Bad Dog (5 page)

Ethyl alcohol molecule (ETOH)
.

Bernese mountain dog (HOLA)
.

P
EOPLE WONDER WHAT
an alcoholic is like and I say:
You
.

We are no different from other people, except we are more afraid.

Alcohol for us isn’t just a constant companion, because companions sometimes take a break. It’s more like an organ or a tragic past: it’s simply always there. A guy named Tony told me that being an alcoholic is like waking up every morning next to a professional wrestler named Demento. It’s a life of artificial combat.

Like most alcoholics, I took those quizzes in the back of self-help books and in magazines. Do you black out? Do you sometimes drink by yourself? No sometimes about it, brother. Have friends and family talked to you about your drinking? Have you tried to cut down and not been able to? Are you embarrassed by some of the things you have done while drinking?

Try, like, every fucking day of my life.

Do you try to conceal the amount you drink?

At the end, I dry-heaved in the toilet at work and sometimes spit up blood. I stopped in the Duane Reade on my way home and bought a half liter of generic mouthwash, stepped into a dismantled phone booth on Twenty-sixth Street and Park Avenue South, and swallowed it whole. My head started to shrink. I didn’t have a cell phone because I had no one to call. The
clawing physical pain in my torso and neck and the nausea that made it harder to focus my eyes—not a symptom, a way of life. Thinking what my boss had said, something like:

Why are you here, Marty?

I … because I—

You don’t seem to like it. Your work is so-so. You’re a smart guy, I know that, but you’re just not showing up these days.

Okay, I say. I appreciate that. I’ll work on it.

What’s going on?

This was a man I admired and liked, and he now knew the feeling everybody close to an active, high-functioning alcoholic knows:
Huh? What am I missing here? What?

Ask us what’s wrong and we’ll all say a thousand things: it’s the job, the apartment, the husband, the kid, the city, the parking, the consumer price index, the rain. We’ll say a thousand things except the one true thing.

Why? Because we can control it; it’s not a problem; it’s your problem, really, not ours. The entire thrust of most recovery programs is just to slide the addict slowly into the bright light of day, to get him to see his own life and other people as they are. This may not sound like much, but by the end, that life, those relationships—it almost seems better to throw in the napkin.

Why?

Because we do things like this:

I come into the apartment now and step past Hola and Gloria. Don’t want her to smell the alcohol on my breath until I’ve had an official drink, one she’s seen.

How was your day? she asks me.

Terrible. I’m in trouble with Don.

What’s the problem?

I don’t want to talk about it.

I pull out a beer and some cheese I don’t want so it doesn’t
seem like I’m just drinking. I swallow. Now I kiss my wife. That last year I don’t know if she had a single sober kiss. We all but stopped making love. Neither of us had the urge, for different reasons; for me, there was always a will but not often a way.

Is everything okay? she asks me.

Yeah. I’m fine. Why?

I leave the beer can on the counter and go into the bathroom. There’s a bottle of vodka behind the wastebasket under the sink, which helps. Gloria keeps talking through the door but I don’t hear her. I’m sitting on the toilet with my pants up drinking vodka. I flush.

I come out and Hola’s standing in the hall there like a little tank with a fluffy tail. Gloria says:

Are you all right? You were in there a long time.

I’m fine.

She’s been waiting for you to take her out.

There is nothing I’d enjoy doing less at that moment.

Oh, God, I say. I have a lot of work to do. Can you take her?

She needs time with you, Marty. Why don’t you pet her?

I take my workbag into the bedroom and fire up the laptop. I hear Gloria taking the dog out; I hear them come back.

They appear at the bedroom door.

I’m going to listen to some music, Gloria says. You want to come?

Great news. Terrific. I point to the laptop. I’ve got all this—

Work. Right.

She leaves. Things happen. I take out old stuff I’ve written that never got published and can’t believe my own genius. I pick up the phone. It’s my dad. I talk and talk, and he gets very small and quiet on the line. When I’m drunk I talk a lot; that’s always what gives me away. If I could just keep my mouth shut, I think, but I can’t. I don’t remember who hangs up.

Hola lies on the floor staring up at me.

What are you looking at? I ask her.

She stares.

We hit our bottom when we’re falling faster than our standards.

Some of us end up in jails or ICUs handcuffed to tables, screaming, and a white light descends. Most of us simply have a moment of clarity or grace, when we see what we are about to lose. Sometimes it’s too late.

There’s something about Hola’s eyes, her sincerity, how pretty she is, lying there on the floor just wanting a daddy. I’m looking at her and I realize I’d talked to my own dad and I don’t remember what I said, but he must have known I was drunk. Did he know I was drunk? Maybe I covered it up; it wasn’t that much so far, what, five drinks, ten. I have no idea. What time is it? Gloria left did she know I was drunk maybe she didn’t know maybe she’s not mad at me, and I’m sobbing and sobbing, deep in my heart, just two thousand miles of dirt road and nothing that bad has happened. I’m just tired, and sick, and tired of myself.

I remember Hola jumping on and off the bed. She was hysterical, jumping on, poking at me with her paws, jumping off, running back and forth on the bedroom floor, jumping next to me, poking me, and I was a wreck of a man there with no one and nothing and nowhere to go but back into my workbag for a bottle of—

I don’t even remember when I passed out.

When I came to, it was morning and before I opened my eyes I said the first honest prayer I ever said in my life:
God, if Gloria and Hola are still here I will stop drinking
.

I opened my eyes.

S
O
I
DON’T KNOW
who to call or what to do or where to go. I don’t know any recovering alcoholics, and I don’t want to talk about it anyway, so I saddle up Hola and drive her around the cemetery.

“I’m sorry I’ve been such a bad dad,” I say as we turn up Riverside Drive and the blood-sausage sun punches a hole in the Hoboken skyline.

