Double Double

by Ken Grimes

  These two guys were best friends—tall, athletic, younger than I was, and more popular with girls than I would ever be. I wondered what I was doing there and how I would get through a weekend of not drinking at the beach with a houseful of strangers.

  Occasionally, they’d turn and ask a question about my status as an alcoholic:

  “What! You have a job? No way.”

  “What? And you have a driver’s license? Dude, are you sure you’re an alcoholic?”

  I had done a Hamptons share house during my first summer in New York City, and it was a disaster. All of the girls were big-game hunters, looking for Wall Street guys with slicked-back hair and money to burn at nightclubs and expensive restaurants. With my pathetic wardrobe and eighteen-grand-a-year salary, I was getting nothing and not liking it. The bar scene was a nightmare and everything horrendously overpriced. I never wanted to go back.

  When Carl, John, and I finally stopped for gas, I went into the convenience store, bought a pack of cigarettes, and looked longingly at the six-packs behind the walk-in glass doors. Bud, Bud Light, Michelob, Coors, all of my best friends sitting side by side, twinkling in the artificial light.

  “I’m going to get a six-pack,” I said to myself. “Fuck them and not drinking.” The sensation passed. I paid for the cigarettes and got in the car and grunted when my sponsor asked me how I was doing.

  We pulled up in front of a mansion from the days of Gatsby, a massive house with faded, chipped white paint and a big front porch. Young men and woman lounged outside and yelled greetings to my sponsor and his friend. As I got out of the car, I was dying for a can of beer to take the edge off, and to give me something to hold, something to do.

  I was under the assumption (which could be the title of another book) that when I arrived at the beach house, my sponsor and his friend would walk me around the whole weekend introducing me to everyone, taking me to meetings, and basically making sure I was happy and feeling good twenty-four hours a day. I was wrong.

  After we dropped our luggage on the floor of the large, sun-dappled room with six single beds, they both disappeared. I hardly saw them again for the rest of the weekend. I was left to drift around the huge house, up and down the massive oak stairs, bumping into people who were talking earnestly about recovery. Peals of laughter could be heard from the porch as drunken war stories were retold. I was full of fear and false bravado, but what made me anxious was the fear of not being able to sleep. I’d had a problem sleeping since I was a kid, terrified of the nightmares I had practically every night.

  One of the two founders of the sober beach house was a very kind “older” man (by that I mean late forties, positively ancient to me at the time), and I asked him if I could sleep on the couch in the living room. He smiled kindly and said it would be breaking a rule, but sure, I could sleep downstairs if I needed to. That was a relief.

  Saturday afternoon I couldn’t wait to get the hell to the beach, where I could separate myself from everyone and jump into the ocean. My sponsor loaded me into his car with a few other guys, and I brought my Frisbee so I could do at least one thing I was good at—spinning my Frisbee on my finger and doing spins, back rolls, and other tricks I had spent countless hours practicing in high school.

  I trudged down to the famed white-sand beach, threw down my towel, and ran into the water. It was freezing but felt good. I swam for a while, staring at the cluster of sober people on the beach, laughing and talking, with no alcohol in sight. I just couldn’t understand it.

  I emerged from the ocean and asked my sponsor if he’d throw the Frisbee with me. A real jock, he jumped up, and we began to toss it back and forth. At last I was on my turf; he might play a killer game of tennis (a country-club sport I barely understood, rivaled only by my lack of knowledge about—and interest in—golf), lift some mean weights, and know every girl in the beach house, but I was confident I was the only one who could deliver an expert forehand toss twenty yards down the beach or spin a Frisbee behind my back.

  After five minutes, I was trying a particularly difficult one-handed catch behind my back when I heard my swimsuit rip. I had torn the rear of the suit in half. In a panic, I waved to my sponsor and yelled something about needing to rest and ran to my towel, where I sat for the next two hours without moving. I was totally embarrassed and feared I would be laughed at. I would rather die than be laughed at.

