FOR THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS, I WENT TO AA MEETINGS EVERY day. While I didn’t mention the meetings to Corey and the other prep guys, I did tell them I was giving up the sauce for a while. They didn’t even think twice about it. In the community we had been raised in, tales of people drying out for brief periods of time were common. After a particularly bad episode at a party or at the beach, the offender would go underground for a few weeks then reemerge with a thirst as great as ever. It was a form of penance.

However, I realized that my case involves never coming out of retirement. The panic attack that had smitten me at the wedding had terrified me, and I knew that there was something wrong with me and that it had to do with alcohol.

Furthermore, I was actually beginning to like AA. There is a magic that occurs in the sixty minutes of an AA meeting that’s hard to define. From the outside, a bunch of people sitting around talking about drinking and life and spirituality seems like slow purgatory, but whenever I went to a meeting, I inevitably felt better when I walked out. A large part of it was the humor of the other alcoholics, who, while acknowledging the tragedy of alcoholism and its pernicious effects on the soul, mind, and body, nonetheless knew that very funny things often happened to us when we were drunk. They also didn’t deny the blissful, sexy, romantic feeling that alcohol gave us.

Indeed, I soon came to feel like I belonged in AA. Whether because of God, camaraderie, or what one alcoholic called the “spiritual ether” of the rooms, at these meetings I experienced the kind of belonging I had only felt during the best times with the Prep guys. It was a warm sense of being with people who knew you better than anyone else. In an odd paradox that is common among religious traditions that advise subjugating the ego to attain happiness, AA, with its emphasis on humiliation, gratitude, and working the Steps, imbued life with joy. Ultimately, it was an affirmation of life as being good and worth living.

However, despite the daily meetings, which only provided a brief respite, my health was not improving. I was getting to know other drunks, but no amount of support seemed to be able to help with a problem I had never before suffered from: depression.

It began almost as soon as I had stopped drinking. Although I was sober, I couldn’t have been more miserable. I barely made it through a day without horrible headaches. I avoided Corey and the other guys, locking myself in my room and listening to music whenever people were around and telling them that I was sick. When I did try to leave the house, panic attacks would often drive me back to the shelter of my room. I did manage to get to AA meetings, but only those in Georgetown that I could walk to. I never felt comfortable more than a few blocks from my house.

I read about depression, but the descriptions - of the sluggish physical feelings, the wet blanket that seems to cover the brain and spirit, the desire to commit suicide not for any urge to die but to end the suffering - always fell short of capturing the dark recesses that I was enduring.

Things continued to get worse. There were days when I didn’t even get dressed, staying in my room all day drinking sodas and watching TV. I only left my room for meetings or for food. I had read in an AA book that eating something sweet could stave off a craving, and I gorged myself on cookies and ice cream.

I kept the shades drawn because the sunlight hurt my eyes and left the TV on all the time. My only relief came when I convinced myself that if things got too bad I would check in at St. Elizabeth’s, the mental hospital, and throw myself at their mercy before trying to commit suicide.

When I talked about my depression in AA meetings or to Ronnie, he told me to “keep coming back” and introduced me to other drunks who had gone through or were going through the exact same thing. They advised me to stick to the program and “work the Steps.” Working the Steps, however, didn’t have any effect. Even when I admitted that I was powerless over alcohol, I had headaches. When I handed the problem over to a Power greater than myself - in my case, it was the AA group because I still didn’t believe in God - it did nothing to stop my despondency. I explained to Ronnie what I found baffling about my malady: That it didn’t seem to be contingent upon any factors in life. I was depressed whether I was getting a rejection letter from a magazine I had submitted a story to or being told by my editor at the Post that he had loved my piece about Julian Mazor.

While Corey was out getting drunk. I hunkered down at home, burying myself in Alcoholics Anonymous, the Big Book of AA that Ronnie had given me.

