Prescription: Recovery

Right before my last relapse, after having just gotten out of the hospital for an operation for stomach hernias, I played Doctor with my prescribed pain medications. I took more than the prescribed dosage because I wanted quick relief. I was in pain. Then I didn’t wait long enough for the next prescribed dosage time. Before you know it, I was immobile on the sidewalk, crazed and an ambulance was summoned by a passing stranger (apparently)) and back to the hospital I went, having been just released a few short hours earlier.

If it takes eight pills to kill you, I would feel safe taking six, and then two hours later I might start wondering if it would be safe to take another one or two. Never was it a case of wanting to commit suicide. I just wanted to get as high as safely possible.

After the first drink, there is no other.

(Sotto): Vatchi? He still sounds a little like he wants to be somewhere where he’s not. Not a lion seeking his prey, or a vegetarian stalking wild asparagus. Ha! That’s a good one! I think he’s still looking to get high. Or at least romanticizing his phantoms.

I know I can never drink again. Countless times, after varying amounts and degrees of sobriety, I have tried. The alcoholic insanity always comes back and always takes over, whether after one drink or twenty.

Smoking marijuana, perhaps, when it finally becomes legal? I really don't know. I just fear that other drugs might retrigger my alcoholism. I don't think I can do any drug 'socially' now.

"Just for Today," as I've heard in Narcotics Anonymous, "just for today, I will not pick up."

Being so level-headed no longer gives me a sense of self-contempt as it once did, early on in my sobriety. Staying sober makes living sober and being sober, not only tolerable, but desirable.

It had taken me nearly sixty years to say "I'm okay," and mean it and know what that means. That might never have happened were I not an alcoholic. Who knows? All I know is... I'm okay, "Just for Today."

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 41)

Denial

There was a time when I was not there, but I did not know it yet. I would drink to forget, forgetting what I did not know. Not yet. I did not know yet. Where was I then, when I was not there?

For years I lived somewhere between myself and the next drink. I would drink to forget what I could not think, halfway to nowhere and another drink. I was grieving and I did not know it. Someone was dying, but I could not feel it, feel my own dying. I could not own it because it owned me.

Denial is so hard to feel, yet, there it is, standing next to you. You: Halfway to nowhere and another drink.

(Sotto): He seems in equal part to have been in denial about how much he hurt people when he was drinking as he is in denial about how much he needs people to help him to remain sober in his recovery

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 40)



Analogies for Addiction

Alcohol is my poison, my prison. A brick wall, a trap door, a cancer, a bad joke, an empty bottle, an excuse, a leaky faucet, a loan shark, a broken promise, a cracked mirror, an earthquake, an avalanche, a train wreck, a recurring nightmare.

Alcohol is my insanity.

(Sotto): Oh, my goodness. I should have seen this shit coming. Ramble, ramble, ramble. Ramble, ramble, ramble. But I’ve got to admit it. Some of what he says is at least half-true.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 39)

The Friars Club (for example):

Having survived this long, I think of myself as a man becoming old, whereas to those around me, I am already old. Quite rightly, perhaps, I feel like Spencer Tracy in The Old Man and the Sea, or, more properly, the old fisherman portrayed by Tracy in the Hemingway novel. Except, instead of the struggle with the fish, my struggle has been with my addiction: A world where so much has been forgotten, because so much was not remembered in the first place.

Here’s a perfect example: My older friends (at the time), Lenny and Don, took me on a trip to New York City to have dinner at the famous Friars Club and to meet Jackie Mason, his career undergoing a huge resurgence. The thousand and one memories I should have had about this trip, the amusing anecdotes and charming witticisms that would have entertained whomever would listen, are now in the dustbin of history, like so many whale carcasses upon a beach whose name I no longer remember.

Alcohol.

Whale carcasses. Bones picked clean. Toy soldiers. Dead soldiers. Same thing.

I have surrendered and whatever there is now left, I will savor.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 38)

The Illusion of "the same, old high":

(Surimi): More alcohol was needed to give the illusion of the same high. But it was not the same high. Could not be the same high. Addiction takes what is lost out of the equation to give the appearance, the trompe d'oeuil of sameness.

But it is never the same high that is achieved because the highway of more becomes littered with loss.

The equation does not factor in loss because the equation is owned by the addiction and not by the dispossessed.

Comfort should be for the dying, yet, there is, in the end, no comfort in this.

Oblivion is not comfort.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 37)



The Aftermath

(Surimi): Jim is incomplete now because his life was incomplete then. His blackouts were the rude punctuation marks of a diseased brain. 

