Alcohol
worked—for a while, anyway. And then it started
killing me. Early on, it made things easier
and funner. If I had a buzz going when I walked into
a room full of strangers, that debilitating shyness
I seemed to have been born with disappeared. Early on
in my drinking career, I was at a party and a woman
commented on how well I could dance. That remark astounded
me! She said, "I wish I could dance like that."
I said, "It helps a whole lot to get drunk."
She said she didn't want to do that. I thought, "That's
too bad." Really. I thought it was a shame that
she couldn't use such a wonderful tool.
But, the good part doesn't last
for the alcoholic. For some alcoholics, it gets bad
fast. For others it takes a while. For the active alcoholic,
though, the movement is always down, down, down. A recovering
alcoholic I know talks about how life gets worser and
worser and worser when we keep drinking. That's another
way of saying the disease, or condition, or whatever
you want to call alcoholism, is progressive. Progressively
worse, that is. I've never heard of a recovering alcoholic
who drank again and said it was better. It's always
worse.
I've spent a lot of
time with other recovering alcoholics and we all have
similar stories. The details are different, but the
themes are the same. The problems alcohol cause us tend
to have benign beginnings before becoming progressively
more difficult. That's for the lucky ones. For a lot
of us alcoholics, we die before it gets too bad.
We
often start with embarrassment. I’m
lying in bed in the morning. It’s that time between
being asleep and being awake – halfway between
dreams and consciousness. A memory comes. My eyes fly
open. Oh, God! I grab my head with two hands. Oh, man
. . . It all comes back. What I did the night before.
Seemed just fine then. Now . . . the embarrassment!
The shame!
That happened a lot before my last drink. Never happens
now. I still make mistakes. Sometimes I say something
I wish I could take back. But, none of those times comes
close to equaling things I did when I was drinking alcohol.
Alcohol
creates trouble. Recovering alcoholics say,
“I didn’t get into trouble every time I
drank, but every time I got into trouble, I was drinking.”
True with me, that’s for sure. My parents raised
me to do the right things and when I was sober, that’s
what I did. When I was under the influence of alcohol,
I didn’t always do that. Now, I wasn’t the
total Jekyll and Hyde some active alcoholics are. I
didn’t get into fights or beat the wife and kids.
In the interest of full disclosure, though, I did beat
up a baby swing one time. It was one of those that you
wind up and the seat automatically swings back and forth.
We were in our basement and I had a pretty good buzz
going when I got irritated about something Pat did.
I forget what that was now. I picked up the swing and
smashed it into our concrete basement floor several
times. When the swing was pretty much destroyed, I wasn’t
finished throwing my fit yet, so I turned around and
kicked one of the iron support posts about as hard as
I could. Brilliant move. My toes were black for months.
Destroying baby swings and my toes by kicking iron posts
just isn’t me. Not the sober me, anyway. That’s
what alcohol does for me. Alcohol also put me in jail
a couple of times. The first time was five years after
my first drink. The second time was ten years after
that. There should have been many more times than that
though. I have an ability to be blasted drunk and not
act like it, so I often escaped trouble when others
might not have. You might think that’s a good
thing. It’s not. Avoiding the trouble just postpones
the inevitable.
[Printer
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Alcoholism results in
tragedy. The condition is fatal. If we alcoholics
keep drinking, we’ll die in an accident, or because
somebody shoots us while we’re doing something
stupid, or from some malfunction of a body part. Even
harder, we often take things into our own and hands
and end it ourselves when life keeps getting worser
and worser and we just can’t take it anymore.
The thing about alcohol is that if you don’t die
of an accident or a gunshot, or you don’t die
at your own hand, it usually takes a while it to kill
you. In a long-term study started in the 1960s, the
average age of death for alcoholics was found to be
56. When you’re twenty that seems old. Seemed
like it to me back then. As I approached fifty, it didn’t
seem old at all. My dad does yard work every day. He’s
88, thirty-two years past when the average alcoholic
dies. If I can help it. I want to be more like my dad
than those alcoholics who are dying younger than I am
now.
