by Ken Grimes
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 br
eath? 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.
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.