  I sat watching the ocean, not talking to anyone, reading. Other than Frisbee and rock music, reading was my only passion. I didn’t want to be alone, but I was completely tongue-tied. I had a split swimsuit and no beer to drink, so I burrowed into the sand and read. This sucked. It was shaping up to be the worst weekend of my life. If this was what being sober was all about, I had no idea how I was going to do it. Oh, sure, “One day at a time.” We all knew that meant: “Never drink again. Period.”

  Every night the beach house had twelve-step meetings where, as a newcomer, I was encouraged to speak up. I can’t remember what I muttered when it was my turn. That Saturday was nothing more than the meeting, dinner, people talking, and then time to go to bed. John had a girlfriend he wanted to see, and my sponsor disappeared again. I had to go to sleep, mind racing, no beer, in a strange place, in a room with five other beds, all occupied by alcoholics. I had decided to be brave and sleep upstairs. Now I regretted it. As an only child used to having my own room, I was petrified. I lay there trying to go to sleep. After an hour, I finally seemed to be dozing, listening to the deep breathing and snores around me.

  Suddenly, I heard John and his girlfriend giggling as they snuck into the room. I pretended to be sleeping as they crawled into the bed next to me, a few feet away.

  Okay, they’re just going to crash here, nothing to worry about, I thought.

  A few minutes later, the bed started creaking, and their moans became audible. Oh. No.

  I didn’t know what to do. This didn’t seem very sober, whatever “sober” meant. I couldn’t lie there for the next twenty minutes and listen to them while the rest of the guys slept, but to get up and let them know I’d been listening would be horribly embarrassing for me (and, I assumed, for them).

  I couldn’t take it anymore. In one swift move, I got up with the top sheet wrapped around my shoulders and left the room. Quietly, I padded down the stairs and headed for the porch, thinking that would be a quiet spot to sit and rest and chain-smoke. To my surprise, there were three other guys on the porch, even though it was well past midnight. Apparently, they were newcomers who couldn’t sleep, either. One of them was chewing tobacco and introduced himself. “I’m Dayton. I’ve got a hundred and six days, want some chew?” I immediately said yes and dipped into the Copenhagen, my first drug of choice when I was twelve. I started talking to him while spitting off the porch onto the grass. I was envious that he had fifty-six days more sobriety than I did and had already crossed the magic ninety-day mark.

  He was funny, and most important, he was a huge fan of the Grateful Dead, my favorite band and the shaky cornerstone that much of my self-image had been founded on. As we talked through the night, I reached a degree of comfort and eventually grew tired enough to go back upstairs, fling myself into bed, ignore the couple next to me in their postcoital slumber, and sleep.

  Although I hated most of the weekend, found the drive back to the city long and boring, and could never imagine doing it again, something stuck. I had a real-life model of people of all ages—particularly young people—laughing and seeming to genuinely like and care for one another, who could talk about how crazy they were with no fear of repudiation.

  Much to my surprise, after ten months of trying to do it mostly alone, taking a series of girlfriends “hostage” as a panacea for all the emotions beginning to bubble up, I found myself at an office in midtown Manhattan in May, signing up for the summer sober beach house. There I was, laughing with Dayton and a couple of other guys I had met in meetings and liked, signing on the dotted line. And I had the money to pay for it.

  Jus
t as my mother’s hotel became the furnace that forged her life and her world view, my sober beach house was responsible for the woman I married and six of my groomsmen. The men I met in the program became the best friends I could ever hope for, the sober house the beginning of a process of redemption that I could never imagine while sitting on the beach in a ripped swimsuit.

  SECOND CONVERSATION: DENIAL AND POWERLESSNESS

  MG: Denial is the biggest danger in addiction. Denial is a concept I have always found fascinating, since the person who’s using it really doesn’t think he’s denying. Those of us who aren’t addicts simply don’t believe it’s possible: The subject being denied is so obvious that the person denying it must be aware of it. (Here again is a thumbs-down to anyone who believes that people act rationally.)

