Quitter

by Erica C. Barnett

  What happened next? Well, I remember yelling. I remember Nick telling me to shush. I remember that “shush” making me madder than it felt like I’d ever been. (“Drunk people tell the truth,” goes one recovery maxim. I guess the truth is that I’m an angry drunk.) I don’t remember puking all over my little cousin’s bedroom. I don’t remember passing out on the guest bedroom floor. I remember my uncle cracking the door open a few merciless hours later and telling Nick, “You have to leave.” I remember thinking that if I just kept my eyes closed, he would change his mind. And I remember him adding, “Now.”

  I scrambled from my spot on the floor, pulled on my clothes from the night before, and staggered out into the early-morning sunlight, Nick trailing behind me, suitcase in hand. Slowly, the enormity of what I had done started to sink in. Lisa and Alex would never invite me to stay at their house again, obviously, and my parents would find out, and everyone would gossip, and they’d talk behind my back about “Erica’s problem,” and I’d have to avoid family events from now on, and my parents would probably be ostracized, too, and it wouldn’t be long before none of them would even talk to me, and, and . . .

  These self-flagellation sessions typically ended with me dying alone, in the gutter, a plastic bottle of Burnett’s Vodka dangling from my hand. But there was no time for the usual denouement, because I had a very angry, very concerned, very imposing boyfriend to contend with. And he was standing right in front of me, waiting for some kind of acknowledgment. I looked up at him, the thin California sunlight stabbing my eyes, and started to wail.

  “What am I going to do?”

  He took a long pause, assessed me, and said, “You need to quit drinking.”

  “I know. But I don’t know how.”

  I knew that I needed to quit—we both needed to, although my own drinking had eclipsed his some time ago. But inside, I was already thinking about where my next drink would come from.

  “Shh.” Nick folded me up in his big arms. My mascara stained his crisp, untucked white button-down. “All will be well.”

  In fact, it got much, much worse.

  Eleven

  Wake-up Call

  I don’t remember why I stopped going in to work; I only know that Nick and I had hosted a party the previous weekend and something had gone terribly wrong. Blackouts are merciful in one respect—you can’t remember exactly how you offended everybody, you just know that you probably shouldn’t call them for a while.

  What I do recall is what happened later: a screaming, dish-throwing fight with Nick. Accusations—something about me hiding the booze from the party and drinking it in secret—and denials. (“Why would I do that? There’s alcohol all over this house. Someone must have stolen it from the party!”) My decision, if you can call it that, to start drinking and just keep drinking, day after day after day. The phone ringing on Monday morning, then Tuesday, then Wednesday—Josh, calling from work, wondering where I was. Increasingly implausible excuses. Climbing up onto the counter to reach the spot above the highest cabinet, up where the stagnant summer air was hottest, where Nick had hidden a gallon bottle of gin. The taste of that gin as I guzzled it straight from the bottle—like rubbing alcohol filtered through a Christmas tree. Light turning into dark into light through the drawn red-velvet curtains, as I lay in bed and ignored Nick’s footsteps outside the door. Occasional trips out of the room to swallow a handful of nuts, or a piece of pizza, remembering in my more lucid moments that a person must eat food to survive. A haze that wouldn’t lift. And sleep. Fitful, but near constant sleep.

  Nick was about to leave for a long business trip, and I avoided him as much as I could avoid someone who lived in the same house—waiting until he had closed his bedroom door before venturing out to the bathroom, or rifling through the cupboard to see if I’d missed a dusty bottle. He worked just as hard to avoid me, and who could blame him? I was a sinkhole in the middle of his house, and all he could do was tiptoe around me, waiting for me to collapse.

  When I finally called for help, I didn’t ask Nick; that would have meant admitting he was right—about me, about my drinking, about everything I had ever claimed he was wrong about. Instead, while Nick was out at work, I called Josh. I didn’t explain where I’d been; I didn’t apologize. I just told him I needed to quit drinking. “Can you come over?” I asked weakly. He hesitated. “Sure.”

