On August 10th, 2023 I was given a small metal chip to celebrate a year of sobriety. It was the first full year of sobriety I’d experienced since 1977. I’d gotten high for the first when I was ten, courtesy of a lung-busting hit off a device called The Neutron Bong.
Despite that name, it was not Cheech and Chong who served up the opportunity. An older cousin and my big brother were the ones who turned the matching keys that armed the aforesaid nuclear bong.
In this situation, both “older” and “big” are relative terms. My cousin was in high school and my brother was only two-and-a-half years older than myself. While some months shy of his thirteenth birthday, my brother was already an experienced stoner, and our cousin was working on his teenage Master degree in all things pot related. Indeed, we were parked near his secret weed patch off a twisting country road when I joined their club.
I don’t recall that it was a club I was looking to join. Neither do I remember being bullied or in anyway peer pressured. I knew my cousin and brother were getting high, and I was offered the chance to join in. I wanted to by cool, I suppose. A desire that would earn me no end of trouble and self-humiliation over the next thirty-odd years before it began to taper off. Though truth be told, the appetite to be cool still afflicts me. A toxic addiction that I can admit to, but for which there seems to be no twelve-step program.
I imagined back then that getting high would make me cooler, but I can’t know what my cousin and my brother were thinking when they instructed me in the art of bong-hitting. At their ages, I don’t expect that they were thinking much at all. In a few years I’d be at a friend’s house blowing weed smoke directly into his dog’s muzzle so we could watch the poor animal get high. We thought that was hilarious. My cousin and my brother may have been of a similar mind regarding my first high.
What is most clear in my memories of getting stoned for the first time is that it worked. It was an unequivocal success. I got baked out of my skull, laughed uncontrollably, and felt wonderful. For years to come I’d hear people tell stories about the first time they tried pot. How they didn’t really get high or got too high and felt nauseous or paranoid or had some other bummer experience that effectively turned them off.
Not so me.
What a lucky boy.
I would get high no more than perhaps another twenty times in the next year or two.
It’s tough to score in 6th grade, but the the pace would pick up by 8th. I’d be fourteen before I got drunk for the first time. From there, the constancy of my drinking and use would ramp up more or less gradually and constantly until 2022. What was most firmly established from that first high onward was a pattern that would come to dictate how I lived my life. The pattern of using drugs and alcohol to feel better about myself.
Using drugs and booze to feel cooler dovetailed with using them to feel more at ease in social situations. This in turn mated with using them to feel better about my life as a whole. Eventually, I’d be using them to feel better about simply existing in the world.
Until the last ten or so years of my life, in which I used alcohol to help make me feel better about having to be alive at all.
During the forty-five years that I drank and drugged, I was what is sometimes called a “high functioning” alcoholic. This is understood to mean that I managed the basic mechanics of my life without booze and dope utterly derailing me. There were aimless years, but over time I built a career, writing several novels and TV shows, while also, more importantly, partnering in a healthy marriage and forging a strong relationship with our daughter. But my ability to maintain a career was in many ways a byproduct of my drinking.
As much as I wanted to write, what I wanted more was to get to my free hours at the end of the day when I could drink with the peace of mind that I’d gotten my work done. Drinking without that peace of mind was a special kind of torture. This is why I find it challenging to embrace the concept of “high functioning.” Despite appearances, I was malfunctioning all over the place.
When I bottomed out, it was very much with an external whimper, but internally I was blown to smithereens. None of my drinking had been done in secret. Friends and loved ones had seen me reeling drunk when I was younger, but that had been typical of our crowd. We’d all partied hard, and most all of us still drank, but we’d been mellowed by time and experience. No one knew how I structured my days, how my entire inner life, my approach to work, marriage, and parenting, revolved around getting to the evening hours when I could drink. When I could file off the edges of the world and of myself.
When I’d stop feeling at the verge of tears, stop having to fight the physical urge to crawl under furniture and hide, stop hearing the constant inner refrains of self-loathing, stop the cataloging of resentments; when I could stop my daily battle with being myself in a horrible world and be cushioned for a few hours by the blur of alcohol.
Despair is deeply entangled with alcoholism and addiction. The most common despair I hear spoken of by fellow alcoholics is the one I experienced; the despair of being hopeless. Suffering from alcoholism means living under a pall that puts hope and optimism out of reach. A shockingly toxic atmosphere breathed second by second every day of your life.
Now, with eighteen months of sobriety, I am beginning to scratch the surface of the wall that stands between me and a full understanding of why I drank and drugged for those forty-five years. Most days I manage to make another scratch mark in that wall, but it is never less than terrifying, never less than painful, even when the results are truly wonderful. The most painful day of that scratching came when I fully realized that I am renewing my life in a way that my brother was never able to. He died at thirty-two, still struggling with his multiple addictions. How I felt when I stopped drinking is very likely how he felt when he died. It is impossible for me to know if I have spared myself from that fate, but at least I know now that it is possible. My magical time travel wish is that I could go back twenty-seven years to the last day I was with my brother, and instead of getting drunk and high with him I would ask him if he would get sober with me.
One of the tools I have for understanding my alcoholism is my writing. Both the act of it and the works I’ve produced in the twenty-something years of my career. All my books, including my newest, were written while I was drinking and/or using. My characters are a catalogue of bar-tending alcoholics, teen stoner delinquents, addict vampires, doping cops, and emotionally crippled adult-children. Looking back over those works is helping me to see myself with a sometimes horrifying and sometimes hilarious degree of increased clarity. Similarly, my current writing is a form of personal revelation. I am learning, at this very moment, what it is to be a sober writer. For example, I have never before had as many sober days behind me when writing a piece of this length.
These are quite literally the most sober words I have ever written. These two words right here are my most sober words: I hope.
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