Double Double (10 page)

I bet I was.

Sherry. Closet. Stash.
Cache.
That sounds less like a trigger than a gun with a silencer.

It was almost as if I hadn't been doing any drinking of note before then. When I started to teach at a college in Frostburg, Maryland, I rented a room in another teacher's house. I remember enjoying Sundays: I'd have breakfast up on the main street, at a restaurant that was at heart a diner and still is today.

It was during one of these Sundays, poring over the paper, when it occurred to me, My, it would be nice to have a drink. For some reason, I thought of sherry, which had never been a serious contender. Perhaps a serious contender would have worried me—I mean, that I would even think of a dry martini in these circumstances. Forthwith, I purchased a bottle of sherry.

That I secreted it in the closet should have been a dead giveaway. There wasn't any particular reason for hiding it, as I don't think the woman who owned the house was either a teetotaler or a snoop.

I was thirty or thirty-one when I started that teaching stint and rented the room, which meant I had a lot of happy drinking years behind me. Consequently, this apparent drinking novitiate of a glass of sherry with the Sunday
Times
puzzles me even now. It might have been merely practical: My room was hardly set up for mixing a martini. I can't picture the closet housing both gin and vermouth and a little dish of lemon twists, to say nothing of ice. That could have come only from the kitchen, and I'd hardly have tried sneaking in and tapping out an ice tray.

Maybe the sherry was a shield. An example of denial. I would guess—though this might be wrong—that there is a moment when one moves from drinking she could have stopped to drinking she couldn't. Many would disagree; many—A.A.? the clinic? the last hundred books written on alcoholism?—would say that alcoholics are born, not made. I think alcoholism takes an education. That I was destined to become an alcoholic, I very much doubt. By the time I took that teaching job and moved into that room, I'd say I'd earned a degree.

The BA came with the University of Maryland; the graduate degree in drinking from the University of Iowa. Those were a
couple of dandy places to become an alcoholic, and perhaps they were practice for it, but the essential thing was missing: I had to have that drink.

Between the two came that bottle of sherry, there on the other side of the line.

Was the line there before I crossed it? I don't know.

T
here are many programs conceived of as alternatives to Alcoholics Anonymous, some of them supporting “controlled drinking,” such as Moderation Management; others built on the idea of complete abstinence, such as Rational Recovery. One of the most notable differences between A.A. and Rational Recovery is that the latter firmly believes one can be cured without being propped up by a group of similarly addicted people.

There used to be Rational Recovery groups, but the group idea, which suggests support, was jettisoned, seemingly because the recovery in this school of thought must be bootstrap (though it's called something else). Dependence on others to keep you sober, they think of as a lifelong dependence. This is one reason they don't go along with a twelve-step program, since it encourages a lifelong connection.

Some proponents of Rational Recovery seem to believe that
A.A. is an evangelical body, that it is really about religion, not drinking, and that this organization is always looking for converts. Admittedly, I had a problem with the Lord's Prayer sometimes ending meetings, but it didn't say to me that I was witnessing the windup of a Sunday service. I simply thought it was a little hypocritical in the light of A.A.'s having no religious affiliation. Nothing was being stuffed down my throat (except the millionth cup of coffee). I'm sure some members convert, go back to their religion, or take up some creed. Some, though, see great harm in this, saying that you're not your own man (as if any of us are), that what you need is not coddling (that's rich! have they ever talked to a
sponsor
?), and what you need to do is stop your addictive thinking. Well, I'll queue up for that! I'd love to stop thinking that somewhere, it's five o'clock, but never where I am. My addictive thinking has less and less of a hold on me, until it's become fairly vaporous and I have to pump it up to get any good out of it—still, I'd like to stop it and certainly to
have
stopped it back in the day.

Addictive thinking is dwelling on the signs and signals that get and keep you drinking (like our minds hovering over Harry's Bar in Venice, for instance, and don't we wish we could?). I doubt that Rational Recovery advocates therapy, since therapy could wind up as a dependence on another person.

