Sober
More than a decade ago I wrote about the virtues of the drinking life and the comforts of what I called a “bar bar.” Then I hit rock bottom. It’s been eight years now since I took my last drink—and I’m finally ready to tell the rest of the story.
(Page 4 of 4)
As time went on, I’d fill the late afternoons with increasing amounts of exercise. I began writing magazine stories again, primarily about health and medicine for Texas Monthly. In my previous life I’d written about crime, but suddenly health in general—and my health in particular—was of paramount importance to me. And I set about trying to make things right with my wife. It would be impossible to ever pay her back for the largeness of soul she’d shown by sticking with me. But I could try to make amends for all those nights I’d stumbled in late by never allowing her to wonder for a second where I was.
At first I hated Alcoholics Anonymous. It seemed cliquey, strangely shallow, and most of all, boring. Unlike group therapy in rehab, “sharing” in AA is unanswered testimony—you say what you want for pretty much as long as you want—and I found that I had no patience for listening to the rants and ramblings of others. But I soon discovered the method to the madness. You don’t just learn from what the other addicts are saying; you also learn from having to sit there and listen. And since I had to attend ninety meetings in ninety days—the common initiation to the program—I did a lot of listening and stewing for three months. But by the end of the regimen, I had learned two things that 43 years of living hadn’t taught me and that form the foundation of my recovery to this day: patience and humility.
Which was a good thing because the twelve-step program that I then had to complete over the next few months required, let’s say, a more modest view of myself than I had been accustomed to taking. The program involves some daunting challenges, such as step four, in which you perform a “searching and fearless moral inventory” of yourself. This mainly involved making lists of my misdeeds, excesses, faults—for example, resentments I held toward others and my role in them. But if done properly, it is an exhausting, exhilarating experience that will lighten your personal baggage and, in the process, strengthen your spine and soften your heart.
There’s a surrealness to recovery that never quite wears off. During my first couple of years of sobriety, not a day went by that I didn’t think about what I might have been doing with it just a few months before. I really did feel as if I were living the second part of my life as a completely different person. I felt weird. I also began to feel isolated and lonely. Although a lot of AA acolytes don’t like to call it a cult, AA most certainly is, and I don’t see how it could be anything else and help people get sober. Taking on the Beast requires both the commiseration of fellow addicts and the seclusion from the mainstream offered by a cult.
And that mainstream culture, you realize, is positively drowning in booze. Right after I sobered up, I had a tendency to think that drunks were the only ones preoccupied with liquor. But the more I looked at the world through clear eyes, the more I saw that the entire society is flush with it. Consuming alcohol is a vital part of the major rites of passage: reaching adulthood, receiving a job promotion, getting married, the birth of a baby, the death of a loved one. It is considered an almost indispensable part of many forms of social contact, ranging from family reunions to business confabs. And don’t kid yourselves. Now that I’ve been to a lot of cocktail parties completely sober, I’ve learned that even you social drinkers get quite drunk, quite often.
People like to talk about booze too. Indeed, ever since I dried out, it seems that all anybody wants to talk to me about is drinking. Some people want to be reassured that they don’t have a problem. Others want to know how much I miss booze. (Not at all, until you brought it up.) Still others want to know what I think they ought to tell their teenage kids about drinking, especially if they sneaked a drink or a toke as teenagers themselves. (My advice: Tell them that just because you experimented with alcohol and/or drugs doesn’t mean that it was right or that they can.) A few have asked me recently what I think about George W. Bush’s drinking past. (I’m happy he’s sober.) And finally, a couple of friends have wondered if I still like them, as our friendships were forged in varying degrees of inebriation. (I do, unless I have to be around them when they’re drunk.)
But as absorbed as society seems to be with alcohol, most people know shockingly little about alcoholism. Here’s a disease that afflicts between 5 and 10 percent of the population; causes half of all violent deaths from accidents, suicides, and homicides; triggers fatal diseases ranging from cancer to cirrhosis; and costs Americans about $180 billion a year. Yet smart, educated people don’t even accept that it’s a disease or that it may be our most egregiously undertreated epidemic. In Texas, for example, only one in five indigent addicts is able to get treatment, and for those addicts who can afford insurance, it is increasingly difficult to find policies that will cover rehab. So why all the—you should pardon the expression—denial when it comes to the concept of alcoholism as a disease? After many years of ruminating on this, I’ve decided that you social drinkers are too often guilty of seeing the world through only your own eyes. Down deep, a lot of you still figure the disease concept is just an excuse that addicts use, since you’ve always taken a drink whenever you wished and never had any pathological cravings for another. I also sense that some of you are reluctant to accept alcoholism as a full-fledged disease because that would diminish the virtue of being able to hold your liquor, an admired American attribute. How do I know this? Because that’s the way I used to think.
At the same time, we recovering addicts must take at least some of the blame for the lack of public sympathy for the disease concept. We’re the ones who’ve insisted on a level of anonymity just shy of that demanded by the average CIA mole, so it’s no wonder that alcoholism and alcoholics are misunderstood. Maybe the secrecy is still necessary to ensure that addicts feel free to come in out of the cold, but it breeds ignorance and contempt. Did you know that alcoholism is regarded as such a minor medical problem that it attracts only 15 percent of the research dollars that go to cancer?
Finally, after eight long years of sobriety involving thousands of AA meetings and aftercare sessions and volunteer work with other addicts, I feel an obligation to state for the record that the drinking life isn’t all I once cracked it up to be. And while I can never forget that I’m carrying a potentially fatal disease, over time I’ve found myself drifting back toward the mainstream. My several selves eventually merged into one better (I think) self. I’ve figured out who I am all over again. I’ve learned how to survive at holiday parties (leave whenever the decibel level of the drinkers exceeds that of the ordinary cat when his tail is stepped on). I’ve renewed friendships with former drinking buddies and even conducted a business meeting or two in a bar over Perrier and not felt uncomfortable. There is, I’ve learned, liberation in abstinence. Eventually I found myself neither craving nor hating alcohol but oddly neutral about it—except for moments like that day on Lemmon Avenue.
My recovery from this disease remains something of a mystery to me. I don’t like to throw around the word “miracle”—or even “mystical”—lightly. But I will say that there continues to be something magical about it. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done in my life that I still can’t completely explain, and maybe that’s why it is, and probably always will be, the most important thing I’ve ever done. It’s a heady feeling to know that you’ve seen the worst of yourself and that, even in middle age, you can change for the better from the inside out.
The other day I was thumbing through my book The View From Nowhere in the course of preparing this article. I wanted to see how the book felt now—whether, as friends often ask me, there’s anything in my paean to boozing that I still agree with. Some of it I found very funny, though it seemed only dimly familiar, as if someone else had written it. I couldn’t find much that I still identified with, except for a pithy bit of irony that my bar buddies and I used to get a pretty big hoot out of because it was so true. Clean and sober, I found it still so true—though in a completely different sense.
“Reality,” I had written, “is for people who don’t drink.”
My Library
