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Sobriety

The idea of sobriety, to a drunk, is terrifying, far off, and totally necessary. To maintain the delusion that you are a reasonable, functioning, GOOD person, you must always have it in the back of your mind – Someday. Someday I will get sober, of course. This isn’t forever, just for now.

Sobriety is a fiction – like writing – you wield to keep yourself drinking.

Someday I will stop. Of course. The voice that whispers this is the same voice that says fuck it, and it says them both with utter conviction, utterly convincing, so long as you don’t stay sane long enough to really interrogate it.

When you do start the interrogation – if you do – the voice reveals itself as a serpent in the potential Garden of your mind. Not Satan – you’re not getting off that easy – but a great deceiver nonetheless.

The interrogation begins with visibility. You have to shine the light on the voice, like a haggard detective teasing a confession from a smirking criminal. You have to admit to yourself that it is a problem, that it lives inside of you, and that it does not live inside most people. You have to see it. To identify it. To name it.

Faced with the actual, impending, absolutely necessary reality of sobriety as opposed to the abstract idea of it you’ve lived with for years or decades, the serpent raises its voice, talks faster.

“Turn off that fucking light! Let’s talk, in the dark, quietly, like we always do.”

It doesn’t want you to know its name. It certainly doesn’t want you to speak it.

It took me a while to say to myself that I was an alcoholic, and even longer to say it out loud.

When I finally did, I was writing a story for a storytelling competition. I led with,

“Hello, my name is Reid, and I’m an alcoholic,” knowing damn well that every other alcoholic in the audience would immediately chime in with, “Hi, Reid.”

It was a joke. I had to make a joke of it to speak the truth. That’s almost always the case for me.

The first time I said it to my wife – Said, “I am an alcoholic” – I was reading her this story, probably two years after I’d stopped drinking.

That’s how stubborn the serpent is. Two years of being sober and I hadn’t summoned the strength to name him aloud.

Until that time I acted as though I was doing it for Kelly. For us. She said she didn’t want to have a baby until I had a year of sobriety.

That seemed reasonable.

So, as the good folks in Alcoholics Anonymous say, I white knuckled it.

I just didn’t drink. I wrestled the serpent, all the time, and there’s a reason snake wrestling isn’t a recognized sport. It’s hard and no fun to watch.

When the serpent’s words aren’t working – “She’s gone for the weekend, she’ll never know. What harm could it cause? No one will know but you and it will be such a RELIEF”– it starts to squeeze.

Some squeeze harder than others. Mine, like me, wasn’t particularly brawny. I didn’t have much for withdrawals. I didn’t drink every day at the time I quit, just on weekends, so my body wasn’t relying on a daily intake, didn’t depend on it.

But, for some people, there are major physical consequences to quitting cold turkey. There can be seizures. You can die.

I got lucky, but don’t use my luck as inspiration. Talk to your doctor. Don’t dry out alone.

So my serpent didn’t squeeze very hard, but goddamn can that thing keep talking in the face of scorn and resistance. And its memory is pristine.

“You’re feeling good, confident. Remember everything you put Kelly through? Falling down the stairs. Pissing the bed? You don’t deserve her. Do the right thing, come back to me and let her move on.”

Or

“This will actually STRENGTHEN your sobriety! You need to go out with a Bang! You need to go out with a really bad one or a really good one and I’ll keep alternating which it should be until you’re dead!”

Or

“You’re selling yourself out! Reid Messerschmidt is not a sober family man, he’s edgy and loud, magnetic. Sober Reid won’t be those things. Who will give a shit about Sober Reid?”

There was that. There was Sober Reid and Drunk Reid. They were two different people, and they couldn’t comfortably coexist.

Sober Reid, I thought (because the serpent told me), didn’t always know what to say and do. He was introverted and awkward. He didn’t take risks. Was conservative, even – in action, not ideology. Lower case c conservative – and god help you if you’re that.

Drunk Reid was a daring extrovert. An emotional and situational adventurer. He prided himself on getting in and out of strange situations. He didn’t think about anything, let alone how to stand, what to say, what to do with his hands. He was neurotic, but in a fashionable, fun way. He was INTERESTING.

There is some truth to both of those depictions, but they’re false in spirit. This is an insidious way to lie.

Sober Reid is more self-conscious than Drunk Reid was, but certainly not more than Hungover Reid, and Hungover Reid was in charge a lot of the time. And I’m by no means conservative in action. Might I have been had I not spent a decade of my life with no real control? Perhaps. But I DID spend a decade of my life with no real control, and it taught me a few things – how to get weird among them.

But I didn’t know any of this at the time.

I coped with all of it in a few ways, some healthy, some not.

First, the unhealthy:

I sought a legal, non-addictive, non-disruptive way to shift my consciousness, something to fill alcohol’s vacated role. This, to avoid leaving you in suspense, does not exist.

Weed I’d tried, and it’s still not legal where I live. I knew from experience that I’d overdo that, and there would absolutely be disruption. Getting high made me want to listen to music and not much else. Eat, I guess. The serpent told me I could just do it at night, after Kelly went to bed, that she wouldn’t even have to know – They have edibles now! – but it wasn’t a convincing argument.

So I did some research and landed on Kratom, which is a plant with opiate qualities that is not actually an opiate. I think it’s related to the coffee plant. I had to order it from a sketchy website, but it wasn’t illegal. You can get it at some of the less reputable gas stations these days.

It came in small Ziplock bags and looked a lot like pot. You can make tea out of it, or just ingest it. It’s fine. Makes you feel kind of pleasantly sleepy, but it’s one of those subtle drugs that kind of lingers in the periphery. It’s the kind of drug that constantly makes you wonder if it’s doing anything or just a placebo. Still, I immediately bought a ridiculous amount and started taking it all the time, despite its lack of any really satisfying tangible effect. I’d go out with friends and literally just eat this dried leaf at a table at the bar. It was ridiculous and didn’t last long.

My healthier and ultimately effective coping mechanisms were two:

I had an office in the basement with a couple of weird thrift store pictures on the wall: A giant, bucolic beach scene that I’d had with me since Post Landing – a calming homage to the Coen Brother’s Barton Fink – as well as a mischievously smirking old-timey kid next to a huge bike, who I called Pip, after the kid in Great Expectations. I decided to cover the walls in thrift store pictures. It became its own compulsion. I went to thrift stores constantly, in search of just the right art. I scoured antique stores and Boys Ranch’s and Goodwill’s for dusty, obscure portraits, unique prints, old photos. It was fun.

There’s something about a thrift store that is so reassuring. The things in there have lived many lives, have ended up here despite starting somewhere else. They have stories to tell. This wild eyed, garishly painted bust of Jesus Christ was manufactured somewhere in China 70 years ago, maybe, shipped overseas, bought by some hopeful artist or bored tinkerer or devout weirdo, painted lovingly in their home, sat on their shelf until they died, maybe, or moved, or downsized. Maybe it was inherited by their child, maybe it went to a thrift store in Texas and was bought by some other hopeful drunk, placed on their mantel, witnessed their struggle, brought reassurance or judgment, was even prayed to, perhaps, and then was again abandoned, somehow made its way to a steel shelf in Fargo, North Dakota, waiting for someone else to love it.

