December 15, 2002

 

My name is Miranda, and I am an alcoholic

The first drink I remember having was a beer. My family was living in Venezuela at the time, I was seven years old and we had gone to tour the local brewery, the Polar brewery. The Polar brewery had a big fiberglass sculpture of a polar bear out front and after our tour we sat out by the sculpture on the grass and all drank beer. My younger sister and I got quite drunk and the adults thought we were a scream, reeling around on the grass. I loved the feeling I remember.

When I was eight years old my father was killed, we were on our way to the coast for Christmas vacation and our car, a Volkswagen bug, went off the road in the night and turned over three times. I still remember how it felt in the car as it went over, like being inside a dryer with a lot of heavy objects. My mother was thrown some distance from the car, none of us kids (me, two sisters and my brother) were seriously hurt but my father hit his head in a bad place and the next day he was dead. We had the wake and the funeral and as we were living in a small village in a Catholic country we followed the local custom and all wore black for a year. My brother blamed my mother for the accident (she had been driving) and went off to a boarding school in the capital and my mother threw herself into her work. We never talked about my father. The tradition in my family and my mother’s family is to never speak about bad things, you keep a stiff upper lip and don’t ask for help and when someone asks how you are you say fine. That’s what we did.

A year or two later we moved back to the States and settled outside of Boston. My mother wasn’t home much, she was very much involved with her work and we mostly raised ourselves. We did pretty well at it until adolescence when first my brother and then I started to get heavily into the drug scene. As I got a little older, sixteen or seventeen, I started using alcohol. The drinking age was eighteen at the time but it was easy to get a fake ID and I spent a lot of time in bars. I was proud of how much I could drink, I could out drink any of my friends. I was a binge drinker, I didn’t drink every day but when I did I got drunk because what other reason to drink was there? I remember one time when I was seventeen; my boyfriend and I had seen a movie where two spies had a chess game with bottles of liquor for pieces. We couldn’t play chess but we thought it looked like fun so we played checkers with nip bottles of Jim Beam. Every time you jumped a piece you had to drink it. I have a vague memory of crawling down snowy sidewalks and later, I am told, we crawled into my house, still on our hands and knees, puking in all directions. My mother was hosting a conference on city planning and there were professors there from all over the world. She had to clean me up and tie me to a bed. I was undoubtedly suffering from severe alcohol poisoning; I’m surprised I didn’t die.

After high school I enrolled in a college in Oakland California, went out there and had my first experience with clinical depression. I didn’t know what it was, I just thought I was crazy. I tried suicide, didn’t succeed thank goodness and went up to Oregon where I had friends and stayed there for five years.

I got homesick for New England though and moved back to the east and ended up in Vermont, living with my brother. Some friends of ours had started a bar/ restaurant and needed money. I had some; my father had left all us kids $7000 in stock which we had gotten hold of at 21 so I gave my friends the money and became a partner in their business on the condition they give me a job. They did and I started the bar life, cleaning the restaurant at 8 AM, prep work in the kitchen until lunch, waiting tables or cooking, short break in the afternoon, setting up and prep work for dinner, waiting tables or bartending, closing the bar around 1AM, partying til 3, pass out, wake up and start all over again. We all drank constantly and as well did a lot of drugs of all sorts.

After a few years of this I met a guy bartending one night that I ended up marrying, He was reluctant but I thought he could save me from myself I guess so I persuaded him to marry me and I quit working the bar and started working with him instead doing auto body work at his shop. We still hung out at the bar a lot and drank a lot and partied pretty heavily. But it didn’t seem odd; everyone we knew did the same. At least I wasn’t having cognac for breakfast anymore and we only did cocaine on weekends instead of all day every day.

After a while we quit the coke, we were in trouble with it and knew it and it was disappearing from the scene anyway. Everyone we knew seemed to come to the same conclusion at the same time. We were all getting older and some of us had started having kids and were leaving our wicked ways behind with the advent of parenthood. The drinking late night scene was passing. We still drank, but not as often and not as heavily.

