My Name is Berks. Yep, I'm a Drunk

I wasn’t always a drunk. 

I have always known I could very easily become one. Then I became a drunk anyway. A raging alcoholic. A no good, very bad, absolutely terrible drinker. How did this happen? It’s pretty easy to figure out. I guess it could happen to just about anyone, assuming his genes and personality are so inclined.

A premonition

How did I know? This is an easy question to answer. 

My father's one. He’s a functional alcoholic who can put down a 12-pack of Budweiser and then go to work at factory the next morning without doing so badly at it that they fire him. I feel like he would be capable of living a much fuller, much richer life if he stopped drinking. 

My mother, if not a drunk, is some species of alcoholic. Which is to say that she drinks, but she does not drink as much as my father drinks. She knows her limits. For work she cares for old people. By all accounts she’s quite good at it. I should know. I’m her kid, and she did OK taking care of me. Point being that my parents are alcoholics of the functional sort. They tell me my grandparents were, too, but worse. I don’t know a lot about my grandparents, so I can’t say, so I take my mom’s word for it.

It’s in the code, kid

My affinity for the booze is genetic, I think. Which isn’t to say that drinking too much of it isn’t my fault. It is. I did a lot of very bad things while I was drunk. 

I can’t help loving the way it makes me feel though. Perhaps this only makes me human. That's what I used to tell myself. I knew from an early age that if I wasn’t an alcoholic then, I could very easily become one in the future, that I probably would become one. I was 11 or 12 when I began to realize this. 

I’d watch my dad sit in front of the TV and drink 10 beers, and even though he didn’t beat the shit out of me or anything, he wasn’t the most engaged person to be around, either. I thought I might grow up to be like that, too. This is also likely the age I found out what an alcoholic was, and I started thinking about what the word actually meant. My parents weren’t absolutely horrible even though they drank a lot and ignored us most of the time.

How could they be alcoholics? It all seemed so normal.  

Drinking too much

And I became just that, an alcoholic, very early on as an adult. The really sad part is I knew from the beginning it was going to happen. I was 15 or 16 when I first realized I was an alcoholic. Let me tell you how. 

The way I imagine it, the vast majority of responsible adult drinkers are capable of having a drink without feeling absolutely compelled to have a second. And these same people, if they so choose, may enjoy a second drink without feeling absolutely compelled, as though their hand is forced by the will of some higher power, to have a third. And they, these wonderfully self-possessed people, may even elect to have a third drink without feeling like they must have more and more drinks until they either pass out or start howling at the moon, the way I do every single time I take a sip of anything with alcohol in it. 

I was doing this when I was 15 years old. I'd sneak beers out of my parents' fridge. I'd have older friends buy me whiskey. I drank on the weekends. It made me feel like a grown up. Not every single day, but often enough to have an idea about how much I loved to drink.

Uninhibited

The way I imagine most drinkers approach their drinking, they can have a few drinks with friends and call it quits before things turn ugly. I have no such restraint. Three drinks is a good start. Six drinks is going strong. Ten or more drinks and it’s time to pass out with masticated burrito stuck between my teeth, but only after messaging my seventh grade girlfriend on Facebook, who tells me she’s feeling kind of sad, so I respond by telling her she needs to masturbate more. 

I hadn’t spoken to her in more than 10 years. She stopped responding. I’m pretty sure she blocked me. And rightfully so. That’s not even the worst of it.

Giving up

I don’t drink anymore. 

I try really, really hard not to drink anymore. 

Sometimes I drink, but I know a little more about my limits these days. 

Even that’s no excuse. 

Although it takes a herculean amount of will power and self-control (too much for the effort to even be worth it) for me to respect my limits, for the most part I respect them by not drinking at all. But sometimes I drink. 

If I was the late comic Mitch Hedberg I might say “I used to drink. I mean, I still do. But I used to, too.” 

Just because I can, because it’s even remotely possible for me to drink and respect my limits and by extension myself, doesn’t mean that I should. It’s too difficult. It’s too risky. Every time I drink, I run the risk of something absolutely fucking terrible happening should I be unable to muster the force of will necessary to quit while I’m ahead. 

If you think telling a woman you haven’t seen for 10 years she needs to masturbate more is bad, I’m going to tell you about the worst month of my life, at the end of which I finally decided to hang it up for good (or at least try really, really hard to hang it up for good).

Spring

During the first week of the worst month of my life, I lost my wallet. I was hung over, for one, but I hadn’t had anything to drink yet on that particular day. I would have counted this as “sober,” but things being what they were I would have probably been more on it and self-aware had I had a drink or two before leaving my apartment. 

