The End of My Addiction

neuroanatomy. The intellectual quest exhilarated me. But I was also often frustrated at how ill I still was. Even at 180 milligrams of baclofen a day, I remained in a moderated binge cycle. Blackouts, accidents, the potential for lethal blood alcohol levels and incurable cirrhosis, among other problems—all the deadly risks of alcoholism remained. It would not matter that I had fewer heavy drinking days per month on baclofen if I stumbled into the street drunk and got run over by a car.
     
    Baclofen seemed to be giving me a hint of a cure rather than a cure itself. There were still dark nights of the soul in which I prayed, “God, if you exist, let me not wake up tomorrow.” The next morning I sometimes thought, “Shit, I’m still here,” and cursed God bitterly. Addiction is truly a living nightmare in which you wake up to the horror, not from it.
    Sometimes during abstinent periods, I would wake with the taste of liquor in my mouth and berate myself (“When did I relapse? How much did I drink?”), only to realize that I was experiencing what is called an “alcohol dream” or a “drunk dream.” The taste of liquor is so strong that you can’t help looking around for the bottle you think you drank from. A drunk dream is a very scary, destabilizing experience, and can trigger a relapse even after years of abstinence. In AA and rehab they put a positive spin on drunk dreams and say they represent a sign of progress in sobriety. But it is a strange sort of progress that thrusts the patient into such a miserable state. During my alcoholism, I had drunk dreams as often as once a month, and 180 milligrams of baclofen a day did nothing to stop them.
    There was one very positive and significant experience I shared with patients taking much lower doses of baclofen: like them, I had no craving for baclofen. It is essential that an addiction treatment not be addictive itself. So far, baclofen fulfilled that criterion.
     
    Slowly, cautiously, I made forays out in the world, proving to myself that now and then I could still show my face somewhere besides a liquor store or the little orbit of physicians and friends that I circled through during my periods of abstinence. Before my drinking began, I had been an avid skier who fearlessly went down the steepest, iciest slopes without ever hurting myself. (Jean-Claude, Eva, and I had all learned to ski as very young children simply by following our father and imitating his naturally athletic technique. Jean-Claude was so talented that at the age of ten or so a French national ski team coach spotted him and said he should train for competition.) Now, for the first time in so many years, I was able to conquer my fears, and spend a few days on the slopes in the French Alps. I enjoyed it more than I can say (and I managed not to break anything). It felt wonderful to regain a small piece of what I had lost to alcoholism.
    I broke up with one woman, took up with another, fell intensely in love with a third. I went on a bona fide holiday: to Eilat, the Israeli resort on the Red Sea, for a week. It was my first plane trip since returning to Paris three years before. I was afraid I would drink on the flights to Israel and back home, but I managed not to do so.
    I tentatively made new friendships and reestablished old ones. In the fall of 2002, I was walking on the street one day when I ran into an old friend of Eva’s named Rebecca. I hadn’t seen her for more than twenty years, but we recognized each other instantly. Rebecca was with one of her two daughters, and she told me she also had a son. She said I must come for dinner to meet all the children and her husband.
    We exchanged telephone numbers, and in a phone conversation a few days later I told Rebecca about my alcoholism. “I know it’s not the standard you expect from my family,” I said. She was very accepting of my disclosure, however, and she renewed her invitation to dinner with her family. Before long, she had become my closest confidante. Much later, she told me that until she actually saw me drunk during a binge she could not believe that I really had a serious drinking problem, because, as she said, “You were always so well-groomed and together. You never seemed in distress. I thought your talk of alcoholism was a romantic pose.”
    If only my alcoholism had been a pose I could throw off when I got tired of it. Before long, Rebecca not only saw me drunk, but passed out in my apartment, covered in my own