First published in 1939 - four years after the founding of AA - Alcoholics Anonymous is composed of hair-raising accounts of alcoholics who endured the misery of morning jitters, DT’s, and draconian Depression-era rehabs before being saved by AA. The book recounts the story of AA co-founder Bill Wilson. Wilson went from the fast track of a New York stockbroker in the 1920s to alcoholic debauchery in the 1930s, winding up in the hospital with the diagnosis that he was “hopeless” and would probably have to be institutionalized. While in the hospital, Wilson was visited by a friend, Ebby T., who claimed to have gotten sober by having a religious conversion and handing his problem over to God. The friend left Wilson a copy of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience; Wilson read the book, learning that many spiritual conversions have something in common: Absolute despair and deflation of the human ego often precede them.

Still, Wilson found it hard to humble himself and slipped into a deep depression. He would later describe what happened next:

My depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the bottom of the pit. I still gagged badly on the notion of a Power greater than myself, but finally, just for the moment, the vestige of my proud obstinacy was crushed. All at once I found myself crying out, “If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything, anything!”

Suddenly, the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence, and I thought to myself, “So this is the God of the preachers!” A great peace stole over me and I thought, “No matter how wrong things seem to be, they are right. Things are all right with God and His world.”

 

After getting out of the hospital, Wilson set off “on jet propulsion” to cure other drunks. But despite his conversion, he was still plagued by cravings. In 1935, while staying in a hotel in Akron, Ohio, his thirst grew so powerful that he called a church and asked to be put in touch with an alcoholic - after all, if nothing else, preaching to other alcoholics had kept Wilson himself sober. Wilson was referred to Dr. Bob Smith, an alcoholic physician. The meeting, which took place on Mother’s Day, 1935, convinced the two men that alcoholics who couldn’t stay sober separately could do so together. AA was born.

Wilson’s experiences led him to conclude that the only way to stay sober was by deflating the ego, which he believed was largely responsible for the will to drink. Borrowing from various religions, Wilson wrote the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, which encourage alcoholics to “turn our will and our lives over to God,” make “a fearless and searching moral inventory,” make amends to all the people we hurt in the past, and live a more conscientious, humble, and spiritual life dedicated to God and helping other alcoholics.

After reading the Big Book, I went on to read the other books about AA - Not-God, 'Pass It On,' Bill W., Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. Through this reading, I discovered that after he had gotten sober, Wilson became interested in consciousness and mystical experiences, and eventually tried LSD.

After meeting author and philosopher Aldous Huxley in 1943 - Huxley would later call Wilson “the greatest social architect of the century” - Wilson was introduced to two psychiatrists, Humphrey Osmond and Abram Hoffer, who were treating alcoholics with the experimental drug lysergic acid diethylamide - LSD. Although he initially expressed disdain for the experiments - he was against using any drugs in the treatment of alcoholics - he relented and eventually supported the experiments after learning about the results the psychiatrists were getting. “It is a generally acknowledged fact in spiritual development that ego reduction makes the influx of God’s grace possible,” Wilson wrote. “If, therefore, under LSD we can have a temporary reduction, so that we can better see what we are and where we are going - well, that might be of some help.”

Wilson jumped at the chance to try LSD. Here was a chemical that could provide the “deflation at depth” of the ego, the “hitting bottom,” that Wilson believed was necessary to recover. In August 1956 Wilson dropped acid in California, under the supervision of psychiatrist Sidney Cohen. Wilson was enthusiastic about the experience; according to ‘Pass It On,’ he “felt [LSD] helped him eliminate many barriers erected by the self, or ego, that stand in the way of one’s direct experience of the cosmos and of God.” Two years later Wilson wrote down observations comparing an LSD trip to spiritual states; “[There is] the probability that prayer, fasting, meditation, despair, and other conditions that predispose one to classic mystical experiences do have their chemical components.”

I was intrigued by Wilson’s experience with LSD. He seemed to be saying that many states of mind were chemically based. Because my depression had physical symptoms such as headaches and dizziness, I thought there might be something biochemical going on in my body, and that, as such, it was a problem that could be relieved with medication. Maybe my alcoholism was chemically based.

