Drinking Diaries

“MAY I OFFER YOU A tropical punch made with our own island rum?” asked the young hostess with the lovely West Indian accent. Then, smiling at our eleven-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter, she added, “Perhaps a fruit punch for the children?” My husband, Denis, grumbled a “no thanks” and stepped outside for a cigarette, but I said, “Yes, the kids and I would love a fruit punch. Thanks.”

It had been a long trip. There was a layover in Miami and then a slow, hot drive across another island to a boat that took us to this island, and now we had to wait for our luggage to be transported to the resort. Somehow our bags had been sent to the wrong hotel. We had kids. We had stuff we needed. We were still dressed for winter, but it was eighty-five degrees outside and our room wasn’t ready. My husband and I were barely speaking; the heat and exhaustion from racing through airports and tending to the children had made us revert to our favorite go-to coping device—blaming each other for everything that went wrong.

That morning, in Connecticut, we had begun the day, all four of us, eagerly anticipating a relaxing week in the sun. It was late February, and we had been wearing boots, coats, and mittens for months. Once I booked the flights, I had really not thought much about the logistics of getting to the resort. Somehow, I just had a vision of my family boarding an airplane and then running and laughing, all four of us, hand in hand, across a white sandy beach and then diving into the surf, where we would spend the entire week frolicking and splashing about like a family of playful seals. I had forgotten that we had a very tight window between the time we landed in Miami and the time we needed to board our flight to the island. Our flight out of JFK was delayed, and we missed the connecting flight. We had to wait in Miami for six hours until the next one. The children were restless. My husband felt the need to repeatedly interrogate me about my mind-set when I had booked the flights so close together. I silently interrogated myself about my mind-set when I had decided I would marry this tyrant.

But now, finally, we were in a tropical paradise with a cheerful, accommodating receptionist, and cool beverages were on their way. Within minutes a man appeared with three drinks on a tray. Two of them were bright pink and garnished with pineapple wedges. The third was a paler shade of pink and also had the pineapple garnish. The bright pink ones were handed to the kids. The third was for me. It appeared to be diluted with something. I pretended not to notice. I held my breath as I lifted the large glass to my lips so that I couldn’t smell its contents. Oops. It tasted like there might be alcohol in it, but I wasn’t sure, so I took another sip. Yes, it tasted like rum. I hadn’t asked for the rum drink, so I took another sip to be absolutely certain. Yup, rum, allright. After all those years, I still recognized the lovely sweetness of rum and the warm way that it, like all spirits, made my heart feel, as if it might overflow with goodness.

Fourteen years earlier, at the age of twenty-four, I had slunk, absolutely sodden with shame and self-loathing, into a church basement to attend a meeting for alcoholics. Yes, one of those meetings, stocked with men and women who gathered regularly to “share their experience, strength, and hope with each other” to recover from alcoholism. It’s an anonymous organization that prefers its members don’t reveal their involvement in the fellowship on a public level; most of its members call it The Program. I had known about The Program ever since a friend’s mother took me to my first meeting when I was eighteen. The mother was in The Program and believed, based on my drunken antics at her house and some stories that her daughter had shared with her, that I might benefit from The Program myself. I didn’t. I was too young, but I was rather fascinated to learn that a few of my friends’ parents were in this depressing program, where adults sat around in a circle and spoke in low tones and at times wept. My parents were out drinking that night, probably really tying one on, but Peggy Schumacher’s mom was in the meeting, drinking coffee, and so was the guy who worked in our local grocery store.

For the next several years, I occasionally thought about the meeting and the people there. I felt very sorry for members of The Program, but though part of me always knew I drank differently than most others, I was certain that I wasn’t an alcoholic. I went to college, held jobs. I had lots of friends. I just needed to control my drinking. My friends all liked to drink, but somehow on most occasions I was the one nobody was speaking to the next day. I was a blackout drinker from the very first time I drank in junior high school, so I often didn’t have any recollection of what I had done to enrage my friends. We had all been having drinks. I was feeling great. I loved my friends, loved myself. I would often express my love for my fellows and myself, and then it was the next morning and my friends were not speaking to me and I hated myself again.