  While I waited, I drank, and while I drank, I called detox facilities, which I understood to be places people go when they want to get sober without the embarrassment and disruption of rehab. As I later learned, medically supervised detox is critical for full-time alcoholics like I was—people who detox alone put themselves at risk of delirium tremens, severe dehydration, and seizures, any of which can lead to death. Detox programs provide medication, hydration, vitamins, and twenty-four-hour supervision.

  Rehab, also known as treatment, is a longer program, usually a month or more, designed to take you out of regular life for a while and teach you the skills you’ll need to stay sober and cope with your problems in the real world. I knew a little about rehab from the many addiction memoirs I’d read over the years, usually with a bottle in my hand, but at this point, that kind of long-term treatment wasn’t remotely on the menu. As far as I was concerned, I was still superhuman, the person who had torn through every obstacle in front of her through willpower alone. The only reason I needed detox, I thought, was that my mind was temporarily clouded, which made it hard to quit on my own. I even had a term for what I was after: A hard reset. I didn’t know yet, nor did Josh, that addiction isn’t like a button you can unpush.

  The first thing I discovered when I called around looking for a detox bed is that it’s not like booking a hotel. Most of the places told me to call back the next day, or put my name on a waiting list for a bed that might open up in a week or more. (Forget the hotel analogy—imagine calling the hospital with a broken leg and having them tell you to call back in a week.) Finally, one place—the detox unit at a high-end Catholic hospital in northwest Seattle—said they had an opening the next day. They just had to ask a few questions. Number one: “How much do you drink?”

  For the first time since I had started drinking in secret, back when I was hitting the bars with a bottle in my purse, I told the truth. “About . . . eight or ten drinks a day? But in the past few days, a lot more. Maybe twelve or fifteen.” It didn’t feel good to tell the truth. But it did feel like cracking a door.

  * * *

  —

  The doorbell rang, and I quickly swallowed the last inch of Gordon’s and shoved the bottle into a suitcase with a dozen other empties. Josh walked in, assessed the situation, and told me we were going out. “Hode on, I need to gerready,” I slurred. Then I disappeared into the bathroom.

  “Are you drinking in there?”

  “No! I’m just brushing my teeth.” Indignant, because I was telling the truth: I had stopped drinking right before he got there.

  When I finally unlocked the door, Josh stormed through the bathroom, zeroing in on a bottle of mouthwash.

  “Have you been drinking that?” he demanded.

  “No!” I said, looking repulsed. “I would never drink mouthwash!” Jesus. I wasn’t some wino.

  “Besides,” I added after several beats, “it’s nonackoholic.”

  My detox appointment was the following afternoon, so all I had to do was get through the next sixteen hours. Josh and I headed up to my old neighborhood, Capitol Hill, to a screening of Man on Wire, a documentary about the French tightrope walker who walked between the Twin Towers in 1974. It’s a strange, beautiful film about someone who risked his life for reasons that would strike most reasonable people as absurd.

  I didn’t even have reasons, really.

  Why did I start drinking in the first place?

  Why hadn’t I just quit on my own?

  Why had I let it come to this?

  I didn’t k
now. It had just turned out that way.

  After the movie ended, Josh put me in a cab. His brow furrowed. “Don’t drink, okay?” I had sobered up quite a bit. “I feel like I’m going to die,” I said. “But I don’t know how to stop.” Josh held my hand fiercely, told me it was going to be okay, and said he’d see me in the morning. Later, he told me that he thought this was the first step in the straightforward process of recovery, the kind we’ve all learned about from watching movies like 28 Days or reading inspiring stories by alcoholics who got better: Quit drinking, go to AA, live soberly ever after. I really thought it would be like that. All I had to do was make this one difficult decision and the rest would fall into place.

  By the time Josh picked me up the next day, Nick had gotten rid of all the booze in the house. He was heading to New Zealand for a speaking gig the following afternoon, and although he had offered a half-hearted expression of regret for going, there was never any question of my asking him to stay so he could be home when I got out.