Here’s how I lost my wallet though. I went to get quarters from the laundromat to use at the coin-op washers and dryers at my apartment complex. I took my wallet out of my pocket, pulled out a $5 bill, and set my wallet on top of the machine. I exchanged the bill for $5 worth of quarters and left without my wallet. If this sounds stupid, just you wait. It gets better and better (or worse and worse).

Summer

During the second week, I crashed my scooter on one of the busiest streets in town, at night, after having three or four drinks after work. I totaled the scooter against the back of someone’s Subaru, flew a good two or three car lengths through the air. I thought I was going to die right then and there as soon as I stopped tumbling along the ground. Because surely I'd get caught up underneath someone car and splattered for a couple hundred feet across the pavement. As soon as I came to a stop and realized I wasn't going to die quite yet, I jumped up and hopped on one leg, then the other. I was in pain, but I wasn't in that much pain. 

The Subaru owner told me it was his fault. I told him I disagreed, but he told me he had rear-ended the car in front of him, so they were stopped in traffic when they really probably shouldn’t have been. He bought me an Uber home. I told him I didn’t give a damn about the scooter. I couldn't imagine asking him to buy me a new one. I felt really, really lucky to be alive. I told myself there would be no more drinking-and-scootering when I got home. 

My roommate looked a little disappointed that I was still alive.

Fall

During the third week, the cops found me passed out in a park downtown and hauled me off to detox. They told the orderlies at the detox center I was “extremely polite” to them despite being blackout drunk, so they weren’t going to charge me with anything. They wanted someone to keep an eye on me. 

I found out about all of this because 10 minutes after landing in detox, I started “acting up,” so the orderlies put me in hand cuffs and escorted me to a tiny little room that looked suspiciously like a jail cell. 

I “came to” in this room without much idea about how I got there, who put me there, or when I was going to get out. Did I break something? Did I kill someone? Did I get pulled over driving drunk? I didn’t have the first idea, so I flagged down a young man in the hallway beyond my tiny jail cell room. 

He responded something like “Oh shit! You’re awake? Let’s get you out of here!”At that point I figured it wasn’t so bad, whatever I had done, wherever I happened to be. He unlocked my door and escorted me to a table where he took my blood pressure and told me what he knew about how I ended up in isolation at the detox center. 

I asked him if it was hard working nights, and he told me yes it was hard, especially with a wife and two kids. I apologized to him for being where I was, in front of him there. He shrugged, told me it was OK, and took me to a much larger room filled with beds and other hopeless drunks. 

I tracked down a nurse, and she told me they were going to let me go at 4:43 AM. It was 12:30 AM at the time. This counts as one of the longest nights of my life. The only thing I could do was lie down on an institutional bed, allow myself to sober up, and think about how I ended up there. I chose to think about nothing, to let the time pass and look forward to sleeping in my own bed instead. I hadn't learned much of anything.  

It was still dark outside when they let me go. I had no idea where I was, only that I was somewhere downtown or near downtown. I desperately wanted a cigarette. I wandered into an empty food festival. I'd have drank the hours old, lukewarm beer out of a half-full solo cup, had I chanced on such a thing. I didn't. Security found me and escorted me out of the empty food festival. 

I asked for directions to the train station, but they weren’t much help. I felt empty inside, like someone had shaken me up, poured all of my emotions into a vat, and let me loose on the city streets early in the morning all hollowed out, tone-deaf, and tuneless. I was hungry, but I barely had money for smokes, let alone the trip to detox, let alone food. 

I needed my last couple bucks for a bus pass or a train ticket back to my apartment, where my roommate again looked a little disappointed that I hadn’t finally succumbed to my drinking problem. My roommate had a drinking problem too, but he didn’t lose his shit on a regular basis or end up in detox over it like I did. 

It would have probably been easier for him to see me in a coffin than to kick me out of our apartment. He was that type of dude. Did I stop drinking right then and there? Absolutely not. Undeterred, I kept right on drinking like Frank Kelly Rich might if he happened upon an open bar on his birthday. 

It didn’t take long for me to fuck up. Again.

Winter

The following weekend, the weekend after detox weekend and just a few weeks after losing my wallet and crashing my scooter, I got just as wasted as I always did and drove a piece of broken glass into the side of my leg. 

Why? Though I self harm, I had never cut myself. I prefer burning myself to cutting myself, and anyone who thinks self harm is strange but has tattoos can rub my back until my eyes roll around inside my head. Pain is often cathartic. When it comes right down to it, self-harm is a way for people to seize control of something, their very bodies, when they feel like they don’t have any control over anything. 

