Barbara used to get up in the
morning, go to the window of her second floor apartment and look down to see if
she could spot her car.
If it was there, it was a good
morning. If it wasn't, it meant she would have to call a cab and drive around
to the Westside bars she frequented. She couldn't remember where she had been
when she blacked out and someone drove her home. So with a cabby, she had to
cruise one watering hole after another until she spotted her car.
Other mornings, when she had her
car, she would drive to a tavern that was on her way to work. It opened at 6
a.m. and Barbara would be parked outside at 5:45 a.m. waiting for the morning
bartender to come open the doors and let the heavy odor of a hundred spilled
beers waft out into the morning air.
“I loved that smell,” she says.
She had plenty of time for a
couple drinks before heading off to work. The morning drinks helped to cut the
hangover from the night before. Sometimes, she had time for a couple more
drinks and then she'd realize she was a little too drunk to start her work day.
So she'd go get a burrito to help her sober up a little. But the fast food
breakfast would make her sick instead, and she'd go back to the bar to have a
few beers to settle her stomach. It would get to be too late to go to work and
she would be too drunk anyway. So she'd call in sick again. After so many sick
days like that, Barbara wasn't totally surprised when she got fired from her
job as a bookkeeper.
Born and raised in Santa Monica,
she'd been drinking since she was 16. By the time she was 30, she had a history
of strange mornings to look back on. In an alcoholic blackout in 1984, she
gotten married to a guy she met in a bar. She woke up after her wedding night
to find herself in a Las Vegas hotel with this strange man who was now her
husband. The marriage ended in divorce after a year. Barbara's ex-husband later
died of cirrhosis of the liver at age 44.
Barbara seemed to be on her way to
the same fate, when one morning before Christmas 1987, she finally realized she
wasn't going to survive too many more years of 6 a.m. visits with bartenders.
At this point, she was alternating between drinking a fifth of vodka a day or a
case of beer. She weighed 200 pounds. She was 31 and had known she was an
alcoholic since she was 25. But she had not found a way to stop drinking.
That early December morning in
1987, she made it to work at yet another of her string of bookkeeping jobs. But
she only stayed long enough to write a resignation letter to her boss. “I don't
know if you know it,” her note began, “but I'm an alcoholic....”
Then she left the office and went
to get help. Her physician helped her get into the Alcoholics Anonymous
program. It didn't work right away. Barbara would quit drinking and then be
sledge hammered by withdrawal symptoms.
“Sometimes it felt like my arms
were screaming for vodka,” she recalls. During that Christmas season, she went
through a discouraging cycle of getting sober and then going back to drinking.
Finally just a few days before New Year's Eve, she stopped drinking and broke
the cycle.
Working with the AA program,
going to three or four meetings a week, Barbara has remained sober for six
years. She is now happily married to an old boyfriend she had dumped during her
drinking days because she thought he was too sober and boring. After all those
jobs that ended badly, she now runs her own bookkeeping service.
Barbara wrote me a letter last
month after reading a column I wrote about a woman who died of alcoholism at
age 32. Barbara feels she was headed for the same fate when she found her way
to AA at age 31.
In keeping with the anonymous
nature of that program, she requested that her last name not be printed in the
newspaper. But she wanted to tell her story so that people would know there is
hope for recovery.
She asked me to mention that
Alcoholics Anonymous is listed in the white pages. There is someone there to
answer the phone 24 hours a day. There are 2,000 AA meetings held in the Los
Angeles area every week.
Published Sunday, March 6 1994, The Outlook, Santa Monica
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