It’s a new day
, she seems to say.
A perfect day—just like every other day
.

“I’m … I’m going to try to get help. I need help. I’m an idiot.”

We all need help, Dad. Think of how much you guys have to do for me. And I’m a very smart girl
.

“I feel so bad, Hola. I can’t believe I got here. How did this happen to me?”

What’s wrong?

“I feel sick. I’m not doing anything right. Gloria’s mad at me. I don’t have anyone to talk to. My dad probably hates me now. I’m getting old and fat and—”

It’s a new day
, she seems to say.
A perfect day—just like every other one
.

Letters cannot convey my nausea at work that morning—the throbbing, scraping sickness that claws like a dying Pomeranian in my gut. My usual breakfast is a vanilla milkshake from
the McDonald’s on Twenty-eighth Street, and I get it so often I don’t even have to order. But it doesn’t help.

I call my Employee Assistance Plan and tell the woman I want to stop drinking. Only not quite as smoothly as that. She sounds about twelve years old and reads from a script:

“How much do you drink?”

“Is your drinking hurting your performance at work?”

“Have your coworkers talked to you about your drinking?”

A large effort to be honest for once, my voice faltering and barely audible in a vacant conference room with no windows, and what I get from it is nothing at all.

“Okay,” says the girl after I’ve torn secrets from the pages of my soul, “we’d like you to take a brief survey about our customer service today. Would that be all right?”

“Huh? I’m sorry—customer service?”

“Question one,” she begins, “on a scale of one to ten—”

“Hold on,” I say, “what’s the service? What am I supposed to do?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What should I do? For the drinking?”

There is quite a wait and I hear keys tap-tapping as she looks for the answer to this bewildering request. Heroically, she decides to go off script:

“Personally, I’d suggest you find a therapist.”

So I do. A large bearded addiction specialist with a lot of credentials and an office across from the St. Vincent’s emergency room, now closed, where the creator of
Rent
went to be misdiagnosed.

“So,” he says to me, “how can I help you today?”

It seems to me that counselors are overdoing the customer-first thing a bit. I feel like I am walking into Walmart.

I tell him my story honestly and ask him if there is a pill to cure alcoholism. This makes him smile in a way that gives me my answer.

“Addicts always want a quick fix,” he says. “That’s what makes them addicts, right? But I’m afraid for you it’s going to be a slow process. You’re going to have to change the way you think.”

“What’s wrong with the way I think?”

“What you just said.”

“Huh?”

“That question,” he says. “That’s exactly what’s wrong.”

Depression is anger without the enthusiasm. And I’ve never been very enthusiastic about therapists. Always seemed to me they were there with the metal toe right at the moment when you’re a man facedown on the boards in a room with no light and no heat. Kick. Your worst moment and they want to emphasize, clinically speaking, it’s actually worse than you think.

Pow.

Like that psychiatrist I’d seen ten years earlier, the young guy who informed me I was more isolated than your average homeless person.

Ten years ago. He left me with a parting shot:

“One very believable scenario for you,” he said, easing my exit paperwork into a thick blue folder, “is that ten years from now, you’re pretty much where you are right now.”

Only older.

R
ECOVERING ALCOHOLICS
, like children and dogs, require routine.

We talk about getting smart feet—another way of saying if we are to recover, we need to stop listening to our own minds.
Why? Because for many years our best idea was pretty much to have another drink.

I come into my first twelve-step group for the same reason most people do: I can’t think of anything else. I don’t want to drink more than I don’t want to get involved with a cult of the rejected and the damned. My first meeting I come late, sit in the back, leave early, say nothing, and the regulars think:
We’ll never see you again
.

Next few weeks I get there on time but say nothing. I don’t speak for months, not even to the person on my right or left, much, and the old-timers think:
You’ll probably leave. It doesn’t work for most of us
.

And when I speak the first time, everybody listens very carefully, and I remember I say: “If I met myself somewhere out there”—gesturing to the world outside the windows, caked with dirt and facing the Juilliard School with its future supernovas—“I wouldn’t want to be my friend.”

A guy beelines up to me after that and says, “You need to stop saying shit like that. Even to yourself.” He is a large man with gray eyebrows and a personality so expansive everyone calls him Crazy Eddie.

What an asshole, I think. What a man who doesn’t get it at all.

Two weeks later, a different asshole tells me that I need to hurry up and get a sponsor already because I am making him sad. What I say to that statement is silence.

And the old-timers and the regulars start to think something else now. Something like:
You’re right where you need to be—for the amount of work that you’ve done
.

Before I joined, my image of the fellowship was of a group of old men sitting in a smoke-filled basement complaining about
their lives, and I wasn’t far wrong. In my home group, I’m considered young: most people insist on taking a lot of punishment before they’ll try the rooms. I’m not sure why. We are a remarkably generous, good-natured tribe, in my experience, and as random as a subway car. Darryl is a retired partner in a major law firm; Jeanne was nominated for an acting Obie in the 1980s; Old Dan, when he was Young Dan, was a protégé of William Burroughs and Larry Ferlinghetti; Charlie was Special Forces in Vietnam, then homeless, now a computer systems analyst. Most of us have more ordinary professions, accountants and teachers and social workers. About two-thirds are men, two-thirds over fifty.

Early on, I take a special liking to guy named Clark. He has a rack of suits, for one thing, and refers to books he actually seems to have read. A shortish, brown-skinned man in his late forties, he has tight black curls hanging over a well-worn forehead and a lurking smile. A Mediterranean-looking guy who talks like some boiler room pump-and-dumper, which is not doing him justice; he smells like the richest guy in the world. His shares make me think we have a lot in common: same business school, same disease, same way of relating to the world.