My Story (like Bill W's Story) TBD (January 2022)

Where Magoo’s used to be.

It was an evening in early August in 1981 when I first realized I was an alcoholic. I was 18 and in-between my freshman and sophomore years at the University of Wisconsin. I had been living at home in Iowa City for the summer and working at the Iowa City Press-Citizen. I had discovered alcohol a few years before and immediately fallen in love with how drinking made me feel. Instead of a shy, nervous, geeky kid on the debate team, I was funny and carefree and nearly charming, and nothing really mattered that much or was very serious when I could drink. I was a quick study and had gone in nearly no time from growing up in a house where no one really drank, to waking up incredibly hung-over on high school debate trips and becoming a regular at a bar in Iowa City.

I’d finished work and was meeting friends later for a night of drinking and smok- ing weed, but had gone to Magoo’s, my regular spot on Lynn Street. It was painted a garish blue and orange inside, but it was quiet, dark and had a good jukebox—and they were willing to serve me. I leaned back on the vinyl black booth, my second margarita was already half-gone. I was relaxed and happy and felt a wave of euphoria wash over me as I watched stars and a crescent moon appear as the sky darkened into night. I ordered a third margarita and the jukebox started playing “Strange Magic” by ELO, a favorite song of mine, but this time the words near the end of the song caught me short:

Oh, I’m never going to be the same again,
Now I’ve seen the way it’s got to end.
Sweet Dream. Sweet Dream.

I already drank way differently from my friends, there was a ferocity to it and once I started, I didn’t stop. I was the one egging friends on to drink more, to try and keep up with me. But that night, I knew for the first time that I was in trouble. I’ve always had a very analytical mind and am prone to sudden and usually correct realizations and that night I realized not only that I was drinking too much, but that I loved drinking too much. And I realized that I didn’t know how I was ever going to stop. I guess I should have felt more afraid, but I didn’t. I guzzled the third margarita and went out to meet my friends.

Despite consuming prodigious quantities of marijuana and alcohol, I graduated a semester early with two majors, my senior thesis was published and I was accepted into an Ivy-League law school. Everything was falling to place and I didn’t even have to work that hard. I arrived in Philadelphia in 1984 for law school with a renewed sense of purpose. I knew what drinking and smoking did to me, how they captured me and even though I had achieved quite a lot, I knew that the haul would have been much greater if I’d been sober. I decided that I’d already let too much of life slip away and was determined to make the most of law school. I worked hard—usually the last one out of the library at 1:30 or 2am and then up at 6 to review my notes before class. But it paid off, I was near the top of my class, I was excited, happy and completely engaged in law school life. I was drinking the way my classmates did: a few beers on Thursday nights and then out with friends on the weekend.

My early years of being a lawyer were nothing but grinding hard work. I was a litigator and was determined to make my mark fast. I outworked everyone in my first year class, I was at the office before 7am almost every day and can’t even count how many late nights and all-nighters there were. The stress was ever-present: tight deadlines, nasty opposing counsel, long hours and lots of travel. My drinking had gotten heavier and I was going to Duke’s, the bar in the lobby of our office building, three orfour nights a week before going home. When I traveled, the drinking be- gan when I arrived at the airport and didn’t stop until I returned back home to DC.

The next few years were marked by steady drinking and every business trip—and there were lots of them—were marathons of drinking. The law firm years ground by, the work was hard and the hours and travel schedules were brutal, but I eagerly snapped up all the work that was thrown at me. I was still so eager to make my mark, to show everyone what I could do and was willing to sacrifice about anything to get ahead.Then I went to work for a tech company and I wasn’t the only one working at a brutal pace. There was lots of drinking and drugs. It was a work-hard, play-hard kind of place and the parties were epic as were the instances of misbehavior. The stock prices was surging, making millionaires out of secretaries, and everything was excused so long as we hit our numbers and kept getting rich.

For me, the combination of money, prestige and constant travel made it possible to drift far, far away from my family at home. The morning reckonings were horrible. The sweet voices of my wife and kids, “Hi daddy,” were simply too wrenching after the nights “on the road.” Hungover and ashamed, I’d call home and try to disguise the rasp in my voice and the rising tide of self-disgust and fear. Time and time again, I’d promise myself that this was the last time. But it never was..

There was no saying “no” to the person that emerged after a few drinks. The success and the money and all of the material trappings convinced me that my behavior was somehow ok. That the person who worked so hard to bring all of this home deserved a little fun every now and then. The professional success made me feel even more self- important; someone this successful deserved to do whatever he wanted.

The dichotomy between the way people saw me and how I was actually living my life was eating me from the inside. I knew everything would come crashing down one day and all I had to do was stop drinking. Just stop drinking for a little bit and let my head clear and maybe I’d be able to just walk away from all of this. But of course, I never could. I never really tried. Finally, on a Saturday morning in March of 2010, my wife confronted me and told me that she thought I was an alcoholic. I took an online assessment and feigned surprise at the results. I started going to AA meetings, they were something to endure, like detention in junior high, but I had no intention of actu- ally stopping drinking.

