A L S O_.T O D A Y The beauty of alcohol By David Bowman A dedicated drinker sings sweet praises of the bottle

Sober truths WHEN I QUIT DRINKING, THE FEELING OF VICTORY LASTED TWO YEARS. HOW WAS I TO KNOW THE HARDEST PART WAS YET TO COME? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY CAROLINE KNAPP In the beginning, there was elation. I quit drinking five years ago last month -- Feb. 20, 1994, to be precise -- and for a solid year, I rode a private little wave of victory. Hah! Problem identified, solution found! I felt triumphant and strong and full of promise, as though all the key aspects of my life -- relationships, work, health -- had been given a second chance. My memoir about that experience, "Drinking: A Love Story," ended on precisely that note of triumph, as well it should have. I was exactly a year sober when I started the book, 18 months sober when I finished it, and that early sense of promise had translated into substantive changes: Within that first year and a half, I'd bought a house, left a burnout job, acquired a puppy. I'd made new friends, grown closer to my sister, ditched a destructive romance and settled more deliberately into a positive one. Of course there were bad moments -- giving up an addiction is not something one sails through without moments of panic and wild disorientation. But that feeling of victory lasted a good two years, an undercurrent of certainty and hope that propelled me through the choppiest seas. "You were so newly sober when you wrote that book! How did you do it?" I'm often asked that question: People (especially people who've groped their way through the fog of early sobriety themselves) wonder how I had the clarity or distance to make sense of either alcoholism or sobriety, how I could think clearly enough to even try. My stock response is usually that it had something to do with need: the need to set down the experience while it was still fresh and raw, the need to record my own history so as not to repeat it. But I suspect I was driven by some sort of prescience, as well, an understanding that if I'd waited longer -- say, five years -- I might have written a book that was not only less raw but, in the end, a bit less rosy, too. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Sobriety is hard. No way around it. Just last night, I dreamed a long, complicated, anxious dream about being betrayed by my boyfriend: He'd gone on a four-day vacation to New Orleans in the dream, telling me he was going with a male friend when in fact he'd snuck away with a woman, someone I understood to be relatively uncomplicated, lighthearted and nonalcoholic (i.e., able to jet off to a place like New Orleans and drink in safety). I was furious and deeply hurt in the dream, and I remember that my gut response was to think: Fuck it -- I'm going to drink. I had beer in mind, many bottles. And there you have it: a little heap of sober fears wrapped in REM; a nocturnal statement about what bubbles up within the sober heart, about what can no longer be washed away with alcohol. There's vulnerability in relationships and difficulty with trust. There's the sense of being inadequate in comparison to nonaddicts, and too damaged to deserve fidelity. There's rage. And -- always, inevitably -- there's the knee-jerk response to emotional pain, which is to anesthetize it, ASAP. Strictly speaking, of course, these are not "sober" fears or "sober" challenges but ordinary human ones, shared by alcoholics and nonalcoholics alike. It's just that I spent the bulk of my ordinary adult life not dealing with fears, not facing challenges head-on, not feeling much of anything, so I still feel like a bit of a novice on the emotional front -- more like I'm 19 than 39. This embarrasses and confuses me. Feelings? Huh? I'll get angry at someone and not realize it until two days later. I'll have a dark, despondent sensation -- something murky and bleak -- and not be able to name it until long after it's passed. (Oh, I'll think, that was disconnection; or, that was envy.) Drinking creates a chasm between head and heart, and bridging the two takes surprisingly long. Five years into the game, I'm still aware of a central sense of disintegration; I still find myself walking around as though I'm on alien territory, unfamiliar with the language. The urge to drink is the least of it, really. There are still moments of the sharpest longing -- I'll see a couple sharing a bottle of crisp white wine at a restaurant and I'll want to die, recalling the light, easy intimacy of drinking with others; I'll feel something acutely uncomfortable, like that sense of fury and betrayal in the dream, and I'll remember with great specificity what it was like to obliterate that feeling, to drink one glass of wine, then another, then another, and feel the discomfort dissipate, soften, blur away -- but those moments are relatively few and far between. They're also predictable, short-lived and, in turn, manageable. I know the geographic triggers -- restaurants with elaborate wine lists, bars, liquor stores -- and so I avoid them. This makes my world a somewhat smaller place than it used to be (less fine dining, more take-out Chinese; fewer parties, more TV), but that's not the hard part. The much greater difficulty involves ensuring that this smaller world is in fact a richer one, a place that's more than merely safe. N E X T+P A G E: When the early feeling of euphoria begins to fade - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY TIM BOWER - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.