“I’ll probably be back one day,” I told my friend, but I’m not sure I meant it, because ten years almost did pass, and then I was like: Screw that.
Screw that. For years, this was my attitude toward AA, the place that reached out its hand to me when I was on my knees. But becoming a professional drunk demands you distance yourself from the girl in the foldout chair who was once soul sick and shivering. I never spoke ill of AA after I left. But I could only recommend the solution to someone else. Like telling my friend to cut out dairy while shoving a fistful of cheddar cheese in my mouth.
During that next decade of drinking, I gravitated toward any book or magazine article about a person who drank too much. Nothing pleased me like tales of decadence. I read Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story three times, with tears dripping down my cheeks and a glass of white wine in my hand. White wine was Knapp’s nectar of choice, which she described with such eloquence I needed to join her, and I would think, “Yes, yes, she gets it.” Then she quit and joined AA, and it was like: Come on. Isn’t there another way?
Another way. I know there is now, because I have heard so many stories. People who quit on their own. People who find other solutions. I needed to try that, too. I needed to exhaust other possibilities—health regimens, moderation management, the self-help of David Foster Wallace and my Netflix queue—because I needed to be thoroughly convinced I could not do this on my own.
By the way, the guy who got me into AA started drinking again not long after I did. He got married and had a kid. His mid-20s revelry didn’t drag into his middle age, which sometimes happens. If you look at the demographics, drinking falls off a cliff after people have children. They can’t keep up. “You wanna curb your drinking?” a female friend asked. “Have a baby.”
I held on to those words into my mid-30s. I knew some speed bump of circumstance would come along and force me to change. I would get married, and then I would quit. I would have a baby, and then I would quit. But every opportunity to alter my habits—every challenging job, every financial squeeze—became a reason to drink more, not less. And I knew parenthood didn’t stop everyone. The drinking migrated. From bars into living rooms, bathrooms, an empty garage. The drinking was crammed into the hours between a child going down to bed and a mother passing out. I was starting to suspect kids wouldn’t stop me. Nothing had.
And I was so pissed about that. It wasn’t fair that my once-alcoholic friend could reboot his life to include the occasional Miller Lite while he cooked on the grill, and I had broken blood vessels around my eyes from vomiting in the morning. It wasn’t fair that my friends could stay at Captain Morgan’s pirate ship party while I was drop-kicked into a basement with homeless people chanting the Serenity Prayer. The cri de coeur of sheltered children everywhere: It isn’t fair! (Interestingly, I never cursed the world’s unfairness back when I was talking my way out of another ticket. People on the winning team rarely notice the game is rigged.)
Three weeks into this sobriety, though, I finally went back to the meetings. I found one near my West Village apartment where they dimmed the lights, and I resumed my old posture: arms crossed, sneer on my face. I went to get my mother off my back. I went to check some box on an invisible list of Things You Must Do. I went to prove to everyone what I strongly suspected: AA would not work for me.
Please understand. I knew AA worked miracles. What nobody ever tells you is that miracles can be very, very uncomfortable.
WORK WAS A respite during that first month, although that’s like saying being slapped is a respite from being punched. What I mean is I didn’t obsess about alcohol when I was at my job. I didn’t tell anyone I’d quit, either, probably for the same reason pregnant women wait three months before announcing their baby. Nobody wants to walk that shit back.
Our office in Midtown became a demilitarized zone for me. What was I going to do, drink at my desk? There was nothing festive about that place. In the depth of the recession, we had moved from an airy loft with brushed-steel fixtures to a bleak cubicle farm with gray carpets and dirty windows. A tube sock sagged the end of an aluminum slat on the Venetian blinds, a bizarre artifact from the previous tenants, and we were all so demoralized and overloaded that it was months before anyone thought to simply reach out and pull the thing down.
The work kept my hyperactive brain buckled in for a spell, though. A friend described her editing job as being pelted to death by pebbles, and when I think back to that summer, all I see are rocks flying at my face—contributors whose checks were late, writers growing antsy for edits. I spent half of the workday combing ridiculous stock pictures to illustrate stories. Woman with head in her hands. Woman staring out rainy window. Woman tearing out hair. A montage of the personal essays I was running, and also my life.