Look. There You Are.

Like most alcoholics, I didn’t think I was slipping much.

Even if I were, my fall from grace would be something I could control. Like I could step out of it for a bit, take a good look at the situation, and then maybe make a few tweaks that would arrest my slide.

I also needed to ensure everyone understood this whole booze thing wasn’t that bad, and even it was, it was mostly their fault, not mine.

But I couldn’t or rather wouldn’t, because self-truth is not allowed on the slide, and worse, you’re getting used to it. You no longer notice the slow but steady abandonment of what was once important to you.

Gone is honesty. Integrity and dignity are not far behind.

Granted, this doesn’t happen overnight, but that’s part of the problem. You grow accustomed to being less of a person. You kid yourself into thinking that you don’t need to change, but the fact is you couldn’t change for the better on your best day, and there aren’t too many of those anymore.

You’re getting used to ‘the bottom below the bottom you know.’ Your clothes are rumpled; your shoes should have been replaced months ago, and god only knows the last time you saw the dentist.

There may come a time if you’re one of the few that makes it back to the tables, when you’ll meet men and women who are just like you. They weren’t born on skid row. They had a life, probably a good one.

When your fog lifts a little higher, you’ll begin to recognize the long-forgotten pedigree of your fellow alcoholics. The VP, the teacher, sales director, doctor, kid’s soccer coach, loving mom, and caring father. People on the plus side of the ledger who made the world a better place only to throw it all away in exchange for one more pull on the Popoff or MD 20/20 bottle or some other substance just this side of antifreeze.

That’s why for this alcoholic, it isn’t the shapeless form of a human sleeping under the overpass that scares me the most. It’s the guy on his way there.

The guy who’s still somewhere between you and that cliff, the middle ground, maybe sober enough to know how sick he is, who’s gotten used to crashing in a fleabag motel or the backseat of his soon to be repossessed car. The ground where prescription abuse graduates to street drugs and the last paycheck is replaced by the last theft.

I’m scared of that vision because it shows me what I will likely become if I ever return to drinking.

Take the roughed-up cowboy who stood unsteadily on the sidewalk one warm spring day outside a South Beach bakery. I happened to look out as I sat down at the window booth and saw such a man.

Dressed in well-tailored but filthy slacks, he wore expensive-looking but beyond repair boots, a blue hospital gown dangling open from his shoulders to reveal a 90-degree arm in a still white cast. I guessed him to be 40 going on 60, rummaging through a trash receptacle with his one good hand. I watched as he lifted a can of Olympia beer out of the trash. Jackpot. He chugged down what remained. I winced at the taste.

“What are you looking at,” asked my son as he sat down across from me. He was in this third year of medical school, on vacation with mom and now sober dad.

“I wonder what that guy is all about,” I said, motioning out the window.

Without hesitating, Bill said, “Well, he probably got into a fight last night, cops took him to the emergency room for a broken arm, got a cast and his pain meds, and when no one was looking, bolted out the door.”

As the Olympia chugging outpatient turned toward the next trash container, I caught a glimpse in the morning light of the fading remnants of a good man on the slide.

I took an educated guess: father of three, devoted husband, an engineer by trade, who one night probably not too long ago, just didn’t go home. Didn’t call either. He had slid down to that place where the bottle was once and for all more important than the good life he helped build. Now his family, kids, wife, job, all of it. Gone.

Maybe I’m too melancholy.

After all, I’m on reasonably solid ground these days, with a 25-year coin in my dresser drawer. Still, if I see a man on that slide, maybe out collecting cans on the roadside or rummaging through the trash in a grubby sportscoat, I remind myself, “Look. There you are.”