Double Double (5 page)

After a year or two and a nudge from my son, it was back to Kolmac.

In my defense, I'll say this: Dr. George Kolodner and Jim McMahon (the cofounders of Kolmac) were wrong in thinking that my complaints about the group were an excuse to leave. This time I was in another group and I liked it. These people didn't
think I was a danger to them; they didn't think I was trying to stiff them somehow; they didn't think I was an albatross around their necks.

This time I stayed.

 • • • 

Alcoholics Anonymous's prescription for success is ninety meetings in ninety days. If you can do that, you have a fighting chance at long-term sobriety.

I would imagine that anyone who attended a meeting every day for three months would be well on his way. Ninety meetings would make attending a habit, and anyone willing to go to ninety meetings in ninety days isn't just dropping by to see if A.A. suits him.

I wasn't that person. I really tried, though. All told, I went to perhaps twenty or twenty-five meetings. I went to meetings in Georgetown, Santa Fe, Seattle, Jackson, London, Martha's Vineyard, and even Florence, Italy. Georgetown and Santa Fe, for the most part, since I lived in both places. The one in Jackson was about as far removed from the sunny slopes of Jackson Hole as one could get. The meeting took place in a church basement; it was a congenial gathering of guys in boots and Stetsons with tobacco-stained fingers and a couple of women in fringed skirts. Yes, that's what they wore in Jackson.

Every drinker knows the pleasant anticipation of a party: the crowded smoky room, the drink in hand, the one or two you had ahead of time to oil up. Everyone standing around with glasses and small things to eat and cigarettes.

The meetings had this odd schema of a party—you know, the way a party breaks up into little groups. One group hung around
the coffee urn (which, in happier times, would have been the drinks table); another group stood near the door smoking; another was off in a corner, munching on cookies.

A meeting was as uncomfortable for me as a party because I could never seem to attach myself to one group or another until I'd had a few drinks. I think that most alcoholics feel this way. Alcohol is the grease or the lubricant that eases us into social situations. Deprived of it, I would stand around like a stick. A drink was a kind of compass that would point me in the right direction in a social gathering. Without it—to my alcoholic way of thinking—there was no True North.

To me, an A.A. meeting made for a very dingy, poor, bleak party, with its coffee and cookies, since A.A. does not have money to waste on parties. It felt a little like a run-down country club to which I hadn't been offered membership. So set down extreme self-consciousness as one reason for not liking the general atmosphere before the meetings.

I disliked the self-fulfilling prophecy of the twelve-step program. I did not object to the twelve steps themselves (well, not most of them), but I did object to the sleight of hand that said if you go back to drinking, it's because you didn't follow the twelve steps. That strikes me as saying you're drinking because you're drinking.

It wasn't that I disdained meetings, and I certainly didn't disdain the people who attended them. I had the same problem with A.A. that I had with the clinic—trying to analyze everything. Except that in meetings, people let you go ahead and say any dumb thing you wanted to, including whatever negative things you had to throw out about not liking A.A. It might be the only place where one experiences total acceptance.

That was during the meetings. Before and after, I felt invisible. There was the circle at the end, the Lord's Prayer (which struck me as leaning a little too far away from A.A.'s espoused secularity). It didn't end every meeting; many ended with the A.A. prayer: “Give us the strength to change what we can,” et cetera. But I do recall joining hands in a circle—indeed, a double circle because there were so many present. I kept trying to wedge my way in but was always a shade too late, and another hand was grasped, not mine. I didn't make the cut. This affected me deeply. I blamed myself for not trying hard enough, but how hard do you have to try just to get in the circle?

It's possible that I'm what A.A. calls a “dry drunk.” (I dislike the designation because I believe jargon and slogans have limited usefulness. But A.A. likes them, possibly for that very reason. “Keep It Simple,” so you don't start overcorrecting the ambivalence by hauling in all of the reasons for not drinking, which undoubtedly would lead you to haul in all the reasons in favor of drinking. The slogan is equivalent to “Just Say No.”)

