Long Island Iced Tea
or, the real reason I stopped drinking (and kept not drinking)
This text contains some brief descriptions of excessive drinking and suicidal thoughts.
I don't mean for this to sound like an exposé, or clickbait, or a tell-all. There was nothing extraordinary about my decision to stop drinking, no inciting event, no rock bottom — it was just something I decided, and then I realized I had to follow through.
Or I didn't have to follow through. But let me go back for a moment, to the last day I drank alcohol.
It was a Sunday, and I was in Nebraska. My uncle has family there, just across the Iowa-Nebraska border. When he and my aunt flew in to visit them around Thanksgiving, I'd usually pop over for a day since at the time I lived within reasonable driving distance. We would hang out, watch a sporting event or three, eat Casey's pizza, and, since we were all adults, drink some local beers.
And that was it! Just a normal visit, a normal amount of alcohol consumed (by U.S. standards), and I was sober enough to drive home after a few hours. It made sense that I didn't see it as my last day of drinking.
There were many days before my last day that I think I wanted to be my last day drinking, because something happened, or more often, something didn't happen — I downed a six-pack (or more) alone in my apartment because it was Friday, or it was Saturday, or sometimes because it was Wednesday and if I finished drinking soon enough I wouldn't be hungover for work the following afternoon. Once, over two days, I recorded a video of myself reading a Very Bad Novel in its entirety, drinking directly from a handle of whiskey every time I felt doing so would punctuate the book's awful-ness. It took six hours across two sessions, because I was too drunk to keep reading after the first three hours. One night, when I didn't have enough money to my name to make an ATM withdrawal, my friend and I maneuvered things so we wouldn't have to purchase drinks all night — and in a college town, this was not a difficult task — and I ended up so drunk I didn't have the wherewithal to accept a different friend's offer of a ride back to their house, I vomited in a fraternity house, and when I did find a ride back to that second friend's house, I couldn't remember which door was theirs and so I slept in my car in their parking lot. But that was just once. Each of these were isolated incidents, see. I never drove drunk; I didn't even say anything I couldn't take back when the sun rose the next morning. I was never the type of drinker who blacked out; I always knew what I was doing to some extent at all times, which is how I knew exactly what I had overcome, and why I knew exactly how I earned every hangover. I survived. Whatever it was that led me to drink to excess, I survived. And with a little help, I could survive again.
Unless, of course, I didn't want to survive. The night in college that I learned about Long Island Iced Tea, for instance, a drink known for being silently potent — it doesn't taste like you're imbibing nearly as much alcohol as you are — I realized if I really wanted to, I could drink so many in a row and not even feel it when things really started going south, past simple drunkenness. When someone asks you what you're most afraid of when it comes to dying, at some point in your life, you might answer something like, Well, I'm afraid it'll hurt. If I drank ten Long Islands, I don't think I ever would have felt pain again, a thought that comforted me. I didn't want to die all the time, but I could, and the sugar rush and the ever-creeping alcohol-fueled euphoria would keep me going.
I survived all of those days, though, even when I didn't want to. Alcohol took the edge off of the pain and nothingness of being alive and gave me something, which was innocent and cunning in its logic — it would make me happy, and then it would drag me down into sleep, maybe forever, but who was keeping score?
The innocence of my last day of drinking alcohol was the secret, it turned out, to the one thousand-plus days of not drinking since. Not just the innocence, but the normalcy, the fact that everyone around me was drinking too, that there were people around me at all, perhaps making it abnormal in that regard, but it all felt so natural and so boring nonetheless. It was just another day, one where dying was far out of mind but I was still doing the thing that had gotten me so close to dying in the past. The irony was overwhelming, though I didn't realize it at the time. I knew nothing about what was to come.
I had my last drink on Sunday, December 1, 2019, a date I remember not because I thought I would have something to remember, but because I happened to have email documentation of another thing I associate with that day. It was by chance that I remembered the exact day at all, because when someone from a Major Company is setting you up to start writing on their platform, why would they do it on a Sunday? What did they know?
At some point after this day, a thought occurred to me: How long I could keep this going? At that time, drinking for me was not something I saw as an absence; I didn't count the days between drinks, drinking was just something that was always an option, a static presence in my life that I never thought to challenge. There was no "this" in my question of how long I could keep this going, because the time between drinks was like the time between getting a haircut or an oil change or getting off work on Friday knowing that Monday was coming — I never thought about the time between events, only about the events themselves.
I downloaded a day counter app to my phone after a few weeks. It was the most bare-bones counter I could find, with no mentions of alcohol. All it did was count days since a particular date. I was trying to let myself down easy in case I decided this no-drinking thing wasn't a good idea. It was just an experiment, one I would keep up until the next time I was around people who were drinking, and when they asked me which alcoholic beverage I desired, I would give in to a Long Island Iced Tea and assuage the pain I'd banked in whatever number of days the day counting app, which I would have deleted not long after, showed. And it might sting in the moment, letting go of a month or two of not drinking, but I would survive. I always had.
I've written before about what happened next; namely, that a global pandemic gripped the world and kept most of us at home for the next several months or more. In that linked piece, I wrote in part:
Since this whole pandemic thing kicked into high gear, [my relationship with drinking culture has] gotten worse. The number of times I've seen a Facebook status along the lines of, "Heading to the liquor store for some essential grocery shopping!" accompanied by a cry-laugh emoji and a photo of a shopping cart full of different beers and liquors has just made me feel so defeated.
Because I had started to realize, then, that I wasn't feeling defeated because everyone seemed to be drinking a lot more and I, thanks to my self-imposed ban, couldn't anymore. I was feeling defeated because U.S. drinking culture doesn't care about anything or anyone except excessive drinking and the people who do it. And, in a way that I detailed in the above piece as feeling pretentious, I didn't want to be a part of that culture anymore. I knew I was the odd one out, but so were we all in one way or another in those early days of "lockdown" (the U.S. never locked down, so).
Not being able to be around other people meant I was no longer at the mercy of friends or family who wanted to buy drinks for me. Feeling too anxious about disease to go to a grocery store or convenience store meant I certainly wasn't purchasing my own alcohol, either.
And so the days kept climbing — I wrote the above piece on Day 131 — and it became more of a Thing for me to be a non-drinker. I started telling people about it, in fact, which was a huge step forward after being too afraid to even admit to myself that I was committing to it. In the face of a very new, very scary disease ravaging the world, this method of survival — an existence without alcohol — was one I could control.
I also wrote:
It's a work-in-progress, is what I'm saying, this part of me. It's still new. And as I'm seeing casual "it's 2 p.m. and I'm drinking at work!!!" social media posts (get it, because they're working from home), I can't help but think about how this particular brand of uncertainty that includes alcohol parallels with my own uncertainty that doesn't.
We were all doing what we thought we had to do to survive. And for me, this was a whole new brand of survival, something I had always associated with drinking. But it was the one in my playbook, the most recently established one, so it was the one I stuck with.
Today, one thousand six days since December 2, 2019 — the day after the last day, the day I plugged into my counter app that's still on my phone — we're still in a pandemic. Drinking to excess is still encouraged and rewarded, because this is the United States of America. And I'm still here, sober from alcohol, because I still can't think of a reason not to be:
I'm counting up, infinitely, so I have some sort of tangible record of what I've accomplished. It's still so scary, because if I go at this for the rest of my life, I can’t know how many more days will be tacked on. But, given the circumstances, the scary thing is the best thing I could be doing.
To quote myself from that piece one more time, with one massive edit: "Here's to Day 1,007, and every day after that."