But she wasn’t smiling and nodding to me—she was smiling and nodding to the security guard. They both wanted to make sure that I was going on my way.
Remembering that, I never went back.
Over the next month, I also got the sense that the barman at the House of Tiki wanted me on my way as well, probably fearing another awkward attempt at conversation involving half-remembered details and made-up facts.
One night, I nodded off between my whiskey and beer, and the barman loudly snapped his fingers next to my ear. It woke me up like a fire alarm, and I left whatever cash was on the bar and staggered out.
It took me a couple of weeks to get up the courage to go back to the House of Tiki for an early-morning beer run. I had been drinking alone, heating up my VCR by going through a stack of horror films and psychological thrillers. I had finished off two six packs of Colt 45 tallboys and was ready for more. The walk to the House of Tiki was uneventful, and I was looking forward to the comforting coolness of beer cans under my arm.
I entered the House of Tiki just as I had many times before—after 2:00 a.m., it was the only bar open, and it was packed.
I went up to the barman and asked for a six of Miller to go.
“Can I see your ID?” he asked.
This hadn’t happened before.
I handed over my Massachusetts driver’s license—I was twenty-eight years old but looked more like eighteen. That had to be the reason.
“What’s the name on the ID?”
I paused. I panicked.
“I don’t know,” I blurted. I couldn’t think.
The barman shook his head slightly as he pushed my driver’s license back to me over the bar.
Stumbling home, I realized my drinking options were becoming limited. “You’re becoming a shut-in,” I told myself, careful not to fall or walk into something.
I probably strung together a couple other sentences as well. “Mathew”—I’d always call myself Mathew—“Mathew, the fundamental problem is that everyone around us is such a lightweight.” I’m sure I focused on Peter—a new friend, a great guy, someone to speak Hindi to and watch Star Trek with. But he didn’t drink at all.
As I got closer to home, I had a moment of inspiration: change the context, stop all the sneaking around! Have a party!
It took over a week, but I worked purposefully.
I planned and I drank. I invited people and I drank. I cleaned and I drank. I was ready and I drank.
And the party happened.
That was February 18, 1993.
Back to the morning after. Trudging into the living room, I managed to find a corner of the carpet that wasn’t soaked with something. I sat, right on the floor, opened my address book, and started dialing the phone. I was going to ask about the blue sweater—that would be pretext enough for a call. But I really wanted to know what I might have done at the party, any clue at all to begin to create a memory of that night.
I called one acquaintance, then the next—I don’t remember whom. No, the sweater wasn’t theirs. Then another inspiration: Joyce. I’d find out from her! Joyce was actually a college friend of my sister—that’s how I’d gotten to know her. She was living up on the North Side and every week or so we’d go to Devon Street for a buffet lunch of tandoori chicken and vegetable curry. Joyce Richardson. At the very least the tone in her voice would tell me something—she was studying to be a therapist, but she hadn’t yet learned the neutral tone.
I called her. Rehearsed and wooden, I began: “Joyce, I’d like to thank you for coming to the party …”
She broke out in laughter. Several days earlier, we had talked about how nervous I was about the party, about how I expected that no one would actually come.
“You really are something,” Joyce said, with lighthearted sympathy.
“You really are something”—the words seemed to echo.
But I knew I was nothing.
Suddenly, I saw myself through the eyes of others. In the eyes of the homeless man, I saw my own grandiosity and racism reflected back; in the eyes of the security guard and the woman at the cash register, I saw my composure unraveling; and in the eyes of the barman, I saw the image of someone who had lost himself so completely that he couldn’t remember his own name.
Joyce didn’t see me in that way, she couldn’t—I wouldn’t let her. She merely thought she was showing mercy to an insecure graduate student, not to a blackout drinker.
After I hung up the phone with Joyce, I realized that no one knew who I really was, not even me.
And so, I sat there, alone, with bottles all around me.
St. Augustine’s Confessions is often passed around in recovery circles just as it is in Catholic ones: if you’re a Catholic in recovery—it’s required reading.
While everyone naturally focuses on Augustine’s story in Confessions, I’ve always found Monica, Augustine’s mother, to be the more interesting character. She’s best known for relentlessly praying for Augustine’s conversion—that’s “praying Monica.” But there’s also another Monica, too, or at least another aspect of her: “drinking Monica,” the patron saint of alcoholics. There’s a scene in Confessions when Monica goes down to her wine cellar. Her maidservant looks at her, and says:
“Boozer.”1
In Confessions, it’s easy to see that Augustine is taken aback that a maidservant would speak to her mistress in that way; he observes that “boozer” was said not in a spirit of charity, but of condemnation.2 But God, Augustine argues, was able to turn that ill will to good, and Monica never drank again. What Augustine was talking about is what Catholics call “actual grace,” a supernatural impulse that allows us to act, to respond to God’s call.
On that morning after the party, after sitting alone for a while, I went to the kitchen to get a phone book. I dialed the Alcoholism Helpline and said:
“I’m an alcoholic, and I need help.”
It was a mercy to be able to say that—to admit what I had tried so long to hide. As my sobriety developed over the years, I would learn words to describe that experience: “moment of clarity,” “jumping-off point,” “powerlessness.” Sometimes it’s not that we’re open to mercy as a conscious choice; it’s that we are opened to mercy by circumstances beyond our own power to control or grasp. Grace is not automatic, of course, but sometimes it takes hopelessness for us to see that hope has existed all along, albeit in different ways than we were capable of imagining.
Stories of sobriety—like stories of conversion—are all different, but they’re all the same. They’re