A dry drunk is one who doesn't have a drink but is still holding on to the glass. You're not waiting for the host to come over and fill it, but you are aloft, or afloat, or in drinker's limbo, somewhere other than with your sober feet on the ground. This state of mind has you clinging to the shreds of your old drinking existence; you're the undead.

The trouble is, you've got this empty glass, but you're not seeking something to fill it instead of vodka. A.A. (and the clinic) wants your life refashioned, since it was the old way of living that got you into the mess to begin with. I've never exactly understood the nature of the refashioned life, that is, beyond the obvious: One doesn't hang out in bars with former drinking buddies. Indeed, I
think one injunction mightily severe: You also get rid of the drinking buddies. Throw out the baby with the bathtub full of gin. I doubt that affected many of us, as friends are generally there to do more than bend an elbow on a bar.

I find the concept of the rearranged life is fuzzy. What are the old “habits”—besides drinking—that one is supposed to jettison? If you're a tennis player, are you supposed to stop? If you play the violin, are you supposed to lay down your bow? The only concrete examples of what you're not supposed to do are 1) drinking; and 2) hanging out with your drinking friends. I've noted this before. I've also noted that it's blindingly obvious. The only thing I've ever heard argued is the hanging out with friends. But I have never been given any other concrete examples of what one is not supposed to do.

As with the cryptic slogans, I think the nebulous advice to stop doing what you were doing before is fairly useless. At best, rearranging one's life has limited value.

 • • • 

My life is largely a writing one. Almost exclusively a writing one. Before, it might have been a writing and drinking one. Now that it's no longer a drinking one, that leaves the writing one. I don't see how I can stop doing that, even if I thought I should. And I don't.

FIRST CONVERSATION: GENERATIONS

MG
: It seems to me, whenever I see teenagers and their parents represented in a film or read it in a book or magazine article, the teenager is always obnoxious in his attempts to get out from under the watchful eye of the parents. You weren't. You were usually charming, and that's one of the reasons I didn't really notice a lot that was going on.

KG
: Once I started drinking beer and smoking pot behind your back, if you weren't the enemy, you were certainly the jail warden. And like any convict, I had to get over on you. I was no longer a little kid, but I wasn't an adult; I was an adolescent on an alcohol- and drug-fueled tear, and nothing was going to get in my way, including you. The traditional things to look for in teenage drug or alcohol abuse are grades slipping, petty lawbreaking, a belligerent attitude, and a different set of friends. I grew my hair long, and that changed my appearance, but you didn't seem to mind. A lot of people had long hair in the 1970s; it was the style for men. The paramount concern for me when I started “partying” was getting away with it, and I knew the best way to get away with it was to fake everything in front of you and my teachers—all authority figures.

MG
: Me being the primary authority figure, since I had to play the role of both mother and father after your father's disappearing act.

KG
: You bet. As you said, I must have had a natural degree of charm, and without even realizing it, I doubled down on
that aspect of my personality. I know I consciously tried to make people laugh so they'd like me. Also, I was never one of those teenagers who wanted to do shit like boost things from the 7-Eleven or get in fights or steal from people's cars. I just wanted to get high and party with my friends and chase girls. My question for you is: Did you have any idea what was going on, or were you in denial and trying to fool yourself? Remember that time when you picked me up from school and asked me why my eyes were so red and I said it was because of my allergies? Did you know my eyes were red from smoking too much pot? Did you believe that half-assed lie? I was stoned out of my gourd.