  Denial so easily leads to the beginning of something prefaced by “Just one drink wouldn’t hurt.” Now, the whole machinery of alcoholism is built on this theory: It’s never just one drink. Never. If you can do just one drink and feel relatively satisfied, then you’re not an alcoholic. Drinkers who go back to drinking almost always begin by floating the just-one-drink argument.

  The second biggest problem is bringing reason into the issue of addiction. If you can’t bring reason to bear, the only other way to get sober is an intervention, but even that is bringing reason to bear in a way: “Can’t you see what you’re doing to me? Why can’t you stop? All of us are saying you have a problem!” That’s emotional, but at the same time, there’s logic: If the drunk can see what he’s doing to his family, then of course he’ll stop.

  The only thing that works is to toss an alcoholic in the car or on a plane and force him to go to rehab. Even then the denial keeps working, because most people don’t get sober the first time they go. Since you [Ken] didn’t go to rehab, I assume you weren’t in as bad shape, so there must not have been as much denial.

  KG: What are you talking about? I was in denial from the first time I started partying with my friends in high school, because I didn’t want to drink or smoke pot, but I did it to fit in.

  MG: Denial is more complicated. It’s elusive, paradoxical, even magical. It’s the rabbit out of the hat; it’s the unending line of colored scarves pulled from the pocket; it’s the lady sawed in half.

  Denial is the art of saying you’re not doing something even as you’re doing it, which is more complex than simply saying, “No, this drinking, this drugging, isn’t affecting my life,” while your life lies in tatters around you.

  KG: I disagree. You can be self-aware and in denial at the same time. In my version, I can have enough self-awareness to know that going on a forty-eight-hour bender was bad for me, but I did it anyway, because I wanted to have fun and didn’t give a damn about the consequences.

  I’d say, “I can get away with this, it doesn’t matter, no one will know, I’m still getting good grades,” even though the evidence showed it did matter—conflicts with you, grades not as good as they could have been, taking the SATs completely hungover, hanging out with lowlifes up in western Maryland or Washington, D.C., or in England. I knew that consuming these chemicals was making my life worse, but I didn’t want to stop. It was even worse in college, and I knew it, but I refused to do anything about it, because I denied it.

  MG: That’s not denial; it’s refusal. Refusal is much more straightforward. Denial is the art of hiding from yourself. You’re not wholly knowable to yourself.

  KG: Well . . . perhaps. One of the worst cases of denial I’ve ever seen was that of a friend of mine who had a terrible drinking problem but refused to admit it, or pretended he couldn’t see it. Wait: Perhaps I shouldn’t say “refused” and “pretended.” That’s probably the point: He didn’t see the problem, or at least not the extent of the problem.

  As I was staring at him one day, I could see something flickering behind his eyes, a truth that wanted to get out, a desire to admit he couldn’t stop—but it disappeared, and I’ve never talked to him about it again. I could see the denial warring with the truth, and the truth lost.

  MG: Now, that is denial, a superb example.

  KG: The literature of recovery states that “understanding and insight were not enough.” Bill Wilson—the founder of A.A.—knew he shouldn’t drink again after the scores of times he sobered up only to get drunk again. He was on this horrible downward spiral for years because he crazily thought he could still have a drink, one or two, and then stop. I can have that first drink, is what he thought.

  According to Bill, the number one obsession for an alcoholic is that he can drink like a normal person.

  MG: Yes, it’s a kind of magical thinking: I do it, but I don’t do it to the extent they think I do it. But it sounds as if you knew it while it was all going on.

  KG: Yes, I did, but I denied it [laughs].

  MG: I still say that’s not denial. You knew but you refused to stop because you were addicted. It doesn’t sound as if you were completely in the dark in the beginning. At the end, perhaps you were.

  What accompanies this is the denial of the people around the drunk—the wife, parents, children, friends, they all try and deny it as long as possible because they can’t stand the idea of the person they love being a drunk. You said that in Al-Anon, people affected by an alcoholic have as much of a problem as the alcoholics, which is, I think, devastating news. And it gets at the extreme complexity of alcoholism.

