Content Warning: This essay has nightmare fuel. It contains visceral descriptions of physical and domestic abuse, alcoholism, and suicidal ideation. It is my past and my life, and also in the strongest terms possible, DO NOT READ this if the above will cause you harm, or even if you don't want to.
The fourth thing to understand about my marriage to Satan is that I came very close to death, then chose to live for pain instead. This is the story of how I did it.
Picture: I’ve just pulled over at Logan Boulevard and Diversey. It’s early afternoon, and a cotton-mouthed, head-ringing hangover is wringing me out in the driver’s seat. Piper has both our kids at the house; Thing 1 is almost 2 years old, and Thing 2 is just three months. It’s early 2014.
I’ve told Piper I’m going to Five Guys to get her lunch. I’m actually planning to drive up an exit ramp on the Kennedy, and keep driving until I’m dead. But I’ve gotten a text from a friend, so I pulled over. I wouldn’t want to text and drive on the way to killing myself, after all.
He’s just checking in, and asks how I’m doing. I stare at his text for several minutes before replying:
“I’m an alcoholic. I hit bottom last night, and I endangered my son.”
I first realized I am an alcoholic three years prior. After I moved back in with Piper, she began pressuring me to have children immediately. It was the one thing that caught my attention after everything she had done to me. My own childhood hung around my head like a permanent cloud of smog. In my mind I had abandoned my siblings when I left for college, regardless of how necessary an escape it actually was. I wanted to fix it, to show myself that what I had gone through wasn’t right.
Thus, I started trying to conceive with Piper. I could barely perform with her (to her ongoing disgust and rage), so I got a Viagra prescription for it. Piper dove straight into the baby rabies industrial complex on the internet, and soon she demanded that we both follow various fad diets and an arcane schedule of ovulation sex.1 And she insisted that we stop drinking.
Two weeks into this regimen of internet fad-fueled clean living, I had an apparent nervous breakdown. I could barely sleep, and when I did, I woke up drenched in sweat from lurid dreams.2 My head hurt constantly, and light seemed to make it worse. My heart thundered in my ears every single minute. My fingers trembled uncontrollably when I tried to focus, to the point that it affected my typing.
Finally, I forced myself to sit down and make a list: what exactly had happened in the past two weeks that could possibly make me feel so strung out?
Thirty minutes later, I had not gotten past the first entry:
“I stopped drinking.”
With a sinking feeling, I looked up the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. I matched almost all of the psychological symptoms, and it was possible the trembling meant physical damage as well. There it was, on the page in black and white words.
“I think I’m an alcoholic,” I told my therapist at my next session.
She didn’t hesitate for a moment: “I think you are, too.”
Blood tests showed no lasting physical damage, but it was impossible to ignore the searing signs my brain had given me. I was an alcoholic, and that was that.
Overnight, I threw myself into managing my addiction. I reached out to sober friends, and identified myself as an alcoholic to often-puzzled (and inebriated) colleagues. I pored over the science of addiction, learning more withdrawal and what I could expect in terms of recovery timetables. I started hobby writing to fill the deafening silence of a suddenly functional brain, scribbling out satiric versions of political events in epic iambic pentameter.
Piper despised the shift from the beginning. During my first Alcoholic Anonymous meeting I turned off my phone, and afterwards I turned it on to several screaming voicemails. Piper had apparently left her anti-smoking lozenges at home, and was furious I was not immediately available to produce them. Every. Single. Meeting. Ended with her screaming at me afterwards.
She also denied that I was an alcoholic. In her view, I had a “moderation problem” and sobriety would only make it worse. The situation turned ludicrous as Piper dropped sobriety for herself, including while she was pregnant with both of our children. And she screamed at me when I protested. One time she even hit me because a friend of mine had side eyed her requests that I mix her martinis.
I relapsed in February 2013. I still don’t know how to write about it. It’s true that I was constantly abused at home over my sobriety, by a violent spouse who didn’t want me to recover. It’s also true that I was immersed in drinking culture at work, and still am: my first official work meeting at my new job was at my colleagues’ liquid lunch. It’s true that barely anyone I knew supported me in any meaningful sense; most of the time my support was just me muttering truisms I learned in SMART Recovery like religious mantras.
But it was still my lips that met the bottle that night in New Orleans. We were in town for my next-older brother’s wedding. Thing 1 was almost a year old at the time. While he played on the bed, I cracked a six pack of Abita Purple Haze with Piper, and my relapse began.
I spun out of control almost immediately. Before I went to New Orleans, I had struck up a promising new partnership and was steadily building a reputation as a no-nonsense, level-headed fact finder. I came back an enraged bomb thrower. An op ed of mine was published savaging a former client so thoroughly that it still comes up almost a decade later. It didn’t matter what drew my attention, be it professional opponents or minor personal annoyances. I had one answer: rage, with the limited handle I had gotten on myself washed away in vodka. Each night turned into a ritual of forgetting: I would wait until Piper was asleep, then drink until I couldn’t remember why I wanted to scream. Then I would pass out for a few blessed hours.
