Quitting Is Just the First Step

Quincy W. begins the day with a prayer from the Big Book. Even after a dozen years, she has it taped to the bathroom mirror in her one-bedroom apartment on a street of apartments in Sherman Oaks. “Relieve me of the bondage of self that I may better do thy will,” she reads, ignoring the reflection of her unmade-up, 30-year-old Judy Garland face. “Take away my difficulties that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of thy power. . . .”

Normally brazen, often profane, Quincy used to ask God for a man. To be honest, she still did until a few months ago, even though she knows full well it’s the women, not the men, who keep you sober.

The first drinker in three generations to achieve sobriety, Quincy started drinking when she was 8. She quit at 15. She quit again three years later.

For alcoholics like Quincy, a concert promoter for rock bands, physical cravings aren’t the problem. In fact, drinking isn’t even the issue anymore. She says it’s just life now, and that’s, like, huge.

Long-term sobriety, a highly individual and little studied phenomenon, is a daunting prospect, especially for the young who relapse repeatedly, says Betsy McCaul, director of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Comprehensive Women’s Center. The diligence and commitment required to achieve it are enormous, she says. About a third of the alcoholics who enter treatment succeed, a third relapse repeatedly and a third drink themselves to death, providers say. “Instead of being shocked when somebody fails, we ought to be stunned when people make it,” she says.

Part of a relatively new, small but growing group of young people with long-term sobriety, Quincy has immersed herself in Southern California’s ubiquitous 12-step subculture. First, she joined Alateen, a program for children of alcoholics, then Alcoholics Anonymous, the global self-help recovery program, later another 12-step group for codependents.

Almost half her life has been structured around a daily routine of practices and meetings, workshops and friends--a fragile daisy chain of women who also depend on the program and on one another. Quincy numbers her friends, most of whom are in AA, in the hundreds, and they must book her weeks in advance for tennis or roller-blading, parties or dinners. On her computer, 31 boxes in a 42-day calendar are filled with birthdays, sober birthdays, trips, committee meetings, parties and a convention--plans she’ll scrap instantly if she hears someone needs support for a do-it-yourself detox, or inspiration to stick with their program.

Unlike Quincy, many of them are unable to stay sober. Over the years, she estimates she’s been to as many as 30 alcohol-related funerals, including her father’s.

At meetings, Quincy is a popular role model, a young old-timer who sits in the front and shares her experiences in the language young newcomers can relate to. Her friends know her as an open book, loud, funny and subject to serious mood swings.

Her friend Toni, 33, a former colleague who does not have a problem with alcohol, is amazed by Quincy and her AA friends whose lives seem intense and operatic compared with hers. “Life is one big drama to those people,” she says.

Toni has counseled her friend through several failed relationships, all with men from AA. Recently, Quincy has agreed that she might find more reliable prospects if she dated “normies,” men outside AA. But then she thinks, Who else besides another alcoholic would ever understand me?

Alcoholism May Be Passed On Genetically

Researchers have made major strides in understanding the neuroscience of addiction in the last two decades, yet alcoholism is still imperfectly understood as an idiosyncratic mix of circumstances, biology, personality and behavior. Studies now suggest that two-thirds of the risk of becoming an alcoholic is genetic, though scientists have yet to find the genes that make children of alcoholics more susceptible than others.

Quincy says she knew right away drinking was more than just a youthful experiment for her. In hindsight, she says it felt as if her disease, slumbering since her birth, had been awakened.

The eldest of three, Quincy grew up in Encino--the cradle of backyard barbecues and swimming pools--at a time of cultural upheaval. Her father, a graphic designer for the recording industry, and her mother, a secretary, regularly entertained industry executives and artists at their shady compound.

In those days, no one considered it unusual to give children a taste of alcohol, and Quincy’s father even invited his daughter to drink and paint with him in his backyard studio. The smells of linseed oil, alcohol and the sweet tobacco from his pipe, mixed with the sounds of classical music and their laughter, would forever be a part of her love for him.

Quincy can’t remember her first drink. But she recalls that alcohol made her feel silly, relaxed, pretty and important, and that she was soon drinking to get drunk. When her parents went out, Quincy and her buddy Ashley drank her father’s beer and sometimes made themselves screwdrivers.

Quincy didn’t know her father’s father had been a binge drinker. Nor did she know that his death, like those of his two brothers, had been related to alcohol.

In fact, Quincy had never heard the word alcoholism until she was 12 and learned her father had collapsed from his first alcohol-related seizure. After he recovered, he started losing jobs. Enraged and despairing, her mother made unsuccessful attempts to get him to quit drinking. They separated; relatives and friends fell away. Quincy’s mother lived with the children in the compound. Her father moved in with his mother in Brentwood and continued drinking.

