by Erin Davis
Rob has told me about one of the very few heated exchanges that he had with our daughter when she was a teen, aware of drinking among her schoolmates. In no uncertain terms, she expressed anger at his enabling me: his inability or unwillingness to “make” me stop. The conversation came in the year before I decided to quit, and I didn’t learn of it until very shortly before you did. Of course she knew; she noticed everything. Don’t forget that this is the child who made pocket change and earned toys by repeating the colourful words she’d heard at home. (This is me giving back that imaginary Mother of the Year award—again.)
In 2002, I quit drinking altogether, but I had help. First, I sought out a doctor who was a friend of my family doctor and happened to be an addictionologist. After having blood taken to make sure there was no liver damage (there wasn’t), I was prescribed something I’d read about and requested: a drug called Antabuse (disulfiram) that blocks an enzyme involved in metabolizing alcohol intake. Whenever I felt that I might be in a situation where it would be hard to say no to a drink, I would take a tiny quarter of a tablet of this drug, which was designed to make the user really nauseated if she ingested any alcohol. I never tested its efficacy; I was taking it as an insurance policy because I had simply put my mind to it and I was quitting. Just like that.
I also had the assistance of a book that came into my life quite by accident. At work, there’s a table in the cafeteria where people leave things that have been sent in from companies hoping for publicity. On any given day in the “shark tank” you’ll find coffee mugs, CDs by artists you’ve never heard of and, occasionally, books. One day, while filling my coffee cup, I looked down at the cluttered table and spotted a book that was meant for me: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Sobriety. I won’t go so far as to say it was the nudge I needed to quit drinking at that time, but I felt Bert Pluymen’s story was my story. When he wanted to quit and expressed his desire aloud, his friends, family and co-workers all tried to tell him he didn’t have a problem, so why was he quitting? But they didn’t live in his body, feeling the way he did after a night where he’d tied one on and then promised he’d never do it again, before . . . you guessed it . . . doing it again. Pluymen also said that he’d quit for periods of a week or a month—sometimes even three months—which gave him the false notion that he could quit anytime. He subsequently learned that this was an on-and-off disorder, and that half of all addicts aren’t drinking in any given month.
He adds that he had a big case of the “yets” when he got sober: not yet having been arrested, losing a job, drinking in the morning or noticing tremors in his hands. So what made it obvious to Bert Pluymen that he had to quit? It was how often he found himself trying to control how much he drank. Something I didn’t know is that only people with drinking problems have to moderate how much they drink; folks without them control the amount without thinking twice.
I’ve noticed over the years just how true that is. How someone can stop at one or two glasses of wine, where I would be going until the bottle was empty (mostly at home, of course, where no one could see) and then following that up with a few ounces of vodka or gin. No off switch. But this book made a light go on.
I read and reread it. The words of this former rock-star lawyer, who had successfully argued a case before the United States Supreme Court at age twenty-eight, resonated so clearly that I took them to heart. His book illustrated to me that everyone’s elevator goes down to a different “bottom.” I didn’t have to wait until I lost my marriage or my career before quitting drinking. I could do it now and my life would be better. I believed that. And so I quit.
For a while.
After eight months of sobriety, on June 14, 2003, I’d get some news that would send me practically running to the cupboard above the fridge. That’s where we kept a fully stocked bar, which hadn’t been a temptation to me during my months of new sobriety. I had convinced myself I wasn’t going to drink, and besides, I had those tiny quartered tablets awaiting me if ever I thought I might slip. Plus, it was a cottage! Who would come to visit if we didn’t have a bar at the ready and a well-used ice maker? And so, there they were: an azure-blue bottle of gin and its partner vermouth in green glass, just waiting to cool my searing pain on a breezy June afternoon.
The radio station I’d called home had started to slide in the ratings. My long-time partner had retired four years earlier, and his replacement and I weren’t delivering the same chemistry or numbers. Left floundering without direction, we were soon to be put out to sea as another ship came toward our slip. Unbeknownst to most of us, the plug was about to be pulled on our sister radio station, leaving a younger, hipper morning team without a home. So it was decided that my partner and I would be taken off the show and it would be given to them. My contract had a “mornings only” clause, and so I found myself fired from the job I’d had—and loved—for fifteen years.
If this wasn’t a damned good reason to drink again, what was? Right?
My sudden departure made the newspapers, internet and evening television news; I felt a sickening combination of failure and embarrassment to see my picture in the paper the very next day as I waited in an airport lounge for the flight to British Columbia to cocoon with my parents, who by this time had moved to the west coast of Canada to retire. I needed to get away from the fishbowl, the intense curiosity and the speculation as to why I’d been let go. I felt humiliated. Unwanted. Done. Old. Lost.
The trauma of losing the job I loved at age forty, after holding such a high-profile position for so long, didn’t hit only me; it was a shock to our entire little family unit.
While Lauren was feeling the effects of our sudden unsteadiness, the stalwart yin to our spinning yang, husband and father Rob was as steady as ever. Once I’d returned home from my escape with my parents, we started to look at our options, which included listing our house and cottage for sale and pulling up stakes. I didn’t think I could live in or around Toronto if I wasn’t in the business I loved.
