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Origin Stories
The first person I remember who drank like an alcoholic was Uncle Pete. He was the older, most Italian brother of my father’s mother. He was terrifying, a little scrambled, his brain warped by booze. He had a beaky nose and these monster hands with large dirty fingernails and this wiry body held together by enormous bones. He would be at family events hunched in a corner at a table, always smoking dirty cigarettes but in an oddly elegant way, the way old-timey female movie stars smoked.
He was almost always drunk, his tiny juice glass filled with either watered-down liquor or smelly wine or beer. He had this weird aura about him that was both haunted and kind. I don’t ever remember him having a wife, but he had a son, one I’d never met, but the drunker he got, he’d always forget that part. “You remember your cousin Petey? He was my little boy. He died.”
Petey had a drug problem, a bad one that was a sack of heavy bricks he could not let go of. He was either hit by a train by accident or threw himself in front of a train on purpose. I think he was, at most, 20 and, at worst, 17. But Uncle Pete couldn’t save him and a chunk of his heart fell off after Petey died. So he drank more.
And when Uncle Pete got real drunk at family parties, he’d insist I arm wrestled him, even though I couldn’t have been more than 10. He’d sit there with his smoky breath and this crooked smile and place his giant elbow on the table and invite me to try to move it. I could not. His hand was coarse and heavy as an anvil. I couldn’t imagine anyone pinning him. I figured it would probably take five or six guys to do it.
There was this amazing story about Uncle Pete that my father used to tell that I always loved. In addition to his freakish bull strength, he was also a total rockhead. He once tried to carry a king-size mattress down two flights of stairs all by himself to his junk truck by folding it in half. He managed to get it down the stairs but the mattress sprang back and landed on top of him. The cartoon ending of that story was less memorable to me than the fact that he folded a king-size mattress in half. If you met Uncle Pete and arm wrestle him, you would totally believe it.
My most vivid memory of Uncle Pete was his performance at my sister’s wedding reception. I was 14 or so, and Pete was probably in his late 50s and positively howling that night. He was all over the dance floor, clapping, tripping, staining, all this with his cigarette dangling perilously, ash falling all over everything he touched. He almost set so many people on fire, including my sister when he tried to wrestle her away from her new husband to dance with him when the band did a Sinatra medley. When the reception ended and it was time to leave, Uncle Pete wanted to get more booze, so he staggered through a set of swinging doors into the kitchen at the reception hall. It only took a few seconds before plates and assorted metal cookware crashed to the floor. “Go grab Pete, please!” someone yelled.
And that’s what I thought alcoholics were: People who were sad and needed to be retrieved.
*****
I went to my first outpatient rehab in Northeast Philadelphia at age 18. I didn’t need to be there; I was just incredibly depressed. But I thought depression wasn’t something that would merit a stoppage of everything that felt bad in my life – frustration with my lack of direction, being trapped in my childhood home because my parents wouldn’t pay for me to go away to college. So there was no fun sex, no new friends, no freedom. I commuted every day to a school I didn’t want to go to and sat in a lounge between classes or in my car all morning listening to Howard Stern and smoking cigarettes. Everyone I went to high school with seemed like they had broke free. I felt suffocated and almost dead.
But the counselors at the rehab knew I was lying – I was trying to be an alcoholic so they’d let me stay while I loafed around in community college. But the jig was up. They asked me to leave if I wasn't going to be serious about staying sober. On my last day there, my dad picked me up, and on the way home, I could tell we were going to act like this never happened.
I waited until my early 30s to try outpatient rehab again. I was living in Astoria, barely employed, and it was probably necessary. It lasted two days, but I stopped drinking excessively and stayed off coke for almost an entire year. But I went back out, right around the time, I achieved success as a blog editor. The success didn’t fix my drug problem, and it also didn’t help with the depression. I didn’t want to die necessarily, but I wanted to kill myself constantly.