Finally, after being sober about a month, I decided to see an addictions counselor. Her name was Dr. Ryan, and I had gotten her name from Ronnie. Her office was on Connecticut Avenue near Dupont Circle, an artsy and bohemian section of Washington.

Dr. Ryan was tall and skinny, with a fair complexion and large square glasses. She exuded cool confidence, shaking my hand when I came in to her office and smiling warmly.

“Mark? How are you?” she said, offering me her hand. I stood and took it, then we both sat down.

I glanced at the clock. “I’m here because I’m depressed,” I said. I only had an hour and it was costing me a hundred bucks, so I wanted to cut right to the chase.

She nodded sympathetically and seemed to appreciate that I was no-nonsense. “Why don’t you tell me when it started.”

“Just in the last few weeks, since I stopped drinking.” I told her about the blackouts, the wedding, the panic attacks. Then I went back to the summer I had started drinking with Seamus and recounted how my drinking had slowly gotten out of hand.

She sat there, nodding and taking notes. I must have blabbed for about a half hour without taking a breath. I was broke, and this could be my only shot at therapy. I wanted to get my money’s worth.

Finally, I stopped. She sat there for a few seconds scribbling, then put her pen down.

“Tell me,” she said. “Do you think you’re an alcoholic?”

I laughed. “Of course. But if being sober means being this depressed, then I’d rather be drunk.”

“Well, Mark, it takes time to achieve a solid sobriety. Physically and emotionally, you’re just starting to gain your sea legs.”

“I just wish this had never happened. I wish I could just go back to a few years ago, when everything was great.”

She looked sad. “I’m afraid that is not possible, at least on the basis of what you’ve told me so far. It sounds like you’re an alcoholic, and alcoholics can’t drink safely. It’s not about willpower or character. Alcoholism is a disease. If you are an alcoholic, you’re physically different from others. You react to alcohol in a different way.”

“But how did I get this way?”

“The causes of alcoholism are multifaceted. We know what the symptoms are, namely, a physiological and emotional dependence on the drug, but even the NIAAA - that’s the National Institute of Alcohol and Alcohol Abuse - hasn’t been able to pin down a definite cause in every case. It’s a complicated mix of genetics, environment, psychology, and culture. You might have been born predisposed to be an alcoholic and just needed a drink to push the button. One thing you can do is look at your family to see if there’s a history of alcoholism. Why don’t you tell me about your parents. Do they drink a lot?”

I looked at her sharply. The last thing I wanted to turn this into was a session of bashing my folks.

“My parents are fine,” I said.

“Do they drink?”

“Yes.”

“A lot?”

“My father does. Every night.”

“Do you get along with him?”

“Sure,” I said. “I mean, I think we’re very different people and we’ve had run-ins over the years, but I don’t think it’s anything out of the ordinary. Anyway, I don’t see what that has to do with-”

“Tell me about them, about your conflicts.”

I began to squirm. While my relationship with my father had certainly had its ups and downs, he was not the villain in this. He was certainly not the reason I was depressed.

Reluctantly, I told her about some of the fights we’ve had. She nodded and wrote in her pad.

“But I wasn’t depressed until I stopped drinking,” I said. “I don’t think it has anything to do with my father. I think it has to do with alcohol. Maybe it’s even chemical.”

“Are you undergoing any treatment right now? A rehab?”

“No. Just AA.”

“AA is a good start. Keep going. You might also want to look into a treatment program.”

I just nodded. I didn’t want to tell her I couldn’t afford it.

“If I can’t get into treatment right away, what do I do about these damned panic attacks?” I asked. “I can barely function with them.”

“Your depression as well as the panic may be related to your drinking. That needs to be evaluated as you continue to abstain from alcohol. In the meantime, I’m going to prescribe a tranquilizer for your panic. But it’s a very small prescription. It’s just for emergencies and to tide you over until you can get some more help.”

The words weren’t even out of her mouth when I felt a rush of relief, and shock. Tranquilizers. Of course. I didn’t have to live in fear of leaving the house and getting a panic attack. I could carry tranqs. It was so simple.

