3) I would recommend AA for anyone in an abusive drinking pattern because twelve-step programs are helpful for anyone trying to build a good life. If, after one has developed a good life, she discovers that she is not really an alcoholic, who cares? The good life is not going to be retracted.
I do want a good life. More than anything, I want to be one of those people I see at sundown on weekdays. I want to be as laughing as the women who window-shop with their girlfriends after the boutiques have lowered their steel security gates, or as lovely as the women who curl their hands into their lovers’ coat pockets, or as self-possessed as the women who lope behind their sprightly black Labradors. I want their sound friendships, their romances, and their swollen self-confidence, and yet I don’t know how to achieve these things without alcohol. These are the wants I always drank to fulfill.
I decide to take the doctor’s advice and try an AA meeting. I call Alcoholics Anonymous, where I am referred to New York Intergroup, where a pleasant young operator reads me meeting times like movie times. I request AA groups in the East Village, which is more than seventy blocks from my apartment, so I won’t have to worry about encountering alcoholics in the neighborhood post office or the produce aisle of the grocery store. Downtown, I also expect to find a younger crowd than the group of crusty old men that smoke Marlboro Reds in front of a meeting on East Eightieth Street.
Still, a curious thing happens when I show up at a church on Lafayette Street after work. The night is mild and the sidewalks are empty, save for the mass of people dallying under a sallow streetlight. They are all young, blue jeaned, pink cheeked, and tousle haired. As I approach them, I can see they are calling out to one another and embracing. Some are dancing. More are blowing over the mouth holes of their deli coffee cups. The scene is so kindly I panic. I don’t know what I will say to this confederacy of cat-eyed extroverts wearing army jackets and plastic earrings. When I reach the church entrance, I keep walking to the corner bookstore. I go inside and pretend to scan the racks for a rare volume of poetry.
After I chicken out of the AA meeting, I decide I have found the volition to stop drinking myself into blackout mode, and therefore can try to drink “normally.” In my mind, this means drinking one glass of beer or wine when it is expected of me on a date, at a corporate function, or during a holiday dinner. It also means I will look for new ways to bond with Vanessa because as long as we are drinking together, I’m afraid we will never drink moderately.
I don’t realize that something will shift when Vanessa and I stop drinking together. A fault opens itself in the floor space between our bedrooms, and it gradually becomes harder to cross. I don’t explicitly tell her that I am trying to get a handle on my alcohol abuse. Instead, I start to invite her to bookstores and flea markets and tea shops rather than bars. Only our new outings don’t function the same way our martini nights did: In the fiction aisle, she hears my false enthusiasm for choices; amid the boxes of old boots and belt buckles, I sense she is attacking my personal style. Together, we fall into vast lulls of silence over kettles of peach oolong tea.
I think back six months to college and try to remember some activity, aside from drinking, that Vanessa and I enjoyed doing together. But I can only remember beer while we bowled or wine while we cooked. Or else there was some residual hangover to talk about during the gray afternoons that we roved the trail around Green Lakes State Park. We don’t like the same movies or bands or stores. We’ve been inseparable for the past ten months, but we don’t have a damn thing, aside from alcohol, to talk about.
Eventually, our interaction drops off altogether. Vanessa camps out at her boyfriend’s house for weeks at a time, and I close myself off in my bedroom with a tall stack of overdue library books. She still goes to bars with the waitress from her old job, or with her boyfriend from Brooklyn, who shoulders her up the stairs some nights. Sometimes I recognize her voice, drunk and baying, when I get three A.M. prank calls. When we are home together, our apartment reverberates with waves of passive aggression. Our only form of communication is about the outstanding electric bills we keep taped to the refrigerator; we are at constant odds about how much we owe each other.
I START dating a boy. Actually, he’s a man. At least that’s what April says, when she meets us at a sushi joint on Bleecker Street. She pulls my ponytail while we’re conspiring in the ladies’ room and says, “K, you’ve found a real man this time.”
