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.
It comes back to me in the strangest ways, at the strangest times. I took my last drink eight years ago and have even lost some of my sensory memory of the smell and taste and effect of the stuff. But just the other day I was idling at a stoplight on Lemmon Avenue in Dallas when my gaze happened to fall on a wispy street guy who was lolling on a bench at a bus stop. He was tippling from what appeared to be a brown-bagged quart of beer. It was a muggy afternoon, and when he held the bottle just so, I could see the beads of sweat on its amber neck twinkle in the sunlight, a tiny, esoteric image that apparently meant a great deal to my subconscious.
“Damn, that looks good,” I said under my breath, startling myself. Then, just like that, the thought was gone, but it served as a reminder that no matter how far I think I’ve walked away from the Beast, he’s always just a step behind me. I may have stopped drinking; I may have even stopped wanting to drink. I may, as I frequently do, feel so well that I forget I was ever sick. But I’ll never stop being a drunk, not really.
Not that I was the worst drunk I’ve ever seen. I was what is called a “maintenance drinker,” meaning that I tended to keep a healthy amount of alcohol in my bloodstream at all times. By healthy amount I mean, in my prime, eight, ten drinks a day—more or less evenly divided between lunch and the cocktail hour—or more, if somebody was throwing a party and invited me and sometimes even if they didn’t. While my consumption definitely qualified as pathological, it produced, miraculously, only moderate damage to my life and none to my liver.
Don’t get me wrong: My bottom was plenty low enough for me. But in terms of gross damage, I’ve heard and seen much worse. Guys who lost everything and wound up living in their cars—I mean lawyers and accountants. Guys who had to head off to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to escape the Beast. In rehab I met a heroin addict who, when she was temporarily discharged to get emergency care for a heart infection, dropped by her favorite dealer on the way to Dallas’ Parkland Hospital, scored some scag, and got high. I later heard that she had died of complications from the infection—the ultimate way to escape the Beast, I guess.
But if I wasn’t the worst drunk I’ve ever seen, I will admit to having been the most vocal and, in my way, the most shameless. I wrote expansively of the virtues of the drinking life, first in a story for this magazine in 1983 titled “The Bar Bar” and later in a book for Harper and Row, The View From Nowhere: The Only Bar Guide You’ll Ever Want—or Need. In both gospels, I endeavored to describe a great bar—what I called a bar bar—as a kind of church, and attendance therein as a form of worship. It was, I was told, an instructive and amusing conceit, and so I did what writers always do when they’re told that: I rode it until it dropped.
A bar bar was where people went to drink—not to dance or flirt or cut business deals. Its faithful drank beer or whiskey, not piña coladas or margaritas, and the only decor required was what I referred to as mineshaft darkness. (My drink of choice in those days was vodka because it was cheap and it left no odor on my breath, and I frequently intensified the buzz with “fuel injection,” shooters of peppermint schnapps.) I argued that the emergent Neo-Temperance Movement was just another meaningless paroxysm of political correctness, and that the drinking man was not some cultural dinosaur but was, actually, somehow righteous. I even imparted the wisdom that barflies don’t really hang out in bars for the booze but for the people. Yeah, right.
In time I fancied myself a kind of cult hero. After all, the Today show called to book me; so did National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. In this culture, you get Bryant Gumbel laughing along with you on national television, and that isn’t just approval. That’s validation. Maybe other heavy drinkers (which is what I’d decided I was) had to ponder whether they had a problem with the stuff. I’d written a book about it and gone on tour, for God’s sake, so I couldn’t possibly have one.
So what happened? Well, somewhere along the line I went from being a mere acolyte of my self-styled faith to being a zealot. But it’s much more complicated than that, and after years of clearheaded rumination on my slide into the gutter, I still haven’t unraveled it entirely. That’s the first thing you learn about alcoholism and the thing that remains true no matter how long you’ve been sober: You never completely know what hit you.
Which is one reason why it has taken me so long to muster the courage—and gain the insight—to write this. There are a couple of steps among the twelve that make up the Alcoholics Anonymous program of recovery that involve making amends to those you have harmed in any way through your drinking. It would be the height of arrogance for me to assume that my musings about the drinking life were so persuasive that they actually led anyone seriously astray. But I still feel a certain discomfort at having so fervently glorified the lifestyle. As it turned out, there was much more to the story than the View From Nowhere. So here’s my View From Somewhere.
When I went off to alcohol and drug rehab in February 1993—at the suggestion of my wife, my agent, and my lawyer, not necessarily in that order—I was in an existential funk. Not only did I not know what had hit me, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do about it.
I was desperate enough about my drinking to have checked into one of Dallas’ better treatment facilities, the Substance Abuse Unit at the main campus of the Timberlawn Mental Health System. My life was in tatters. During the preceding year and a half, I had been arrested for DWI three times, my writing career had dwindled to “working on a novel,” and relations with my wife had been strained almost to the breaking point. Given all that, one part of me knew that the program would probably involve quitting drinking altogether, since self-styled efforts to moderate my consumption had failed. But another part of me still believed that I wasn’t that bad off and hoped that the counselors could just help me get out of all the trouble my drinking had caused without my actually having to quit. Like they say in rehab, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
Of course, the first thing I did at the treatment center was look around for someone to blame. Sitting alone in my room, which resembled a Holiday Inn Express suite in, say, Amarillo, I mulled whether it was my parents, my wife, or my various editors, agents, and colleagues who were at fault. I even blamed my bartenders for overserving me and the police of Highland Park for having the gall to haul me in on a charge of DWI when all I’d done was weave through their town at an indecent hour and then mangle the alphabet on the field sobriety test. None of the cops seemed to have read my book, either.
I was not a happy camper, and the most maddening thing was, I couldn’t find any sympathy. My peer group consisted of newcomers like me, who had their own bruised egos to look after, and jaded “rehab rats,” addicts who’d been in and out of treatment facilities three, six, even a dozen times—like the young fellow who said he used to relax by sniffing a little paint thinner and then chasing it with an animal tranquilizer or two. “It’ll really twist you up, man,” he allowed during our one conversation. (My rehab center didn’t make distinctions among addicts based on their “chemical of choice.”)
One good way to measure how much a chemical addiction has come to dominate your life is to evaluate that life in the absence of said chemical. How desolate my life seemed without booze and bars in it! I realized that normal drinkers might count on a drink to relax at the end of the day or maybe to get through being fired or something. But I had come to depend on booze just to feel normal. Without it I felt utterly bereft, suddenly soulless, as if I had lost a loved one in a violent and unexpected way.
A counselor at the treatment facility told me that, in fact, I was grieving over the loss of a dear friend: booze. “Just let it pass and allow us to beat a little sanity into you for a while and you’ll be surprised by when and how you’ll see the light,” he added.
My Library