All Quincy wanted was the impossible: to have her old life back. She drank to escape her new life. When she drank, she blacked out, but who cared? By then everybody else was doing drugs.

She and her friends never needed fake ID. Quincy says she and Ashley bribed older liquor store customers with money for an extra six-pack if they’d buy the girls vodka or Jack Daniels. They drank straight from the bottle before taking a taxi to Hot Trax, a nightclub in a seedy part of the San Fernando Valley. It didn’t matter if her mother grounded her, she’d stay out until 2 a.m.

If she needed money, Quincy says she panhandled strangers at the Sherman Oaks Galleria. She stole makeup from Sav-On. She started having sex at 13 with her boyfriends. She started using drugs, and her drinking escalated.

“We were all out of control,” says Quincy’s mother, now remarried and living in Los Angeles. She knew Quincy was drinking and lying about her whereabouts, but she was focused obsessively on working and saving her husband. After a friend told her about AA, she took her husband to AA meetings, joined Al-Anon and shuttled Quincy and her siblings to meetings of Alateen.

“I was so guilty. I knew I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing,” her mother says. “It didn’t get better for a long time.”

In the end, she says, Quincy saved herself.

New Year’s morning, 1985, Quincy remembers coming to, alone, in a dank alley across Hollywood Boulevard from Graumans Chinese Theatre. She was 15. Her blouse was mysteriously bloodied, the odor of urine saturated the crisp, predawn air. She couldn’t remember what had happened, although she did unfortunately recall part of the previous night when she had thrown up on a taxi driver. Christmas lights twinkled over the boulevard beyond. She felt like the trash strewn around her. She didn’t feel lucky enough to die.

In a flash of clarity, she saw she was angry, confused, messed up and had absolutely no solution of her own. Screw it, she thought, I’ll go to AA. Whatever.

Giving Up Alcohol Was Only the Beginning

In movies, the story usually ends here. But for Quincy, as for many addicts, quitting was just the beginning.

In Alateen, Quincy had been too angry and distracted by the cute guys there to absorb the basic 12-step message: Take personal responsibility, develop a spiritual life and try to help other people. It would be the same in AA. She had been able to quit drinking, she understood what they said in meetings, but life still sucked. She still thought of herself as trash.

Happy and fun one minute, she turned mean and manipulative the next. She smoked, she stole, she slept with her girlfriends’ boyfriends. But they’d slept with hers, so who cared?

She watched her father’s health deteriorate. Her mother sold their Encino home and moved to Woodland Hills. A friend was killed in a gang fight. She saw adults in AA take financial advantage of young people.

Screw AA, she thought. She had already dropped out of high school. She stopped going to meetings.

After eight months without meetings, a thought occurred just before she left for a family vacation in Hawaii. I haven’t had a drink in almost three years. I deserve one! It won’t count in Hawaii. Quincy and her sister got totally wrecked that August in Maui. Afterward, she promptly forgot about it.

Two months later, her disease caught up with her again at a wedding reception at the Hotel Bel-Air.

It was a rainy night in October, and Quincy was seated with the other young guests at a round table in a ballroom, feeling anxious and uncomfortable in her fancy dress and makeup. Large eyes ringed in black, she watched the waiter as he filled each guest’s flute with Dom Perignon. When he approached, she didn’t wave him off.

Quincy stared at the glass. She felt a familiar knot in her stomach, then the mental tape began to play: Go ahead. It won’t hurt you. You’ll feel like Marilyn Monroe.

In AA, she had been told those thoughts were a manifestation of her disease. The disease seemed stronger than before: You can have it, Quince. It’s just champagne! Sure, it messed you up before, but it won’t mess you up this time. You can’t be an alcoholic. You’re too young.

Ten minutes passed.

She was tired of fighting, and of feeling. She reached for the glass.

Quincy didn’t sober up until the following weekend. The four-month binge that followed is a blank now.

She remembers her last night of drinking, Jan. 31, 1988. She had thrown a party at her mother’s house in Woodland Hills. But almost immediately after the guests arrived, she blacked out.

The next morning, she awoke alone, feeling sick, in a quiet, empty house. Quincy crawled to the phone to call a friend to ask what had happened. He said her drunken and profane insults had made his girlfriend cry, and he hoped he’d never see her again.

Once more, Quincy says, she wanted to die. Instead, she dragged herself back to AA and found her first sponsor.

Vanessa Overby, vice president of clinical services at Betty Ford Clinic in Rancho Mirage, says the sponsor is the key to AA, and especially for many women alcoholics. In the 12-step world, a sponsor is a veteran with long-term sobriety who serves as a mentor, a confessor and a role model for facing life’s ordinary ups and downs without alcohol or drugs.