By the same token, I immediately know Matt is the type of man that I should have been dating all along. He is an intern at the magazine, and the sales reps fan themselves when he glides past our row of cubicles, purring and saying he has “bad-boy” appeal. I guess I can see that. Matt has the rock-star good looks that strangers regularly compare to Mick Jagger or Jim Morrison, anyone who is all eyes and hair. Women, particularly, have the idea that he smokes hand-rolled cigarettes and shoves over drum kits. But the truth is just the opposite; Matt will prove to be the kindest man I’ve ever known. As I get to know him, I’ll find he’s never had a cigarette or a cavity. He’ll confess that he’s only had three hangovers, ever, and two of them will follow nights out with me.
And yet Matt, in the beginning, tosses me right back into voracious drinking. He does it because I am faced with the same old romantic problems when I’m in his presence: I try to break the ice and steady my breathing, and I work to be bright and entertaining.
Alcohol facilitates our first date. At an Irish pub near my apartment, we sit under a blackboard where draft beers are spelled out in chalk, and I drink the first blond pint, which stops my nervous shivering. Then we hail a cab to an East Village bar, where I sip a tall vodka drink that enables me to pull a plastic rose from a vase and stuff it into Matt’s shirt pocket as a boutonniere, my joke about first-date formality. Then we link arms and trip to the garden lounge on Avenue C, where we drink red wine and I lean against him amid the candles and throw pillows without feeling silly. Much later, Matt will admit it was four rounds of drinks that gave him the courage to lean over and kiss me while the cab bumped back up First Avenue, and I’ll admit I was drunk enough to lose my cell phone between the cab seats.
Second and third dates follow. In windowless bars, where the weather inside feels overcast, Matt and I drink enough beer to get jelly kneed and tug on each other’s sleeves. I can’t stick to a couple of bottles, nor can I restrict myself to beer or wine when hard alcohol is so alluringly disarming, when it gives me the courage to air sentiments like “You’re wonderful.”
But the pattern of drinking and confessing is just as confusing as it was in college. In graffitied bars, Matt calls me “sweets” and lets me mess up his hair, and I believe it when he tells me he wants to keep seeing me even after he goes back to a Philadelphia university for his senior year. But that certainty burns off the next morning, with my blood-alcohol level. Matt is quiet in his hangovers, and I wonder if his affection for me is wavering.
Our nights might continue in this cycle, but Matt leaves for college. On a Sunday in September, he drives over to say good-bye in a car bulging with boxes. We hug in front of the corner luncheonette. People are jetting onto the sidewalk after brunches of Bloody Marys, and the scene feels too busy and public. He says he will call me when he hits I-95, but I am skeptical. I wave good-bye and turn around before he pulls the car into traffic. I don’t want my last memory of him to be his taillights rounding the corner of East Seventy-eighth Street.
But the phone rings a few hours later, while I am searching for a TV signal in the static, and his call is so prompt that I have to stop for an instant and make sure I’m not imagining it. It rings the next night when I am sponging down the refrigerator door. And it rings the night after that, by which time I’ve learned to snatch up the phone before Vanessa can answer it.
For a month, I talk to Matt on the phone every night until well after midnight, when the phone’s battery dies. Another girl might have learned to do this in high school: roosting on the kitchen counter or the fire escape
with the phone cradled against one shoulder, soaking up stories, and learning that not all silences are bad. But I’ve never exposed myself without the confessional catalyst of alcohol. Maybe the fact that I can’t see Matt’s expression makes it easier for me to tell him things. I describe for him the orchids that grow wild in my hometown, the argument I had with my parents on a trip to San Francisco, the way our house cat used to claw my sister and me when we tried to tie him into bonnets.
Months go by, and I save enough money to move out of the apartment I share with Vanessa and into a small studio in the East Village. Tompkins Square Park, with its women in top hats and men in eyeliner, is the perfect location to practice sobriety. The view from my window holds the promise of unconditional acceptance; in this part of town, cars are bedecked with glitter and baby dolls’ heads, street activists pass out flyers that encourage you to “ban Republican marriage,” and men slap shoulders outside of Doc Holiday’s, where they compare conspiracy theories. Here, nothing is too kooky or creepy or off-putting. I can let the inner awkwardness I’ve always felt flower, and I can stop using alcohol as a mode of belonging.