People grappling with their own introversion – which is every introvert I’ve ever met – tend to be nostalgic and materialistic. Not materialistic in a greedy sense, but in the way that they connect with things when they can’t connect with people. We have a deep desire to physically interact with the things that have imprinted themselves upon us. It’s not enough to remember a shirt you wore every day for a year when you were eleven, although you do that often enough. You want to find and buy and wear that shirt again.

Within a year, I had filled every inch of white space in my office with pictures of dead people and art, lined the shelves with strange busts, knick-knacks, and the wistful detritus of my youth.

It’s an ongoing project. Things are moved, replaced, jiggled, and reset to allow room for more. It looks like my head exploded and my psyche painted the walls. It’s beautiful, a living collage of ME, and I love it.

It reflects what I want to do with this show, which was the second coping mechanism.

As I mentioned before, I’d always called myself a writer. It was time, in my sobriety, to make that true.

But what would be the medium? Writing a novel didn’t seem an effective way to fend off alcoholism. Too many of the writers I admired had lost that fight.

I’d been listening to podcasts for years, they were the background noise to everything I did, a way to stave off silence and introspection.

There were many I loved. Marc Maron’s WTF was especially important to me. Maron’s a recovering addict himself and, though his show’s not about that, he brings it up regularly and his ability to exist as a sober person was inspiration in itself. I listened to every episode, collected every word about addiction, banked them, and used them when they were needed. Sobriety is when I needed them most, but when I was in my darkest days, they gave me something to consider for the future, a possible way out when the time came.

There was the intense, carefully considered storytelling of This American life, Ira Glass’s calming, kind, intelligent voice, which grounded me in reality, made me want to be a better person. A deliberate person, which is the opposite of a drunk.

There was the ecstatic goofiness of Comedy Bang Bang, a show built around the sheer joy of discovery.

There weren’t any rules.

It seemed the barrier to entry in the podcast world was pretty low, it was my best bet for getting my words in front of an audience, and I could do it.

So I started to plan. Honestly, I barely remember this. There’s this weird thing when you’re getting sober, where you feel, for the first year, like a drunk just not drinking. A dry drunk. Or that was the case for me, anyway. My brain was still trying to figure out how to function properly. I imagine neurons firing where they’ve never fired before, my brain slowly lighting up like a city at dusk, healing itself. I was still groggy, my thinking a bit muddled.

By the second year, you think you feel like a sober person. By the third year, you realize that was ridiculous, that THIS is what a sober person feels like, and then this happens in every successive year after that. It’s partially why sobriety birthdays are such a big deal. They give you a chance to assess how you feel different from a year, two years, three years ago.

I still have the notes from working out what this would be, so I know I made lists of topics, watched documentaries, started reading more vigorously than I had in a decade, probably ever.

I read a few books by Erik Larson. These are billed as nonfiction, and they are, but read like novels. And it occurred to me that some of the glue holding the thing together must be fabricated, and I asked myself whether that mattered. I decided it did not.

If I’m told that, say, Chester Arthur ate a chicken sandwich on April 5th 1882, and he, in fact, ate a bowl of soup with no sandwich, how does that affect me or current reality in any way? Even if I’m told something far more outrageous, that while Chester Arthur was eating his chicken sandwich, it was snatched out of his hands by a Bigfoot and he spent the rest of his life trying to get it back, which is why he only served one term in office, does that change anything that I know or how I live?

I don’t think so. It would be a much more fun story and might cause me to have a stronger belief in Bigfoot, but I’d be much more likely to assume that Arthur was mistaken and was just the victim of a mischievous monkey. Also a good story.

So that was intriguing to me, an idea I thought I could explore. The first element in my new, sober, still suitably odd and engaging thought process.

And then I remembered Chris Gaines, Garth Brooks’s weird, pop alter ego from the 90s, and it recaptured my imagination.

I started to write, without any real idea of what would happen. If you want to know what did happen, go listen to the Chris Gaines episode. I think it’s pretty good.

It was a revelation.

I had my outlets.

The one thing that everyone considering sobriety should really be told is that it will leave you with a shocking amount of free time. Shocking. You’ve got mornings, clear headed afternoons, unimpaired evenings. This is daunting. You’ve got to fill it up somehow, or sobriety won’t stick.

There are two other things you should know before you get sober.

  1. Life will get incalculably easier, which, of course, is a good thing, but doesn’t always feel that way. Drunks thrive on the struggle. It’s a part of the package. Maybe we’ll complain about it, but deep down, the wiliness and animal instinct needed to pull off functional addiction is itself addictive.
  2. Shame and regret are useless. Counterproductive. They can only hinder your recovery and are best tossed away. Feel your feelings, but move on as quickly as possible without totally pardoning yourself from the actual, outside harm you’ve done.

I hadn’t realized this yet in my first year, and it was hurting my marriage.

Kelly, obviously, was happy that I wasn’t drinking, but she was still wary, as she should have been. She didn’t trust me. And her feelings were still hurt that I’d been willing to almost tank our marriage for drunkenness.

I was so busy beating myself up for the same thing, that any outside condemnation felt superfluous and cruel. And when you’re forced to face your feelings for the first time, you are very raw.

So every time she expressed her feelings of hurt, I felt unfairly attacked. Wasn’t I doing the thing she wanted me to?

But that’s obviously not how feelings work.

Resentment lingers long past any termination of wrongs.

I would do something that, to me, felt like such a vast improvement over how I had been that it was above condemnation. But I was still a human being in the world. I couldn’t expect to be held to a lower standard just because I’d knocked the bar down so many notches.

It took work. It took time. That work was subtle and undramatic and I won’t bore you with it here.

We’re good now, I think, and when we talk about my drinking days, it doesn’t feel like an attack, because that is no longer me. That’s Drunk Reid. We all know he was an asshole, let’s have a laugh about it.

As I sit here writing this, it occurs to me – not for the first time – that paradoxically, my sober memories are less clear than those from my drinking days, which makes describing them difficult.

I think this is the case for a few reasons.

  1. Timelines become less distinct as you get older, obviously. As a kid, and as a young adult, everything seems momentous, and you work over them again and again in your mind. The stories, as they say, become etched in your mid. As an adult, hopefully, you spend less time etching.
  2. In my drinking days, I was consistently having traumatic experiences, inflicting them upon myself. Traumatic experiences imprint themselves in ways that the steady march of contentedness can’t. They mark off the days, signposts by which you can measure when everything else happened.
  3. The drinking stories have a short arc, which more often than not, can be reduced to the following: Expectation, elation, chaos, consequence. The arcs of a sober family man are longer, and less immediately dramatic, though much more meaningful over time.

So I’m left with a broad overview and a few milestones.

The first is the birth of my son. I’ve told most of this story before, in the episode called Otis and the Rabbit, and I won’t retell it here, but I do want to talk about sobriety and fatherhood.

When Kelly and I decided it was time to have a baby it felt like the end. Like the final death of Drunk Reid after a long fight against my will power. That Kelly trusted me enough to make me a father was a massive step, but I’m not sure I understood how massive it was at the time. When she told me she was pregnant, it meant the real end had come. To start drinking again now would make me a monster. This felt like a demarcating event, after which even the serpent couldn’t argue that drinking was justifiable, and to have gotten to that point felt like a victory. But unlike the engagement and buying of the house, there was no victory lap. I’d learned my lesson. This was a somber victory, or stoic anyway.