My drinking changed. I started keeping a bottle at home, which I had never done before.  I began to drink every night after work. I was now working as a housepainter and I’d come home and have a drink and then have another as I fixed supper. The amount was less but it was steady. My husband and I grew steadily further apart. One thing (among the many) which we had never discussed when we married was whether either of us wanted children, I did and he didn’t. Finally I reached 35 and told him either I got pregnant or the marriage was over. I got pregnant and the marriage was indeed over, we didn’t have sex but once after that although we stayed married for five years more. I drank while pregnant, once a week on Friday afternoons we would go up to the bar and I would have one drink. My son was early and small, only four pounds and seven ounces but strong and healthy. I didn’t drink regularly while I was nursing him, although twice I went out and binged on alcohol and coke; I pumped the breast milk after and gave him a bottle on those occasions.

My husband, during my pregnancy, had decided to change his life and become a salt-water fly fishing guide instead of an auto-body man. He studied hard, got his captain’s license and a boat and started spending six months of the year in Massachusetts. Much to his surprise he adored our son but he didn’t want to be around me. I used to think that I drank because we had such a poor marriage, I see now that we had a poor marriage because I drank. His mother and father are both alcoholics, still actively drinking in their 70’s, I think Barry started to see more and more of his mother in me and didn’t like it.

When my son was five I told my husband I wanted a divorce and I moved out. We got a divorce and it was as amicable as these things can be I suppose. We were both determined to act in Chris’ best interest in the matter.

It was at this juncture in my life that I went to a family wedding in New York State. At the reception I got very drunk indeed and was soundly flirted with and kissed by an extremely attractive and younger adopted cousin, Robert. I fell instantly and violently in love and began to write him letters and have long heart to heart talks with him on the phone. He was living in Chicago at the time. Robert is also an alcoholic and has landed in the hospital near death several times with it. He is now sober, having been told in no uncertain terms that if he drinks he will die. Anyway I began this extremely passionate paper relationship, I wrote him letters every few days for years. Someday I will put all those letters into a book and make a million dollars. My passion, however, was not reciprocated as I would have liked. He had long talks on the phone with me and cares for me very much and all that but mostly used me as a sounding board for his miseries, depressions and various mental illnesses as well as a source of money.

I started drinking more every night. Now that I didn’t have someone (my husband) keeping the weather eye on my consumption, it really took off. I still only drank at night, after work, but it crept up to three and four drinks instead of one or two. Then it was five and six. I started to sometimes drink until I blacked out. One of my worst memories of drinking is one night when Chris was six. He had a friend stay overnight, a little boy of seven. I came to somewhere around three in the morning. I was on my bed in nothing but a t-shirt and all the lights in the house were on. I went down the stairs and the two little boys were huddled up together on the couch under a blanket. The front door was wide open. This was on a main highway. The next morning Chris told me that Steven had been scared and crying and had wanted to go home but they couldn’t wake me up. Steven had taken off down the road in the middle of the night to try to get home, 12 miles away. Chris had gone after him and persuaded him to come back and they had put themselves to bed on the couch. Anything at all could have happened to those two little boys, anything and I was passed out drunk.

After a year or so of floundering around, painting for a living, I went back to school. I had gotten interested in computers and wanted to do that instead of house-painting. My mother had sold the big house outside of Boston and divided the proceeds among the five of us. I decided to live on the money, go back to school full-time and get a degree. After my first year of school I decided to take Chris on a cross-country driving trip and it was during that trip that I became aware that I could not stop drinking when I wanted to. I drank every night. I was never out of alcohol. That had been true for years but for the first time I realized that I couldn’t NOT drink. We mostly camped and every night, we would find a campground, set up our tent and stove and what have you and I would need that drink so, so badly. There was one horrible night in Tonopah, Nevada. We had decided to get a motel that night, it was about a hundred and five and we needed showers and a bed. I started drinking, vodka and coke I remember, I liked it with grapefruit juice but all there was available from the vending machine was coca-cola so I drank that. We started watching TV, The Good The Bad and The Ugly was the movie. We had gone out for chinese food but Chris hadn’t liked it much and he got hungry and wanted me to get some cereal from our food box in the car. I got very angry but I got dressed and went out and got the cereal. When I got back in the room and fixed the bowl of cereal he decided he wasn’t hungry anymore and I lost it. I hissed at him, I was evil. “You wanted that cereal and now you better eat it you little bastard” I said. He said again that he just wasn’t hungry anymore. “Eat it goddamn you!” I said and I shoved his face down into the bowl, “I went out and got it for you and now you better eat it!” and I kept shoving his face down. He was sobbing and sobbing and trying his best to shovel cereal into his mouth.

