my sluggish journey toward the gates of eden without the booze:
OVER THE YEARS I HAVE LEARNED...
THAT THERE ARE LIMITS TO THE MYTH of the hard-drinker. One Sunday night, a black-tie party was held in a luxurious apartment on Central Park West in the City of New York. People dropped in. The night rolled on, full of laughs and drinks and good conversation. It lasted until well after midnight. The first time I had an inkling that I might have a drinking problem came on the following morning when I arrived at Interboro Institute on West 56th to teach my writing class along about 10AM. I thought I was sober, seeing things clearly and thinking lucidly, but I was still half-drunk. I slurred my words and wobbled when I walked. Finally, a fellow professor by the name of Francine Waxman came into my classroom, stood facing me and said, I think you ought to go home. I was mortified. Francine was a part of the faculty saloon fraternity too, and happened also to be the woman I was dating at the time; she wasn't objecting to the drinking itself but the obvious fact that I couldn't hold my liquor. I put on my jacket and she stepped even closer to me and whispered, You should never come to work like this again!
And I didn't.
I did not think that was enough of a reason to stop drinking, however. As in most things, you need rules of conduct, and insofar as I was concerned, I had simply made a minor mistake. I never drank in the morning prior to going to work. I did drink most evenings, but so did most of my friends. That wasn't unusual. On weekends, there were festivities to attend. In the city at an upscale party. Out in the Hamptons at a charity event in the evening or at the East Hampton Bar and Grill on North Main Street in the afternoon. After all, saloons and bars and social events all served as a clearinghouse for news and gossip. If you were a stranger at any of these occasions, you went up to another individual with a drink in your hand in order to break-the-proverbial-ice, it was the socially acceptable thing to do. As a matter of fact, it was almost a must for upper-class camaraderie.
Late one Sunday evening I was aboard the Hampton Jitney on my way back from the Hamptons to New York City, and for some unknown reason I thought about one of my literary heroes, Ernest Hemingway, the great bronze god of American literature, the epitome of the hard-drinking macho artist; who one morning in July of 1961, put a twelve-gauge shotgun under his jaw and pulled the trigger. His writing, his life, his courage, his drinking, were all part of the heroic image. Suicide was not. Suicide, I believed at the time, was the choice of a coward. And yet, when I arrived back in the City of New York, I immediately went to a place called Extra-Extra on East 42nd Street and ordered a drink in memory of Hemingway; then gave a lecture on the following morning to my writing class on what a magnificent writer Ernest Hemingway was.
That year, as spring turned to summer and summer became fall, I found myself in the back room of a bar called Jimmy Armstrong's Saloon on the corner of West 57th Street and 10th Avenue. It was Friday evening. I was there with 5 other professors from Interboro. We all ate hamburgers and drank beer and whiskey. We talked politics. We made jokes. We argued about the comparative merits of Jets versus the Giants. We talked on, drinking more, laughing louder. Then it was time to go. Mitch Paul, a fellow professor, called for the check. Mitch stared hard at us, his smile gone, his eyes suddenly deep under the furrow of his brow.
You know what? he said. All of us are nothing more than cowardly drunks!
I laughed, thinking he was joking.
He wasn't.
The problem is, he said, none of us have the balls to quit. We all think that we're hot shit, just because we can teach kids. Fuck it! he added, standing up abruptly. He then walked out the door.
The rest of us did the same in stone-cold silence.
I took a cab to my apartment on West 44th and went to sleep.
Mitch walked to his apartment on West 61st and took a dive out of his bedroom window.
The price I was paying for drinking was very large, but for a long time, nobody presented me with the check. I still didn't realize that I was losing my way, so I made no attempt at repair. It was as simple as that. Those of us who had been there with Mitch on that godawful night cut down on drinking, stayed away from Armstrong's for a week or so, worked hard, then resumed the old Friday evening pattern of drink and conversation without Francine Waxman, who had the courage to stop drinking on the night that Mitch had taken the dive, begged me to stop drinking too; and when I politely refused, she broke-up with me. So I found solace in drinking more and telling many tales of my adventures out in East Hampton, which were, by then, beginning to erode at a rather rapid pace, due to depleting lack of funds and the high cost of booze in the City of New York; and me pretending that I was wealthier than I actually was.
