My last ever drink
Phil Quin adored drinking. Even when the physical and emotional damage became untenable, he says booze never let him down. Here he comes to terms with his past and knows that although nothing has matched booze’s knack for coaxing him into believing all’s
The most surprising thing about my tumultuous but all-consuming love affair with grog is how timidly it all came to an end.
My Last Ever Drink, a long anticipated and much scoffed at affair, took place on the stroke of midnight, October 2nd, 2006. Emerging from my Last Ever Alcoholic Coma that morning, I finally took the bed in a Melbourne detox facility I had reserved several wildly booze-soaked months earlier.
Tremors of withdrawal and craving made it impossible to scrawl my signature on the admission forms, but the kindly male nurse told me, like a seasoned pro, we could wait until the 20 milligrams of Valium he had just administered took effect.
Aside from an unfortunate miscommunication in a Bangkok Irish pub during an All Blacks match, when my lime and soda came with two unsolicited shots of vodka, I haven’t touched a drop since.
I adored drinking, never really resisting its hold over me. Even by the end, when the physical and emotional damage became untenable, booze never let me down.
Among all that’s happened since – the flush of new romance, career accomplishments, a pictureperfect life in New York, all made possible by sobriety – I have yet to replicate, even once, the sense of wellbeing that washed over me between the fourth and eighth beer on any given Tuesday of my drinking life.
By the end of my decade-and-a-half long bender, the shakes were bad enough I couldn’t get the first couple of drinks from glass to mouth without spilling it everywhere. The trick was to make a quick diversion home en route from work to pub, improvise a sling from a bath-towel or T-shirt to hold one arm steadily in place, and wrestle to my lips a sufficient quantity to quell the shakes: precisely two cans of beer.
Newly settled, steady as a surgeon, I would arrive minutes later at my favourite watering hole – the Rising Sun in the inner Melbourne suburb of Richmond turned out to be the last in a series of locals – whereupon I would consume 20 or 30 pots of Carlton Draught.
That’s between 15 and 18 pints – or roughly
8 litres of beer. One day in 20, perhaps having pushed my luck at work to the nth degree, I might convince myself to take it easy. This meant staying clear of the pub and keeping my intake to a dozen or so cans – or until I was drunk enough to sleep.
A futile but insistent habit of my so-called recovery is to sort endlessly through the debris of what came before, rearranging shards of memory like stray jigsaw pieces, scarce and scattered across
15 mostly unremembered years.
Little reveals itself, unless you count a stubborn ambivalence: Drinking, and ceasing to drink, are totemic events in my adult life, but the familiar narrative arc, with its crescendo of recovery and redemption, eludes me. Instead, the question that burns most, and shames me to put into words, is not why I chose to drink myself to an early grave – the reasons for doing so were abundant and obvious, even at the time – but why instead I stopped.
Before booze, in my late teens and early twenties, I was outwardly ambitious and supremely self-assured, enough to irritate myself considerably in retrospect. Active in politics and elected to my local city council at the age of 19, the future brimmed with promise.
And yet I was paralysed in mute turmoil over my homosexuality — a source of deep foreboding I refused to confront until I was 27, after three years of marriage. Even with the superhuman equanimity of my former wife, and the love and acceptance of friends and family, coming out was a profound trauma. I hated being gay – everything about it – and had convinced myself, to unreachable depths, that it ended any prospect of a purposeful life.
And so, escaping my hometown of Wellington for Melbourne, I gave alcohol my undivided embrace – days into weeks into months into years, drinking through and over and underneath everything.
As consumption escalated, health, finances, career and relationships duly suffered – but nothing before or since has matched booze’s knack for coaxing me into believing all’s right with the world. I was a good drunk, insofar as there is such a thing. Never weepy or obstreperous. Never threw a punch or made a pass. Until blacking out (every night, without fail), I was generous and sociable and reliably euphoric.
The view that alcoholism is a hereditary disease for which abstinence is the only cure has congealed into accepted wisdom over the past century, not least among addicts themselves.
It’s a hypothesis that works better as metaphor than scientific or medical fact.
Claude Steele, a social psychologist at Stanford University who has done pioneering research in the field, told me a few years back that the disease theory is ‘‘primarily the product of wishful thinking, not science, because as far as anyone knows, there is no evidence that alcoholism is hereditary in a strict genetic sense.’’
And yet, no matter how robust or conclusive the contradictory evidence, the appealing idea that an alcoholic was born with a pre-existing medical condition – that his or her addiction is an immutable fact of life – seems impossible to shake.
It is a gripping storyline. To a newly minted sober drunk, arriving edgy and self-conscious to their first AA meeting, the appeal of the disease theory is obvious: ‘‘We are like diabetics and our insulin is abstinence!’’ The shambles you have made of your life – not to mention the untold collateral damage on others – is, at least partly, beyond your control. For families and loved ones, as well as for the community at large, the disease theory holds sway because it demystifies the otherwise senseless choices addicts make.
I’ve long been troubled by many of AA’s foundational ideas: That they grant quasi-mystical powers to the abused substance – alcohol in my case – while downplaying the psychological factors that compel the addict to abuse; the insistence that the sufferer engages in irrational and selfdestructive acts for reasons beyond their control; and, most egregiously, subservience to a ‘‘higher power’’ which, for all their dogged denials, really means the Protestant conception of God.
AA has doubtless saved many lives by offering addicts respite, positive reinforcement and camaraderie, but its core assertions strike me as all wrong. Alcohol has the power only to sit, inert, in bottles and glasses until free agents pour it down willing throats. I did not drink in spite of its mindscrambling effects, but because of them – consciously seeking out the haze. Yes, drinking in such reckless quantities was killing me, but such a death was far less troubling than the pitiless clarity of a sober existence.
Even as bouts of depression have grown in frequency and duration in the years since, I’ve barely endured a single craving. Don’t ask me why. For all that I reject the claims of AA, I followed their prescribed abstinence path – in part because I haven’t been tempted otherwise, but mostly because ‘‘moderate drinking’’ alternatives carry no appeal whatsoever. Nothing makes less sense to me than a half-finished bottle of wine.
Afew years sober, I moved from Melbourne to New York City, taking an apartment on the Upper West Side and a job in Greenwich Village. Later, I picked up some consulting work in East Africa, moving back and forth between Rwanda and New York. I was, on paper, living the dream. Hitting the gym with the monomaniacal focus only a recovering addict can summon, I lost weight, grew a fleeting six-pack. I even managed a semi-serious relationship until his patience ran out.
But, during bouts of depression, I can’t help feeling as if I’ve travelled full circle, back to the point at which I first deemed drinking myself into a daily stupor preferable to not doing so. And yet I won’t be tempted. Booze would quickly overwhelm my life again, and the thought alone leaves me exhausted.
I had hoped recovery from alcoholism would transform my life, give it meaning and purpose. A necessary delusion en route to recovery, I guess.
But, as it turned out, alcohol for me was a means of distraction, a way to shut down the turmoil long enough to get from one hazy night to the next. It played havoc with my life, but it also made it bearable as a day-to-day proposition.
That, for me, is the essential paradox, the heretical insight, that came with sobriety: On its way to killing me, booze had helped me stay alive.
I was a good drunk, insofar as there is such a thing. Never weepy or obstreperous. Never threw a punch or made a pass. Until blacking out (every night, without fail), I was generous and sociable and reliably euphoric.
‘‘Moderate drinking’’ alternatives carry no appeal whatsoever. Nothing makes less sense to me than a halffinished bottle of wine.