by David Carr
There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge. To indulge for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed.
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, “THE IMP OF PERVERSE”
There is a Delphic component to addiction. Anyone who denies that has no idea what he is talking about. On November 23, 2002, almost fourteen years to the day after I entered Eden House, I found myself in my kitchen with a drink in my hand. And not just any old drink. I had been cleaning up during a party, pouring one glass of leftovers into another, and without much thought, I put that disgusting concoction to my lips. And then a few more. One would think that if a person were going to do something as momentous as take a drink after umpty-ump years, he’d make a plan—you know, put on a nice suit, go to the Pen-Top bar, and order up a proper martini. For fourteen years I had walked by precious single-malt Scotch, exotic tequilas, and in one particularly difficult moment, an ice-cold beer after they ran out of Coca-Cola at an open-air disco overlooking an active volcano in Nicaragua. But no, I was drinking the equivalent of college wapatuli.
Somewhere in the move from Washington, DC, to New York, I had stopped going to recovery meetings. But still, why get back in the ring? The heedlessness of that act is beyond comprehension, in part because I was sitting atop all the promises that sobriety brings: a wife and family I adored, a job I was proud of, and enough income to live comfortably.
With that drink, consciously or unconsciously, I set out to become a nice suburban alcoholic and succeeded. Having profiled as a nondrinker in all my endeavors, at first I told no one. A few weeks later, Jill was sitting on the back deck of our house and noticed the odor of alcohol. Five years later, she has very little trouble recalling that morning.
“We’re on the back porch, it’s Saturday morning, I had been running errands and doing things, you were going to put Christmas lights on the outside of the house, which required a ladder. We were sitting at the table, and I could swear I could smell alcohol—and it’s like ten-thirty in the morning,” she said. “I’m like, This can’t be, I’m imagining this. I convinced myself that I was imagining it. So then you were either outside or went somewhere, and I went and opened your bag that was on the side table in the dining room—your briefcase bag—and there was a bottle of half-drunk vodka in a paper bag, and it was sloppy and messy and spilled and stinky.”
Sort of like the guy the bag belonged to. She called my father and her mother, there was a lot of drama, and then I started going back to meetings and didn’t drink for months. I was at a loss to explain myself. For years I had been the life of the party without doing any drinking, and now I was back in the ditch. It seemed to come out of nowhere, except it didn’t.
Some of my old buddies in recovery back in Minneapolis saw it coming, or something like it. Sitting over a burger in the summer of 2006, Dave C., my pal the businessman who brought Christmas presents when the twins were little, said that even over a distant phone line, he wondered whether I was having my way with New York or, more likely, the other way around.
“I was worried about you,” he said. “When you started talking about some of these people you’re interviewing and the access that you have, these powerful people who know what you could do for them, they’re gonna bait you and gonna give you stuff or offer you stuff, you’re going to be in situations that are unlike, you know, something we see here in Minneapolis, which makes you very vulnerable. I was just worried about that. It’s a big lure, especially when you’re traveling and stuff like that.”
A chaotic pattern emerged. I would be sober for weeks or months, take a trip somewhere, go buck wild, then return and stumble back into meetings. I got drunk in Los Angeles, London, Montreal, and Chicago, but was very careful to do my work and turn in my assignments. I never really came out as a drinker, never joined the huge social swirl as a party person. Because nothing was going horribly wrong, I eventually wore Jill down and began drinking at home, at the end of the day, when the kids were in bed.
I tried snorting coke a few times, but I was older, more scared. I knew that if I jumped down that hobbit hole, I would lose my job and my family in short order. I’m sure there are plenty of fifty-year-old white males who still do coke, but even drunk, even stupid, I had no real interest in another go-round with illicit drugs. Still, the progression of the disease had its way with me even without narcotics. Booze is a cunning, baffling opponent. I never turned into a mean, fulminating drunk, just a quiet, morose one. I knew in my bones that what I was doing would not work. I never took a drink under the illusion that I was a normal person, but something in me wanted to screw things up. I was in and out of meetings, in and out of sobriety, in and out of trouble.
There were some fun moments in there. Jill and I partied our way through Paris and points beyond in 2003, but there were significant signs that the center would not hold. In February of 2004, Jill and I got dressed up and went to the opening of the Time Warner Center in Manhattan. I drank early in the evening, but, mindful of the fact that it was a very public event and that I would likely be the one driving home, I backed off and started eating. When we drove to the entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel, there was a sobriety checkpoint, a frequent phenomenon that I had breezed through many times as a sober person. I still wasn’t worried, but when the cop checked my BAC level, he said it was on the borderline and that I would have to wait to make sure it went down. It did not.
I was booked, in a tuxedo, for driving while impaired. Not legally drunk, but not legal to drive. I was locked up in a West Side precinct during the night—Jill was looked after in the lobby until she was judged OK to drive—and then I was brought to Midtown for a hearing in the morning. It was jail: a grisly cell, and the food was rancid. The day passed, and no one came to get the guy in the tuxedo, and I began to go into diabetic shock because I had not eaten. As the end of the day neared, I told the jailer that I was in some medical distress. He said that was fine, that they would just transfer me downtown to the Tombs, the legendary holding pen for Manhattan. Yeow. I talked my way in front of the judge and got kicked loose, finally, onto the streets of New York in a day-old tuxedo. I pled guilty, paid fines, and went to alcohol education classes and got back into meetings, but not for long.
