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)