But then it was Oktoberfest in San Francisco, and my friend Andy was in town. I couldn’t not see him and, well, you can’t not have a beer at Oktoberfest. Just one. And on and on and on, until I was actively watching Twitter and Facebook and anywhere else on the Internet where my Brit friends detailed their travel plans. Coming to San Francisco? Let’s go for a beer—I know an out-of-the-way place.
My “lapses”—and I still thought of them as that—only happened about once a week and they weren’t affecting my work. Nor was anyone important in San Francisco seeing them. I convinced myself that was the main thing: that I wasn’t embarrassing myself, or anyone. I was just having a drink, like everyone else does.
Except when everyone else went home, I couldn’t stop. I’d just sit at the bar, drinking on my own, making the most of it because I didn’t know when my next excuse would roll into town. I think I was the last person to realize that I was the dictionary definition of an alcoholic, and the only person to be surprised when it turned out that I couldn’t quit.
And yet it baffled me. Like any addict, I’d assumed that I could just stop whenever I wanted to. That it was just a social prop. I never got drunk on my own. Or at least I didn’t get drunk on my own until that was the only way I could get away with it. Then I did.
It was only a matter of time before I got caught.
Chapter 1700
Twice You’re Screwed
I
’d been out for dinner with Kelly. We hadn’t seen each other for a while, and she was one of the few people I knew I could trust to drink with me in San Francisco without telling anyone.
In American psychology-speak she was “an enabler”—in London she’d be called “a drinking buddy.”
We started out easy, with just a few glasses of wine with dinner but by 1 a.m. we’d worked our way through several rounds of rum (me) and vodka (her). I was doing the lion’s share of the drinking and at some point she’d decided to leave me to it. I made it back to my hotel not long after 2 a.m.
I’d got away with it for another night; aside from Kelly, no one else in San Francisco knew I was drinking. Robert was safely in London and Sarah was on another research trip: this time to Beijing.
I staggered into my room and had just crawled into bed when my phone rang. It was an unknown number. I knew it wouldn’t be Sarah at 2 a.m., especially not calling from China, and Robert never called me on my mobile because he knew I’d get hit with the roaming charges.
In my drunken haze, then, I reasoned that this made it safe for me to answer. It might have been a girl; or, even better, it might have been another drink.
“Hello,” I slurred.
“Hey!”
Shit.
1701
It was Sarah, calling from China. She’d calculated the time difference wrong and thought she was calling me in the early evening.
I should have hung up. And, had I not been drunk, I would have done. But like a teenager arriving home from a party and trying to hide the fact that he’d been drinking, I thought I could get away with it.
“Oh, hi, it’s you, hello” I slurred—or at least I imagine I tried to.
“Have you been drinking?”
“Yes,” I should have said. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” I said, “what makes you shay that?
Ten minutes later, Sarah hung up. I know this because that’s what my phone told me the next morning. I also know that because Sarah had thoughtfully emailed me a summary of the conversation, assuming that I’d have forgotten most of it. It wasn’t that I’d been drinking that annoyed her.
She’d always said she didn’t think I’d be able to quit without getting help. It was the fact that I’d lied about it and then—apparently—blamed her for falsely accusing me, even though I could barely form the words to do so.
As she put it in her email, she wasn’t angry, she just doesn’t really like being yelled at by Drunk Paul when all she was doing was calling to see how I was getting on with my book.
1702
Every recovering alcoholic I’ve spoken to since that moment has told me about the moment they hit “rock bottom.” The moment they knew they had to get help to quit, because they just weren’t capable of doing it themselves. Speaking to Sarah that night was my moment.
I knew that she would almost certainly mention the incident to Robert next time they spoke, and that even if she wasn’t mad, I’d get a lecture from him. About how Sarah had risked her own professional reputation to vouch for me, and that I was throwing it back at her, while fucking up my health at the same time. He’d dress it up as being worried about me, of course, and he’d probably make a joke, but I knew I’d let them both down, badly.
It was also the moment that I understood—really understood—that I couldn’t quit on my own. It was time to get help, and I knew where to get it.
1703
I first met Ruth Fowler in 2006 when she was working as a stripper, and I was pretending to be a publisher.
Specifically, she was a Cambridge graduate who had grown up in Wales but had decided to smuggle her way into America to work illegally as a stripper in one of the most prestigious strip clubs in Manhattan and blog about the experience.
I had been sent to New York to convince Ruth that ours should be the company to publish her book based on that blog. I didn’t succeed in securing the book rights, but Ruth and I became good friends; a friendship that had grown over the years as she’d stopped stripping, become a published author, moved back to London, moved legally to Los Angeles to work as a screenwriter, decided to quit drinking, joined Alcoholics Anonymous and recently celebrated her seventh month sober.
