The following is not like most of the Memorabilia in this section in that it doesn't focus on a particular phase of my life.  Rather, it is an account of a long and very important transition that, in a sense, is still occurring.  I have broken my anonymity as a recovering alcoholic here in the hope that what I write will be encouraging to those still in the throes of addiction or those embarking, perhaps fearfully, on the road to recovery.

(For convenience, I have divided this into three articles.  This one pertains to "addiction"; Part 2 describes "recovery"; Part 3 reaches "beyond recovery" into a process that can last the rest of our lives.)

By the time I was 21, I was addicted to alcohol, and I was 44 before I embarked on the path to recovery, which I have now followed for 24 years.  It has been an interesting journey, to say the least, but I have no regrets.  I do not even regret that I am an alcoholic.*  Indeed, I am grateful to be an alcoholic – a statement that may seem curious to nonalcoholics but that will be explained in due course.

Addiction

Unlike many people who become addicted to alcohol, I knew early on that I was an alcoholic.  Though counselors say in rehab that alcoholism is "a disease of denial" that tells the sufferer that he or she doesn't have the disease, my denial took a different form, as I'll explain later.  Even before I read a description of the alcoholic in a college psychology book, I knew I had the symptoms, and, when one has the symptoms, it doesn't take a great mind to conclude that one probably has the disease.

The most obvious symptom was that, when I take a drink, I can't stop. Social drinkers can have a drink or two and stop; that anyone can leave a part of a drink and not finish it is incomprehensible to alcoholics.  We're like a house with a broken thermostat; the furnace keeps generating heat long after the house is warm enough.

I didn't drink a lot in high school.  It simply wasn't available, at least not in the crowd I hung out with.  I was a serious (perhaps too serious), college-bound, honor-roll student who felt out of place at the party scene.  Besides, this was the early 1950s, and alcohol was not as accessible to teens as it is today, and other drugs had not yet penetrated the suburbs.

When I went away to college, I attended a university in a town that prohibited anything stronger than 3.2 beer (beer with a maximum content of 3.2% alcohol).  The prohibition was a farce, as I soon learned, because people in town (including students, especially fraternity men) could always make a "milk run" to get something stronger.  This was true even though undergraduates were not allowed to have cars unless they needed them for work, were married or were veterans, or were over 25.

Nevertheless, I soon took to drinking 3.2-beer at the beer joints in town, which were frequented by students who wanted to have any kind of social life – or so it seemed to me.  In retrospect, I realize that many students who did not drink at all had perfectly fine social lives, but my priorities had already begun to shift.  I simply did not hang out with people who didn't drink.

One had to drink an awful lot of 3.2 beer to get even mildly high, of course, but I was able to do that quite easily, especially since my natural inclination was to drink one right after another.  I enjoyed the taste, but – and here's another symptom of alcoholism – that isn't why I drank.  I drank for effect.  If I decreased the speed of input at all, it wasn't until after I had a reasonable "buzz" on.  Like many alcoholics, I felt inept socially, and booze loosened me up.  Indeed, my dependency was beginning, for I couldn't (or believed that I couldn't) loosen up without alcohol.  I didn't set out to get roaring drunk, although, thanks to my "broken thermostat," I sometimes did.  The only reason this did not happen more often was the low alcohol content of the beer.

That was soon to change.  Long before I graduated, I had established connections with people who could supply me with harder stuff.  I maintained a stash, and, when the hard liquor ran out, I made do with 3.2 beer until the the stash could be replenished.  It was very difficult, and I always felt vaguely guilty and self-conscious about what I was doing, but booze had become very important to me.  I became fearful of running out of it.  As early as my junior year in college, my sleeping habits had gone to hell.  I did not fall asleep; I passed out.  If my supply of booze ran low, I suffered long bouts of chronic insomnia.  I was not yet a morning drinker, but my night-time dependency on alcohol had begun.  I drank alone virtually every night, and I began to develop a pattern of secrecy about how much I drank that was to continue for years.

In graduate school (I continued at the same university), I had the luxury of access to a car, which belonged to my roommate.  By then, I was legal – I was over 21, and, as a graduate student and part-time faculty member, was entitled to have wheels and to use them for milk runs (despite local prohibitions, which faculty and townspeople ignored with impunity).  Still, the vague – and sometimes not so vague – guilt about my drinking haunted me.  My roommate was one of those incomprehensible (to me) social drinkers who could take one or two drinks and stop.  When we went to the liquor store out of town, he would buy one bottle; I would buy three or four, and I always ran out of booze before he did.

