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Sunday, Sep. 20, 2009

When happy hour really comes

I met a buddy for a drink after work the other night.

He got there early and ordered iced tea. I came in out of the rain, pulled up a chair and ordered a Coca-Cola.

After he got to the bottom of his glass, he decided to switch to the harder stuff. He had the waitress bring him a Coke, straight up.

We laughed. This was our happy hour. Two wild and crazy guys, huh?

When I had seen him a few weeks ago, I almost didn’t recognize him. He told me he had stopped drinking. He was working again. There was a bounce in his step.

I asked about his wife.

“She has a new husband,” he said. “Me.”

My friend has spent more than two-thirds of his life bending elbows and breaking hearts.

There were times when he was guzzling a case of beer every day. He would pop open his first can before lunch and keep himself wasted until long after sundown.

In almost every photograph or video of himself for the past 30 years, he is holding a beer can, like an extension of his hand.

“I was out of control,” he said. “I was killing myself, and I knew it. But I couldn’t stop.”

He quit smoking several years ago. He kicked his two-pack-a-day habit in the butt and moved on.

Snuffing his cigarette habit was easy compared to the demons of alcohol. He could never go cold turkey on the cold beer.

His wife wore out her knees praying for him to stop. One day last year, he sat next to her on the porch.

“I told her I needed to get help, and a beautiful smile came over her face,” he said. “She started crying. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her so happy, and I hadn’t done anything yet. I had just told her that I needed help.”

He now realizes the importance of that first step. Recognition. It was followed by admission, then action.

So he checked himself into a rehabilitation hospital in another city. He has not had a drop of alcohol touch his lips in more than a year.

The temptation is always there, though. He teeters on the edge of a cliff, where one beer is too many and a dozen are never enough.

My friend is 61 years old. It all started when those numbers were reversed. When he was 16, a friend snuck out with some of his father’s vodka, and they mixed it with cherry ice drinks from Dairy Queen.

He spent a year in Vietnam, where he “brought up the rear with the gear.” The rest of the time, he soaked his brain with liquor like the monsoon rains.

He returned home, vowing to make up for lost party time. He moved to the Georgia coast. He would stay out half the night drinking, then somehow manage to drag to work the next morning with a Category 5 hangover.

Marriage settled him down for a while, but then the tap started again, this time almost nonstop.

He quit working. He struggled with back problems, then had knee surgery.

He used beer to wash down all those pain killers.

He even kept it in his hospital room following his surgery.

He remembers being angry after his 30-day stay in the rehabilitation clinic.

“They had taken away my best buddy,” he said. “And I was never going to see him (the beer) again.”

Not even visitation rights.

My friend now attends Alcoholic Anonymous meetings and takes one day at a time.

That’s all he can do. And, for right now, that’s enough.

Reach Gris at 744-4275 or gris@macon.com.