Drinking too much

I’ve never done this before, but I’ve listened to enough of them that I’ve got the idea. Let me tell you what I used to be like, what happened, and what I’m like now. Carry the message. I should start with a story—the sort of story I hear a lot here, which is supposed to be a little bit funny, until you remember that it’s about destroying yourself, and wrecking your family, and betraying your principles. My grandfather flew an F-86. He was a security guard at Sears after he retired. He was a foundling. I don’t know if anybody uses that word anymore. They found him, as a toddler, wandering a Halifax slum. It’s impressive, what he did, I think, what he made of himself. He had a good life and when he began to look forward to death, he decided that he would send out an inheritance to his few grandchildren. He had three daughters and two sons, but they only had eight kids between them. He signed the check over to my mother and she sent it to me. I spent it in a single night. I went to Ginza and bought champagne for a hostess with crooked teeth. It was what I wanted to do. It was my second visit there in a week. I took Shirley to the same place. She told me she was from Los Angeles, but I knew she must mean Temecula, at least, or even Stockton, or even further out. I thought I heard something in her accent. She wore perfume that smelled like baby powder and white flowers. She told me she was twenty-five, but, after studying her face a bit longer, I knew she must be about the same age as I was. I liked that she resented the Brazilian girls that worked the bar with her, and that she had alienated most of the regular customers. We drank until the early morning. I can’t remember what happened. I came out of a blackout punching down the bathroom door. I wasn’t angry. I was too drunk to work the lock. The cuts on my knuckles sealed and filled with pus. When I asked my mother for more money, I had to tell her all about this. I wanted to keep going. That’s it. It’s easy enough to understand how I ended up there. I can remember the first drink I took. Slugs of Drambuie, chased with basement sink stale tap water, sometime in the winter after I turned fifteen. I suppose I wanted, even then, to become an addict. If I didn’t necessarily want to emulate my father, who drank plenty in those days… Well, I guess I had other role models. I know there’s some antipathy in these rooms to plumbing too deep into the why or how. We are allergic to the substance. That’s good enough. This is why a single dose is never enough. We have an obsession with the substance, which lingers past physical craving. Before I drank, I drained Robitussin bottles. I smoked cannabis from a crushed can. It was mostly out of boredom, by which I mean a desire to do experience or do something significant. But alcoholic solved things I didn’t know were a problem. I can remember that night. I watched an Almodóvar movie on cable TV. I liked the taste. I liked the way it made me feel. I couldn’t stop. So, I kept drinking. High school, most days. When I went off to college, every day. What the hell was it? The most romantic way to put it is: I was until the age of twenty-three or twenty-four staging rituals that would kill me. I thought I should seek death by misadventure. But I couldn’t take enough of any substance to put me out. On the mountain roads, my hands were steady. Rudimentary self-preservation instincts carried me out of danger. And I lost the drive. I couldn’t accept death, but I also didn’t want to accept responsibility. I wonder if everyone tries the same thing. I don’t know. I knew some people… But they faded away. Some of them succeeded in dying. You ever think how sad it is that kids supposedly don’t drink anymore? Even if it wrecked my life, I sometimes think that’s sad. I think of all the good or frightening experiences I had. But the less romantic way to put it is: I was lonely, and, if I drank, I was temporarily incapable of feeling that way. I was distracted by liquor, or emboldened to seek the company of strangers. I could be completely sure of my decisions. I could solve my life in one night. Sorrow, distant. Forgive, everyone. Repeat. I could beat down anything I felt. I am bereft; I drink; and everything is forgotten. I am happy; I drink; and everything is forgotten. So, all that was left was the sadder half of the ritual. I drank at the kitchen table of my uncle in Cold Lake, who had lost his wife the year before. He drank Golden Wedding and Pepsi and ice cubes from the machine in his fridge. He retired from the Air Force and took a job cleaning up rooms where people had died. He showed pictures on his phone of sticky pools of brown blood on linoleum floors. My mother watched us drink. He talked about my father. I drank—whatever liquor was left from the night before—in Michael’s apartment in Dalian every afternoon when we woke up. It was usually red wine. I never understood that Deleuze line about the alcoholic seeking for the next-to-last drink, but maybe that’s what he meant: you want to put yourself out, but you want something to take the edge off in the morning. By then, I had gray, mild hallucinations, when I woke up and then closed my eyes again. After that, we went to the baths and drank Yantai brandy in Coca-Cola. After that, we drank cans of beer from the store on the road, cognac and orange juice with Gigi and her friends, vodka from Trey’s stash. Maybe I used to look down on the drunks that showed up at the liquor store at ten in the morning, bought cold cans, and