I’m grateful for a plate appearance. I’m grateful for a gorgeous afternoon. I’m grateful for the coffee stand in Bryant Park. I’m grateful for the Bryant Park Library. I’m grateful for other places, too. I’m grateful to be sober today.
My anniversary is not the product of a “Sober October.” I write about spirituality and all of the changes in my life, etc, and it maybe probably gets tiresome, but those things also aren’t responsible for me having an October sobriety date. Why do I celebrate my sobriety in October? Does that mark my triumphant entry into sobriety, where people were throwing down their cloaks and what-nots so that my little donkey could walk on them? No. I got sober when someone smarter than me, someone who loved me and saw what I was doing to myself, called my bluff. I got sober in the same way I might have lost a hand of poker.
I had been sober on and off that year, and had been managing to keep things kind of afloat until the end of summer. The old patterns had begun creeping in and I was back to drinking with breakfast on select days. I knew I was teetering on the edge and knew there wasn’t going to be much holding me back from the next fall. I was seeing someone who, like everyone else in my life, was under the impression that I was sober. We had made plans to meet here, in New York City, for a weekend.
I was able to drink on Friday afternoon. Her plane was going to arrive around 8pm, so I had time to spend a few hours drinking in an excellent dark bar somewhere and then head out to the airport. To the extent, I seemed “off,” well, it had been a long week and here I was at the airport on a Friday night. Of course, I’m bleary-eyed and tired. Yes, of course, I had this all planned out back then. That’s the only way you can maintain a long-term alcoholic career: planning. And also, self-dishonesty. But that’s for another day.
I arrived at the airport, pretty well modulated, and received the excellent news that her plane was late. This meant I had an opportunity for another drink or two before I faced the abyss of a real teetotaling weekend. At this point, I knew that I’d be suffering through withdrawal the next day, so I was already laying the foundation for that ordeal.
She arrived and I think the fact that I had been drinking was pretty obvious. I always thought it was much better concealed than it ever was. She didn’t say anything about it, which was fine with me. The next morning, as I was brushing my teeth with pretty shaky hands, she called out,
“Have you taken your medicine?”
And my blood ran cold. My “medicine” was the dreaded Antabuse, slayer of alcoholic desire. Well, not actually. It’s more a slayer of alcohol consumption. I’m not a doctor, but as an alcoholic, I’m here to tell you what happens when you try to drink after taking an Antabuse:
You get really sick and think you might die.
My first brush with the Antabuse Apocalypse was in 2012, and the occasion was my very first Intensive Outpatient Program (“IOP”). They administered Anatabuse at our evening sessions. By administered, I mean they called us over one at a time, handed us a cup with the Antabuse tablet and watched us take it. The idea being, Antabuse would create the restrictive sobriety usually accomplished in residential settings. I vividly remember the first time I took Antabuse.
My intake appointment for the IOP was late on a Friday morning. I knew that Antabuse was part of the regimen and had done a fair amount of research on half-life and other details. I knew it it was going to end my drinking for some period of time. I will tell you, even taking the Metro to Silver Spring for an IOP Intake Appointment, I was already plotting my eventual return to drinking. During the appointment, my hopes began to rise and thought it was possible that I might just be given a prescription, meaning I could fill it later that weekend. I might not have drunk my last drink!
The night before, I had gone to many of my favorite haunts to celebrate my last drink. We had to stage this ceremony at a number of different locations. I was very candid with my bartender friends, I was going to get sober. They were all super-happy and supportive, seriously. I think it was pretty evident that I needed help. More evident than I thought, for sure. I had advised the proprietors of my haunts that should I re-appear, they were not to serve me anymore. I was about to get sober.
My hopes for a last minute reprieve were dashed in that dingy medical office. The very pleasant nurse handed me a cup with a single pill in it. It was the Antabuse. “Here, take this, and here’s a prescription you can get filled.” No heartbreak was ever more jagged. I took the Metro home and literally felt completely empty. Without drinking, I had nothing.
My research had not suggested there might be an onset period, a “grace period” for some last gasp drinking. I was grasping at straws. I went to one of my preferred spots and asked for a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. The bartenderess cocked an eye, “you said not to serve you anymore.
”I did say that, but this is an experiment and it’s just one glass.”
I got the fish-eye as she put a glass in front of me. She made a show of pouring only a half-glass. I took a careful sip and settled back to wait. A few minutes passed, I hadn’t really noticed anything. Hmmmmm. I took another sip. A few more minutes, maybe I had a slight headache coming on, but it had been kind of a stressful day. Another sip and the hammer dropped. My head felt like it was going to explode. I was flushed. My heart was beating about 375 times a minute and I thought I was going to throw up.
What’s interesting is that Anatabuse works by blocking the liver’s ability to process alcohol. Those symptoms are what happens when your body is not able to filter out the toxins associated with alcohol. Seriously, something to think about in connection with a healthy lifestyle.
