I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that I’ve ended up being an alcoholic. I’ve been addicted to lots of other things in the past: sex, when I was in my teens and twenties; gambling, when I was in my twenties and thirties. So, why not alcohol in my forties? It’s not as cheap as the sex addition, but, much cheaper than the whole gambling thing.
I haven’t mentioned this alcoholic thing before, you say?
True.
Maybe this is my A.A. meeting, then.
Hello. My name is John. I’m an alcoholic.
Now we’re up to speed.
When I say that I am an alcoholic, I am immediately filled with a need to explain that I’m not a hardcore alcoholic, more of a Cinemax, soft-porn type of alcoholic: there are enough glimpses of what’s going on to get the idea without all the messy bits being on display. It’s this burning need to qualify the statement “I am an alcoholic” that’s kept me from really admitting that there was a problem. It seemed that if I could say that I wasn’t as big a drinker as other people I’ve known, who say they aren’t alcoholics, then, that would mean that I didn’t have a problem.
Here’s an example, a story of a lady I knew, a woman I’ll call Pam:
Pam likes to brag how she eats a healthy breakfast every morning, because she gets lots of vitamins. For breakfast she drinks a very large glass of orange juice (the glasses she uses are large, iced tea tumblers). That’s it. What she doesn’t say is that most of the content of the glass is vodka, with just enough juice added to make it appear to be a glass of juice. Some mornings, when she’s feeling especially healthy, she’ll have 2 glasses. Sometimes she’ll have toast. Not often though. After breakfast is done, all pretense of drinking something other than vodka is put aside. Between the end of breakfast, and the start of dinner, the glass is filled with ice, then filled to the rim with vodka. One glass after another. Dinner is the only meal she eats, though, she usually picks at the food. At dinner, she drinks a vodka martini — this is really just the same drink, it’s just named differently. If you’re out to dinner with Pam, which is most likely, because she doesn’t buy food to keep in the house, she orders her drink this way: “I’ll have a vodka martini. No Vermouth. A tall glass of ice on the side.” The “martini”, when it arrives, is then poured over the ice. After dinner, it’s back to the tall, iced-tea glasses filled with ice and vodka. A few nights a week, for a change, Pam will “splurge” on a gin and tonic, though, the amount of tonic poured into the glass full of ice and gin is not even enough to mention. Usually, by this point in the day, she’s not too coherent. I remember spending a day with her, seeing how much she drank, and being stunned that she would be coherent until 8 or 9 p.m. By eleven, Pam would be “asleep.” Pam’s house was the hub, the meeting place for a select group of people, those who drank at least as much as she did. More often than not, when one woke up at Pam’s, one would find five or six people “asleep” around the house. At Pam’s house, if you woke up in the morning, and found that you were on the floor, or, better yet, under the dining room table, this, then, was worn as a badge of honor. Pam was successful, she owned her own business (she painted houses, inside and out), did a remarkable job, was In Demand because she was good, and completed jobs on time. By mid-afternoon, Pam would be more than halfway through a bottle of vodka, and she’d be up a ladder, painting window frames, and not get a drop of paint anywhere.