Some critics have complained that women newcomers are vulnerable to predators in mixed gender groups; that the language in AA’s Big Book is condescending to women; that women should be empowered rather than forced to admit their “powerlessness” over alcohol. For young women, particularly, treatment providers say ongoing support from other women is crucial if they are to overcome persistent image or relationship problems and build resistance to the drinking environment that surrounds them. “It’s hard for them to believe they can never drink or use again,” Overby says.

To succeed, young women need to “get to the core stuff of being someone other than what the culture tells them to be,” she says. “They have to learn to trust other women.”

Quincy first met Tanya one morning when she was working as a drug counselor at the Van Nuys Community Hospital. She walked into the basement and saw a small blond woman thumbing through a magazine. She introduced herself, and the two connected instantly. Tanya, another counselor her own age, 19, had four years of sobriety. Like Quincy, she came from a long line of alcoholics and adored her father. She had also started drinking at age 8.

Quincy felt safe with her new friend. Tanya was one of the first women she trusted. Tanya wasn’t a guy trying to sleep with her or not. With Tanya, Quincy could confess all her secrets and lies and be certain she wouldn’t be cut off.

They went out dancing Friday and Saturday nights. They moved in together. Friends teased that they’d become Siamese twins.

Then, in 1990, Tanya got married and, a year later, moved to Arizona.

Bereft, Quincy felt as if she had lost her lifeline. In the following years, she struggled to find new sponsors. Among those she tried were a stripper who wanted her to baby-sit; a housewife who yelled at her kids; and a legal secretary who criticized the way she had designed her program.

Now her sponsor is a 55-year-old bookkeeper whom she met at a women-only AA meeting. After 17 years of sobriety, she sponsors 19 other women.

The two attend a women-only group once a week and meet occasionally to go over the steps. Quincy calls her if she has a crisis with men or work. Her sponsor reminds her how to apply the program in her life.

Quincy is like many young women she’s seen “hit bottom” at a young age because of multiple-drug use, her sponsor says. “You see a lot of young people who come in and go out, come in and go out, partly because they can, physically.”

One reason Quincy has stuck with the program may be that she had the advantage of already being familiar with AA early in life. She also has built up a large support network, her sponsor says, and is able to “relocate herself within AA.”

In time, Quincy became a sponsor to three other women: an advertising representative, a business administrator and a high school teacher. The teacher, in turn, sponsors one of her students. The 15-year-old has one year of sobriety. But the teacher has had trouble believing she is alcoholic and has relapsed four times.

Some young people mature out of problem drinking, even chronic dependence, with age and responsibilities, researchers say. Some don’t. Quincy tries not to take it personally when someone she sponsors gets loaded. It’s always weird. It’s like, oh, they’re not done with their drinking. Or, maybe they’re not even alcoholic. You just don’t know when you get sober so young.

Still, Quincy could barely believe it when she heard three years ago that Tanya had gone out.

Her Father’s Death Was a Lesson for Her

There are times in life when the tools of her program aren’t enough.

In late September 1995, Quincy went to the Veterans’ Administration hospital on Wilshire Boulevard to see her father, dying of esophageal cancer. She sat by his shriveled, 64-year-old body, her face inches from his own, yellowed with jaundice.

They had never cried in front of each other and didn’t start then. What a stupid way to end a friendship, he told her.

This time, Quincy knew no spiritual guidance, no steps, no working with others would help her. Even her disease was quiet as if it too knew alcohol would be useless.

On Nov. 11, the day he died, she

went to her grandmother’s house. She searched until she found his robe. She held it to her face and inhaled the scent of him, a musty, sweet tobacco smell. She buried her face in the folds and she wept.

Quincy believes now that her father died from alcoholism so that she’d know how to live with it. If she ever drinks again, she believes she’ll end up like him.

She can’t explain why others--including her brother--don’t learn from a close example. He calls himself an alcoholic. He was once jailed for drunk driving after he struck another car, injuring two people. He just doesn’t want to quit yet.

Quincy’s mother is surprised at how many people still ask of alcoholics, “Why don’t they just quit drinking?” She understands

Quincy’s struggle and is proud of her. “She has a wonderful life, a big circle of friends. The only thing that’s missing in her life is a soul mate to share it with.”

She also understands why her daughter’s quest is all-consuming. Quincy’s search for a soul mate, she says, is an obsession to replace her father.

