Diary of A Drunk

Dying of alcoholism normally takes years. But before a final, prolonged bout of uncontrolled drinking caused my physical collapse and led to treatment, there was no doubt I was well on my way. My appearance was shocking. I was about 20 lbs. underweight and malnourished, the result of giving up almost all forms of food except coffee, sugar and, of course, alcohol. I was in the early stages of delirium tremens, the DTs. I sometimes heard faint ringing noises in my ears and suffered unexpected waves of vertigo. I felt near constant pressure in my lower back and sides from the punishment my liver and kidneys were taking. My personality was also seriously diseased. I was nervous, reclusive, by turns extravagantly arrogant and cringingly apologetic. I tried to cover my extremes of mood with brittle cheerfulness, even though I was desperately afraid. If you asked me how I was feeling, I usually lied, "Just fine."

I now see "just fine" as a key phrase that encompassed my diseased physical and mental condition. At the nadir, my addiction to a chemical that was killing me was nearly complete. I knew that something was very wrong with me. I even knew I was an alcoholic, but I had long since come to believe there was nothing I could do about it. I had decided that it was perfectly appropriate -- just fine -- that I should die. In fact, I honestly hoped that * I would, sparing further grief for many people I loved. Dying, I thought, was the best thing I could ever do for them. The idea of living without alcohol could not occur to me. I preferred the idea that I was a hopeless case.

No one finds alcoholism more mysterious than the suffering alcoholic, and I was no exception. I had no idea why I was an alcoholic at all, though I should have: my father was one. But from his illness I had gained only a morbid fear of the substance, which lasted until I reached college. I would never touch the stuff. That prolonged abstinence while my adolescent peers experimented with liquor only made what happened to me more mystifying. I thought I could take alcohol or leave it.

Why did I ever start to drink at all? The short answer is that initially it made me feel better. Alcohol numbed my self-awareness, the same trick that it performs for nonalcoholic drinkers at cocktail parties. The difference is that normal drinkers dull their self-consciousness only slightly, the better to socialize. I very quickly tried to send all my thoughts and feelings about myself to oblivion. Psychologically, I was undoubtedly depressed when I began to overcome my well-founded but ill-understood fears about alcohol: my father died when I was a sophomore. For whatever reason, I spent the better part of two decades trying to stay emotionally and physically numb.

Even in those early days, signs might have pointed an expert on alcoholism toward my growing problem. One hint was my immediate tendency to drink to unconsciousness. At parties, I would often fall asleep in mid-hullabaloo on the couch. That drew plenty of jokes at the time. Only much later did I recognize that I had been passing out. Another signal was an initial, abnormally high tolerance for alcohol, at least until the passing-out stage. I thought I could hold my liquor pretty well. Now I think it means that my body was being less dutiful than most in handling overdoses of a hazardous chemical. (Years later, when only a couple of drinks would overload my toxified liver, causing slurring of words and other drunken symptoms, I finally joined the company of those who "can't hold a drink.")

Exactly when did I become addicted to alcohol? I don't know that either. The addiction was preceded by a delusion: I thought I drank to socialize. Maybe I did. My alcoholism took years to develop into a chronic affliction, and during much of that time I went to bars after work, one of the guys. The delusion was gradually reinforced by gravitation. I mingled more and more with other persistent drinkers who took longer and longer to call for their bar tabs. Most of us were actually alcoholics in varying stages of development. The nonalcoholics had long ago selected themselves out. Those of us who remained agreed that we were "normal." Unhappy, but normal.

Alcoholic perception is like that, in a hundred insidious and distorting ways. All of them are aimed at protecting a drunkard's notion that he is possessed of free will. My drinking buddies and I agreed that we did not have a drinking problem. Everything in our increasingly narrow world, though, was a problem that required drinking: the wife, the kids, the boss, the government. In dingy watering holes from which everyone with a healthy life to lead had gone home, we conspired to overlook the obvious, that our bodily cells were addicted, and our minds were along for the ride.

Inexorably, the need for alcohol grew, while the lies wore thin. As my alcoholism accelerated, I abandoned most drinking partners and joined the ranks of solitary topers bellied up to countless bars. I lost any sense at all of what would happen after I started drinking; I became completely unpredictable. Sometimes I would go home after a couple of drinks (there was usually more booze there). More often, I would join the lineup of other alcoholics at the bar telephone stalls, fumbling with worn-out excuses about unexpected visitors and urgent business meetings. Sometimes I would simply hole up in my office with a bottle after everyone else had gone home. There simply wasn't anything else in my life. Most frightening of all, I began to suffer alcoholic blackouts during drinking episodes. I would swim back into consciousness with no recollection of where I had been or what I had done. Once, I came to late at night on a downtown city street with my suit trousers slashed down one side by a razor.

Bizarre incidents like that left me petrified but unable to stop drinking. None of the growing physical pangs of alcoholism -- the retching, nervous spasms, sweaty and sleepless nights, dehydration -- matched the moments of hammering panic I felt every morning for months on end, as I tried to remember exactly what I had done the night before. At one point, terrified that I might kill someone with my car, I gave up driving, but never alcohol. Along with the fear came sudden rages -- at my wife, at my friends, at anyone who tried to stop me from drinking. My homelife became a nightmare. Creeping paranoia set in.

No one wanted me to stop drinking more than I did. What I could not say was that I did not know how to do it. Every day, the inability inspired waves of remorse and self-loathing. But in my fearfulness, I stayed willfully ignorant of alcoholism. I would walk out of the room if a television commercial mentioned the subject. I was convinced that getting sober was merely a matter of personal willpower -- and that, through some unfixable flaws of character, I lacked the power. I never wanted to be reminded of what was, to my mind, a moral affliction. Who would?

I still consider the fact that I did not die to be a miracle, meaning that some kind of providence intervened. For me, it took the form of a friendly superior at work who confronted me. I finally broke down and admitted that I needed help. That simple admission, so long in coming, brought an enormous release. Suddenly, alcoholism was no longer something I had to endure in private. Somehow, in that encounter, a powerful psychosis dissolved.

Years later, after hundreds of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and many hours of intensive counseling, I am happy to acknowledge that I have a serious, progressive ailment, with no cure. Alcohol is no longer a terrifying, destructive force in my life. It is just another chemical, fine for you, perhaps, but deadly for me. I avoid it, but without a sense of panic or fear. Friends say I am a completely different person now. Only, sometimes, I remember the feelings of hopelessness and shame from those terrible years, and I still have to struggle to hold back the tears.