Heavyweight Short: A Sobering Thought

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About a year ago, heavyweight was canceled, and for the first time in my adult life, I was without a job.

Luckily, I had a plan B.

Drinking.

Drinking has always been my safety net.

It makes me feel bulletproof, in a state of grace.

Who needs a job when you're in a state of grace?

So job or no job, health insurance or no.

At the end of the day there was still booze, just like there had always been.

Which is to say, that every night for 25 years, I have drank.

But after getting laid off, something shifted.

Along with losing my job, I lost my sense of identity, and booze only amplified the feeling.

After a night of drinking, I'd wake up at 3 a.m.

in a panic, not knowing who or what or why I was.

I'd always turned to alcohol for solace, but now I found myself too scared to drink.

Over the course of Heavyweight's eight seasons, I've acted as an interlocutor between friends, family, and strangers.

Now, I needed to interlocute between me and me.

the me that wanted to keep drinking and the me that didn't.

So I started a journal to reflect on my relationship to drinking, how it all began, how much I have loved it, and whether it was time to stop.

These are excerpts.

Day 6, Without a Drink.

New Year's Eve.

Our new neighbors stop by.

The wife sells pet supplies and the husband does something with money.

Even though I interview people for a living, After 10 minutes, I run out of new things to ask.

Since I'm not drinking, I don't know know what to do.

Emily has put out frozen pepperoni pizza, so I eat slice after slice.

Ram Das says that at a certain point, he cared less about getting high and more about getting free.

The pepperoni pizza gets me neither high nor free.

Week 3 Without a drink.

I remember when my friend Paul quit drinking, it was because he found himself thinking about drinking all day and looking forward to it too much.

That's called being an adult, I had said dismissively.

Children have their sense of wonder.

Adults have booze.

Week 5.

I don't think I drink the way other people do.

I prefer to drink in the spaces in between, on subway rides, while taking long walks.

in darkened movie theaters.

And although I'll drink with others, my preference is to drink drink alone.

I'm not sure what constitutes alcoholism, so I've lately been googling Is drinking alone alcoholism or Does drinking every night make you an alcoholic?

Even using the word alcoholic makes me feel disloyal, like I'm badmouthing a friend behind their back.

Maybe if you think of alcohol as a friend, you've got a problem.

Maybe if you're asking Google if you've got a problem, you've got a problem.

Week eight.

It might have all begun at the age of four, with the joy of spinning, around and around until the living room ceiling became the floor, the chandelier a stalagmite.

Life felt easier upside down.

Or maybe it began at five, breathing in and out as fast as I could to make myself lightheaded.

Before there was beer and whiskey, there were quick, intoxicating breaths.

My drinking began in earnest during my teen years.

I drank to be less shy, to make myself more comfortable.

And as I grew older, I drank because it was what I did.

My identity became so fused to whiskey that at my 40th birthday party, every one of my friends and family gifted me with a bottle of bourbon or scotch.

At the end of the night, I counted 14 bottles.

My friend Steve says that, plain and simple, human beings need to get fucked up.

Week 11.

I'm on a flight to New York and for the first time in 25 years, I haven't packed small bottles of whiskey for each of my front pockets.

I'm not a good flyer, and I keep the bottles with me in case the flight gets rough and I can't get booze from the flight attendant quick enough.

But in all honesty, sometimes turbulence was a relief because it was permission to crack open a pocket whiskey before noon.

When you're in town, that's where we meet is at a bar.

That'll be our first stop.

In New York, I visit my friend Sean.

Sean is one of my favorite people to drink with.

For him, it's simple.

If you drink, you're a drinker, and a drinker drinks.

Can you describe what it is about the feeling of drinking that you like?

Getting a hug from the inside.

Sean and I can talk and drink late into the night.

The drink and the talk run parallel to each other and make a good combination.

But sometimes, the drink will overtake the talk.

I don't black out as much as I used to.

Everybody's going to think I'm like a raging alcoholic, but like, and we'd be at the bar and I'd have like one and another and another.

And at a certain point during the evening,

it got to the point where I was,

I would be having a conversation with somebody and looking at their face

and going to myself, oh, this is the conversation that I'm not going to remember.

And I was always right.

As a drinker, you exchange memory for intensity.

I asked Sean if my sobriety might threaten our friendship.

Oh, oh, I don't...

No, I don't...

I don't think so.

But, like,

I feel like you and I like it too much.

I think you and I are cut from a certain cloth

where

we're just

drinkers.

So what do you call a drinker who doesn't drink?

Week twenty one.

Without drinking, everything isn't as weighted towards the night when the first drink is drunk.

As a result, there's more evenness.

The points of intensity are scattered throughout the day.

A run in the morning, Aggie walking through the door after school, the taste of dessert after dinner.

Week 24

It's after several months without a drink when I begin to bargain with myself.

Maybe I can enjoy a glass of wine with dinner once in a while.

After all, it's been five months.

