Out From Under the Influence

MY first date with Julie did not begin well and ended even worse. For starters, I didn't show. It was Saturday evening of Presidents' Day weekend, and I was drinking gin and tonics and watching hoops in the Telephone Bar on Second Avenue, whiling away the time before I was supposed to meet her at John's Pizzeria just down the block. The next thing I knew it was hours later, and the phone was waking me from my slumber in my apartment on East 12th Street.

I stumbled out of the building and ran to John's, where Julie ended up crying defiantly on the sidewalk, her words lost to me but their meaning clear: never again.

After she left in a cab for the Upper West Side, it could have been just one of those first dates from hell that eventually becomes funny in the retelling. But it wasn't that simple. We worked together at an advertising agency, she as a human resources coordinator and I as one of the human resources she coordinated. She was the first person I'd met at work. I'd only passed the typing test because she had added an extra five minutes to the egg timer.

With that and a smile she'd hooked me, and I started spending my nights constructing elaborate and clever e-mail messages to her that I would pass off as spontaneous the next day. She began to drop by my desk with a frequency that I attributed more to her need for my ragged charm than my need for the memos she was distributing.

Now all that groundwork appeared lost. And on Tuesday I'd have to face her again.

I continued to drink all weekend, wallowing in regret, and on Sunday I sent her $100 worth of roses bought with money I didn't have along with a note of apology. Unfortunately I also left her a voice mail message that consisted of Hootie and the Blowfish's "Hold My Hand" in its entirety.

When Tuesday rolled around, I stayed home. Wednesday, same.

I knew this kind of denial was not a practical long-term strategy, so on Thursday I got dressed and tried to return to work. But my nerves were shattered, my head cloudy. I had crossed the line, as I sometimes did, from functional alcoholic to clearly not.

Finally I called Julie. "Did you get the roses?" I asked.

Yes, she had, and they were lovely, but she felt it was a rather grotesque gesture all the same. "You're an alcoholic," she said, not unkindly. "You need help."

I had already reached this conclusion myself at age 16, but no one had ever said it directly to me. Julie suggested I make an appointment for the next morning with a doctor associated with the agency's employee assistance program. I did. I was love-struck and free-falling, and if she'd asked me to jump off a bridge, I might have done that, too. But again I stumbled out of bed disoriented and arrived at the doctor's half an hour late, rain soaked.

His West 57th Street office was lush and quiet; somewhere a fountain trickled tranquilly. He was bearded and kindly but he got right to the point.

"Now, what brings you here?" he asked.

"I drink."

"How often?"

"Daily."

"Have you been drinking this morning?"

"Affirmative."

"What about your arm?"

"I have a cat."

"Must be some cat."

"I don't really have a cat."

"I think you like to see the physical manifestation of your psychic pain."

"Who doesn't?"

He diagnosed me with acute alcoholism, which wasn't exactly breaking news, and recommended that I seek treatment pronto at an inpatient rehabilitation clinic.

"If it's O.K. with Blue Cross," I told him, "it's O.K. with me."

I was 24 years old.

I returned to my apartment, where I hadn't paid rent in some time, and waited for a call from the benefits people at work. I had been with the agency for only six months and only as a favor to my aunt, who had worked there for several years. From my shaggy wardrobe to my computer illiteracy, it was pretty clear I was not Madison Avenue material, but she had snagged me an interview anyway.

Julie, my unlikely advocate, called and told me that my benefits were shipshape and that I was good to go. So I went, but not before draining several 40's to steel myself for the phone calls I had to make to family and friends to ensure I wasn't reported AWOL.

When the van arrived to pick me up, the grizzled driver told me that most people were drunker than I was. Somehow this made me feel worse, as if I couldn't even self-destruct correctly. As the van sailed north on the F.D.R. Drive, I thought the bright lights of the big city never looked quite so intoxicating as when you were leaving.

