YOU DON'T HAVE TO DRINK NEW YEAR'S EVE

To a Sober 2023, One Day at a Time

The last time I drank on New Year's Eve was on Dec. 31, 2009. We had been invited to a New Year's Eve party in the next town, complete with live band, platters of food, dozens of guests, and three stacked self-serve bars. Our daughters had been invited to friends of theirs just a few blocks away, so it was an easy call: drop them off, go to our party, pick them up after midnight, go home.

I had been semi-sort-of-not drinking, which meant I was drinking and trying to hide it, in the weeks before. This was five months before my epiphany in Cocoa Beach, Florida, in early May 2010. I wrote about that as a kind of miracle story December 25, 2021, "Sober at 60."

It was how my mother gave me her late-husband's car just to get it off her hands. I flew down to Boynton Beach, Fla., to drive it home. My plan was to drive slowly and drink myself into a spiritual coma at beachside resort hotels all the way back to New York. The first night, I passed more than 200 motels and hotels (t/h Frank Zappa) looking for a place to stop when I arrived at a suitable looking destination, only to find a weekend-long Alcoholic's Anonymous convention known as AA Woodstock just starting. The earth shifted.

Photo from TV screen of a very early episode of “Doctor Who,” all rights reserved by copyright holder

But New Year's Eve 2009 was different. My wife and I knew only the hosts at the party, acquaintances from our childrens’ Sunday school. The social anxiety was maximized because the host had been a big fan of my writing in Newsday, but almost everyone else: her family, the musicians, the various guests, were from New Jersey, or Staten Island, or Westchester. . . were from places where Newsday was unknown. She'd introduce me around as this "famous" writer, she was so kind, I was famous to her, but nobody else had ever heard of me. I no longer heard of me, either. I had no credentials.

I had left Newsday 15 years earlier, I had been working for trade magazines, I'd been laid off from my third-string copy editing position at Billboard in six months earlier in 2009, had no prospects and little hope. With my wife being sociable, my kids not around to complain, I kept wandering off to refill my vodka glass. There was plenty of food, but my drinking outpaced any cushion the food might create. Plus, I was out of shape, since I hadn't been drinking quite every day, or as much as I was used to. After a few hours of straight vodkas, I started to get woozy. I thought I should switch to something other than vodka.

Guinness stout. What an idea.

When we went to pick up our daughters, (my wife, of course, was driving) we socialized for a few minutes. Then the spins set in. Seasick on dry land. I realized Guinness was not a wise chaser: that Guinness did some serious chasing on its own. The seasickness morphed into a shipwreck.

We made it home barely in time for it all to come out: I collapsed on the bathroom floor, vomiting everywhere. My wife and daughters watched this spectacle, unsure of whether to call an ambulance, or just kind of watch me die. I think they were neutral on the subject. It would have been a closely split decision.

I was overwhelmed with shame, but maybe not for the reason you'd think. I was in that revolving door of 12-step meetings for 10 years already. The reason for my shame was that I was not even a competent alcoholic. New Year’s Eve was for amateurs, the weekend or monthly, or once-a-year drinkers who had society's permission to drink until they puked. It is one of those sad, sick truths that people in the rooms of AA laugh about: Every night was New Year's Eve for us! Nothing special about it. Only Earthlings, or Muggles, got drunk on New Year's Eve. Our motto was more like, "Carry On, Drink as Usual."  

A regular alcoholic wouldn't puke. They'd probably go into a blackout instead. I used to think a blackout meant passing out. If only! A blackout occurs when, after a period of drinking, you are conscious but unaware of your surroundings, and your behavior. In a blackout, one might fondle the CEO's wife (or the CEO herself!) at the company holiday party. You might piss on your best friends living room rug in front of a group of otherwise merry revelers. You might claim to have knocked out Mike Tyson in a bar fight. Whatever it is, I have always been touched by the fact that one never hears stories of funny or kind blackouts. Nobody ever says, "What got into you last night? You went into the kitchen and washed and hand-dried every dish in the sink? You were so polite to your mother-in-law! I thought you didn't get along with her . . . "

For those in early recovery, New Year's Eve is a nightmare, because it is a socially-endorsed trigger, a kind of cultural free pass to drink to excess, especially if you don't do it regularly. (I have just been told that the new management at CNN does not want Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen doing shots on the air, or getting perceptively buzzed as they host the network's long countdown to the Times Square ball drop.)

Though it is a positive sign that many millennials and Gen Z-ers now strive to go dry for "Sober January," I'm concerned about those who will celebrate New Year's Eve like it's 1959. But whatever works. Some January refuseniks will find they don't need to drink at all. Not everyone, even those who have a drink or two every day, is an alcoholic. There are some people who, after one or two, can just say, no thanks, I've had enough. Hand on top of the glass. My dad was like that, until the day he died at age 96. Me, as soon as I sipped the first one, I was anticipating the second and third.

I never had enough, until finally, I had enough and got help. The Cocoa Beach epiphany was a miracle. But it was not the day of my last drink. I'll have to write the story of the rest of that week, from Georgia to South Carolina to North Carolina, Virginia, the trip home, the arguments with myself, until the last drink on the last night before I got home.

As I was writing this, I was interrupted by an unexpected drop-in from one of my daughters, one who witnessed that pathetic pukedown in the wee hours of January 1, 2010. Had I continued on the drinking path, it is unlikely she would drop in for a visit and a chat. My whereabouts might be unknown. It is also highly unlikely she would let me pat the bump in her belly, where the critter she calls "peanut" will make me a grandfather for the first time later in the summer of 2023. And my daughter knows, as an article of faith, that her kid will never see me drunk. I believe her faith is well-placed, one day at a time.