In the meantime, what I didn’t know was that Lauren had shared her anxious questions with her father, and later she wrote about the experience in a chapter in her seventh-grade school project. Quoting a lyric in Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” she called the chapter “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ’Til It’s Gone.”
In June of 2003, though I didn’t know it, my life was about to change drastically. On June 14th, my mom was let go of her 15-year-long job at the Toronto Radio Station CHFI, to bring in a new morning show.
Well, when big things happen in our lives, we tend to retaliate. So my mom’s first solution, since she was born and raised in Western Canada, was to move to Osoyoos, British Columbia. After reviewing many brochures and websites, I thought that it might not be such a bad thing.
Then the reality of it hit me. Just months before, I had been informed that I had been accepted in Spectrum Alternative School. Plus, I was going to lose my best friend, my wonderful cottage, not to mention all of the family’s friends that I’ve known since before I can remember. I went through a really emotional time after that.
It didn’t help our daughter’s confidence that, between my martini-fuelled crying jags, I also half-joked about pitching it all, leaving the big city and opening a yarn barn in the mountains of my native Alberta (even though I’m not a knitter and my crocheting is, let’s say, “holier” than thou). I was ready to give up the career that I loved, so devastated and humiliated was I by this gutting turn of events. I felt that even though I believed I was not done with radio, my beloved medium must certainly be done with me!
And then, as things have tended to do in my semi-charmed life, a few little miracles happened. An interview I gave to the Toronto Star that resulted in an article entitled “Fans Soothe Jilted Davis” drew attention to the outcry that my firing had elicited among the radio station’s many loyal listeners. While the comment section on the station’s website was overflowing with anger and bewilderment, the inbox at my own website was filling up faste
r than I could answer. (It would take me a full six months to respond to every one of the four-thousand-plus letters of support and disappointment; I held onto those email addresses so I could update now-former listeners as to my whereabouts.)
That newspaper article, featuring a picture of me sitting on the bow of a tour boat heading down Ottawa’s famous Rideau Canal, led to three amazing events. First, thousands of readers learned of my relatively new website, erindavis.com, which had been set up only three months earlier as a place to blog daily (which I still do). Second, a renowned theatre producer in Toronto, Ross Petty, contacted me and asked if I’d be willing to audition for the role of Fairy Godmother in his wickedly silly Christmas musical comedy Cinderella. (It’s actually a panto, a British-based form of interactive theatre featuring a villain in drag—that would be Ross himself, in this case—and lots of family-friendly double entendres.) And that same week, I was contacted by a representative of the Ford Talent Agency, who asked if I’d be interested in hosting a daily nationwide TV talk show. What was happening?
I said yes to the offers and landed the role in Cinderella. Lauren was elated. As she wrote about that tumultuous time in that same school project:
I was extremely emotional and I spent a lot of time crying in my bedroom for weeks on end. Finally, my mom was presented many job offers, including being invited to audition in Ross Petty’s production of Cinderella for the role of Fairy Godmother. She got it, and we’re staying in Ontario for the time being. I guess the Fairy Godmother really did make my wishes come true.
Even though the TV show coincided (collided?) with rehearsals and performances of Cinderella, I managed to pull off both. Truthfully, it all took a toll: by the end of 2003, I was diagnosed with bronchitis, pleurisy and pneumonia, but I didn’t miss a show, on stage or on the W Network. And still, I drank just about as hard as I worked for that four-month period. Martinis after rehearsals and performances every night, then to bed before the next day’s TV show. I think I might have mentioned the term high functioning already in this chapter?
No matter how late the night before, I’d set my alarm for 4 a.m. That’s when I’d prop myself up in bed with a cool cloth over my eyes to hide any signs of drinking the previous night. Then I’d get up at 6:30 for an 8 a.m. pickup to take me to the TV studio. (I realize as I write this how much like Joan Crawford I’m sounding here. How many more of us are there, I wonder?)
Once the curtain dropped for the last time on Cinderella, I returned to just one job: hosting W Live with Erin Davis. A live national one-hour talk show, it aired every weekday on one of Canada’s second-tier cable channels. Had social media existed (or any promotion at all), I might have been able to draw in some viewers from other provinces, but as it was, the ratings were too meagre to merit a second season of what I felt was an engaging hour of quality live television. So I “bowed out” and surrendered the 11 a.m. time slot to another morning talk show newcomer who also happened to share my initials: Ellen DeGeneres. I couldn’t have lost to a better person—not that we were competitors in any real sense of the word. Still, in my soggier moments, I wondered how many jobs a person could lose in one year. I had more time on my hands than I’d ever had in my adult life, so Rob, Lauren and I took advantage of the spring and summer by travelling to Europe. By the fall, I’d found work as a fill-in on the morning show at a station that was a direct competitor to my former radio employer. And then things started to click all over again.