  I know you believe in the “disease” model of alcoholism and addiction. Say for the moment that it’s more of a learned behavior. Let’s say, for example, that Joe’s social drinking turns into alcoholic drinking. Joe’s wife, Betty—with whom he has a rocky relationship anyway—sees this but tries to deny it because she doesn’t want to be married to a drunk. Actually, she doesn’t want to be married to Joe very much, and the alcoholism—which she can no longer ignore, not with Joe lying on the kitchen floor every night—becomes a weapon. Under the pretense of wanting him to stop drinking, she keeps berating him, which makes him drink more. The drinking becomes something like a Ping-Pong ball they shove back and forth across the table, neither one willing to put down the paddle. Because they both want to win the game. I’d bet that’s what’s going on in the minds of a lot of people in Al-Anon, all while they’re acting like victims. What they (we) want is to play the game and win. And if Joe sobers up, uh-oh! There goes the game.

  KG: Absolutely! In fact, some would argue that the Al-Anonic’s behavior gets even crazier than the drunk’s.

  MG: So we’re doubling the problem. It leads us back to reason: why people struggle with bringing reason to a problem that is not conducive to reason. You cannot reason a problem out of existence when the problem resists reason at every single turn. The irony is that the only thing any of us has to use in dealing with problems is reason, or logic. Here is someone who appears to be ruining his own life and the lives of other people. What can we use except reason and logic? But that’s not going to get you very far. So what are you going to do? What’s the answer?

  KG: There is no answer. Which is not what Americans want to hear: We’re a results-oriented country, not as interested in moral shades of gray, say, as are the French or Germans. Twelve-step programs were founded by two Americans. The steps are very action-oriented and try to solve an unsolvable riddle. What describes America better than that?

  The American psyche says, “If there’s a road that ends, knock down the wall or plow a new road.” The fact of the matter is that twelve-step programs have a far better record of helping people with alcoholism, gambling, overeating, sex addictions, overspending, you name it. In the end, the success rate is never going to get to 50 percent, 60 percent, 70 percent, because of the riddle we just described, a problem that defies logic and rationality.

  MG: I’ve come to the conclusion that the really big block when it comes to twelve-step programs is the insistence on powerlessness. Why some alcoholics prefer Rational Recovery and Moderation Management is that these organizations are completely, adamantly agains
t the idea of powerlessness.

  Both organizations look at excessive drinking entirely from the position of self-reliance. We know there’s some success, because they let people keep on drinking. Still, all of these groups appear to be dead set against the idea of powerlessness, which means turning one’s life over to a Higher Power. Most people equate “Higher Power” with God, despite the insistence that a Higher Power can be anything at all that one conceives of as transcending self. I wonder, though, if the notion of the Higher Power is how twelve-step programs really indoctrinate people. Isn’t the so-called Higher Power God in disguise?

  KG: In essence, yes.

  MG: Exactly! There is a religious—or, if you prefer, spiritual—underpinning to the whole organization, which is not at all a criticism, just an observation. Now, here’s the thing. A group like Moderation Management says that you can drink in moderation and learn how to drink safely if you work at it and schedule it properly. In other words, you can control your drinking. I wouldn’t say this is total nonsense, for I imagine that some people in this group—or out of it—do manage to control their drinking. But I also think they spend a lot of time thinking about drinking, and that, to me, would sap a lot of pleasure from drinking. So there’s no Higher Power to appeal to, to keep you off the bottle; you’ve got to keep track of your drinks. “Now, how many more drinks can I have at this party?”

  KG: Charting—

  MG: Yes, keeping count. The question also lies in the word “problem” in the phrase “problem drinker.” Some people look at having a problem with drinking as completely different from having an addiction. As far as I’m concerned, if you have a problem—

  KG: A problem with drinking suggests that it’s something the drinker can “solve.”

  MG: Right. Again, if you have to moderate your drinking, then it’s automatically beyond being a problem. People who don’t have a problem with drinking don’t have to work to moderate their drinking; they just curtail it or cut it out altogether, as if they have a food allergy.