The lingering idea in the back of my head, the faint but still present promise of the serpent, had been that maybe we weren’t done yet. Divorces happen all the time and men go on to formidable second acts. People DIE. That’s how the HEROIC second acts begin.

This is a dark thought, I know, but when a liar is cornered, the lies become unhinged, especially when that liar is an extension of your subconscious mind.

But I knew, and know, that there are no heroic second acts for a drunk – not ones that involve drinking. I’ve played through the various scenarios that could theoretically get me drinking again, and the inevitable result of any of these scenarios, even in my imagination, is sad and gross. A burden and a disappointment to me and everyone I love.

No heroics, only tragedy.

And I already have my heroic second act. The sober one, where I’m a Dad and a husband and life is steady and sweet.

I said before that this is a happy story, not a sad one, and I realize I’ve yet to really deliver on that promise, but here it is:

Sobriety is a goddamned gift that makes everything that came before it worthwhile, and sobriety as a father is especially sweet, I think.

I’ve talked about the self-knowledge, experience, and gratitude that are the result of ten plus years of lost control.

These are magnified by fatherhood.

I look at these kids and can’t even believe that they exist, that I’m here for them to exist, that I’m present and GOOD at being their Dad.

When you’re a drunk in early adulthood, your maturity is stunted. I didn’t learn any practical life skills beyond basic survival, trivia, and what I read from books in all that time.

A problem would arise, and I’d adjust my life around it, instead of just fixing it. Once my air conditioner broke and, instead of even attempting to fix it, I was just hot and sweaty for an entire summer. Then I bought a new one. I also grew up with a father who probably couldn’t change a tire – if he could, I never saw it – so I was already behind.

Now, I get to learn with my sons. To rebuild myself from the ground up with the perspective of a man who has lived a life. It’s a joy. We’re constantly discovering together, and my stunted maturity means I can take some childish joy in it all.

I’m also lucky to have a wife that knows how to do things and a father in law that taught her all of that, and is patient enough to teach me as well.

I’ve become an ADULT adult at a rapid rate. The person I was even five years ago isn’t gone, but layers have been added. I was effete, impractical, neurotic, vain, smart, and obnoxious. I’d often say things like “I do not care for the out of doors”. Sobriety and fatherhood have made me more masculine, slightly more practical, far, far less neurotic, unconcerned with appearance, and infinitely less obnoxious.

I’m still very smart, obviously. And still pretty obnoxious.

I enjoy being outside. I love to mow a lawn. I’ve now chopped down four trees with an axe, if you can believe that. I can and do address problems as they arise, mostly. I no longer worry that I might accidentally pop my eyeball or refuse to swim in a lake because something might bite my penis, two things I was weirdly concerned about for a long time.

The number of mistakes I’ve made in my life are incalculable – to quote the Ben Folds song – “I don’t get many things right the first time, in fact, I’ve been told that a lot.” But with mistakes comes wisdom, with the added benefit of an emotional intelligence that can only be attained through prolonged misery.

I’ve often said that my super power is always knowing the most hurtful thing to say to a person at any given time – that, and being able to tell people which celebrity their baby resembles – and that is true, but the flipside is also true. I think I’m better equipped to understand how someone is feeling than most, even if I’m not always equipped, yet, to engage with that feeling.

This makes me a GOOD Dad. Not just a physically present Dad, though I’m that as well. An emotionally present Dad, a good Dad. I deeply love my kids and I tell them that constantly. I let them be who they are. I listen. We have actual conversations where we both come away having learned something.

The second sobriety milestone was a close friend – one of the Whiskey Kids I mentioned – who was also struggling with alcohol.

No specifics here – that’s his story to tell, mostly – but viewing his struggle from a sober remove was enlightening, allowed me to objectively – somewhat objectively – watch what I myself had gone through.

It was horrifying. Maddening. I was MAD at him, even though I, of course, knew that I’d been exactly the same way just a few years before.

If you’ve never done it, trying to talk to a drunk about their drinking is hopeless. When a drunk is drinking, after a few incidents and interventions, all they want to talk about is getting sober. They’ll weep and promise, plan, hope, alternate lies and brutal honesty. They are completely illogical, but so sold on whatever line of logic they’re on at the time that you almost agree.

Do not try to talk to a drunk about their drinking. It’s completely useless.

When a drunk is not drinking, it’s almost as bad. The gaslighting is relentless. “I know!” “I don’t want to talk about it!” “I’m fine!” “You’re making a big deal out of nothing!”

Experiencing this as the intervener gave me a better understanding of what I’d done to the people around me, justified their anger and resentment.

Eventually, my friend agreed to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and I agreed to go with him.

I hadn’t gone to AA before. I don’t know why, exactly. The idea of it appeals to me – it’s like a secret society – but it took me two years to call myself an alcoholic out loud and by that time I felt pretty secure in my sobriety.

But going to AA was an experience. The first meeting we went to was an all men’s meeting. Saturday morning. Probably 200 men there.

If you’re not familiar with AA, it goes like this. Some meetings are different, but this is the one I went to.

The men gather in the service area of a large church. Coffee and donuts are available. A lot of people smoke outside. Most sit around one of the couple dozen tables set up, but many also sit on folding chairs along the periphery.

You’ll see people there you know. People you didn’t know had a problem. You’ll nod at each other. You’ll see people you know of, because they are visible in the community. Local celebrities. You will ignore that they are that.

You’ll see young people, and old people. People dressed up and people who look like they have to get back to the corn field when this is over. People that look like they’ve had a hard week and people that look like they’ve already gone for a jog this morning.

One person chairs the meeting, announces milestones, reviews any business. You go around the room with everybody saying, “My name is Reid, and I’m an alcoholic” to which every other person responds, “Hi, Reid”. It does feel like church, but only the good parts of church, the community parts.

Once the group portion is over, everyone splits off into small groups, and this is where things get interesting. The small groups, in this case anyway, meet in small Sunday School rooms, around tables and on chairs meant for young, tiny children.

This is humbling.

I thought about how the kids that would have Sunday School here the next morning had no idea what kind of business was taking place in this room today. I wondered about who had been in my Sunday School rooms before me, when I was young, and what had been said there.

What is said now is intense.

You have a collection of maybe eight men, all sitting with their knees at their necks. You have old, grizzled farmers, local politicians, young guys that don’t look like this sobriety thing is going to stick for them. You have people that have been doing this for 30 years and people that are there for the first time. There are no political affiliations here, no races, no ages, no class. Just alcoholics.

And then everyone shares what is on their mind. Most tell their story, many of them for the thousandth time. It is emotional. It is fascinating. It is honestly one of the best and most heartening experiences of my entire life.

You really haven’t lived until you’ve hugged a 60 year old North Dakota farmer who is weeping because of how badly he’s messed up his relationship with his kids. It’s an astonishing experience.

Which is why I didn’t keep going.

