2.
I first sobered up back in 1987. After several alcohol related incidents involving Military Police, urinating in inappropriate places, and AWOL, the Army decided that I had a drinking problem and sent me to alcohol rehab at Tripler Army Medical Center.
Only 22 years old at the time, I could already see the self-destructive influence alcohol had had in my life, so I was enthusiastic about sobriety. My father and grandfather had both been alcoholics and had both gotten sober. After each of my early adolescent adventures with alcohol, like when I would meet my father at his front door accompanied by a uniformed escort, my dad
I met a woman Marine in the rooms of a 12 step program. My attraction to her kept me coming back to the meetings and eventually we got married. But, after we were married for a couple of years, I stopped going to meetings. The people in the meetings told me I needed a Higher Power, and I'd found her. What did I need meetings for. Of course, my marriage didn't last and neither did my sobriety.
My marriage ended in ‘96, the year I returned to school and the year I rediscovered pakalolo (literally “crazy tobacco”) and started getting high a few times a year. One one hand, I was trying to hold it together...law school was hard and I knew I couldn’t do it if I were drinking. On the other hand, there was nothing I wanted more than to be able to drink like a gentleman, to lose my inhibitions a bit but not loose complete control. Most of my fellow students at U.H were about ten years younger than me, good students, but they still knew how to party and have a good time. Smoking a little weed was my compromise.
I finally let the genie out of the bottle during my last year of law school. Disaster didn’t strike right away, it waited a couple months. I was arrested for my first DUI a few weeks before taking the bar exam.
For a few years I bounced in and out of the 12 step fellowship, always on the verge of completely fucking my life to shit, but never quite succeeding. I started treatment a couple of times but never finished it.
Still working for the DOE, my attendance record at work was terrible. As a state employee, I was allowed 22 sick days per year and I used nearly all of them. Sometimes, afraid to call in sick yet again, I would stop on the way to work and pick up a small bottle of vodka and some chewing gum just to get through the day.
It must have been just a week or two into 2004 when my bosses confronted me on my absences and told me that some of my colleagues were concerned. Pauline said some had told her that they had smelt alcohol on me in IEP meetings. John really liked me and, he said, I did a good job when I showed up sober, but I’d have to get my act together if I didn’t want to face disciplinary action.
I confessed to John and Pauline, the two administrators I reported to, that yes, I’d been struggling with alcohol, but I was seeking help again and going to meetings. I was sincerely contrite, as I always was when I had to face the consequences of my drinking. And I knew at some level that being sorry was not enough to keep me sober.
John and Pauline were kind to me, but I wasn’t sure that their threat of “disciplinary action” would keep me sober either. I was a union member after all. It would take a major fuck-up on my part for me to get fired...probably a series of fuck-ups. The already familiar sense of overwhelming dread intensified. My self-destruction seemed inevitable.
No comments:
Post a Comment