Quiet Please I'm Trying to Drink

JAMES KAINE

© 2017 James Kaine. All Rights Reserved

For Anonymous Alcoholics

ONE ... TELLING TALES

I MET A GUY NAMED SAM years ago at an AA meeting, and we became friends as those who have shared similar experiences and predicaments often do. At 27 Sam was forced into an intervention by close friends and family. Several garbage bags of 24 oz. Miller tall boys, empty bottles of wine, and vodka were unceremoniously dumped on the patio table; the fruits of a week of heavy drinking. The intervention succeeded in getting Sam into outpatient rehab, but not to stop him drinking. Ten years, one failed marriage, one failed career, one stint in jail for an alcohol-related auto accident (what we call an alkcident), and an Olympic swimming pools’ worth of alcohol later, Sam went sky diving and for one horrible time slice, his parachute failed to open. Five seconds of sheer horror followed before he decelerated as the chute opened, leaving Sam to gasp and sob the rest of the way down. He experienced that free fall as an allegory of his life. But it was another 6 months before a bout of influenza rendered him incapacitated and unable drink for 9 days. Remembering the parachute jump and its powerful imagery Sam decided to try and make it to 14 days without a drink. His friends had been slowly disengaging, his outrageous behavior becoming intolerable. Even his family were tired of him pissing his life away. Sam was a rock-bottom bum, divorced, jobless and verging on homeless. When he hit day 14, he began confessing to his innermost circle of loved ones, had a breakdown in his mother’s kitchen and told it all. Sam is blessed with an extraordinary group of people who surrounded and protected him with their love and compassion. He had put these people through the sausage machine. Coming out was his equivalent of a born-again experience. I joined my first AA group the year before I met Sam, and wherever I’ve lived in the years since, I’ve found one. I have attended meetings in 21 different locations over the last 10 years, but Sam has me beat; he has been to meetings in 39 different states, and three different countries.

In writing this down I have tried to recreate events, locales and conversations from my memories of them. I some cases I have used contemporaneous diary entries and audio recordings. In order to maintain their anonymity in some instances I have changed the names of individuals and places. I may have changed some identifying characteristics and details such as physical properties, occupations and places of residence.

This story is not meant as glorification nor celebration of the use and abuse of alcohol, or other mind-altering drugs. Nor is it an excuse for my behavior over the nearly 30 years described herein. It’s warning to anyone with a chemical addiction or is in danger of developing one; eventually your habit with catch up with you and slowly consume your life. Addiction has a voracious appetite and will eat you and those about whom you care, and care for you. Quitting of your own volition is nigh on impossible, and you should seek help out before you poison your life beyond repair.

I knew another guy from years ago who told me a story. When this dude was a freshman in college, he had wandered the hallways of his dorm one Saturday night listening for parties. Some doors were open, so he went in and had a drink before wandering off. Sometimes he knocked at a closed door, and sometimes he was invited in. After 5 or 6 such adventures (i.e. 5 or 6 drinks), he was so drunk he turned to his room and slept it off. The end. This was his drunk story and told to impress. Everyone has one good drunk story, some better than others, and told to any normal person this one might seem dangerous and edgy. Five or six beers for me and Sam would not constitute even a ‘primer,’ the alcohol needed to return to ‘normalcy.’ The primer removes your anxiety and prepares the way for an alcohol assault, and once started it can’t be stopped. What this guy did one time in his dormitory and considered reckless, would represent just an opening salvo every day for Sam and me.

You should probably put down your drink now and dive in while you can still swim; the water is cold and fizzy with an ABV of 5% or more, and you’ll feel just fine for a while. But you might want to keep that drink within reach ... there isn’t a happy ending.

TWO ... I’VE GOT CRABS

HELLO ... MY NAME IS Jim, and I’m an alcoholic.

