Free Double Double by Ken Grimes

alcoholic.” Most alcoholics would chortle at this, knowing that one can always find the time for a drink. Always. I thought this amusing in its naïveté. Now I’m not so sure there wasn’t a lot of truth in what she said: Work, especially such all-encompassing work, can keep you sober.
    I think sometimes alcoholics feel they’ve vaulted onto some other plane, clearing the high bar of time and circumstance. We’re extremely self-absorbed. We’re all wrapped up in a sort of alcohol aesthetic that sees the simple picture as impossibly naive. Alcoholics like to say “Keep It Simple,” and this is all too true of the simple instruction: “Stop.” Despite the bumper-sticker slogans that arisefrom keeping it simple, alcoholism, or the defeat of it, becomes a truly complex business.
    Couldn’t the circumstances that my mother found herself in have kept her safe from addiction? One striking difference between her and Mrs. D. was that one worked and one didn’t. Or at least for Mrs. D., work never interfered with drinking. Cocktail party? Out the door.
    I’m not talking about the kind of work that leaves one hand free (like writing) to pick up a glass but the kind of work my mother did, ten hours a day or more, seven days a week. I can still see her, walking down the long second-floor hallway, white apron wound about her. At six A.M. , heading for the kitchen to make the Parker House rolls for a dinner party that evening.
    Time and circumstance. Maybe she really didn’t have time to be an alcoholic.
    I wonder if my mother felt excluded from the back-office brawls and how she explained the exclusion to herself. Or if her answer was to imagine the dinner party—the pastry still cooking in the kitchen, the poached pears, the crème anglaise. The mint sauce that she needed for the lamb. I wonder if work was as close to salvation as she could get.
    Why didn’t I learn to be a good cook instead of a good drunk?
    Why didn’t I spend my postprandial hours in the kitchen instead of the back office?
    I recall once when I was in my twenties and in England, writing my mother a letter of apology for things I had done that made her unhappy. It was a long letter full of self-pity and sorrow. She never mentioned the letter when I came back. Finally, I asked her what she thought about it. She said she’d never received it.
    Sometime later, she asked me to search out something fromher dresser drawers. In looking, I found the letter down in a corner of the drawer, buried beneath blouses and slips.
    Another instance of this failure to acknowledge emotions occurred after an interview for the Washington Post Magazine years ago. The interviewer was with me for some hours, up until the entrance of my brother and his second wife. We were going out to dinner. We hung out for a while with the journalist, had a drink. In the published piece, the writer said that I changed the minute my brother walked in. I became another person.
    This surprised me, although I was conscious of sometimes retreating around my brother, who had, to say the least, an entertainer’s personality. What surprised me more was that I heard nothing from him. No call, no question, like “What in hell does this mean?” No response. The question buried, like my mother’s letter, in a bottom drawer.
    Burying emotion exacts terrible consequences. Thus are psychiatrists called into play. A psychiatrist can do a lot, but only as much as the patient can stand. And there it stops.
    Buried emotions, especially anger. You know how brutal the anger you’re conscious of can be. Imagine the brutality of the anger you’ve buried. Rage can be terrifying, for it seems endless, limitless. Probably it is. There is no bottom to the cauldron. It doesn’t appear to have what T. S. Eliot called an objective correlative: an object that can be identified as a reason for an emotion. (Eliot’s prime example is