Each time I went back out into the drinking world, worse things would happen. In June of 2004, I went to San Antonio, Texas, and gave a speech, which went very well. I celebrated by going up into the hill country, drinking and driving and carousing. The next day I missed my flight and then finally left San Antonio without my good shoes or my car keys. I came home and went straight to a meeting. I sat in an L-shaped room and poured out my heart, talking about the ass-kicking I had just put myself through. When I got up to leave, I recognized a guy I knew who had been sitting around the corner where I could not see. He had a position of some leadership at the Times. I was horrified that he had heard my story, but when I got back to work, there was an e-mail from him reminding me that he was at the meeting for the same reason I was, and that if I ever needed to talk, he was available.
Being in those meetings made me feel like a bit of a fraud. I was surrounded by people with years of recovery, years that I had drop-kicked away. I came late, left early, sat in the back row, not talking to much of anyone. I went months—sometimes as many as eight—without a drink, but every time I picked up again, I would end up passing out or driving drunk or wandering around in parts of cities I knew nothing about. I didn’t hit anyone, I didn’t sleep around, and I did not fall back into a life of drugs. My career continued to prosper, in part because I drew a bold white line around it—if I felt a bit overmatched at the Times sober, I was toast as an active drunk. Still, I was failing to notice the trend, failing to realiz
e that one of these times, I wouldn’t make it back.
Once again, I began handing out different versions of the truth. I told many people, including my boss Sam, that I was back to having a few drinks very occasionally and, boy, it was going swell. One night, maybe after he got a promotion, we had a spontaneous dinner. We walked into Bar Americain, a popular spot that had to be booked weeks in advance, and using nothing more than his charm and directness, Sam got us a table right in the middle of the room. He never mentioned The New York Times, an invocation that I always took as a sign of weakness when a story wasn’t involved. It was a stupendous night, one of those magical New York evenings when possibility seems everywhere. Two martinis, half the menu, and many toasts to the fact that a couple schmucks like us would end up with the jobs, families, and lives we had. Of course, Sam hopped the subway home to that lovely family with a nice little glow on. I took off for the West Side and drank alone.
The only person I told the unalloyed truth to was Seth, a writer I knew. We had been introduced by mutual friends in the belief that we might hit it off, and we did. I was older and had more years in recovery under my belt, and he’d been involved in heroin, but we both took journalism and sobriety very seriously. When I was going good, I talked to him about that. When I was in the ditch, I talked to him about that as well. He ran a straight, simple program of recovery and had, as they say, something I wanted.
Seth was really the only one apart from Jill who knew my whole story during that time. I called him in the summer of 2007 and was very surprised to find out he had worried about me long before 2003.
In 2001 we’d been walking toward a party in the Village for some dot-com, a party where we would both not drink.
“You had been going through some of the health stuff, and you were taking Oxy,” he said. “We’re talking about how that was fine, and you said you had to take it sometimes slightly different than it was being prescribed, but it wasn’t a problem. I was about ninety-eight percent sure that you had taken some that day that kind of blurred the line between need and recreation.
“There were three things going on. Like, you’re telling me what was going on with yourself, and you’re trying to convince yourself what was going on was OK, and you’re asking me if I felt what was going on was OK,” he said. He did not think what was going on was OK.
Stripped of pretension, you could say I was born a drunk and merely acted like one after many years of being in remission. Regardless of health issues, sobriety will do nice things for your life if you follow some kind of program, and almost any will do. Mine sort of begins and ends with an admission of powerlessness, attendance at meetings, and, when I get in a jam, a power greater than myself. Stick to those basics and you can live congruently, stay married, and keep out of jail. But what you can’t do is change channels. If you are filled with quiet ennui, you can’t go to the cupboard and suck down several ounces of booze so you no longer care or smoke a doobie on the porch so you no longer notice. Sobriety means that wherever you go, there you are, for good or ill.
My decision to do further empirical research on my relationship with alcohol when the data were already clear still leaves me baffled. For me it was less about having scrambled to the top of some greasy career pole and finding not much, and probably more about some venal, long-brewing urge to take a sledgehammer to things I adore. We, I, you tend to feel unworthy of some of the blessings that come our way, perhaps because, in our darker moments, it is so much more than we think we deserve. If that seems a bit ardent, a flourish of therapy-speak in what is a fairly black-and-white matter—there are some people, millions, in fact, who should not use mood-altering chemicals—how else to explain the very common story of relapse among people who have a decade or more of sobriety? Perhaps it has less to do with Freudian imperatives and is more as simple as the fact that human beings have a tendency to forget. You might say I had a lapse of memory.
I stopped in Chicago to see my pal Ike, a rock singer and songwriter, a former doorman at the Park Hyatt, and an astute student of the human condition. Sitting in the studio he had built in his house, he considered the riddle of why people, people like me, choose chaos. He knows the syndrome, and me, pretty well.