Due to the aforementioned lack of funds, after 13 years in the City of New York, I moved to a town in the East Bay Region of the San Francisco Bay Area called Brentwood in 1999, went to work for a newspaper, The Brentwood Press, and the pattern resumed. At a bar, I could believe that my life was a delight, so I hunted down a place 2 blocks from where I worked by the name of Cap's Oak Street Bar and Grill. On New Year's Eve of 2002, the newspaper tossed a party. I was at the crowed bar with editors and writers and the remainder of the staff. Everybody was drinking. We all thought we were witty. We exchanged stories. We were supposed to having a good time. There were balloons. There were funny hats. There were noisemakers. I suddenly felt as if the air was slowly going out of me. I wanted to be back in New York City. If this was a play, I wanted a better script. So I went into the Men's Room, returned to the bar, and sipped my drink. The band started to play. The singer was perfectly groomed and perfectly dressed and he began to sing Frank Sinatra tunes, beginning with "Lulu's Back in Town" and "I Did It My Way." A few celebrants snapped their fingers. I stared into my glass, at the melting ice and the vodka-logged lime. And I whispered to myself, I don't think I can do this anymore.
I finished my drink and walked out of the bar.
I didn't join Alcoholics Anonymous or seek out help, I just made an attempt to ease-off a little. My goal was provisional and modest. A few days without drinking. Then a month. The month stretched into 6 and the 6 into 1 year. I now saw more clearly what liquor did to people. In the City of New York I had met unemployed writers and actors: all broken by booze. I recalled some of the final tortured stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald and felt surges of pity, for Fitzgerald, for folks like Mitch Paul, for other friends. I paused and gave thought to the asinine remarks and stupid lapses in grace which I had made while drinking; and realized that I now had more time than I'd ever had as an adult for lucid thought.
On one recent morning July of this year, I went for a long walk through a small park in my new Sacramento neighborhood and gave thought to how much booze I had downed since that New Year's Eve night back in 2002. Over the past 12 years, my count was this: 6 Irish Whiskeys at a bar in San Francisco on Saint Patrick's Day in 20013 with an old dear friend by the name of Barbara; 6 shots of Johnnie Walker Black Label at Christmas and Thanksgiving; and 12 glasses of beer to beat the summer's heat. It was not a record of perfection, but I realized that I loved my life, with all its hurts and injuries and failures, and the things I now saw clearly without the blur of booze...
...Although I am not yet completely through the gates of Eden, I am on my way and doing OK...
And I didn't.
I did not think that was enough of a reason to stop drinking, however. As in most things, you need rules of conduct, and insofar as I was concerned, I had simply made a minor mistake. I never drank in the morning prior to going to work. I did drink most evenings, but so did most of my friends. That wasn't unusual. On weekends, there were festivities to attend. In the city at an upscale party. Out in the Hamptons at a charity event in the evening or at the East Hampton Bar and Grill on North Main Street in the afternoon. After all, saloons and bars and social events all served as a clearinghouse for news and gossip. If you were a stranger at any of these occasions, you went up to another individual with a drink in your hand in order to break-the-proverbial-ice, it was the socially acceptable thing to do. As a matter of fact, it was almost a must for upper-class camaraderie.
Late one Sunday evening I was aboard the Hampton Jitney on my way back from the Hamptons to New York City, and for some unknown reason I thought about one of my literary heroes, Ernest Hemingway, the great bronze god of American literature, the epitome of the hard-drinking macho artist; who one morning in July of 1961, put a twelve-gauge shotgun under his jaw and pulled the trigger. His writing, his life, his courage, his drinking, were all part of the heroic image. Suicide was not. Suicide, I believed at the time, was the choice of a coward. And yet, when I arrived back in the City of New York, I immediately went to a place called Extra-Extra on East 42nd Street and ordered a drink in memory of Hemingway; then gave a lecture on the following morning to my writing class on what a magnificent writer Ernest Hemingway was.