My wife divorced me in 2012. My life was unraveling at a rapid pace, but no matter what I tried, I couldn’t stop drinking. I finally went to an IOP in 2012 and was able to stop drinking for about 60 days. The next few years were spent drinking and collecting a series of one-day chips. I understood that I was an alcoholic and that alcoholism was for me, very likely to be a terminal disease and I still couldn’t stop. I got caught drinking before group sessions and was sent home, but I kept drinking. No matter how much resolve I mustered, no matter how many meetings I went too, no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn’t stop drinking.

I kept trying to stop drinking. Someone smart and funny came into my life; on our first date she told me that we had met a long time ago, in a past life, and that she knew we were destined to be together. She helped me get to rehab for the first time in 2016. She stayed as long as she could, but she always knew, and all of the excuses and all of the lies were finally too much. She left in March of 2018 and that was when the wheels finally came all the way off.

At first I celebrated my alone-ness by drinking cautiously, only a few glasses of sauvignon blanc and carefully spaced out. I even installed an app on my phone that could track my drinking—but within a week, I was undercounting my drinks—already hard at work convincing myself that none of this was really that bad.

But it soon was— I’d wake up early, stomach churning, anxiety coursing through me and feeling horribly sick. There was a bar called the Commissary near my house that opened and served alcohol at 8am. I was usually there a few minutes before 8, pacing the sidewalk and waiting for the manager to unlock the front door. Within a few moments of taking my stool, a steely, flinty glass of sauvignon blanc would arrive. My hands shook so violently that I’d wait until the bartender walked away before trying to take a drink, and then having to use two hands to take a couple of sips of wine. My days were spent consuming wine—desperately trying to stay ahead of the dreaded withdrawal symptoms and the only thing that changed was where I was drinking. Life was bleak and filled with remorse.

I was alone and the downward spirals were tightening and I didn’t see a way out.

In October of that year, my Mom had a terrible heart attack. She had been dead for several minutes before being revived. I arrived in Iowa City and went straight to the ICU. She was a horrid sight, pale, with tinges of blue still around her lips. Her normally carefully tended and colored hair was a mess, her long shocking white hair was splayed out all over her pillow. She was intubated and not conscious. The vision was horrifying and suddenly I saw myself in that bed, my life wasting away and my kids having to sit and watch the terrible last chapter. I decided then that I wasn’t going to end my life that way.

I spent the next five days in Iowa City, secretly detoxing. I was afraid to do it completely alone—it’s not uncommon for men my age to succumb to heart attacks during the process. The next 5 days were some of the hardest of my life. Barely sleeping, and when I managed a little bit of sleep, the sheets and pillow would be drenched with cold sweat. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t focus to read or even watch tv and my whole body would shake violently. There were moments when I felt like I was coming apart at the seams and didn’t know how I was going to make it from one hour to the next, but I did. But I made it through those next several days and when I flew home to DC I was sober. I got home with a renewed sense of purpose, threw myself into work and man- aged to stay sober for several months. I wasn’t going to meetings, I didn’t have a sponsor, I wasn’t reading the Big Book, but I also wasn’t drinking.

A pretty spring day in 2019 and lunch at a nice restaurant near my new apartment in Philadelphia was the occasion to start drinking again. Things were good and it was only a couple of glasses of wine, right? By fall, yet another new girlfriend confronted me and said that the price for building a life with her was sobriety. So I stopped drinking again and October 22 is still my sobriety date. But even though I had stopped drinking, I hadn’t gotten to my bottom yet.

That relationship, like every other, ended with a stupendous flash. I realized I had nowhere to go. I had literally burned all of the bridges. I decided, after a miserable time in an AirBnB near a golf course in Florida that I would move to New York. I didn’t know if it was a new life or a last stand.

I arrived in New York on Labor Day of 2020 with four suitcases under my arms and checked into a sober house on 84th Street. I slowly and cautiously began rebuilding my life. A few nights after arriving and only a few weeks removed from the stunning upheaval in my life, I was in bed reviewing the events of the last few months. I had destroyed yet another relationship, I was alone and surrounded by the wreckage I had left. I had no job, had no concrete plans, I was 58 years old and essentially living in a halfway house— certainly not the life I had envisioned for myself. But that night, with the sounds of the city coming in through the windows, I realized I wasn’t scared or anxious anymore. I was safe and there was calm and peace in my heart for the first time in a long time. I thought to myself that I should be really freaked out—but I wasn’t. I was sober and for the first time in a long time, things seemed ok.

That was the beginning for me. I got a sponsor and began studying the Big Book and working the Steps. The thing that was different, the Big Book made sense to me. It didn’t seem like the archaic preaching of a guy my grandfather would have considered a crackpot, it was someone who was speaking the same language that I speak. And saying something I needed to hear.