For the next few days, I went to meetings at least once and sometimes three times a day. I shared at every one, revealing my frustrations about not being able to impress my father, and how alcohol helped me deal - or rather not deal - with this in high school and college. I was working the Steps to stay sober, but I was anxious to get to the root of what had made me a drunk. I shamelessly dug into every relationship and conflict I had ever had. I recalled my party and how I had dumped Mary for Laura. I relived the Drafthouse days and admitted that Corey was a bad influence and most likely an alcoholic.

I read everything I could get my hands on about alcoholism, taking stacks of books on the subject home from the library. I particularly liked ones that had to do with writers. One of my favorites was Jack London’s John Barleycorn, or Alcoholic Memoirs, which reflected my own story. London started drinking as a young sailor in San Francisco, and after several years he began to lose control. He suffered from panic attacks and suicidal depression. “The things I had fought for and burned my midnight oil for, had failed me,” he wrote. “Success - I despised it. Recognition - it was dead ashes. Society, men and women above the ruck and the muck of the water-front and the forecastle - I was appalled by their unlovely mental mediocrity. Love of woman - it was like all the rest. . . . Art, culture - in the face of the iron facts of biology such things were ridiculous, the exponents of such things only the more ridiculous.”

I wondered what London could have meant by “the iron facts of biology.” He seemed to be saying that his depression was chemically based, and therefore aesthetics, environment, and personality could do nothing to change it.

After John Barleycorn, I read another book that made me question the idea that my alcoholism had an environmental or psychological basis - indeed, made me question whether any cases of alcoholism are purely psychological. It is called The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer, written by British journalist Tom Dardis. The Thirsty Muse dismantles the myth that America’s great writers achieved that greatness in part because of their drinking. Profiling Hemingway, Faulkner, O’Neill, and Fitzgerald, Dardis argues that alcoholism actually destroyed the talent of most of these men and cut their careers short. The one who escaped, Eugene O’Neill, got sober and stayed that way for twenty years, during which time he wrote The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night, his two finest plays.

According to Dardis, alcoholism is a purely biological disease whose onset has nothing to do with personality.

Faulkner’s principle biographer, Joseph Blotner, ascribes his subject’s heavy drinking to his need for temporary oblivion from the world around him. Blotner views the prolonged binges as experiences that Faulkner chose of his own accord, something willed. Yet it is clear that Faulkner did not will his binges - they were far too painful and damaging for that. He was always surprised to find himself back in the hospital. The bouts of drinking were, in effect, the inevitable result of a disease over which he had little or no control.

“Most alcoholics do not drink because they are emotionally ill to begin with,” Dardis concluded. “They drink because they’re alcoholics; the psychological disorders follow.” (Emphasis in the original.)

I would soon come to agree with Dardis, with one addendum: It is all, not most, alcoholics whose illness is triggered by biology and not psychology.

 

When I told Ronnie about what I had learned, he just shrugged. He thought my problem was that I didn’t know how to have sober fun. He kept insisting that I go dancing with him and Ruth.

Finally, I decided to go. The place where they danced was called the Spanish Ballroom. It was part of Glen Echo, an old amusement park that stood on a hill in the woods above the Potomac River. Glen Echo had been built in the 1930s; as a child, my father had gone there to ride the carousel. It closed in the 1960s, but the ballroom was still open. It was an airy, cavernous space, about as big as a small airplane hangar and large enough to comfortably hold 500 dancers. It had no heat or air-conditioning, but it was early May and the night was cool and cloudless.

When I walked into the ballroom, it was like stepping back in time. There was a twenty-piece big band, the Tom Cunningham Orchestra, on the stage, and they produced a sound unlike anything I had ever heard. My dad used to play big band records, but those were recordings made with primitive technology. It was quite different live. You could feel the rhythm of the drummer and the blast of the horn in your entire body, and the players were right in front of you, close enough to touch. It was a different world from the mega concerts I had grown up on, where you needed binoculars to see the band.

