Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell Read Free Book Online Page A

did I drink? When my therapist asked me this several years after I had stopped, I thought it one of the most ludicrous questions I had ever heard. Why
wouldn’t
one drink? I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I shrugged and answered as honestly as I knew how. “Be
cauuse
,” I said, with a little scorn. “The whole world turned golden.” It took me hearing the words out loud to realize that the hue of the sublime had itself been an indicator of trouble.
    A few professionals over the years had made feeble efforts to address the problem; in Texas in the 1970s, “substance abuse” wasn’t even a phrase yet. My last couple of years in graduate school, I went to see a nice woman psychologist to address, or so I thought, the ordinary stresses of work and love: I was in a demanding academic program, I had just broken up with someone, I was having difficulty sleeping. We ate Milano cookies together, the therapist and I, and laughed about how hard life was. “I think I drink too much,” I said one day. “I’m throwing down five or six glasses of whiskey a night. Maybe I need to check in to Shoal Creek.” Shoal Creek was the psych hospital in Austin where people went to dry out; a lawyer I’d worked for (and who taught me how to drink scotch and eat raw oysters) had considered it his spa. “Theywouldn’t take you,” my lovely, nonconfrontational therapist said. “You look too good.”
    By which she meant that I was still vertical, still functioning in superdrive, and that I hadn’t yet had the external calamities that suggested a problem: no drunk driving citations, crashed marriages, employment woes. The same year I had a routine physical with a male internist who was less benevolent and more obtuse. When he asked me how much I drank, I told him about four drinks a night, not yet aware that the medical profession’s rule of thumb, if a patient’s consumption seemed problematic, was to double whatever quantity the patient confessed. “You’ll want to be careful with that,” he said, refusing to look me in the eye. “There’s nothing more unbecoming than a young lady who drinks too much.”
    Such idiocies only fueled my intake. I was in my late twenties by then, a veteran of the counterculture and the women’s movement, and I clung to the belief that my drinking was part of the sine qua non of a new day—it was how women like me functioned in the world; it was an anesthetic for high-strung sensitivity and a lubricant for creativity. The alternative truth was far grimmer. Alcoholics—a word I couldn’t even think of without shame and terror—were broken people who had drunk themselves into a corner, and the only way out for them was to give up the drink. That was unthinkable to me, a gray, gray room without any highs or relief or evenchange, and so I clung for years to what I believed was the border between alcoholism and drinking to excess. Every time I voiced my fears it was in the guise of humor, or machismo, or nonchalant rebellion. “I’m afraid that if I stopped drinking, I wouldn’t be interesting anymore,” I said offhandedly to a friend in Austin, an RN whose father had died of alcoholism after sitting in a chair surrounded by beer cans for decades. “Don’t be so sure,” she told me. “Day in and day out, boring is where all alcoholics are headed.”
    No one whose first allegiance is to the source of the problem can hear such warnings, at least not until they’ve dragged themselves through a few miles of broken glass. Help in its most benign and unthreatening form—if there is even such a thing for an alcoholic—wasn’t exactly beating down the door; if it had, I’d probably have moved out in the middle of the night. I didn’t want help; I wanted reassurance. Which is to say that I wanted the consolation, however transient or artificial, that I would be able to drink forever and get away with it. It’s like the old joke about the guy on the desert island with the genie who offers