As people in AA are wont to do, she’d emailed every so often to encourage me to attend a meeting. She could recognize the signs, she said. As people who don’t realize they’re alcoholics are wont to do, I brushed her off, pointing out that I wasn’t an alcoholic, I just enjoyed drinking.
But now that I was finally ready to admit that I had a serious problem, I knew it was time to find out more about AA. I couldn’t bear to call Ruth and admit that she was right and I was wrong.
So I emailed her. Just one line: “
Hey—if I come to LA—will you come with me to an AA meeting
?” She emailed back in less than five minutes. “
Yes
.
Come now
.”
1704
There were AA meetings in San Francisco, of course—dozens of them, according to the Internet—but I had two very good reasons for wanting to travel to Los Angeles instead.
For a start, going to a meeting in LA meant that Ruth could come with me. I knew that if I tried to go on my own then I’d put it off, first for a day or two while I picked the meeting that sounded best for me, then for a few more days while I wrote that week’s column, then for a week or so because, hell, there was no rush. Soon I’d be back drinking again.
The second reason was that, by going to LA, there was little to no chance anyone in San Francisco would find out. The idea of going to Alcoholics Anonymous embarrassed me. This was an organization that was the exact opposite of everything I’d stood for.
For one thing, I’d made no secret of my drinking. In fact, I’d so been proud of it that I’d made it one of my defining professional characteristics. Even when I’d started writing for TechCrunch and had ostensibly given up, I had still continued to cultivate a fictitious drunken persona.
The last thing I wanted was for readers to find out that not only was my drinking so out of control that I’d had to quit, but that I’d actually joined AA to help me do it. My ego just couldn’t stand it.
I booked a plane ticket from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It cost
me $90 return, which seemed quite reasonable for a trip that might save my life. Then I fired up Google and decided to do some research about what lay in store for me when I got there.
What I discovered annoyed the hell out of me. For a start, Alcoholics Anonymous is incredibly—and pompously—religious. They’d clearly tried to tone down the explicitly Christian aspect in modern times with lots of talk of “God as you understand him to be” rather than just “God,” but there was still no getting away from the idea that the only way one could quit the sauce was by asking for divine assistance.
In fact, not only did members have to ask God to help them stop drinking, but according to the organization’s “twelve steps” they had to “turn [their] entire lives over to His care, get closer to Him through prayer or meditation in the hope that [they] could have Him remove [their] shortcomings.”
In short, Alcoholics Anonymous is a place where alcoholics can hide from their friends and plead with a deity that may or may not exist to magically cure them of their addiction. It’s the antithesis of personal responsibility and accountability.
Put another way, going to Alcoholics Anonymous would be little more than a formalized, religious extension of what I was already doing—except that instead of promising close friends like Robert and Sarah that I was going to get my shit together and quit drinking, I’d be promising a roomful of strangers.
And then I had to ask for help from a deity who—it should be noted—hands the stuff out every Sunday. Hell, if the New Testament is to be believed, this is a God—as I understand him—who taught his son how to turn water into wine. You might as well pray to Oliver Reed for help.
If the thought of Robert and Sarah being disappointed in me hadn’t been enough, then would my new self-righteous AA buddies have any more success? Of course they wouldn’t.
1705
I was trying to talk myself out of seeking professional help. I knew that. But I also knew that I was serious about giving up.
One of the reasons I’ve always been so good at getting away with things is that I’ve always obeyed the golden rule of the blagger: know when it’s time to stop. Recognize when you really have reached your last chance; and don’t push it an inch further.
AA wasn’t going to work for me, I knew that. I’d end up going to the meetings and then going for a beer afterwards, knowing that I’d get away with it. If I was going to quit then I had to acknowledge the two things that were keeping me drinking.
The first was ego: I was still acting like a gonzo wannabe and I still hadn’t shaken the idea that “my readers” expected me to drink. The second was opportunity: by only telling a very small number of people that I was quitting, I could still get away with drinking as long as they didn’t find out. Somewhere deep inside my brain, a synapse fired.
Tzzziz.
I opened up my email account and began to write a message. In the subject line, I wrote three words: “
I’m quitting drinking
.” I clicked BCC and added everyone from my address book: friends, professional contacts; everyone I might possibly run into in the coming weeks and months.
My plan was to write an email telling everyone I knew about my decision to quit, and the reasons behind it. I’d ask for their help: if you see me drinking, I’d say, please stop me.
But then I stopped.
Who was I kidding? All I was doing was expanding the list of people I couldn’t drink around. Even if I sent the email, and even if I recruited all of my friends to watch over me, there was still a whole world of strangers out there; a planetful of bars where I’d never get caught.