I was in The Seabear Oyster Bar on a Saturday evening, eating crabs with my family, about a week before the shit hit the fan. I always get the same thing at the Seabear – crabs – and always have the same kind done the same way. I’m the same at almost every restaurant I go to, always getting my favorite foods done my favorite way. Like many of us, I like a drink with dinner, and along with my food that night I had a damned good margarita served in a heavy square glass with one big fuck-off chunk of ice. Lots of salt around the brim, and no mini umbrella taking up valuable space. It was made with Cuervo La Reserva but you don’t need good, expensive tequila to make a good margarita – that’s a myth. Most bartenders have no idea how to make a really good one anyway and use that syrup-infested shit that’s sold in the store. You know the stuff, some red, some blue, some green. Not me hombre; when it comes to Margaritas, I’m a tea-party conservative.

I ordered it when we got there, along with drinks for everyone else, and it slid down my throat exceedingly well on top of the 10 or so beers I’d drunk that day; six before lunch, with a leisurely top-up rate of 1 per hour. I only had the one that night to make sure I came over like a socially conscious and perfectly responsible healthy drinker, but I was no longer fooling myself, or anyone else by then – something was wrong and everyone knew. As usual I drove home, mom, dad, Rachel and Snow in the car. If you have a drinking problem, the last thing you’d ever do was be the 1-drink only designated driver, right? As usual, I drove well, like a champ. I always thought I drove best when drunk, but not yet shitfaced. I’d only almost crashed once, and that was a few years earlier in bad weather.

I had spent less than 50 days of the previous 23 years sober; as a percentage, that comes out to about 0.60%. At the height of my powers I could get through a 12 pack of 8% ABV malt liquor (Mike’s Even Harder Lemonade®), and anywhere between a quarter to half bottle of Bacardi per day, plus extra beers and sometimes wine. Near the end, I lived by the 6 by 12 rule; six cans of 12 oz. Mike’s by noon. Usually by then I could get through the rest of the day drinking, oh maybe a couple per hour, plus Bacardi® mixed with Sprite Zero® or Coke Zero®. By the way, ABV is alcohol by volume, something every aspiring alcoholic should know. The booze with the bigger ABV numbers tends to do the job better. Eight percent ABV means that for every 100g of liquid you consume, 8g of it is ethanol. It’s harder to convert it to mL or fluid ounces because you need the density of the solution (and for super-accuracy, the temperature). Trust me, I’ve done the calculations.

Alcoholism is a disease, a mental and physical illness, where self-diagnosis is almost impossible. According to others it’s a drunk getting sloppy as a result of weakness. Alcoholics have to go to meetings, make confessions, concessions, and promises. Drunks don’t have to do any of that. Drunks haven’t faced up to what they are, haven’t admitted they have a problem, and in many cases, have managed to hide it from the outside world (and even from themselves) more or less successfully. So, by that definition, during most of the 23-year period chronicled in these pages, I was just a drunk. I only became an alcoholic at the end. And if you believe that you should go buy National Enquirer, they may have found another B-52 bomber on the moon, with Elvis in the pilot seat assisted by bombardier Jim Morrison.

Saying no to the third drink and then cutting myself off never worked; if I started drinking, I would have to finish the job. Even though my highly-trained mathematical mind knew I was slowly committing suicide, I was never able to stop. Every time I tried, I eventually belly-flopped or face-planted off the wagon, and into the gentle, soothing warmth of alcohol. Until it almost killed me.

Because being constantly drunk is really fun.

THREE ... GENESIS

SCHOOL

In many cultures, drinking prowess is a desirable social status symbol. Like most kids growing up I was allowed a glass of sherry at Christmas, maybe a lager shandy, or even Babycham from time to time. Adults drank, kids didn’t. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my mom drunk, and my dad maybe twice, three times. But a couple of my uncles, a cousin, and one aunt were shitfaced at more than one family gathering. My dad hardly drank at all, in part because he was obese from his early thirties on, and as you will see, beer packs oodles of calories. His dad was a boozer, and I’ve long known that he beat my dad up when he was a kid, and long suspected he was drunk when he did. Maybe that’s why my dad didn’t drink? He never hit us. Unlike many of my friends, I didn’t have parents who went out drinking, or drank at home. There was seldom beer in our fridge, nor wine and liquor in a cabinet despite dad working for a brewing company for 20+ years. I just didn’t grow up around booze.

