Not Rock Bottom

Wine Glass. Photo by Callen Harty.

The first time I ever got drunk was, appropriately enough, on St. Patrick’s Day, 1978.  It was also the day I turned in the paperwork to quit college.  Prior to that time I was a teetotaler.  I knew family history and didn’t trust that I would be able to control it if I drank.  I had organized the first-ever non-alcoholic graduation party at my high school.  I was a determined non-drinker.  But on that fateful night in Eau Claire I drank about a pitcher and a quarter of beer by myself and I did not get sick and did not suffer a hangover.  Before long I was drinking regularly at parties every chance I got.  I was a fun drunk, not a mean one, but I was a drunk.

I was a long way from rock bottom, but did not know I was heading into hell.  Drug-induced hallucinations, low wages and poverty, damaged relationships, drunken binges, depression, suicidal tendencies–these defined the next ten years of my life.

One time in Platteville I woke up at about 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning, but was not in my bed.  It took a moment to figure out that I was on a small strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, underneath a street lamp shining on me like a cold sun.  It was several blocks from the university campus and several blocks from my house.  I tried to get up but was so dizzy I fell back down again two or three times before I managed to stay up and stumble home and fall into bed.

This was not rock bottom.  Passing out or blacking out, like vomiting, was a regular kind of experience.

Winter.  Madison.  I had been kicked out of my lover’s house after a drunken argument (both of us being drunk).  I wandered the streets of the city, wondering where to go.  I ended up in the basement of a downtown apartment building, sleeping behind a washing machine with my winter coat as both blanket and pillow, hoping that I would sleep and stay warm and that nobody would find me.  It was perhaps the most alone I had ever been.

And it was not rock bottom.

In Denver I had so many lost weekends and lost nights that I could not count them.  I remember staying in one of my favorite bars after hours night after night drinking still, partying until all hours of the morning.  There were long nights of beer, whiskey, cigarettes, along with political and philosophical discussions and bullshit.  There was emptiness in everything.

That also was not rock bottom.

The thing is I don’t believe I ever did hit rock bottom, but I did have an epiphany in the middle of a drink in the middle of a bar in the middle of the night and suddenly realized that I was lucky to be alive and that if I wanted to stay alive I had to quit drinking, and had to do it at that moment.  This was a couple years after I had already cut other drugs out of my life.  Alcohol was really the hard one to let go, but I am so fortunate that I was able to do it.  That was 23 years ago now.

I have had at least nine lives, and I believe I have used the latter ones well.  I truly am lucky to be sober and alive.  Some people can have a drink now and then.  I could not.  I cannot.  If I drank a beer tomorrow it would not be one, and it would not just be tomorrow.  This is something I know.  So now I have come full circle, back to where I was as a youth, knowing myself well enough to know that I cannot drink anything.  My head is clearer.  My heart is clearer.  I have learned to love myself and others, to forgive myself and others, to find peace in the middle of a violent and chaotic world.