1701

It was Sarah, calling from China. She’d calculated the time difference wrong and thought she was calling me in the early evening.

I should have hung up. And, had I not been drunk, I would have done. But like a teenager arriving home from a party and trying to hide the fact that he’d been drinking, I thought I could get away with it.

“Oh, hi, it’s you, hello” I slurred—or at least I imagine I tried to.

“Have you been drinking?”

“Yes,” I should have said. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” I said, “what makes you shay that?

Ten minutes later, Sarah hung up. I know this because that’s what my phone told me the next morning. I also know that because Sarah had thoughtfully emailed me a summary of the conversation, assuming that I’d have forgotten most of it. It wasn’t that I’d been drinking that annoyed her.

She’d always said she didn’t think I’d be able to quit without getting help. It was the fact that I’d lied about it and then—apparently—blamed her for falsely accusing me, even though I could barely form the words to do so.

As she put it in her email, she wasn’t angry, she just doesn’t really like being yelled at by Drunk Paul when all she was doing was calling to see how I was getting on with my book.

1702

Every recovering alcoholic I’ve spoken to since that moment has told me about the moment they hit “rock bottom.” The moment they knew they had to get help to quit, because they just weren’t capable of doing it themselves. Speaking to Sarah that night was my moment.

I knew that she would almost certainly mention the incident to Robert next time they spoke, and that even if she wasn’t mad, I’d get a lecture from him. About how Sarah had risked her own professional reputation to vouch for me, and that I was throwing it back at her, while fucking up my health at the same time. He’d dress it up as being worried about me, of course, and he’d probably make a joke, but I knew I’d let them both down, badly.

It was also the moment that I understood—really understood—that I couldn’t quit on my own. It was time to get help, and I knew where to get it.

1703

I first met Ruth Fowler in 2006 when she was working as a stripper, and I was pretending to be a publisher.

Specifically, she was a Cambridge graduate who had grown up in Wales but had decided to smuggle her way into America to work illegally as a stripper in one of the most prestigious strip clubs in Manhattan and blog about the experience.

I had been sent to New York to convince Ruth that ours should be the company to publish her book based on that blog. I didn’t succeed in securing the book rights, but Ruth and I became good friends; a friendship that had grown over the years as she’d stopped stripping, become a published author, moved back to London, moved legally to Los Angeles to work as a screenwriter, decided to quit drinking, joined Alcoholics Anonymous and recently celebrated her seventh month sober.

As people in AA are wont to do, she’d emailed every so often to encourage me to attend a meeting. She could recognize the signs, she said. As people who don’t realize they’re alcoholics are wont to do, I brushed her off, pointing out that I wasn’t an alcoholic, I just enjoyed drinking.

But now that I was finally ready to admit that I had a serious problem, I knew it was time to find out more about AA. I couldn’t bear to call Ruth and admit that she was right and I was wrong.

So I emailed her. Just one line: “Hey—if I come to LA—will you come with me to an AA meeting?” She emailed back in less than five minutes. “Yes. Come now.”

1704

There were AA meetings in San Francisco, of course—dozens of them, according to the Internet—but I had two very good reasons for wanting to travel to Los Angeles instead.

For a start, going to a meeting in LA meant that Ruth could come with me. I knew that if I tried to go on my own then I’d put it off, first for a day or two while I picked the meeting that sounded best for me, then for a few more days while I wrote that week’s column, then for a week or so because, hell, there was no rush. Soon I’d be back drinking again.

The second reason was that, by going to LA, there was little to no chance anyone in San Francisco would find out. The idea of going to Alcoholics Anonymous embarrassed me. This was an organization that was the exact opposite of everything I’d stood for.

For one thing, I’d made no secret of my drinking. In fact, I’d so been proud of it that I’d made it one of my defining professional characteristics. Even when I’d started writing for TechCrunch and had ostensibly given up, I had still continued to cultivate a fictitious drunken persona.

The last thing I wanted was for readers to find out that not only was my drinking so out of control that I’d had to quit, but that I’d actually joined AA to help me do it. My ego just couldn’t stand it.

I booked a plane ticket from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It cost me $90 return, which seemed quite reasonable for a trip that might save my life. Then I fired up Google and decided to do some research about what lay in store for me when I got there.

What I discovered annoyed the hell out of me. For a start, Alcoholics Anonymous is incredibly—and pompously—religious. They’d clearly tried to tone down the explicitly Christian aspect in modern times with lots of talk of “God as you understand him to be” rather than just “God,” but there was still no getting away from the idea that the only way one could quit the sauce was by asking for divine assistance.

In fact, not only did members have to ask God to help them stop drinking, but according to the organization’s “twelve steps” they had to “turn [their] entire lives over to His care, get closer to Him through prayer or meditation in the hope that [they] could have Him remove [their] shortcomings.”

In short, Alcoholics Anonymous is a place where alcoholics can hide from their friends and plead with a deity that may or may not exist to magically cure them of their addiction. It’s the antithesis of personal responsibility and accountability.

Put another way, going to Alcoholics Anonymous would be little more than a formalized, religious extension of what I was already doing—except that instead of promising close friends like Robert and Sarah that I was going to get my shit together and quit drinking, I’d be promising a roomful of strangers.

And then I had to ask for help from a deity who—it should be noted—hands the stuff out every Sunday. Hell, if the New Testament is to be believed, this is a God—as I understand him—who taught his son how to turn water into wine. You might as well pray to Oliver Reed for help.

If the thought of Robert and Sarah being disappointed in me hadn’t been enough, then would my new self-righteous AA buddies have any more success? Of course they wouldn’t.

1705

I was trying to talk myself out of seeking professional help. I knew that. But I also knew that I was serious about giving up.

One of the reasons I’ve always been so good at getting away with things is that I’ve always obeyed the golden rule of the blagger: know when it’s time to stop. Recognize when you really have reached your last chance; and don’t push it an inch further.

AA wasn’t going to work for me, I knew that. I’d end up going to the meetings and then going for a beer afterwards, knowing that I’d get away with it. If I was going to quit then I had to acknowledge the two things that were keeping me drinking.

The first was ego: I was still acting like a gonzo wannabe and I still hadn’t shaken the idea that “my readers” expected me to drink. The second was opportunity: by only telling a very small number of people that I was quitting, I could still get away with drinking as long as they didn’t find out. Somewhere deep inside my brain, a synapse fired.

Tzzziz.

I opened up my email account and began to write a message. In the subject line, I wrote three words: “I’m quitting drinking.” I clicked BCC and added everyone from my address book: friends, professional contacts; everyone I might possibly run into in the coming weeks and months.

My plan was to write an email telling everyone I knew about my decision to quit, and the reasons behind it. I’d ask for their help: if you see me drinking, I’d say, please stop me.

But then I stopped.

Who was I kidding? All I was doing was expanding the list of people I couldn’t drink around. Even if I sent the email, and even if I recruited all of my friends to watch over me, there was still a whole world of strangers out there; a planetful of bars where I’d never get caught.

Thanks to my years of creating a persona of drunkenness, there was always the chance that I’d run into someone—particularly in a town as small as San Francisco where it seems like everyone reads TechCrunch—who would offer to buy me a drink.

In my own little world at least, I was famous for my inability to say no.

And that’s when it hit me.

A ridiculous idea.

That settled it.