I first started hanging out with kids who drank at about age 14. It was no conscious action, just an unfortunate coincidence. One such friend was Ian, who played tuba in the band, while I played alto saxophone. His parents were divorced, and Ian’s dad supplied me with my first beer outside the family. I hated the taste of the stuff and categorized it alongside cigarettes, wondering why anyone would ingest it for fun. Ian’s mom worked night shifts at a police station, so wasn’t around much, leaving us mostly alone. There was almost nowhere we could buy beer at that age (sold by a shop called an off-license). Pubs were different though, they were on-license, where alcohol bought was consumed on the premises. This was a time when, unless you had a passport, no one had an ID with a picture on it (Including drivers’ licenses). The drinking age was and still is 18, and even at 14 ½ we could walk into a bar and, with enough swagger order a couple of pints. The doorman would either let you in or not, and the barman or barmaid would either serve you or not. The police never raided pubs apart from on New Year’s Eve. By the time we were 15 we knew which pubs you could get into, and where you would be served. The object was not to get drunk, rather gain notoriety by the act of getting into pubs (and if possible being served in off-licenses). We found alcoholic apple cider much more palatable than lager or bitter, but ordering it marked you. If you ordered a couple of pints of cider it would be a dead giveaway; only queers or underage boys drank cider, real men drank pints of bitter, and if not, pints of lager. The problem with bitter is that it’s shit, but you have to order it to play the game.

Ian and me became regulars at a couple of pubs where we’d make a pint of bitter last three hours (it doesn’t lose its fizz as it doesn’t have any to start with, and it’s served warm). After he encouraged me to break into vacant houses with him I decided Ian was a bit of a nutcase, into shooting of air guns in public places, stealing from department stores, and so on. I didn’t hang out with him for more than a year and was never into drinking in his company. Soon thereafter I began a relationship with my first love partner in drink, Charles. We had known each other since age four, had hung out together as part of larger groups, but now we were about to boldly strike out on our own. Around the summer after our 4th year of high school Charles and me became an item. We entered our final year of high school that fall. High school is structured very differently where I grew up than the U.S., and if you’re American, for any of this to make sense, you need a quick primer.

High school lasts 5 years and you start the fall of the school year you turn 11. At the beginning of your fifth and final year, you’re 15 and will turn 16 before the next summer. To put you on an equal footing if you’re reading this in the United States, high school begins with sixth grade, and ends after sophomore year. Back when I was in school the vast majority of kids left at the end of their 5th year and went off to seek work. Some stay on to do what we called 6th form college. You do that for two years, essentially your junior and senior years, and then go off to university (only about 7% of 18-year old’s went off to university back then). All university offers are conditional on you passing a final set of exams. It is a very stressful process tremendously conducive to fostering a drinking habit.

Charles and I started excluding people from our little club at the beginning of our fifth year (sophomore year, if you’re taking notes). Charles’ mom was an alcoholic avid drinker of red wine, and although his dad was also a heavy drinker I don’t think he ever crossed that magical line to full-fledged alcoholism. But they were cool about us drinking in their house as long as we didn’t get too wasted, his dad even helped us build a homebrew making room in the basement. They lived in a massive old Victorian house with about 15 rooms, including a huge parlor with grand piano, real fireplace, and a TV at least 20 years old. A guy called Dave, the son of good friends of Charles’ parents, occupied the top floor flat. Dave was a student at the University and was often gone, so we used the kitchen area upstairs to drink and listen to 80s pop; Wham! OMD, Split Enz, Jimmy Barns, Howard Jones, Paul Young, The Cure. Etc. I think that by the late fall of that year, aged just 16, Charles and I had taken our first baby steps towards addiction.

