Free The End of My Addiction by Olivier Ameisen M.D. Page A

went to the window and looked outside into the dark. A fair number of people in the street meant it was five p.m. and I could go down and buy a bottle. Empty streets meant it was five a.m. and there were five hours to get through until the liquor stores opened.
    If there was a little liquor left in the apartment, I could sip it and surf with some discomfort to the next bottle. One morning I woke up around seven a.m. needing liquor, but there was none left. Over the next hour, the idea began to grow in my mind that the doorman might have liquor. I went downstairs and asked him, “Do you happen to have any liquor behind the desk?”
    Of course he said no, and he would have risked being fired if he either had liquor there or told me that he did. I said, “Ah, you see, it is a little awkward. But the French ambassador to the UN will be here at nine a.m. He’s coming directly from the airport. I don’t have any liquor in my apartment, and the liquor stores don’t open until ten a.m. Are you sure you don’t have any liquor you could let me have to greet him with a toast? Of course I will replace it as soon as the liquor stores open.”
    He told me no, and I went up to my apartment for a restless wait. A little before ten a.m. I went down and told the doorman, “The ambassador was delayed, fortunately, so I can go get something at the liquor store. If he arrives while I’m gone, please tell him I’ll be right back.” That is the level to which I fell.
    Usually I managed my drinking better and woke up with a hangover, but not an unmanageable thirst, so I could spend the morning and early afternoon recouping. I drank lots of coffee, read the papers to stay current with what was going on in the world and exercise my mind, kept myself as well groomed as possible, went to the gym to restore the muscle tone and cardiovascular fitness that I was losing because of drinking, went to my doctors’ appointments as often as I could, and attended AA meetings.
    Following the advice of AA, I called my sponsor and other people throughout the day, drinking or dry, for support and human contact. I usually drank just before I called my sponsor, because he was sure to encourage me not to drink. He was a good guy I could call from anywhere at any time. I called him drunk in the middle of the night once that winter and said, “I’m finished. My life is over. I’m a zero. I might as well commit suicide.”
    He said, “Okay. So you want to end your life?”
    “Yes, I am calling to say goodbye. My only worry is that I’ll screw it up and I’ll be worse than dead, paralyzed in a wheelchair.”
    “In that case I have a suggestion,” my sponsor said. “Go to the Thirty-third Street station on the Lexington Avenue line, and when the express train hurtles through, throw yourself in front of it. That way you won’t miss.”
    “Very funny.”
    “So why don’t you go to a meeting?” my sponsor said. “It will help.”
    Although in depressed moments I sometimes contemplated suicide in a very matter-of-fact way, I was not ready to die, as my sponsor knew. I told myself and others that I did not want to die until I had seen India, a lifelong dream that I still have not fulfilled. Plus I was convinced that right after I died, a cure for alcoholism would be discovered. So I always held on grimly to life and a faint hope of recovery.
    My sponsor was a much traveled, much married man, who had lost a good professional career to drinking and who now worked in a very different field at a much lower level. He had several years of sobriety as a narcotics addict as well as an alcoholic, although in accordance with twelve-step practice he only discussed drinking with me. We had a good mutual understanding, but he could be rather doctrinaire, and later that winter he fired me as his “sponsee” because I insisted on going to France for the bar mitzvah of Jean-Claude and Fabienne’s son, David.
    He said, “Don’t go. You’re not ready. I’ve spent