I felt like a spectator. I was already five years into my sobriety and didn’t REALLY need this. And my natural inclination is to collect stories. That’s not why AA exists. AA exists to allow people in similar, impossible circumstances help each other through.

It’s a remarkable organization, if only because it has been self-sustaining for 85 years. No funding, no central organization. No real official structure. Just thousands and thousands of meetings all over the world. At any given moment, wherever you live, you can find a meeting if you need it.

And the level of emotional vulnerability at these things – especially for a group of Midwestern men – is astonishing. You just won’t find it anywhere else.

I love it, but it’s not for me.

But I’ll say this: It’s very possible that it is for you, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

These days, my life is not perfect. I have bad moods, my patience leaves much to be desired. Sometimes marriage is hard, sometimes parenting is hard. Anxiety and depression are still in my life, will always be in my life, though they have changed.

Alcoholism and anxiety are tied in a kind of endless Gordian Knot, one leading to the other, the other leading back to the one. Because of this, it’s hard to say which is the root of the problem when you’re still drinking, though in my sobriety the anxiety remains – much improved but still there – so I know now that they are each their own entities.

Now the anxiety is mostly physical – manifests itself as restlessness. It’s not pleasant. It makes me feel like I want to crawl out of my skin and sleep becomes difficult, but I can identify and manage it. Exercise helps. Eating better would probably help. I’ll get to that someday.

Depression is the same way. When it’s there, it feels permanent, but I know it’s not, and it always passes, sometimes faster than others. But I know it always passes.

Depression and anxiety aren’t the unpredictable storm they used to be, coming and going without warning, often many times in a day. There’s an ebb and a flow to them.

So life is not perfect, obviously. You can’t leave yourself behind.

But any objective view of my life now is breathtaking, relative to what it was – relative to just about any life I can imagine. I am beyond lucky, beyond thankful. I shouldn’t be here for this. I shouldn’t be able to CONTRIBUTE to something this good.

But I am.

Sober Reid is a better man – and more interesting – than I could ever have imagined. Whatever fears I had about losing myself in sobriety were such bullshit that it’s hard to even comprehend them now. I lost nothing and gained everything.

Would I have been able to do it under other circumstances? Would I be sober if not for Kelly? I don’t know. I don’t want to put the burden of being my savior on her – she doesn’t want that AT ALL – and the work was something that I had to do. Maybe I would have found a way to do it without her. Maybe not. I’m glad I didn’t have to find out.

I don’t regret anything that I went through – that I put myself through – and I’m learning to be less judgmental of Drunk Reid. He was struggling with something much bigger than him. I don’t mourn (much) for lost time. All of that time was necessary, I think. I don’t cry for what could have been, because what is is all I could ever hope for. I’m not ashamed of myself. Obviously. I’ve laid everything out here. I’m happy to share my experience with anyone that wants to hear it. I hope some people find that helpful. I love talking to people who want to get sober. It really feels like the least I can do, and it happens a shocking amount.

So many people are struggling with addiction. So many people. If you are one of them, just know that you are not alone, and that you can ABSOLUTELY get sober, and that the sober life is GOOD. Good in ways you can’t even imagine. I’m sure I’ve not done it justice here. Like I said, misery is much easier to write about than happiness and stability. But however hard it is, I promise it is worth it. I promise.

Sober Reid is proud to be a recovering addict. We are a club. A secret club, of survivors and shitalkers and storytellers and salty secret optimists. It’s a good club. Maybe you should join us.

The End.