Photos Remind Her of How It Used to Be

The further away Quincy gets from her past problems, the harder it is to remember how it was. She pictures her disease now as a young man doing push-ups in a corner of her mind, working out and waiting for her to be weak. He is curious, she says, about painkillers, about heroin, about wine coolers. She knows he would like her to forget how it used to be.

Quincy has hung reminders on a purple wall above her living room sofa--a gallery of 42 photographs of family and friends.

There’s a photo of Ashley, her childhood drinking buddy. Last year she got detained for attempted shoplifting and gave the police Quincy’s name as her own. Now she’s out somewhere on heroin.

There’s Jaime, the teacher whom she sponsored. Quincy has heard she’s trying to get sober again. And there’s her friend Danielle, who decided she wasn’t alcoholic and went back to drinking a year ago.

Tanya is tucked behind another friend’s photo on the bookshelf. She got sober again after five months, but it was harder than before. Tanya moved back to the San Fernando Valley, and she and Quincy are still close, but they’re both so busy. She has kids. You know.

Men, Quincy says, have to earn a place on the wall.

A few months ago, she added a new photo--Michael, 36, an old boyfriend who moved in with her earlier this year. A handsome jack-of-all-trades she met years ago at an AA club in the Valley, they were dating when her father was sick and broke up three days before his death. He didn’t do that emotional support thing well, he says now.

When they first reconnected, Michael had just divorced his second wife and was using drugs and drinking a fifth of booze every night just to go to sleep. He knew what they say in AA about relationships like theirs: He’d get her drunk before she’d get him sober.

In the last five months, since Michael suffered a debilitating motorcycle accident, his drinking and using have subsided. He says he is in love and wants to marry her.

Quincy realizes Michael is as undependable as she now knows her father was. It’s an issue.

For reasons she can’t fully explain, she can’t let him go. Why, she asks, did she talk to her father until the day he died? Why hasn’t she turned her back on her brother? Mike is like her best friend. She’s never loved anyone else like this.

Quincy’s friends haven’t tried to hide their concern. It feels to her like disapproval or rejection. It’s almost like being shunned, or blackballed, if you hang out with someone who still drinks, she says.

The crisis has set off a new round of self-doubt. Her disease has started to mess with her again. You’re not really an alcoholic. Not after all these years.

Quincy has burned out on her rigorous routine and has cut back her meetings to one a week.

Her thoughts have swung to the opposite extreme: Would anybody give a damn about me if I didn’t have 12 years sober? Would these people be my friends if I didn’t see them five times a week? What if I didn’t have Alcoholics Anonymous? Who would I be then?

Then, she thinks: I still am who I am. My life is more balanced now. Isn’t that a definition of sobriety?

*

Quincy’s last name has been withheld, and some of her friends’ names have been changed, because of AA’s tradition of anonymity.

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Facts About Alcohol

* Forty percent of children who start drinking before the age of 15 will become alcoholics at some point in their lives, compared with 25% for those who begin drinking at age 17, and about 10% for those who begin drinking at ages 21 and 22.

* Nearly 4 million American women ages 18 and older can be classified as alcoholic or problem drinkers.

* Seventy-six million Americans, about 43% of the U.S. adult population, have been exposed to alcoholism in the family.

* Twenty-two percent of American adults are former drinkers.

* In the 1980s, the membership of Alcoholics Anonymous doubled and became younger and more female. Women now constitute more than a third of the membership and closer to half for those under 30.

* Every day, more than 700,000 people in the U.S. receive treatment for alcoholism.

* The estimated economic cost of alcohol abuse was $185 billion for 1998, mostly because of lost productivity from alcohol-related illness or premature death.

*

Sources: Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University in Providence, R.I.; 10th Special Report to the U.S. Congress on Alcohol and Health; the National Institutes of Health/U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence; National Assn. for Children of Alcoholics.

Talking the Talk

Alcohol Dependence

At least three symptoms during any 12-month period:

1. Tolerance (increasing amounts of alcohol are required to achieve a desired effect); withdrawal syndrome; drinking larger amounts over a longer period of time than intended.

2. A persistent desire to drink or unsuccessful efforts to control drinking.

3. Giving up or reducing important social, occupational or recreational activities in favor of drinking.

4. Spending a great deal of time obtaining alcohol, drinking or recovering from drinking.

5. Continued drinking despite knowledge of having a persistent or recurring physical or psychological problem caused by or exacerbated by drinking.

Alcohol Abuse

At least one of the following traits:

1. Continued use despite social or interpersonal problems caused by drinking.

2. Recurrent drinking when alcohol use is physically hazardous.

3. Recurrent drinking resulting in a failure to fulfill major obligations at work, school or home.

4. Recurrent alcohol-related legal problems.

Source: American Psychiatric Assn.’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-IV.