Possibilites - Part 1

After my mom died I became a wino. Not a stumbling, grizzled old bleary-eyed man, smelling of Blue Nun Rhine River wine, but a nighttime French-Bordeaux-Mouton-Cadet-swilling inebriate. It snuck up on me like a Mormon on an LDS Church mission. When I got off the subway in Marble Hill after the funeral, the first thing I did was buy a magnum of Bordeaux. I went home and immediately poured a glass. Then I had another glass, and then another. That was okay. The first day back from two weeks in hell necessitated letting loose a bit. It was the next night, and then the next that began a steady increase of the daily imbibing. It wasn’t until I went for a routine physical and bloodwork that I discovered my liver enzymes were above normal and that something was definitely awry. As with many things in life, there are scores of possibilities based on decisions we make. There were two possibilities for me, but only one choice: under doctor’s orders I had to abstain for three weeks.

My usual routine after work is to get off the subway, cross the street and enter the liquor store on Broadway and West 225th. The guys working there got to know me very well over the past few months.

“Hey, teacher!” Hector yelled. “No homework, no homework today!”

The white-haired Juan Carlo, who sits behind the plate glass every day at the Lotto machine, nodded to me. He intimidated me the first time I went in last summer: he stared at me, silently regarding me with unblinking eyes. Over time, I started talking, joking with him, and now he always gives me a smile and a nod that’s grown more pronounced and sincere.

“Mouton? The big one?” Hector asked, as if he really needed to.

I nodded. It was the same every other day when I walked in. I was a regular. I was drinking half a bottle of one of the big magnums every night, sometimes a little more. What started out as two glasses of wine, had increased to three, passed and moved to four, and on occasion would slip into a fiver. I didn’t have any control over it. If the wine was there in the house, I drank it, and while I was doing that, the enzymes in my liver were progressively kicking into high gear to fight the toxins.

After a second blood test to confirm the results and test for hepatitis or any other virus, my doctor called me and told me all the tests were negative. “How much do you drink a day?”

“Uh…”

“Do you just drink wine?” he croaked.

“Yes.”

“How much would you say?”

“I’d say three glasses, sometimes more.”

There was a pause, then, “That much?”

He told me that in order to see if it was the wine causing the elevated enzymes, I’d have to abstain for two to three weeks. When he told me this on the phone, it was a Monday night and I was on my second glass of wine. I took a sip. “Really?”

“Yes. Come back for another blood test and we’ll go from there.”

Gulp.

I decided to follow doctor’s orders, but since I had already started drinking I summarily commenced polishing off the rest of the bottle – my last for three weeks – and got a royal buzz on as fast as I could. Tuesday would begin my sobriety. Monday night was the last hurrah.

It’s been ten days, and it’s not so bad. I’ve been tempted, but I’ve been a good boy. It took all this for me to realize that I don’t need wine. I like wine, I don’t intend to stop drinking after the three weeks, but I’m not going to drink as much because I don’t need it to relax at the end of the day. I do yoga when I come home now and by early evening I feel centered, more aware of my true self. The physical and emotional habit is breaking.

I also don’t need wine to escape my feelings about my mom’s death. With or without wine, I feel the same about it – sadness and anger. I didn’t come to this realization right away. It took a morning in Central park and a conversation with a friend to see that we’re offered countless possibilities every day to create the life we want, and also that the elevated enzymes weren’t merely a physical response to the wine, but also a spiritual response to my emotions.