Another afternoon in Idaho, I had run out of vodka, it was Sunday and liquor stores weren’t open so I stopped at a gas station and bought a six-pack of beer because I knew I had to have something, I had to have some kind of alcohol. Chris just looked at me when I came out carrying the six-pack, he didn’t say anything but I’ll never forget that look he had, it was fear and disgust all rolled into one.

Chris remembers that trip as a wonderful time and it was, we criss-crossed the country for seven weeks with no discernable plan, saw the Pacific and San Francisco, crossed the High Sierras and went to Acoma, the oldest inhabited pueblo in this part of the world, and Graceland  and Cadillac Ranch too. But of all the trip those are the two moments I remember best.

I knew then that I was addicted to alcohol, but the word alcoholic never entered my mind. After all, I was getting excellent grades in school, I graduated, got work doing what I wanted to do. I never drank during the day (except sometimes on weekends of course). Just because I had to go to different liquor stores so that I didn’t buy too often at one, just because I hid my vodka bottles in the bottom of the trashbag instead of recycling them, just because when I went to visit my mother and step-dad in Boston I had to pack a flask of liquor in my suitcase… I was addicted sure but I was no alcoholic.

But I could not stop drinking. I tried. I would be out of liquor and I would say to myself that I was NOT going to stop on the way home and get some but then somehow I would. Or I would say that I would just have one glass of wine because wine is elegant and it’s not really liquor but then I would drink the whole bottle. Or I would be out of booze and I would swear to myself that just this one night I would not drink and lo and behold round seven o clock or so I’d tell Chris I was going out to get a pack of cigarettes at the convenience store and I’d find myself getting a bottle of screw top wine. I HAD to drink. It was no longer a choice, I had to do it. I was having blackouts more and more often. I would appear to be normal, I could talk and walk but the next day I would remember nothing. Big chunks of my life started going missing.

I started to get worried about it but I didn’t see any way out. One morning my mother called and told me she had decided Chris ought to see the rainforest before it was all gone. She would pay for the trip. I called a friend who is a travel agent and she arranged a wonderful tour of Costa Rica with an ornithologist as our guide. You know what concerned me most about going? I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get alcohol and would start having the Dts. I didn’t want to go into withdrawal. I wanted desperately to quit, I welcomed the thought of being forcibly removed from alcohol but I was worried about withdrawing. As it turned out I was able to get alcohol every night and didn’t go into withdrawal on the trip.

It never occurred to me to go to AA. AA was for alcoholics. I was just addicted to alcohol.

Besides, I was functioning and I thought functioning well. I never missed work, although I was often so hung-over on the drive in that I’d have to smoke a joint to get rid of the nausea (I smoked dope daily too). I actually bought a house, which is a true miracle. On the outside my life was getting better and better. On the inside it was a wasteland.

Then, shortly after I had bought my house, in fact it was the weekend after our housewarming party, Chris was at a friend’s for the day (the same Steven who had tried to walk the 12 miles home years before). I came home from work and there was a message on my answering machine. It concerned Robert, my cousin, who by then had moved to Vermont and had been staying with me off and on that summer. It hurt me so badly that I bent over gasping and then I headed straight for the vodka and jumped in. I called Steven’s mother and told her that I was a mess and was going to get messier so would she please keep Chris overnight. Then I started drinking in earnest. At some point, my brother, who was visiting in the area, (he lives in Florida now) came over and found me reeling around in my front yard sobbing. I don’t remember him arriving but he was there the next day.

