Double Double

by Ken Grimes

  Over the next few years, he made more of an effort to visit and have me stay with him after he moved out of his mother’s apartment into his own two rooms. By the time I was nine years old, we scheduled visits every other weekend, and in his limited way, my father tried his best to be a good parent. My most vivid memories are of him reading to me in a big square chair with wide arms. I would sit and pick at the polyester upholstery as he read me C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series, Huckleberry Finn, The Three Musketeers, and other classic children’s books.

  Another passion my father and I shared was the Baltimore Orioles. The 1970s and early 1980s were a great time for the team at the old redbrick Memorial Stadium. Section 34 was where the rowdy, self-anointed Orioles cheerleader “Wild” Bill whipped fans into a frenzy with his “O!R!I!O!L!E!S!” chant. I loved the excitement, the fans smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, the ceremonial burning of the pennants of the hated New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, the booing of Reggie Jackson. I even loved the corny fan sing-along to Kenny Rogers’s first major hit, “Lucille,” in the steamy Maryland twilight. Lucille was my grandmother’s name.

  Today my father has outlived his father by almost thirty years. My grandfather made it to fifty-two, fourteen years longer than his father. My father is eighty years old. He is a survivor, but he remains a mystery to me and, I think, a mystery to himself.

  Whatever doors he closed and walls he erected to survive have created limitations that have often stopped me cold over the decades. I’ve wondered: Is it that he can’t or won’t? We share a love of reading and politics and baseball, but little else of what interests me interests him. He lived in the same tiny one-bedroom apartment for twenty-six years, next door to his mother in a broken-down blue-collar Baltimore suburb that he could have left decades ago. He has never evinced any interest in exploring or stretching out of his comfort zone. He never travels for pleasure, has little ambition, and seems disinterested in how he lives. If he can’t reach out beyond those limitations because of what he had to survive growing up, I understand. I’ll never know the answer. We have talked many times, and he paints a picture of an idyllic childhood that I don’t believe.

  With my two sons, I’ve tried to be the opposite. If anything, I have erred the other way, revving too high and loading on too many family activities. I try to avoid any painful feelings by organizing a frenzied schedule of activities—multiple museum visits, nature excursions, sports activities, and day trips to monuments. One of my best friends in recovery nicknamed me “Mr. Blur.”

  “Onward to Mount Vernon . . . time to climb Sugarloaf Mountain . . . wait, there’s a play to see at the Kennedy Center . . . but let’s not forget the art museum!”

  My sons have never seen me drunk, and I hope that makes a difference in their lives. It’s a gamble of the genetic dice for them. Hopefully a completely different environment than the one I grew up in and the one my father grew up in will make a difference. I hope they are spared a disease that has afflicted four generations of men in my family.

  I hope the disease ends with me. I hope the sins of the fathers aren’t passed down to my sons.

  THIRD CONVERSATION: ADDICTION, DISEASE, AND ANONYMITY

  KG: In January 2011, a writer for Harper’s magazine who is now sober broke multiple rules with regard to the traditions for twelve-step meetings by discussing specific meetings, naming people at the meetings, and reporting what they said. He mentioned in a meeting how his psychiatrist had him on medications for depression. A silence fell on the meeting. My experience is that sometimes there is an uneasy alliance between those in the program who do not take medication and those who take it for anxiety, clinical depression, and other mental illness.

  In the vast majority of meetings I’ve gone to, this isn’t an issue. In the twelve-step literature, it clearly states that we are not doctors and that people should go to see doctors for “problems other than alcohol.” But at some meetings there is a faction of the old guard who got sober when these drugs were not available, so they’re suspicious of using pills to alter the brain chemistry and make one feel better. They are hostile toward psychiatry because, for so many years, psychiatrists and therapists knew little about alcoholism and took their money, and it was a complete waste of time for everyone. There’s a saying—“Analysis is paralysis”—that I used to hear in meetings. It didn’t mean psychiatric analysis. It meant trying to get to the greater truth. Trying to analyze and discover why you drink will only get you drunker. There is no answer. Trying to figure out the whys is useless.

  To be fair to the psychiatric profession, the alcoholics in treatment would lie about their drinking, thus making their addiction hard to diagnose.

  MG: So in meetings you’ve been to, it doesn’t matter if people mention their therapists or psychiatrists?

  KG: Not at all. But I avoid—and I think many others in meetings do as well—mentioning them, because that’s not what we’re here to talk about; we’re here to talk about recovery, the steps, not what our therapists said about our childhoods. I can’t stand people who, for example, share their dreams. That’s not what I’m there for.

  MG: I think you’re caught up in a number of clichés, or perhaps “brainwashings” would be a better way of putting it. “Analysis paralysis” is one way of jettisoning both formal analysis and self-analysis. I agree completely that to think you can stop drinking by starting with analysis is a mistake. But to say that analysis is useless is, well, idiotic. You also say one thing, then another: Yes, there is an uneasy alliance between members who have therapists and/or take drugs; later, you say that there is no prejudice at all about members who do this. You can get out of it by saying the tone of meetings differs. I doubt there’s a difference except in degree of mistrust. I agree that if a lot of members in therapy start talking about what’s going on, discussion could get so tangled up (as in recounting dreams) that it would be worthless.