On several occasions, usually Tuesday nights as his parents were always out at their club, we would drink our newly made high-gravity homebrew, get seriously buzzed, and then take his dad’s car for a joyride (DUI, no insurance, no license) Charles driving, and me telling him to ‘trust his instincts’ when approaching a stop sign at speed. Several times we were seen by other kids who went to our school. I had always been a top student and sportsman, who played for the school soccer and cricket teams, and ran track. That kept me on the good side of the maniac brigade, saving me from being beaten up. One night we saw one of the hard men, Branny, out while drunk and driving around, and we suddenly got major respect at school (Charles was a big, strong lad who the thugs didn’t bother with anyway). We had seen Branny on foot 10 or so minutes earlier, told him we’d be back in our car, and he was suitably impressed when we showed up. On another night, we drove about 15 miles down a freeway to call on a girl we knew. Her parents didn’t know us, and presumed we were old enough to drive. We found out later her dad was a cop. By early December we had earned the reputation of daring drinkers, something quite at odds with my hitherto goody two shoes image. This sudden notoriety was a thrill for me, suddenly I was cute and cool. Even the hard men who didn’t play sports stopped bothering me. I’d spent so many years being the perfect student (elected Deputy Head Boy, Prefect, school debate team, Mastermind, alto saxophone player, and all-around dick). This new-found notoriety afforded me a slice of the life the movie star wannabe had thought forever beyond reach.

One Saturday in December of our 5th year me, Charles and another friend, Norman, decided on mixing new kinds of booze to study the effects. Charles and me had already done experiments with Cinzano (an Italian kind of vermouth), discovering it to be far more potent than cider or lager – it never occurred to us to check the ABV. On the Cinzano-run we paid dearly for the experiment and were both absent from school the following day. On this night, we bought two 8½-ounce bottles of Bells Scotch Whiskey, 2.5 L of white wine, and twelve 500 mL cans of beer. In strategic reserve were 120 pints of homebrew. Starting briskly with whiskey, we then drank beer followed by the Blanco vino. Here’s my diary entry for the following day, Sunday Dec 15th. We never got to the homebrew.

"Fuck me. It’s 4 in the afternoon and I just stopped puking. Managed to hide upstairs all day. Mom gone to visit Grandma and Granddad with our kid (OK). I passed out last night. Off the booze for a while I suspect."

We drank everything before going out to stomp – our term for walking the streets. I don’t recall any notion of equating the strength of the different kinds of booze, nor how quickly it can be absorbed. I do remember mixing whiskey in the same glass as wine and topping it up with beer. Feeling nothing after 20 minutes we all drank more of these awful cocktails, and quickly. According to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA);

It takes 30 minutes to feel the effects of alcohol. It may take an hour to metabolize a drink, but it takes approximately thirty minutes before you feel alcohol's effects. This is a good gauge for pacing yourself. Drinking more than one drink every 30 minutes means you are probably drinking too much, too fast.

Of course, when your ‘one drink’ is beer, whiskey, and wine all combined you would be prudent to drink them less frequently. Our experiment discovered downing a mouthful of whiskey is a lot more effective than a mouthful of wine, and certainly more so than beer. You are bound to get drunker faster, but now, some two years after first going into pubs, getting drunk was the point. When you’re 16 it’s almost expected you experiment with alcohol ... but when you’re 26 or 36 and still that way it’s not OK; Houston, we may have a problem. I got separated from the other two, and vaguely remember falling over backwards into another friend’s front garden singing "Pissed as rats, pissed as rats, pissed as rats" to the tune of que sera sera. There’s not much else I recall except memories of being utterly outside my head. Somehow, I got to Charles’ house and passed out on his porch, because when I came to sometime later he carried / dragged me up the stairs. Charles puked on the floor and, after watching this I did what many of you do when seeing someone throw up, promptly puked into his washbasin (old Victorian houses had them in the bedrooms). Turns out he and Norman had walked into town and got thrown out of a couple of pubs before detouring past an off-license to buy a couple for the road. Apparently, I drank more than either of them that night, including one of the 8 ½ oz. bottles of whiskey. The following morning, his room reeking of whiskey vomit Charles got up and scooped the cold puke off the floor, adding it to my washbasin offering, but that blocked the plughole, so he opened a window, and began chucking it out onto the ground for the birds and squirrels to munch on.