We all know about liver disease killing alcoholics,
but there are a bunch of other things alcohol does to
our bodies. Bad things. I developed heart disease and
drinking and smoking undoubtedly were big factors. Since
I stopped drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes, my
heart disease doesn’t appear to have progressed.
In fact, it may have regressed a bit.
I had some microbiology stuff going on, too. Alcohol
caused my bone marrow to do bad stuff, causing my red
blood cells to get big, and they kept getting bigger.
That can lead to macrocytic anemia, which eventually
could have killed me of pernicious anemia. In short,
your liver may survive excessive alcohol consumption
if you’re lucky, but there’s a bunch of
other stuff that’s laying in wait to kill you
way before your time.
It’s easy for young alcoholics to figure they’ve
got time to quit before it gets bad. Don't count on
it. Kenny died in his early thirties. I met him after
we had both quit drinking. He was brilliant. I loved
talking to him. He had quit high school before graduating,
but was making a good living in construction. I saw
him after he started drinking again and he was an entirely
different person. He was drunk one night and decided
to drink liquid morphine. It killed him.
Dan was a learned man who was a highly respected, successful
professional in the education field. He was chariman
of the English Department at the high school where I
did my student teaching. Later, he became a leader in
the state department of eduation. He was also an active
aclcholic who never quit drinking. He was found dead
in a pool of blood in his kitchen. His drinking had
produced esophageal varices. Those are veins in the
throat area that become extremely thin due to liver
damage from alcoholic drinking. Eventually, they just
burst and the alcoholic bleeds to death. He was in his
early fifties when he died.
Richard was a friend from my early days in sobriety.
I enjoyed talking to him. He had such good things to
say about how to stay sober. He didn’t, though.
He got drunk and was arrested on a gun charge. They
found him dead in his cell. He had hanged himself.
And I could go on and on.
Miss Maryella Camp was my senior English teacher. It
drove her crazy when people misused the word ‘tragedy.”
She told us it wasn’t a tragedy when a meteor
fell on a house and killed a family, or when a tidal
wave killed thousands in Indonesia. Those things were
horrific, terrible, unimaginably bad events. But, they
weren’t tragedies. A tragedy occurred when bad
things happened to someone due to a tragic flaw in the
person’s being or character. Kenny, Dan and Richard
meet that definition. They were good people and their
tragic flaw was their alcohol abuse. They’re not
unique.
Alcoholism is a fatal disease. It creates tragedy. It
kills you.
[Printer
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Alcohol
makes dumb decisions. It doesn’t feel
like it when you’re in the midst of active alcoholism,
but it does. When I quit drinking, I’d accumulated
more than $40,000 in credit card debt. Almost none of
that debt came from putting alcohol on a credit card.
First, I didn’t want to be an alcoholic who bought
liquor on credit. That’s bad. Second, and more
importantly, I didn’t want to leave a written
record. If I keeled over from a heart attack, whoever
took over the bills would certainly notice all those
liquor store purchases and I’d be disgraced. Didn’t
want that.
That’s not to say I didn’t spend a lot of
money on alcohol. Most nights, I drank a pint of vodka.
A half gallon would go for four nights. (Or whatever
liter amount that is. Nobody says, “I’m
going out to pick up 1.75 liters of vodka.” We
say “half gallon.”) I bought Old Mr. Boston
or Barton’s at a little less than ten bucks a
bottle. That’s what it cost at the end of my drinking,
anyway. That was about seventy dollars a month at the
end. I figure that over twenty years, it works out to
about fifteen thousand dollars. I couldn’t spend
that money without justification. I rarely bought clothes,
didn’t go to movies, didn’t play golf, or
do much of anything else. I bought booze and cigarettes.
So, if I wasn’t putting alcohol on credit cards,
where did all that debt come from? Dumb decisions made
under the influence of alcohol. And, very little of
it was stuff. It was just living and dumb decisions.
My oldest daughter spent her first two years in college
at Young Harris College. She had a couple of scholarships
and earned tuition money from work-study. That didn’t
pay for it all, though. To make up the difference, we
both had to borrow money. The government has a loan
program for parents called PLUS that provides low interest
loans with a long payout schedule. I intended to apply
for that. Never did. Instead of completing the paperwork,
I’d come home, fill my glass with vodka, go to
the porch and drink and smoke.