My friend Lauren tried to help me sort it all out one day. “The problem with you is that you just don’t know when to stop. After two or three drinks, I start to get that out-of-control feeling, and I realize it’s time to switch to water. I think that’s what you need to do.”

I remember nodding tearfully. I was reeling with shame about some incident from the night before, but in all honesty, I had no idea what she was talking about. After two or three drinks, I always start to feel in control, but how do you explain to a social drinker what it’s like to have been born three drinks short of comfortable? You can’t.

When I stopped drinking at age twenty-four, I went to another meeting. This time I heard what all the other people born three drinks short were saying, and I realized that I had found my tribe. I had always loved boozers when I was drinking. I’d single them out at parties within seconds and plant myself next to them—the fun people—and now here were the same characters, sans booze but avec the warped perspectives, maladaptive coping skills, and hysterical stories about how they came to be in The Program. I found myself shoulder to shoulder with my brethren—all the disappointed dreamers—the type of people who imagine themselves running along beaches holding hands with their loved ones and then are blindsided by the logistics of getting from one place to another. I learned in The Program that I drank to cope with the disappointments of life and that I needed meetings to help me to live “life on life’s terms” (another corny cult slogan), not based on my own childish fantasies about how life should be.

When I stopped drinking, there was some joy and relief each morning when I woke up and remembered going to bed the night before, but I missed it. A lot. The topography of the dry world, especially during those early months, was so strange and foreign that it was sometimes hard to find my bearings. So, like an expat who has found herself in a sometimes beautiful but often frightening new world, I liked to meet up with people from my soggy homeland and remind myself why I had left. Nothing worked where I came from; everything was broken. I talked about this fact with writers, artists, bankers, ex-cons, current felons, grannies, junkies, and the occasional movie star who frequented meetings of The Program that I attended every day. Truly, the most interesting people I have known, I met in those meeting halls. My new friends and I all made fun of the corniness of the slogans and the literature, but at the same time we clung to the ridiculously simplistic tenets of the program (“One day at a time”; “Easy does it”) and lived by them.

“You gotta be neck-deep in this thing if you wanna get better,” an aging bookie told me at one of my first meetings. Soon I was, and my life did get better. My relationship with Denis—at that time my live-in boyfriend—improved. We got married, we had two great kids, Denis’s career took off, and we were no longer broke. We moved to Manhattan and later Connecticut. I had been sober about eight years (one day at a time!) when I stopped going to meetings.

I stopped going for many reasons. First, it was hard to find the time. When I had an hour or two away from the kids, I wanted to do other things that seemed more important. Also, I started to worry about other parents seeing me coming in and out of church basements with big A triangles hanging from the doors. Before I had kids, while we were living in Boston, I didn’t mind if people knew that I was in The Program. I didn’t need to explain to anybody why I was there, because my friends all knew what I was like when I drank. But in New York and Connecticut, nobody had ever seen me drunk. When my new friends asked why I didn’t drink, I said that I had been a little wild when I was younger and that I just liked my life better without drinking. Most people were fine with that explanation, but several friends told me that they, too, had been wild in their youth, also binge drinkers who occasionally suffered blackouts, but that they had grown out of that behavior. “When I became a mom, I changed,” a friend told me. “I could never party now the way I used to. I just have a glass of wine or two with my husband at dinner. Maybe a couple drinks at a party. That’s it.”

I didn’t drink for another five years, but during those years I started entertaining the fantasy that I might be able to become a social drinker, had I given myself time to mature. The thing that kept me from helping myself to my husband’s vodka or ordering a drink when I was out with friends was The Program. I had been programmed not to drink. In The Program they say that “the first drink gets you drunk,” and I had become terrified of taking that first drink. In my mind, after that first drink, all bets were off. If I had even one glass of wine, I would be compelled to have another and another until I awoke from a blackout behind prison bars. My children would be in the custody of Child Protective Services, where they would remain until my husband could be located. I am not exaggerating; that is how fearful of alcohol I had become. To choose to take a drink was to choose to destroy my life and my family.