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Alcoholism

I started to drink the way that a lot of kids do, I think. As a teenager, I climbed up a stool to carefully fill a thermos with a splash from every ancient bottle of booze on the top shelf of my parent’s closet. Peach Schnapps, brandy, rum, tequila, whiskey, vodka. It all went into the intoxicating, barely consumable witch’s brew. Toil and trouble awaited. There was alcoholism in my family, but not the immediate family. I can recall my father being drunk on just a few occasions and my mother not at all. Both of my grandfathers were alcoholics, but one died when I was very young and the other had stopped drinking by the time I was old enough to notice. Supposedly, his doctor told him, after some heart trouble, that he was allowed one beer a day, to which he replied, “Can I save them all up for Saturday?” So far as I know, that’s the only funny thing he ever said, but maybe that’s because I only new him sober. Alcoholism is endemic to my city and state, Fargo, North Dakota. It gets very cold here, and also very hot. Alcohol, theoretically, is a cold drink that can make you feel warm, so it’s perfect both ways. I can’t tell you what the bar to person ratio in this state is exactly, but it’s high, and, from my personal experience, we drink differently than people do in other places. We don’t do a thing AND drink. We don’t socialize AND drink. We don’t barbecue AND drink. We drink, and anything that happens alongside that is incidental. We drink to get drunk. That’s the point. Obliteration. But I suppose this may just be my personal experience. After I got sober, I heard a story from the great John Roderick that I found illuminating. To paraphrase, he says, when he was a drinker, he’d go to a baseball game and get drunk because of course you go to a baseball game and get drunk. That’s what baseball games are for. Everyone there is getting drunk. But when he got sober, he realized that like 10% of the people at the baseball game are getting drunk and the other 90% are just trying to have a nice time with their family and friends. They HATE the drunks. So, maybe that’s the case with this city, but I’ve been sober for a while now – 7 years – and that’s still not my experience. In high school I smoked pot much more than I drank. I don’t know why. Weed always inverted me even more than I already was, made me unsociable – outside of a tight group of fellow pot smoking friends – and withdrawn. In retrospect, I’m somewhat glad for that, but at the time it went against what I wanted – to be outgoing and confident and appealing to girls. The first time I can remember thinking that booze was an excellent way to attain these traits was a school dance. I and two friends got thoroughly drunk before the event. Two of us went unnoticed. We DANCED, confidently and without self-consciousness, the only way to successfully dance. People noticed. Girls noticed. I made the rounds, beloved, I felt, by everyone I spoke to, man and woman. Soon we began to get word that our compatriot, Jake, hadn’t been so lucky. “Jake’s in the principal’s office!” someone told me. Ten minutes later, “The police have been called!” Ten minutes after that, the police arrived, and Jake bolted from the principal’s office, past a police officer, shoved the door open so hard that the metal frame slapped against and shattered the plate glass window surrounding it, and fled, underdressed for the deeply cold North Dakota winter, into the night. He eventually sought refuge in the only safe space he could think of: the kitchen of the McDonald’s where he was employed, a mile from the school. He got a minor anyway, and had to pay for the window. It was so dramatic. One of the best nights of my life up to that point. My friends and I were bequeathed our drink of choice by a tradition handed down through the generations: North Dakota drunks drink Windsor Canadian Whiskey. That’s just the way it is. Sometimes a bottle of Canadian Mist or Black Velvet or some hideous vodka or rum or, god help you, gin would make its way into the routine. Maybe some terrible beer, Milwaukee’s Best – The Beast – more often than not. Beggars can’t be choosers, as they say, especially when they’re under the legal drinking age. But usually it was Windsor. At one point I had a jersey made, which said Windsor 175 on the back, 1.75 Liters being the standard bottle size for the cursed stuff. On Wednesday nights we’d cruise around in an old Buick Celebrity station wagon with a deep v dent in the front from when we’d hit a tree, smoking pot and taking pulls from the whiskey bottle – wildly irresponsible – until it was time for Wednesday Night Bowling, where all the kids would get fucked up and roll some balls on a school night. The staff there hated us. The Buick Celebrity had one of those rear facing seats in the trunk. I don’t know if you’ve ever locked eyes with the disgusted driver behind you while guzzling hard liquor or sucking down a joint, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it. There were experiments with mushrooms and a brief dalliance with opium, but nothing serious. By college we had a routine. We’d get a bottle or two – at one point we were just having our buyer get cases – we’d sit in a circle around a table with one shot glass, and pass the bottle around, each taking a shot when it came to us, until the bottle was gone. If you got too wrapped up in your rant, or just needed a break, you’d be harangued for holding up the bottle. Once a friend was doing a presentation on binge drinking for a class, so we filmed this debacle and finished the bottle in an hour. The tape was lost so we had to do it again a few nights later. His professor was unimpressed. At first it was six men to a bottle, then four, then two. People at our college started calling us The Whiskey Kids, because we’d show up at a party and immediately get in our circle. Others would come and go, but we mostly just stayed huddled until it was time to stumble home. Second year of college, we got a house, and it was a beautiful mess. Massive parties. Weird chaos. Binge drinking. By the time we left, the house was trashed – blood on some walls, unusable bathrooms, a rug confiscated by the police “for evidence”, a visit from a Private Investigator, and an assault in the boulevard that left a kid I didn’t know with a shattered jaw, forced to drink from a straw for months. We were justly evicted after maybe eight months, but it feels, in my memory, like a decade. There were more houses and more drinking. Good times, bad times. Typical college stuff, if slightly elevated and more dramatic than the college stuff most experience, I think. The drinking was excessive but social. We were all in love with Hunter S. Thompson and a thousand burnout rockers and the whole thing felt very romantic. To me. It’s very possible that this wasn’t what my friends experienced. Sometimes we blacked out, but everyone around us did the same, so it felt normal. Trying to piece things together in the morning was part of the fun. There was one time that a bunch of us packed into a limo and went to a casino. Ten people in that limo and not one of us remembered the ride home. I had a disposable camera with me and all of the film was used in the lost hours. I didn’t get it developed for probably 10 years, but I often wondered what kind of madness those pictures would reveal. When I got them back it was just a bunch of tousled kids, sleeping and sloppily eating chips. In 2004 I was 21 and it felt like I should see more of the world, be away from the friends I’d had since grade school. So I signed up for a student exchange program. I knew only one thing – I wanted to go to California. Not knowing much about California, I eventually settled on . . . San Bernardino, then the city with the second highest murder rate in the nation. Before I left, I moved into my Mom’s basement for a couple months while my friends moved into yet another house. I was upsettingly, desperately in love with a girl who was technically my girlfriend, but the relationship was tenuous. I’d be leaving for California and she for Spain, and we’d been off and on for the extent of our relationship anyway, as she went to college in a different state. Unofficially on when she was in town, off when she wasn’t. We spent that month before the inevitable end going to movies that seemed bizarrely relevant – Garden State and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were in theaters that Summer, irresistible to a pretentious kid intent on heartbreak – drinking with friends, and drinking in my mom’s basement – huge jugs of Gallo Wine while we played Paperboy and fucked and slept on a mattress on the floor. I loved it, getting drunk just the two of us. It felt so intimate. We also argued – exclusively about whether we should break up when we moved. Obviously, we had to, but that wasn’t obvious to me at the time. I was frantic and heartbroken and impossibly annoying. On top of this, my mother had a cancer scare. So, heartbroken and scared – both for my mother and about setting off on my own – I packed everything I owned into my 1992 Buick Park Avenue with 200,000 miles already on the odometer and set off from the far East of North Dakota to Southern California, wracked with anxiety. I tell you all of this to get to the part where I start drinking alone, as that’s the real turning point. Up to this point I’d abided by only one rule, already half aware that I had a problem: NEVER DRINK ALONE. After eight hours of driving, I pulled my car into the parking lot of a liquor store in Beach, North Dakota, the farthest west city in North Dakota, right on the border with Montana. I got a box of wine, checked into the first hotel I saw, and set to drinking. It was a revelatory night. After a couple big glasses of cheap zinfandel, my anxiety melted away, and I started to feel like Jack Kerouac, on a grand adventure, in a strange place without the support system I’d known my entire life, anything possible. With all of this potential, I