This ‘whiskey run’ marked the first time I’d ever passed out from drinking. How close to death did I fly that night? If I’d have passed out in the road I might have been taken to the ER to have my stomach pumped. In this alternate history, my blithely unaware parents might have stepped in and acted. Might the snowball have melted before it gained enough momentum to roll? Was this a missed opportunity? Monday at school word was passed around by those whose houses we visited Saturday. We were overnight sensations, the kings of rock, we were envied, we were cool, available for parties, bar mitzvah’s and charities. That night still ranks with the drunkest I have ever been, but an element of caution ensued. I hated whiskey, liqueurs and wine, and still preferred cider to anything else. You couldn’t overdose on cider, although you could get the nastiest acid stomach the following day and throwing up cider is baaaad news. Over the next few months we repeatedly drank to get drunk, on our own, or at parties. In fact, such was our reputation we stopped getting invites to parties for fear of us causing trouble. All this time we reveled in our notoriety. I made a phenomenally bad decision during the Christmas disco dance at school. Having snuck past the teachers on the door drunk as fuck, I got up on the stage before all and sundry to dance to ‘Nellie the Elephant’ by Toy Dolls. I once saw a photograph of that performance and hope to fuck it never gets posted anywhere. Throughout all of this I was top of my class, some 550 students. It wasn’t much of a competition. By the time we finished, 55 of the 550 were pregnant.

Kicks for Vic

Vic was an English teacher who came during our 3rd year (8th grade). I had him for English that year, and he seemed like to coolest teacher, like ever man! Vic wore a blue tapered leather jacket, Kickers® Loafers, and styled his hair and sideburns like Midge Ure from Ultravox (ohhh Vienna!!!). He was cool because he recorded the latest albums onto cassette for his favorite three (me, Charles and Norman). He was so cool he even had the Thompson Twins’ Into the Gap before anyone else. He swore in front of us when no one could hear, and even ratted out Norman) to us one time (Norman)’s here, Norman)’s there, Norman)’s every fucking where). But then Norman spent a Saturday afternoon one time over at Vic’s place (sanctioned by his parents). Of course, Vic was adored by his disciples, and not liked by his peers, most of whom thought him a dangerous prat. January of our 5th year (10th grade) Charles and me got into a night club downtown called Kicks, built in the basement of the Britannia Adelphi Hotel. We waited until the doorman walked down the block for a fag with his buddy on the door at Saturday’s" night club, then raced across the street and into the darkness. There were no bouncers inside so the bar staff just presumed we had got in past the doorman and it wasn’t their issue. We were dressed in black school trousers, white school shirts, black school shoes, and black leather piano ties we’d stolen that weekend from a store in the mall. We must have looked ridiculous.

But we had an ace up our sleeves. Vic had told us he worked there on Saturday nights! Would you believe it lo and behold he did! We saw him about an hour after we got in and I simply can’t describe the look on his face. Perhaps you can imagine? Well, not only did Vic not kick us out, but he served us too, and even gave us 3 shots each of Jack Daniels plus 2 pints of lager for the price of one pint of lager. Our meagre 10 quid (a king’s ransom back then) suddenly went a lot further. By the end of the night (2AM) we were utterly shitfaced, and on the way out hailed Vic, then stumbled past the annoyed and upset barman. Next Monday at school, far from dodging us in the hallways, Vic called out cheerily when he saw Charles; Hey Jack Daniels! Obviously, Vic wasn’t’ worried about disclosure. There’s a nice coda to the Vic story; Norman stayed in touch after Vic left our school the same summer we did. He got a promotion to a prestigious Grammar School, and never looked back. One of his other spare time jobs was managing the supporters’ club for a famous club and international soccer player. One memorable Saturday a few years later me and Norman spent a day chaperoning disabled kids