by Ken Grimes
Being with Julia that week strengthened my resolve not to pick up a drink or a drug. Her chain-smoking even helped me quit smoking cigarettes. I finally kicked the habit five months after Julia’s book tour was over, only to discover the truth behind what I heard my first year of sobriety: “You’re not really emotionally sober until you quit smoking.” Nothing can block feelings, enhance a lonely or sad moment, or kill an unwanted emotion better than a cigarette.
My last day with Julia was typical of our week together. I had to cancel yet another interview, this time with WABC Radio’s The Joy Behar Show. The producer was completely pissed, if slightly mollified when I told him I had canceled Howard Stern and that Julia wasn’t doing any local New York City radio. The producer went on to tell me that they’d advertised the interview twice in the papers and that, in canceling, “You’re making us look like assholes.”
I apologized profusely for another fifteen minutes (all of my apologies seemed to last that long), and the producer calmed down before hanging up on me.
I walked over to the hotel and picked up Julia for a taped NPR interview with Weekend All Things Considered, a top author-interview show. Julia was in a great mood, relieved that I wasn’t wearing a suit on this Friday afternoon but had come in my “play clothes.” She asked me, “Ken, tell me the truth, am I the most difficult author you’ve ever worked with?”
“No, I’ve worked with tougher.” I mentioned an author we both knew, and we burst out laughing.
The interview was not one of the host’s best; he stumbled and was off his game. After it was over, Julia complained, then invited me to her hotel for a drink, apparently unaware that I was sober. Though it seemed to be an olive branch for all of her antics, I politely declined. It was the last time I saw her.
Julia died twelve years later, in 2002, of cancer. She was fifty-seven.
I was sad the day I heard she died. I even forgave her for calling me “Random House PR boy” in her follow-up book, Driving Under the Affluence. Her charm, wit, and sixth sense for the marketing of culture made her much more than another Hollywood Day of the Locusts–type story.
For me, the experience of working on a number one New York Times best seller, of handling the world’s most difficult person for a month, was an education. I honed my PR chops and saw up close how an incredibly intelligent, warm, and charming person could self-destruct because she couldn’t stop drinking. Julia’s excuse was “twelve-steps meetings are about religion, and I’m an atheist.”
You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again was a self-destructive act that got Julia Phillips—whom everyone in the entertainment industry had written off and forgotten—back on the front page of entertainment news. She had lunch in Los Angeles again. She got her second act, if not sobriety. I was nearly fired from my job just a few months earlier for having a difficult personality and being intolerant of my coworkers, but largely because of my work on this book, I was able to save my job. I earned a second act and sobriety by attending lunchtime twelve-step meetings to keep my sanity.
For all of her bravado and slams of the film industry, Julia had loved her work, every last minute of it.
Maybe, like Julia, I wanted to eat lunch in my town again.
18
MG
Downtime
I wonder sometimes why I bother. At times I feel almost as much a prisoner of sobriety as I did once of drunkenness. What’s the point of this liquor-free life? Do I feel better? I don’t know. Am I healthier? Probably. Do I look better? No. Am I easier to get along with? Yes, depending.
The clinic would call this kind of halfhearted attitude denial. Indeed, if the doctor read what I’m writing here, he’d want me back in the clinic tout de suite.
I think of the freedom of that woman my mother mentioned, the one who sat at her window every evening, reading and drinking two highballs. She had the freedom to do that. I don’t.
I hear the friendly voices in the clinic telling me, Oh, but you do have that freedom! You’re freer than she is. She has to have those drinks every evening. She’s locked in to that particular prison. But you—you’re out of it.
Why does that sound like a lie? If I’m out of that prison, I’m still on parole. “An alcoholic is never cured; he’s always recovering.” That’s bad news right there. How much effort would you want to expend on solving a problem that you’re told in the end cannot be solved? Am I supposed to be placated by the knowledge that I’m my own parole officer?
