Cracked Head Memoirs

Over the past 30 years, I’ve been sober for several extended periods of time. For me, anything less than a year is negligible. For people who have a harder time, 24 hours without picking up is a big deal. I’m lucky and have never found it particularly hard to stop. Staying stopped, however, has been a different matter entirely .

The first time I was sober for anything like a month or more was in, I think, 1987. I was in my mid 20s and had started to college. It didn’t take me too long to realize that if I was to actually go, much less say pass, I was going to have to refrain from drinking – at the very least, on school nights. Somehow I managed to make it for more than a month without so much as a cigarette. I can’t recall how I was holding up. I do recall that when a guy I’d never met called me and told me he was friends with one of my best friends who lived in Atlanta, and that he was in town on business and had some cocaine, I shot over to his hotel room and promptly fell off the wagon.

Over the next several months I began my binging career. I’d make it a few weeks, maybe even a month or so, then I’d go on a bender that would last for a couple of days or more. By this time it had dawned on me that I actually had something of a problem, and couldn’t in fact just walk away from it clean. It was a humbling experience. I continued to binge for about six months or so, and then something happened.

Astute fellow that I am, I had realize by this point that any amount of alcohol whatsoever would in all probability lead to a binge. I’d also realized that if I was to avoid booze and drugs, I had to avoid boozers and dopers. And since at that stage of my life I wasn’t ready to become the hermit that I since have, I sought out the company of the good people. I started going to church. I went on Sunday morning and Sunday night. I went to visitation on Monday and prayer meeting on Wednesday. If there was a bible study or revival, I did that too. I immersed myself in evangelical culture and all that goes with it, and for a time, it worked!

Before too long I’d been sober for several months and had several friends, and some of them were cute girls! The Jesus thing was working out really well, and I was too busy to know whether I was actually happy or not. After five or six months, however, things began to deteriorate. The symptoms, as I recall, were mainly the inability to concentrate, trouble sleeping, and fatigue in general. Today it’s pretty easy to see that I was depressed. I saw it then too. When I told a “strong Christian” I was depressed, he looked at me in amazement (disgust?) and wanted to know how I could be depressed knowing that Jesus had died for my sins and that I had eternal life? I didn’t have an answer for him.

Nevertheless I held on. Unfortunately, being the alcoholic/addict that I was, I knew what to do about extreme emotional discomfort. It’s what I’d done as often as possible for most of the past 10 years. That, of course, was to self-medicate with booze and drugs. And after several miserable weeks, I gave up the fight and got drunk. It happened a couple more times over a relatively short period. To say that my new Christian friends, not to mention my family, were shocked would be something of an understatement.

One of the more enlightened (and cuter) church girls I’d met was a medical social worker, and while she was surprised that the Jesus cure wasn’t working, knew that there were other, more tried and true methods for dealing with addiction. Because of her encouragement, and my sincere desire to leave my past behind, I entered a treatment program. Unfortunately I wasn’t ready, as they say, and my initial treatment, back when we still called it treatment and not rehab, was a miserable and expensive experience.

It started out as outpatient therapy. I won’t rehash it, but my emotional state deteriorated over what I think was the six week course of the program. I abstained, though, until a day or two before graduation. That relapse, which was the new term I’d learned for returning to drink and drug, began when I was just about to turn into the treatment center and an Allman Brothers tune came on the radio. At what at that time I thought was a moment of clarity, I ran away to Atlanta and got on cocaine for a week.