OldTroubador's blog post - The answer to the countdown - An Anniversary

It is the month of September. There are two anniversaries for me in this month; one I shared with you last year and one I will share with you now. This second anniversary is much happier than the one I wrote about last time.
I started drinking at sixteen years of age (that was 1978 for those keeping score) at a party my sophomore year in high school. I didn’t do much with it really for another year, but my junior year in high school saw a marked increase in my alcohol consumption. Just about every other weekend saw me going to a beer bash somewhere. By the time I hit my senior year, I was an accomplished weekend alcoholic – getting drunk for most of the weekend and then spending a good bit of the school week trying to figure out with my friends what exactly we did. Friday night would come around, and we would start all over. There was a liquor store near the house that cared only about the color of our money – I never got carded. On Monday nights, when our school jazz band would practice; the seniors would all buy a couple of six packs and, as long as we each gave a can or bottle to the director, we could sip beer during the practice, then hang out in the parking lot drinking the rest.
I went off to college in the fall of 1980. At first, I stayed away from the beer, but soon found an upperclassman who would go on a beer run for me and a few of my friends. Fraternity rush followed and that meant unlimited amounts of free beer and whiskey. I was pretty much stuporous from Friday night through Sunday. My upperclass friend would make beer runs for me during the week and by spring semester, I would drink by myself all night, sleep all day, and to hell with my classes. Needless to say, in May, I had to explain to my parents that I had flunked out, but would be staying in the Gettysburg, PA area to look for work.
During this time, I also learned about drinking cheap whiskey, rum, vodka, southern comfort, gin, and a variety of other liquors. One April night in particular stands out. Some friends were having a rum and coke party and invited me over for it. I drank my share, and then some, to the point I don’t remember much of anything. I was told later that I stole a friend’s Mo-Ped and rode it around campus for the longest time. I finally wrecked the bike and hefted it into a dumpster behind the local pizza joint. I went to the fraternity house to sleep, I guess, but started hallucinating about things crawling on me and was thrown into a shower to bring me to some level of sanity. This was my first, but not my last, brush with blacking out.
In late August, I finally found a job at a book printing factory. After a few weeks, I was invited to go to a local bar with my lead operator and a few others from work. Protesting that I was xxxxxxxx, I was told that the owner didn’t much care. If I was a working man, age meant nothing. Soon, a pattern of working a shift, drinking a shift, then sleeping it off became the norm. That bar was closed by the state eventually, not for serving xxxxxxxx drinkers though. We found another bar that had just opened and would serve beer, whiskey, and hamburgers to anyone coming off shift, no matter if shift ended at midnight, 8am, or 4pm. The cycle continued for the next five years I lived and worked there.
I was going to chronicle my downward spiral into the cans of beer and bottles of whiskey, the blackouts, the lost weekends, the women I left behind because I would rather drink, but there is no need. Skipping ahead about eight years, I was living on my own again, having had two fiancés leave me. I was in a nice brick ranch that I was renting from the company I worked for. I had about a three minute walk to work. I was feeling the loneliness of living alone. I was drinking a lot of beer, as I always had, but was also drinking a lot of whiskey and tequila. I soon became tired of the beer so Jack Daniels and Jose Cuervo became my best friends. For years, I would drink myself to sleep. Mornings were rough, trying to get started until one day I decided to try the ‘hair of the dog’ cure. It worked wonders, like it always had. I walked to work with a spring in my step and a smile on my face. This soon became as normal to me as showering in the morning, or brushing my teeth. Mornings, I would have a shot or two of Tennessee’s finest, then pour a cup of coffee and add a shot of whiskey to it. It progressed to the point that I would walk home at lunch, have a couple more shooters to tide me over, walk back to work and count down the hours until 5pm. That is when the real drinking started. I would pour a couple of drinks then head into town to get supper, always to go, so I could get back to the house and wash my burgers down with more booze. Sometimes it was Jack, other days it was Jose, but either way I went, a bottle was destined to be empty by the time I passed out. I passed out on my floor, in the yard, on my deck, wherever I happened to land. Pressures at work became greater, certainly due to the fact I was rarely sober, and the drinking increased.
Jimmy Buffet came to Raleigh and friends picked up tickets. I started the evening by buying a magnum each of JD and Jose Gold. I nipped at the Jack on the way to the pre-concert party, then pulled from each bottle the rest of the evening. By the time we all got to the concert, I was polluted. I couldn’t tell you for sure if Buffet even showed up. Friends were bringing back margaritas for me because I couldn’t walk to the concession. After, they poured me into a vehicle for the ride back and I kept tugging on both my bottles. When they opened the door for me, I fell out of the truck and landed in the gravel driveway, getting torn and bloody in the process. I crawled to the front porch, where a couple of the ladies stemmed the bleeding and I finally fell asleep/passed out/went comatose.
My drinking never slowed down after this. For the next year, I would wake up and drink, take a break from work and drink, come home in the evening and drink. A bottle a night or more would find its way into my trash. Weekends were one long drunken haze – I didn’t have to stop drinking for something as inconsequential as work. Then came the fateful morning I woke up and there was not a drop to drink. I had run out of booze. In a single moment of lucidity, I realized that what I was doing was a shitty way to go through life. I decided then and there to quit drinking. Cold turkey. On my own. No 12-step program, no clinics, no sobriety buddies to call on, just tough it out. That was the worst three to four weeks of my life – I had the shakes so bad, I could not sign my name to anything. I didn’t sleep much during this time because my body did not know how to relax without being inebriated. But I did it. To let you know how far I had sunk, I could not at the time, nor now, remember exactly which day it was that I quit. I do know, from the dates of events I attended soon after, that it had to be in September of 1994. I was 32 years old, and half my life was spent thinking about where and when my next drink was coming from. So the whole month is now a celebration of sobriety for me, 19 years clean and sober.
Back then, I thought one had to drink to be a man. I thought courage, fortitude, fun, and answers could be found in a bottle. But I realized that courage was leaving the cork in the bottle, fortitude came from within, fun was what I made of it, and some questions were just never to be answered. I became a man the day I quit drinking.
Every day is still a battle to stay out of the bottle. Some days are easier than others. Some are tougher, and I really need to think of a reason to NOT buy a drink. On really hot days, I can still taste the cold beer flowing down my throat. I can still taste the whiskey, smell the oaken aroma. But the memory of them is all I will ever have. I worked hard to get off the booze; it was one of the toughest roads I ever traveled, and I will not backslide. I know that I have an addictive personality and know that one drink, one little beer, and I will be right back where I was 19 years ago. I quit drinking in ’94 and have not looked back.
One footnote – Another one of our own is celebrating her sobriety too. SexyBitch76 is 70 days clean and sober. Congratulations SB and may you fill a treasure chest with all your gold coins.