All the Marbles: Five Years Sober

Vol. 3, Issue 31

The first person I remember who drank like an alcoholic was Uncle Pete. He was the older, most Italian brother of my father’s mother. He was a little terrifying, a little scrambled. He had a beaky nose and these monster-man hands with large dirty fingernails and this wiry body that was held together by these enormous bones. He would be at family events hunched in a corner at a table, smiling and friendly, always smoking dirty cigarettes but in an oddly elegant way, the way old-timey female movie stars smoked. 

I never saw him not drunk. At these family events, he always had one of those tiny glasses – I called them apple juice glasses – filled with either watered-down liquor or smelly wine or beer. He had this weird aura about him, that was both haunted and kind. I don’t ever remember him having a wife, but he had a son, one I’d never met, but the drunker he got he’d always forget that part. “You remember your cousin Petey? He was my little boy. He died.”

Petey had a drug problem, a bad one that was a sack of heavy bricks he could not let go of. He was either hit by a train by accident or threw himself in front of a train on purpose. I think he was at most 20, at worst 17. But Uncle Pete couldn’t save him and a chunk of his heart fell off after Petey died. So he drank more.

And when Uncle Pete got real drunk at family parties he’d insist I’d arm wrestle him, even though I was maybe 10. He’d sit there with his smoky breath and this crooked evil smile and place his giant elbow on the table and invite me to try to move it. I could not. His hand was coarse and his arm was heavy as an anvil. I couldn’t imagine anyone pinning him. I figured it would probably take five or six guys to do it. 

There was this amazing story about Uncle Pete my father used to tell that I always loved. Pete obviously had this freakish bull strength but he was also a total rockhead. So the story was that he attempted to carry a king-size mattress down two flights of stairs all by himself to his junk truck by folding it in half. He managed to get it down the stairs but eventually, the mattress won out, sprang back, and landed on top of him. Still: this son of a bitch folded a king-size mattress in half. I totally believe it.

My most vivid memory of Uncle Pete was his performance at my sister’s wedding reception. I was 14 or so, and Pete was probably in his late 50’s and positively howling that night. He was all over the dance floor, clapping, tripping, staining, all this with his cigarette dangling perilously, ash falling all over everything he touched. He almost set so many people on fire, including my sister when he tried to wrestle her away from her new husband to dance with him when the band did a Sinatra medley. When the reception ended and it was time to leave Uncle Pete wanted to get more booze so he staggered through a set of swinging doors into the kitchen at the reception hall. It only took a few seconds before plates and assorted metal cookware crashed to the floor. “Go grab Pete, please!” someone yelled.

And that’s what I thought alcoholics were: People who were sad and needed to be retrieved. 

*****

I heard a speaker a few months ago proclaim this: “I was an alcoholic since the first day of kindergarten.” That notion shot right through me. I realized that the insecurity and approval-seeking and crippling loneliness that inhabits five-year-olds pushed out into the world had never left me. So I drank and did drugs to not feel that way anymore. This made perfect sense and was an important discovery. This was me – this is still me. I just stopped poisoning myself over it.

*****

I went to my first outpatient rehab in Northeast Philadelphia at age 18. I didn’t need to be there, I was just incredibly depressed. But I thought depression wasn’t something that would merit a stoppage of everything that felt bad in my life – frustration with my lack of direction, being trapped in my childhood home because my parents wouldn’t pay for me to go away to college. So there was no fun sex, no new friends, no freedom. I commuted every day to a school I didn’t want to go to and sat in a lounge between classes while everyone else broke free. I felt suffocated and almost dead. 

But the counselors at the rehab knew I was lying – I was basically trying to be an alcoholic so they’d let me stay while I loafed around in community college pretending to be a glamorous alcoholic. But the jig was up. They asked me to leave if I wasn't going to be serious about staying sober. On my last day there my dad picked me up and we drove back to my depressing childhood home and I could tell we were going to act like the whole experience never happened. 

