26
IN AUGUST 1979, I took my last drink. It was about four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, the hot sun streaming through the windows of my little carriage house behind the Four Farthings on Dickens. I put a glass of scotch and soda down on the living room table, went to bed, and pulled the blankets over my head. I couldn’t take it anymore. I visited old Dr. Jakub Schlichter, recommended by Zonka, because when I discussed drinking with my previous doctor he said unhelpfully, “I know what you mean. With me, it’s martinis.” Schlichter, a refugee from Nazism, advised me to go to “AAA,” which is what he called it. I said I didn’t need to go to any meetings. I would stop drinking on my own. He told me, “Go right ahead. Check in with me every month.”
The problem with using willpower was that it lasted only until my will persuaded me I could take another drink. At about this time I was reading The Art of Eating by M. F. K. Fisher, who wrote: “One martini is just right. Two martinis are too many. Three martinis are never enough.” The problem with making resolutions is that you’re sober when you take the first drink, have had a drink when you take the second one, and so on. I found it almost impossible, once I started, to stop after one or two. If I could, I would continue until I decided I was finished. The next day I paid a price in hangovers. I’ve known a couple of heavy drinkers who claimed they never had hangovers. I didn’t believe them. Without hangovers, it is possible that I would still be drinking. I would also be unemployed, unmarried, and probably dead. Most alcoholics continue to drink as long as they can. Unlike most drugs, alcohol allows you to continue for what remains of your life, barring an accident. The lucky ones find their bottom and surrender.
That afternoon after I pulled the covers over my head, I stayed in bed for thirteen hours. On the Sunday I poured out the rest of the drink, which at the time I had no idea would be my last. I sat around the house not making any vows to myself but somehow just waiting. On Monday, I went to see Dr. Schlichter. He nodded as if he had been expecting this and said, “I want you to talk to a man at Grant Hospital. They have an excellent program.” He picked up his phone and an hour later I was in the man’s office. He asked me the usual questions, said the important thing was that I thought I had a problem, and asked me if I had packed and was ready to move into their rehab program.
“Hold on a second,” I said. “I didn’t come here to check into anything. I just came to talk to you.”
He said they were strictly inpatient.
“I have a job,” I said. “I can’t leave it.” He doubted that, but asked me to meet with one of their counselors.
This woman, I will call her Susan, had an office on Lincoln Avenue in a medical building across the street from Somebody Else’s Troubles, which was well known to me. She said few people stayed sober for long without AA. I said the meetings didn’t fit with my schedule and I didn’t know where any were. She looked in a booklet. “Here’s one at 401 North Wabash,” she said. “Do you know where that is?” I confessed it was the Chicago Sun-Times building. “They have a meeting in the fourth-floor auditorium,” she said. It was ten steps from my desk. “There’s one today, starting in an hour. Can you be there?”
She had me.
Once in the building, I was very nervous. I stopped in the men’s room across the hall to splash water on my face and walked into the room. Maybe thirty people were seated around a table. I knew one of them. I sat and listened. The guy next to me got applause when he said he’d been sober for a month. Another guy said five years. I believed the guy next to me. They gave me the same list of meetings Susan had consulted. Two day later I flew to Toronto for the film festival. At least here no one knew me. I looked up AA in the phone book and they told me there was a meeting in a church hall across Bloor Street from my hotel. I went to so many Toronto meetings in the next week that when I returned to Chicago, I considered myself a member.
Susan was unconvinced that I was fully a member, however, and told me she’d seen too many relapses after an early glow of victory. I’d never before stopped for long. She required me to begin taking a daily dose of Antabuse, a drug said to cause great distress when combined with drinking. Perhaps it was a similar drug that my mother slipped to my father before I was born, when Aunt Martha remembered him being too sick to move. Whatever it was, he never drank again. There were rules involving Antabuse. I was not allowed to take it myself. I had to find a Helping Person to hold the bottle of pills, give me one every day, and call Susan the first day I missed one. Part of this policy, she said, was designed to help me admit my alcoholism to another person and be willing to ask for help.
It was no use asking drinking friends. They’re a lot friendlier late at night than after awaking in the morning. I went to see Sue Gin, the Chinese-American woman who owned the Four Farthings and had sold me the coach house. Sue had been born above a Chinese restaurant in Aurora, became one of the first Playboy bunnies at eighteen, used the money to put herself through college, got a real estate license, and at the time I met her owned and managed a lot of rental properties in the Lincoln Park area, as well as the bar, Café Bernard on Halsted, and a bakery. These she managed more or less by herself.
When she started buying real estate along Halsted, it was a no-go area plagued by gangs and drug dealers. She was a barely drinking honorary member of the O’Rourke’s crowd, and we all went to the opening of the French bistro she opened with a chef named Bernard LeCoq. This was the first outpost of gentrification on a rough stretch of Halsted, Tom Fitzpatrick distinguishing himself by getting into a fight. A lesser woman would have been furious that her opening had been disrupted. Sue had an instinctive feel for people. She told me, “I filled it with a freebie for newspaper people and a few radio and TV. Not the food critics, not the straight arrows, but you guys who all hang out together. So Fitz got in a fight. I didn’t like it, but tomorrow that will be all over town. How else will anybody hear about a French restaurant in the middle of nowhere?” This was true enough, and although I can no longer eat, Café Bernard is still there, almost forty years later. Sue has an instinct for synergy.
