‘Think I’ll Quit Having Tumors’

Quit drinking the other day, but knowing me, it won’t be long before I hit the bottle again. It’s my pattern. 

That means I’ll soon be drinking again. Hallelujah. 

I started in college and have never stopped except for when I stop. I’ll drink a few years then quit. It’s several weeks here, six months there, always knowing I wasn’t done drinking, just giving my liver a well-deserved rest after years of abusing the poor but sturdy fella. 

So that’s my drinking pattern: Mostly I drink, sometimes I don’t. 

Which makes me wonder about those tales of the wrenching horror of a poor drunk trying to stop drinking. You know: The tremors, the shakes, the vomiting, the pink elephants and the snakes in the sanitarium. 

Or the Alcoholic Anonymous club where everyone gathers in a church basement to brag about what a hot success they were in life until those demon strawberry coolers brought them low. Lost everything, even the yacht and the Bentley. 

AA is the place for those who can’t stop drinking without consulting a “higher power” to run interference. Works for everyone, providing they submit. I never said it was a cult. 

My favorites are the people, and there are millions, who insist steady drinkers are gravely ill, wasting away and suffering from a horrible disease. 

Call Hospice! Call an ambulance! Call a priest! 

The guy at the Forest Club calls for another round. 

My dad drank to the point he lived inside a vodka bottle. One day my brother and I lied to him, got him in a car, drove to the Cleveland Clinic and shoved him through the front doors. 

He walked out 30 days later saying he wished he’d quit drinking 15 years earlier. He should have locked himself in the basement for a month. 

What disease can be controlled by volition? Name another illness the patient can decide not to have. 

Years later I watched dad rot from the inside-out with throat and brain cancer, and there was no simple-headed “I think I’ll quit metastasizing tumors” road back to pink-cheeked good health. 

We can opt not to use drugs, but tell me how to opt out of cystic fibrosis. You can stop drinking by deciding to not buy the next bottle, but tell me what someone with Alzheimer’s can decide not to do. 

The nation’s vast rehab industry that runs the engines that cure the diseases that target the drunks has little use for free will, preferring powerlessness and blind submission from its captives. 

There are men and women all around us, and all through history, whose lives have been enhanced, not diminished, by tankards of mead, jugs of corn liquor, tinctures and quarts and fifths of whisky, barrels of rum and hip flasks of Southern Comfort. Inspiration and good cheer can be sparked with a 40 ouncer of Schlitz Malt Liquor. 

But AA franchises and their subsidiaries would deny it. With the endless meetings, the doctrinaire conversions, the submitting of one’s destiny into the hands of a worldwide committee of lackluster leaders whose only triumph in life is Sobriety is as lopsided an exchange as I’ve ever heard. 

Rehab is a big business. It’s imperative to convince some dolt with his third hangover in six months that he needs help and can’t do it alone. And insurance will pick up the tab. And you’ll get full pay for 28 days missing work. 

Emerging sober after a therapeutic setting in a healthy environment he’ll have accumulated beads and badges, armloads of important certificates, and proud delusions he’s courageously overcome a crippling illness. Whee. 

One more thing: He must never let alcohol touch his lips again or he’ll immediately be flung back into the pit, helpless and remorseful. 

Twaddle and bunk. 

Consuming strong drink is not without peril. I might die of cirrhosis tomorrow, but you might die of boredom. And let’s be real: at this point in life my drinking is pale, thin stuff. 

No more heroic battles with cheap tequila, no more long cozy summertime affairs with vodka. A bracing Martini as prequel to a nice dinner out is as crazy as it gets these days. 

At my age it’s two, maybe three beers a day. I used to drink more than that in my morning shower. 

But at least I’m free from the shackles of the bottle, no longer slave to the cravings that haunt those seeking the illusory comforts of drink. I’m alive! I’m sober! 

But if I’m strolling down State Street later today and if I imagine getting lightly marinated in the soft golden glow of an ice cold Coors, I’ll waltz into the Forest Club and have one. Maybe you’ll be there and we’ll each have a couple. 

Then it’s back to the sidewalk, walk on home, and quit drinking some more for the next month or two.

(Tom Hine authors this weekly outburst of paragraphs but gives credit to his stage name, the invisible chap named TWK.)