In the Come-Down.

A Food Writer Comes to Terms with Being a Problem Drinker

My friend, Jolene, brings over a canned artisan cocktail from a local restaurant. She leaves it in the planter at our front door. Social distancing and all that. She texts me to let me know. 

I’m thinking about drinking it. 

But the routine is embedded in me now. I put the can in the fridge to get cold. David will enjoy this, I think. 

I can say no to a drink. 

David takes the cocktail out a bit later, pours it into a whiskey glass with fat chunks of ice. I can be with him now while he drinks. But it wasn’t always this way. A year ago, I couldn’t imagine a day without booze. An evening even.

But coming up on January 10, 2021 I will have been mostly-sober for a year. Still, sobriety is liquid. Fluid. What it is and what it means is constantly changing. To be sure, sobriety is a tender tender thing. 

Pre-Covid. Life is Normal AF.

I wake up one morning and can’t remember how I got in bed with my 13-year-old daughter, Edie. 

I brush my teeth trying to figure it out. 

I make tea. 

I eat raw salmon from the fridge with my fingers. 

I make lunches for the kids and send them off to school. I still can’t remember. 

As I’m sitting here writing this, I don’t remember. 

I try to piece it together – I was binge-watching, Schitt’s Creek, with my husband, David, the night before, and then, I’m waking up in my daughter’s room. 

What did I say to her? Was she awake?  

Was I awake? 

Is this what people call a black out? 

Fuck. Did I black out? 

My drinking has been consistent and copious – every night, at home, holidays, with people, without people, professionally and not professionally. I’m a food writer and a cook, so I’m eating out often, drinking out often, drinking while I cook at home, and cooking at events where a glass of something is exactly what you need to cut through the balls-to-the-wall energy of putting out food. 

Maybe it’s even required at the end of a night. For me, it feels that way. 

I start thinking about the first drink around 4pm, when I feel us moving toward evening, when I want to manually downshift from the day, the worries, the shit, or even when everything is damned wonderful. Which it is, a lot. It doesn’t matter. Sometimes I don’t wait for evening, or for David to come home. Sometimes I start by myself in the kitchen, cooking dinner. I get out the tequila, a nice big glass that sometimes I leave in the freezer to frost over, lots of ice, lime, a generous squirt. But mostly tequila. I am not shy about my pour. 

I cook and talk to the kids. I listen to their problems, their day. We go over song lyrics to the musical one of them is doing. I watch handstands and lop-sided cartwheels. I applaud and clap. I yell at my son as he and our pitbull tear through the house, knocking everything over. And I drink. 

Then David comes home and I make him a drink. In my mind, it’s like the way Joan Holoway would’ve made her man a cocktail, hips swinging, in a red brocade dress with heels, the ones with the peeky toe and the ankle strap, tits up, a silver-rimmed retro-60’s cocktail glass in my hand, ice tinkling against the glass. I have my rituals, like the way a heroin addict gets her spoons in order, her flame going, the satisfying clink of ice, the sound of liquid pouring, the slicing of lime, the squeeze, the juice on my fingers, the anticipation of that first sip, the glorious come-down that comes slowly after. 

I make the drinks and deliver David’s to him, with a little board filled with sliced soppressata, cold soft-boiled eggs, a handful of macadamias, manchego and a few cornichon. Isn’t that how you love your partner? Plying them with things that make them feel good? He says something nice, runs his finger along my thigh. And because I can justify my second glass, which David probably thinks is my first glass, I’ll make another for myself just the same way. 

I am mellow. And dinner – a chaotic sit-down affair with all the kids and a couple of their friends –  bouncing around the kung pao shrimp for David, Edie and I, the panko-crusted chicken fingers for Raffi and Desi and their friends, the kung pao tofu for our vegan, Lucy. Teenagers want to leave the table and I get eye rolls when we say no. Everyone is talking about their day, arguing, getting up, sitting down, jostling for the right to be heard next. I clear the plates. I’m alone in the kitchen with the bowls  and the dirty woks. I’m on my way to my third drink, David’s second. 

I am buzzing and into my high, and happy as fuck. I can’t feel the near-constant thrum of my amygdala miss-firing over and over. When I’m buzzed, my brain quiets. It’s not barking disaster scenarios or telling me to run, flee, fight, or be fucking scared. The booze turns off the ticker-tape, and for this, I am grateful. It is not telling me everything sucks; your life sucks, your talent sucks, your parenting sucks, you suck. It’s so good that the rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat  is turned down. Finally. 

 I melt into the sofa, with my laptop and my social media. The binge-watching is an important and glorious component of the come-down. Mind Hunter, the third go-round of Games of Thrones, Gentified, The Americans, Succession.  It’s a true mathematical equation,  alcohol + binge-watching = complete absorption into the sofa and my own dark numb cloud of a brain.  Somewhere in the middle of it, I  drink my drink.  I get up and make us both a new one.  

