EP.2 - Down, Please...

Fear and loathing on my way to the bottom

​~ Continued from Beer Boy ~

I had a massive opportunity in Chicago and I blew it l. Enrolled in a Computer Science program at a community college, all I had to do was stay focused. The cycle had been interrupted.

My first semester was solid and although I was over my head, I found the material fascinating. Living in the basement of my parents’ townhouse, I stretched out my weekly 6-pack of Old Milwaukee and barely touched the brick of hash that I brought with me from Montreal. I’d started to make some friends at school and spent most evenings on campus, soaking up films and discussions. I was still a bit distant, but this new world stimulated and energized me.

And then I met the woman I would marry a few years later. Evelyn’s taste in drugs took me to a new place.

Back in Montreal we drank beer, smoked hashish and occasionally indulged in LSD. America was about cocktails, MDA, Quaaludes, blotter acid and Mexican pot. I felt outclassed by my new friends and Evelyn - suburban Americans who were better read, better educated and better off than me. The drugs leveled the field.

Or at least, that’s what I told myself.

Three years later, I’d dropped out of college to coat huge industrial floors with urethane and epoxies. My mother and sister had moved back to Montreal, my father and I shared a smaller townhouse and I’d fallen comfortably into a hedonistic 70s lifestyle that allowed me to exist in a highly functional, but perpetually wasted state.

My father’s visa expired a year later and by then, I was simply adrift on the sea of life. No ambition, no direction, no real sense of anything. Back in Montreal, I was pumping gas on the midnight shift and sharing a duplex on the wrong side of the tracks with a couple of guys from my high school tribe.

When I think back to Chicago, it makes me sadder than perhaps any other time in my journey to sobriety. I had come so close to breaking a cycle that would ultimately progress to a near-terminal state.

But, I had just enough ambition to get a data entry job that expanded my world and boosted my finances. Evelyn and I wrote to each other regularly and a year after I had left Chicago, she landed a job at IBM in Ottawa.

Living in a cottage in the country just east of Ottawa and surviving on a single income interrupted the cycle of heavy substance abuse, and once I got a decent job, we moderated our use. But a move to a 200 year old church that had been converted to three loft-style apartments rebooted the party lifestyle. One of our neighbors was a volume dealer of high-quality pot.

By the time we moved to a nearby hobby farm, we’d come close to the level of drinking and drug use that defined us in Chicago. Not long after I picked up a gig selling software, Evelyn ended our marriage, leaving me for my cousin.

Here’s the thing - I can’t blame her. The reality was that I was still distant and never fully engaged with life. So, while I was outwardly devastated by the loss and double betrayal, I knew what the score was and accepted my free pass to return to heavy use of whatever was handy.

~

My work environment supported the lifestyle. These were the early days of minicomputers and word processors and we were the pioneers. Liquid lunches and cocaine fueled afternoons. My manager was an alcoholic prone to ugly blackouts, but we made our numbers - nothing else mattered.

I simply went with the flow, and the flow led to Kathy, who would eventually become my 2nd wife. And a job transfer to Halifax.

You’d think that by this point, I’d have gotten into some kind of trouble. But, aside from a DUI and a couple of broken bones from an LSD influenced sightseeing excursion gone bad, I’d survived with less damage than I deserved. Halifax was a 4-year long party in a city with more bars per capita than any place I’d been. I thrived in that environment - just not in a good way.

New jobs brought us back to Ottawa with a combined income that neither of us would have imagined possible. Outwardly, happy and successful - inwardly, insecure and distant.

Then the blackouts started. The panic attacks followed.

The first “panic attack” hit me at the airport as I was heading to my departure gate for a business trip to LA. I was looking forward to the trip and to spending time with my associates but, suddenly the floor sort of tilted, my heart started to pound, and I felt this odd sense of foreboding and dread. Cold sweat, shakes, difficulty breathing - the works.

I stopped. Is this about the flight? Is something horrible about to happen? I talked myself down a few notches, boarded the flight and ordered a scotch once the wheels were up. Normality restored, I wondered what the fuck had just happened.

It happened a few more times over the following months, so I went to talk to my GP about it. Naturally, I wasn’t honest about my drink and drug intake and she sent me home with a prescription for Diazepam.

Diazepam was like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.

~

My life was crashing, but my career was taking off. Soon after, I got a gig as Director, International Sales for a database software company. I was now over my head professionally, and in the beginning stages of physical addiction.

I started my days with Valium, but that took too long to kick in, so I’d add brandy to my coffee. After my shower, I’d do a couple of lines to even things out and head off to work. Margaritas, beer and tacos for lunch, sneak in a few lines at 3PM and then home for a couple of bottles of wine with dinner and brandy before sleep.

