Page Two of Hitting Bottom
Looking him back in the eye, I replied, “I think I will, Doc.” And for the first time in my life, I meant it.
I returned to my office that afternoon and, with hands that were still shaking, looked up the phone number for AA to get information about nearby meetings. A kindly male voice answered the phone and, when I gave him my location, said, “There’s a meeting five days a week at lunchtime in the basement of the Western Presbyterian Church, just across Pennsylvania Avenue from where you are right now.” He said the name of the group was “High Noon” and they welcomed beginners at all their meetings. By then it was already too late, so I resolved to go across to the meeting at noon the following day.
In 1947, when I was twelve, I belonged to a Boy Scout troop that met one evening a week in the basement of our church, St. Stephen’s Episcopal in Sewickley, Pennsylvania . Leaving the troop meetings, I often noticed adults arriving in the lot behind the church, parking their cars and entering the same building through a back entrance. They were all middle-aged and seemed tired, almost furtive, I thought, as they quietly went inside, glancing over their shoulders at our boisterous little group of Scouts waiting in the street for our parents to come and pick us up.
One evening on the way home, I asked my parents who those mysterious people were. My father made a wry face, sighed and said, “Those are the alcoholics, Johnny.” I had heard of alcoholics, but I had only a vague idea of what they were. I didn’t pursue it.
Years later, when my wife would berate me on Sunday mornings for getting drunk at Saturday night neighborhood get-togethers, she would often ask, “Why do you keep doing it?”
I finally learned a gambit that would usually get her off my hung-over back, at least for a little while. I would stare at her, bleary-eyed but defiant, and say, “Because I’m an alcoholic.” She would usually gasp, turn in disgust and leave the room, slamming the door on her way out, without a further word.
I knew, or thought I knew, that I had to drink, that I couldn’t live without it, so therefore I must be an alcoholic. Mostly, I could confine my heavy drinking to weekends, family beach vacations and my frequent World Bank business trips overseas, usually in the company of other hard-drinking colleagues. Over the years, though, weekends began to spill over into the work week, and my buddies and I would go for boozy Friday martini lunches in the Roger Smith Hotel at Eighteenth and Pennsylvania and then meet up again for draft beer at the little bar across the park on H Street before driving home late to our angry wives. Then, finally, I began keeping a bottle of vodka in my bottom desk drawer and dosing my coffee mug with it as soon as I arrived at the office. That started the year our second daughter graduated from high school.
It never occurred to me that I might actually be able to stop drinking. I was an alcoholic, and that meant that I had to go on drinking until… whatever. Right?
With my simplistic belief about alcoholism and my negative childhood memories of the mysterious cabal of tired middle-aged people meeting secretly after dark in the church basement, was it any wonder that I resisted Dr. T’s urging for so long? I used to joke sometimes about drinking until I died. And then, that day on I-95, something or some one finally got through to me, and my choices became real and immediate.
I arrived at the church at 11:45 on Wednesday morning. Should I go in and ask someone where the meeting is? No, better walk around a little more until my nerves stop jumping. I thought of just forgetting the whole thing and going back to my office. I was afraid to go inside and afraid to stay out there on the sidewalk. Finally, I took a deep breath, went in the office entrance and found the narrow stairway leading down to the basement. As I started down the stairs I heard voices and laughter. Laughter? I must be in the wrong part of the church. Better go down there anyway and ask. Can you tell me where the AA meeting is?