“Make it light one for me, babe,” David yells after me. 

I make his light and mine heavy. 

I am now into binge drinking territory, and I’m just having a regular night. 

The little kids cuddle with me on the couch, their socked feet propped up on my legs. It’s good. It’s always good with my babies. I am with them, relaxing in the come-down. But this is cheating and I know it. This is the only kind of interaction I am offering them. 

I take Desi to bed, kiss her, snuggle, try not to fall asleep while I read to her, and then I drift off as she drifts off, and have to rouse myself and plod back out to the living room. There is another episode playing. More email. More surfing the Internet. Another cocktail while David is tucking in Raffi. I’m lit. I’m not Joan Holloway anymore, with her hip-swing and her decolletage. I am Dorothy Parker begging for a cocktail in an insane asylum. 

I’ve had five drinks. It’s 9pm. I’m no longer mellow. 

I’m grouchy, tired, but decent at hiding my tipsiness.  If one of the kids leaves a big mess, I find it and bitch about it. I stomp around the house, muttering about the mess, the extra work. Had I found the mess at 5pm, I would have the kids pick it up and move the hell on, but in the late-evening episode of the come-down, I’m grouchy and I dwell on it.  If Lucy and Edie, my teenage girls, have some unmet need, like Lucy needs help making a late-night snack in the kitchen, I see it as an interruption in the pursuit of my come-down, instead of seeing it as an opportunity to connect with a teenager, who has finally left the confines of her room-cave and is open to interacting with me. 

And Edie’s anxiety – my amygdala is her amygdala – gives me reason to climb into bed with her, earlier than normal, so I can help her process her anxiety. This is a lovely part of the come-down. But too many times, she tells me the next day, I fall asleep and she ends up handling her fears alone.  

By 10pm, if I’m not asleep someplace,  my brain is starting to shut down.

“I’m tired,” I say as if the day and it’s work did this to me. 

By this time, I’m grouchy with David, and he invites me to head off to bed while he turns off the lights. I am only too happy to do this. Because I am immaculately wasted. Combine the booze with the SSRIs I take for anxiety, which can exacerbate the effects of booze, and I’m pickled. 

David probably knows I’m pickled too. But we don’t discuss it.

I know I will pop up awake at 3am, dry like a dusty lake bed, and feeling like a bag of garbage in my bed. And I can’t even tell you what happens in the bathroom when you are a drinker. The drinks fuck with all your insides equally, and there is nothing glorious or beautiful happening when your body is expelling all that poison. 

“I am killing myself,” I repeat to myself, sitting on the toilet. 

I let the wave of guilt cover me. My youngest is four-years-old.  My oldest is fifteen. I might not even see Desi graduate highschool or Lucy fall in love for the first time. I’m going to miss all the milestones, all the shit worth living for. 

“I have to stop,” I say under my breath. 

It seems so strange to me why I’m drinking like this at all. I mean, things are good. David and  I are in love – actively, sweetly, sensuously in love – after 14 years of marriage. We have disposable income. We like our careers. The kids are doing okay. We are all healthy. We are surrounded by a beautiful community that we love and who loves us back. We have manageable problems. I do not have to numb myself. 

But even as I think it, I know that this is about my crazy brain and how I seek relief from it, and always have. I have been seeking relief  my whole life. 

Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat

“I have to stop.”

And I mean it at 3am.  I worry about it for a few minutes. I drink half of the Pelligrino right out of the bottle. I stare at the ceiling, listening to the rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat until I sleep. In the morning, I pull myself together, forget about the middle of the night, and do it over and over again, calendar year after calendar year. 

I am going to lose my liver. I imagine it happens the way a transmission can just drop off a car. 

I Put Things In My Mouth for Money.

I’ve always said that I don’t have a drinking problem as much as I have a “putting things in my mouth” problem. 

This is complicated by having a career in food.

In 2019, I made pho for 300 guests at the wildly-popular Las Vegas food event, Picnic in the Alley with other women chefs. I interview food producers, chefs and restaurateurs in front of an audience of eaters and drinkers, many of whom were also blitzed. I have my own flask of tequila, which I keep on ice. People drop off glasses of champagne and wine while we cook and serve. I host  a protracted whiskey tasting. 

After service, the ladies set up shots and caviar bumps. There is so much love and friendship and support in this group of hugely talented culinary folks. Why shouldn’t I join? Why can’t I be a part of this? Why can’t we all just be happily fucked up together celebrating this cool thing we did? 

I do not have a reason to say no. So I say yes. I do not stop. 

And writing about chefs and restaurants is also fraught. Eating too much and often, and drinking too much and often, is part of the game. Extra dishes come out of the kitchen, they have to be eaten. I want to eat them! That chef who comes over and pours you the perfect Calvados to close out your meal – Am I  going to say no? No way. 