And not just alcohol. The chemicals, known and unknown, in Angel Dust, marijuana, and a host of others.

The best prisoner is he who does not know that he is imprisoned. The door is closed but is not locked because no key is ever sought.

"Drink me and everything will be alright," whispers the auditory hallucination. 

Blind loneliness as the final result.

Stop. 

He stopped.

Now what? What next? Where?

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 36)

How Chapter 35 ends....

Brought to my knees once again, A defeat in my present. A leftover from my chemically defeated past. I cannot let my past succeed in defeating me again.

My leftover, hung-over, sideshow, freak show is the language of self-destruction and alcoholic destruction, pure insanity, purely insane, insane, pure.

Help.

Help me. Someone help me. Someone help me help someone. Help someone. Someone help.

I have proven to myself again and again that 'addicted to chaos' is another form of denial. Sobriety was such a rude, uncomfortable and painful awakening. My addiction wants me to continue down the familiar path of more: a rock, a hard place, trapped.

“When things go wrong, don't go with them.” - Anonymous

 

Can and should the healing ever be complete?

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 35)



How Chapter 34 begins...

“Seeing Eyeball to Egg Yolk"

 

   "You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”

 Ayn Rand

   I did Step One of my 12 step recovery program and moved on. Denial left me and came back again disguised as an old friend who could set me free. 

Can you remember being seven years old and being told that your Aunt Alice was dying of consumption and you didn’t know what dying was and you didn’t know what consumption was?

And do you remember being ten years old and finding out that Karen, the seven year old Gallo girl next door had died suddenly and you still didn’t know what dying was?

Or when you were thirty and Carl was forty and had a heart attack climbing a ladder and literally dropped dead? 

(Sotto): I can't listen to him anymore, Vatchi. I wish he would just stop. 

Ten years old: Walking around aisle after aisle of clocks and watches, antique timepieces everywhere. Shiny metal and glass cases. Grandfather clocks, Mantelpiece clocks. Ticking everywhere. Pendulums. Gears, interlocked and clicking....

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 34)

In Memoriam

Jean-Paul. Jean-Paul. You could not call him Jean. You could not call him Paul. “My name is Jean-Paul,” he would say. “Call me by my name.” And only Jean-Paul could say that and not come off as a snob.

He was my best drinking buddy. Whatever lies I may be telling myself elsewhere in this extended monologue, here, I want most clearly to tell the simple, yet baffling truth.

I already said he was my best drinking buddy. When he came from Rome in the springtime or from Australia in late summer to spend time with relatives in Atlantic City , he would know which bars to find me in. He never called. He never wrote. He just showed up and the party would begin.

Only Jean-Paul could keep up with me on my all night sprees or my three-day binges. No need for speed. The alcohol was fuel enough for him and for me.

Only Jean-Paul lived to drink as I drank. And only I was shielded from his knowledge of his dying, that he could not live for even one more year.

It was only after his funeral a few short months later that I found out the truth of his dying of AIDS and that he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, partying his ass off with me, without me knowing. “Because that would have changed everything, had you known,” as his Nephew explained to me. He had wanted to protect his knowledge of his dying from me so that in his final days everything would be as they had always been with us: A giant party that could not, would not, did not stop.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 33)

 



Tomorrow

Tomorrow is a storm coming over South Mountain.


The lightning’s light will quickly reach us.


The thunder’s rumble: an old man shuffling our way.


I thirst for rain, the hope for change.


I hold hope and turn it in my hand like a hand holding and turning an apple.


Tomorrow is the apple seed of now.


from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 32)


Chapter 31's end

...Toy soldiers. Dead soldiers. Victims and unintended victims. One nightmare reminding me of another. One death not different from the next. An empty glass, a full glass, the same thing. I am only alcohol and alcohol is king.

 

    I should hope that somehow this sorrow for myself will end. But it has not. It exists within my current self, my sober self. It is a sorrow and a pity for my younger, drunken self, that self near dead, containing a dormant predator. This predator waits for me to let down my guard. Self-pity is one of many baits my predator disease lays out, a mouse trap in my recovery maze.

 

“There are two ways to slide easily through life- to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.”