  On the other hand, I believe that if you lined up a lot of veteran A.A. members, they’d turn thumbs down on psychiatry, with the objection that it roots around in the past and isn’t useful. That’s a stereotype and a cliché. I also think it hints at A.A.’s holier-than-thou attitude.

  KG: Sure, maybe it’s holier than thou, but we’re talking about a life-threatening disease.

  MG: I have a problem with alcoholics constantly defining themselves by their disease.

  KG: One of the most important findings of recovery is that if you can permit yourself to say that alcoholism is a disease, you escape the shame that is too often associated with drinking. The old notion of the town drunk, the falling-down man in a raincoat rolling in the gutter in the Bowery: These kinds of images still exist for people, even in our Oprah age. I look at alcoholism as a disease, and the main symptom is an inability to stop drinking to the point where it causes death.

  On the other hand, I have a friend, a molecular biologist, who claims that if he can’t see it on a slide, it isn’t a disease.

  MG: I agree with him. How can you group addiction with cancer, heart problems, stroke, measles, tuberculosis? To say that drinking is a disease because if you carry on with it long enough, you could die, is hardly logical. You’re saying if you drink hard enough, long enough, you could die. That’s true, but you can’t say disease is the cause. The disease concept does, I guess, take away the onus of having to accept responsibility.

  KG: So do you prefer the allergy concept? Do you believe the causes of addiction have a physical component?

  MG: No, I don’t believe in the allergy concept any more than I believe in the measles and mumps concept. Oh, there’s a physical component, yes, in the way your brain processes the drugs. It’s important for the medical community to classify addiction as a disease because of health insurance. If it’s a disease, your insurance pays for treatment. The American Medical Association kicked the disease thing around for a long time, didn’t it? For example, I don’t drink anymore, so would people in recovery think I still have the disease?

&n
bsp; KG: In the eyes of a lot of people in recovery, you would probably be considered “dry.” Meaning that you’re physically sober, but you would have to make your own judgment as to whether you’re emotionally sober. Emotional sobriety depends on your having some kind of contact with the Higher Power idea, and the ability to accept your situation with a degree of serenity. Some semblance of peace of mind instead of suffering from RIDS—Restless, Irritable, and Discontent.

  In my experience, most alcoholics have a compulsion to control their environment. For example, I have read that as many as one out of three women in recovery have eating disorders. The desire to control everything in the external world, to gamble or overeat (or not eat), is connected with a greater malaise, or illness, which is an essential dissatisfaction with the way the world is, with the way people are, that disappointment is a frequent unwanted guest. There’s nothing we can do but accept it.

  MG: Wait a minute—you realize you’re talking about the entire population. Everyone’s dissatisfied with the way the world is—

  KG: Yes, but they don’t deal with it by drinking four or five martinis or a fifth of Jim Beam or a couple of six-packs a day. We’re talking about a very specific way of dealing with the outside world. An alcoholic keeps the refrain going: “I don’t fit in, I don’t like the way the world works, why aren’t people more the way I want them to be? Fuck it, I’m going to drink.”

  People who aren’t alcoholics have all of the same feelings; they just don’t get to the “Fuck it, I’m going to drink” part. They say, “Well, I hope this ends soon,” or “I’m going to call a friend and have dinner”—something like that, which consoles them to the degree that they don’t lash out self-destructively at the world.

  MG: God, I find it hard to believe that all those who aren’t addicts deal with their problems in such a healthy way. I don’t think they do. I think they have fights with their partners and yell at the kids. I mean, really—

  KG: Wait, though. These thoughts about life have a finality and a totality for alcoholics, a sense that nothing can ever change, that this will go on forever. When they stop drinking and they’re physically dried out, they can come to see who and what they are. By going through the twelve steps, they begin to see their flaws and defects. They share this with somebody else to get relief from the guilt over the things they’ve done—and not done—while drinking, the same guilt that made them keep drinking and not quit. Then they make amends—and by amends, I don’t mean simply saying “I’m sorry” but really acknowledging it. They do this by paying back loans, or being of service to other people, or changing longtime aberrant behaviors for those around them. This is a cycle that should raise you out of a self-pitying, victimized worldview. Like that Chet Baker song “Everything Happens to Me.” I bet if I played that song at a meeting, everyone would laugh, because every alcoholic has felt exactly that way most of the time they were drinking, and maybe half the time when they were sober.

  That’s what the twelve steps are trying to get to: Bottles are but a symbol. Drinking is a symptom. It’s what’s underneath that it’s trying to change. People in recovery believe that if you don’t do the steps, you’re vulnerable to drinking—

  MG: That’s what you believe.