*****
This is the year-by-year breakdown of what I’ll call (and forgive me for this heavy-handed description) “My Sober Journey”:
Year One was a challenge the way those Year Ones are supposed to be. It creaked along so slowly and it was very awkard—the first non-invite to a Christmas party sunk me so low. “You wouldn’t have fun,” was the excuse I got from one of the people who would happily attend. But I knew it was more likely that everyone feared I wouldn't be any fun and I’d make everyone feel low. When people want to go hard, they exclude the newly sober. It’s like inviting a grief-swept widow to an orgy.
By Year Two, though, I’d solved it. My gold-ish coin said “II,” but that wasn’t accurate. I was wise beyond my actual sobriety time, part Navy Seal, part Jesus Christ. I had a blinding shine and a bucket full of triumph to share with everyone. If you wanted strong sobriety, I was your guy. I AM the Highest Power.
But in Year Three, I returned to the world of the less deluded: I clicked into fatherhood, marriage, and steady work. I scheduled a colonoscopy and a dermatology appointment but canceled on them a day before. I don’t know why, habit mostly. It was a similar slog to Year One, but less bumpy.
I was sure I had no desire to drink anymore, but sometimes that desire snuck up on me anyway. This one time it was a sweaty LA afternoon and I was walking down Sunset on the way to a meeting but there was a guy perched on a plastic bucket outside of his tarp tent guarding a styrofoam cooler. He was drinking a Bud tall boy that looked cold and inviting. I walked past him, slower than normal, and rehearsed my response if he reached into that cooler and tossed me one. How could I say no? That would alter some cosmic dramatic plot point I was supposed to be a part of. But he didn’t, and I moved on, quietly disappointed that I didn’t say, “Hey man, can I grab one of those?”
Again, this was Year Three and I was still capable of throwing myself into the asshole of an active volcano. I thought I was cured so this was a surprise.
Year Four, I was a total mess. I was anxious, morose, guilt-ridden, and fearful. My past kept me up at night. Panic attacks were frequent. They would chase after me and then I would wish for a big red button to press down on to sound the alarms, call the buzzards to take me away to a comfy hospital bed or a faraway future without the hammering despair. Enough of this shit. It was almost worse than Year One. I wanted out, I wanted to stop all the stopping, and let my impulses take me down. But I stuck around.
In the Beverage Program, there is a saying that in Year Five, “Your head comes out of your ass,” but I prefer the less gruff version—Year Five is when “You get your marbles back.” Because I can now humbly recall the moment I lost my marbles.
It was in 2015, my most actively degrading year of substance misuse, and on one of those crazy surprise adventure-filled Saturday nights in April or August I was at a bar seated between two strange women who’d suddenly become my best friends or future wives. I was ordering drinks for all of us while sailing on mushrooms and cocaine and watching the bartender's face crack open. “Are you okay?” they asked. Whatever strange noise came out of my mouth caused the bartender to stop serving me. I remember straddling that stool and then maybe a day or two later I realized I was no longer on that stool. I’d lost touch with reality, empathy, responsibilities. All of my marbles had fallen out of my head and rolled into a sewer. Gone.
I always wonder about that marble night–what would have happened if I hadn’t stopped? If I stayed on that stool, waiting for a bigger life, convinced it was bound to happen, despite all evidence to the contrary and how poorly I was deteriorating.
But now there is now a beautiful nothingness inside of me. I am happy to be here. I am right where I am supposed to be. Somedays it feels like all I’m doing is sitting in a rocking chair on a summer porch as the sky explodes with new orange colors. I’m so goddamn happy. I can’t believe it.
*****
Portions of this essay were originally published on July 13, 2021. I have stayed sober since then and if all goes well, July 15 will be Year Eight.
Listen to an old TSB podcast episode with author James Frey.
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*****
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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:
The Road Back
by Anne Sexton
***********************
The car is heavy with children
tugged back from summer,
swept out of their laughing beach,
swept out while a persistent rumour
tells them nothing ends.
Today we fret and pull
on wheels, ignore our regular loss
of time, count cows and others
while the sun moves over
like an old albatross
we must not count nor kill.
There is no word for time.
Today we will
not think to number another summer
or watch its white bird into the ground.
Today, all cars,
all fathers, all mothers, all
children and lovers will
have to forget
about that thing in the sky,
going around
like a persistent rumor
that will get us yet.
ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN
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Just started year 5 and hope you’re right …