Double Double (6 page)

MG
: Yes, so there's another example. Combine that with the headmaster at your high school, who was so blasé when I confronted him about the pot smoking in the woods. He said, “What do you expect me to do, put a fence around the woods?” I was astonished at his thinking he was unable to do anything. These were the people in charge, and they refused to take your behavior seriously, to take action.

KG
: And you sent me back to my childhood psychiatrist when I was fourteen. I had seen him when I was six and off and on through elementary school. But he wasn't interested in my pot smoking; he was interested in how I felt. So I went to my weekly sessions stoned. He did tell me once that if I kept on getting high, we weren't going to get anywhere,
but he really didn't see drinking and getting high as a problem unto itself.

MG
: No, but give him some credit. You yourself claim that addiction is a symptom (while at the same time claiming it's a disease—work that out, will you?); clearly, a psychiatrist believes that, and wants to get at the way you feel, since the way you feel is the problem, not what you're taking to douse the feelings. My own psychiatrist simply didn't believe I was an alcoholic, which was what I wanted to hear. I argued with him about it, I said I do this, I drink this many martinis, and he just let it go. My editor couldn't believe it when I said I was an alcoholic, either.

KG
: Because he was an alcoholic!

MG
: Maybe, but that's not the point. A number of my friends could have been alcoholic or had a “drinking problem.” The trouble is that people think that it's so clear-cut; they think that an alcoholic is just someone who gets drunk and falls down, acts like a drunk. But that's often not the case. It wasn't with me for decades.
   Psychiatrists want to figure out what the underlying problem is, and their record for getting people sober is very poor. I don't think you can manage your drinking without eventually going right back to where you were, drinking uncontrollably every day. Consequently, it's both difficult and simple—what is lying behind wanting to pick up that glass of booze is a massive complex of reasons, all tangled up together. You don't understand what you're up against. You have no idea.

KG
: That's for sure.

MG
: Also, I feel that you had too many advantages. For instance, when it came to responsibility for financial commitments, you knew nothing. You never really
understood the cost of your college education, you just thought I should pay it for it, and I say that makes you at least somewhat spoiled. You've said that you think you were selfish and self-centered but not spoiled? What's the difference?

KG
: Well, to me, a person can be an extremely hard worker and put on a good front, but he's still essentially thinking about himself with little regard for other people's feelings. “Spoiled” is someone who expects to receive a lot with very little effort, doesn't have to work hard for what he receives, has been overpraised for his abilities, and thinks he should win just by showing up.

MG
: What about your behavior from high school graduation through college and beyond? My feeling is that you should have gone to the University of Maryland, because I had to pay for most of it, and that was all I could afford.

KG
: That's completely different. Look, people in twelve-step programs see it like this: Because things were so bad for me at the University of Iowa, it was crucial to my getting sober. It had to be terrible enough for me to even consider stopping drinking. I collapsed three years after graduating from college and got sober. Your point is valid, the University of Maryland is what you could afford, it was in-state, Iowa was out of state and much more expensive and I practically died there, but it sped up the process, and I got sober when I was twenty-five instead of thirty-five or forty-five.

MG
: There's something wrong with that argument. What I'm talking about when it comes to spoiled is overindulgent parents. When I think of it now, letting you go to college at a place I couldn't afford was wrong for that reason and that reason alone. I was indulging your desire to get away
when what I should have said was too bad, you have to go to UM. After you got to Iowa, your behavior was terrible. You spent too much money, didn't take difficult enough classes, didn't get good enough grades.

KG
: Yeah, and that's where I went off the deep end.

MG
: The Western Union scam for five hundred dollars was outlandish and a real example of the streak in your nature of putting stuff over on me.

KG
: I tried to put things over on you, all right. And you're talking about a generational difference. With my generation and my sons', I'm wise to the game, so there's no being caught off guard—

MG
: Oh, really? Well, good luck with
that
!

KG
: No, no. They could try, but my kids would have a very hard time outfoxing me. I wrote the book on that. Children not really understanding their parents drinking, parents not really understanding what their children are doing, whether it's how much they're drinking or if they're sneaking drugs or not. That will never change, the back and forth, it's so hard to gauge the amount and the effect.

MG
: I guess I just assumed you would do what I did—wait until college before you started seriously drinking.

KG
: Yes, your drinking started slowly and then escalated when you were in your twenties, right? Mine began in earnest when I was fourteen. And you didn't have the drugs to complicate everything. Some teenagers supposedly can “drink safely,” whatever that means. But how much is that? One beer? Four beers? Are “boys going to be boys” and get up to hijinks with drinking, and is that just a normal rite of passage? Some parents tolerate a degree of drinking under their watch so as to take the forbidden-fruit
aspect of it away, the allure of it. Some parents have zero tolerance, some don't pay attention, no one knows how much is too much until it's obvious, like a drunken car wreck or getting busted. With you, I was consuming far too much alcohol and drugs, and I was able to hide it, and when I went to college, I didn't have to hide anything anymore.
   That's where all of a sudden I went off the cliff, because I didn't have to fake it anymore. I tried to use my girlfriends as a way of controlling it, using them as a kind of governor to throttle back on my consumption. That would work temporarily, then we would break up and I would step on the gas. I used my first job out of college as a control mechanism; I would just party on the weekends, but that made me miserable.
   Then I crashed.

T
he number of drinks I had every evening is a bit of a blur (how surprising!), but I'd guess four or five martinis. And one has to consider who's making the martinis. One of mine might equal two of any bartender's.

I did this drinking before dinner, always, never after. I never wanted to drink afterward. And I always ate dinner. One might ask, If you only drank during cocktail hour, what's the problem?