  By now, sixteen hours after my last drink, I was a mess of nerves. Sweat poured from my forehead and darkened my collar as Josh and I walked slowly through the mild summer morning, killing time in the neighborhood while we waited for my afternoon check-in time. It was late August—a few weeks before my thirty-first birthday—and far too bright. “How are we going to get you through the next hour?” Josh asked.

  “How about a drink?”

  In lieu of a crisp, cold glass of white wine—which would be totally normal at this hour, by the way—we wandered around, looking in the windows of gift stores and froyo shops. All the people seemed so aggressively normal, and I tried to reassure myself that one day soon, I would be, too. “This is just a bump,” I said, my voice shaky with exertion. “All I need to do is get through this, and get off the booze for at least right now, and I’ll be fine. I think maybe I’ll even be able to have a glass of wine with dinner eventually. I mean, not right away. But someday. Don’t you think?” Josh started to say something, thought better of it, and led me through the doors to the hospital bed that I thought would be my wake-up call.

  The physical part of withdrawal is no joke—estimates of the death rate for people with delirium tremens, a severe withdrawal symptom, range from 5 to 25 percent—but the psychological aspect is what hits you like a hammer. Existential dread is such an inadequate term. What you feel is the certainty that you’ve fucked everything up so bad that it can never be unfucked again. Every step felt like I was walking on broken limbs, every ray of sunlight was an arrow through my corneas, but the physical pain was at least a distraction from the despair. What I realized then, well past the point of turning back, was that I would never feel better again. I knew, in some bone-deep way, that nothing in that cold, ammonia-scented building would ever make me well.

  There’s a scientific explanation for this feeling, having to do with chemicals called neurotransmitters, which keep your mood in balance. Alcohol, like heroin and Valium, is a depressant, and if you drink a lot of it on a regular basis, like I did, your brain starts to think you’re in a permanent depressive state. To compensate (in technical terms, to return itself to a stable state called homeostasis), the brain pumps out fewer of the “downer” chemicals that produce feelings of well-being and calm, and more of the ones that produce feelings of alertness and arousal—sort of like drinking coffee to counteract the effects of a night of drinking. Take alcohol out of that equation, and you’re left with an excess of stimulating chemicals, combined with a shortage of sedating chemicals to balance them out. The effect is a bit like eating a ton of sugar on an empty stomach—your brain kicks into overdrive and you get an extreme form of the jitters. The effects of this overstimulation can be mild—shakiness, an elevated heart rate, high blood pressure, and sweating—or severe—delirium, hallucinations, convulsions, and seizures. If you’ve ever abruptly stopped taking antidepressants, or quit drinking coffee or cigarettes, you may have experienced a mild version of this—a chemical imbalance that leaves you feeling overstimulated or sluggish.

  Kicking caffeine is a drag—I’ve done it. Kicking heroin will make you feel like you’re going to die. But the most dangerous drug to quit suddenly isn’t heroin, or cocaine, or any other illegal substance—it’s alcohol. When your body is used to high doses of booze, quitting cold turkey can kill you, and the danger can last a week or more. That’s why detox (and access to detox) is so important for alcoholics. Without it, many of us won’t get help; without it, many of those who try to quit on their own will die.

  Of course, I didn’t know any of this back then. All I knew was that I had tried to quit on my own, and found, inexplicably, that I couldn’t.

  Detox wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Movies like Clean and Sober and Trainspotting gave me the impression that quitting would involve a lot of dramatic sweating, scratching, and puking in buckets, but it was actually a lot like staying in a regular hospital, at least once my first dose of Librium—a powerful benzo known in the sixties as mother’s little helper—kicked in. After the nurses had searched my bag and clothes for drugs, booze, or anything containing alcohol, like perfume or Purell, they hooked me up to an IV bag filled with fluids and electrolytes, watched as I swallowed a handful of pills, and left me to chill out in my private hospital room, comfy rubber-soled socks on my feet, remote control at my side.

