An Alcoholic in New York

September 22, 2021

I’m a 58 year-old alcoholic living and writing in New York. How I got here is kind of a long story. Shakespeare wrote “brevity is the soul of wit,” and I do like to think of myself as kind of a witty alcoholic, so I’ll try to be concise. I ended up here in NYC because I didn’t really know what else to do and literally had no place else to go. I’d always loved it here and had always wanted to live here. If I was headed for the end of the road, I thought it might as well be somewhere nice.

I began trying to get sober in 2010, it’s taken me until now to put together almost two years. I was a high-bottom alcoholic and a chronic relapser. I have so many terrible relapse stories: Pinot Grigio at a Chili’s 30 minutes down the road from my first rehab (and I hate Pinot Grigio); being dropped off at an IOP by my daughter and waiting until she drove away to walk down the street and into a bar; or maybe worst, sitting across from my son, telling him how my latest relationship was finally saving my life and keeping me sober, while I was drunk.

I can’t tell you how many times I relapsed. I do know that I have a collection of thirteen one-day chips. And I know that means there were at least thirteen times when I walked back into an AA meeting, my head hanging in shame as I took my seat on a metal folding chair. At halftime, the alcoholic treasurer or secretary of the meeting would begin to hand out chips for different lengths of sobriety. I’d sit and wait, my hands moist and fidgety, until I heard, “And for the most important person in the room, anyone with one day or more or just a desire for a new way of life.” And then I would exhale hard, put my hand up and say “Hi, I’m R and I’m an alcoholic. I have one day today.”

I’d trudge to the front of the room, collect my chip to some scattered applause and a hug (remember hugs?) and walk tearfully back to my seat to wait for a chance to share about my most recent relapse and how much I had learned and how I finally realized what it was going to take to get sober and how things were finally going to be different. So, I did that at least thirteen times.

I got divorced in 2012. I say that like it’s something that happened to me. Of course, in true alcoholic fashion, I tore a twenty-year marriage down to the studs and when I was done with that, I went to work on myself. Trying to arrest the decline, I tried IOPs (Intensive Outpatient Programs) in 2012 and again in 2015. I wen to in-patient rehab in 2016 and again in 2017. I did another IOP for about four days in the summer of 2018 and by that time, things were getting very dark. It’s when I first really began to see that there probably wasn’t a way out.

I had destroyed another relationship; laid waste to a smart, funny, beautiful woman’s desire to make a life with me. I drank hard to console myself and it got bad really fast. I lived in DC near Logan Circle—lots of bars and restaurants—I was frequently at the Commissary, a friendly, dark place on P Street with middling food, but a bar that began service at 8am every day. In those days, I’d fall awake, still bleary and unfocused, my stomach would roil as I began to contemplate another day in this horrible place, the awfulness of the sameness of being an active alcoholic. I’d run a brush though my unruly hair, take a swig of mouthwash, pull on clothes, usually yesterday’s, and unsteadily walk the six or seven blocks to the Commissary, usually arriving just as the doors were being unlocked for the day. I’d quickly take my spot at the bar, away from the door and window and in front of a tv near the end. I was a known quantity and a glass of sauvignon blanc would arrive unbidden as I got settled. I liked to think that the bartenders thought of me as a witty, sophisticated guy—but I was more likely the “old guy who drinks white wine with his pancakes.”

My spiral down tightened that summer, by Fall I began to really feel the bleak hopelessness of deep addiction. There was really no time that I was sober then. My days were nothing but moving from bar to bar and staying drunk enough to stave off the terrible withdrawal symptoms. I really didn’t see a way out and had mostly decided I didn’t want one.

In October of 2018, my Mom had a devastating heart attack. She was clinically dead for several minutes, but was resuscitated. I flew back to Iowa City and straight to the ICU. She was intubated and not conscious. Her normally carefully tended and colored-brown hair was a dirty gray and splayed out crazily on her pillow. She was a ghastly, pallid shade of death, tinges of blue still evident near her lips. It was a horrifying sight. In that moment, I think I saw myself honestly for the first time in my life. I was an alcoholic hurtling toward the end. I was going to end up like my mom, in a bed like that, perched on the edge of death like that, making my kids watch the last horrible, little bit like that, and wasting the rest of the life I’d been given to steward, just like that. I’m sure I was drunk then, because in those days I always was, but I knew I didn’t want an end like that. I decided I wanted to get sober, before I had just tried to give up drinking. This was different.

