Relapse, Part One

    I suppose if I’m going to be brave about all this shit, it means a certain amount of real-time honesty. So here we are. I gave total sobriety a go, and it lasted two weeks. Now I have to pick up and start again. Not that this is a game. That’s one thing I have to remind myself — I still was sober for those two weeks. Just because my resolve broke one night, that doesn’t mean I’ve lost all my points and am now behind. It doesn’t, does it?

    I don’t suppose it’s completely fair or accurate to say that I relapsed because my dad, white-bearded and discombobulated by oxycontin and valium, looked me straight in the eye the other night and said, “Can I ask you something? What kind of place is this?” He had been moved from a tiny hospital room crowded with machines, one of which beeped when his breathing got too shallow and prevented him from sleeping, to a much bigger, much quieter room. Having fallen on a patch of ice and broken seven ribs, he’d drifted in and out of delirium for days, wracked with pain, coughing blood, insomniac, drugged, and had indicated earlier in the day that he believed he was fighting in the Easter Uprising of 1916. The answer he expected to his question was this: “It’s a place where they take people to die.” When I told him it wasn’t that kind of place, he eyed me crossways and said, “Are you sure?” I said I was sure, but he didn’t believe me.

    But I also don’t know if that’s not why I relapsed. The two didn’t feel connected, but the truth is that I left the hospital, stopped at a liquor store, and bought a little shot-sized bottle of Grey Goose. As a rule, when I’m drinking vodka I’m doing serious drinking, drinking that isn’t about pleasure or sociability or fun; when I hit vodka, I do it because it’s flavorless, it’s cheaper than bourbon and less filling than beer, and it gets you drunk fast. I sucked down that shot in the front seat of my car as it idled in the garage, not even giving myself time to get out and go into my warm house to at least get comfortable before I got drunk. Within minutes I was on the express train to Drunkville, sitting in a bar down the block and poking around the internet, as I have spent so much of my life doing over the years. By dinnertime I was well and truly blasted. Though I had drunk less than I often did on a regular night in the old days, I was toweringly, hilariously drunk, my tolerance halved by my two weeks on the wagon. I couldn’t think to pay attention to the movies I was trying to watch, couldn’t keep a sentence on a page in focus, couldn’t play a video game to save my life. At one point I got it in mind that I needed more — but when I went outside to go get it, I fell over and bonked my head on the trunk of an old pine tree in my front yard. Just about the only reasonable thought I had all night was as follows: Maybe this means I don’t need anymore to drink. I went inside, barfed up my dinner, and fell asleep on the couch. It wasn’t even 7PM yet.

    The funny thing is, there was no intense craving involved in this relapse; I’m as yet to really experience those, though I’m told they’re common. Instead it happened in a sort of automatic way, my higher functions turned off as I went through the motions of getting righteously, tumbledown drunk. I left my dad ailing in the hospital — in additon to his troubling questions, I’d also seen the massive, flowering contusion that decorates his back in shades from sickly yellow to radiant violet — and bought the vodka without making any decisions. It didn’t feel like a choice. It didn’t even feel like an action. It just happened. Sobriety —> drunkenness. It probably took about half an hour.

    One of the difficulties I’ve always had in addressing my problems has been a stubborn unwillingness to try new approaches. I always thought that one day I would just have to gather the will to quit, like Mark Renton pinned to his bed in Trainspotting, and then I would be fine. I always thought that one day, one of the strangers I picked up in a bar would turn out to be much more than just another drunk out looking to get fucked, that our stumble out the front door and sloppy makeout in the cab and ill-coordinated writhing about in the bed would somehow turn out to be a kind of Meet Cute. I thought that applying for jobs that were beyond my basic qualification would one day land me a gig at NPR or Gimlet. All of these things were, of course, silly pipe dreams, designed to fail from the start, so that nothing ever changed and I got to get up each morning and repeat my comfortable routine of food, exercise, books, and booze. Having recognized their futility, I know I have to change. But what to do?

    How do I approach this problem again, and how do I do it differently? I guess I’m owning up to what happened and have decided to quit hiding it, which is one thing. But that obviously hasn’t been a magic trick that solved the problem; I need something else. I don’t know what that something else is, yet, if it’s a meeting or a new therapist or seeing my current therapist more or what. One thing that I’m fairly sure of, having read a couple of addiction memoirs in the last few days, is this — I don’t need detox. I don’t get the shakes when I don’t drink for a while, my head doesn’t hurt, I don’t get the sweats, and so on. About my only symptom of physical depenedence has been short-lived insomnia. So, if I’m not going to go into some facility and sweat it out with people whose problems make mine look like a hangnail, what to do? There has to be something.

    And I’m worried, too, that this is how I react to bad stimulus. My parents are getting old; this is my dad’s third serious bout with broken bones in the last nine years. These hospital trips are not going to get less frequent as time goes by. I have to find a way to cope with how that makes me feel that doesn’t involve pouring vodka down my throat until I can’t see straight. I just don’t know what it is, yet.

    Oh, also: I’m going to take the advice of one of the addiction memoirs I’ve read, David Carr’s The Night of the Gun: no more addiction memoirs. They appear to be triggering, even as they describe the great folly of getting drunk.