Time doesn’t pass while I’m living alone. Every day becomes an ordered little compartment, in which I work, elbow my way into a subway car, buy milk at East Village Farms, mop the floors, watch pointless TV, and interact with no one other than the two-dollar psychic and people I give dimes to on the street. Thanks to caller ID, I can avoid the people I used to drink with, who call me, dead drunk, from a nearby bar to see if I’ll come down. I’m glad I had the sense to keep my address private, so no one buzzed can buzz my intercom.
I know I am making the same mistake that I made in college, when I mistook being reclusive for being sober. But I have few college friends beyond my hard-drinking buddies, and my new friends from work won’t make the fifteen-dollar cab ride without the prospect of a few rounds of beer. I’m often lonely, but I don’t know whom to invite over. I am hard pressed to find other twenty-two-year-olds who don’t drink.
I spend most of my time with Matt, who takes the train to visit me every few weeks. Matt drinks occasionally, but it means little to him. His relationship with alcohol doesn’t run nearly as deep as mine does. We occasionally sip beer when we are together, when we’re at a show with a two-drink minimum or an after-party where the beer is free. I try to intersperse glasses of water between beers, which everyone always says is the key to drinking moderately.
My new approach to “normal” and “responsible” drinking is to drink only while I’m doing something else, too, like watching a band, as opposed to absentmindedly draining Amstels because I’ve run out of change for the jukebox. The method is kind of like that old cliché of thinking about baseball while you’re having sex; I rely on outside entertainment to distract me from the joy that alcohol brings me. Only it doesn’t always work. Sometimes, when I’m already buzzed after the drink minimum, the feeling multiplies inside me like microbes and I feel a greedy desire to feed it two more beers so it will grow.
I AM NURTURING that kind of buzz on New Year’s Eve, after four bottles of beer. Matt and I have spent the evening blowing paper horns, sneering for a disposable camera, and listening to a generally bad band that, tonight, sounded good. I am skipping down the street while the wind lifts the pleats of my skirt. Matt is lost somewhere behind me on the crosswalk. The people I pass on the street look out at me through the zeros of their 2003-shaped glasses, and their faces smear. The headlights of cars trail the way they would in a photo taken with a sluggish shutter in low light.
Every few steps, I turn around to tell Matt that I hate him. I’ve been saying it for many blocks, and I can’t remember why. Maybe it’s because a woman’s name popped up in the caller ID box of his cell phone at midnight. Or it might be because he wants to stay out when I want to go home. Or it could be because my feet hurt and alcohol has resurrected my irrational hostility.
Eventually, I push into a bar on Avenue B, where the air is sweaty and the clientele looks as pissed off as I do. I decide I want to order more beer, to shift and twist angrily on my bar stool, and to give Matt the silent treatment. And when he asks me what’s wrong, I want to slap a bottle off a table, so I do. He laughs and presses his forehead to mine, like I am acting for the sake of some joke. But my rage is real. I’ll be able to see it tomorrow when we develop the night’s roll of film. A picture will show me standing in the middle of Houston Street, flashing my middle finger for the camera, while traffic is stopped behind me for the red light. My smile will look wide and kidding, but I’ll be able to tell by the squint of my eyes that the fuck-you sentiment is genuine.
I decide to quit drinking for good before the hangover hits. I make up my mind during the cab ride home, when I feel dizzy and Matt lets me lie down and rest my head on his lap. My stomach pitches with every pothole on First Avenue, and when I look up I can see his face hanging over mine with ungrudging affection. I wonder how many people have shown his kind of faith in me, how many have made an effort to ally with me without alcohol. Probably no one has. His is the first honest friendship that I’ve had in years, and I don’t want to spend my time with him drinking, sobbing, shrieking, and otherwise pushing him anyway. A rare truth falls over me like the glare from the streetlights. I know that as long as I keep drinking, I will drive back everyone who is good-natured. Only people who are as drunk and damaged as I am will stay.