The smooth wooden floor was filled with couples swing dancing. They moved side to side and back together, a mirror image of each other. A man lifted his arm and the woman twirled under, then they effortlessly snapped back to their original position, always moving.

Ronnie had told me that closer to the stage was where the really great dancers performed. It was here that you saw the best moves, including serials, where the man would toss his partner over his shoulder or slide her between his legs.

Ronnie and Ruth were standing in the corner watching the dancers.

“Hey, twinkle toes,” I said.

“I don’t believe it,” he said, taking my hand. “Lazarus has risen! I thought for sure you’d chicken out.”

“Me? How could you think such a thing?”

“Because everyone your age is terrified of learning how to dance right,” he said. “Everyone’s too self-conscious. This requires that you let go a little bit. And for your generation - and especially for alcoholics - letting go is not easy.”

“Hey, I have no shame,” I said. “I’m willing to try something new.”

He turned to Ruth. “Hey Mom, can you show Mark the basic swing step?”

Ruth got up and took my hand, leading me onto the dance floor.

“Can you count to six?” she said.

“It’s been a while, but I think I can hack it,” I said.

“Okay, hold me,” she said.

I took her right hand in my left hand and wrapped my right hand around her back.

“Now let’s try the basic step,” she said. “Step left on one-two, right on three-four, then back and forward on five-six.”

I lunged to my left.

“No no no,” she said, pulling me back to the center. “Take small steps, like walking.”

I took small steps. She held me tightly so I wouldn’t lose track, and we slowly moved around the floor.

“You got it,” she said.

I did. We moved together in perfect time to the band. She went under for a turn and snapped back. I was dancing. Ruth smiled at me.

“This is actually just a piece of the larger dance, the Lindy Hop,” she said. “It was named after Charles Lindbergh, who hopped across the Atlantic in 1927. The Lindy Hop is eight counts and much more complicated than this. I’ll show it to you when you get used to this.”

I turned her under my arm again, and smiled. This was actually fun.

Then it hit me. The panic. My lungs seemed to shut down, and the room began to spin. I stopped dancing.

“You okay?” Ruth said.

“It’s okay,” I stammered. “I just have to take some medicine.”

I reached into my pocket.

It was empty. I had left the tranquilizers back at my apartment.

I told myself not to freak out, but it was too late. I was already hyperventilating.

“I have to go,” I said. “I left some medicine at my apartment, and I have to go back and get it.”

“Oh, okay,” Ruth said, looking a little confused. “When you get it, come on back.”

I ran outside. If I don’t get a tranquilizer in the next few minutes, I’m going to die, I thought. There was no way I could make it all the way back to Georgetown to get my pills. I had to face it. It was time to call an ambulance.

I rushed over to a convenience store located in a small shopping center across the street from Glen Echo.

“I need the phone,” I said.

“Two doors down,” the clerk said. “In front of the liquor store.”

Liquor store. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, I knew I was about to drink again. I had no desire to get drunk, but it was the only thing that could save my life. If I could get drunk fast and pass out, it would prevent me from choking to death while I waited for an ambulance.

I marched inside the store and bought a pint of bourbon. Then I went around to the back of the building, opened it, and drank half of it down.

Relief came quickly. My toes started to tingle, then the feeling moved up through the rest of my body. My lungs loosened up. I took another couple hits off the bottle, then tossed it aside. Suddenly, I was overcome with shame. I hadn’t wanted to drink, and while I now felt at ease, I knew that if I went in and got another bottle, I would wind up in a blackout, or worse.

I realized that I needed help right away, or I wasn’t going to make it. I needed to go to a rehab. I decided to go home and talk to my parents, who were paying my insurance. I needed to tell them the truth: I was an alcoholic and it was life-threatening. I needed help, starting tonight.

I picked up the bottle and finished it. Then I drove out of Washington and Potomac, with each mile my breath becoming more assured, the calmness taking over my body.