  KG: Yes, I do. Now, that’s not to say there aren’t issues that complicate all of this—clinical depression, for instance. Twelve-step programs believe that practicing the steps will lead to the priceless gift of serenity. If you can get to that place, picking up a drink won’t occur to you. But if you’re a victim, and everybody’s out to get you, and things are driving you crazy, why not drink?

  MG: Look, if I had the “priceless gift of serenity,” obviously, I wouldn’t need to drink. But if I’m a victim, why not drink, you say? Because I wouldn’t be able to stop. Now, your sometimes smug twelve-stepper would say I’m emotionally dry because I’m not doing the steps—

  KG: You’re right, you’re not doing the steps, and I think you would be happier if you did.

  MG: I don’t. I think A.A. is a great institution because it offers something that is indeed priceless: fellowship. Even so, I think the twelve steps are dumb, except for the first one, which is the important one, which is the only one, which is the one that will get you from here to there. Admit you are powerless over alcohol. It’s the leap of faith. The cavern you’re crossing is denial. Indeed, they’re like two sides of the same coin: faith and denial. Neither one can be explained in rational terms; they both defy rationality.

  26

  MG

  WebDrunk

  In a book titled The Shallows, Nicholas Carr writes about the effects of the Internet on the way we perceive things. He says that the Web has completely changed the way he does research. He used to refer to books; now he goes online. He notices that it has become increasingly difficult for him to read books. And friends he’s talked to who have for some time been poring over the Web for research, instead of poring over books, have found that they can no longer read books. It has become almost impossible for them to sustain the concentration necessary to read printed pages. These people have been doing research through books for years, but now they can’t train their attention on printed material.

  The author’s point is that arguments about the pros and cons of what the Web gives us are nearly always centered on content: how crass it is, how shallow and superficial. But content, Carr says, isn’t the problem. The problem is the delivery system, in this case the Web, and what it does to the way we read what’s on the screen; that is, the way we perceive the content.

  This is important. It hearkens back to Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, “The medium is the message.” The message is changed by the way it is delivered. The delivery system embeds itself in the message.

  Take the way the Web gives us news and how it differs from the way traditional newspapers convey it. The screen breaks up into pictures, photos, colors, sounds that convey pieces of information running in different directions. Advertisements pop up, images throb. There is constant, often dizzying motion.

  In the 1960s, McLuhan predicted the “end of the linear mind.”

  We’ve grown so used to getting our information via the Internet that we’re demanding that delivery system more and more. Why else would a newspaper such as The Washington Post change its format from linear black on white to imitate a Web page? Every byline now has a photo of the journalist accompanying it. We demand pictures.

  People are giving up newspapers because they lack the juice, the quick and colored fragments, the eye-spring of the page that makes our eyes dart back and forth—one could say the way in which we read the page, yet one wonders what kind of reading is going on.

  At the same time, I’m reading a book on Buddhism that says, “Don’t get caught up in the content.” I need to empty my mind. This is difficult. I always get caught up in the content.

  • • •

  What has this to do with addiction? I have a suspicion that twelve-step programs are about the medium, not about the content. Form, the delivery system, might be vital to success here, when content is given all the credit.

  Take the slogans: They’re short; they’re sweet; they’re easy to absorb. They’re supposedly to the point (I wonder sometimes what point). “Easy Does It,” “One Day at a Time,” “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” They don’t ask you to think about what they say; indeed, they don’t want you to think about it. (Although one of the slogans is “Think,” I don’t believe it. It goes against the sloganeering grain, and perhaps against the content grain, since alcoholics are constantly reminded not to think too much, not to analyze the problem.) The slogans are accepted en masse. They are not questioned; they are not held up to the light to see what’s behind them.

  I’m not criticizing this. The method—the delivery system—the slogan is probably necessary for success. We’re being told: Do not think about it. Ordinarily, I would say this is bad advice, but not in this case. Remember that the purpose of the twelve-step program is to get
you to stop drinking (or otherwise drugging). The purpose is not to get you to understand why you do it and then stop.

  I’ve often wondered how successful interventions can be because relatives and friends intervening have to reason with the addict. For instance, they tell him how he’s causing pain to each of them; how he’s endangering his health; how drugs are affecting his work. The addict, the center of it all, looks around with shifty-eyed sincerity.

  The problem is the content: how you’ve hurt us, how you’re hurting yourself, et cetera. In other words, the same rationality that’s always brought to bear is present here. What if the ones intervening paid more attention to form? I don’t think it’s content at work, since that can appeal only to the rational mind, which the addict is sorely lacking, or else the content is something he already knows. Content is a list of things the alcoholic has done and is doing. Content is “Remember the dinner where you threw a drink in my face?” The medium, the delivery system, is the person presenting the message, the look on his face, perhaps the way he leans forward in his chair.

  At least that’s what I think must be happening. I don’t think addicts respond to content. Those rhetorical questions asked during an intervention—“Can’t you see what your drinking is doing to your family?”— are content. But the way in which they’re asked, or the person doing the asking, is the medium.

  The message lies in the medium. The way you say something is actually what you say.