Coffee after Midnight: Sober Grrlie Chronicles Part I
by flightless
I swagger up to the bar and order a cream soda. Sometimes an inadvertent giggle escapes the bartender; this one doesn't flinch. The Black Cat is my favorite local lair; they also carry lovely ginger beer in glass bottles, as well as the classic Jolt cola.
I don't go to meetings and stand up and say I'm an alcoholic, but I am a former binge drinker in recovery. I do have an online sobriety group (q.v. unhooked.com) and I bought my lover a liquor cabinet so I wouldn't have to see the Chartreuse and Absinth and Tanqueray all temptingly lined up on the shelf. Yes, I have been known to drink black coffee after midnight. (Hate decaf, can't tolerate the stuff; wire me up or leave me alone.) Yes, it can be boring to be the only sober person in the room, but it can also be fun. And it's a novel experience to wake up rested and remember the whole night before. Though I understand it's not for everyone.
For me, the hardest part of going out to a club and staying sober is not the temptation of the bar itself -- it's staying awake and happy and uninhibited enough to dance. In fact, I'm still not uninhibited enough to dance sober, but it's one of my short-term goals. To fight the temptation of the bar (if I am not at the Black Cat, where ordering my own ginger beers is a pleasure not a struggle), I generally dispatch my sweetie to bring me back a plain tonic or ginger ale with a wedge of lime or lemon. The bit of fruit is what makes it look like a "real" drink and thus spares me any number of sloppy-drunk-and-defensive queries about my blatant sobriety. I am undercover.
I refuse to become one of those recovery addicts who go to nightly meetings and fraternize only with other ex-drunks. I am not powerless over alcohol; I just don't have the knack for using it in moderation. Y'all go ahead. (I won't drive you home, but I'll hail the cab while you finish puking in the alley.)
Every alcoholic has their “aha” story, when they heard someone else’s version of the same downward spiral and went “d’oh!” I came to attention when I read Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story, a book I had spent a year peering at but not picking up, like a kid with a crush. Knapp tells about being a female drunk, a high-functioning alcoholic: “Part of what keeps us going,” she writes, “is that we’re so very different from the popular definition of a ‘real’ drunk.” Drink was about hiding from myself, refusing to live in full honesty. She says that “fear of life” and feelings of “fraudulence” are epidemic among drunks -- no wonder, I think, that drink is the occupational hazard of writers, whose job description is to look honestly at life and to tell the truth without any safety net of self-deceit.
Here’s Knapp on those little quizzes in magazines: “The real questions...might have been more pointed: Are you driven by a feeling of hunger and need? When someone sets a bottle of wine on the dinner table, do you find yourself glancing at it subversively, possessively, the way you might look at a lover you long for but don’t quite trust?” There were nights when, if you had suddenly plunged the room into complete darkness, I could have told you the exact level in everyone’s glass. I always wanted more; someone in her book calls alcoholism “the disease of more,” it is a way of seeking a physical solution to an emotional problem, and it is just another form of the all-American desire for a fix, a magic Thing, the perfect car or face-lift or cheeseburger that will finally cure the void inside us. And as Knapp points out, “Everywhere we look, we are told this is possible...together the wine, beer, and liquor industries spend more than $1 billion each year reinforcing this knowledge: drinking will transform us.”
I did go to one AA meeting. I called the number in the phone book (they were very kind and helpful) and went to a women’s meeting near Dupont Circle. It was intermittently religious--several women talked about prayer but not joyously, more like brushing their teeth or working out: just something they have to do right now. At the end, everyone held hands and said the Lord’s Prayer except me. One woman, who had over 5 years of sobriety but still went to AA all the time, talked about how she used to have nothing in her fridge but vodka and ketchup; that made me feel smug and safe, a “high-functioning drunk.” She said that sometimes she felt cured and she had to remind herself that she was still in recovery, still powerless. She told me I should go to 90 meetings in 90 days.
Knapp mentions some reasons to dislike AA, but adds, “I welcomed the sense of brainwashing. I felt like my brain could use a good scouring out by then and I was both frightened and desperate enough to set aside whatever biases I’d bought and just listen, to absorb. I believed what I was told and I believed I belonged there...”
It should be obvious if you know me, but...
“We
admitted we were powerless...”
I did not believe
what I was told.
over
to the care of God as we understood Him...”
I did not welcome
the sense of brainwashing.
There are alternatives to giving your power to their god. Unhooked.com is my favorite source of secular sobriety tools. Women For Sobriety replaces AA’s 12 steps with “13 Affirmations,” starting with “I have a life-threatening problem that once had me. I now take charge of my life and my disease. I accept the responsibility.” And then there’s Marilyn Manson... from his oddly charming, funny memoir The Long Hard Road Out of Hell: “I may not have always exercised self-control in my life, but, when needed, I had the necessary willpower and capacity for self-denial on reserve... I also had ambition, tremendous ambition, and drugs were now getting in the way of that ambition. One of them had to go.” Like MM, I wasn’t a wino in the gutter, but I was softer and less splendid and far less focused than I wanted to be. Knapp writes, “When you quit drinking you stop waiting. You begin to let go of the wish...that someone will swoop down and do all that hard work, growing up, for you. You start living your own life.”
The main question, to me, is: Does it bother you how much you drink? Have you tried, and failed, to quit or cut down? A lot of my friends are hard drinkers who expressed varying levels of concern or skepticism when I quit. I think they were afraid I’d be less fun, that I might become a Carry Nation and hassle them about their own drinking. But if these folks don’t feel that their habits are a problem, then they don’t fit my definition of needing to stop. Whether they might be more effective or happier is their own issue. Me, I feel happier and clearer and slightly overcaffeinated. And one of these weeks at Catacomb, I'm going to be dancing.
...Next month: coffeehouse reviews and how to accessorize a one-month chip...
Flightless, aka Dorothy Hickson, lives in Columbia
Heights, where she obsesses over hair extensions and writes sporadic bursts of
poetry. She is the creator of the zine dodo
and can be found online at www.mwmw.com/dodo.
She still does everything she used to do except drinking, jogging, and
trying to grow her nails.