I did that each afternoon until the day the letter came
from Young Harris College saying the tuition balance
was due in two days and Heather would be dismissed from
school if I didn’t send a payment pronto. Yikes!
I rushed to my office and dug around for the “convenience
checks” from the credit card company. You know
those cash advance checks that have a 22% interest rate
attached to them. I’d write the check for a few
thousand dollars, and then rush to the post office to
pay fifteen bucks to express mail the payment.
Back home, I’d refill my glass, light another
cigarette, and make a solemn promise not to let that
happen again. Then I’d forget and another semester
would arrive, and I’d do it all over again. The
$40,000 came from stuff like that.
Dumb decisions. Failure to act. All alcohol borne.
[Printer
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Alcohol
creates failure. Sometimes the failures
are spectacular. Sometimes they’re subtle. Sometimes
it happens right away. Sometimes it takes decades. I
wasn’t immune. No alcoholic is. It kills me to
think about my biggest alcohol-fueled failure.
In 1989 I decided to write for publication. In 1994
St. Martin’s Press published my first mystery
novel. Publishers Weekly and Mystery News had some nice
things to say about it. In 1996, my second novel was
published. The Kirkus Reviews starred their review,
indicating my novel was particularly recommended. The
book was well reviewed by some major newspapers such
as the Dallas Morning News. There was a nice mention
in Playboy. Two of my short stories appeared in the
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Writer’s Digest
magazine featured an article I wrote and I was on its
cover holding my second novel. That article was republished
several times in subsequent publications.
Early on, I read a lot about how
to become published. Almost two decades later I can
see these words of warning in my mind's eye: "Don’t
drink alcohol while you write. If your writing becomes
connected to your drinking, you’re on a sure road
to a 28-day program and no writing career.”
No problem, I thought. I had been drinking daily for
a decade by then, but almost always beginning in the
late afternoon. Exceptions included our annual week
at the beach, Christmas morning while cooking breakfast,
and Thanksgiving morning while cooking the dinner. Stuff
like that. I was writing on Saturday mornings, so drinking
wouldn’t be an issue. I was wrong. After St. Martin's
Press bought my first novel, I decided I wanted to hurry
up and finish the second one. I began writing at night
— my prime drinking time. Very quickly, drinking
became a part of my writing. Eventually, that killed
it.
Becoming published is difficult.
Zillions have the desire, thousands actually sit down
and write, and only a relative handful of people actually
sell what they’ve written. That’s particularly
true for fiction. And, I gave all that away because
I couldn’t stop drinking alcohol.
[Printer
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Eventually,
we isolate. In the end, alcohol wore me
out. That happens to all alcoholics who keep drinking
sooner or later, especially the functioning kind, if
they don’t die from the addiction first. It’s
hard work to do what it takes to drink as much as our
addiction requires while keeping others from knowing
how much that is. We grow weary of enduring all those
embarrassing moments and suffering through the trouble
we create. The cognitive dissonance our behavior produces
saps our energy. Sooner or later, something has to give.
More often than not, what gives is human contact. We
isolate.
Life sucked during those few years before my last drink.
Looking from the outside in, it didn’t look like
it to others, but it did. What made it even harder was
acting as if everything was OK. I had a student in my
office who was telling me about her father. She said
that he got drunk every night. The night before he’d
gotten out of his chair, urinated in the corner of the
trailer’s living room, and made her clean it up.
As she was telling me that, I saw myself in my office,
working on my computer, with the vodka and water sitting
next to the monitor. Daddy’s water. I never urinated
in the corner of the living room, but I understood that
guy. I did what I could to help the girl deal with her
dad’s behavior, but I had to do that while slogging
through my own swampy mess. That was just so very hard
to do. And I did it day after day.
Life’s good now. Glorious. Escaping from hell
changes everything. A completely new perspective is
born. But, before that happened, it got awfuller, and
awfuller, and awfuller.
And then it ended.
[Printer
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