Alfred Korzybski

  

What did you forget to buy on your shopping list of memories? 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 31) 

 

All That Glitters

   In the past all my coping skills were wrapped up in alcohol, like chocolates wrapped in tinfoil. The only tool in my toolbox was alcohol. My old toolbox is 100% poison. I am 100% alcoholic. I can never drink again. And the anxiety of 'never' makes me want to pick up. The anxiety of 'always stay sober' makes me want to pick up. "Always" and "Never" are too absolute. The only absolute I ever knew was Absolut Vodka.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 30)


Reuptake alcohol

　　 I'm not a Doctor. I can't talk "reuptake inhibitor". But "reuptake alcohol"? That I know. The boundaries of my early sobriety kept changing, like the undulating circumference of an amoeba under the microscope.

　　 "Reuptake alcohol". Inhibit nothing.

　　 Class dismissed. Life destroyed.

　　 Cause of relapse? The first 50,000 drinks.

　　 The illusion of cause. Delusional effect.

(Surimi): The illusion of cause. The delusional self, haunted by possibilities, seeking escape. Addiction to alcohol has changed every boundary in Jim's life.

　　 Rapid mood swings and a slow recovery for Jim. He just spoke of five years sober and it's nearly eight.

　　 Fifteen years since he first got sober.

　　 Invulnerable. Invincible. These lies have been exposed.

　　 Now Jim is mending fences, building bridges.

　　 He is blind. Alcohol has blinded him.

　　 Illusion is cause.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 29)

NEWSFLASH:

        Cocaine sped me to my bottom. The more cocaine I took, the more alcohol I could drink. The two substances fed off each other, a feeding frenzy. Already plummeting well enough on my own, cocaine and other dry goods sped the process.

　　 "Up, Down, Sideways, Here I Go Again" coulda, shoulda, woulda been a song to sing as I was doing my thing and my thing was doing it's thing to me. Easy, Peasy, Louisey!

　　 For me, Alcohol, in combinations with any and many other drugs, was the Quicker Fucker-Upper (Sorry, Bounty Paper Towels).

　　 Cocaine sped me to my bottom.

　　 Hallelujah!

　　 "Do Not Take With Alcohol." Hallelujah!

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 28)

Letting go.

　　 Sometimes I really, really have to just let it go. But bad habits make letting go of no longer needed emotions difficult.
　　　 Letting go.　　　 As a child, I saw a chicken get its head chopped off and its body slip out of my Uncle's hand. That chicken ran headless, down a deep slope and into the swimming pool. Blood everywhere.　　　 My Uncle's hand let go. Letting go is hard to do.　
　　 A pool of liquor awaits me.

{Note: Vatchi speaks here [content edited], then Jim continues}:

   A pool of liquor. Bigger than a vat of bathtub gin. This is Prohibition of the most difficult kind. Liquor, not illegal, just deadly. I must prohibit the onslaught of my disease. I must not lose my head or I will lose my body. The bloody, headless chicken running straight down and senselessly twitching straight down into the swimming pool. There is no shallow end. Just a deep end dead end.

    I must learn to let go and to not let go, a balancing act of the sober kind. The voices of my disease call out for me to drink. Alcoholics Anonymous has become my lifeguard. Control and letting go in balance.

    Christ, I really do need help.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 27)

Run when you cannot scream....

Trapped in my drunkenness, waiting for a train. Going from point A to point B was measured in drinks. New York to Philadelphia- five drinks. Philadelphia to Atlantic City- three drinks.

Life measured in Alcohol- the “X” Factor. Factor the “X” into everything. How many drunken call outs equal one getting fired? How many drunken lies, promises and broken promises, excuses and inexcusable actions until a relationship unravels?

This is life measured in a retrospective I could not measure then. Alcohol measured me in a row, one drink following the others, ducks in a row.

People rush to catch a train in getting somewhere else. Once they arrive at their destination, they most often do not move as quickly. They have arrived.

Drunk in the train station this one time was like being awake in a drunk dream: Trent ran because he could not scream.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 26)

CHAPTER 25

"Obviously Obliterated"

“Sometimes the truth of a thing is not so much in the think of it, as in the feel of it.”

Stanley Kubrick

    The door to the prison of addiction opened and I was afraid to leave. Fear of leaving was fear of living, because I had not lived beyond that door for decades.

    My living in Atlantic City began as a vacation. I came to get away from a failed relationship back home. I’d never really been away by myself before and twenty-four hour open bars helped me drown my past in liquor. The collateral damage from drowning my past was destroying my present. “Prone to occasional blackouts” would come to be a gross understatement, as I eventually would blackout nearly every night, never knowing if I got home by Jitney, bus or cab.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 25)

The Beer Experiment

    My mind was so alcohol addled by the end of my one year tenure at Resorts, that I don’t clearly remember the controlled crisis that the Human Resources Department was apparently trying to create by getting me to speak to a psychiatrist in Brigantine about my drinking. In retrospect, I suppose they were trying to save me from my disease by forcing me to confront it.