Nearly three weeks later I appeared at Julie's cubicle in my only suit. She hugged me and told me I looked great. I told her she did, too. She found some envelopes for me to stuff and papers to photocopy, tasks I completed with unprecedented zeal. She looked amused each time I reported on my progress and requested more work.

At the end of the day I took off my jacket, sat in her cubicle and told her about rehab.

"Nobody thought you'd come back," she said.

As I got up to go, I briefly touched her knee as if I were some repressed character in a Merchant-Ivory movie, and then I walked home through the streets of Manhattan.

We met that weekend in Central Park and talked as we walked. Julie was from Canton, Ohio, a daughter of a schoolteacher and a football coach. She was a Phi Beta something or other, and her best friend was her sister, a graphic designer in Chicago. She chose the ad agency over Merrill Lynch because it felt more humane. Me, I was just a guy from New Jersey whose path of least resistance had led through the Lincoln Tunnel.

The recovery literature warned of the dangers of starting a romance days (or even weeks, sometimes years) after coming out of the drink, but I wanted company on my lifeboat, and Julie seemed ready to grab an oar, if warily.

At our next date in the park, she climbed a rock and declared me too raw to date. "I think we should just be friends," she said.

I didn't begrudge her this decision. If you were to take Julie's suitors from over the years and place them in a police lineup, I clearly was the one who most likely belonged. We walked through the Ramble, across the Sheep Meadow and to a clearing where the skyscraping hotels of Central Park South looked luminous in the gloaming. As the light disappeared behind the Palisades and a full moon shone, she turned to me and said, "If we weren't just friends, this would be kind of romantic."

During our hermetically sealed days and nights that followed, I made her a promise that I would stay sober.

Two months later, though, I was back with old friends and to my old self. Julie and I attended a wedding at the Jersey Shore, where, unbeknownst to her, I knocked back drink after drink. I simply could not see anything past the clinking ice cubes and undulating limes in seemingly every person's glass. I danced with the groom's sister, who whispered in my ear to give her a call if I ever decided to "lose the blonde." One old acquaintance looked at me quizzically as I poured a few back during our conversation and said, "You a little thirsty?"

On the return to the city, we became ensnarled in traffic awaiting a D.W.I. checkpoint. Terrified, I kept up the ruse by telling Julie it was a good thing I'd quit drinking when I did. Such is the bottomless cup of duplicity that we drunks drink from. When the officer simply waved me through, I felt such joy and relief that I vowed I'd had my last drink.

AND it nearly was. Just 25 months after my brush with the New Jersey state troopers, we were married on a steamy June day in a tiny church in an industrial corner of Canton as guests fanned themselves with their programs. The night before the wedding, a group of the hopeful and faithless had gathered for the rehearsal dinner in a restaurant in old downtown Canton. There was the requisite mix of drinks and well wishes, and I still had the sense that my mouth and arm could conspire against my brain to raise a little hell.

When it came my turn to toast, I recited the speech I had outlined on a cocktail napkin at the Indians game the night before. I forget every word of it now except for the last line, which I borrowed from a Bruce Springsteen song. I promised Julie that for better or worse, for richer or more likely poorer, I would love her with all the madness in my soul. It was one part vow, one part pose and one part roll of the dice.

Then I lifted my glass in the air and put it back down.

It's been 10 years since my last drink, and it's not like rolling a boulder up a mountain every day. In fact it's no effort at all. I don't attend meetings, speak in jargon or mouth the serenity prayer when flummoxed. The accumulation of thousands of days without alcohol has simply made it a reflexive nonhabit.

Julie and I have ordinary jobs, a home in the suburbs and a minivan for our 2.5 children (two now and one due in December), who, genetically speaking, could have hoped for better. Soon enough they will surely tell me so.

But I don't know. The thing is, would their mother and I ever have gotten together if I hadn't been a drowning alcoholic in need of her outstretched hand? Sometimes I can't help but wonder if the burdens we carry don't end up carrying us.

MODERN LOVE Kevin Cahillane is a copywriter and journalist who lives in Summit, N.J.