The “addictive voice” of Rational Recovery seems to me to be similar to the internal sentences of rational emotive therapy. This is a school begun by Albert Ellis, who coauthored a guide to rational living with his colleague Robert A. Harper. Its thesis (and I know this, since I was a client of Dr. Harper) is that one is not made unhappy by the actions of somebody or something else, but by the internal sentences we construct that insist we should respond as if these actions reflect truth. Your daughter, say, calls
you a bitch, says she loathes you. Dr. Harper would say, “That's not your problem, it's your daughter's. You're making it your problem by listening to what you're telling yourself in your head: that you must be unhappy because of what your daughter has said.” Rational emotive theory has a lot to do with this “must” reaction.

It would take near-heroic detachment not to react to your daughter, but what Harper says is probably true. By “react,” he means you shouldn't
feel
desolated, since the words are hers, not yours. What you're likely doing, in this mental process, is
making
the words yours. What I found to be the only difficulty with this therapy is that it needs reinforcement (like all therapies), and that means going to the therapist. Either the therapist or your own constant policing of your responses to emotionally charged situations.

The internal sentences are like the addictive voice of Rational Recovery, The AV tells you you need a drink. You tell the AV, no, I don't. I imagine this dialogue continues for a while until one or the other voices cashes in its chips. What's the difference between doing this and the usual old stuff of telling yourself, I need a drink! No, I don't! Yes, I do! Don't drink! Drink!

People generally are driven not by reason but by emotion, so that “rational” behavior—i.e., “recovery”—has a very long row to hoe, in that you are supposed to be able, in the simplest terms, to talk yourself out of your addiction. I just don't see how you can.

How can you drink rationally? Rationality has nothing to do with drinking. Although a ton of books pressing for controlled drinking would disagree with me, I think there are only two kinds of drinkers: nonalcoholics and alcoholics. For the first group, “rational” as a word to define drinking is meaningless, simply because a social drinker, a drinker who is satisfied after a drink or
two—drinking is not a problem. For the second group, “rational” didn't get you
to
where you are now, so why would it get you
out
of it? “Rational” is just another word in the service of “control.” The nonalcoholic doesn't think about control. The alcoholic thinks about it all the time. It's what he's trying to do but can't.

Moderation Management is a program that would disagree with me because it believes that there are many drinkers who are only “problem drinkers” and who, if the problem is caught in time, can avoid addictive drinking. I think the person who believes he has a problem, really does. “I'm not an alcoholic, only a problem-drinker” sounds like a dangerous assessment.

Promises to oneself: “I won't drink until five”; “I'll stop for a week [a month, a year].” The point is not whether one keeps the promise but that one has to make the promise in the first place.

Let's say you can do it, that you can monitor your drinking, apportion the drinks to a few a day (“Ten beers and I'm outta here!”), that you can stop after one drink at lunch, or even stop drinking at lunch altogether, or allow yourself no more than three drinks—one an hour—at a party. Do you want to? Do you want to go through life having to police yourself, to undertake this kind of surveillance? What sort of deliverance from sobriety is that? I mean, three lousy drinks spaced out. The only thing worse is one or two, and that's unthinkable.

A good friend and fellow drinker, Leon, was told by a doctor that he would have to restrict himself to two ounces of alcohol a day, i.e., one decent martini. Leon's reaction was to say if that was all he could have, why not just stop altogether? Remarkably, he did. This is the same Leon who would meet me at the end of the driveway with a martini in each hand. (We had a contest going: Who could get the martini to the other person quickest?)

The trick is that it's better not to have the first one. It's the first that wakes everything up, like the little lights and raucous noise of a pinball machine.

For the person who is not addicted to chocolate, one truffle is satisfying. For an addict, well, just hand me the box and pretend we never met. For an alcoholic, there is no such measure as “one martini.” One martini is a contradiction in terms.