The first bottom was inevitable.

In ‘89 I was sent to Europe for a two-week seminar tour that started in London and then continued on to Germany and finally to Yugoslavia. I woke up in Hyde Park with an unmarked hotel key card, a couple of pounds and a matchbook in my pocket. I hadn’t a clue where I was or how I got there, and worse - I didn’t know the name of my hotel.

I eventually figured out where I was staying, made my way to Germany, stumbled through my business obligations, and started the Yugoslavian leg of the tour in Belgrade. I had a 35mm semi automatic camera, so I had a record of where I went and who I met, but 70% of the week was lost to the blackouts.

Based on the lack of trouble I got in and the way people obviously at least tolerated me - I was pretty civilized, functional and socially aware when I was in a blackout.

I remember the morning meeting with a big distributor in Novi Sad on the final Friday. It was in a very old building in a large boardroom with huge windows and heavy oak furniture. They had coffee, but served brandy in thick cut glass tumblers. I exchanged gifts with the company president and we toasted. We exchanged translated speeches and toasted some more. It wasn’t even 9am yet and these folks loved to toast. We broke for lunch around 11 and the whole crew went to an outdoor cafe to watch a soccer match and continue toasting.

They sent me off to Dubrovnik for the weekend with an escort - I had pictures, but little memory.

The following Monday, I was to meet my wife at Heathrow and join her enroute to Singapore for her President’s Club trip. I don’t recall Heathrow or anything up to entering our hotel room in Singapore. After the President’s Club activities we headed to Phuket for a week.

I remember only fragments - some good, some great, some not so great. But, even before we flew back to Ottawa, I could feel a sense of dread creeping in. I knew that what was happening to me was far from normal and certainly not sustainable.

~

Within a week of my return to work, I couldn’t shake an ever-increasing sense of impending doom. One evening, at a Mexican restaurant and bar I frequented, I confided in a doctor who was a regular. He recommended Beech Hill and the following day I registered for the next available opening.

Beech Hill didn’t work for me, I was drinking within a week of my discharge. The life that I had built around myself normalized almost everything I was doing. Everyone in my orbit shared this alcohol and drug-centric lifestyle - but none more so than me. I was hopelessly lost.

Kathy saw where this was headed and jumped ship. The blackouts had cost me my job, my self-esteem and my direction. I’d lose everything else within a few months.

I’d managed to get a gig with a local consulting firm, but the day before I was supposed to start, I woke up in a Caribbean resort. According to the guest directory by the phone in my room, I was at Club Med Turks and Caicos and half a bottle of rum sat on the table - this was obviously another blackout. I vaguely remember buying the ticket, but everything else was a blur. Naturally, I lost the job.

I sold the house and stayed sober long enough to get a job selling new cars. I’d break the standing monthly sales record, pick up another 60-day AA chip and then relapse into another blackout spiral shortly after. I did that twice and ultimately became unemployable.

In desperation, I took a second shot at rehab, this time at a facility south of Ottawa. It was mid-December and I had already awakened in the Dominican Republic courtesy of another blackout inspiration. I arrived at the facility and collapsed into a brutal Diazepam withdrawal. Forty-eight hours later I discovered that I’d packed for a Caribbean vacation instead of a December in Ottawa.

I managed just over 90-days this time. There wasn’t an obvious trigger event - I simply left my aftercare session one afternoon and, instead of crossing the road to the bus stop, I turned left towards a small shopping mall. I walked into the liquor store, bought a bottle and finished it before I’d walked a long block.

I’d stopped believing there was a way out.

If I had to point to a single point of failure in the years of meetings, rehabs and counselors it was this: I never met anyone I wanted to become. Not one. All I saw around me was fear, simmering anger or almost blind conformity. I saw grey.

Or maybe that was what I wanted to see…

Each relapse episode seemed to take me deeper into blackouts and produce more violent withdrawal symptoms. I was alone and my daily routine revolved around feeding the monster.

I now understood the old man I delivered beer to as a kid - the Olympic athlete turned alcoholic, slowly wasting away alone in his apartment. I knew what was going on - I’d been in this world long enough to see the quick decline of my peers begging on the streets.

I had a mirror - I just tried not to look too closely when I used it. But when I dropped my guard and saw the guy looking back, I saw the end.

I resigned myself to my fate.

~ Continues with The Last Walk ~

I’ve chronicled my journey to sobriety in five essays:

Beer Boy

Down, Please...

The Last Walk

The Deal I Made With Myself

Sitting Duck

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