chose to drink myself into a stupor and watch three episodes of Six Feet Under on the complimentary HBO. I’d never seen it before and it felt IMPORTANT, a harbinger of all of the high drama that I was about to experience. Intoxication made being alone feel like something bigger. I was diving deep into myself and coming up with something more heroic than I’d suspected. In the morning I set off again early – in those days hangovers were pleasantly foggy, even giddy – and proceeded to drink myself across the western half of America. I took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in Cody, Wyoming. I got wasted and walked to a blue collar bar where I ate pickled eggs and fried mushrooms for dinner – I was a vegetarian by this point – and shot pool with some old timers. I made it to Denver and stayed in the cheapest hotel I could find – 30 dollars a night with bars on the windows. I pulled back the bedspread and saw burns all over the sheets. Opened the bedside drawer and found the source of the burns – a crack pipe. Now this was living. I got hammered, considered hiring one of the prostitutes outside, didn’t, thank god, and wandered out into the streets. I found a bar with live music, tried to flirt with a girl who ended up being the singer’s girlfriend, and drank with the band until the sun was up. Then it was back to my room for a couple hours of sleep and back on the road. Magical. My first night in San Bernardino I was alone in my dorm room – a suite, individual rooms emptying into a common living room and kitchen. By this time, I was so in love with drinking alone that I didn’t even bother to venture out. The next day my first roommate arrived – a tall, skinny, cocky emo-ish skateboarder type, covered in tattoos. I pulled out a box of wine and told him we were going to become fast friends. It worked. The next day he was so sick he thought he had the flu and ended up vomiting in the parking lot of a grocery store where he’d gone to buy flu medicine. I felt pretty good. California is a story for a different time. Great for the most part, but filled with heartache and an evolving reliance on alcohol to get myself brave enough to be social. Eventually I was out of money and headed back to North Dakota, moved back in with my friends. We picked up where we’d left off. One night it occurred to me that I could drink things other than wine when alone. I got some whiskey, sat in my room, and watched a History Channel documentary about the Founding Fathers. Again, it was revelatory. A night alone felt enlightening, an adventure. I think I fell briefly, actually in love with Benjamin Franklin. A girl I’d met in California called every once in a while. I flew back to see her a couple times. We went to Coachella, twice. When a friend and his girlfriend and I decided to go to a music festival in Chicago, I asked if she’d like to come. She flew to North Dakota from Las Vegas and we drove to Chicago. Once back, it became clear that she didn’t intend to leave. This was a problem for me. I didn’t love her, first of all, and I was not equipped for a live in girlfriend. The habits I had acquired didn’t allow for it. But she didn’t have any money to get back, and I had very little, so I bought her a bus ticket and sent her on her way – after we’d both consumed our share of box wine, of course. She cried, I didn’t. I was mostly thinking about how nice it would be to return to my room alone, and get back to the drunk I was working on. It turned out that it was her birthday, but I didn’t know that until a day or two later, when she called me from the bus. A 40 hour bus ride with a broken heart must have been bad, and I feel terrible about it. A year later, and it was time to get my own place. I liked living with my friends, but we were starting to get on each other’s nerves. Passive aggressive notes were being written and left on the fridge. I went looking for an apartment, somewhere appropriately cheap, shabby, and downtown. I found Post Landing. I’ve talked about Post Landing here before, but some of it bears repeating. Post Landing is an old, repurposed building close to Fargo’s downtown area. It stands among the Rape and Abuse Crisis Center, Salvation Army, Native American Services, and the only strip club in town. There are fully 15 bars in walking distance and two liquor stores. Some of the units are huge. Mine was not. It was partially below ground, with windows that looked out onto the gravel parking lot, and occasionally a homeless man would piss on the window above my bed. You’d enter through a back door, walk down three rickety stairs and then through the door to my unit, number 8. The layout was unique in that it was long and narrow, a straight shot through the living room to the kitchen to the bedroom to the bathroom. You could sit on the toilet and see the whole thing. I loved it immediately. But now, completely left to my own disastrous whims, I was free to indulge my obscene, suicidal hobby to a degree never before possible. And I took full advantage of that. A typical night would involve a trip to a liquor store for cigarettes and a box of wine or the vodka I’d switched to somewhere along the line – too many black outs with whiskey – or both, then some snacks at the grocery store – snacking and drinking went hand in hand for me, the only time I’d let myself eat without restriction or guilt, two compulsions linking hands and skipping into oblivion – and finally to a video rental place, to pick up my entertainment for the evening. I’d build a little drunkards nest of food, my laptop, drinks, and maybe a book of crossword puzzles – they get more challenging the drunker you get – slam a few shots in quick succession to get things going, and settle in for the night. If that sounds sad and insane, it’s because it is, but I can’t imagine it’s unique. And I can’t lie to you and say that it doesn’t have its charms. But I would strongly advise against getting into it yourself. You could like it. I’d still go out – fairly regularly actually – meet friends at bars, go to house parties, what have you, but there was always 1) Significant drinking before these occasions and 2) A voice in the back of my head telling me to get home and finish the night in my preferred mode – alone. Occasionally a girl would enter the picture, and occasionally I’d be or stay sober enough not to make a total mess of that for a while, but it was always a struggle. The reason I’d started doing this in the first place – to make myself an extrovert – had lost to my strong, innate introversion. Drinking became 20% a means of being social and 80% a means of obliterating my ego to let my unrestrained Id have its time on the stage, free to act out its horrific, primal, sparsely attended one man show. I don’t know what my friends thought I was doing during this time, or how cognizant they were that I was spiraling. We were all heavy social drinkers, and some of them may have been doing some version of it themselves, but most were busy becoming adults – starting families, getting real jobs, buying houses. I was quirky, neurotic, free spirited. Mostly fun to be around if you were also a sufficient level of drunk. Maybe even, at first, if you weren’t. When you’re in your 20s, being a drunk can be romanticized. We have so many role models: Bukowski, Hemingway, Thompson, Kerouac, Burroughs, Fitzgerald – and that’s just the writers. It is especially forgivable if you are a writer – or say you are anyway. That’s what I did. I’d written through all of high school – was good at it. I wrote for the school paper and for Fargo’s paper of record, The Forum, as well. My short stories were very emo, but not bad, all told. But the guys that pulled off being both drunks and writers were, first of all, mostly over rated. Second of all, what you start to realize as you mature as a reader, is that they would have been good without booze. Better even. The only leg up that alcohol gives a writer is that it generally makes you miserable, and writing about how miserable you are is the easiest thing to write. Writing with nuance about happiness, stability, beauty and the like is much, much more difficult, and these guys rarely pulled that off, with maybe the exception of Hunter S. Thompson, who was a freak of nature who found some degree of joy in chaos, but was probably as miserable as the rest of them and ended up shooting himself anyway. Third, they were mostly natural geniuses, which I am not. So I talked about writing a lot without ever doing it, and it made the drunkenness seem justifiable. While my friends were busy starting their lives, I was a careening ARTIST, though nobody had ever seen this theoretical art, outside of a few half-witty, half uncomfortable social media posts that proved I could put words together just enough to convince everyone that I was who I portrayed myself to be. I had jobs. I was relatively functional. But the jobs were a means to keep up an impossible lifestyle and got weirder and weirder. First, I worked at a grocery store. I’ve talked about this as well. I was there for eight years and on many mornings showed up still drunk from the night before. I had a bad attitude, but I did a pretty good job. Good enough. And in an employee pool mostly filled with teenagers, fuck ups, and adults with disabilities, I went fairly unnoticed. There were only two times I can remember when I showed up in no shape to work and had to send myself home. Once when a night at the lakes turned into four nights at the lakes – I was having so much FUN! – and I showed up still more than half blitzed, with scrapes all over my face from when I’d fallen at some point, wracked with the anxiety of being potentially and rightly fired and also trying to piece together a mostly blurry lost weekend, and smelling less than ideal. The other when I’d just stayed up too late and drank too much and loudly relayed the plot of the wildly inappropriate Tod Solendz movie I’d watched the night before. Next, I’m not sure what I did, honestly. I had some savings built up, so I think I just