Surrender to Win

I was 13 in the summer of 1972 when I got drunk for the first time. It was a neighborhood block party, and my friend and I kept sneaking into his parents’ liquor cabinet while the festivities took place outside on the suburban lawns of our comfortable middle-class neighborhood. By the time the night was over, the world was spinning, my father was half-carrying me back down the street to our house, and I was put to bed with a wastebasket next to me just in case my worship of the porcelain god had not yet concluded. I woke up the next morning with fear, nausea, a splitting headache, and an overwhelming sense of, “Wow… I can’t wait to do that again!”
And so began my magical relationship with alcohol. I had a happy childhood, neither of my parents were heavy drinkers, and there wasn’t a hint of trauma from which I might have been trying to escape. I just knew from that first night that I loved the way alcohol made me feel, and I wanted to recapture that bliss as often as possible.
I went through my high school years without any problems, but always looking for any opportunity to party. I dabbled with marijuana, and even though I liked it just fine, I was always a bit paranoid about getting caught. Back in those days, teenage drinking was winked at by parents and the authorities, but getting caught with weed could have actual consequences. Why take the risk when my friend alcohol did everything I wanted it to do?
My college years were more of the same, only with greater opportunities to drink. With the legal age being 18, and living in the great party city of New Orleans, the good times were almost non-stop. Oh, I kept up with my responsibilities. I was a full-time student making good grades, worked 20–25 hours per week, played in a band, and managed to maintain a relationship with my high school sweetheart. It was a full life, but one that was liberally lubricated with alcohol, and I loved it.
We married at 21, and spent the next few years building what looked on the outside like a normal adult life. She prodded me about my drinking frequently, but I was unfazed. I had a decent job, we bought a home, and had a couple of children to fill it. Even though she eventually started calling me an alcoholic (as her late father had been), I was convinced that an alcoholic was someone who, after taking one drink, would drink himself to embarrassing oblivion every time. An alcoholic, in my mind, couldn’t keep a job, showed up falling-down drunk to PTA meetings and family gatherings, and couldn’t be trusted to be anywhere when he was supposed to, much less be sober. I was none of those things. I was just a hard-working husband and father who liked to kick back and enjoy the warm glow of alcohol when he had the chance.
The problem, though, is that the more time passed, the more everything started looking like a good time to drink. For years, my drinking had begun when I got home from work in the evening. But as the nagging and the fighting got worse, I began to keep booze in the car so she couldn’t monitor my intake. More and more frequently I would find excuses to run an errand so I could down a half-pint of vodka to take the edge off. To complicate things even more, I had gotten a new job in outside sales which made it extremely easy to drink during the day.
By 1990 we were well-entrenched in the familiar cycle of me getting drunk, us fighting about it, and me apologizing profusely the next day, with the promise to do better. Everyone who has ever been in an alcoholic marriage knows the dance. One day it just got to the point where I knew no mere words could stem her anger and frustration. I looked up the number for AA, and called to find out where and when there was a meeting. I promised to go, and I did.
I wish I could say that was the beginning of my recovery, but I was still far from ready. Even though I heard people in the rooms share experiences alarmingly similar to my own, I was still focused on the differences. There were so many things that hadn’t happened to me. Yet. For the next five years I continued to drink, and continued to go to AA meetings sporadically. I struggled mightily with the question of whether or not I was an alcoholic. (Only after I was sober did I realize that people who don’t have a serious problem with alcohol virtually never ask themselves this question.)
Finally, in the fall of 1995, things came to a head. My wife told me to leave, and if I didn’t she would take the children (then 9 and 6) and go herself. Not wanting to see them uprooted, I packed a few things and moved back into my old room at my parents’ house. This marked the beginning of a much more rapid downward spiral. They were perfectly willing to accept the idea that my wife was exaggerating my drinking, and their blind loyalty opened the door to me coming and going without question. I drank whenever and wherever I pleased, and usually ended up completely blitzed in front of the television hours after they had retired to their bedroom for the night.
By early 1997 I had become fully alcohol-dependent. I woke up every morning with the shakes and the dry-heaves, symptoms that would only be relieved by more alcohol. Amazingly, I was still working, but everyone had begun to see that I was seriously compromised. While I had successfully kept the depth of my alcohol problem under wraps for years, the veil of denial was being snatched away. I began having serious health issues related to my drinking, and was told that I could not go on this way very long.
Even though I knew by now without question that I was an alcoholic, I couldn’t do anything about it. I had reached the point where I could no longer imagine a life with alcohol or without it. I was stuck living in hell one day at a time, just surviving from one moment to the next. One night in March I was taking the short drive from my parents’ house to watch the kids while my wife went out with a girlfriend. I was no drunker than my normal, everyday state, but I failed to see an SUV in front of me stop to make a left turn, and plowed into the back of it. The policeman who showed up to write the report said I didn’t seem drunk, but he smelled alcohol on my breath and would have to take me in for a breath test. Almost laughably now, I thought I had a good chance of passing. I hadn’t had that much. He even said I seemed sober. I’m not sure which of us was more surprised when I blew .293.
In all my years of partying, driving drunk, and doing all sorts of things I shouldn’t have, I had somehow managed to avoid ever seeing the inside of a police station. Having to call my senior-citizen parents to bail me out of jail broke something inside of me. That, coupled with that .293 reading when I didn’t even feel drunk. Somehow, I knew the jig was up. After pretending for so long to be okay, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I could no longer project the illusion of normalcy.
The next morning, without my usual drink I was shaking so badly I could hardly speak. I asked my mother to phone a detox hospital that I knew of from my AA meetings. They were telling her that they couldn’t take me because she wanted them to… that I should be the one making the call. She had to convince them that I was the one who wanted to go, but that I was unable to speak intelligibly due to my uncontrollable tremors.
She drove me down to the hospital, and we went through the intake procedures. I had to scrawl my signature on a few forms, which was really quite the adventure. They told her it was time for her to leave, and led me to the ward. I remember the sound of the door locking shut behind me, and the sense of doom that had overtaken me. There was literally, in my mind, no worse that it could get.
There were some preparations of a room to be made, so one of the psyche aides brought me to the large but empty family visiting room to wait. To this day I get goosebumps remembering exactly what happened next. He put one arm around my shoulder, looked at me, and spoke:
“I know everything looks pretty terrible right now, but it’s okay. We’re going to take care of you.”
I cannot describe what happened at that moment, except to say that I believed him. I suddenly felt as though the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders. The burden was no longer mine to bear. This thing I had fought for so long, this beast that had nearly taken everything, was no longer mine to battle. I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that I was helpless. These people knew how to help, and I was going to let them. I had never realized the power of the message of self-reliance I was raised with held over me. Finally now, letting go of any pretense that I could do this alone, brought me the ultimate freedom; the freedom to need others.
I was a drunk who could never put two days of sobriety together because the power of alcohol was so great. But in that moment, the compulsion to drink was removed from me, and would never return. Religious folks would call it a miracle, but I know it was surrender. By allowing myself to lose the battle, I had gained a chance at winning the war.
