Photo by Dennis Steinauer

Darrin and I bantered about alcohol, as people often do. We joked about sneaking a flask into an inappropriate venue—not sure I can remember which one, maybe the book sale we’re both working in July. Sarcasm, not seriousness. Guy talk. Tribe talk. Then I fessed up. “I’m nine years sober.” Nine years dry, really, but I’ll explain what I mean by that later. I told Darrin some of my story, the reason why I’m dry.

“Oh man,” he said, “you should come and speak at Al-Anon*. This is good stuff to hear from the addict’s perspective.” I said I would. This is what I told them.

~ ~ ~

Part 1—Establishing my cred: I was a drunk. From the day I first stepped on my college campus until I met my wife fourteen years later, I was a drunk. Don’t let me mislead you, I was a partier in high school too, but in college, I went pro.

I have countless stories of ridiculous things I did. I used to see them as funny, edgy stories. Reckless adventures to be proud of. Now I see them as poor self-esteem, thinly guised self-harm, or maybe even a death wish. I’ll give some examples, but I picked short, simple stories. The longer ones end with me being mugged, or waking up naked on the basement floor, or permanently scaring away good friends with embarrassing behavior. We could call this my top ten, but really, it’s just ten, any ten. Given a bit of time, I could come up with dozens more.

Let’s call this “Ten stupid things I did drunk.”

1. I woke up in my car countless mornings—on city streets, major commuting thoroughfares, and leafy suburban lanes. Sometimes even on work days.
2. I got separated from my group on the fourth of July in DC and wandered around trashed for eight hours all by myself.
3. My friends and I walked out on a huge bar tab because we forgot to pay.
4. I went to a bar with the change jar from the top of my dresser because my bank account was empty and my credit card was maxed.
5. My friend Mike said something mildly insulting, so I smashed his passenger-side window with my beer bottle.
6. I gratified the dining room in my rental house with black spray paint.
7. I mummy-wrapped my head with duct-tape.
8. I insulted a big, muscular biker, called him a redneck, and then fell backwards over his parked motorcycle knocking it to the ground.
9. I passed out on a highway on-ramp while hitchhiking to my girlfriend’s college
10. I surfed down a wooden staircase on a bathroom scale.

Do you wonder why no one intervened? No one sat me down and said “Jeff, you have a problem. You need to stop drinking so much.” The day after the bathroom scale incident my brother chastised me: You know, you don’t always need to be the drunkest person in the room. But it was a half-hearted attempt, and for the most part, people laughed along at my escapades.

Thank God I found Susan. We met a couple of weeks after I returned home from a 4,600 mile bicycle trip around the United States. Given the constant exercise, my drinking calmed down a bit over that summer. I drank daily, of course, three to six beers per day—often warm beer—but with only one blackout bender across the course of the summer.

Susan was (and is) a light drinker. When we went out to parties, she would scale up to drink two or three beers, while I plowed through my usual six to nine or more. A few weeks into dating, I stepped off a curb and fell face first into a traffic lane on Connecticut Avenue in DC. Fortunately, no cars approached. Susan told me in clear terms that she wasn’t interested in dating a sloppy drunk. I decided to scale back my drinking. This was 1994, I was thirty-two years old. I had been a daily drinker with weekly blackouts for fourteen years.

Scaling back took years. I want to say I got my act together quickly. And things certainly improved, but not enough to avoid the hangovers, which continued for years and were a constant reminder that I still had a serious problem. Two memorable ones:

Four years after meeting Susan, I stood up a work-client I was supposed entertain at my company’s skybox at Redskins Park. I was too hungover to leave home. I not sure I ever recovered from that one with my boss.

Eight years after meeting Susan, I pulled to the side of the road, opened my car door and vomited into the street. We were on our way to a late afternoon cookout. I was still hungover from the night before. My new baby was in the car.

So, scaling back was a long, slow transition.

Part 2—Banging my head against a wall

Through the combination of parenting young children and willpower, I gave up drunkenness. From 2003 until 2016, I controlled my drinking. Control is the operative word. My desire and my nature were to overdrink—to slip passed buzzed into a slightly stuporous state. But I didn’t allow it. I limited myself to three drinks per night. Maybe an extra on Friday and Saturday. I delayed my drinks, usually red wine, until my kids were in bed. I wanted to savor my experience. 

As boxed wines proliferated and became better, I switched from bottles to save money. it got harder to track my intake. I felt an urge to top off whenever I passed through the kitchen. My consumption crept back up. Others noticed.

My son, maybe seven, learned in school that anything more than one is problem drinking. “Don’t get another dad, you’ve already had three.”

My wife: “How fast did you go through that box of wine anyway?”

