Sunday, October 17, 1999
Young drinkers: Here's what it's like to be an alcoholic
BY PAUL DAUGHERTY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Fred is back at work three days a week, waiting tables at an Italian restaurant in Tucson, Ariz. God gave him another chance, he says. His aim is not to mess this one up.
It's good and it's bad, Fred working. “It gives him a purpose,” says his wife, Becky. But it puts him back with his old friends, the drinking buddies who tossed him off the wagon a second time two years ago. That was when it got so bad, Fred tried to kill himself. The alcohol was an eternal black hole, pulling him down. He stood in front of Becky and drank a container of drain cleaner.
You should know that Fred is my best friend. You should also know that we spent lots of our late youth and early adulthood drinking. Beer, mostly. Miller High Life usually. We loved the clear bottles. But also malt liquor, and gin and tonics in summertime.
I see these images on TV now, of high school and college kids stumbling around on an alcohol high, and 25 years later, they look as fresh as yesterday. That was me and Fred.
Fred never grew out of it. He graduated from college, moved to Arizona, waited tables at a resort. He worked the dinner shift. When he was done, 11:30 or so, he'd go close down a bar. Every night.
Drinking too much was in my past by then, a phase, something I knew I had to shut down. I had no idea of Fred's problem. In 1989, I went to Phoenix to cover a football game. Fred and I were going to get together afterward. He never showed.
He called me the next day, sobbing and apologizing. He said he started drinking at the game and hadn't stopped. That was the beginning.
The end nearly arrived that day two years ago. They pumped his stomach and sent him to treatment for the second time. He had been sober for seven years.
It's so damned hard. This is what he says. The rest of us, who drink casually or not at all, do not understand the siren scream of drink, the tragic imploring that obliterates everything and everyone else.
You've got a drinking problem? Hey, stop drinking.
We do not know. The cravings, the physical and emotional need. The fatal notion that just one drink won't hurt. I can handle just one drink.
“Pretty difficult,” Fred says. “Very difficult. Every day.”
He has been sober 16 months this time. He says there will be no looking back.
“If I drink again, I'll die,” Fred says. He attends a support group with his wife and 14-year-old stepson, three times a week. Fred met Becky while both were in treatment the first time. She has been sober nine years. Becky begins each day with the serenity prayer, then forces herself to remember the worst days of her addiction.
Becky works as a bartender.
“Bartending helps,” she says. “The smell (of booze) is sickening. It brings back the bad memories. I need those. Alcoholics tend only to remember the good times.”
Fred and I had some good times, back in the day. Too good, perhaps. I can't help but feel that Fred's life now owes a little to Fred's life then — and that I am partly responsible.
If you're 15 or 17 or a college freshman, this line's for you: Don't drink. If you must, do it responsibly. Encourage others to do the same. You'd never believe you'd go where Fred has gone. Neither did he. Spare yourself that terrible place. Spare those you love.
Fred is good. Today.
God help him.
Paul Daugherty, an Enquirer sports columnist, writes a lifestyle column on Sunday. He welcomes your comments at 768-8454.