That hot day at the island resort, however, I hadn’t chosen to take a drink. I had asked for a fruit punch, and they had misunderstood. On another day, in another place, if I had been rested and well fed, if I weren’t enraged at my husband and fed up with my children, I would have asked the waiter what was in the drink as soon as I saw its color. That day I didn’t. I hadn’t asked for a drink, but here I was sipping one.

After my second or third sip, I decided to turn it into an experiment. An alcoholic would be compelled to order another drink, and then another and another, after that first rum punch. I left the drink half-full on the reception desk when the valet led us to our rooms, and I didn’t look back. When he showed us the complimentary bottle of island rum that sat on top of the refrigerator, I barely glanced at it. I didn’t feel like having that rum. An alcoholic would have opened the bottle and started chugging its contents the moment her husband turned his back. I suggested we all go to the beach for a swim, and for the rest of that day I swam and strolled on the beach in a sort of daze, filled with a sense of euphoric wonder. It seemed that I could have one drink after all. I could stop drinking once I started. Perhaps I was not an alcoholic. Later that night, I tested my hypothesis by pouring a slug of the free rum into my Coke and sipping it before we headed down to dinner. I didn’t want another drink at dinner. It was official. I was not an alcoholic. It felt then that I had been living some sort of stagnant half-life for years, but now I was whole again. I had been enslaved by the tyranny of the cultish Program, but now I was free.

I didn’t tell my husband about my discovery until we returned to Connecticut. It had been fourteen years since he had seen me drunk. At first he was skeptical, but after spending a few nights with the new me, I had him convinced that I could drink again. For some people, alcohol lessens their inhibitions and makes their sex life more interesting. I’m rather uninhibited naturally—my baseline is just a hair above an exhibitionist—and when I drink I’m what a former boyfriend once called “a bit of a handful but lots of fun,” so who could blame my husband for overlooking, with me, the obvious signs that I was not really in control of my drinking at all? We started having all that fun with my being a handful again. Plus, he was away a lot of the time, so he didn’t see me drunk on a regular basis, and I was careful that the kids and my friends didn’t either. I would pour a glass of wine while cooking dinner for the kids and then refill it only when they were out of the room. That way it looked like I was drinking the same glass of wine all night, when in truth I often consumed quite a lot more. When I was out with friends I never had more than two glasses of wine. I had to drive home and wasn’t going to drive while intoxicated. That’s what alcoholics did. After I arrived home, checked on my sleeping children, and sent the babysitter on her way, I would enjoy a bottle on my own.

Here’s the strangest thing: Though I had attended meetings for years and had read dozens of books on the subjects of alcoholism, addiction, and recovery, once I started drinking again, I was unable to recognize the signs of my own alcoholism. I truly believed I was in control of my drinking. When I had my moments of doubt, I made excuses. I hadn’t eaten enough. Everybody was drunk at that party. I’m a grown-up! Grown-ups sometimes get drunk! To view my drinking as normal, I had to view the perspective of The Program as completely warped. I had been like a dependent child when I had been in The Program. I had been brainwashed into thinking that I had a drinking problem, when really, I assured myself, I drank like most other adults. In The Program, people talked about how once you had a slip, you would lose everything you had gained in your sobriety. It would be a fast downhill slide straight to the gutter. I had my first book published during those few years I returned to drinking. I went on a book tour and attended book parties, very careful to stick to the two- or three-glass maximum while out. My life got better when I drank, which was proof enough that I wasn’t an alcoholic.

Right? I asked myself as I poured the last drops of a bottle into my glass, all alone in the dark with my dogs. Right? I asked as I staggered to the fridge for a fresh bottle. Right? I asked as my daughter inadvertently crashed my party of one and found me stumbling toward her, trying to talk but unable to arrange my mouth so that it could form the words properly.