till time and circumstance present the iceberg, and then you sink . . . . It’s the genetic predisposition that, if stimulated, causes the compulsion-not volume, dose or duration of drinking.
I thought, “Nuts.” In the seedy side of my brain, the part maybe fueled by itchy kidneys, I was holding out hope: I come to terms with this depression stuff, get off the medication one fine day, then pop a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Some champagne, maybe a couple ice-cold beers and sure-why not-a double bourbon on the rocks with a splash.
The few AA meetings I’d gone to, what struck me the most was the honesty: no bungfodder, no head games, no salesmanship, no pressure. It was weird, a little unsettling. Especially when you’re not used to it, when you’ve just stopped drinking, when you’ve just spent a long time lying to yourself.
There are the Twelve Steps, the foundation of the program, the blueprint for sanity, the first of which reads, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol-that our lives had become unmanageable.” That is not an easy thing to do-admit you’re a drunk. But what’s even harder is accepting it. Everything in your body resists, wants to deny it. It feels like somebody asking you, “Would you like me to cut off your right arm?” and you nodding like an idiot, “Sure!”
Or at least it feels that way when you’re lying in bed awake late at night and forgetting not only that you can’t do it alone but also that you don’t have to.
Jack Ryan, the more-or-less hero of “Unknown Man (no.) 89,” at one point pulls the plug on three years’ sobriety, drinks for a couple days but manages to get himself back to a meeting. It’s his turn to talk. He was going to pass or just make something up, but he doesn’t:
. . . . Why I started drinking again, I don’t know. Maybe because my car needs shock absorbers. Or it was King Farouk’s birthday. The reason doesn’t really matter, does it? I slipped-no, I didn’t slip, I intentionally got drunk-because I’ve stayed away from meetings too long, four months, and I started relying on myself instead of the program. I forgot, I guess, that when you give up one way of life, drinking, you have to substitute something else for it. Otherwise, all you’ve done, you’ve quit drinking, but you’ve still got the same old resentments and hangups inside. You’re sober, but you’re miserable, hard to get along with. You’re what’s called a dry drunk. Sober, but that’s all.
Well, I can keep kidding myself, admit I’m a drunk but not accept it, not get with the program, rely on myself and stay sober out of sheer obstinacy, maybe even for years. But some day, my car’s going to need shocks or it’ll be King Farouk’s birthday or Happy the Clown’s, but by then it might be too late. Those same old resentments and hangups, buried so long, ignored, will implode. And the only thing left for the giant killer to kill will be me.
