OPINION: Field notes of an American alcoholic in rehab
. I put the Beatles on. My 11-year-old recently discovered them. In his greenest youth he thinks Paul, not George, is the best of them. It’s wonderful to see your kid’s taste grow.
It's such a small choice. It's just a little liquid in a glass. The most normal thing in the world as it has been since long before the Romans. Then one night in late November I was alone in my Bay Ridge dwelling, fabulously drunk and high on a moderate amount of mushrooms. I was crying. I was angry at God. I demanded of Him that he show me my mother, who died 25 years ago.
There is no pill or vaccine for alcoholism, not an effective one, anyway. This is a bit odd given the condition’s preponderance in the world. It would sure as hell be a path to billions for its creator. Instead, the most successful solution or treatment, by far, is of a metaphysical flavor. On the one hand this is not a matter of faith, the millions of recovered addicts are real, you can count them.
I knew it was a bad idea. I also knew I had already made up my mind. In a very real way, making the decision to drink is the same as having a drink. Together we would share group therapy and meals, do outings and go to meetings in the evening. I’ve never taken a drink on a day when I have attended an AA meeting, even one of the glossy, impersonal Zoom variety. It feels like a magic trick, and I am at a loss to know why it is so. When I returned to Brooklyn in April, I obtained my five months of sobriety without meetings or a sponsor. I thought it was all fine.
I have a dim but flickering hope that if I avoid that mistake this time the result will be different. But maybe not. Maybe I will do everything right, or think I am, and still slip headlong, highball glass in hand, into the well-worn quagmire of alcohol. And it's not the fear that is the most terrifying. It's the hope. The lack of privacy in rehab is very difficult. There is a reason adults don’t go to summer camp. But it serves a purpose.
Rehab is, at its most basic, a community. Just like AA, it is centered on seeing ourselves and our experiences in the mirror of others who have endured the like. It also reflects, at its best, the nation in which its principles were founded.
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