Girl Walks Out of a Bar

by Lisa F. Smith

  The night before we left France, Randi and I stood front row center at the intimate Olympia Theater. With nobody between us and Sting, he sang to us and no one else. Randi cried like a teenager watching the Beatles step off their plane in 1964. I cried because I couldn’t believe that this could be my life.

  After the Paris trip, I began attending Group twice a week and 12-step meetings every other day. I was no longer including the “if” in my thoughts about staying sober. It had become all about “how.” I heard story after story about people who had almost drunk themselves dead but who were now living fulfilling lives as long as they didn’t pick up a drink. I wanted to be those people, decades deep into sobriety, my drunk days far behind, my time spent trying to help the next girl to shuffle in from Gracie Square. So I linked arms with Lexapro, and we put one foot in front of the other.

  It was time I chose a sponsor—she should be another woman who had been sober longer than I had and who was living the kind of sobriety I wanted for myself. If she agreed to become my sponsor, she would be like a sober coach and guide me through the 12-steps. After some scouting, I chose Jennifer, a manufacturing executive with long blonde hair and perfectly painted nails. She looked so much like Natasha Richardson it seemed strange to me that when she opened her mouth, American English came out. Jennifer worked a stressful job, just as I did. She loved booze and coke, as I did. And she got sober when her self-poisoning began to threaten her career, as I did. Jennifer also had a marriage at stake, and she wasn’t willing to trash it. Now she was the picture of calm in the midst of New York nuttiness and an endless wave of corporate shit storms. I could see us in each other and I liked it.

  One Wednesday afternoon I called Jennifer from my office. “So I’m having dinner with my friends tonight, but I won’t stay out late.”

  “The friends you used to drink with?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I thought you were keeping it to breakfasts and lunches with them?”

  “I have been. But it’s been three months. I’m sure it’ll be fine.” It was quiet for a moment.

  “Have you ever, in the fifteen years you’ve been friends with these people, ever, not had a drink when you all went out to dinner?” she asked.

  “No,” I said with a sigh, my eyes turning toward the ceiling.

  “But after just three months of sobriety you’re sure it’ll be fine?” Ugh. She was a tough broad and dammit, she was right.

  “I guess it could be hard,” I said.

  “That’s an understatement,” she said. “If you want to go, go. But I think you’re putting yourself at risk without good reason.”

  She was right. She was right. She was right. It had been only three months. I had a tremendous amount to lose, and I just didn’t know if I was stronger than a 1999 Far Niente.

  “Hey, it’s me,” I said when Devon picked up her office phone a few minutes later.

  “Hey, you.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I’m not going to make it tonight.” I felt my throat choke up.

  “What? Why?” she asked.

  “I’m not ready. It’s that simple. Fuck! I’m not ready. I’m afraid of drinking.”

  “I completely understand. You have to do whatever’s best for you. We’ll miss you, though.”

  Fuck me.

  A few months later, some of my friends started turning forty. That meant parties. I’d gotten good at sidestepping out of weeknight hangs, and the occasional brunches were easy to manage—even normal people didn’t always order booze to go with their eggs Benedict—but these milestones presented a much bigger hurdle. These were my people and my people were turning forty.

  “Baby, you’re still coming to the party, right?” Jerry had asked me early in the week.

  “You know I wouldn’t miss the night you step into real adulthood,” I said, as if I hadn’t spent the past ten days trying to craft an excuse.

  “I don’t know about that,” he laughed. “You know it might get a little out of hand, so…”

  “I know. But it’s a big night. I want to be there.”

  Jerry’s fortieth party was held on a Saturday night at The Palm, a steakhouse in the Theater District. It was a classic party establishment with dark brown walls lined with color caricatures of the restaurant’s most famous and biggest-spending customers. Everything at The Palm was thick and meaty, from the heavy wooden tables to the steaks to most of the patrons. As in so many other New York restaurants, Jerry had buddied up to the bartender, so the drinks flowed whenever we showed up. That night, twenty of us took over the private dining room, and all through the night, full bottles of wine were marched into the room as fast at the empty ones were marched out.

  At the dinner, Jessica and Devon hovered around me as if I were a diabetic in a Godiva store.

  “Does the seltzer have enough cranberry for you?” Jessica asked when my mocktail arrived.