IN THE year and a half since I’ve quit drinking, I’m not sure if I’ve found the “good life” that the addiction counselor mentioned to me, but I’ve certainly uncovered a better one. It’s made up of good days and bad days, and they are sometimes grossly out of proportion. But I think that’s the thing that makes abstinence momentous; it has a sweet-and-sour appeal.
I’ve learned that I will always be uptight. In the absence of alcohol, I have learned that I am not and have never been an extrovert. I will never be the kind of woman who dances at weddings, unburdens to hairdressers, or stops strangers to admire their shoes. Instead, I have a cautious carriage, an unwavering gait, and the kind of rigid shoulder blades that make yoga instructors grind their elbows into them. Like all escapists, I sometimes get lost in long moments of silence.
I’ve learned that my anxiety won’t ever drop off entirely. I will always fear the outside chances: that a deadline will go unfulfilled, or an elevator will jam, or a mouse will scuttle across the floor no matter how many cubes of poison the exterminator drops behind the stove. Like so many people, I know I can’t expect to stop feeling anxiety during a time in history when there is actually a device for measuring it—the terror-alert level, which in New York always hovers at orange. Without alcohol, it is harder to hide from my fears. Instead, I have to close my eyes, shake out my hands, and try to get a handle on them.
Likewise, I will always have emotional hot spots. Memories of drunken disasters tend to flood back to me at the most inconvenient moments. In Central Park, when I see teenaged girls unloading beer cans from their backpacks, I catch a glimpse of what I looked like ten years ago, and I have to look away. My breath seizes up while I’m watching a Brooklyn-based band because the percussion section is so violent it returns a hangover-like heart thumping to me. Some part of me still feels distrustful of men; when I walk home with my hands bound up in plastic grocery bags, I feel the stab of panic when a man on the corner leans in too close to say, “Hey, pretty.” I’ve learned that the deeper I examine the past, the less it wages war on my consciousness.
I’ve learned that I can’t jolt myself out of sadness. Just as I couldn’t do it with alcohol, I can’t do it with naps, herbs, or rigorous exercise. I think I will always be more vulnerable to it than some people. I will always be moved to tears by an animal-rescue show, or a certain Polish poet, or some bit of advice from my mother. But depression, the feeling that I was slow-motion falling into my own imminent madness—or worse—ended when hard drinking did. Today, bad days have a bottom to them.
I’ve learned that romantic love adapt
s to life without alcohol. Once Matt and I stopped wasting whole hours in the bar below my apartment, our time together became less haphazard and more deliberate. We used to talk while we drank beer and played pinball at side-by-side machines. Now, we do it while we sit on a hill in the park. We cluck at squirrels and tell stories until we’ve missed the movie that we planned to see.
In the end, Matt elected to stop drinking as a show of solidarity. And though I am thankful for his support, I know my decision to abstain began as an individual choice, and I know it has to stay that way. I have to believe that it is easier for me to hold fast to what I want without alcohol. It makes it easier for me to know who I am, and to accept it.
I’ve learned that if my friendships have any hope of surviving, they can’t have their roots in commiseration. As for the female friends I have cried in my beers with over the years, the women I loved so completely—for their sadness manifested as madness, or madness manifested as sadness, for their electric instability and profound pain—I have lost touch with every last one of them. Without alcohol, our friendship seized like an engine without oil. We could support each other through tragedies, but not through good days or even average ones.
In the wake of it all, I think I’ve learned what it means to be authentically glad. These days, I’m grateful for a hazy afternoon when the man behind the counter of the grocer remembers how I take my coffee, when the guy in the long tunnel of the Sixth Avenue subway station is still playing “A Hard Day’s Night” on guitar, when the park is filled with strangers laughing as their dogs try to mount one another. I like picking up a roll of developed film at the corner photo lab and discovering that the world inside the prints confirms that, for a few brief moments, the world was as handsome as I thought it was. It convinces me that my efforts aren’t useless. I think I’ve found some meaning here.
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