Here’s the thing: It would be almost as hard for me now to have a drink as it was back then to refuse one. I’m locked in to my own stiff psychology. I seem to have exchanged one prison for another. (Or perhaps that’s sophistry. Or denial.)
I haven’t had a drink in two decades. No, it’s even longer than that. I haven’t pinned down my nondrinking history, as Ken has. He knows day-month-year. Do I consider it less important than he does? I must, and that could be a bad thing. I remember that I stopped two days short of the New Year. But which New Year?
I do remember my faux lapse on a flight when the attendant served me a martini by mistake. I’m set to wondering again: Why bother? Why not jettison this whole sober life? This brings me back to square one, after I’ve handed out a lot of reasons for not drinking. Good reasons abound: Do I show more self-restraint? Yes. Does food taste better? Of course not. Have I laughed as hard not drinking as I used to laugh with the same person after belting down a few? Yes, I think I have. Do I have as much fun at social functions? Absolutely not. To have fun at a social function, you’ve got to be drunk or eight years old.
To commemorate a member being sober for a month, a year, ten years, they are always handing out coins in A.A., the way my kindergarten teacher handed out paper hearts to those who had shown some hint of extra-goodness. I wonder if it has to do with our kindergarten selves, stripped of our adult allegiances to the trendy and the cool (like Mad Men without cigarettes), when drugs did not abound and escape meant not a substance but an open door.
Did it work?
I would have to ask, To do what?
You would say, To make you happy.
No. (Should it have?) Other things, like age, came along to knock the slats out from under that. I’m not sure, really, how unhappy I was, drinking. The memory of an alcoholic isn’t all that reliable.
Am I glad I stopped? Yes. I only wish the rewards were more obvious. For some people, the gains must be immense. If one can go from ruining one’s prospects, one’s family, one’s work to reversing all of that, one wouldn’t have to ask: Was it worth it? Did it work? It worked like a miracle.
I’m sure I felt a tremendous sense of relief not to be waging war on myself, not having to construct, every day, that architecture of the drinking life: whether to quit or carry on. Quitting put an end to the argument. The “why” fell by the wayside.
Twenty-odd years later, do I want to drink? Of course I do. When a truly exasperating day winds up, you bet I want to wind down over a cold martini. It’s a desire as sharp as a knife of ice. If I were living with someone who drank, who rolled out the cocktail cart with the Absolut every evening, how would I resist? I think I would resist; I just wonder how.
If alcoholism is indeed a progressive disease (and I’m not at all sure it is), then I suppose I’d be drinking a lot more than I did, had I kept at it. I didn’t drink until I passed out. I never passed out. Is that what I’d be doing? Somehow I doubt it.
It’s always there, the possibility of drinking. That I could drink again and be none the worse. This is completely inconsistent with what I’ve said before, but none of this is ever settled, is it?
I have long since reached the age when friends are dead or gone. My best friend died years ago after many, many years of drinking. A doctor told her she would have to stop or die. She stopped. It was her heart that failed, but the irony is, I wonder if the abrupt cessation of the chief thing in her life killed her. It was a life she’d woven out of beer and cigarettes and martinis, and I imagine th
at, without it, her life unraveled as if it were a ghost life.
I was never particularly proud of myself for stopping. I think it was the drinking version of my mother’s “anyone who can read, can cook.”
My old friends Jim Beam and Gordon and Jack Daniel’s. It would be nice to sit around a roaring fire and talk about the old days and relax, relax, relax, go down, go down, go down. Yes, it’s always there, the possibility of that pale reunion, waiting for me to join it.
So why don’t I? If I’m no longer persuaded by the best of arguments against drinking, why don’t I?
The answer has to do with the failings of argument.