Have I not demonstrated self-mastery?

The problem is, as the saying goes, that that first drink makes you feel like a new person, and that new person needs a drink, and so on, and so on.

But somehow, moderation always feels within my grasp.

Is this for me what passes for hope?

The first times I got drunk, it was like, Where has this been my whole life?

Like, this is what everything should feel like all the time.

My friend Tony went into rehab for heroin addiction in his mid-twenties.

It meant having to give up all drugs, including alcohol.

But recently, after 25 years of sobriety, Tony started drinking again.

Just a drink here and there.

Is such a thing possible?

I had just gotten out of a meditation retreat, actually.

And I was sitting around on a Friday evening with a bunch of people at the retreat center, including the meditation teachers.

And somebody offered me a shot of very expensive scotch.

But I said, no, at first,

I don't drink.

And then as I was sitting there watching...

other people's shot glasses get filled and thinking about how I identified after 25 years, I still identified as a

recovering addict, recovering alcoholic, ex-addict,

or just plain old addict, alcoholic.

I still identified with that.

And I thought, well, am I still that?

Like what?

It was a question that came up kind of naturally.

It was like, why am I saying no?

Is it because I really am afraid that something bad's going to happen?

Or am I just identified with it and it's part of kind of like an ego structure where I, it's kind of like a notch in my belt and a pride thing.

You know, I've been clean for this long.

So I kind of had a shot, and uh, it was no big deal.

And I thought I could do this once in a while.

And I kind of gave myself permission to keep doing that.

And how long now have you been doing that?

Oh, God, it's been about three and a half years.

Do you find

you know, drinking in front of friends and family that their shows of concern harsh your buzz in a way?

No,

not really.

Nobody's actually, I mean, a couple of people have asked, a few people have said, oh, oh, you're drinking now.

And most people are like, oh, good.

Huh.

Yeah, I think most people felt like I took it a bit too far.

I think you're the only one who's actually expressed concern.

Am I overthinking Tony's situation?

Am I overthinking my own?

To that question, my father would probably say,

absolutely.

Do you think there's any benefit to not drinking?

Nope.

After the break, the man who raised me.

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Week 28.

I suggest to my therapist that maybe I've quit drinking out of a kind of masochism, an inability to just allow myself pleasure.

I have friends who have quit and feel better.

They have more energy.

Their skin looks better.

I experience none of that.

My therapist says, I drink to avoid my feelings, which might be true, but I also think it's helped me to embrace my feelings, to love more freely.

For one thing, drinking has helped me bond with my father.

When I go home to visit, he leads me down to the basement where, in the storage space under the stairs, alongside his high school diploma and tax forms from the past 30 years, he keeps a plastic jug of vodka.

You go first, he whispers.

He whispers because he and my mother play a game in which he pretends to hide his drinking and she pretends not to know that he is hiding it.

Since stopping drinking, every time I see my dad, I remind him that I've stopped drinking.

But all the same, every time, he offers me a drink.

And beer, you don't drink beer at all?

No, no, no.

If I'm not drinking, then beer is drinking.

Okay.

It's still an alcoholic beverage.

Right, right, right.

My father is now 90 years old.

Would you say that overall drinking has had a positive effect on your life or negative?

I'd say for me, positive because, you know, sometimes

life gets a little boring.

You got something a little to look forward to.

I have my, what you call my cocktail hour.

Yeah.

At night, when I know I'm not going anywhere, I have a couple of shots.

Yeah.

And your shots, I mean, I've seen your shots are, they're, they're very generous.

Like a half a glass.

It's pretty far up above the bottom.

Yeah, that's one way of putting it, I guess.

And I never get drunk.

Never, never, never get drunk.

Well, what do you call getting drunk?

Drunk is when the room starts spinning and you feel like you want to throw up.

That's drunk.

That's all I thought.

And

you start whirling around.

Right.

But I mean,

that's getting sick already.

That's getting ill.

Yeah, but no, I never get drunk where I'm stupid and I'm insulting or I'm this or that.

No.

The first time I ever got drunk was with my father.

I was 14 and we had been invited to a rabbi's house for Sukkot.

I sat beside an Israeli man in a paper Yamulka who filled and refilled my plastic cup with vodka.

We talked about deep things like God and creation.

It felt like this kind of talk was fueled on vodka, that vodka allowed a person to see that the world was really all spirit.

The rabbi explained how we were on the edge of the Messianic age and that at any time now, the Messiah or Mashiach would appear.

Slowly and with some effort, my father rose from his chair and quieted down the room.

I remember it took a while, but my father was insistent.

It was then that he pointed to the rabbi and made his great declaration.

Oh, and I want he was the Messiah.

That's right.

You announced, you announced the rabbi as the Messiah.

That he's the Messiah.

He said, yeah.

I was, I was drunk.

Yeah, I mean, that was too much.

Do you remember the response that it got?

Kind of stupid.

It just silenced me.

Everyone was stunned.

