Chapter 1800

Going Public

The half-finished email was still glaring out from my laptop screen. I read it back and laughed. Even though it was only a few minutes old, it now seemed ridiculously naive; full of jokes and half-excuses.

My ego simply wouldn’t let me look pathetic in the eyes of even my friends, let alone people I only knew tangentially. Being honest about my inability to stop drinking went against the whole character I had spent years building; the hard drinking, doesn’t give a fuck, never apologizes, never explains asshole.

The asshole who wrote my column for the Guardian, and the asshole who in two months was supposed to file a book on how to be just like him. Robert called him Drunk Paul, Sarah thought his problems went far deeper than drinking and I … well, I don’t know what I thought.

Apart from this …

That asshole had to die.

It was him or me.

I got up from my chair and walked laps of the room, thinking through the consequences of what I was about to do. Then I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. An hour passed; maybe longer. Finally, I managed to summon up the kind of courage that would normally take me a couple of beers and a shot of rum.

I closed the email window and opened a fresh browser window. I typed in the address of my blog and clicked the button to write a new entry. It started with a title …

 

The trouble with drink, the trouble with me

 

And then a quote that seemed apt …

“The chief reason for drinking is the desire to behave in a certain way, and to be able to blame it on alcohol.”—Mignon McLaughlin

Then I wrote …

I mulled for a ridiculous amount of time over whether I should post this.

 

Not because it’s hopelessly self-indulgent—that’s never stopped me before—or because it’s too personal—ditto—but rather because there’s so much weirdness and angst and back-story that I would really need a whole self-indulgent book to tell it all. Lucky I’m writing one, I guess.

 

Getting straight to the point: a few days ago I decided to stop drinking. Or, rather, I decided to stop properly. Completely. It was actually back in July—during my month-long London visit—that I realized I needed to take a break from the ridiculously Bukowskian cycle I’d got myself (back) into.

 

And—with a few dramatic exceptions—I was doing ok. But then, as someone pointed out after my last binge, in recent weeks those dramatic exceptions had started to move closer together—to the point where they were inevitably going to collide. Almost-quitting is just not something I’m capable of. It’s all, or it’s nothing.

 

One complicating factor (in my head at least) is that I’ve forged a career—and a respectable income—from drinking too much, doing idiotic things and writing about them. My last book floated on a sea of booze, and if you were to ask anyone who knows me to give you three keywords about me, drink would certainly be one of them. Barely a week goes past without a PR person trying to bribe me with a bottle of good rum (really, it’s got weird now—and each thinks they’re the first to think of it); and the look of disappointment on people’s faces when I say I’m not drinking is heart-breaking.

 

Last week I was at a party where someone said—and I swear this is true—“of course you’ll have a drink … you’re Paul Carr.” Jesus.

 

But the thing is, there’s a line between doing entertainingly idiotic things under the influence and doing irreversibly damaging things. And what sells the most books and makes people read blog posts—losing loves, getting arrested, being fired, inching towards cirrhosis of the liver—is not actually that much fun when it’s you doing it.

 

The truth is there are people in my life who I would rather trade every single funny anecdote I have just to avoid hurting them again. Or in certain cases, just to speak to them again. When you get to that point the decision isn’t the difficult part. The difficult part is the execution.

 

To be honest, drinking for me became a habit—a prop—rather than a necessity; I’m perfectly capable of doing dumb things stone cold sober, and it’s not like I need a fucking confidence boost. I also never—ever—write while drunk.

 

But having a drink in my hand—and another, and another—is also one of those habits that has proved incredibly hard to break. Hence the decision to write this post. I figure by making the statement—I’m not drinking—I don’t really have anywhere to hide. Maybe people who have read this and who see me drinking will look as disappointed as those who previously were disappointed that I wasn’t.

 

I’ve been lucky enough to get advice on quitting from some really good friends in the past week or so, including one friend who has been sober for seven months despite previously writing a drink-fueled memoir of her own. No doubt some of the advice will work, and some of it won’t. But I’m going to try it all. I might write a follow-up post on the subject, or there might be more in the book, or I might just get on with it. It’s too early to tell.

 

All I know is that it’s my 30th birthday in a couple of months, and I really hope I’ll be spending it sober. And alive. And with friends. Those are decent enough goals for now. And to those worried that a non-drinking me means fewer hilarious fuck-ups, don’t be. The only difference is I’ll be able to remember them in the morning. God help me …

I clicked the “Publish” button and the post immediately appeared on the front page of my site. From there it was automatically sent out to the 20,000 or so people who had registered to be notified whenever I posted something new.

Just to make sure, I posted a link on Twitter and sent it out to the thousands of people who follow me there. As often happens on Twitter, people started reposting—“retweeting”—the link to their own followers. The first was Michael Arrington, who appended his own message to the retweet … “We’re here for you, dude.”

By the end of the day, more than 100,000 people had read the post. By the end of the week, it was closer to a quarter of a million. I had nowhere left to hide.