Antabuse worked that day. I went home, defeated, took the Librium they had prescribed for withdrawals and spent the entire weekend in bed, binge watching “Community,” and dreading Monday and the beginning of sobriety. For those keeping score, I stayed sober that time until November, just about 60 days.
So, my bluff has been called in a hotel bathroom. I mumble a thanks for the reminder and fish out the bottle of dreaded tablets from my shaving kit and shake one into my shaking palm. Here it is: The end. I put it carefully on my tongue and washed it down, wishing it wasn’t with tap water.
That meant no drinking on Saturday. Then she said the same thing on Sunday. And having taken two full-strength pills, I knew I was probably on the shelf for 3-4 days at this point. I should mention that she was a doctor and might have understood this, as well. It worked. I didn’t drink that week. It turns out, my last day of drinking had happened.
One of the ways Antabuse worked for me was by moving the decision point to less vulnerable times. I tended to take mine in the mornings, there wasn’t a day full of frustrations and resentments to compete with the noble impulse to just take the pill.Once I took an Antabuse, there was something that clicked in my brain. Somewhere, it had been marked down that there was going to be no drinking possible for the next few days. I felt desolate and empty inside, often felt like I was coming apart at the seams. I had no idea what I was feeling, the fear and anxiety and dread growing. But I knew I couldn’t drink.
I wasn’t going to meetings. I had no program and my chemically-engineered early sobriety was now being enforced by the pandemic. There were simply no opportunities to drink—no where to go and of course, my body was now primed to basically explode like the prisoners in Running Man if I took a sip of wine.1
That relationship came to an end in August. I was formulating my new life plan from a horribly-furnished AirBnB near a Florida golf course and began settling on the idea of moving to New York. Here’s the thing, I was in pain and my life had descended into chaos again, those were conditions I would have been drinking through—and I wasn’t. I had a very, very strong sense that I was white-knuckling things and didn’t know how much time I had.
I did two things then that saved my life. I had help—again, another story for another day, but someone showed up and got me exactly where I needed to go. First life-saving thing, I went to treatment. I went to a two-week residential program and did some serious work. The other life-saving thing: I made arrangements to move into a sober house in New York.
I was finishing up my stint in rehab and was going to be flying to New York the next day, to move into the sober house. My alcoholic brain had already flagged this opportunity a few weeks before. This rehab, while residential, didn’t have any kind of nursing and they were very reluctant to administer drugs. Since I was going to be completely supervised, they suggested that we hold off on the Antabuse until I left.
That was okay with me. I made a note, if we didn’t take an Antabuse on morning I left, there was one last afternoon of drinking, at an airport no less. This plan would have worked except that I confessed. At a farewell group session on the last afternoon, I let it slip that I was already thinking about not taking the Antabuse the next day. What was I thinking? Of course, all of the people I had come to know in the very deep way that comes from telling all of your terrible stories for a few weeks, were very concerned. I hadn’t known any of these people ten days ago and in that moment all I felt was love. Not judged, not pushed, not scolded. Loved.
I said I’d take it when they pulled my banned stuff out of the safe the next morning. The super-aggressive and super-smart guru who animated this place came over to me later and said, “you could help a lot of people, don’t be an asshole and kill yourself.”
Not the fondest of farewells. But here’s the other thing. This was the first time I was getting sober by myself and that was the thing he had noticed. I wasn’t trying to salvage a relationship or a job or whatever. I just knew that if I drank, there was no going back. I didn’t think I had another recovery in me. The next morning, I took the Antabuse and headed to the airport.
I moved into the sober house and lived there in September and October. I celebrated my first anniversary sitting on the smoking deck, qualifying at a Zoom meeting on a brilliant October Saturday.
I don’t take Antabuse today. I have several vials full in my medicine cabinet. It may be expired, I keep it there as a reminder, and maybe a safety, in the event of an emergency. Antabuse isn’t responsible for my sobriety, but it helped me stay sober long enough so that when I started ingesting the words of the Big Book, well, this time they found fertile soil, they took hold.
People often have mixed feelings about anniversaries—I think they stir up an awful lot of emotion and not all of it good. As I like to point out, the day before the sobriety date was usually not a great day. For me, my last day of drinking was fittingly emblematic of my entire drinking career: Driven by desperation, aided by deceit and accomplished with the knowledge that the only one who didn’t understand what was going on was me.
The question that immediately preceded my sobriety wasn’t some inspirational, super-deep, wow, I’ve just realized the secret of life flash of brilliance: Someone smarter than me, someone who loved me, saw what I was doing to myself and called my bluff. That’s how I got sober. It was the Big Book and the Program that let me finally see those same things for myself. That’s how I stay sober.
Happy Sober October.
A science fiction movie about a game show? Yes, I’ve seen it 41 times.