Two glasses of red wine daily offer health benefits. Everyone knows that. At least we did fifteen years ago. Those two glasses became my target. My medicine. My guarantee that I was doing my part to boost my immune system, reduce my cholesterol and blood pressure, even though none of these metrics were really all that great. I knew I wasn’t addicted. I took my son to scout camp every summer for three days. Proof that I could go alcohol-free without detox.

Sometimes my consumption would creep up, an extra glass, but after a couple of weeks or months, I always returned to my two-glass target. I spent years trying to maximize my allowable daily allotment.

Trying to take the two-glass recommendation seriously, I filled a measuring cup with ten ounces of wine. I called it my measure. I broke it up every way imaginable—two equal portions, three tiny portions. A large glass, then a small glass, or the small glass first. It was never enough wine. As soon as I finished, I mourned. By mid-morning the next day, I craved my daily measure. I thought about it all day. After dinner, I cracked a book, poured my ten ounces, I sipped and read. And then it was gone. Back to mourning. Counting the hours until my next drink with a nonstop internal dialogue, looking for excuses to cheat.

I gave up drinking during the week. I thought if I broke the habit of nightly drinking, I’d feel better, it would be easier. It wasn’t. Instead of counting hours until my next drink, I counted days. My cheat days increased. Sunday is still the weekend. Thursday is close enough. Tuesday, a reward.

In January 2016, I quit. I couldn’t stand it anymore. The internal voices exhausted me. Alcohol was all I thought about. When’s my next drink. How much more do I have left to drink tonight. Ugh, no more tonight, cut off until tomorrow, cut off until Friday.

Part 3—My bitter pill: On my last day, a friend came over for Sunday night drinks. I opened a cheap bottle of red knowing these were my last drinks. I had two expensive and highly rated bottles in the cabinet, a pinot noir and a malbec. I didn’t want to open them because I knew I wouldn’t finish them. My wife and friend were drinking white. The wine I opened was terrible. One of the worst I can remember. My last two glasses of wine sucked.

Every sober alcoholic has a date. Except me. Two or three weeks after I quit, I was so frazzled, I couldn’t remember if it had been two weeks or three. My date is either January 10 or January 17. I’ll never know. I drank bottle after bottle of club soda over ice with a lime wedge. At least it looked like a drink. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t concentrate. All I could think, over and over, was “the rest of my life!” I went to bed early to escape the sadness.

It took five years to go away. All of it wasn’t bad, but much of it was. It hit me in waves at obvious times and at random times. The feeling of loss lingered. Those occasions I always drank now felt hollow. Top ten times I crave(d) alcohol:

1. Passing out candy on Halloween
2. The night before Thanksgiving
3. Thanksgiving day
4. Setting up the Christmas tree
5. Christmas day
6. New years eve
7. After a hike
8. After mountain biking
9. While grilling meat
10. Out at a restaurant

Being a nondrinker is a bitter pill to swallow. “Drinker’ was an identity I embraced. An example is my conversation with Darrin. The one that launched this whole event for me. Alcohol is something we bonded easily over. It’s a quick way to understand each other. Short-hand. Membership in a club.

I’m not comfortable using the word sober. Sober suggests not-drunk, and I haven’t been properly drunk in decades. I use the word Dry instead. Was I an addict? Someone drinking ten ounces of wine a night doesn’t have a physical addiction. But I clearly had and emotional one. Which is worse? I’m not sure, but my detox period lasted five years, and it was brutal. I let all my friendships evaporate. Acute depression popped up again and again. But over time it faded away.

Part 4—Cured: I don’t miss it except in an abstract, unrealistic way. Like thinking when I was a drunk, I had friends. Life was a party. My confidence soared. I was a leader. “Beer goggles,” a therapist once said. “You see those days through blurry vision.” I know she’s right.

I have no desire to drink now. In fact, I hate being around people showing the slightest signs of intoxication. When I hear their voice thicken, it puts me on edge. I remember when my voice sounded like that. Another thirty-minutes, and they’ll be slurring. I’m embarrassed by the spectacle I must have been.

People suggest that if the draw is gone, I can resume drinking. I broke my habit. My addiction is past. I’m cured. Never. Those blackout-drunk fourteen years are ugly days to remember. 

Giving up alcohol is the hardest thing I ever did. It took me seventeen years from the time I met Susan until I was free from the clutches of alcohol. In all, alcohol influenced and controlled thirty-two years of my life. I’ll never give it a chance to grab hold of me again.

*Al-Anon: a mutual support program for people whose lives have been affected by someone else’s drinking.

Note: This is written in a passive voice. Because this is meant to be spoken, I believe people will digest it more easily than my usual tight, aggressive phrasing.