Thanks to my years of creating a persona of drunkenness, there was always the chance that I’d run into someone—particularly in a town as small as San Francisco where it seems like everyone reads TechCrunch—who would offer to buy me a drink.
In my own little world at least, I was famous for my inability to say no.
And
that’s
when it hit me.
A ridiculous idea.
That settled it.
Chapter 1800
Going Public
T
he half-finished email was still glaring out from my laptop screen. I read it back and laughed. Even though it was only a few minutes old, it now seemed ridiculously naive; full of jokes and half-excuses.
My ego simply wouldn’t let me look pathetic in the eyes of even my friends, let alone people I only knew tangentially. Being honest about my inability to stop drinking went against the whole character I had spent years building; the hard drinking, doesn’t give a fuck, never apologizes, never explains asshole.
The asshole who wrote my column for the
Guardian
, and the asshole who in two months was supposed to file a book on how to be just like him. Robert called him Drunk Paul, Sarah thought his problems went far deeper than drinking and I … well, I don’t know what I thought.
Apart from this …
That asshole had to die.
It was him or me.
I got up from my chair and walked laps of the room, thinking through the consequences of what I was about to do. Then I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. An hour passed; maybe longer. Finally, I managed to summon up the kind of courage that would normally take me a couple of beers and a shot of rum.
I closed the email window and opened a fresh browser window. I typed in the address of my blog and clicked the button to write a new entry. It started with a title …
The trouble with drink, the trouble with me
And then a quote that seemed apt …
“The chief reason for drinking is the desire to behave in a certain way, and to be able to blame it on alcohol.”—Mignon McLaughlin
Then I wrote …
I mulled for a ridiculous amount of time over whether I should post this.
Not because it’s hopelessly self-indulgent—that’s never stopped me before—or because it’s too personal—ditto—but rather because there’s so much weirdness and angst and back-story that I would really need a whole self-indulgent book to tell it all. Lucky I’m writing one, I guess.
Getting straight to the point: a few days ago I decided to stop drinking. Or, rather, I decided to stop properly. Completely. It was actually back in July—during my month-long London visit—that I realized I needed to take a break from the ridiculously Bukowskian cycle I’d got myself (back) into.
And—with a few dramatic exceptions—I was doing ok. But then, as someone pointed out after my last binge, in recent weeks those dramatic exceptions had started to move closer together—to the point where they were inevitably going to collide. Almost-quitting is just not something I’m capable of. It’s all, or it’s nothing.
One complicating factor (in my head at least) is that I’ve forged a career—and a respectable income—from drinking too much, doing idiotic things and writing about them. My last book floated on a sea of booze, and if you were to ask anyone who knows me to give you three keywords about me, drink would certainly
be one of them. Barely a week goes past without a PR person trying to bribe me with a bottle of good rum (really, it’s got weird now—and each thinks they’re the first to think of it); and the look of disappointment on people’s faces when I say I’m not drinking is heart-breaking.
Last week I was at a party where someone said—and I swear this is true—“of course you’ll have a drink … you’re Paul Carr.” Jesus.
But the thing is, there’s a line between doing entertainingly idiotic things under the influence and doing irreversibly damaging things. And what sells the most books and makes people read blog posts—losing loves, getting arrested, being fired, inching towards cirrhosis of the liver—is not actually that much fun when it’s you doing it.
The truth is there are people in my life who I would rather trade every single funny anecdote I have just to avoid hurting them again. Or in certain cases, just to speak to them again. When you get to that point the decision isn’t the difficult part. The difficult part is the execution.
To be honest, drinking for me became a habit—a prop—rather than a necessity; I’m perfectly capable of doing dumb things stone cold sober, and it’s not like I need a fucking confidence boost. I also never—ever—write while drunk.
But having a drink in my hand—and another, and another—is also one of those habits that has proved incredibly hard to break. Hence the decision to write this post. I figure by making the statement—I’m not drinking—I don’t really have anywhere to hide.
Maybe people who have read this and who see me drinking will look as disappointed as those who previously were disappointed that I wasn’t.
I’ve been lucky enough to get advice on quitting from some really good friends in the past week or so, including one friend who has been sober for seven months despite previously writing a drink-fueled memoir of her own. No doubt some of the advice will work, and some of it won’t. But I’m going to try it all. I might write a follow-up post on the subject, or there might be more in the book, or I might just get on with it. It’s too early to tell.
All I know is that it’s my 30th birthday in a couple of months, and I really hope I’ll be spending it sober. And alive. And with friends. Those are decent enough goals for now. And to those worried that a non-drinking me means fewer hilarious fuck-ups, don’t be. The only difference is I’ll be able to remember them in the morning. God help me …