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My final drink was the stale last half of a two-dollar bottle of red wine I’d hoped might taste more like a ten-dollar bottle, guzzled and gulped through chopped cork fragments left behind by a paring knife when the corkscrew failed to get the job done. I had rules that guaranteed I would never get into trouble with drinking. If I broke a rule, I had to stop drinking for a week to prove there was no problem. Finding myself drinking the bottle I had recorked after dinner violated both the half-bottle-of-wine-per-night rule and the no-alcohol-after-Xanax rule as well as the not-being-pathetic-and-desperate rule. All the trouble that followed that night could have been avoided if I had just taken an extra milligram of Xanax and stayed in bed where I belonged or if I hadn’t had so many stupid rules.

When I stopped drinking the next day, I threw in the Xanax as a generous gesture. The first twelve hours went well. “If you do something every day, you won’t be able to figure out what it’s doing to you unless you stop doing it,” I kept repeating. I was an almost-forty-year-old, home-owning, married father of two boys who was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and who coached soccer.

Time started stretching in unpredictable ways. Maybe orange juice would help. My first appointment that morning after slugging down a quart of orange juice was a mother who wanted to talk to me about her son’s alcoholism. Once your moorings come a little loose, that sort of thing happens and happens and happens until you just can’t pick yourself up off the floor anymore. Snowflakes hit with the force of Mack trucks. The floor and ground got a little springy, sort of like I was walking on a trampoline.

The next morning I was trying to get dressed, and I woke up in a puddle of spit not able to move. Maybe if I just drank more orange juice or gin, I could pull things together and my wife wouldn’t notice anything.

I read the chapter in Goodman and Gilman, the basic pharmacology text, about alcohol withdrawal and was amazed. Suddenly, alcohol went from being 0 percent of my problem and possibly the glue that was keeping me together to 100 percent of my problem. There was no evolution. But now that I knew what the problem was, everything was going to be okay.

“Oh my God, you’re a pig.”

I had dressed up a pig and put lipstick on a pig and thoroughly fooled myself and then taken a pig out dancing. Chilled mugs, imported beer, no more than six or seven a night, Bordeaux futures, never more than half a bottle of wine most nights, making a quart of Jack Daniel’s last a month—all lipstick on a pig. Drinking less than I did in college, blacking out at most once or twice a year … more lipstick on a pig. Having one or two reasons your drinking is okay is maybe okay. I heard someone at a meeting say that on her list of all the things that might be wrong with her life, drinking too much was number nineteen.

All that fancy wine in my basement was nothing but alcohol. What was I going to do about the couple thousand dollars’ worth of Bordeaux futures I owned? I cried tears of joy for having been such an idiot and having things now be so clear. It was also an enormous relief that, since I knew what the problem was, I wouldn’t have to do anything degrading like go to a hospital.

I went to an ATM and took out two hundred dollars. A man not sure of where he’s going or what might happen next needs at least two hundred dollars. I called my sister. She was seven years sober at the time, and I asked if she could take me to an AA meeting. We went to a meeting at the Kennedy skating rink in Hyannis. Amazingly, I won the raffle and was given a Big Book.

“It is a big book,” I remarked to my sister. “And blue. Do my hands look like they’re glowing to you?”

When I put a twenty-dollar bill in the collection my sister said I should have only put in a dollar. I said that if these guys were going to save my life, I should give them at least a twenty. I liked the meeting a lot. There was no mention of Bordeaux