The best, and also worst part is, I’m a talented drinker. I can cook for people while drinking, write essays and hit deadlines while drinking, show up and read my work in front of people while drinking and speak coherently on panels while drinking. I don’t do dumb shit like drive drunk. The bottom has never been too ugly. I haven’t fallen on the floor once because of my drinking, although slurring my words is not totally out of the question. I surround myself with food friends and industry colleagues who are also not shy about drinking, which makes my drinking seem completely chill and normal. I am almost never the heaviest drinker in the room. I almost never stand out. It’s easy to pretend I don’t have a problem when I’m doing what everyone else is doing. 

I eat all the food. I drink all the drinks. I tell myself I love it, even when I can feel it slowly fermenting my insides. I don’t listen to my body. I forget the pain I cause myself. I say yes, hell yes,  and put everything in my mouth. 

New Normal.

On January 10th, 2020, I wake up in Edie’s bedroom. 

It makes me think of my Uncle Bill, who drank too many Manhattans, went to hug me and fell over, dead drunk on the floor of a restaurant. My dad carried him to the car. It also reminds me of the busted up, burnt dinners of my childhood Thanksgivings because Aunt Stell drank a half bottle of vodka while cooking for us. I think about my mom who died in July, alone at her nursing home, so riddled with trauma from a childhood saturated by alcoholics and enablers, that she functioned like a drunk whether she drank or not.

I quit drinking. 

I read somewhere that when you die from the effects of alcohol and drugs, medical people sometimes call it a “disease of despair.” I do not want to die from a disease called despair. 

“I don’t know if I’ll drink again,” I say to David. But truly, I can’t imagine not having booze in my life. I’m already thinking I can find the work-around. 

David – best husband in the world – hears me, as good partners do. He decides to no longer drink at home or when we go out together. I recognize immediately I will not be able to do this without his support. I am immediately grateful.

I quickly learn that giving up booze is not so much about not drinking, as much as it is about changing every single facet of my life, so it isn’t focused on alcohol. I notice how much of my time is spent thinking about drinking, preparing to drink, finding a drink, making the drink, choreographing the evening so I can get a drink and how much I worry and strategize, when I can’t get to the liquor store, when I know we don’t have any in the house. My head is full of booze even when there isn’t a cup in my hand. 

I notice that in my work in food, being out drinking, celebrating with booze, honoring people with champagne and cheers, ordering this round and another and another is an epidemic in my life. It’s fucking everywhere. 

I can no longer ignore that booze is the focus. 

It is so ingrained in everything I do. On date nights, David and I sit at the bar, order a Casamigos Blanco rocks with a little lime juice and a grilled octopus, then more drinks at another restaurant with  raw oysters and a rare filet, or on another night, mapo tofu, cumin lamb and dan dan noodles with ice cold beers, then, maybe another bar for a nightcap. Later, we head home for a cocktail and watch a movie wrapped up in each other on the couch. 

With my food colleagues, it’s partying, keeping up, celebrating that great food event with cocktails that will transport us to fuckedupville, and readings I give where we clink glasses and do a shot of tequila together before going on stage. We talk about booze. We think about booze. Someone makes a joke about getting drunk together weekly. Even in my own cookbook group, I host at a local bookstore, the wine flows and people drink as much as they eat. 

Drinking is my culture. My community. My relaxation. My come-down.

When I stop drinking we have to re-invent everything. Total life overhaul. When we go on date nights, we peruse bookstores, instead of hitting bars. We eat food from the Shaanxi province in a tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant, inside a supermarket in Chinatown, that doesn’t sell booze. We get a massage. Another time, it’s a taco truck, a bookstore and a Love Store.  

Sex toys become my new martini. 

I drink water. Pelligrino over ice with a lime is my cocktail. Don’t give me a sugary mock-tail, I don’t want to pretend to drink. I want to do something different. David and I talk about the garden we’ll plant. How to turn our backyard into a small farm. We wonder aloud how to get our surplus of chicken eggs to the families that need them most in our neighborhood. We talk about writing. We talk about shows. We talk about us. And our kids. 

We do not melt into the come-down anymore. We read with the kids without falling asleep. We walk the dogs after supper. I go to bed with a book. I have so much more time to read!  I walk Edie through her anxiety by being right there with her, and feeling my own anxiety, and sharing that with her.  We plan how to turn our bar into a cupboard for something else. 

At two months in, I’m going through a series of firsts as a non-drinker – the first dinner at a restaurant with friends who order multiple bottles of beautiful wine, first time refusing that drink and having an explanation when the host persists, first dinner party where I cook and everyone around me is slammed, first night out with food industry pros who know how to throw down and expect me to follow along, writing that first restaurant piece without circling the wine list and beer selections, first night after cooking at a culinary event and wanting to relax into that after-service, come-down with my colleagues, where we drink and talk and post-mortem the happenings of the night. 

