The first page of my first published book began like this:
“There was a fountain in the center of a bar I used to make when I first came to live in the Village. I remember a brass merman perpetually sounded a sea trumpet there, forever calling surrounding mermaids to a wilder dance. No cold water flowed from that fountain—something better: the great ocean basin offered all the bottled wines of the world. It all seemed an image of the way I wanted to live—generous, naked, overabundant, and noisy.”
That was how my drinking career began. It ended with me walking around London alone, dazed and drunk, leaving my weeping wife back at home.
Those were the days when I was living on the Five-Martini Diet—writing for Helen Gurley Brown at Cosmopolitan Magazine by day, and passing out before dinner more nights than I like to remember. I’d just mailed Helen a piece that ended, “I always tell people deeply in love to get married soon as possible. So they’re not too old when they get divorced.” I don’t know how my (then) wife tolerated my drunken half-ass jeering as long as she did. This time, I’d hit too close to home. Her face turned red. Ducking the ensuing quarrel, I jammed a pint of gin into both my raincoat pockets, slamming out of the house. At every little red telephone kiosk I passed, I’d lift one of the bottles to my lips. Finishing the first in three or four gulps, I promised myself I wouldn’t buy another. A few hours later, I bought two.
I still don’t remember why I was carrying my passport. In any case, I managed to fly from Heathrow to JFK in a total blackout, waking fully clothed on the floor of a tiny apartment my wife and I kept in New York.
This was at the tail end of my second marriage. The only intelligent thing I’d done in my life until then was not having any children. My family was mostly disgusted with my antics. Most of my New York friends were fed up with my drinking as well. So I was alone. But l knew someone who’d welcome my call. I dialed up my old liquor store and ordered a case of gin.
There were bottles of tranquilizers in the medicine cabinet—I’m not sure who left them behind. l washed down a handful with a glass of gin, drinking my way into two hospitals over the next ten days. The first was the posh Doctor’s Hospital, on Manhattan’s East Side. No one there even mentioned A.A. I was still young enough, and reasonably healthy. They had me on my feet in three days. After a shave and a haircut, I celebrated how good I looked in the barber’s mirror by ordering a martini in the first bar I passed. This time when I came out of my blackout, my bladder was so paralyzed I could not pee.
I ended up at another hospital, with a doctor perched beside my bed. “Do you know who I am?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “You are the end of fun.”
It turned out she was Roosevelt Hospital’s Dr. LeClair Bissell (who later founded Manhattan’s famed Smithers rehab). Back in my late twenties, when I was Grey Advertising’s chief liquor copywriter, we’d once met over a drink at the White Horse Tavern. Since then, she’d gone on to med school. I’d gone on to become a drunk. She shook her head sadly and advised me to sign myself into rehab.
I laughed. “You actually think a bunch of holy rollers is going to turn me around in 28 days?”
At the time, Dr. Bissell was on the Board of a Pennsylvania rehab called Chit Chat—it’s since been renamed the Caron Foundation. As opposed as I was to the idea of rehab, something about her demeanor convinced me to give it a shot. I arrived there by bus late one afternoon. What followed was 28 days with a bunch of pill heads, drunks and coke fiends. At first, all I wanted to know was why I couldn’t have learned all I needed—faster, better—by reading a book?
I often ask that of people who’ve gone the 28-day route themselves. Why do rehabs work? “I can’t put it into words,” they often say, “but it’s magic.” Which may not be an entirely logical answer. But also not as dumb as one might suppose.
Ever read the lyrics to a pop song without the music? The words alone are often flat and trite, even silly. Put music behind them and they take on enormous power—magic.
Patients at a rehab attend scientific and medical lectures. But the counselors just repeat warnings and bromides you’re well aware of. Snorting coke is bad for you. A bottle of Absolut a day will kill you. Why don’t you just cut it out? But for most addicts, information doesn’t seem to be enough. What is missing is the motivation and the music—the power and passion to put that information to work.
Back when I was a regular in a half dozen Greenwich Village bars, the cultural hero of the night was whoever got the most “wasted” or “blasted.” Rehab was the first society I ever knew in which we admired those among us we felt most likely to stay sober. That resonated with me—we helped heal each other.
Looking back now, I feel that rehab operates on an unconscious level having little to do with willpower, science, religion, medical facts or words. You don’t have to understand why it works. I certainly didn’t at first. But living there, being there—somehow works on the even the most cynical users. The heat, hope and emotional intensity melt down the supposedly sophisticated drinker or doper identity. In the process, a new person is born.
My last bender was over 20 years ago and I haven’t had a drink since. Except for one two-week-long crash-and-burn six months after I arrived back home—perhaps the worst 14 days of my life.
It began at a New Year’s Eve party, a gala event: awash in champagne and lobster, featuring a giant banquet table loaded with pills, pot, cocaine, speed, and imported wines. At three in the morning, my wife was slightly wasted. I was sober as a judge. To celebrate, I poured myself a glass of Veuve Cliquot. “All that A.A. business about one drink will start you again?” I said to her. “That’s a lot of crap. I’m not even tempted to pour a second glass.” Then we went upstairs to bed.
The next morning, I snuck down to the butler’s pantry and poured myself a full glass of gin. I downed the entire bottle before noon, and consumed a second before we got home. That’s how it ended, in a little English country hospital where I’d checked in to get away from temptation. I cannot explain this but the moment I walked through that door, all my Chit Chat memories came flooding back; the obsession to drink was gone, like taking off a coat.
My wife and I are now long divorced. Several years ago I moved from New York to California. I no longer write about the bars of Greenwich Village; instead, I’ve teamed up with the eminent Dr. Dave Moore and together we write “Addictions & Answers,” a weekly column in The New York Daily News.
I haven’t had a drink since that relapse over 20 years ago. And my life has never been better.
A novelist born in New York City, Bill Manville has written for The Village Voice and the Saturday Evening Post and was a long-time Contriubuting Editor for Cosmopolitan Magazine. He now lives in California and co-authors “Addictions & Answers,” a weekly column for The New York Daily News.