One day she took me along to buy a tuckpointing company a few doors down from Bernard. We entered the shabby old building with its garage opening onto the galley, and she heard the elderly owner’s story about his life in tuckpointing. She cross-examined him, saying she thought there was a future in tuckpointing. He sold her his building and business for what must have been close to its market value. “Are you really going into tuckpointing?” I asked her. “I sure am. I’m starting Monday.” On Monday, the Four Farthings building, a four-floor structure containing eight large flats, was surrounded by the tuckpointers of her new company. Within a year the former garage was a storefront for one of the early stores of the Gap. When she bought the old bakery on Armitage, however, she kept it in business, supplied restaurants, and used it as the base for a company she named Flying Food Fare, which supplied in-flight meals to Midwest Airlines. She met one of its owners, Bill McGowan, who was to found MCI, one of the first competitors to AT&T. They fell in love. Sue had never been married, and I knew her well enough to see this was the real thing. They began to shuttle between Chicago and Washington. A few times she brought him along to dinner with some of her newspaper pals, who’d started favoring the Farthings as a fourth angle in the Bermuda Triangle. They invited a planeload of friends on a trip to Ireland, and at a dinner there McGowan’s brother, a priest, announced that a year earlier he had married them. Some years later McGowan became an early recipient of a heart transplant, and Sue Gin became an expert on the procedure and its leading practitioners. All this time running her little empire, as nearly as anyone could tell, out of her head. She rehabilitated a few white-collar drinkers from the Farthings and put them back to work for her as architects or accountants.
All of this was still ahead on the morning I walked across my yard to the Farthings building and climbed four flights to Sue’s sunny kitchen to receive my first Antabuse pill. She had coffee waiting, and pastries from her bakery. Every morning we repeated this ritual. If I overslept she woke me on the phone: “Rog! Time for your medicine!” She reported back to my counselor at the end of every week. Sue was brash and direct, analytical, always networking. She quizzed me on alcoholism, went to a meeting with me, and started working on some of her rescue cases in the bar downstairs. She drank, but very sparingly. She was comfortable in bars. When she looked at a customer and told him he was drunk, the customer believed her. Eventually I told Susan the counselor I wanted to get off Antabuse because I was in love with AA and it made me feel like a fraud at meetings. I have a feeling Sue kept an eye on me for my counselor.
Sue was possibly the only person I could have asked at that time to help me. At a bad time in my life, she was very helpful to me. She helped a lot of people. We occasionally see each other, more rarely these days, maybe at a benefit. “How you doing, Rog?” she asks, smiling, and we know what she means.
An AA meeting usually begins with a recovering alcoholic telling his “drunkalog,” the story of his drinking days and how he eventually hit bottom. What’s said in the room stays in the room. You may be wondering, in fact, why I’m violating the AA policy of anonymity and outing myself. AA is anonymous not because of shame but because of prudence; people who go public with their newly found sobriety have an alarming tendency to relapse. Consider those pathetic celebrities who check into rehab and hold a press conference. Anonymity encourages humility. People who tell everyone they’ve gone two weeks without a drink are on thin ice. When I decided to out myself as a recovering alcoholic, I hadn’t taken a drink for thirty-one years, and since my first AA meeting I attended, I have never wanted to. Since surgery in July of 2006 I haven’t been able to drink at all, or eat or speak. Unless I go insane and start pouring booze into my G-tube, I believe I’m reasonably safe.
I have seen that AA works. It is free, everywhere, and has no one in charge. It consists of the people gathered in that room at that time, many often unknown to one another. The rooms are arranged by volunteers. I have attended meetings in church basements, schoolrooms, a courtroom, a hospital, a jail, banks, beaches, living rooms, the back rooms of restaurants, and on board the Queen Elizabeth II. There’s usually coffee. Sometimes someone brings cookies. We sit around, we hear the speaker, and then those who want to comment do. Nobody has to speak. Rules are, you don’t interrupt anyone, and you don’t look for arguments. We say, “Don’t take someone else’s inventory.” There are some who have problems with Alcoholics Anonymous. They don’t like the spiritual side, or they think it’s a “cult,” or feel they’ll do fine on their own, thank you very much. The last thing I want to do is start an argument about AA. I tell people, don’t go if you don’t want to. It’s there if you need it. In most cities, there’s a meeting starting in an hour fairly close to you. It works for me. That’s all I know. I don’t want to argue about it.
