Every recovering alcoholic I’ve spoken to since I quit drinking almost two years ago has told me about the moment they hit “rock bottom.” The moment they knew they had to get help to quit, because they just weren’t capable of doing it themselves. My “rock bottom” moment didn’t come when I was chased up a Spanish mountain by knife-weilding drug dealers; it didn’t come when I woke up naked in a hotel corridor and had to go down to the lobby and beg for a spare key; it didn’t come when I was ejected from my third Las Vegas casino or when I was arrested for the fourth time or when I narrowly avoided a fifth night in the cells when I drunkenly showed up outside an ex-girlfriend’s house to—oh boy—apologize for the drunkenness that had caused her to dump me in the first place. Hell, I didn’t even acknowledge I had a serious problem when I was given a book deal to write a second memoir about my drunken misadventures.
No, the moment I knew I had to quit was far more mundane than any of that. It was the moment my two best friends, Sarah and Rob, made it clear that they could no longer watch their friend playing dice with death every night made it clear: I had to choose between the booze, or their friendship. Or, more accurately, it was the moment when, not a week after promising that—this time; THIS TIME—I was serious about quitting, I answered my phone at 1 AM to a phone call from Sarah. I was drunk. She knew it. I knew she knew it. She hung up. She gave up.
One of the reasons I’ve always been so good at getting away with things is that I’ve always obeyed the golden rule of the amateur con-artist: know when it’s time to stop. Recognize when you really have reached your last chance; and don’t push it an inch further.
AA wasn’t going to work for me, I knew that. I’d end up going to the meetings and then going for a beer afterwards, knowing that I’d get away with it. If I was going to quit then I had to acknowledge the two things that were keeping me drinking.
The first was ego: I was still acting like a gonzo wannabe and I still hadn’t shaken the idea that “my readers” expected me to drink. The second was opportunity: by only telling a very small number of people that I was quitting, I could still get away with drinking as long as they didn’t find out. Somewhere deep inside my brain, a synapse fired.
I opened up my email account and began to write an message. In the subject line, I wrote three words: “I’m quitting drinking.” I clicked BCC and added everyone from my address book: friends, professional contacts; everyone I might possibly run into in the coming weeks and months. My plan was to write an email telling everyone I knew about my decision to quit, and the reasons behind it. I’d ask for their help: if you see me drinking, I’d say, please stop me.
But then I stopped.
Who was I kidding? All I was doing was expanding the list of people I couldn’t drink around. Even if I sent the email, and even if I recruited all of my friends to watch over me, there was still a whole world of strangers out there; a planetful of bars where I’d never get caught. Thanks to my years of creating a persona of drunkenness, there was always the chance that I’d run into someone—particularly in a town as small as San Francisco where it seems like everyone reads my posts on TechCrunch—who would offer to buy me a drink. In my own little world at least, I was famous for my inability to say no.
And that’s when I had the idea that would end up saving my friendship with Sarah and Rob—and probably my life.
The half-finished email was still glaring out from my laptop screen. I read it back and laughed. Even though it was only a few minutes old, it now seemed ridiculously naıve; full of jokes and half-excuses.
My ego simply wouldn’t let me look pathetic in the eyes of even my friends, let alone people I only knew tangentially. Being honest about my inability to stop drinking went against the whole character I had spent years building; the hard-drinking, doesn’t give a fuck, never apologizes, never explains asshole. The asshole who wrote my column for the Guardian, and the asshole who in two months was supposed to file a book on how to be just like him. Robert called him “Drunk Paul,” Sarah thought his problems went far deeper than drinking and I…well, I don’t know what I thought.
Apart from this…
That asshole had to die.
It was him or me.
I got up from my chair and walked laps of the room, thinking through the consequences of what I was about to do. Then I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. An hour passed; maybe longer. Finally, I managed to summon up the kind of courage that would normally take me a couple of beers and a shot of rum. I closed the email window and opened a fresh browser window. I typed in the address of my blog and clicked the button to write a new entry. It started with a title…
The Trouble With Drink, The Trouble With Me
And then a quote that seemed apt…
“The chief reason for drinking is the desire to behave in a certain way, and to be able to blame it on alcohol’ – Mignon McLaughlin
Then I wrote…
I mulled for a ridiculous amount of time over whether I should post this.