A year after my relapse began, Piper planned a “mom’s night in” party with some of her girlfriends. Thing 2 was three months old and sleeping like a champ, a blessed relief after Thing 1’s constant screaming struggles with it. I still remember the booze run I made for it: Binny’s for wine, and the Chicago Distilling Company on Milwaukee Avenue for a bottle of unfiltered rye.
I managed to put Thing 1 to sleep fairly early in the evening. Then I drank.
Piper’s sharp eyes were a bright smear in the dimmed lights of the open kitchen, the same island where she’d beat me almost to passing out a handful of years earlier. Her girlfriend’s voices slurred into each other as they snuck outside for cigarettes.
I drank.
The unfiltered rye was disgusting moonshine. It vanished as I kept going. Then a bottle of wine was in my hand instead.
I still drank.
A crash trickled though one ear and out the other. I had broken a glass. The pieces fractured into a thousand more as I swept them up, Piper’s laughter harsh in my ears.
And I drank even more.
Then they were gone. I was in the master bedroom, Thing 2 was in my arms, trying to sway him back to sleep. I thudded sideways into the wall as I lost balance, almost falling over.
“Oh my god,” Piper said. Real fear was in her voice, not the lilting act she put on when she was about to hit me. “You’re impaired. Give him to me, now.”
I handed Thing 2 over, words turning into soup before they reached my tongue. She shouted at me to get out, and I staggered downstairs to Thing 1’s room, where I often slept to keep him in his bed through the night (and to escape from Piper).
When I woke up it was noon, I was covered in my own puke on Thing 1’s bed, and he was nowhere in sight.
Even as I flailed to sit up, the baby monitor crackled to life. “Get the fuck up here, you fucking drunk,” Piper hissed over the speaker.
Ice dropped in my stomach when I arrived at the foot of the stairs. While staggering down, I had left the baby gate open. Thing 1 had wandered up the stairs to the master bedroom.
Muddy relief bubbled through me when I saw both our children in the master bedroom with Piper. She glared at me with undisguised contempt.
“You endangered Thing 1’s life,” she growled. “He could have died.”
Yes. Yes I had. Soggy images flickered through my head of my head stuck in the toilet, puking out all the wine I’d guzzled. Thing 1’s hand was on my back. He was crying.
I had endangered my son.
“It’s going to take a lot to make up for this, you pathetic drunk,” she continued. “Daddy doesn’t love you,” she added, turning to my children. The words smashed into me like hammers. They had reduced me to a sobbing wreck before; now, all I did was stare.
She was right. I didn’t deserve to love them.
Piper dismissed me with a demand to get breakfast from one of her favorite takeout places. As I silently got into the car, a plan clicked into place: where to go, where to turn.
Where it would be too late.
And then my friend texted.
I watched my words on the screen. I had hit bottom. I was an alcoholic, just like my father. I was as bad as him. I didn’t deserve my children, and they didn’t deserve me.
Then my friend replied:
“Are you thinking about killing yourself?”
I froze.
I still don’t know why I replied. If there’s one thing readers take away from this essay, it’s that I almost didn’t. Suicide is never just thoughts, or words that you don’t have to heed. One second you think about death, and the next you are dead, and that’s all that happens between one point and the other.
If you remember one thing about this story, remember that: When you think as I did, feel as I did, your life is already in mortal danger, and you already need mortal help.
Because I still have no fucking clue why that simple question startled me back from the brink.
After a long pause, I tapped:
“I haven’t decided yet.”
And immediately, he answered:
“Don’t.”
Just like that, I knew I wouldn’t.
It hurt in that car, worse than I had ever hurt. I had no idea how I could go on living, hurting like that. As far as I knew, it would hurt like that forever.
But he was right. Maybe my kids didn’t deserve me as a father. Did they deserve a father who killed himself instead? Did they deserve Piper as their only parent?
Did they deserve my last lesson to them, at their tiny ages, to be to just give up and die?
I grinded my teeth against the gummy heat of the sunlight. I didn’t deserve to be a father, but I didn’t deserve to die either.
That was too easy.
I deserved every agonizing second of life that was ahead. I deserved to suffer through sobering up a second time, and to drag my worthless life together, and hold it together, until my two children were properly fucking parented.
Until I knew they wouldn’t be like me.
And if Piper was going to kick me the entire time, so much the better.
As an aside, I reject, denounce, and curse the baby rabies industrial complex of the internet to the thousandth generation. I’m looking at you, What To Expect When You’re Expecting discussion forums.
Ironically, this is the first time in my life I started distinctly remembering dreams about sex with men. Thanks, sobriety?