I waited until my early 30’s to try outpatient rehab again. I was living in Astoria, barely employed, and it was probably necessary. I lasted two days, but I stopped drinking for a little while and stayed off coke for almost an entire year. But I went back out and when I did I went really hard. I also achieved minor success as a blog idiot soon after that. The success didn’t fix my drug problem and it also didn’t help with the depression. I didn’t want to die necessarily but I wanted to kill myself all the time. Does that make sense?

Then at age 41, I did a 9-day detox in North Jersey. I failed again. So two months later, still 41, I did rehab for almost two months in Florida. I finally achieved sobriety at 42. More like pledged sobriety at 42 – nine months after I entered that rehab. I just discounted those nine months of half-assed sobriety on my own and was so proud of myself for doing that.  I was serious this time. 

*****

This is the year-by-year breakdown of what I’ll call (and forgive me for this heavy-handed description) “My Sober Journey”:

Year One was a challenge the way those Year Ones are supposed to be. It creaked along so slowly and I had no idea of what to do. It was so awful and awkward – the first non-invite to a Christmas party sunk me so low. “You wouldn’t have fun,” was the excuse. But I knew it was more likely that everyone feared I wouldn't be any fun and I’d make everyone feel low. When people want to go hard they exclude the newly sober. It’s like inviting a grief-swept widow to an orgy.

By Year Two, though, I’d solved it. My gold-ish coin said “II” but that wasn’t accurate. I was wise beyond my actual sobriety time, part Navy Seal, part Jesus Christ. I had a shine that was blinding and a bucket full of triumph to share with everyone. If you wanted strong sobriety, I was your guy. I was the Highest Power. 

But Year Three I returned to the world of the less deluded: I clicked into fatherhood, marriage, steady work. I scheduled a colonoscopy and a dermatology appointment but I still haven’t gone to either one of them yet. It was a similar slog to Year One, but less bumpy.

I was sure I had no desire to drink anymore but sometimes that desire snuck up on me anyway. Like here’s this one time: It was a sweaty LA afternoon and I was walking down Sunset on the way to a meeting and there was a guy perched on a plastic bucket outside of his tarp tent guarding a styrofoam cooler. He was drinking a Bud tall boy that looked cold and inviting. I walked past him, slower than normal, and rehearsed my response if he reached into that cooler and tossed me one. How could I say no? That would alter some cosmic dramatic plot point I was supposed to be a part of. But he didn’t and I moved on, quietly disappointed that I didn’t say “Hey man can I grab one of those?” 

This was Year Three and I was still capable of throwing myself into the asshole of an active volcano. But why? I thought I was cured.

Year Four, this most recent year, I was a total mess. I was anxious, morose, guilt-ridden, and fearful. My past kept me up at night. Panic attacks were frequent. They would chase after me and then I would wish for a big red button to press down on to sound the alarms, call the whoevers to take me away to a comfy hospital bed or a faraway future without the hammering despair. Enough of this shit. It was almost worse than Year One. I just wanted out. Tap tap tap. But I stuck around. 

*****

In the Beverage Program, there is a saying that in Year Five “Your head comes out of your ass” but I prefer the less gruff version –  Year Five is when “You get your marbles back”. I love the imagery of it and I can now humbly recall the moment I lost my marbles.

It was one of one those crazy surprise adventure-filled Saturday nights in April or August of 2015 and I was at a bar seated between two strange women who’d suddenly become my best friends or future wives and I was ordering drinks for all of us while sailing on mushrooms and molly and watching the bartender's face crack open. “Are you okay?” they asked. Whatever strange noise came out of my mouth caused the bartender to stop serving me. I remember straddling that stool and then maybe a day or two later I realized I was no longer on that stool. I’d lost touch with reality, empathy, responsibilities. All of my marbles had fallen out of my head and rolled into a sewer. Gone. 

And here we are, at the onset of Year Five. There is now a beautiful nothingness inside of me. But guess what? I am happy to be here. I am right where I am supposed to be. It’s like I’m sitting in a rocking chair on a summer porch as the sky explodes with new orange colors. I’m so goddamn happy! I just can’t believe it.

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