Chapter 13: Me An Alcoholic?
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Alcohol's wringer squeezed this author---but he escaped quite whole.
WHEN I TRY to reconstruct what my life was like "before," I see a coin with
two faces.
One, the side I turned to myself and the world, was respectable---even, in
some ways, distinguished. I was father, husband, taxpayer, home owner. I was
clubman, athlete, artist, musician, author, editor, aircraft pilot, and
world traveler. I was listed in Who's Who in America as an American who, by
distinguished achievement, had arrived.
The other side of the coin was sinister, baffling. I was inwardly unhappy
most of the time. There would be times when the life of respectability and
achievement seemed insufferably dull---I had to break out. This I would do
by going completely "bohemian" for a night, getting drunk, and rolling home
with the dawn. Next day, remorse would be on me like a tiger. I'd claw my
way back to respectability and stay there---until the inevitable next time.
The insidiousness of alcoholism is an appalling thing. In all the
twenty-five years of my drinking, there were only a few occasions when I
took a morning drink. My binges were one-night stands only. Once or twice,
during my early drinking, I carried it over into the second day, and only
once, that I can remember, did it continue into the third. I was never drunk
on the job, never missed a day's work, was seldom rendered totally
ineffective by a hangover, and kept my liquor expenses well within my
adequate budget. I continued to advance in my chosen field. How could such a
man possibly be called an alcoholic? Whatever the root of my unhappiness
might turn out to be, I thought, it could not possibly be booze.
Of course I drank. Everybody did in the set which I regarded as the apex of
civilization. My wife loved to drink, and we tied on many a hooter in the
name of marital bliss. My associates, and all the wits and literary lights I
so much admired, also drank. Evening cocktails were as standard as morning
coffee, and I suppose my average daily consumption ran a little more or less
than a pint. Even on my rare (at first) binge nights, it never ran much over
a quart.
How easy it was, in the beginning, to forget that those binges ever
happened! After a day or two of groveling remorse, I'd come up with an
explanation. "The nervous tension had piled up and just had to spill over."
Or, "My physical plant had got a little rundown and the stuff rushed right
to my head." Or, "I got to talking and forgot how many I was taking and it
hit me." Always we'd emerge with a new formula for avoiding future trouble.
"You've got to space your drinks and take plenty of water in between," or
"Coat the stomach with a little olive oil," or "Drink anything but those
damn martinis." Weeks would go by without further trouble, and I'd be
assured I'd at last hit on the right formula. The binge had been just "one
of those things." After a month it seemed unlikely that it happened.
Intervals between binges were eight months.
My growing inward unhappiness was a very real thing, however, and I knew
that something would have to be done about it. A friend had found help in
psychoanalysis. After a particularly ugly one-nighter, my wife suggested I
try it, and I agreed. Educated child of the scientific age that I was, I had
complete faith in the science of the mind. It would be a sure cure and also
an adventure. How exciting to learn the inward mysteries that govern the
behavior of people, how wonderful to know, at last, all about myself! To cut
a long story short, I spent seven years and \$10,000 on my psychiatric
adventure, and emerged in worse condition than ever.
To be sure, I learned many fascinating things and many things that were to
prove helpful later. I learned what a devastating effect it can have on a
child to coddle him and build him up, and then turn and beat him savagely,
as had happened to me.
Meanwhile I was getting worse, both as regards my inward misery and my
drinking. My daily alcoholic consumption remained about the same through all
this, with perhaps a slight increase, and my binges remained one-nighters.
But they were occurring with alarming frequency. In seven years the
intervals between them decreased from eight months to ten days! And they
were growing uglier. One night I barely made my downtown club; if I'd had to
go another fifty feet, I'd have collapsed in the gutter. On another occasion
I arrived home covered with blood. I'd deliberately smashed a window. With
all this it was becoming increasingly hard to maintain my front of
distinction and respectability to the world. My personality was stretched
almost to splitting in the effort; schizophrenia stared me in the face, and
one night I was in a suicidal despair.