A man I was aware of in the radio market, but with whom I’d never worked, became my new morning wake-up show partner. Right away, we both knew there was something going on here. A blue-collar guy with a blue-ribbon heart, Mike Cooper was pretty much a legend in our radio market: while working for the number-one pop music station in the 1970s, he’d ridden a Ferris wheel for weeks, right into the record books. He had a voice as big and deep as anyone in radio, and I figured someone with “pipes” like that must have an enormous ego to match and a brain inversely sized. How wrong I was! His heart matched his voice, our senses of humour and wits were perfectly paired and the two of us hit it off beautifully. Radio magic—that indefinable lightning called “chemistry”—was happening again right before listeners’ ears. We soon enjoyed number-one ratings.
Meantime, the station that had let me go in June 2003—which had been on a downward slide ever since, largely because former listeners could not get past the way they felt I had been treated—was beginning to take notice of what was happening at the competition.
Mike was not only a perfect radio partner but a convivial and willing drinking partner as well. He is one of the few people I’ve known who say they can hold their liquor and then actually do—which makes it ironic (but true) that he was eventually instrumental in my decision to quit for good. But that would come later, when it appeared I might be putting both of our careers at risk.
For now, I was soaking up the days of wine and rising ratings. I was happy and secure in my job; our family was breathing a collective sigh of relief. Radio wasn’t done with me yet, and we would be staying put.
Then, six months after my pairing with Mike Cooper, a dream I’d literally thrown into the fire rose from the ashes. You see, back on New Year’s Eve 2004, in a gin-soaked ceremony of symbolism, I took that year’s calendar off the wall and tossed it into the flames of our cottage fireplace. Despite all of my wishing and hoping, the station I’d called home for so many years hadn’t called to invite me back. Clearly, it was time for me to embrace the change and move into a new year and new dreams. But in the spring of 2005, something amazing happened: the boss who’d let me go in June of 2003 called and asked if I’d be willing to discuss returning to the CHFI morning show. My response was cautiously positive, and we met for coffee a few days later. Julie Adam began with a heartfelt apology. I think we were both nervous (I know I was), but our initial coffee went well, and we began to talk more often. And once I’d been assured that Mike Cooper could come with me, the wheels were in motion for my move back “home.”
It was a triumphant return. I was able to come back with a new sense of confidence, appreciation and respect, although deep down there were still voices in my head asking: If I was too old for the job two years ago, how can I be right for it now? The hours of therapy I’d paid for (and would for years to come) helped assuage those concerns and, in the fall of 2005, a major advertising campaign announcing my return to CHFI—and pairing with Mike Cooper—was launched.
Did I stop drinking then? Oh, heck no! Why would I? There was too much to celebrate; too many dinners with good friends and fine wine. I had no intention of slowing down. Besides, I thought, I’ve got this.
Of course, as anyone who has a dependency on alcohol will tell you, there comes a time when, if you’re lucky, you realize that the control is actually not in your corner at all: it’s the booze that’s in the driver’s seat. I believe that I still didn’t let it affect my job performance, and I’d defy you to find a listener, even on our group trips to all-inclusive resorts, who could tell you I had a problem saying “No, thanks” when the server was refilling wine glasses. I like to think that I did a solid job of hiding my weakness. Of course, I could be wrong. Alcohol tricks you into believing all kinds of untruths.
So what was the tippling “tipping point?”
It came on St. Patrick’s Day 2006—or in the wee hours of the morning that followed. My comeback had made waves significant enough that I was asked to be the grand marshal of the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and with a name like “Erin” (plus a dog named Molly Malone and an Irish king somewhere way back in the family tree) you can be sure it was a huge honour. I gratefully accepted, taking part in luncheons and gatherings that led up to the big day. I only wish I’d had something to eat before or after the parade. On an uncharacteristically chilly March day, I sat atop the back of a convertible and, bundled up in a green wool cape and soft yellow leather gloves, waved at the festive crowds shivering along Canada’s longest street. It should have been a
triumphant day—the icing on my comeback cake. Instead, I let my celebrating get out of control. I was not “on my best,” to put it mildly, despite the vow I’d made to myself the night before not to let anything smear the memories of this great honour.
Rob insists that I was told by many of the organizers of the week-long series of events that I was the best grand marshal they’d ever had. Perhaps it was the Guinness talking, or a bit o’ the blarney, but doggone it, what else was I to do but drink right along with my hosts—many of whom had put their abstinence promise for Lent on hold for this very occasion. After the parade wound up, we found ourselves at one of the city’s many Irish bars. This one, with close ties to parade organizers, had a private lounge upstairs where the special smooth and aged whiskey was poured freely for the big day’s VIPs. I didn’t realize just how freely until I attempted to leave my perch atop a dark wooden stool: as I tried to stand, I fell to my knees, to the laughter of everyone, including me. At least three people ran to my aid and, brushing off my satin grand marshal sash and gathering what was left of my dignity, I got to my feet. That is the last I remember of that night. How I managed to negotiate the narrow, steep stairway that took Rob and me down to a waiting cab, I have absolutely no idea. Nor do I have any memory of the trip home or how I got into bed.
What I do know is that about four hours later, I slept through my alarm clocks. Rob heard them and tried to rouse me, with little success. When he finally did, I was able to call in to our producer at the radio station and tell him I had no voice from shouting during the parade and wouldn’t be able to do the show. I could hear Mike in the background, angrily saying, “That’s just grrrrrreat!”