Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
My last drink of tequila came on Easter -- resurrection day.
Jun 16, 1999 | While Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12-step offspring still dominate the addiction field, there is a growing clamor for more alternatives. We may well be seeing an addictive-treatment Reformation, and if you'll join me inside that metaphor for a moment, ask yourself how long it's been since you could say, "I'd like to worship Christ, please. What's the routine?" Sit yourself down, Jack. It ain't that simple anymore.
It was simple for me, to my everlasting relief. I quit drinking almost 15 years ago. No 12 steps; I took one, right off a cliff, and found I could fly.
It was the final chapter in a drinking history that began in Grade 8 when my friend Bodo and I sat in my parents' basement during Christmas break, chugging from a $1.05 bottle of Calona Double Jack. (It went equally well with meat or fish.) One moment I was sitting on the floor guzzling, the next I had somehow ended up flat on my back, knocking over a set of chess pieces, laughing like a hyena. A pivotal moment, like a future pope trying on his first toque, or Curly getting his first finger-in-the-eye from Moe.
What followed over the next 11 years was, at times, a lot of fun -- for me, if not for my parents. (We're only young and thoughtless once.) I traced that familiar curve from party animal admired for his tremendous capacity, to party animal inspiring a growing level of concern among friends, to guy drinking himself out of a job or two, to guy living alone in a strange city and hauling home 42 beers in a backpack, enough for two solitary trips to Blottotown.
That lonely drinking phase is not what you could call fun, but it is oddly comforting, in a way that probably only a lush can recognize. Other people may be confused about their lives and their goals, but not you. You, the addict, have a clear plan, and the very straightforward means to put it into action.
Every drunk has stories. Actor John Larroquette tells of emerging from a blackout to find he was on an airplane, and trying to figure out through casual small talk just where it was he was going. I'm not really the best source for some of my own ugly tales; you'd have to ask a participant whose personal think tank was not flooded at the time.
One little story, while not the worst by any means, stands out for its neat combination of so many of dipsomania's drawbacks: danger to self and others, pain and anxiety for loved ones, loss of dignity, amazing lack of judgment and elementary common sense. It involved a bicycle ride home from an all-night party. I remember only little snapshots from it, but they are enough to confirm that I made the entire cross-town trip while looking straight down at the ground. Stop signs ambled by the corner of my eye as I trundled on blindly, spared from death or injury by dumb luck and the fact that I lived in a city small enough for the streets to be deserted very early on a Sunday morning.
A witness supplied the end of the story; I wasn't really there. The sun was already up and kids were playing on the street when my mother saw me pedal into the driveway and stop. Not stop and dismount, but simply stop pedaling, pausing upright for a wondrous moment before toppling over, bike and all, like a tipped cow. With a crowd of kids pointing and laughing, Mom had to walk out to the driveway and drag me into the house. She noted that, in fitting punctuation to a perfect experience of pain for her and humiliation for me, I had pissed myself.
