people will offer me a bite of ice cream or a bit of their chocolate whatever. I usually decline. They usually force it on me. If I have one bite, when we part ways, I'm at the corner store buying a pint of Ben & Jerry's and thinking about what pint I will buy the next day. I'm obsessive about ingesting food. The bad side is, this food is bad for my health. The good side is, if I eat a pint of ice cream, I don't call my ex-girlfriends at 2 a.m.
When I drank whiskey this way, I combined a self-control problem with a substance that is physically addictive and lowers inhibition. There is no set of circumstances in which this turns out well. There are no tools left to fight the compulsion to drink more. The only things that would stop me at this point are the liquor store closing, running out of money, or getting thrown out of the bar after last call.
Where Everybody Doesn't Know Your Name
On 16th Street in San Francisco there's a bar called The Kilowatt. This is where I drank on Sunday mornings with The Boys. We watched football and drank like men. Andy, the bartender, made me bourbon and Cokes in pint glasses. From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. we watched the brutal ballet that is the National Football League. Outside, Rob grilled the meat, and we were all bonding.
Many were the Sunday afternoons when I'd bid farewell to The Boys and stagger off to the BART station to make my way home, to catch HBO's Sunday night lineup with a nightcap of bourbon. All in all, a good day indeed, spent drinking well over a quart of whiskey.
I thought that if I quit drinking I'd let everyone down. They'd miss me. The bar wouldn't be the same without One of the Boys, would it? I was the literary one of the bar. I imagined myself to be the Frasier of the 16th Street Cheers. I was the hard-drinking, underappreciated-in-his-own-time writer, whose published book had unfortunately been ahead of its time.
There was no way I could let them see me in the bar during football without a drink. It would be much like seeing Barry Bonds limp after a pop fly in his later years, or watching a boxer past his prime step into the ring, or listening to the Aerosmith album they did right after they quit doing cocaine. It wouldn't be right. Luckily for me, I got sober in February, as the Super Bowl was wrapping up the NFL postseason.
I approached the bartender, Andy.
“I'm thinking about getting sober,” I admitted.
“That's a great idea,” he said without hesitation. When your bartender really wants you to quit, it's time.
Further than that, if you don't know who the worst drunk is in your favorite bar, it's you. When you quit, someone else becomes the worst drunk in the bar. They've all been comparing themselves to you, saying, “At least I'm not that guy.” Quitting is threatening to them. Your drinking validates their drinking. You may know a lot of people who drink as much as you do; you also know a lot of other alcoholics.
For you drug types out there, if you don't know someone who hasn't tried cocaine, you're an addict. You've surrounded yourself with a social circle that thinks it's normal to do cocaine, even if it's a now-and-then situation. Most people in this country will never try cocaine or heroin. Most of them will never even have the opportunity. You've created this world for yourself with a reality to which you shouldn't compare yourself.
Drinking during the day, drinking whiskey in the morning didn't seem odd to me, since I knew plenty of other people who did it. Most people I knew did it, because I had created a world of problem drinkers around me. The people I knew drank every single day after work in the same bars.
That fall, I returned to The Kilowatt with about half a year sober. Andy poured me a root beer, and I handed him some poems I'd written since he'd seen me last.
“What are you reading,” one of The Boys asked.
“Some of Bucky's new shit,” Andy told him.
“Who's Bucky?”
“This guy,” Andy said.
He looked right at me. No recognition whatsoever.
“Nice to meet you,” he said.
It hit me. He didn't know me. I looked around the bar at the rest of The Boys. There was Panama Hat, Guy Who Drinks Corona With Lime, Redskins Fan With Ponytail . . . I didn't know these guys. They didn't know me. They weren't my friends at all. They were random jerks at the bar. And I was a more random jerk from off the street.
So Life You in the Nads
First off, apologies for the decidedly male metaphor here. Gut Punch would work as well, but it doesn't quite have the same ring to it. The days of the Gut Punch are long over, any way; few people have been randomly socked in the midsection, but guys all around the world still know what a good racking will do.
Anyone who has partaken in playground violence understands the equalizer that is the Kick in the Nads. No matter how tough that bully is, anyone else can take him down with one well-placed Buster Brown.
I thought that if I quit drinking I'd let everyone down. They'd miss me. The bar wouldn't be the same without One of the Boys, would it?
In adult life, there are events that are unforeseen and shattering to the psyche. Usually it's the death of a loved one or a child, but it can also be financial disaster or any number of things. The event is so traumatic that it renders the eventee helpless and incapable of dealing with the rest of life. This is when a lot of people cross the line from having had a drink or a drug to becoming full-blown addicts.
Many addicts grew their dependence over a lifetime of poor emotional and social choices. The Nad Kick takes people who were otherwise successful in life and reduces them quickly. The Kickee's social group enables the bad behavior, since he or she seems to deserve to get drunk or high. No one blames him for a bender or prolonged depression. But the danger with dealing with a Nad Kick by using drugs and alcohol is that the depression sometimes sticks.
Ever have someone tell you, “Don't make a face like that, it might stay that way?” Or were you told that if someone slapped you on the back while you made a nasty face it would stick? Consider your depression the nasty face and a drug bender that slap on the back.
The physical part of your addiction will make an alliance with your misery; as long as it's okay for you to drink when you're miserable, then the part of you that wants the vice will keep you miserable so you keep self-medicating. Before too long, your physical addiction will be strongly tied into a dark emotional state.
It's hard for the Kickees in 12 Step. Most of the Steppers can't point to a specific incident to relate to why they started drinking. The Kickee can. The easy thing to feel is an addict's superiority complex. The others don't seem to have a real reason to be drinking; they seem to have been born addicts. The only bad things that ever happened to them were of their own design. Life for the Kickee was going great until The Event.
Clean and Sober Versus Straight Edge
When I first found the punk scene in the '80s, I felt like I was home. I had come out of a crazy religious upbringing that was either extreme fundamentalism or a mind-controlling cult. Neither part of my childhood
