Addictions, Part 4

    I love to drink. Looooooove it. If one were to sit down and evaluate my behavior over the course of my adult life, there’s some evidence that I love drinking more than I have loved any woman I’ve ever been with, any book I’ve ever read, any friend I’ve ever made, any work I’ve ever done, my grandmother, my nieces, and my brothers. I love the taste, the smell, the way it makes you feel (up to a point); I love bars, especially small dark ones with good music playing and no food menu; I love the long, rambly conversations you get into when you’re drinking; I love the way it lowers my inhibitions and makes talking to good-looking women easier; I love the way it turns off the part of my brain that is constantly worrying about everything; I love how it makes it possible to tolerate idiots and boors, which in my experience make up about 80% of the world’s population; I love the unhinged story ideas I get while drinking. Just about the only things I don’t love about it are the hangovers and the fact that it makes you fat. Well, that, and the growing sense I’ve had for a while now that it’s taken over my life.

    One of the things that addicts on TV rarely say is how enjoyable our addictions can be, at least for a while — especially if, as they did for me, the stakes start off very low. I’m always kind of dancing around this fact when I talk to people, but the truth is that the reason I’ve been able to spend the two years since graduate school working on my novel — much as I’ve been able to survive partial-to-unemployment at other times in my life — is that I was born into affluence. I’m not ultra-rich, and I won’t be able to go about my life doing nothing to earn money forever, but there’s always been a floor for me, so that when I fuck up the consequences aren’t that awful, or at least they don’t seem that way. When I was in my early 20s, this was a real recipe for hedonism. I bounced around from California to Portland to DC to Bend, catching up with old companions and getting fat (among other things, I had no idea how to feed myself properly until I was about 27 or 28). My only constant companion was that old friend, booze.

    The first time I can remember worrying about how much I drank was very early on, at a point where it was barely legal for me to do so: I can see myself pouring beer down the sink at the house in Palo Alto where I lived after graduation, so I can have been no older than 23 when it first dawned on me that I was doing this too much. Already, a lot of the sense of the party had gone out of drinking for me. My daily life was a boring, depressing grind, as without the structure of school or the supervision of an interested adult, I floundered. I had a job at a newspaper and discovered that I was an exceptionally poor fit for the kind of work I had always half-believed I was going to end up doing one day (it’s the family business, after all). It filled me with anxiety and fear, which lead to procrastination and poor performance: I could write, but writing is a tiny fraction of the job of a reporter for a daily paper. Most of it is about cultivating personal relationships, calling person after person out of the blue, chasing down people who are too busy to talk to you — all stuff that pressed exactly my sorest spot, the feeling that other people didn’t want me around, that I didn’t understand their motives, that merely being in a person’s presence was a form of asking them for a favor and that if I didn’t put on some kind of entertaining show I was wasting their time. (This feeling persists to this day. It’s why I perform onstage.)

    Outside of work, I could barely handle anything. The insurance lapsed on my car, and after one attempt to get it fixed that went nowhere, I left it parked in the driveway for several months, where all it did was cause me to worry. I was eating too much, burritos for lunch, spaghetti for dinner, and didn’t even quite realize I was doing it; too, the daily routine of basketball and soccer that had left me relatively svelte in college had vanished, and the result was a rapidly-ballooning waistline, again pressing one of my particular buttons: I had been a fat kid (or that’s what other kids told me — looking at pictures now I don’t see it), and my body image has always been very poor. I bought a computer; it broke, and I didn’t get it repaired. The poems I had been so proud of writing dried up, and I had yet to reinvent myself as a fiction writer. Meanwhile, the political situation was a raging nightmare, as the Bush Administration, capitalizing on the blind rage in the country after 9/11, was lying and bluffing its way into a dumbassed war in Iraq that I sometimes felt like the only person in opposition to. There was very, very little pleasure in my sober life, even after I quit the job that taxed me so much. So I turned to drinking on basically a daily basis to get myself through it.

    I came to think of this as maintenance drinking, and the funny thing is, it did the trick. As long as I was drunk, I was relatively happy. I could tune out and play video games or whang on my guitar, and get to feel some of that pleasure that was so hard to come by in my daily life. I learned to like the taste of bourbon, I think because drinking bourbon seemed tough and cool, the kind of thing a writer would do, and left a trail of empty bourbon bottles behind me wherever I went. I cultivated an image as a hard-partying artist type, though the fact was that I wasn’t making any art and the kind of drinking I did when other people were partying was the same kind of drinking I did when sitting at home watching television. If anybody worried about me, I didn’t know it. I worried about myself, though. Grinding worry about my drinking habits has followed me almost as long as the drinking itself, and eventually it would overwhelm the pleasure I got out of it, so that practically all I did was drink, and worry about drinking.