And there is always the question: What if someone passes me a martini just the way I like it, dry as the freakin’ Mojave, with two olives? What if they say, “Have one. You aren’t an alcoholic.”

I might be. I might not be. I don’t know. 

And Then, There is a Global Pandemic.

The world is turning upside down. I know this because David and I hunker over the butcher block in the kitchen, talking in whispers about having our guardianship papers in place for the kids, should we both get sick and die. 

Shit. I have to face death and sickness sober.

I see the cases of booze flying out of Costco in carts. I roll down the liquor aisle, but I don’t buy any of it. I wonder, will I need it? What if everything shuts down, and I can’t get any? What if I fail at this thing, and I need it and it isn’t there? 

Are liquor stores even essential? God, at one time I certainly thought so. 

That question is always there. But there is also a tiny bubble of confidence that has formed, too. David and I are doing this. We have changed every routine. David will stay sober with me through lock-down to get me through. We are storing a heap of ramen noodles in our liquor cabinet now. The kids are always in the cabinet, searching through piles of dried noodles, and I see it is transformed. It’s a noodle cupboard now. 

This piece of furniture is living its best life. 

Instead of booze, we buy cases of cheap canned sparkling water and we serve it to each other, every night, in pretty glasses with beautifully square chunks of ice and slivers of lime. We linger after dinner around the table outside, reading and discussing what we read. The back half of our house is open, doors pulled back completely, so the inside is outside, and the outside, in. There are twinkle lights, and dirty forks leaning on scraped plates, a leftover platter of crumbs from the lamb sambusas, and a half-eaten salad with mache and almonds slices wet with oil, lemon and a light snow-fall of salt. The kids are off someplace in the house or bouncing around on the trampoline. 

I’m tender. And also, concrete. 

David and I do the dishes together. I used to do them alone after dinner, with a heavily-poured drink, podcast voices thrumming in my ear, but new changes breed new rituals, and I clean the table and pack up leftovers as he rinses and fills the dishwasher. 

This is a more connected life. 

Months in, it isn’t perfect in sober-land. Rat-a-tat-tat-rat-a-tat-tat. We still have the same problems, and a few more with the pandemic. But I can’t tuck them away as easily, which means my anxiety propels me to see them, accept them, and look toward solving them. My therapist says this is a way that anxiety can be a positive. It can drive me, as much as crumble me. 

There isn’t perfection because of sobriety. But there is a clarity. 

2021

I have had three drinks during this sober year. 

They are all drinks I purposefully allow myself. One, when David has a wonderful moment in his career. One when my dear friends open a restaurant, and I want to celebrate their food and cocktails. One, to toast a personal success of my own. 

Each time I have these drinks, I do two things; 1) I spend an elaborate amount of time in my head getting excited that I am going to have a drink, and 2) I wonder if this will be the drink that busts open the levees and leaves me an irretrievably drunk. I know “alcohol management,” or drinking with controls, is possible for some people – and I want it so badly to be something I can do – but booze makes me tender, exposed and open. 

No. Not just open, but seeking out total obliteration. 

When I quit smoking cigarettes in 2001, a half pack a day Camel habit, it is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Not emotionally, but by way of will power. I had tried so many times and failed, that I give myself one last chance to get it right. I promise myself I’ll  quit one more time and  throw everything at it.  And if I fail, I promise myself to be cool with smoking. I’ll  accept that I can’t quit, that I’ll always be a smoker. I’ll accept all the consequences – early death, illness, feeling like shit. I’ll  just be okay being a smoker. 

But I give it everything. And I quit. 

But it’s still not lost on me that the smell of people exhaling smoke is a little thrill. I inhale it secretly and wish it were me behind that cigarette. I still would love to smoke. 

Which means I will probably always want to drink. Which probably means, like smoking, I will have to give it up completely. 

I am an addict, an addict of nearly everything good and compulsive  – booze, skin pulling, skin picking, nail biting, nicotine, social media, love, sex, all the food, any drug that makes me numb and turns off my brain and gives me subdued, cloudy relief so that I am bendy, untextured, quiet. 

One evening, in the throes of quarantine, I consider caving. I forgot to take my Lexapro, and I am unsettled, anxious, teetering on the edge of a panic attack. A drink. Or two would do the trick. 

“I really feel like a drink tonight,” I say to David, hoping he will cave and enable me. 

“We aren’t drinking anymore,” he says, although he means me. 

He is so blunt. So clear. He won’t budge. A breach is impossible, I see. 

I dig into that feeling of wanting the drink. I close my eyes and let it pass. I do not think about the come-down for the rest of the night. 

It really is one day at a time. One moment at a time. One second at a time. 

My life is not despair.