  If you ignored the IV, beeping machines, and orderlies filing in and out every couple of hours, the place wasn’t so bad. I had a little desk and a door that closed, and access to cable TV whenever I wanted. I could even call down to the front desk to order room service—cheeseburgers, mac and cheese, fettucine Alfredo—at any hour of the day or night. I ate a lot of fettucine in the first couple of days, and drank prodigious amounts of water; even so, I was so dehydrated that a full day passed before I rose to pee, my IV stand clanging beside me as I trundled over to my private bathroom.

  The days went by in a Librium haze. The other patients were scarcely more real than the politicians giving speeches at the Democratic National Convention on the TV in the corner—muffled voices through the walls and hollow-eyed wraiths who looked sicker than I did, trudging around the hallway in robes that hung from their skeletal frames. The care was kind but utilitarian—the nurses and occasional doctor were there to make sure I stabilized and didn’t die, not to put me on the path to lasting sobriety. Fine by me. I knew that once I got out, I would never want to go through anything like the last few weeks again. I didn’t need some well-meaning psychologist or social worker to tell me not to drink.

  One afternoon, I heard a commotion outside in the hall—a man’s voice, screaming, “LET ME GO! I DON’T BELONG HERE! LET ME OUT!”—and I asked a nurse, as calmly as I could, what was going on. “Oh, he’s just in here for benzos,” she said serenely. “They’ll give him something to calm him down.” Just then, on cue, the screaming stopped. An image—Nurse Ratched plunging a syringe the size of a turkey baster into the arm of a man twice her size—popped into my head, but after a few minutes of silence, I turned back to my book about 9/11 and let the walls of the room fall away.

  The ward I was on, I learned, was primarily reserved for pregnant women addicted to drugs and alcohol; only a handful of the beds were for people there for short-term detox, like me. After a couple of days, when I started feeling well enough to leave my room, I started stepping out into the hall to watch them walking around the ward, past a sign that read: 64X=1 MILE. I often wondered how they got to the point that their addiction was more important than the life of another human being.

  How could someone use drugs while they’re pregnant? I thought.

  It’s one thing to harm yourself, but what kind of monster would hurt an innocent baby?

  And if the next thought was That’s why I’m on birth control, and the next one, I mean, I’d obviously just have an abortion, that didn’t make me judge the women waddling around the ward any less harshly.

  If
I was going to have a baby, I thought, I would figure out a way to quit.

  Never mind that if I could figure out a way to quit, I would be sleeping in my bed at home, not hooked up to IV fluids in a hospital. And never mind that I had driven drunk more times than I could count, putting not just my own life but those of everyone on the road at risk. I was careful. I knew what I was doing. I drove just as well dead drunk as most people do stone sober. Didn’t I?

  After a few days on this regimen, I felt well enough to start feeling guilty. I called my parents, but played down the seriousness of the situation—which, come to think of it, wasn’t really that serious, now that I was feeling so much better. “I’m detoxifying from alcohol in a facility,” I said to Mom, as if all those extra syllables would distract her from the fact that her daughter had checked into a detox ward—a term that evoked images of nineteenth-century flophouses and moldy-walled loony bins. Besides my parents, I didn’t call anyone other than my closest friends—Tiffany, Sarah, and steadfast Kevin. At some point, Nick had dashed off a quick, semiapologetic email—hope everything’s okay, sorry about the timing of this trip but it sounds like I couldn’t do much anyway if I was there—but I didn’t respond. I wasn’t ready to deal with Nick yet. I was happy that I’d be coming home to an empty house.

  Five days later, when I was ready to be discharged, a nurse summoned me to the office of the detox director, a stern but kind-faced man who proffered a sheaf of papers and asked me what I planned to do after my release. “This may seem like the hard part to you now,” he said, “but it isn’t. This was the easy part. The hard part is staying sober once you get out of here.” How can that be the hard part? I thought. I’m sober now, and I feel better than I have in years. Why would I want to throw that all away on a drink?

  “So, what is your plan?”