My professional life looked fine on the surface. I was now head of a
publishing venture in which nearly a million dollars had been invested. My
opinions were quoted in Time and Newsweek along with pictures. I addressed
the public by radio and TV. It was a fantastic structure, built on a
crumbling foundation. It was tottering and it had to fall. It did.
After my last binge I came home and smashed my dining room furniture to
splinters, kicked out six windows and two balustrades. When I woke up sober,
my handiwork confronted me. It is impossible for me to reproduce my despair.
I'd had absolute faith in science, and only in science. "Knowledge is
power," I'd always been taught. Now I had to face up to the fact that
knowledge of this sort, applied to my individual case, was not power.
Science could take my mind apart expertly, but it couldn't seem to put it
together again. I crawled back to my analyst, not so much because I had
faith in him, but because I had nowhere else to turn.
After talking with him for a time, I heard myself saying, "Doc, I think I'm
an alcoholic."
"Yes," he said, surprisingly, "you are."
"Then why in God's name haven't you told me so during all these years?"
"Two reasons," he said. "First, I couldn't be sure. The line between a heavy
drinker and an alcoholic is not always clear. It wasn't until just lately
that, in your case, I could draw it. Second, you wouldn't have believed me
even if I had told you."
I had to admit to myself that he was right. Only through being beaten down
by my own misery would I ever have accepted the term "alcoholic" as applied
to myself. Now, however, I accepted it fully. I knew from my general reading
that alcoholism was irreversible and fatal. And I knew that somewhere along
the line I'd lost the power to stop drinking. "Well, Doc," I said, "what are
we going to do?"
"There's nothing I can do," he said, "and nothing medicine can do. However,
I've heard of an organization called Alcoholics Anonymous that has had some
success with people like you. They make no guarantees and are not always
successful. But if you want to, you're free to try them. It might work."
Many times in the intervening years I have thanked God for that man, a man
who had the courage to admit failure, a man who had the humility to confess
that all the hard-won learning of his profession could not turn up the
answer. I looked up an A.A. meeting and went there---alone.
Here I found an ingredient that had been lacking in any other effort I had
made to save myself. Here was---power! Here was power to live to the end of
any given day, power to have the courage to face the next day, power to have
friends, power to help people, power to be sane, power to stay sober. That
was seven years ago---and many A.A. meetings ago---and I haven't had a drink
during those seven years. More-over, I am deeply convinced that so long as I
continue to strive, in my bumbling way, toward the principles I first
encountered in the earlier chapters of this book, this remarkable power will
continue to flow through me. What is this power? With my A.A. friends, all I
can say is that it's a Power greater than myself. If pressed, all I can do
is follow the psalmist who said it long before me: "Be still, and know that
I am God."
My story has a happy ending but not of the conventional kind. I had a lot
more hell to go through. But what a difference there is between going
through hell without a Power greater than one's self, and with it! As might
have been predicted, my teetering tower of worldly success collapsed. My
alcoholic associates fired me, took control, and ran the enterprise into
bankruptcy. My alcoholic wife took up with someone else, divorced me, and
took with her all my remaining property. The most terrible blow of my life
befell me after I'd found sobriety through A.A. Perhaps the single flicker
of decency that shone through the fog of my drinking days was a clumsy
affection for my two children, a boy and a girl. One night my son, when he
was only sixteen, was suddenly and tragically killed. The Higher Power was
on deck to see me through, sober. I think He's on hand to see my son through
too.
There have been some wonderful things too. My new wife and I don't own any
property to speak of, and the flashy successes of another day are no longer
mine. But we have a baby who, if you'll pardon a little post-alcoholic
sentimentality, is right out of heaven. My work is on a much deeper and more
significant level than it ever was before, and I am today a fairly creative,
relatively sane human being. And should I have more bad times, I know that
I'll never again have to go through them alone.