He had been sober for 14 months at that point. I had heard that he had been going to AA but we hadn’t talked about it at all. That morning I got up early and went out to try and install our mailbox. I was digging a hole for the post and whimpering with pain and misery. It was very misty. My brother came out wrapped in a blanket with a cup of coffee and I remember the steam from the coffee curling up as he stood there watching me scratching ineffectively at the stony ground. He didn’t say anything he just stood there watching me and shaking his head.

We did a few little chores and then went to the hardware store and on the way back I started crying as I drove and saying “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with me?”

“I can tell you one thing that’s wrong with you” said my brother, “but you probably don’t want to hear it.”

When we got back to the house my brother said to me “So, want to try a meeting?”

“Sure, what the hell” I said, “I’ve never been to one”.

“Well it’s high time you went,” said my brother.

He took me to an AA meeting at our local hospital. I hated it, it was very small, six people and very weird I thought. At the beginning of it the chairperson asked: “Is there anyone new or visiting who would like to introduce themselves?”

My brother said Hi my name’s Chris and I’m an alcoholic, visiting from Florida, and then they all looked at ME! I thought to myself, What??!! You mean you have to do this the very first DAY? But I introduced myself, I said my name is Miranda and I’m an alcoholic. It was the first time I had said that aloud to another human being.

He took me to another meeting the next day and it was even worse, it was down in White River Junction in an old factory building and there were all these old skoady guys there, real alcoholics you know, not like me at all of course. They were reading from the big book, Alcoholics Anonymous, and I thought it was the biggest bunch of religious, cult-y horse-shit I had ever heard in all my life. Then they all stood around in a circle and held hands and recited the Lord’s Prayer. I thought my brother had gone clean out of his mind to take me there, he had obviously lost it. I even heard him say during the meeting that he prayed even though he didn’t know what he was praying to. My brother! The hell-raising atheist- pray?? Too totally weird.

Well my brother went back to Florida, leaving me with a meeting schedule and several days later I was into my fourth gin and tonic (I was finishing off the various bottles I had bought for the housewarming, and had been through the vodka already) well I was into the gin and all of a sudden I thought: This can’t go on.

I saw there was a Beginner’s Meeting on Tuesday night so I called a friend of mine and asked her if she would come up and stay with Chris while I went to this meeting. She said that she would be honored to do so.  The next day I wasn’t really sure if I had called her or not but she showed up on Tuesday and I went down to this meeting.

At the meeting during the discussion period I raised my hand.

“I’m Miranda and I’m an alcoholic,” I said, “ I don’t know why I’m here. I just feel like there’s this big hole and I keep thinking alcohol’s gonna fill it but it never does. Some nights I can’t even remember putting my son to bed. I see the towels on the bathroom floor in the morning and I know he had his bath, I see the book mark has moved in the book so I know I’ve read him his nightly chapter but I can’t remember any of it. I don’t even know what being here is supposed to do for me,” I said “but I just know that liquor isn’t doing it”. I was crying, I was a mess; I had snot running out my nose.

Everybody said “Thank you Miranda”.

The next day I e-mailed my younger sister about it and I told her that I didn’t understand it but I felt like those people down there understood me in a way that nobody else ever had. Anyway I think they can help me I said.

So that was the beginning. I still feel there is a lot about AA that is religious, cult-y and horseshit. But I do know that since I have been going to these meetings I am not drinking. I am happy. There are still things that happen in my life that are bad of course but even so I am a happy person.  There is a saying in AA “Take what you need and leave the rest” and I use that a lot. I do pray, like my brother I don’t understand what I’m praying to, but I don’t need to understand. I figure it can’t hurt me and it makes me feel better so I do it.

As a side benefit, AA (or a higher power if you will) not only has relieved me of the obsession to drink it almost instantly relieved me of my obsession with my cousin Robert which is a good thing because that boy is a mess.

 

 Miranda C

Miranda C lives in New England, does service work as a tech at StayingCyber, and would love to hear from you.

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Glen H
Revised: 30 Oct 2005 03:40:41 -0800