I didn’t stop drinking then, but I managed to detox myself that week. While my mom clung to her life in the hospital, I hung on through terrible nights and days of home-detox. I tossed and turned in sweat-drenched bedsheets, trying to still the rising panic that comes with depriving your brain of alcohol. I had crazy dreams, felt stomach-dropping anxiety, all amid my childhood bedroom furniture. Mom recovered and I managed nearly six months of glorious white-knuckle sobriety that ended very gently with a few springtime glasses of sauvignon blanc.

Well, my sobriety didn’t really end “gently” that time either. There was another woman who loved me, another family that trusted me. But that story is for another time. As the summer of 2020 waned, I arrived at LaGuardia Airport at 11pm on the Sunday night of Labor Day weekend with most of my possessions under my arms. I moved into a room in a sober house on East 84th street. I’m not sure how that happened, but I guess I finally had the willingness and desperation to try and save my own life.

I remember being in bed one evening at the sober house. Sleep for me has always been a challenge, but this night, in my beaten-up bed in what is essentially a halfway house, the sounds of 1st Avenue vibrating through the room, I was relaxed. I was happy, pretty calm and sleepy. I was only a few weeks removed from some terrible, chaotic events: I had ended an engagement, sold my house, collected my possessions and now here I was, starting over alone in New York. I didn’t really know anyone here and didn’t know what I was going to do for work or where I was going to live. I should have been completely freaked out. But I wasn’t. That moment was when I glimpsed, for the first time, what sobriety could mean for me. I had never really been able to envision myself getting sober before, I guess. But that night, as I fell asleep in a place that should have felt like the end of the line, I saw a future and my freshly minted sobriety was the foundation of that future.

Within a few weeks I had met the most amazing group of men: they took me in and showed me the way. For the first time in my life I was able to listen. I did what I was told. I went to meetings. I got a sponsor and we began to work the steps again from the beginning and a strange thing happened: I began to feel a sense of calm and peace start to work through me. When I meditated or sat quietly at a meeting, I would feel little jolts of energy, electrical charges coursing through me and I started to feel connected—to what, I wasn’t entirely sure. But I felt connected and I began to start to live again, slowly, a bit at a time. One day at a time.

I plunged into the program, doing two, sometimes three meetings a day. I met people, collected numbers, made phone calls and talked to my sponsor. I was staying sober. I read the Big Book, shared at meetings, started doing a daily gratitude list and I stayed sober. I have sponsees now. I’m working the steps again—but with an intensity and sense of purpose I’ve never had. I’m staying sober. Friends have relapsed, I’ve had setbacks, some days I feel terrible and lonely and alone and I’m staying sober. I had 22 months on the 22nd of last month (tell me all those 2’s aren’t auspicious!). For those that are keeping track, that’s the longest I’ve gone without drinking since I began in 1978.

I’m coming to realize that getting sober isn’t so much about deciding to not drink, it’s about deciding to connect to the life that’s all around us. Addiction is a disease of isolation, there was no place I’d rather be than at the dimly-lit, end of a bar somewhere, drinking sauvignon blanc and hiding out from the world. As I began to connect, the fear and anxiety that had ruled my life began to slowly subside. I could began to take the first few real steps on the path to recovery.

So here I am. I’m an OG alcoholic and a newly minted New Yorker. I moved here one year ago under unbelievably shitty circumstances in the middle of a pandemic. I was desperately alone and knew, knew for certain, that this was my last go at this. I knew I couldn’t go on as I had and I knew I couldn’t withstand another failed attempt at sobriety—so that didn’t leave me very much room. Looking back, I see how close it was, how touch-and-go; but I stayed sober.

I’m not telling you this so that you admire me for being genuine or honest. I’m telling you this as the seemingly-irredeemable architect of a thousand shitty things who managed to find a way out and stay sober. If I can get it to work, you probably can, too. That’s why we tell these stories.

Thanks for Letting Me Share