All he wanted was to get off certain pills. But no, the celebrated
novelisthad to give up drinking, too. The place of cure he took himself
to required that he begin by admitting that alcoholism is a disease. To a
man who has had polio and a bout with cancer, this was not like any other
disease he had met. Naturally, he resisted.
"This place you're recommending won't be AA, will it?" said
I.
"They're all AA," said Dr. K., but added with a small professional
smile, "You don't have to listen, you know."
All I wanted from Happy Valley was a little peace and quiet while I
gently let the poison out of my system, and maybe also some tips on how
to hurry it up.
So when a guy said on my first full day in the Valley, "Do you
accept that alcoholism is a disease," I had every intention of answering
"Anything you say, sir." But I guess I didn't, or if I did, l didn't say
it right--be-cause for the rest of the month, the authorities kept
bearing down on me about this in the furtive style of the proselytizer
("Have you given any thought to," etc.); and later, at my passing-out
interview, the chap of the first day said, "I believe that he's finally
come to accept alcoholism as a disease."
I had? If I'd known it was so important to them, I'd have rent my
garments agreeing with them the first time it came up, just to get it out
of the way. It really was all the same to me. Although alcoholism was
like no other disease I'd ever heard of, I assumed they had some
definition I didn't know about, which I'm sure would have been okay with
me. In a lifetime of drinking, I'd met maybe half a dozen people who
might well have been diseased: They didn't enjoy drinking, gulped the
stuff like medicine, yet would kill their mothers or themselves to get
it. If that wasn't a disease, it wasn't like anything else either. Did I
really have that?.
My own view, which I did my damned-est to keep to myself, was that
the disease proposition had probably begun as a necessary cover to give
drunks a little breathing room while they wrestled with a temptation more
powerful than anything nondrinkers can imagine. But to be overmatched
against a particular temptation is not necessarily to be diseased--is
it?
Please let me argue, just this once. In retrospect, the only
temptation that bothered me the whole time I was at Happy Valley was that
one, the craving to thresh things out and maybe bang a few heads, and I'm
afraid it showed, because I wound up being considered a cynic despite my
most solemn efforts and despite the fog that rolled in every second day,
blanketing my cerebellum in what felt like thick fur. Like any addict of
anything, I knew that my addiction to arguing was bad for me, and in my
heart I didn't even want to do it, but I could barely keep my reflexes on
hold as one fat pitch after another came my way.
This was the first of the several misunderstandings that would
bedevil my stay in the Valley, and since it must have landed on the very
first page of my dossier, it might be called the mother of them all.
People who don't enjoy arguing, or aren't used to it, always take it too
personally, and whatever resistance I may have shown to disease dogma was
read as proof that I felt personally threatened by it. Again, if I had
known this, I could truthfully have said, "What's another disease to me,
gentlemen? Call it whatever you like." But what I, or my expression,
probably did say was something dry and irritating like "A disease isn't a
matter of opinion, is it?"
Bad move. What I had taken to be an abstract discussion of a
question that didn't concern me one way or other was actually the entire
syllabus and the only question that they cared about, and I had just
unwittingly spun myself a web in which I would be stuck until the day I
left. I had, it seemed, virtually talked my way into official denial of a
disease that had given me 35 great years and at worst two lousy
ones.
To be fair to the institute, it had at least two other bits of
evidence to suggest I was indeed in "denial"--not that I ever denied I
was in denial, mind you. On arrival I had told Dr. Y. that as far as I
was concerned I was addicted to pills and nothing but pills. The idea
that Ativan addiction automatically meant alcoholism was new to me. I was
still digesting it slowly. "I'd like a drink right now, but I would kill
for a pill" was my not particularly striking way of phrasing my
difficulty-but I did lie about this, because l wouldn't have killed for
either of them. l was trying to sum up everything I'd learned so far,
that pills worked, they brought relief, and booze didn't, and Dr. Y.
seemed to understand this. "You've just been doing maintenance drinking
anyway," he said.
That's it! But even he didn't quite mean it, because a couple of
days later he asked why I had so much trouble admitting my drinking
problem, as if we'd never discussed it before. "Because if I admit it,
I'll have to quit--and who wants to do that?" I thought to myself but
didn't say, because of course I did plan to quit, it was the chief reason
I was here. I just wanted to get on with it without bogging down in all
this airy-fairy talk.
But airy-fairy turned out to be of the essence, the only approach
they knew to this thing, and there was no way I could reason or
sweet-talk my way around it, even with the good Dr. Y. And the first rule
of this approach was that the patient's estimate of his own condition is
objectively worthless, except as possible evidence against him.
Tags:
alchoholism,
authorities,
chap,
garments,
half a dozen,
happy valley,
lifetime,
little peace,
pills,
poison,
polio,
proselytizer,
rehabilitation