I was almost home when I noticed, on a hill above the road, a familiar sight: Our Lady of Fatima, my old grade school. For some reason, I pulled into the parking lot. I wasn’t struck with any deep religious feelings; I was returning to Fatima out of sheer cowardice. I was afraid I was going to die and wanted to square myself with God if I was on my way out. When it came down to it, all my atheistic ranting was just that - empty blathering by a spoiled brat who had been given everything in life and had never known real adversity. It was easy to be an atheist during happy hour at O’Rourke’s, with Corey egging me on and parents who were able to bail me out of any mess I got myself into. But now I had an affliction that money, sarcasm, and, most important, alcohol, couldn’t cure. I was out of options.

Slowly, I entered the church. I hadn’t been in here since I was a student at Fatima. I remembered walking down this red carpet during my first communion, waiting in the pews to make my first confession, feeling chills during the Stations of the Cross.

I was almost to the front when I saw the priest on the altar - Father Paul, the man who had been my spiritual guide at Fatima.

For a few seconds I just watched him. Then I came up to the edge of the altar.

“Excuse me. Father Paul,” I said. “I was wondering if I could make a confess-”

I started sobbing. It was as if everything that had happened in the last few months hit me at once. I started to crumble and would have hit the floor had he not caught me.

“Easy there, easy,” he said, helping me into a pew. He held me while I shook, the sound echoing in the empty building.

He handed me a handkerchief. “Just try to settle down,” he said. “Just take it easy.”

“I’m dying,” I whispered.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m here, Mark.”

He remembered me.

“I’m a drunk,” I said. “A drunk who rejected God.”

“It’s all right, Mark. Just take it easy. Breathe deep.”

I began to breathe deeply and slowly regained my composure. I told him about everything that had happened, about the panic attacks, the blackouts. He listened intently, nodding at different times.

“We can get you some help,” he said. “Wait here.”

He left and returned a few minutes later, carrying a magazine and a small book.

“Are you in AA?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Good. Keep going, as often as possible.” He handed me the book and magazine. “Read these. I used to do some alcoholism counseling, and the man who wrote this book is the most knowledgeable person working in the field today. It will give you some of the information you don’t get in AA. You also need to be in treatment.”

“I’m going home to talk to my parents about that right now.”

“Good. Remember, you can always reach me here. Use the church as an anchor. If you want to come in and pray, at any hour, let me know and I’ll open it up.”

“Thank you, Father,” I said. He headed out the door, pausing only long enough to bless himself with holy water.

After the door had shut behind him, I got on my knees. I closed my eyes and said a Hail Mary and an Our Father, then spoke to God. I asked Him to give me courage and strength and to forgive me my sins. While I was praying I felt a faint sense of calm, the kind of tranquility I hadn’t experienced in years - probably since before I had started to drink.

 

When I got home, my parents were watching television. My father was drinking out of a tumbler.

“Can you turn the TV off?” I said. “I have something to tell you.”

I sat in front of them. “I’m an alcoholic,” I said. “And I need some help. I need to go to a rehab.”

They sat there silent for a few seconds.

“What makes you think you’re an alcoholic?” my father said.

I knew I should have waited until morning. It was after five, and Dad had already had a few.

Slowly and carefully, I recounted everything that had happened in the last year. My parents listened, looking uncomfortable.

When I had finished, my father just shook his head, as if I had just blown a play during a crucial game. “Look,” he said. “I’m not paying for any rehab. There was a writer at the Geographic who was a drunk, and we sent him to rehab. When he came back, he was drunk again before he got off the plane.”

I just sat there, examining my hands. My mother said nothing.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” my father asked.

“No,” I whispered.

“That’s your problem. You need a girlfriend. Then you wouldn’t have to go out and drink all the time. A good woman would keep you out of the bars.” He got up and walked out of the room. I heard the door to his den shut behind him.

I left the room, then climbed upstairs. I wanted to go back to Georgetown but was too exhausted. I got into my old bed and started to look at the material Father Paul had given me: a magazine article called “The Alcoholism Revolution,” and a book called Under the Influence: A Guide to the Myths and Realities of Alcoholism. Both were written by a clinical psychologist named James Milam.

My ideas about alcoholism were about to be turned upside down.