If I have to make my skin ugly in order to expose my pain, then so be it. It’s my body. I’ll do as I wish with it. It’s the only thing on earth, near as I can tell, that I own and nobody can ever take away from me. It’s covered with scars, many self-inflicted, most the result of having too much dangerous fun. So what? 

Has a woman ever put a cigarette out on your leg right as you came? Try it sometime. The scars are worth it. Or maybe that’s just me.

Which brings us back to why? Why did I cut myself? I was black out wasted, and my “official” story ,  the story I told the doctor who stitched me up in the morning , was that I drank too much last night and happened to fall on some broken glass in my room. Although I only have the foggiest idea, I have some insight into why I cut myself that evening, assuming of course that I did, in fact, cut myself. That’s what my roommate insisted I did. There could be no other way. The thing of it is, I have no recollection of the event. I can’t say what happened for sure. 

But let’s say I was so upset that I decided to cut my leg open out of spite, or for attention, or for a million other unknowable reasons. Why would I do that? This is a question I can answer.The reason, I think, was because I felt alone in my own apartment despite the fact it was full of people. That night my roommate had a party of sorts, and his girlfriend invited some of her friends over. Then they ignored me. One of her friends’ husbands sat on the couch, put his headphones on, and stared at his laptop. Nobody said “Hi!” to me or made even the slightest attempt to introduce themselves. This was my apartment, dammit, and nobody had asked me to leave beforehand, and I felt more than a little left out. I was also completely ratfucked by the booze at that point. 

Unraveling

I woke up the next morning, and my roommate and his girlfriend had to explain to me why my leg had two huge gashes in it. I simply had no fucking idea what had happened to me when I woke up. This is a spooky but not unfamiliar feeling for many drunks. 

It didn’t help that the only authentic feeling I felt about my roommate’s girlfriend was that of sheer, absolute, unequivocal hatred. By extension there was no way I was going to give any of her friends a chance. I thought well enough about my roommate, who was a friend before he was a roommate, but I didn’t think he was capable of choosing such an unattractive woman for a mate. She was loud and obnoxious, and when she revealed that she couldn’t get her own apartment due to screwing over her last landlord in addition to receiving a less-than-honorable discharge from the military, I decided I wanted nothing else to do with her. It would have been something else entirely had she been the least bit sweet, the least bit easy on the eyes, the least bit quiet and thoughtful and engaged with something other than the tip of her own nose. Then we may have become friends and had a grand old, fucked up time together. But no. It was not to be. I assume she felt the same about me.

She was the sort of person I actively avoid. I had to live with her. Because my roommate was fucking her. It was a bad deal, but like most bad deals it was temporary.

Done

And that’s when I finally decided to stop drinking more-or-less for good. 

Enough was enough already, and I’d had more than enough of it. You could call it a string of “bad luck,” which is what I would have called it had a series of unfortunate events like this happened earlier on in my toxic relationship with the beer and the booze. 

It wasn’t bad luck though. It was my own bad drinking. Terrible drinking. No good, very bad drinking. So I stopped, finally.

My boss at work was amazed that I’d managed to get sober without professional help. Two or three months after I stopped drinking, my roommate and his girlfriend succeeded in throwing me out on my ass. Our mutual hatred for one another had grown and blossomed into an unmanageable, tangled mess of feelings that none of us were equipped to deal with, and it’s not like there was a viable way for anyone to talk me out of hating my roommate’s girlfriend, and he was ready to double down on her and throw me out of his life. 

They could have asked me nicely to leave, and I’d have gone without much fuss. They didn’t, so I didn’t. If there was ever a time to be sober, that was it. I found a new apartment without much trouble, and I haven’t so much as spoken to or seen my ex-roommate or the Cthulhu Lady since. The way I handled that whole stupid affair was my first big milestone after quitting the booze. Looking back on it now, it wasn’t that long ago, I’m not proud of how I handled myself, but I am glad I wasn’t drinking at the time.

I stopped drinking for about eight months. 

Deserving it

Some months later, on my birthday, I tip-toed back into Beerville with a Modus Hoperandi served straight to my lips from a single glass bottle purchased at a local liquor store.

One drink aint so bad right?

Some nights later I abused my limits, got raving drunk, and started calling people. One of those people hasn’t spoken to me since, and the other person was my sister. Some weeks later I figured out how to drink without abusing my limits, and I thought I was going to be OK. I was finally drinking like a responsible adult! Yay for me!