Rational Recovery does not believe in alcoholism as a disease. A.A. does; accepting it as a disease is crucial to getting well. I don't care whether it is or isn't a disease; you have to take the same steps to overcome it.

A lot of A.A. dropouts take up some form of moderation. I would assume they do it because a lifetime without drinking is unimaginable—and, I'm sure they would add, unnecessary. But people who join groups to get
help
must feel they have a problem (well, an issue) with whatever the group espouses.

If you think, no, you're not an alcoholic, just someone who has a drinking problem, why not solve your own problem? You tell yourself you need to cut down. So cut down. But isn't that the problem? You haven't been able to do that. Thus, you hitch up with a program that's designed to let you keep drinking. Now,
that's
a program any alcoholic could live with!

There are obviously drinkers who can do it; if there weren't, the moderation groups would have gone out of business. There are also drinkers who can quit without attaching themselves to any group or organization. They can stop by themselves. It's harder. And it's rare.

If Leon did it—old drink-at-the-end-of-the-drive Leon, then maybe you can, too. But don't bet on it.

W
hatever I thought my future held changed the day I graduated from high school, when my mother had to pick me up from the local police precinct. I had been busted for drug possession with my girlfriend and two best friends. My aunt and uncle drove my mother. The shame I felt was overwhelming, and I cried endlessly when I got to my room in the basement.

That ended quickly. Even in my despair, I began to figure out how to get out of the situation. I had been caught, which was a drag, but I wasn't going to stop partying. I just needed to be more careful. So what if my mother had watched me receive my diploma or my uncle had hosted a graduation-day lunch for the family at his house? I was buzzed, cocky, and feeling superior to everyone. I was a happening guy who was going to college. My cousins weren't, poor bastards.

That feeling of entitlement quickly disintegrated. My arrest was combined with losing my driver's license and my girlfriend telling me that her father wouldn't let her see me anymore. My lawyer said I must get a summer job immediately, no matter how demeaning, to show that I was serious about cleaning up my act. I survived forty hours of community service at a YMCA swimming pool, by teaching mentally challenged kids how to play Frisbee. I tacked on to that a job of selling newspaper subscriptions door-to-door with some junior-high kids and our forty-year-old chain-smoking, van-driving, dentistry-challenged crew boss who was married to the best salesperson on our team—an eighteen-year-old blond girl who had run away from home. It was the worst job I ever had. We preyed upon old people who had no one to talk to and tried to sweet-talk them into multiyear subscriptions of a weekly newspaper that they clearly didn't need.

My attorney finally brokered a deal with the chief of police, who decided not to pursue any legal action against me. As a seventeen-year-old minor in an era when teenage drug possession was still relatively new, I received a slap on the wrist and was free to leave the state and attend college.

It was a long, hot, boring summer that culminated in a thirty-year-old guy beating me up at the park in front of my friends after an Ultimate Frisbee game. He was even more competitive than I was and kept jawing at me, so I decided to deliberately outplay him for kicks. He became so enraged that, after the game, he started punching me. I didn't fight back. None of my friends stopped him, they stood and watched. I ran to my car and wept as I drove myself home.

My mother could see that I was miserable and did her best to help. She asked if I was interested in leaving the U.S. and going
back to England to work for her friend Charlie in London. He had called her to offer me a job working in the cake factory he managed in the North of England near Newcastle. She had vague intimations that Charlie was a “character,” but what she didn't know was that Charlie was associated with the English mafia. They had met a few years earlier at one of the pubs she frequented while doing research for one of her mysteries.

I was in awe of Charlie. The previous Christmas, the three of us had tied on a hilarious drunk in London, where he regaled us with tales about his coterie of disreputable friends. I leaped at the chance to get out of the country and leave my problems behind. When I spoke to Charlie on the phone, I was able to put together, despite his thick Cockney accent, that he could get me a job at a factory he ran in northern England.