After all of the arguments have been settled, unsettled, resettled, I conclude that there is no argument. Nothing is settled; nothing ever was. Sober for twenty-two years does not mean sober for twenty-three. It does not mean the question is answered, the problem solved. Although twenty years would seem to be more proof of sobriety than twenty hours, I question that it would. I thought about drinking much more during my time in the Kolmac Clinic than I do now, but I don’t believe I was closer to a drink.
I can hear my clinic colleagues argue, “Impossible! Of course you were closer to drinking then!” But that’s argument, and argument can be unconvincing. Argument is faulty in any belief system—here, the belief being that alcoholic drinking is ruinous. You shouldn’t drink.
If you try to argue your way out of a drink, you’ll lose.
There comes a point when nothing can be depended upon; where the more you stand up in the boat to view that spit of land, the more dangerously the boat rocks.
T. S. Eliot says in “Little Gidding”:
You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.
I don’t know anything, I can’t prove anything. There is evidence, yes, but the evidence is good only for that time and that place. It cannot be extrapolated and, like a downy blanket, thrown over every case, and every case proved to be the same case.
Me, I want some downtime.
That drinking is the only way (or any way) to get it is, of course, a lie.
Do I even know what downtime is? Or what it feels like?
It might be Eliot’s “Zero summer.” The paradoxical “Zero summer.” That’s a major contradiction in terms. Yet maybe that’s the time and the place: the zero summer. The supposedly impossible.
Contradiction is what Kierkegaard came to; indeed, it was the only thing he depended upon: the belief in the absurd. The belief in what can never be known by means of argument, what he called the “leap of faith.” He decided to believe in God because it was absurd to do so; there was no reason in the whole wide world for such belief. In a lesser way, it’s like Edmund Hillary’s mountain: There was no reason to climb it except it was there.
I’m not talking about God, faith, or prayer in any conventional sense. The mountain climb, the leap of faith. I don’t belong to any church, not even the church of A.A. Or maybe I belong to this church, congregation of one.
Cheers.
19
MG
Alcohol, C’est Moi
I’m sitting in the tiny waiting area of a French restaurant. These few seats happen to be right next to the bar, where the bartender has set a martini (straight up, with a twist) before a woman smoking a cigarette and talking to her friend. The glass sits there. It’s large, fan-shaped, fogged with ice; I can see the tiny rivulets running down the side like rain. She hasn’t picked it up before we are shown to our table. For all I know, it might still be sitting there like a sign or a signal.
Waiting.
I identify completely with that drink on the bar.
Yet the advice I’m given in one how-to book after another talks as if it doesn’t realize that I’m the drink on the bar.
The advice is always the same (and useless): During the time I would ordinarily be drinking, I should exercise, or read a book, or go to a movie, or cook a gourmet meal. And not hang out with my former drinking friends. I should reconnect with my nondrinking friends. How many friends do they think I have? They make it sound as if there’s an army of them over the hill, just waiting to engage.
And be sure to avoid triggers, those things that really make an alcoholic want to drink. The assumption is that there are only certain times or objects or people that start you on your way to the drinks table. (The assumption also is that triggers always operate in the conscious mind.) The reason this bit of advice is vague is because anything can start an alcoholic on her way to the drinks table, or down to Swill’s, or next door to see Lucy, who always has a cold bottle of Ultimat or Grey Goose chilling in the freezer. Anything can trigger it.
In other words, these how-to-stop-drinking books are telling me to get a(nother) life. All this advice can be distilled (not, unfortunately, like Absolut) to this: Find something to take the place of that drink you crave.
What? Are these books kidding? Nothing can take the place of that frosty martini on the bar; those shadowed glasses of Château Lafite on the table of that couple eating boeuf-something; that black Guinness foaming up beneath the bar pull until its creamy top is knifed smooth; that globe of Rémy warming in that gentleman’s fingers. Nothing can take their place.
It’s as if the consensus among those who treat or write about alcoholics is that we’re dumb. In some way, this might be true; hence, A.A.’s dictum to “Keep It Simple.” But I’m sick and tired of books that treat me like an idiot.