“We’re talking about middle-class white Americans that have an inside track to any success they want, and yet a great portion of the people have fucked it up,” he said. “You have, I have, guys we pass through town have. Why? I don’t know. Greed and insecurity are obvious; the guy is greedy. What’s the cliché? Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Greedy people should be punished. I’m all for that.”
While Ike tends toward the biblical in the wiseguy epics he writes and performs, he suggested that my decision might have been as basic as a longing for the dark aspects of life, in spite of its downsides.
“Is it an escape from the monotony of the white middle-class lifestyle in this era?” he asked. “Were you tempting fate?”
Yes.
“Maybe you found that—and I found this—it’s too straight, and because of something in you that relates—to the tenets of the rock lifestyle or the journalistic lifestyle or the addict—to what’s happening, where the action is.”
Sometimes, he suggested, it was less about engaging in bar talk with some nitwit twenty-three-year-old at four in the morning—a little of that will go a long way, especially after awhile—than having trouble knowing where to stand at the kids’ soccer game.
“I can’t even go to the school where my kids go because it creeps me out so much. I don’t want to go to the church. I don’t hate those people, but it reminds me of everything I wanted to escape as a kid. And so it’s midnight, everyone else is going to sleep to get up for work, I’m still living in the same town, I’m going to get fucked up tonight, and I’m going to walk through the streets, I’m going to stay up all night, I’m going to run through my yard in my underwear in a thunderstorm. Is that the same thing as giving the suburban drunk a try?”
Almost precisely, come to think of it.
“I drink too much,” Ike went on. “I clearly don’t have a history of addiction and programs like you, maybe because I haven’t gone to any meetings, but I haven’t bottomed out like you. I haven’t jeopardized the loves of my life. You gotta work, you gotta be a man. There’s nothing wrong with being a man and taking care of people, and with that comes compromise. We go back to the discussion of great artists, great writers, who forego all that shit—family, homes—and are they men? Are they loyal?” he asked, pausing on a word he probably knows comes freighted with meaning in my neighborhood.
“What are you going to do?” he asked. “Are you going to be loyal to a fucking concept like being an artist, or are you going to be loyal to human beings that you’re responsible for?”
Barring a necessary and opposing force, the obsession that lives in an addict is always in the basement, doing push-ups, waiting for an opening. And all the treasure, human and otherwise, will not change that math. That’s why reading all the junkie memoirs that ridicule various programs of recovery makes me laugh. As opposed to what? Free will? Moderation? A flash of self-realization followed by a lifetime of self-control? Gee, that sounds like a plan, except an addict alone—me, for instance—is in a very bad neighborhood. Millions of lives have been saved by gathering like minds in a church basement. You don’t like the slogans? Make up some new ones.
In various programs of recovery, adherents will talk about “slips”; but the collapse into drinking and drugging can take a very long time. In that process, the prospect of getting high or drunk, unimpeded by obeisance to a higher power or a program of daily living, is rolled around in the mouth absently, surreptitiously, long before it is actually swallowed, to see how it might taste. That’s how I finally found myself in my kitchen with that disgusting drink.
When I really think about it, somewhere in the late nineties and into 2000, I stopped identifying myself as an alcoholic and an addict and began thinking of myself as someone who just didn’t drin
k or do drugs. It took about four years to make that nasty drink in my kitchen, four years of not going to meetings, four years of not speaking honestly with people in recovery, four years of a long conversation in my head, before the thought became deed.
Each time I would come back, I would bounce a little lower. I filled Seth in here and there during that slide. “You would say, you know, I’m having, like, a drink, and it’s fine. Whenever that happened, I sort of said, ‘Well, isn’t that always what you hear?’ And you said, ‘Well, no, it’s not like I’m smoking crack.’ Well, there’s a lot that’s not fine before you hit that.
“I was less worried about work than just worried about whether I was gonna wake up one day and get a phone call that you were either in the hospital or you had died,” he said, recalling the times when we would walk and talk after a meeting. “Maybe, again, this was stupid of me, but I sort of had confidence that no matter what happened at work, you were talented enough and skilled enough to kind of be able to bullshit your way out of it.”
For a guy like me, the work is always the last thing to go. It is, in some twisted way, more sacred, more worthy of protection, than friends, loved ones, and family.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t trying. At the end of 2004 and into 2005, I put together eight months sober. But on the Fourth of July weekend, I found myself at loose ends. I was in Mississippi and Louisiana, writing about an author who was using a raft to do a book tour, a juicy, wonderful assignment. As I was driving toward St. Joseph’s, Louisiana, I called the guy who was advising me on sobriety matters, and we talked until the cell coverage ran out. I was feeling itchy, but determined. I was tired and hungry and a long way from home, but the motel I was staying at was supposed to be on a lake. I envisioned a nice dinner followed by a cup of coffee with a good book on the porch.
I pulled up to the place, and it was a cinder-block building on a swamp. I checked into my room, and it was beyond bleak. The restaurant was closed, and I went to the store at the front of the motel, which sold mostly two product lines: whiskey and guns. In my rattled state, I thought, God either wants me to drink or blow my brains out. I bought some Jack Daniel’s.