    It didn’t help that nearly everyone I knew had a substance abuse problem of one kind or another in those days. My roommates in Palo Alto were unrepentant potheads who were either stoned or at work every waking hour (and sometimes stoned while at work). In Portland the roommates were drunks and potheads and opiate abusers. In Washington my best friend was a functioning alcoholic who drank himself to sleep every night because his job caused him such stress that otherwise he would lie awake with his mind racing until morning. These were all people I had grown up with, gone to college with, known before any of us developed these habits, and somehow we all turned out miserable and had to self-medicate. I realize now that the year or two right after college is just a scary, unpleasant time, when people work bad jobs for low pay, and nearly everybody feels terror and anxiety about their future — I can remember describing my recurring dream that I was on a crashing airplane to one friend, and she said, I have that dream, too! At the time, though, it just seemed like I was born into an unhappy generation.

    The difference is that most of these other people reformed, eventually, and I didn’t. My pothead roommates from Palo Alto are now a lawyer and a college professor, just as people who graduate from Pomona College are supposed to be. My friend from Washington is a thoroughly domesticated husband and father who no more drinks himself to sleep than he goes out clubbing on weeknights. One of the guys from the house in Portland works for Google. Meanwhile, I lurched around, kept doing desperate and beside-the-point things like moving from city to city, in hopes that somehow, in the transfer from Portland to Washington, or Bend to New York, or New York to Minneapolis, or Minneapolis back to Bend, I would lose my addictions in the same way one might lose a saucepan. As the years ground on, the addictions enabled, and were enabled by, another problem: social isolation. My peripatetic lifestyle meant that I was often in a new place, where I knew nobody, spending a lot of time alone. Doing that sober is boring, and makes me feel like a real loser. I don’t know when I developed this obsession with the fact that I’m an uncool dweeb — I certainly never had it as a kid, when cluelessness about social hierarchy prevented me from ever realizing what a space cadet and a nerd I was — but now it’s one of the things that really, really drives the drinking. Sober up, and I have to look at my life for what it is, which is pretty fucking depressing. Go down to the bar, and I can have a conversation with the bartender, screw around on the internet, and return home to watch reruns of Gilmore Girls without examining just how sad and lonely an existence I lead.

    This quitting thing — which I’m not doing perfectly, by the by; I’m a little hungover as I write this — has been coming down the pike for a long time. When I had a mental breakdown in graduate school, I nearly drank myself out of the program, especially in the last year when I was living alone and didn’t have much structure. For the first time in my life I began drinking in the daytime, would spend days on end intoxicated, bought things two and three times because I’d forgotten I’d already purchased them, tried to write drunk, picked up strange men and women in bars and would wake up next to them the next morning without knowing their names, hurt myself falling on ice because I’d gotten drunk and then realized there was no food in the house and had to walk to the store in blizzard conditions. Just about the only things I didn’t do were go to work drunk, and drive drunk. All the time I knew I had to quit. I had reached a state of emergency I’d been headed toward for a long time. I didn’t have any idea how one might go about doing it, but I knew I had to figure it out.

    The process has been gradual, which came as a surprise to me, though I suppose it shouldn’t have. So much of what you learn about addiction comes from television and other media, in which the story is always, Was a drunk, hit rock bottom, went to rehab, now I’m a recovering addict and I touch nothing. That’s a dramatic story, but it doesn’t feel especially accurate to me, in any of its aspects. First of all, there was never a moment when I, personally, realized I’d hit rock bottom and I had to quit immediately — the election of Donald Trump was close to that, but I’d been working very hard for more than a year at that point on cleaning up my act, including by keeping track of, and moderating, my booze intake. That wasn’t rock bottom, because I was already on the way up. Second of all, quitting all at once — why would that work? It’s like sticking a five-year-old on a bike and saying, Go for it, kid, I know you can win the Tour de France. I’ve been rehearsing sobriety for months now, forcing myself to tolerate the boredom and occasional mind-fuck of not drinking for a few days at a time, so that when the day comes next month and I try to go clean for good, I’ll be familiar with what it’s like. And there’s all this preparation to do — my shrink calls it building a life worth living. I know that if I don’t repopulate my life, if I don’t find people to spend time with and useful things to do, I just won’t be able to hang. One day I’ll be feeling lonely and purposeless and I’ll just find myself back in a bar. I’m a little uncertain about this stuff, but I know it’s necessary.

    And so I don’t have any grand conclusion. This might be the last of these or it might not. I’ll keep you updated on my progress, anyway.