  Devon handed me a plate, “Here, Li, have a plate of fried calamari—all tentacles attached, just the way you like it.”

  “It’s cold out tonight. We want to call you a car when you’re ready,” Jessica said.

  By the time dessert was served, I had breathed in countless wine fumes, heard countless glasses clink, and heard countless happy old stories about Jerry and the gang. I had made it through my first post-rehab party, the kind of energetic drinking romp that had dominated almost all of my thirties. I was tired, sober, and happy to go home.

  In clean pajamas, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror washing my face and thinking about the night. I’d left a party while it was still rumbling, and something about that made me feel left out. Someone in Group had said that it’s helpful to “play the tape through,” to think about what the scene would look like if I’d said “yes” to alcohol after months of hard fought sobriety. That was an easy exercise. Even if I could have made my friends believe that I could drink “just one, maybe two and then call it a night,” in the best-case scenario I would have drunk more than anyone realized, passed out in my own bed, and awakened the next day dehydrated, aching, vomiting, and wanting to die of self-hatred. In the worst-case scenario, I would have blacked out somewhere dangerous or called Henry for a bunch of coke. That is, if I hadn’t already stepped blindly in front of a speeding truck and been smeared across 50th Street.

  I awoke feeling the simple tiredness of having gone to bed late. That was all, just a little Sunday morning laziness. I thought, I’ll spend a couple of hours drinking coffee and reading the paper in my pajamas. I couldn’t help smiling as I padded into the kitchen and poured water into the back of the coffeemaker that I no longer neglected. I looked forward to talking through the party post-game with my friends hours later after they’d already been up once for Advil and water and had thrown themselves back onto the mercy of their mattresses.

  Curled on my couch with a big cup of expensive coffee warming my hands, I looked around my bright living room, so pleasant when the curtains were pulled wide, and thought about the night before. Things had changed and forever. From now on, the memories I created with my friends would simply not look like the memories we had built up to now. From my sober station the night before, I had watched as the personalities expanded and volume boomed with every refilled glass. And for every single second of the party, I was completely aware that I was the sober one, the one who wasn’t like everybody else.

  Sitting there in the morning sunshine, I felt content and even a little bit proud. But it wasn’t until many years later when I realized that my choice on the night of Jerry’s fortieth birthday was the most extraordinary accomplishment of my life.

  Epilogue

  It’s been twelve years since I got sober …

  I’ve apologized to people I hurt when I was drinking and using drugs. They haven’t all forgiven me.

  I hold a job I would have lost in a week if I were drinking. Twice during presentations I’ve suffered anxiety attacks so vicious that I’ve had to halt the meeting and lower my head into
deep breaths as partners handed me glasses of water.

  I married a wonderful man in the Santa Fe home that we bought together. I wore pale blue because white would have felt ridiculous.

  I held my father’s hand and gave him morphine as he lay dying. Then I pulled myself together and delivered a eulogy that I hope was worthy of him.

  I’ve watched friends I met in recovery jam onstage with rock gods and act in the hottest HBO television shows. I’ve built friendships with people who came to a 12-step meeting one day and relapsed the next.

  I buried a best friend. I still can’t accept his death.

  I regularly call sober friends from 12-step programs who help me stay clean. In turn, I help incredible people to stand up straight, salvage their careers, save their marriages, and anchor their families.

  I now have a niece and a nephew, and I made it to the hospital the day Ben was born. I’m the aunt who shows up for sleepovers.

  On many mornings, I haven’t wanted to get out of bed. On most mornings, I’ve gotten out of bed.

  On more than 4,000 mornings, I have awakened and made a decision:

  “Just for today, I will not drink.”

  About the Author

  Credit: Photo by Rod Goodman

  Lisa Smith is a writer and a lawyer in New York City. Sober for more than ten years, she is passionate about breaking the stigma of drug and alcohol addiction, particularly for professional women.

  Lisa’s writing has been published in The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, AfterPartyMagazine, and Addiction.com. She is on the Board of Directors of the NY Writers Coalition and The Writers Room in Greenwich Village.

  Prior to working for more than fifteen years in legal marketing, she practiced corporate finance law at a leading international law firm.

  After attending Northwestern University, Lisa received a JD from Rutgers School of Law, where she served on the editorial board of the Rutgers Law Review.