MG
: I had no idea at all. There are two things. One is that I really didn't know about marijuana smoking back then. I knew nothing about drugs, and I would have had no idea it made your eyes red. The second thing is you were lightning quick with your answers. If you had stammered or stuttered and seemed nervous or guilty, I would have been suspicious. You were always in there with the answers, every single time. I still remember standing in the kitchen when you were in high school, and I was telling you a whole series of things I wanted you to do. You just stood there nodding, dutiful.
   I'll bet when you were stoned, you stood and looked me right in the eye, like a victim of locked-in syndrome. You had a peculiar ability to muffle this stuff. I knew there was something going on in the woods after you got caught by the teachers in ninth grade for smoking pot. It was a failure on my part that I didn't do more about that.

KG
: You had no idea? You didn't smell the marijuana on my clothes or on my breath? Because I was high constantly
from the second half of ninth grade through my junior year of high school.

MG
: No. That's what I said: I wouldn't have known what I was smelling.

KG
: On the other side, I knew many kids who've told me about their drug use and drinking, and they would always tell me about their parents, many of whom were drunks. They couldn't invite their friends over; the parents were passed out on the couch. That wasn't the case with you, because you drank but never showed the effects. I can think of only a handful of times that I thought you might be drunk, which is amazing, considering your martinis had at least three shots of vodka in them, and you drank at least two a night, along with some wine. The effects were more joking. And when you got together with your brother or some of your college-teacher friends, the witticisms had more of an edge. You were probably reenacting what you went through with Mrs. D., your mother's business partner, who was so jovial during the first few drinks but then could become quite cutting in her comments.

MG
: Yes and no. There was a big difference: Mrs. D. got completely paranoid and consequently unapproachable and inexplicable. I didn't, nor did my brother, nor my friends, ever go that far. Mrs. D. was so much fun in the beginning. But she could become completely irrational.

KG
: Alcoholics are usually very undependable. But your drinking never impaired your driving, you never missed a day of work, dinner was always on the table, so I never really understood what was going on when you lost your temper over what I thought were pretty small issues, or suddenly became furious and got in an argument. It was
because of the booze, but I didn't know that. I remember one time in college going to a friend's home; he told me in advance how funny his dad was and how much he liked to drink. I met him, and the first thing he did was pull out a bottle of vodka. But what got me was he pulled out a fifth of vodka, and I just assumed that all parents who drank kept half-gallon jugs, like you did, with the built-in handle. His bottle seemed hilariously small in comparison. I knew there was excitement around drinking, I loved making your martinis, I was a bartender at one of your parties when I was twelve.

MG
: God.

KG
: And it was confusing because there must have been times when you were hungover or not feeling well, or the alcohol was making your depression worse. I couldn't figure out what was going wrong. I never connected the second or third martini with your getting angry and frustrated.

MG
: Isn't that one of the troubles right there, that people don't or can't make a connection between alcohol and quixotic behavior? I had no idea about alcoholism when I was twenty-five, couldn't even imagine it. I would imagine some people would say to me that I didn't know what you were doing because I denied it, and I suppose that's a possibility, but on the other hand, there was such a gap between the 1950s and the 1970s, between your generation and mine. I mean, when I grew up, the only drug I knew about was cigarettes, and the first time I smoked a cigarette, I was a senior in high school—and my mother bought me my first carton of cigarettes when I graduated.
   There were no drugs for me and my friends. They just weren't there. I remained stupid about drugs except
alcohol for most of my life and most of yours. I found your pipe in the basement when you were a senior in high school, and I didn't say anything about it. I don't know why; I just really didn't know what it was for. Of course, when you were suspended in the ninth grade for smoking pot, I took you to a drug counselor at a halfway house—that was the level of sophistication about teenage drug use in 1979—and he told me you didn't have a problem.

KG
: Yeah, I really got off the hook then, because I hadn't graduated to harder drugs yet, and my pot smoking wasn't completely out of control at that point. I hadn't earned the nickname of “Spent Ken” (as in burned out from smoking too much pot) yet; that happened in tenth grade. If I had told my counselor the truth at age sixteen, he would have enrolled me in that halfway house immediately. But at that point, the truth was in my favor, and the counselor didn't see occasional pot smoking as a real problem.