    They probably imagined that I would fall on my knees in gratitude as they whisked me off to a Rehab somewhere.

    The best I could do was promise her, the dear Psychiatrist, that I would try to control my drinking by limiting myself to six drinks a day, that being only beer.

    The “Beer Experiment” did not last even one day. Beer was far too weak for me. I couldn’t drink it fast enough. So, after the sixth beer, I decided that that was like nothing, but certainly I could limit myself to six scotch on the rocks. The beer simply wouldn’t count. And, as the story goes, after the sixth scotch, I said “To hell with this beer experiment....”

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 24)



The Punishment for Addiction

(Vatchi): I'll tell you what he's trying to hide, Sotto. He's trying to hide from himself that alcohol, that desire for alcohol, his addiction to alcohol, replaced all other desires, finally, and nearly, the desire to live. 
   More of addiction is less of everything else. 
   The denial continues. 
   The denial changes hands. 
   Sobriety continues. Life goes on. Time takes time. 
   He's going through this so that he can get that.

The punishment for addiction is time served.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 23)

“The Intelligence of Trees”

 

It took me half a century to learn of

The intelligence of trees,

Why and how their leaves know how

To lift their underbellies to the rain.

How many centuries did it take

For the trees to learn this?

How grateful should I be

For the power of observation?

When will I inherit

The intelligence of trees?

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 22)

What Addiction Steals

Right after my note to myself, “Alcohol replaced self-discovery” in the last chapter, I ran across my next blasé-blasé note to myself: “Addiction steals power” of no more apparent critical importance at the time than “pick up laundry after work” or “buy postage stamps”.

 

Sometimes I must not listen to my own inner voice. “Addiction steals power”. I find my childhood memory standing outside the house I spent my childhood in, watching that aluminum disc circling around inside that glass protective globe, clicking off the electric use for the meter reader’s next visit. It was like a watch, but instead of measuring time, it was measuring power. Well, whatever power is, that’s what addiction steals.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 21)

 

 

Needing Nothing

This is very interesting. The very process of writing this piece has increased my self-discovery. In my notes, typed in without asterisks, italics or exclamation points, I found this simple entry, a note to myself: “Alcohol replaced self-discovery.” Like that was an insignificant afterthought, interesting, but of no real importance.

And yet there it was, brushed over, cast aside, almost ignored.

Let me just add here, and Chapter 20 is as good a place as any: from about the age of 16 to 20, I sincerely believed that the answer to the problems of ego and self existed outside myself and that the controlled use of substances like LSD, marijuana and (minimally) alcohol, would lead to the discovery I would need to untangle, unlock and open the doors to self-understanding.

I still, as a matter of fact, have lingering doubts of this improbable possibility. Some inner voice, even today, tells me, “Well, if you weren’t an alcoholic these keys could unlock those doors."

Controlled use of substances. There was the illusion. A thirty year illusion may not keep an audience on the edge of their seats, but it kept me on the edge of reality- the illusion of control.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 20)

Sometimes, even lies are truth.

(Vatchi): There are probably hundreds of people in mental hospitals who think they're Jesus or Napoleon Bonaparte. Why anyone, including Ted, would believe that they were Jim, Sotto, is beyond my comprehension, but insanity has a way of doing that. I can't say that I blame you for doubting some of what Jim says, Sotto. He was a blackout drinker. Sometimes I think you have to give people the benefit of the doubt. But I believe that belief can never be complete, that there will always be some shred of doubt. Mother Teresa, speaking in religious terms, struggled with doubt of her faith in God for years.

    Suicide Bombers- there's beyond the shadow of a doubt for you, Sotto.

    Sometimes, even lies are truth.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 19)

The Way The Addiction Balls Bounced

    My younger sister's addictions came on harder, faster, and stronger than mine. A certain frailty, susceptibility, took over Betty sooner than it took over me. Our common genetic predisposition could have led to my death instead of her suicide, but that's not the way the addiction balls bounced.

    We had become too distant, detached. Our addictions kept up apart. I dissolved into mine. She dissolved into hers.

    There was no "We" as "She" and "I" dissolved into addiction.

    It was distance that kept up apart. Not the distance between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The distance of disease, if you please.

    The distance of disease if you don't please.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 18)

A Good Question

   How many keys did I have to lose before I learned that alcohol could not open doors?