No, ethyl

Then I wanted to keep kicking ass at work, start a few things of my own, and write more books. That’s when I finally realized that whenever I say yes to drinking, I’m saying “Nope” to things I could be doing other than drinking. Kind of like how my dad used to like drinking in front of the TV more than spending time with me.

Why bother writing, like I’m doing now, when I can have four beers and scroll endlessly through the bottomless pit of Facebook, or Instagram, or the Internetwebs itself? Well because writing is way, way more productive than having four beers and all of that scrolling, even if everything I write amounts to pointless navel-gazing. At least I’ll remember having written it. I’m doing something, anything, and I’m doing it sober without feeling too terribly bad about myself. That’s something, right?

Not that guy

I used to think I could write drunk, but that’s not even close to true. I can barely write sober. Writing well is like taking apart a very complicated machine and putting it back together again without dropping a single part or tool on the floor. In other words it’s difficult, though not impossible, and I’ve learned I can’t do either of those things during the day quite as well if I’ve had four beers the previous night. 

Some people can run businesses, court spouses, fuck mistresses and paramours, have kids, take night classes, write books, avoid dropping tools, and make art all while drinking their faces off. Or so I imagine. I’m not even sure if that’s true, or if I’ve ever met such a person, but I would like to believe that they are out there.

I am not one of them though. I might like to be, but I’m not. Every time I pick up a glass of booze, I feel like I’m losing a little part of myself in the process of drinking what’s inside of it. That’s part of what makes drinking so great. It makes me forget about how much the world sucks for a while. Booze is a one way ticket from anger, misery, sadness, and rage to completely checked out, gone with the wind, three sheets to it and then some after 4 or 5 beers. 

Or shots. Or whatever fraction of a bottle of wine that happens to be. The only time I drink wine is when it’s on sale for $2 a bottle, and the only thing I look at before I buy it is the alcohol content. I couldn’t tell you the difference between a Merlot and a Chianti, but I have likely gotten drunk off of both at some point in the past 7 years. I also know how to spell and pronounce those words because you hang around in bars and liquor stores, you tend to pick these things up over time. I also know Riesling, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Syrah. There are others, I know, but I don’t know how to spell them even if I do know how to pronounce them.

Love affair

I do love to drink though. I still love to drink. It’s the ultimate escape. Compared to a drug like cocaine, which is like being inside of a fluorescent light bulb, drinking myself silly is like returning to the womb or wrapping myself in a warm blanket that never gets cold, even in places without electricity, without the heft of batteries or generators or assistance from anything combustible. Booze is like a magic blanket, or rather a living, breathing warm blanket that only wants part of my soul and some of my flesh and blood in exchange for keeping me warm. The only other thing that comes close is weed. I like weed. I don’t love it the same way I love booze though. But I’m not allowed to have the booze because it’s very, very bad for me. This is what I have to tell myself. I have to treat myself like I’m 5 years old. It’s kind of ridiculous, but it’s better this way.

Chill out Sandy

Telling an alcoholic to drink in moderation is like telling a hurricane to moderate its wind speed as it makes landfall, like hinting at a torpedo its got the wrong boat and maybe it might want to kindly turn around and head the other direction, like trying to pause a war or hit the “reset” button after a natural disaster. . 

I have never been good at having just one beer. If I have one beer on Tuesday, I feel so emboldened as to have two or three or even four or more on Thursday. By the weekend I’m doing my best not to drink during the day, but 9 AM on a Saturday morning with nowhere to go is fucking boring, and who wants to drive anyway? Might as well get a 6-pack, open a book, and not remember a thing I’ve read when I come to after passing out drunk closer to noon than I'd like to admit, on more occasions than I'd like to admit. I’ve pulled this stunt more times than I am capable of remembering. Waking up in the early afternoon with a hangover is the best, a sort of milestone in the life of a drunk.

Spare luck

The best way, I’ve found, to make myself feel better after waking up with a hangover is, of course, to have another drink! And the cycle continues unabated until it is interrupted again, the interruption marked by fear and loathing and anxiety, the intensity of which constitutes a sort of white-knuckled death-grip on reality, the kind where 24-hour liquor stores start to seem like a good idea and maybe drinking and driving isn’t so bad after all.

That is, until I lost my wallet, crashed my scooter, got thrown in detox, and cut the fuck out of my leg all in the span of a month. Only then did I realize I seriously needed to cut it out.That was a year ago. I am doing my best. Wish me luck. This is not easy.