Like almost everyone in my diminishing circle of friends, my roommate knew how addicted I was, even more so than others because we shared an apartment.  At times, he could scarcely conceal the annoyance he felt that I got as good grades as he did (and occasionally even better grades) when I drank virtually every night and got blitzed on weekends.  Externally, I was doing as well as, or better than, he was, and this helped to fuel my rationalization that, despite my qualms of guilt and other misgivings, I was a "functioning alcoholic."

The Progression

Alcoholism, it is said, is a progressive disease.  No matter what one does, the addiction keeps growing.  In fact, one of the mysteries of the condition is that, even when one stops drinking for a time and starts again, one picks up not where one stopped but as if one had been drinking all along.  Within a few days or weeks, one is drinking more than ever.  I had a few "dry" spells when, having been scared out of my wits by some consequence of drinking, I forced myself to stop altogether.  But the craving never went away, and I would eventually go back to it.  When I picked up again, I was worse than ever.

That I was a "functioning alcoholic" was one of the lies I told myself to permit myself to drink.  Fully aware that I had a problem with booze, I fed myself the illusion that I could control it.  It was one of the many rationalizations that I developed to justify my addiction.  Another was that, since I was in fact an alcoholic, there was nothing I could do about it.  This was, I now know, a form of denial.  Unlike some alcoholics, I did not deny that I was an alcoholic; I couldn't deny for very long that my drinking was creating some problems.  But I denied that I could do anything about it.

My disease was always talking to me.  It may seem strange to personify the disease in that way, but this is exactly what it was like.  It was as if another person was occupying my head, talking to me and directing my actions.  Increasingly, I did not like that "other person" (he may have been fun at first, but now he was getting me into trouble), but I couldn't get rid of him.  "He" or "it" was taking more and more control and was diminishing "me."

My disease told me that I couldn't live without alcohol, that I could control it, that I "wasn't that bad," that bad luck or other people created my problems, and a host of other falsehoods that took me into a downward spiral.  It wanted me dead or insane or locked up – the three ultimate destinies of the alcoholic who does not recover from the disease.

Let's fast-forward through the next phase.  The external manifestations of alcoholism vary considerably from individual and are much less important than the psychological and emotional deterioration that all have in comon.  I got married.  My wife, who almost never drank, forced me to abstain almost entirely.  I divorced her.  I married again and taught my second wife to drink with me.**  My teaching career, which I loved, went downhill and eventually crashed, but I found other work.  As a "functioning alcoholic," I rationalized that, even though I was not doing the work that I enjoyed the most, I still had an income.  Sometimes I didn't even have that, and my wife supported us.  I got a DWI and lost my license for three years, so I walked and had my wife drive me everywhere.  I was hospitalized after alcoholic seizures, usually precipitated by my efforts to control drinking.  These episodes were followed by dry periods, but they never lasted.  The disease would persuade me that it was okay to have one or two beers, and I would be back to the races again.

Eventually, I succumbed to what I refer to as "maintenance drinking."  In other words, unless the alcohol content of my blood was at a certain minimum level, I was a basket case, shaking terribly, unable to think straight, riddled with chemical anxieties.  Thus, I drank around the clock, unable to get started in the morning without a few beers and unable to get through a day without drinking my lunch.  I had, along the way, pretty much given up hard liquor, thus feeding the illusion that I was controlling the situation.  My objective, anyway, had never been to get totally blitzed; it had been to get a satisfactory buzz on and to maintain it.  Now, however, the buzz was irrelevant; I drank to keep myself enough together to function.  I knew it was gradually killing me, but I was convinced that, if I stopped, it would be so painful that it would be worse than death.

I was, in a word, insane – not sane, not capable of truly rational thinking, believing myself to be in control despite all the evidence to the contrary.  No matter what came down on me, it was not enough to persuade me to put the plug in the jug and leave it there.  I still had to be hit on the head by a two-by-four.  That blow came, at age 44, in August of 1981, in the form of an alcoholic seizure that nearly killed me.

[The path to recovery is described in Part 2 of this article.]

*Recovering alcoholics always say that they are alcoholics, not that they were, no matter how long they have been in recovery and without a drink.  We believe that the "ism" of alcoholism is always with us and that complacency about our recovery is dangerous.  We are always "recovering," never "recovered."

**We are still married.  She became my "drinking buddy," and we enabled each other.  She was headed in the same direction as I was, but I had a head start and was much worse.  Although she was dependent on alcohol, she never developed the degree of dependence that I did.  When I quit, she did too, and to this day she describes herself as "an alcoholic who never bottomed out."