Fossilized Fuel

I remember the day my oldest friend told me, “Ames, maybe you’re the kind of person who can’t drink at all.” It was a great shock to me, sort of like somebody suggesting I could go without a kidney or some other body part, a concept so foreign it never fully registered. Like a magnet with an opposite charge, the idea easily bounced off my hungover brain, loitered in the dank air of my darkened apartment, then simply fell to the floor, pushed to a corner where it would linger, gathering dust, for another couple of years until it was the only thing left to try.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see why my friend made that suggestion. He’d come to visit me late on a Sunday afternoon many years ago. The doorbell had hurried me out of a deep sleep (otherwise known as having passed out the night before), and when he walked in I was half-dressed, half-awake, and, seemingly, half-alive. The lights were out (courtesy of Con Edison’s billing department), the shades were drawn, and the floor was a tumult of dirty clothes, old newspapers, empty beer cans, and half-eaten containers of Chinese food.

Looking around, my friend queried, “Been drinking?” And while my brain wasn’t nearly running at its peak, I did recognize this to be a dangerous question and responded with the only answer possible at the time, my standard default to any question about my drinking, “I just had a few beers.”

Nick’s eyebrows raised, he coughed a little bit into his fist, and then proceeded with the aforementioned suggestion, tossing it out there like a flower petal on a still pond.

In many ways, I’m grateful that he did. While I completely ignored it, of course, it was the first time anybody had ever suggested to me that my drinking had reached a point where perhaps I shouldn’t do it at all and, well below the level of consciousness, his observation stayed with me, a fossilized piece of shale bearing the imprint of truth. But, like many alcoholics, I still had the illusion that I was calling the shots and I simply wasn’t ready to stop.

When my world shook apart some years later with seismic force, however, that obscure suggestion was unearthed, lifted up out of the sediment that had covered it over, delivered across a fault line into my lap. With the illusion of control finally smashed, drinking nothing at all seemed the only logical way out, and while it still felt like losing a limb or an internal organ, I could at least sense that it was the right thing to do.

And so, that’s what I’ve done, with the help of a multitude of others who have found themselves in the same boat: I have stayed away from the first drink, one day at a time. Every so often in my sobriety, however, I have moments, ancient longings for the chaos and the pain associated with my alcoholism, much like the sensation of a phantom limb—aching with the remembrance of that long-ago ability to simply push everything out of my consciousness—even, and especially, the truth—for a few moments of numbness and the groggy half-world of awareness that I inhabited.

But those moments pass and I return to the realization that what’s true in my life eventually rises up to the surface, regardless of my often ill-advised efforts at shoving it back down.

My friend was right. I am the kind of person who can’t drink at all. And I’m grateful now to know it.