coasted. Ignored my student loan payments for a while, which would become a habit. Did a little freelance writing here and there, mostly bad. There was a significant relationship in the midst of all this. A girl named Angela who I’d worked with briefly, but never really spoken too. We somehow connected over MySpace and I somehow convinced her that I was boyfriend material. We essentially lived together for a few years, and I loved her, and she loved me, but I was massively depressed for almost the entire time and the drinking was a constant problem. The whole relationship is weirdly hazy. One time I said, “I’m fun, aren’t I?” To which she replied, “Well, you’re fun-ny.” Still probably the most astute assessment of my character I’ve ever heard. Eventually I got tired of having to hide the extent of my drinking from her, and ended things. Things didn’t stay ended for long, and we were just about to officially move in together when she broke up with me. I had the gall to be shocked and angry. During this time, I worked at a call center for the deaf – its own absolute nightmare, then I went door to door trying to convince people in a very red state to send letters to their senators – and to write those letters while I stood there – in support of what became known as ObamaCare. This in the dead of a North Dakota winter, mind you. Then I sold myself to science, signing up for various drug tests that could pay out as much as $4,000 for three weekends or a full week lying in a hospital bed, being administered experimental drugs, and having my blood drawn every hour. That wasn’t bad – a week to lie in bed and read, and dry out – but presented problems of its own. I smoked cigarrettes, kind of a lot, and you weren’t supposed to be a smoker. I got around this by abstaining from cigarettes for a couple days before a study and drinking massive amounts of water the morning of. It worked, somehow. I did a study for morphine, which was quite a week, and for Erectile Dysfunction, another interesting stint, among others. This was great until I got kicked out of a study for also donating plasma when the rules said you couldn’t. They caught me when one of the study administrators was giving plasma at the same time. Half devastated that my source of income had been cut off and half excited to get back a week of drinking, I retreated to my apartment to regroup in the most self-destructive way possible. Two days into this, I realized that something had to change. I knew I should probably quit drinking. I’d tried it once or twice before. My sobriety record from the time I was 19 to the time I was 30 was 16 days. At this point, I was wracked with anxiety to the point where I couldn’t really do anything, basically whenever I wasn’t drinking. It felt like being strangled while simultaneously drowsy and high on coke, with an internal television quickly flipping through the channels of every shitty, embarrassing thing I’d ever done and said, every potential shitty thing that was waiting for me in the future, and a crystal clear view of the pathetic now. I’d shake and sweat. I was vomiting pretty consistently. I wasn’t answering my phone. It was getting hard to think clearly. Once, after a night of hard drinking with my brother, the one person I felt unjudged enough by to fully DRINK around without any subterfuge, I woke up on his couch in the morning, still very much intoxicated, and decided I needed to get home to do some more drinking. I got into my car and felt my blood pressure drop. I was immediately soaked in sweat, thought I might pass out. Not for the first or last time, thought I might die. Sugar, I thought. I need sugar. And I’m so thirsty. I pulled into the parking lot of a Walmart and trudged inside, pale and wet and reeking of booze at 9 in the morning, under fluorescent lights. I was conspicuous, even in a Walmart, and probably got looks, but I had tunnel vision. Somehow I ended up getting a big bag of popsicles, started eating them as soon I got out the door, barely made it back to my car, and laid in the backseat devouring popsicles until I fell asleep, sticky from artificially colored syrup. This, in case you’re wondering, was not exactly one of the rock bottoms you hear about, but it should have been, probably would be for most people. For me, it was one police officer waking me up with a knock on the window short of that, maybe, and barely a blip on the despair and self-humiliation spectrum I regularly put myself through. When I was hungover, I couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to be awake. There was a constant voice in the back of my mind reminding me that I knew one very simple, familiar way to feel good again, and it wouldn’t shut up until I said the fateful words that are the beginning of every good bender and poor decision, words that are constantly in the pocket of any drunk. Peeking out of the pocket even. Hanging out of it, so you always know it’s there: Fuck it. Fuck it, of course, means just do the thing. Drag yourself to the liquor store and end this internal debate. That hectoring voice is the alcoholic’s unique bane. Probably the one thing that, if present, absolutely means that you’re an addict. It’s the voice that, when you think about quitting whispers, “What about weddings? Gotta drink at weddings,” or “There’s a little left in the bottle,” or “If you quit drinking vodka, you’ll be okay. Just switch to beer and wine” and then “This wine isn’t getting you to where you need to be. How about vodka?” or “What’s the worst that could happen? You die. Is that even so bad?” It’s very persuasive. It sounds exactly like you. I started to suspect that not everyone had this voice whispering in their head fairly early on, but that didn’t make it any easier to ignore. It’s a voice so persuasive that it can make cleaning up after yourself before going to bed obliterated, in case you die, seem sane, even responsible. And by this point I was miserable all the time. I managed to romanticize that fact by thinking of what I was doing as “Emotional Spelunking”, bouncing down into the depths of my psyche as an exploration of my ugliest feelings, and then trying to pull myself up again. When I started to feel okay, I’d think, “Recalled to life!” a fun Dickensian allusion that only lived in my head. It was all very exhausting. I don’t want to make it seem like it was all despair. There were good times too. Times I’m forever thankful for, situations that I wouldn’t have gotten myself into otherwise that built me as a person. There were ecstatic, drunken sing alongs with my friends around the bonfire, weird dance parties, days spent walking the streets of Fargo, bouncing from bar to bar, meeting insane and great and great insane people I’d never talk to otherwise, no idea what the day could or would bring. Passionate conversations with anyone who happened to be at hand, probably nonsense, but profound at the time. Wild house parties. Moments of elation, moments of despair so complete they become meaningful. I have a backlog of stories alternately shocking, funny, and heartbreaking, stories that can surprise because no fully sane person would ever experience them. And probably most valuable, I know myself very, very well. I know what I’m capable of, good and bad, when unencumbered by inhibition and I know that I can do those things with the inhibition intact. I know how sad I can be, and how happy. I know what I want and don’t. I know, without a doubt, that I was one or two big mistakes away from really wrecking everything in a way that I wouldn’t be able to bounce back from, and that has made me empathetic. I grew comfortable with the idea of my own death. I feel my good fortune every day. I think, in retrospect, vanity saved me. I was – am, to a degree – very self-conscious, even though I act, mostly, like I’m not. I was very focused on keeping up appearances, and that meant dressing well, eating well when I could, exercising, and generally taking care of myself outside of doing the thing that was obviously going to kill me. I needed to be perceived as well and likable. There’s a somewhat minor section of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five that really spoke to me. It’s when Billy Pilgrim and his unit become German prisoners of war, and they are housed with British prisoners of war, who, though their chances of making it out of their current situation alive are nil, insist on running their drills and maintaining their standards of dress, hygiene, and behavior. It keeps them alive and, more importantly, maintains their sense of dignity. I thought about this a lot, so I made myself clean my apartment regularly, to sweep multiple times a week, to put on clothes and shower and shave and comb my hair and go out into the world. To maintain relationships. Without that . . . it could have been much worse. so, I knew I needed to quit, though that’s not the change I was prepared to make. I told myself it was time, but I knew I wouldn’t. I decided I needed a real job. So I called my Dad, a commercial lender with contacts, and asked him if one that he’d been pushing me to apply for was still available. It was, and I applied. Threw down one more hard drunk and then dried out for a few days. Miraculously, I got it. Not so miraculously. I’m a smart guy, and fairly charming in the way that many addicts have. I’m educated. I can do a job. I stayed pretty dried out to my first day. I still nearly fell asleep during training. My sleep schedule was such a mess that being required to be up and alert at 8 was difficult. But the job was fine. A phone job – always less than ideal – but fine. And for a bit everything was fine. I was still drinking on the weekends, and one weekend, as they do, things got out of hand. I started drinking on Friday night, and by Sunday morning I had the full anxiety, decided to tamp it down with just a little booze. Sometime on Sunday afternoon, I noticed that I was getting a really strong internet connection, which was rare. I didn’t pay for Internet – couldn’t afford to – and relied