All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir(41)

So rather than put myself in that position and act like a jerk, I excused myself with “Sorry, on a shoot; let’s touch base in a month”—as code for “not gonna happen.” I spent night after night scribbling in a notebook about “structuring devices,” and/or points in the movie that bored me.

This is the time when I began to steal my roommate’s Adderall, popping it for “emergencies,” as in when I was too anxious to be stone cold sober at something. While it was true I wasn’t drinking, this had essentially blown my sobriety. I was too ashamed to tell anyone, most of all my dad.

I had lost interest in the anonymous rooms where alcoholics go to find their people, their community, thinking that my relationship with alcohol was now different from theirs. Sure, I had lost a job and on occasion been asked politely to leave an apartment or party due to my antics, but I was just a middle-class white girl who enjoyed white wine and the occasional line.

All falsehoods I told myself. In reality, my identity was very much tied up with being the life of the party. After six months, I limited my AA time to one meeting a week, and then I stopped going altogether. I strongly believed that I could handle my alcoholism; I didn’t need a room of cultists to tell me how to live my life. Instead of going to basements I read recovery memoir after recovery memoir, looking for easy answers. I was certain words would save me.

That was when I first read Drinking, A Love Story by Caroline Knapp. Finally, a girl who got it. Caroline was a high-functioning alcoholic who managed to hold on to a successful career in journalism and two misguided relationships all while drinking herself close to oblivion for fifteen years. The book’s description of wine made my heart beat faster, and suddenly and without warning a craving would develop.

One night, instead of popping an Adderall, I chose to carefully pour the tiny beads on my desk and started crushing them into a fine powder with my MetroCard. I took a twenty-dollar bill out of my wallet and snorted two long lines. It wasn’t wine, but I definitely knew I wasn’t sober any longer. It had been a long nine months without a drink. I went down into the subway, and by the time I emerged, I was resolved to add alcohol to the mix, with the idea of “experimenting” with its reentry into my world.

In order to ward off this type of thinking I had kept a document inside my purse to read at just such a moment. In it, there was a detailed accounting of episodes in my life when alcohol had laid me low. I scanned the list and came to the decision that these were the acts of some other girl, some other life. I was confident that this girl could now moderate. I was sure of it.

Once, when I brought up the idea of moderation to my dad, he responded by telling me to look up Audrey Kishline.

I googled her and discovered a couple of things. Audrey was a woman who was convinced that the abstinence-only approach of AA was scientifically flawed. In 1994, she founded Moderation Management, an organization with a scientific, purpose-driven approach to reducing harm around drinking. Kishline claimed she was a “problem drinker” and not physically dependent on alcohol. It caused controversy and then a firestorm. In 2000, Audrey was found in her car drunk, with a blood-alcohol level of three times the legal limit. She had hit an oncoming car and killed two people, Richard “Danny” Davis and his twelve-year-old daughter, LaShell. She served time in prison, but according to friends and family she was not able to achieve any long-term sobriety. She committed suicide in December 2014. I knew all of this and yet I felt convinced I was unlike Audrey. Plus, I didn’t drive.

After snorting the Adderall and heading out, I told my boyfriend Jasper to meet me at our favorite sushi restaurant in Queens. We had gone there every other week for the past year. Our favorite waitress came over and presented us with a dusty bottle of sake, a gift for the holidays. I took it as a sign from the universe. I carefully explained to Jasper my reasons for wanting to drink again. I pitched him on the idea the way I’d pitch a network or a media exec. I constructed my points evenly and asked for feedback. He seemed open to the idea. To be honest, I had been a pretty miserable SOB as of late. But he asked me to call my twin first. He most likely didn’t want this to be on his shoulders alone.

I called Meagan.

“Hey, do you have a sec?” I asked her.

“Yeah, of course. What’s up?”

I informed her that I was toying with the idea of drinking again—that very night, in fact.

“I need you to call Dad and or your sponsor and talk this through.”

“No, I’m not doing that. I just wanted to let you know.”

There wasn’t much left to say after that, so the call ended shortly thereafter.

I knew I was putting her in a tough spot, but at least I had told her. I had gone on record with my decision. I didn’t call my dad. This was a couple of weeks after I had asked my whole family to do a sober Thanksgiving for my benefit, and I felt pretty sheepish telling him all the insight and work he put into me and my program was for naught.

Instead, after dinner I rushed to the nearest wine store with Jasper in tow and picked out an upper-range bottle of sparkling rosé—no cheap stuff for my return to the game. Sake was never my favorite so we took the bottle home out of politeness, but my palms were sweating with excitement when I clutched the cold bottle of light pink liquid from the store. I realized we needed wine glasses and a corkscrew. Months earlier, in a fit of anger, I had asked Jasper to throw away all of our wine paraphernalia. Now I felt the magic that you get when you have a bottle or any sort of enhancer in your back pocket. I felt giddy in a way I hadn’t in months.