That year, as spring turned to summer and summer became fall, I found myself in the back room of a bar called Jimmy Armstrong's Saloon on the corner of West 57th Street and 10th Avenue. It was Friday evening. I was there with 5 other professors from Interboro. We all ate hamburgers and drank beer and whiskey. We talked politics. We made jokes. We argued about the comparative merits of Jets versus the Giants. We talked on, drinking more, laughing louder. Then it was time to go. Mitch Paul, a fellow professor, called for the check. Mitch stared hard at us, his smile gone, his eyes suddenly deep under the furrow of his brow.
You know what? he said. All of us are nothing more than cowardly drunks!
I laughed, thinking he was joking.
He wasn't.
The problem is, he said, none of us have the balls to quit. We all think that we're hot shit, just because we can teach kids. Fuck it! he added, standing up abruptly. He then walked out the door.
The rest of us did the same in stone-cold silence.
I took a cab to my apartment on West 44th and went to sleep.
Mitch walked to his apartment on West 61st and took a dive out of his bedroom window.
The price I was paying for drinking was very large, but for a long time, nobody presented me with the check. I still didn't realize that I was losing my way, so I made no attempt at repair. It was as simple as that. Those of us who had been there with Mitch on that godawful night cut down on drinking, stayed away from Armstrong's for a week or so, worked hard, then resumed the old Friday evening pattern of drink and conversation without Francine Waxman, who had the courage to stop drinking on the night that Mitch had taken the dive, begged me to stop drinking too; and when I politely refused, she broke-up with me. So I found solace in drinking more and telling many tales of my adventures out in East Hampton, which were, by then, beginning to erode at a rather rapid pace, due to depleting lack of funds and the high cost of booze in the City of New York; and me pretending that I was wealthier than I actually was.
Due to the aforementioned lack of funds, after 13 years in the City of New York, I moved to a town in the East Bay Region of the San Francisco Bay Area called Brentwood in 1999, went to work for a newspaper, The Brentwood Press, and the pattern resumed. At a bar, I could believe that my life was a delight, so I hunted down a place 2 blocks from where I worked by the name of Cap's Oak Street Bar and Grill. On New Year's Eve of 2002, the newspaper tossed a party. I was at the crowed bar with editors and writers and the remainder of the staff. Everybody was drinking. We all thought we were witty. We exchanged stories. We were supposed to having a good time. There were balloons. There were funny hats. There were noisemakers. I suddenly felt as if the air was slowly going out of me. I wanted to be back in New York City. If this was a play, I wanted a better script. So I went into the Men's Room, returned to the bar, and sipped my drink. The band started to play. The singer was perfectly groomed and perfectly dressed and he began to sing Frank Sinatra tunes, beginning with "Lulu's Back in Town" and "I Did It My Way." A few celebrants snapped their fingers. I stared into my glass, at the melting ice and the vodka-logged lime. And I whispered to myself, I don't think I can do this anymore.
I finished my drink and walked out of the bar.
I didn't join Alcoholics Anonymous or seek out help, I just made an attempt to ease-off a little. My goal was provisional and modest. A few days without drinking. Then a month. The month stretched into 6 and the 6 into 1 year. I now saw more clearly what liquor did to people. In the City of New York I had met unemployed writers and actors: all broken by booze. I recalled some of the final tortured stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald and felt surges of pity, for Fitzgerald, for folks like Mitch Paul, for other friends. I paused and gave thought to the asinine remarks and stupid lapses in grace which I had made while drinking; and realized that I now had more time than I'd ever had as an adult for lucid thought.
On one recent morning July of this year, I went for a long walk through a small park in my new Sacramento neighborhood and gave thought to how much booze I had downed since that New Year's Eve night back in 2002. Over the past 12 years, my count was this: 6 Irish Whiskeys at a bar in San Francisco on Saint Patrick's Day in 20013 with an old dear friend by the name of Barbara; 6 shots of Johnnie Walker Black Label at Christmas and Thanksgiving; and 12 glasses of beer to beat the summer's heat. It was not a record of perfection, but I realized that I loved my life, with all its hurts and injuries and failures, and the things I now saw clearly without the blur of booze...
...Although I am not yet completely through the gates of Eden, I am on my way and doing OK...
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