Not because it’s hopelessly self-indulgent—that’s never stopped me before—or because it’s too personal—ditto—but rather because there’s so much weirdness and angst and back-story that I would really need a whole self-indulgent book to tell it all. Lucky I’m writing one, I guess.
Getting straight to the point: a few days ago I decided to stop drinking. Or, rather, I decided to stop properly. Completely. It was actually back in July—during my month-long London visit—that I realized I needed to take a break from the ridiculously Bukowskian cycle I’d got myself (back) into.
And—with a few dramatic exceptions—I was doing ok. But then, as someone pointed out after my last binge, in recent weeks those dramatic exceptions had started to move closer together—to the point where they were inevitably going to collide. Almost-quitting is just not something I’m capable of. It’s all, or it’s nothing.
One complicating factor (in my head at least) is that I’ve forged a career—and a respectable income—from drinking too much, doing idiotic things and writing about them. My last book floated on a sea of booze, and if you were to ask anyone who knows me to give you three keywords about me, drink would certainly be one of them. Barely a week goes past without a PR person trying to bribe me with a bottle of good rum (really, it’s got weird now—and each thinks they’re the first to think of it); and the look of disappointment on people’s faces when I say I’m not drinking is heart-breaking.
Last week I was at a party where someone said—and I swear this is true—”Of course you’ll have a drink…you’re Paul Carr.” Jesus.
But the thing is, there’s a line between doing entertainingly idiotic things under the influence and doing irreversibly damaging things. And what sells the most books and makes people read blog posts—losing loves, getting arrested, being fired, inching towards cirrhosis of the liver—is not actually that much fun when it’s you doing it. The truth is there are people in my life who I would rather trade every single funny anecdote I have just to avoid hurting them again. Or in certain cases, just to speak to them again. When you get to that point the decision isn’t the difficult part. The difficult part is the execution. To be honest, drinking for me became a habit—a prop—rather than a necessity; I’m perfectly capable of doing dumb things stone cold sober, and it’s not like I need a fucking confidence boost. I also never—ever—write while drunk.
But having a drink in my hand—and another, and another—is also one of those habits that has proved incredibly hard to break.
Hence the decision to write this post. I figure by making the statement—I’m not drinking—I don’t really have anywhere to hide. Maybe people who have read this and who see me drinking will look as disappointed as those who previously were disappointed that I wasn’t.
I’ve been lucky enough to get advice on quitting from some really good friends in the past week or so, including one friend who has been sober for seven months despite previously writing a drink-fueled memoir of her own. No doubt some of the advice will work, and some of it won’t. But I’m going to try it all. I might write a follow-up post on the subject, or there might be more in the book, or I might just get on with it. It’s too early to tell.
All I know is that it’s my 30th birthday in a couple of months, and I really hope I’ll be spending it sober. And alive. And with friends. Those are decent enough goals for now. And to those worried that a non-drinking me means fewer hilarious fuck-ups, don’t be. The only difference is I’ll be able to remember them in the morning. God help me…
I clicked the “Publish” button and the post immediately appeared on the front page of my site. From there it was automatically sent out to the 20,000 or so people who had registered to be notified whenever I posted something new.
Just to make sure, I posted a link on Twitter and sent it out to the thousands of people who follow me there. As often happens on Twitter, people started reposting—”retweeting”—the link to their own followers. The first was Michael Arrington—my editor at TechCrunch—who appended his own message to the retweet…”We’re here for you, dude.” By the end of the day, more than 100,000 people had read the post.
By the end of the week, it was closer to a quarter of a million. I had nowhere left to hide.
Excerpted from The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations. Copyright 2011 by Paul Carr. Paul Carr is also the author of Bringing Nothing to the Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore and a columnist for TechCrunch. He can be followed on Twitter here.