I’m clearly addicted. This isn’t a huge surprise considering I was just a toddler the first time I got drunk. Apparently I found some leftover Old Fashioneds at the end of a party my parents were throwing in Greenville, Mississippi in the 1960s. I downed them and then did handstands and somersaults. It was always told as a funny story.
I was still in high school before I really started drinking, and I didn’t do it often because I was a competitive swimmer. Still, almost every time alcohol touched my lips, I drank so much that I would vomit or pass out. I had countless blackouts in college, including one time when I was so drunk that my friends tied me to the bed. I continued this when I was in the Peace Corps—including a couple of nights of drinking with a KGB agent that almost got me in big trouble—and during my first brief marriage in New York when I was in my late twenties. In the winter of 1991-92, a friend had had enough of me drunkenly pouring beer into her risotto to “make it taste better” and ruining her dinner—and practically demanded that I get help.
Risotto going bad isn’t usually a warning sign, but I’ve known for a long time that something was wrong. Both my grandfathers had died as a result of their alcoholism, my parents had drinking problems, and one of my sisters had been a severe alcoholic since her teenage years.
In January 1992, I began an eight-month intensive outpatient recovery program. Thanks to three days a week of group therapy for men, I slowly began to confront my more uncomfortable feelings—in fact, all of them. My wife and I, who had been married for only 18 months, separated. On the surface, this was because she had found someone else, but I knew it was because I was impossible to be around: oversensitive, jealous, arrogant, and determined to be right in every argument. And I needed all of her attention to feel good.
In short, I had a lot to say. It was not easy, but I got there after seeing all the other men – a carpenter, an art historian, a banker, a couple of famous actors and a comedian – opening their hearts to me.
Most addicts have buried traumas that we self-medicate. As much as I wanted to be different in that regard, I wasn’t. To understand the causes of trauma, you have to peel back the layers. One of my stories was like this: I grew up in a family that was despised by most white people in Mississippi and throughout the South because both my grandfather and my father were editors of the Delta Democrat Times and wrote groundbreaking editorials on racial injustice beginning in the 1940s.
The hatred we faced was nothing compared to what blacks endured during that time, but my family was the target of frequent death and kidnapping threats and endless vitriolic phone calls. The Carter men drove around with guns under their seats, and in the mid-’60s my mother reportedly used a shotgun to confront a group of teenagers who planned to erect and then burn a cross on our lawn. Although I was a fairly clueless child, I grew up with a siege mentality.
At around 1am I had to face reality. Upset stomach, aches, shaking and muscle cramps – all classic withdrawal symptoms. I immediately cursed myself for not bringing a pint of gin with me.
And here’s another layer: In 1973, when I was eleven, a man broke into our house and held my mother hostage at gunpoint. Not knowing any better, I had let him in through the front door. He took her into the living room and sent us kids to our rooms. Somehow my mother called a family friend who came over and managed to disarm the man by showing a police badge. No one was hurt, and soon the intruder ended up in Whitfield, a state mental hospital.
A week later, a neighbor gave me a tour of the house and instructed me to lock all the windows and doors. He also told me that when my father was not home – which was often because he was having an affair – I was the man of the house. There were 23 windows and doors in total, and from then on I checked them every night. I also started sleeping with a shotgun under my bed.
I was just a scared little boy pretending to be tough, and to this day I often have nightmares in which I am being attacked, attacking others, or running for my life.
A few years later, my father left my mother and I was shipped off to an all-boys boarding school in New Jersey. One day, after a semester of crying alone in my dorm room, crying to my tutor, crying when other boys were mean to me, and calling my father every week and begging me to get back together with my mother, I suddenly decided I was done crying. From then on, I didn’t want to show or feel sadness, fear, or even anger. Anything that was considered weak, I hid from the world – and from myself.
Toward the end of my outpatient treatment, I met and fell in love with Lisa while we were eating wild strawberries in a mutual friend’s garden. I was fortunately sober, and after we married in 1995, we spent the next ten years building a life for ourselves. Most of our time was spent with and for our four children. Instead of climbing the corporate ladder, we took them hiking in the surrounding mountains, playing poohsticks in streams, and holding their hands as they fell asleep. Lisa managed to build a solid career as a lawyer while I wrote.
My old buddy, alcohol, was also slowly creeping back into my life. While working in rehab helped me keep my addiction under control, it was my role as a father – or more accurately, not wanting to be a father like my father – that really kept me on the right path. Nevertheless, I would experience days, sometimes weeks, where I would fall back into alcohol.
Our children mostly thrived during that time – all parents hurt their children, and I’m under no illusion that I didn’t – but our marriage was faltering. Lisa and I separated in 2004 and we both started seeing other people. We got back together about a year later and worked hard to reconcile, but looking back, our marriage was never the same. I wasn’t sure if we should still be together, but not wanting to follow in my father’s footsteps, I kept quiet. It seemed to be the best thing for our children.
Instead of talking to my wife about how I really felt, I just kept drinking, sometimes adding prescribed painkillers. For a surprisingly long time, nearly a decade, I was “just” binge drinking and didn’t consider myself an alcoholic. But very slowly, my addiction became a habit. By 2015, I was drinking half a bottle of wine a day, four or five times a week—and occasionally much more. In 2017, while working on a piece for this magazine—tracing Benedict Arnold’s attempt to sack Quebec for the Continental Army—I started downing a few glasses of rum every night with my fellow adventurers (in the spirit of historical accuracy, I told myself). I was also having an affair with a friend, as was my own father. Lisa and I got through it—without enough talking and without therapy—and I kept drinking. Every day, and eventually, during the pandemic, all day long.
