He drank too much, the doctor had informed him. Now this was big news. From a clinical perspective, he’d drunk too much since he was a teenager. He’d read the pamphlets, knew the amount of alcohol prescribed by those scolds at the American Heart Association: one glass of wine a day, maybe two on rare occasions, like your wedding night or the death of a parent. As far as Richard was concerned, the world as outlined in these articles and surveys was an alternate universe of probity and wise abstention, a wonderland evidently untouched by human worry, frailty, greed, lust, or any of the features of existence that make people drink more than one goddamned glass of red wine a night.
One doctor, long ago dismissed, had suggested if he was having two or more drinks a day, he might have a problem. How many did he estimate he had a week? Well. Here he utilized a complicated formula, a version of which all heavy drinkers employ in doctors’ offices. Something like 7(a/3) − d, where a represents the actual number of daily drinks consumed, and d represents the number of drinks necessary to subtract from the initial lie to get into a normal-sounding ballpark. Whatever number he told the doctor, it was still too high. Presumably doctors have their own counterequations, which they apply to the false numbers they’re constantly given. The doctor edged close to Richard and in a hushed tone suggested AA, intimating that he himself was a member, that it had worked wonders for him. In order to get power over the disease, the doctor said, he’d had to accept his own powerlessness.
The problem, Richard decided that night, over a large glass of warm gin, was his lack of powerlessness. If he felt powerless in the face of alcohol, he would have had no choice but to give it up. After all, who wants their life run, and ultimately ruined, by something over which they have no control? The problem was not that he couldn’t not drink. The problem was that he didn’t want to not drink.
He liked drinking. He always had. It made him feel good. It quelled his anxiety. It made him temporarily interested in other people’s lives, and his own. Plus it tasted good. If alcohol had no redeeming qualities, like water, it would be very easy to not drink a lot of it.
Nonetheless, he had quit altogether for two separate stretches in his life. The first time was during a period of chronic unemployment when Cindy was little, two or three years old. He couldn’t seem to find any work that summer and wound up Mr. Momming it, making her breakfast in the morning, then lolling around watching cartoons with her, or helping her finger-paint or color in her books, or taking her to the little community park down the road from their apartment, watching her stumble around, arms outstretched, in the thick grass, forever toddling after someone’s dog. Early on, he discovered that going about this in his usual state of spooked, strobe-lit hangover was exceedingly unpleasant. For one thing, everything related to childcare—constant vigilance, exposure to loud noises and fast movements, anticipating the needs of another person—was antithetical to recovering from a hangover. For another thing, experiencing the precious, fleeting moments of his daughter’s childhood as something to be grimly endured made him feel like a complete piece of shit, so he stopped drinking.
It lasted for a few months and was a pretty good time. He didn’t say anything about it to Eileen, and she didn’t say anything either, in the superstitious manner of someone afraid of dispelling good fortune by acknowledging it. But in September he finally got on another high-rise crew—a group chronically populated by heavy drinkers—and he got back on or fell back off the wagon, however the expression went.
The other noteworthy stretch of sobriety was with Carole. Their life together was anesthetic enough, it seemed at the time. He was barely writing, was trying on the mantle of sober, fiscally responsible, married suburbanite, a mantle that felt very comfortable after years of dissolute, impoverished loneliness in the service of art, or “art.” She’d nepotized him into a job as head of landscaping for the property management company she ran. In the evenings, they’d return to her condo, a newly built property in Mesa that looked out over the placid fairways and greens of Casa Blanca Country Club. Sometimes she would pour him a glass of chilled white wine; sometimes she would not. They might sit on her Ethan Allen signature sofa and watch a laserdisc of Ghost on her giant TV, and he would swoon in an ecstasy of content despair. For two years of nearly continuous sobriety, during which they got married and honeymooned in Acapulco, he tried to embrace this contentment, which amounted to a kind of meditative acceptance of what felt—deep and also not so deep down—like a reduced state. Paradoxically, in this dreamless, frictionless, numb existence, alcohol seemed not only superfluous but dangerous. It had too much to do with his real self, which he’d kicked into unconsciousness and locked in the condo’s basement two years earlier.
His real self, fortunately or unfortunately, eventually kicked down the door and escaped screaming back into the desert night. In his extended second bachelorhood, he’d established a drinking routine that had allowed him to function more or less normally, provided the definition of “normal” included living alone in a desert trailer for five years. Nothing before noon, nothing hard before five, nothing hard after ten. This had served him well enough to work and live, not to mention write the book.
Now, he drank his allotted BEER and looked at the can. It wouldn’t be a bad last beer to drink, if there had to be a last one. Anyway, it seemed to be having the desired effect—along with the little pills the nurse brought three times a day, he felt no worse than usual. No tremors, no upset stomach or sweating. Dull and blank, yes, but there was no discomfort. Maybe that was the trick—to embrace that dullness, the real blankness that existed in the heart of every moment and action and thought, the void he’d been running away from as long as he could remember. He finished his last BEER, crushed the can, threw it in the corner, sat there.