solely on the continuous coming and going of new, unsuspecting neighbors who didn’t put a password on their account. I did this for YEARS. This time, the connection only worked if I was sitting on my bed, but I could handle that. This stroke of luck merited a celebration, so I decided I’d call in sick from work. What you need to know here is that addicts are inherently liars. We get so used to having to cover up how badly we’re wrecking ourselves that the lies begin to spill out automatically, even when they aren’t exactly necessary. And, in my case, I tended to make them so elaborate that no-one would question them. Once, in college, I was having a level of anxiety that was affecting my schoolwork, so when I had a paper due that I couldn’t seem to bring myself to start, I told my professor that my cousin in North Carolina had testicular cancer and didn’t seem like he was going to make it. This was especially difficult news for me, because he was like a brother. The hardest part about that lie was acting sad when I came back to class a week later. This time, I blamed an uncle’s death. Again, very close, almost like a father. I had to go to Michigan and I didn’t exactly know when I’d be back. My third day of drinking turned into my fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh. At some point, my parents started calling and texting, but I wasn’t answering. The messages were getting frantic. On Friday night, early in the evening, there was an urgent knock on my window. It was my mother, crying, and then my father, and my brother. This was shocking for many reasons. First and not least, is that my parents have been divorced for a long time and aren’t in the habit of teaming up. Second, I was a disaster. No one could see me like this. Third, the invasion of my private space had become a constant fear. This is where I did the thing that nobody knew about – could never know about. There was one afternoon when I laid on my couch in a panic for several hours, afraid to make a sound, because there was a persistent, light tapping on my door. The longer I laid there, the more I became convinced that someone was out there, tormenting me, like an urban telltale heart with none of the poetry. When I finally worked up the courage to crack open the door, I saw an advertisement for a Chinese Restaurant hanging from my doorknob, lightly wafting in the breeze of an open window. But now my family were shouting through the window, “Open up!” “Let us in!” “We’re not leaving until we see you!” I shouted at them to go away, I’m fine, but the barrage continued. I finally agreed to let my Mom and my brother come in if my Dad would go away, and he reluctantly agreed. I could deal with tears, but wasn’t prepared for a shouting match. I didn’t really have a leg to stand on there. What had happened was, a guy I worked with sort of knew my Dad’s wife, had run into her, and had offered his condolences for her deceased brother. Unbelievable. It wasn’t an intervention, exactly. No one even mentioned drinking, we just talked about how bad my anxiety had gotten. It was awful, but not awful enough for me not to start drinking again as soon as they were gone. But I did agree to get help, and my Dad got me in touch with a guy who got me in touch with a psychiatrist. I saw the psychiatrist twice, I think, and it was helpful. Seeing a psychiatrist is good, if only to have a neutral third party to dump all your shit on. But I didn’t really dump ALL my shit on him. We only talked about anxiety, again, and not drinking – because I didn’t bring it up. May have even outright lied about it. But things got better. Focusing on easing my anxiety helped me to reduce my alcohol intake. I knew it was the root, even if I didn’t tell it that way. Alcohol kind of works like a flimsy, hastily built stick dam against the persistent river of anxiety. It can stop it up for a while, but the river – fear and doubt and panic – are building up behind the whole time. When the dam breaks, you get all the fetid water that has built up behind it. I started to go to the gym again. Seeing friends more often. Reading and listening to music more. I began spending a lot of time at the library to keep myself busy. I still drank, but almost exclusively in a social setting. I got a new position in the company I was working for, a better one, more suited to me. And then I met my wife. Re-met her actually. She was a friend of my brother’s and we’d almost dated once before, but I was a mess and she’d just broken up with her live in boyfriend, and it didn’t happen, thank god. I’d never have been able to see it through. I shouldn’t have this time, but she had an uncanny gift/curse for overlooking red flags. She didn’t change my life immediately, I had to do that myself, eventually – we’ll get to how I continued to self-destruct – but it was immediately clear to me that she was who I wanted and needed and I had to lock it down. I told her I loved her on our second or third date. I remember leaving her apartment one night, wracked with anxiety, and calming myself by taking stock of what I had, an unlikely bounty. I had a girl who loved me, and who I loved. A girl who was proficient in all the areas I am not – impulse control, money management, practical knowledge, responsibility, etc. I had a car. I had a job. Things were looking up. I asked her to marry me after about a year, and, against all sense and reason she said yes. Here’s why she shouldn’t have. We co-habitated pretty quickly, after I bid a bittersweet farewell to Post Landing. My brothers helped me move and when the couch that I’d slept on so many nights, did most of my drinking on, proved too big and bulky, we smashed it to pieces and threw the remains in the trash – classic Messerschmidt impulse control deficiency – an act so obviously metaphorical that I’m not going to bother making the metaphor. But putting a halt (mostly) to the solo drinking didn’t change the fact that I was almost always the drunkest person in any given room. She saw drinking induced panic attacks and let me work through them in my own way, which was less than flattering or effective. It mostly involved sweating it out in bed all day and being generally unpleasant to be around. After I pissed the bed a couple times – an upsetting development that should have sobered me up – she didn’t throw me out, as she should have, she went out and bought a waterproof mattress cover. We laugh about this now. Before our wedding, we bought a house. A beautiful house. A house we want to live in forever, two stories with a double garage and shop extension, a half-acre backyard in town, and my own office, something I’d always wanted. She was busy making wedding plans and I was sort of helping, but mostly I was taking what I was thinking of as a victory lap. I let the drinking go. I was wrecked all weekend, every weekend. The anxiety got worse, and I went to a therapist, began weeping as soon as I sat in the chair in her office, lied about the drinking, and was prescribed Zoloft. The Zoloft was a revelation. It cut down the hangovers, cut out the anxiety, and made me, in combination with the vodka I was drinking, extraordinarily manic. I talked so, so much, bounced around the house when I wasn’t passing out, wanted people over to drink with me, wanted to go out. Kelly was losing patience and the wedding was coming up. She’d tell me to cut it out. I’d say, with all the desperation of a true alcoholic, “I’m having FUN! Why don’t you just have FUN with me?” I said this so many times it couldn’t possibly have been true. We got married, though she was already having doubts. I was a little drunk at the wedding, a lot drunk at the reception, though I held it together pretty well. After we were married, there were several instances where she’d wake me up from where I’d passed out on the couch with a bottle nearby, and I’d lay there pathetically, looking up at her, blurry and in full defensive mode, agreeing that I’d cut back, agreeing to quit, whatever would end the conversation. I was lying constantly, stupid lies, denying being drunk when I clearly was. Denying things in the face of inarguable evidence to the contrary. One night, I told her that I was going to prove I could drink reasonably. That night I got so drunk watching a show with her that I could barely stay awake, and told her I was going to bed. She was furious with me. I trudged up the stairs and hesitated at the topmost step, tilted back, and fell down the entire flight, slammed into the banister – still a little wobbly to this day. I lay on the floor for a while, groaning, and then got up, insisted I was fine, and went to bed. When I woke up, I had huge bruises on my side and a vague memory of what had happened. Kelly had had enough. I told her I would quit drinking. I quit drinking in front of her. Quit telling her I was drinking. She caught me a few times and one night, after she saw a charge on our bank account to the liquor store from earlier that day, which she graciously hoped was cigarettes but I admitted was not, she said, “I’m not crying anymore, and that’s a bad sign for you.” I was about to ruin everything. I thought about what it would be like to end up back at Post Landing, back at where I was and how I was living before. I knew that would be a death sentence, and not an easy death. And I was just so fucking tired. It was finally time to quit. In the next episode of The Irrationally Exuberant, I’ll talk about sobriety, because this is a happy story, not a sad one. Tune in next week. The End.

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Are You OK?

A new feature on The Irrationally Exuberant – Guaranteed 96% true short stories from the life of yours truly.  This first edition is a story about a time maybe ten years ago when I should have known I had a problem. This is the story of the time I found myself in front of the Fryin’ Pan at three in the morning, drunk, wearing a bloodstained suit and a backpack full of potatoes.  This is the story of the time a grizzled old hobo asked me if I was okay.