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 17)

Addictive Personality?

What Way Your First Clue?

Vatchi responds to Sotto:

(Vatchi): You're not hearing what I'm hearing, Sotto. I'm hearing the voice, no, the heart of a murderer expressed through Jim's voice, his response to fear expressed as an emotional vacuum. Jim was left to feel alone in himself. Hollow point bullets? That strange survivor's guilt, that knowledge, barely felt, that he could have held that knife or gun. Hollow. Part of him is empathetic victim. And then he turns his back on empathy and he turns his back upon himself. Man's inhumanity to man looked squarely in the eyes and immediately ignored. The hollowness that survival bestowed upon him. What about that state of mind, Sotto? Denial of his alcoholism is not even part of that. What of the glint in those murderish eyes? The glint of the knife? The denial that is both empathy and emptiness? He stared at the knife and the knife stared back at him. He shut himself off as a way to survive.

    Sotto, Jim is really fucked up. Confusion as a survival strategy. But I think he has the will to get better, to work through, to survive. Confusion as survival.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 16)

The Conclusion of Chapter 15

   I woke up sober one day only to discover that the world changed and grown but that I had not. My disease had progressed but I had not. A snail's pace twenty-seven year rollercoaster crawl down to the sea and below. I could not have guessed that my three-martini lunches would turn into  a faceless chemical betrayal.

    Live and don't learn. Live and don't learn. Then, live and learn. Too much, too little, not enough. Try as I would, there could be no perfect level of drunk. I was a perfect idiot. My perfect level is none.

“A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it is committing another mistake.”- Confucius

Which mask would I drop first when, at last, I had reached my turning point?

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 15)

Other reasons, people, places, things?

   No one could believe that I had stopped drinking when I did finally stop. Of course, I couldn’t have known this, because for the first few months I had severed all connections with the “Bar Scene”. In retrospect, they must have guessed that something catastrophic had happened to me.

    This was borne out much later, when after a sustained period of sobriety I entered a bar just off the Boardwalk on South Carolina Avenue called Reflections, one block from Resorts International, Atlantic City’s first casino.

    An old drinking buddy and pool player, Donald, came up to me there and asked me how my “prescription regimen” was going. I must have had a fairly perplexed look on my face, because, to tell the truth, I had not an idea in the world what he was talking about.

    It turned out that since I had suddenly stopped showing up at our various hangouts, the rumor mill wrongly deduced that since I had been such a hard partier (and ever other euphemism for drinking that exists), and had quit drinking, that I must have AIDS.

    I guess when you are confronted by a bar crowd fully in denial of their own alcoholism, it shouldn’t be surprising that they would have to create some outside reason for anyone quitting drinking. After all, who in their right mind would quit drinking for drinking’s sake? Wouldn’t that be insane? "Cunning, baffling and powerful" is how the rooms of recovery describe the insanity of alcoholism. How odd that the reason for picking up the next drink is rarely, simply, "I am an alcoholic." There are always other reasons, people, places, things.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 14)

nightvision

    How often must I visit the past before it becomes a repetitive obsession, a nightmare in its own right?

 

    Clearly, I do not know. And equally clearly, I am sure, that at some point I must just let go.

 

    There are lessons to be learned and behaviors to be unlearned. I paddle my canoe into my past, explore that land of half-memories and half-dreams, collecting and recollecting. Surely, quietly, I take this oar and push off that shore and paddle, presently, into the unknown future.

 

    I am so glad that I did not even think to drink today.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 13)

Undo my death with one click now.

Click back two relapses. Exhume Jane's corpse. Breathe life back into her. Put Bob's knife at my throat. Leave Jane in Atlantic City with her new boyfriend. Leave Bob, the father of two of her three children at home. Click me there. Go ahead. Put Bob's hand on Bob's knife. Put my throat on Bob's knife. Put my neck on Bob's lips. Click me to that moment which I knew must be the kiss of death. Click Paula, Bob and Jane's oldest daughter in the next room. Click open a pill bottle. Don't let me know that Paula is stuffing pills down her throat to kill herself. Click me not hearing Bob screaming at me. Click an ambulance on the way to answer Paula's cell phone call for help. Click the police arriving at the same time as the ambulance. Click the neighbors on their front porch. Click just, just, just, just drunk enough to not forget. Click me drunk enough to barely remember. Click soldiers. Click Vietnam. Click Post Traumatic Stress. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click all you want you fucking bastards. Click me sober. Click me drunk. Undo my death with one click now. Undo my fucking life.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 12)