What a good doctor and good man Jakub Schlichter was. He was in one of those classic office buildings in the Loop, filled with dentists and jewelers. He was a gifted general practitioner. An appointment lasted an hour. The first half hour was devoted to conversation. He had a thick Physicians’ Desk Reference on his desk and liked to pat it. “There are twelve drugs in there,” he said, “that we know work for sure. The best one is aspirin.” One day, after a month of sobriety, I went to see him because I feared I had grown too elated with the realization that I need not drink again. I had started needing only a few hours of sleep a night, began to see coincidences everywhere, started to find hidden AA messages in Johnny Cash songs. I was continually in heat.
“Maybe I’m manic-depressive,” I told him. “Maybe I need lithium.”
“Alcohol is a depressant,” he told me. “When you hold the balloon under the water and suddenly release it, it is eager to pop up quickly.” I nodded.
“Yes,” I said, “but I’m too excited. I’m in constant motion. I’d give anything just to feel a little bored.”
“Lois, will you be so kind as to come in here?” he called to his wife. She appeared, an elegant Jewish mother.
“Lois, I want you to open a little can of grapefruit segments for Roger. I know you have a bowl and a spoon.” His wife came back with the grapefruit. I ate the segments. He watched me closely. “You still have your appetite,” he said. “When you feel restless, take a good walk in the park. Call me if it doesn’t work.” It worked. I knew walking was a treatment for depression, but I didn’t know it also worked the other way.
That was the beginning of a long adventure. I came to love the program and the friends I was making through meetings, some of whom are close friends to this day. I made friends at meetings in London, Edinburgh, Paris, New York, Cannes, Park City, Telluride, Cape Town, and Los Angeles. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. What I hadn’t expected was that AA was virtual theater. As we went around the room with our comments, I was able to see into lives I had never glimpsed before. The Mustard Seed, the lower floor of a two-flat near Rush Street, had meetings from seven a.m. to ten p.m., and all-nighters on Christmas and New Years’ eves. There I met people from every walk of life, and we all talked easily with one another because we were all there for the same reason, and that cut through the bullshit. One was Humble Howard, who liked to perform a dramatic reading from his driver’s license—name, address, age, color of hair and eyes. He explained, “That’s because I didn’t have an address for five years.”
When I mention Humble Howard, you’re possibly thinking you wouldn’t be caught dead at a meeting where someone did dramatic readings from his driver’s license. He was as funny as a stand-up comedian. I realized that I’d tended to avoid people because of superficial judgments about who they were and what they would have to say. AA members who looked like bag ladies would relate what their lives used to be like, what happened, and what they were like now. Such people were often more eloquent than slick young professionals. I discovered that everyone, speaking honestly and openly, had important things to tell me. The program was bottom-line democracy.
Yes, I heard some amazing drunkalogs. A native American who crawled out from under an abandoned car one morning after years on the street, and without premeditation walked up to a cop and asked where he could find an AA meeting. And the cop said, “Follow those people going in over there?” A 1960s hippie whose VW van broke down on a remote road in Alaska. She started walking down a frozen riverbed, thought she heard bells ringing, and sat down to freeze to death. The bells were on a sleigh. The couple on the sleigh took her home with them, and then to an AA meeting. A priest who eavesdropped on his first meeting by hiding in the janitor’s closet of his own church hall. Lots of people who had come to AA after rehab. Lots who just walked in through the door. No one who had been “sent by the judge,” because in Chicago, AA didn’t play that game: “If you don’t want to be here, don’t come.”
Funny things happened. In those days I was the movie critic for a 10:00 p.m. newscast on one of the local stations. The anchor was an AA member. So was one of the reporters. After we got off work, we went to the 11:00 p.m. meeting at the Mustard Seed. There were maybe a dozen others there. The anchor took the chair and asked if anyone was attending his or her first meeting. A guy said, “I am. But instead I should be in a psych ward. I was just watching the news, and right now I’m hallucinating that two of those people are in this room.”
AA has “open meetings” to which you can bring friends or relatives, but most meetings are closed: “Who you see here, what you hear here, let it stay here.” By closed, I mean closed. I told Eppie Lederer that I was now in the program. She said, “I haven’t been to one of those meetings in a long time. I want you to take me to one.” Her limousine picked me up at home, and we were driven to the Old Town meeting, a closed meeting. I went in first, to ask permission to bring in Ann Landers. I was voted down. I went back to the limo and broke the news to her.
“Now I’ve heard everything!” Eppie said. “Ann Landers can’t get into an AA meeting!”
Alcoholism is a family disease. My father had a drinking problem before I was born, and my mother began to drink for the first time in her life during her marriage to George Michael. I was by then living in Chicago and drinking too much myself, and at times I welcomed this, because we drank together. This led to conversations of unprecedented frankness and occasional recriminations. Whatever was said, she simply dismissed it the next day. I came to dread her visits to Chicago. I didn’t want her to see me drunk, although she did.
After joining AA, I understand alcoholism better and realize that my father was an alcoholic who stopped before I was born, my mother was after he died, and I was from the time I took my first drink. The disease caused deep wounds, driving me into a personal life of evasion, denial, and concealment, and keeping me unmarried for an unnatural length of time. Did I know drinking made me unmarriageable, or did I simply put drinking ahead of marriage?