How long is your cocktail hour?

I stopped drinking between Christmas and New Year's—to be more exact, on New Year's Eve. But wait a minute: I stopped before,
before,
the magic hour of midnight, New Year's Eve. I stopped despite a dinner date at a swank restaurant. Why didn't I allow myself that one last wonderful binge, like any sane alcoholic would do?

Because I told myself it would be better not to turn those last
wee hours into some grand drama of martyrdom and sacrifice. In other words, don't lend the occasion too much significance. Better not to allow alcohol center stage; better not to clothe it in such gorgeous raiment that I would let it precede me to my table. No, let it walk around in rags, let it be refused admittance to the dining room. Sorry, Stoli, not this time. Goodbye, Grey Goose, go fly in somebody else's airspace. Henceforth, I will walk in on the arm of sobriety. I will refuse to attach a lot of importance to drinking.

As if I could. The notion that any alcoholic could attach too much importance to drinking only shows how naive I was.

Naive and arrogant. I didn't wait until New Year's Day to stop, because I insisted upon having a handle on drinking before I even knew what a handle was. I had no idea what I was up against. I was, admittedly, extremely proud of myself. And you should be proud of yourself, considering what you're placing on the table; just not as proud of yourself as I was five minutes after I'd stopped. Wait at least half a day before you're proud of yourself.

Arrogance got me through both New Year's Eve and the week that followed. I remember walking past a bar in Georgetown, looking in, thinking, Oh, you poor guys, look at you, finding the only happiness you can in booze. How pathetic.

But then the next week, after I'd been kicked out of Arrogance, Inc., I was back at that bar with my nose pressed up against the glass, mouthing, Please, sir, another helping of gin, please.

There's something simple about drinking: You can stop only by stopping. “How do I—?”, for an alcoholic, is the wrong question, because there is no “how.”

“You're saying that I'm supposed to stop something so entrenched in my psyche I can't tell where the drink on the bar ends and the rest of me begins?”

That's right.

“—the one thing that makes my entire life supportable?”

Yes.

“—that'll get me through those boring parties?” (Or lively ones.)

Right.

“—and without something to put in its place?”

Because there is nothing to put in its place. Nothing substitutes for your drug of choice, for the substance of an addiction. What would you put in its place? Food? There is nothing that the bartender can put on the bar, or the waiter on the table; nothing cooked up by Jamie Oliver or Julia Child or all the chefs at the Bellagio that would make up for the loss of a dry martini.

You stop by stopping.

Intelligence has nothing to do with it. Understanding has nothing to do with it, which is the reason psychiatry has never had much luck with alcoholic patients. Alcoholics Anonymous might be considered a “how to stop.” But even there, it isn't “how.” Although the twelve steps might look like a directive, I don't think they are; the steps are simply supportive (which is not to diminish their importance). The twelve-step program is not a way of toning down your drinking; it is not a method that tells you how many drinks to have and in what proportion and at what time and with what ingredients. That's because the twelve-step program is not a methodology but an ideology: The intent is to change your life. It is not telling you how best to drink but how best to live.

You might compare it with dieting. There is every manner of recipe advising you how to take the pounds off: what to eat and how much of it, all the substitutions you can make for high-fat food, how much of this to consume and how much of that. Dieting
is a methodology, with hundreds of new variations coming out every year. Its instructions, its recipes, are precise.

There's no recipe for ending an addiction. Unless you consider this one: Here is a glass. It has vodka in it. Do not pick it up.

 • • • 

In the Kolmac Clinic, there was one rule: If you decided to quit treatment, you would come for one last session and tell the rest of us “Goodbye-and-why-I'm-leaving.” This was never a popular assignment for those who were quitting.

The reason the quitters gave was always the same: “Since I've been here, I've learned that I can control my drinking,” or some variation on that theme. “I believe I can take one or two drinks now without slipping back into my old ways.”

No, you can't.

Such reasoning always astonished me, since it was precisely that inability that landed the person in the clinic in the first place.

Ah, yes, I can take one drink . . .

The blessed first drink that goes down like fire stolen from the gods (and you can bet they're looking forward to payback), the deliverance, the relief from the sharp-edged day, from party anxiety, from boredom outside and in-, from the empty night.

It's at least as good as holy water. You relax and become not exactly another person but a better version of this one. Who would not want to hold on to that feeling? You'd have to be mad not to want to. So here comes the tray with the fresh drinks, and you take one, which is the second one, the one you told yourself you weren't going to have. A little later, the third one steals in on little glass feet.

You can fool around with recipes. You can set limits for yourself.
Perhaps you'll become a weekend drinker. You can try it, but it probably won't work, or not for long. Indeed, it only prolongs the misery. If you start weekend drinking, you'll still have five days to get through, and you'll spend them waiting for the weekend.

The weekend becomes the only time you feel alive. It's Friday. Let's live! So you spring the cork or pop the top or twist the cap. This will work, you think. And for a while it does. For one or two weekends, or a month or two, or even six months.

But listen: What of the wasting away of the rest of the week? Of those blighted five days? The five days you can hardly wait to end, to get to the weekend.

There are any number of variations on this theme: “I only drink at parties,” “I only drink after dinner,” “I only drink during the Sunday game,” “I only drink to unwind after work, especially on Fridays, with the other working stiffs.”

The problem was that I couldn't stop. I decided not to drink on any given night. I tried to do this any number of times. Sometimes it worked; more often it didn't. A few times I told myself I wouldn't drink for several days. I was back to drinking within forty-eight hours. I wouldn't have lasted a week in the weekend-drinking scheme. The question was not whether I was an alcoholic—I was pretty sure of that—no, the question was, did I want to be?