ONE HAND ON THE SINK

Chapter 3

And now, about a dozen years later, Mike was headed back to that same store, although he was driving instead of jogging. This time he was also armed with knowledge about alcoholism that should have kept him from getting anywhere near another drink and had done so for eight years. How many times had he heard it said in AA meetings that a relapsing alcoholic always returned to the same point along the addiction continuum from which he left off? Hundreds. So he knew there would be no slow, gradual build up. One drink and he'd be off to the races, chasing that buzz through whichever hideous dark alleyways it led him.

But instead of keeping him from pulling the pin, the knowledge he had gained about addiction allowed Mike to think maybe this time it would be different. Or could be. As he drove, he thought about what had changed in the past eight years. First and foremost, he now knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was an alcoholic. When he entered rehab and AA in 2009, he had only a vague understanding of what an alcoholic was. If asked back then, he would have said the dominant trait of an alkie was a constant need to drink — morning, noon and night — 365 days a year. This was the guy you saw under the bridge downtown with the seedy overcoat and the bottle dangling from one grimy hand.

And that was not Mike at all. He was more of a drinker of opportunity. Tight finances, Steph's watchful eye and his need to keep some semblance of himself as a decent husband and father conspired to limit his opportunities to drink to once or twice a week, sometimes less.

But what he came to understand was that being a drunk had nothing to do with how often you drank. It was all about what happened AFTER you took that first drink. Social drinkers (damn them all) could sit at the bar with their buddies, have a couple of beers and call it a night. Mike could honestly not recall a single time in his drinking career when he had voluntarily shut it down. He either ran out of booze, ran out of money or, more often than not, passed out. He had to smile whenever he remembered a local TV news sportscaster who, year after year, would boast about giving up drinking for Lent to prove to himself that he wasn't an alcoholic. Most drunks could give it up for 40 days. The trick was to string together 40 more and 40 after that, until those weeks and months became the rest of your life.

Mike was not self-delusional enough to think it was likely he had "grown out" of alcoholism or was suddenly cured during the past eight, dry years (although he guessed stranger things had surely happened). No, he believed that one drink would surely follow the next. In fact, part of him was at that very minute craving the idea of slamming one drink after another until he couldn't see straight. There would be no tip-toeing back in.

So he would simply need to adapt his drinking to his new-found understanding. Although it would severely limit the number of days he was able to drink, he would now do so only in controlled environments. Once a month would be better than going the rest of his life without a drink, right? And, as luck would have it, his career afforded him the perfect opportunity.

As a business reporter for a national financial publication, part of Mike's duties involved covering industry conferences around the country. About seven or eight times a year he would hop on a plane and spend two or three nights in a hotel in some city far away from his kids and Steph's prying eyes.

Mike was about four years sober when he got the reporting job. Prior to that, during his early recovery, he was the "transportation director" for a halfway house, a silly title for a job that really amounted to driving recovering addicts to 12-step meetings, job interviews and doctor's appointments. It paid next to nothing, but at the time Mike was thrilled to have any income at all, and being immersed in a recovery environment was the cherry on top.

When he first started traveling to the conferences for work, the irony of the situation was not lost on Mike. Here, he finally had a job with an expense account, a career that sent him to some of the nicest resorts in the country, where the rich and powerful gathered virtually every night at cocktail parties. It was the kind of situation he would have killed for while he was drinking. An all-expenses paid trip during which all the drinks would be free and there would be no wife looming nearby counting the empties. Mike thought on more than one occasion as he sat poolside sipping Diet Coke in Orlando and Palm Springs and Tucson that God sure had a strange sense of humor.