You, Me, and Alcohol

I am touched by your confidence, old friend. That must have been hard to write. I might have grieved less to hear that you had lost a leg. Heroin addicts who can afford a clean supply live longer and enjoy life more than alcoholics. Yes, of course you are an alcoholic. You drank a fifth of vodka by yourself in one evening and did not go to the hospital or the morgue: You are an alcoholic. Presumptuous is correct, exactly so. I am presuming our friendship is a good one, on the basis of forty-five years’ evidence, minus a few decades in the middle.

Here I am in March 2009, enduring a free private cruise on a corporate charter. Would have told you I was the happiest man I knew, and I might have made you believe it. That cruise would have been the highlight of a desolate year if I had been alone. The 24-hour bar was a big help, but even free liquor did not make my kids’ mom any easier to take. I have been married twice, brother, but my second marriage gave me my first wife.

I’m not proud of these pictures, not even the ones of me getting well. I just want you to see that I have done my time in purgatory. I was living an incredibly poisonous personal life and my profession ground against the grain of my soul in ways that grew more obnoxious daily as the endless years coiled past. Alcohol was a place I could go to get away, but alcohol hated my guts.

Here’s dear old me, in Easter Island mode, on a joyous family hike that fall. I was drinking not sure how many liters of cheap red a week. I thought I was grinning my biggest grin for the picture.

Maybe I was.

The next photo is the one that finally got to me.

Christmas, 2009. 220 pounds or so, I think. I made myself look at this picture a long, long, time. At 52, I was already older than most of the men in my family are when they receive their diabetes diagnosis. That flush is insulin resistance, and I knew I would soon be getting the call.

Instead, I decided to fight back. I started munching broccoli and carrots between meals, and walking a few minutes after work each day. It does not sound like much because it wasn’t. Just a simple change of direction, from dying to living. Two months later, my darling and I reconnected, after being lost to each other for twenty-six years. It was certainly coincidental, but it is also true that on the way toward living, the things we find pertain to life.

I could preach the glorious path to becoming who you are minus the poison, but you already get it. We all do. The path away from misery is to do the things we know are right, the things that make us enjoy our body and our being. No one will do that until they reach a point of personal resolve and turn. Most never do.

I will say this. You have no need to scare yourself about stumbling drunk on the basement stairs when another person’s heart is beating behind your ribs. There is a family out there wondering if that heart still lives, a family that hopes the gift has given you strength, enjoyment, and fullness of days.

Six months after the previous picture:

Taken at the annual get-together at corporate headquarters. I talked to my teams every day on the phone, but we only saw each other once a year. They did not recognize me until I spoke. Back home, all my “friends” had gone from encouraging my weight loss to telling me I looked sick. They were stupid and wrong.

Ten months after the Christmas picture:

 

My skin was pretty saggy for a while, but I like this picture for the light in the eyes. That’s me sitting there, alive and well, after having been gone so long. And yes, seeing the love of my life behind the camera certainly was an improvement.

 Thirty months from the point of resolve:

  

I gained back a few pounds on the weight bench. It is not about looking better, and no, you could never hope to be so pretty: it is about doing and feeling and being your best, and truly taking each moment as what the fuck magic, which it holy shit is. I hope you live to be a perky, bright-eyed 95, but the length of life matters less than the fullness of each hour. Alcohol’s number one effect is to suck our time empty. Even to the point of stealing the memory of an entire evening, yes; but it is out to drain life dry from sip the first. All it has to do is sap my judgment enough to make me take another drink.

It is nobody else’s business why a man drinks, not even his family’s, and I presume nothing about your reasons. My alcohol problem was actually two parts toxic family life and one part profession that suited me like pretending to be a foxhound would suit a zebra. Nonetheless, when I stopped drinking I had a backlog of grieving, thinking, maturing, and general catch-up work to do. It was ten times harder than staying drunk would have been. Even so, I would gladly trade any previous decade of my life for one more day of the happiness I have found in my pain, like a vein of solid gold in granite.

So how could it take two whole days to scribble up such impertinence? Glad you asked.

We are finally updating our kitchen, and I am become

                ze maestro of ze tile saw.

The Fairy Queen disdains the use of grout, as you can see, which means I must make perfect cuts. Actually, it’s easy, if you can afford to scrap every other tile you pick up and you have all the time in the world.

Meanwhile, you have been much on my mind and heart, and I’ve been looking forward to having time to write. Best regards, old friend.

How I’m supposed to look “at our age”:

signed 8 x 10s available