Yeah, it was kind of stupid.

The next morning, I awoke in our basement on the floor and still dressed from the night before.

My head hurt, but it felt adult, a fair price to pay for the evening.

Just as I drank with my father, my father drank with his father.

Did he drink much?

Oh, yeah, sure he did.

When I got older, I started joining him.

Kind of dreaded, you know?

Plus, he would get really stupid and then he would throw up and he gets floppy.

It was, you know, nasty.

Did he ever get violent when he was drinking?

Not while he was drunk.

No, no.

He only got violent when he was sober.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He was good natured when he was drunk.

Week 44.

In the early days, just after Augie was born, I'd sit in our tiny Brooklyn kitchen sipping bourbon until all hours of the night.

All day was spent with worries.

Was our baby peeing enough, eating enough?

But at night, I drank.

It evened me out and allowed for a feeling of bliss, perhaps the only bliss I've ever known.

While other forms of joy were complicated by guilt or intrusive thoughts, drinking alone in that kitchen was always simple.

There was a liquor store across the street, and seeing it through the window, luminous in the night, stocked with all those bottles representing the nights of drinking that lay ahead, made me feel like everything was going to be all right.

Night after night in that small Brooklyn kitchen, I drank and watched YouTube videos of old Jerry Lewis' appearances on talk shows and kissed the top of our baby's head.

Each night was like biting into the first square of a mile-long Hershey's chocolate bar.

But as blissful as that time was, when I think back on it, I'm unable to recall very much.

It's all a vague Calgon bath.

That is the exchange I made.

What did you have for breakfast?

Week 52.

Yogurt with chia seeds and pumpkin seeds and applesauce.

You know what I find fun about chia seeds is like finding them in your teeth an hour after you ate and enjoying them.

If you really like ever want to kiss me ever again, I would suggest stopping this conversation right now.

My wife Emily and I are about to walk to Agi's school to pick him up.

Agi's now in the second grade.

Before we set out, I asked Emily if we could talk for a minute.

It's now been over a year that I have stopped drinking.

Did you ever think

I'd get here?

I'm sure there are specific incidents

where I expected you to relapse, if we're going to call it that.

I'm not going to lie.

I've missed it every once in a while.

Missed my drinking?

Yeah.

You weren't a stumbling drunk.

You weren't a mean drunk.

You weren't really a drunk.

And I think that that was confusing to me in some ways because you drank every night.

I mean, kind of a lot.

I can only remember a handful or fewer, fewer than a handful of times where I ever looked at you and thought to myself, oh, he's drunk.

There was one night.

Do you know what I'm going to say?

Was this the ocean's night?

Yes.

I was roofied that night.

You were not roofied.

You were drunk.

Drunk.

I think we were targeted by thieves.

I was sober.

I mean, I had probably had a drink or two.

There weren't any roofies in my drink.

No, you too.

It was your birthday, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it got incredibly excessive.

And I had to essentially carry you about six blocks home.

I kind of want to take my glasses off so I can't really see your face at this moment.

Is that okay?

Yeah, why?

I don't know.

It's a little hard to talk about.

Okay.

I mean, I want to say this just like very clearly.

I'm very happy you stopped drinking.

I do

think that you are a significantly better parent

than you were when you were drinking.

I think you're just here with us in a different way.

I think you're more present.

I think you're more consistent.

I think you're more stable.

It's just like you have access to a different part of yourself, it seems to me now.

I even just want to say you have access to yourself now

in a way that you just didn't.

And I think I feel that, but I think he feels it

more.

And I feel like he's proud of you.

And I don't mean proud in the sense that he's like, oh, my dad doesn't doesn't drink.

I think he's just more proud of and attracted to the person that you are sober

than the person that you were before.

Week 53.

Today is the first real snowfall of the year.

and I'm walking along a path in the woods near our house.

At a certain point, I can feel my pace begin to slow, and eventually I come to a standstill.

It's serene and a part of me just wants to melt into the scene.

I don't mean I want to admire it or write a poem about it.

A part of me just wants to wander off the path, curl up beside a tree, and let the snow cover me.

I don't know that I'd call this feeling depressive or anything.

It's just a feeling of wanting to hit the pause button on life.

It's a feeling of wanting, if only for a while, the pleasure of complete surrender, of giving up.

But instead, I keep going.

This episode of Heavyweight was produced by me, Jonathan Goldstein, along with senior producer Khalila Holt, supervising producer Stevie Lane, and Phoebe Flanagan.

Our production council is Jake Flanagan.

Marcelo de Oliveira mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K.

Sampson, Blue Dot Sessions, and Bobby Lord.

A special shout out to Howard Chakowitz, who Tony wanted it known, also expressed concern.

Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight, Instagram at Heavyweight Podcast, or email us at heavyweight at pushkin.fm.

We're still looking for your stories, so please keep them coming.

We'll be back next week with an encore presentation of the Gregor episode, which will include an update from the titular Gregor.

So tune in.

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