Read a book? Good. I’m choosing Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up,” or anything by Hemingway, so that I can at least enjoy a drink by proxy while being instructed on the fatal effects of drink.
Cook a gourmet meal? Now, tell me this: What alcoholic could bear to eat a gourmet meal without some of that Bordeaux gracing the table? A gourmet meal without wine? My God. The ocean without the shore.
Call these things distractions if you call them anything, but do not say they’re taking the place of the cocktail hour or the session with the guys at Swill’s.
C’est moi.
When Flaubert said this of Emma Bovary, he meant his identification with her was complete. It would seem to be his fate.
One is inclined to think the same thing of genetic makeup and, in our case, the determination of alcoholism, as in the studies of genes handed down from alcoholic parents to children.
With a gene, it isn’t c’est moi. We seem to believe a gene shoots a behavioral characteristic arrow-straight. It doesn’t. Genes are some distance back from any particular behavior, so genes are destiny only in the sense that character is destiny: There’s a lot of room for modification. If parents are alcoholics, there is a predisposition toward the child’s becoming one, but it’s only a possibility—or, if one insists, a probability. It is by no means a certainty.
This identification with the object (in Flaubert’s case, with Emma) might also be perfectly true of an alcoholic’s identification with alcohol. It is so complete, it would seem to be one’s fate. An alcoholic will drink no matter what; no, he has to drink no matter what. The choice has ceased to be rational. Therefore, what about appeals to rationality? Well, he doesn’t give a toss for those. I shouldn’t put it that way: He does give a toss, and he thinks someday he might be able to kick the habit. Just not today.
One appeals to his rational mind by observing, say, that he’s making everyone around him miserable; or, say, that he’s losing job after job; or, say, that he seems to be making himself miserable. And on and on. There are more reasons (meaning reasonable, meaning rational) for quitting than there are for continuing, and probably every alcoholic knows that (at least the ones who admit to the “disease”).
What we have here is “alcohol, c’est moi.” Sorry, but that’s the way it is. I’m the drink, the drink is me. The pleasure/pain principle isn’t working here. And one depends upon that principle to get an alcoholic to see sense.
• • •
We are all after endorphins or, rather, the effects of endorphins, our personal little supply of opiates, our morphinelike substances: Runners, weight lifters, drinkers, gamblers are after endorphins, the substance that carries us along on a euphoric wave, a rush.
There is a drug called naltrexone that blocks the effects of endorphins. One has to take it while drinking! Can’t you hear the howls? A drug that encourages the alcoholic to drink? Not Antabuse, the one that makes you sick if you drink. No, that drug does nothing at all if you don’t drink while you’re taking it. The point is that alcohol releases endorphins into the brain, and naltrexone blocks the effects. No rush, no euphoria. No rush? Why drink?
An alcoholic would undoubtedly agree. Except he’d turn it on its head.
No rush? No, thanks. You take that stuff.
Me, I’ll take this drink at my elbow.
C’est moi.
20
KG
Sober Hotel
The beautiful girl with the cracked green and blue eyes turned to me in front of the refrigerator and said, “It’s hard getting sober when you’re young.” I instantly knew what she meant, in that way people in recovery can communicate in shorthand. I was twenty-five and had no career, no marriage, no kids, nothing to give me any shape or dimension. Nick Hornby in his novel High Fidelity wrote, “It’s not what you’re like, it’s what you like.” I defined myself by my likes in music, sports, and some politics. Other than connecting those few dots, that was it when it came to understanding myself. Alcohol and drugs had caused me to truly lead the unexamined life.
I turned from the girl and looked at some other young people around the kitchen table. When my sponsor, Carl, invited me to his sober beach house in the Hamptons during my first month of sobriety, I said yes. Carl and his friend John talked about people in the house, bike riding, twelve-step meetings as we sped across Long Island. I fidgeted and looked out the window.