drank in their cars. I was making twenty-eight thousand dollars a year to oversee the disaffected suburban children that ran the register and stocked the shelves. I wasn’t thirty yet. I was in love with a Boston Pizza waitress—eighteen, the daughter of a Turkish commercial bakery owner—and still married to my first wife—twenty-six, the daughter of a Chinese carpenter. This seemed romantic. I drank Powerade and rum while checking receipts from the night before. When everything else was closed, and they had no hope of snagging more lucrative customers, I drank with the massage parlor women of Ueno and Gotanda. At four in the morning, we brought bags of beer upstairs to their rooms and sat cross-legged together on a massage table, playing the saddest songs we could think of, talking about our lost loves, children, exile. We told each other we’d keep in touch. Sometimes I passed out. Sometimes I blacked out and stayed awake until dawn. When I came to, I slipped away, back home, to sleep the day away. If you get up at four in the afternoon, you might as well drink. I slept on the floors of friends’ apartments. I slept under a truck. I slept in my cold bed. I slept all afternoon. I slept in my car. I slept beside the river. I never talk about that. The river at night in December looks the same as the river at night in August. All the men who live beside it are there because they couldn’t accept a better solution. I slept there for the same reason. When the policemen made their rounds and roused me, I gestured at the duffel bag beside me and made up a story about flying in a day early, not being able to check into my hotel. They smiled. When they told me to be safe, their eyes darted left to right, left to right, reminding me of the men sleeping in the weeds. Sleep is important. When I tried to stop, I couldn’t sleep. I mixed rye with zolpidem, olanzapine, codeine, meperidine, alprazolam, bromazepam, diphenhydramine, morphine, apronalide, rilmazafone, flutoprazepam, dextromethorphan, suvorexant, zopiclone, promethazine, daridorexant, bromisoval, zaleplon, ketamine, rilmazafone, chlorpheniramine… Olanzapine made it feel as if my cerebrospinal fluid was boiling. The orexin antagonists made it impossible to assemble a thought. They fluttered away, like raindrops on a windshield. The emptiness in my mind was disorienting. The anticholinergics made me see things. If these substances worked, they became ineffective after a couple nights. Twenty years went by. I didn’t think I could stop. But I needed to. If you don’t drink yourself to death, alcohol stops working the same way it did before. You drink, but you can’t sleep. Instead, you rush outside, blacked out. You don’t feel peace anymore. So, I went to a meeting. I don’t know why I’m ashamed to admit that part of the reason was that in the worst period, I had started re-reading Infinite Jest. I skipped through to the Don Gately sections. I was convinced that there was no way to solve my problems without an ontologically and epistemologically transformative spiritual experience. The self acknowledges and yields to something more powerful than itself. There. But when I attended my first meeting, I heard men talking about resentment. It didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t have any resentment. I couldn’t stop drinking because, if I did, my stomach would hurt, my hands would shake, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep. But I knew I was sick, so I kept going back. I heard men talking about tamping down the sorrow of existence, but I was drinking, I told myself, because I wanted to experience a more extreme enjoyment. So, I drank more. I was sure I couldn’t go on. I stopped sleeping, stared at the ceiling. I went out, found people to drink with, passed out for a few hours. When I got tired of the sprees, I started taking the substances in amounts that would probably be fatal to someone experimenting naively. I believed that many warnings about the dangers of combining central nervous system depressants were good-intentioned fearmongering, but I quickly blew past even the dubious limits I set for myself. I thought I would die in my sleep. When I attended my third meeting, I promised that I would pray. I became a believer. We are all in a crisis that makes it difficult to be human. It’s difficult not to be addicted. And the program is metaphysical and communal, so it is against everything in the modern world that makes us sick and addicted. It is against reason and atomization. You cannot succeed unless you take care of strangers. There is responsibility. You must stand around in the moments after the meeting ends, hearing about the suffering of your brothers. If you are a certain type of person, who feels as if nobody in the world cares about you, you might feel some degree of safety and love. So, I haven’t had a drink in a year. It felt like ten years. Time passed slowly. My life didn’t immediately improve. I didn’t expect it to. I found myself experiencing painful things, without any sort of buffer, or escape, or therapeutic alternative. I prayed and went to meetings. I wrote in a journal. It occurred to me that it’s easy not to drink. It’s easy for me not to drink. Don’t buy liquor. When it’s offered, turn it down and don’t give any reason. Just say you don’t drink. It’s easy enough to pull that off. But it’s hard to live. Everyone’s already realized that, I guess. I didn’t want to admit it. Well, there it is. How long has that been? Well. I’m grateful for everyone that came out tonight.