Son of a French Holocaust survivor, Alan Kaufman drank
to fill the huge hole in his heart, wrecking himself and everyone in his
path. In Drunken Angel, the poet and critically acclaimed writer recounts
with unvarnished honesty the story of the alcoholism that took him to the brink
of death, the PTSD that drove him to the edge of madness, and the love that
brought him back. Kaufman minces
no words as he looks back on a life pickled in self-pity, self-loathing, and
guilt, delivering a lacerating, cautionary tale of a life wasted and reclaimed.
Have a look:
Chapter 82
Why an angel? Because I believe that, in time, that
is what we become in sobriety, if we last long enough, to the end. Not the
winged kind, no. Not some haloed cupid or sword swinger but a kind of flawed
angel, without wings, that belongs to no religion but rather to a species of
human heartbreak unlike any other known.
Alcoholics and addicts are unlike any other people
I’ve ever met. I am unlike most people. A blazing mutant of some kind. A wondrous
freak. In my mind lurks an urge that will be with me to the end, to put a
bottle to my lips and drink myself to death. A judge and jury that I wake up to
each morning has pronounced a verdict of guilt on me for no crime that I have
committed, just for being alive, and has sentenced me to death, not by
guillotine or rope but by a single drink.
It is the strangest thing, this sentence of death,
this disease I have which tests me to the max and each day holds my existence accountable
to the very universe, a god no religion can know as we drunks know it.
A god of drunks who goes with us into our prisons
and gutters, bedrooms and businesses, flophouses and alleys, hospitals and mansions,
and patiently waits with hand on our shivering shoulders as we groan through
yet one more night of near death, waits to see if maybe this time we’ve had
pain enough, loss enough, enough hangover, illness, fear, to ask for help.
And yet many cannot ask, and die right before the
god of drunks, who I think must weep helplessly when this occurs. So many lose
heart and fall. I have seen so many of my brothers and sisters in recovery
fall. I have seen so many beautiful people die. The poet found in his room OD’d
with a needle in his arm. He was my best friend. The twenty-year-old drummer
who killed himself over a romance gone wrong. Nice kid. The young artist who
drank and was found murdered in her Tenderloin hotel room. She was so talented.
The buddy who drank and wound up facedown in a river in Pennsylvania, drowned.
The ones, so many, who jumped off the bridge or the roof or put a gun barrel to
their heads and squeezed the trigger, or in private ate painkillers until found
on the floor brain-dead, or perished young of a destroyed liver. That young nurse,
a mother of three, who had everything, beautiful children, loving husband,
looks to die for, a house with two cars in the garage, who also had this little
problem that she couldn’t stay sober or stop smoking crack, no matter how many
meetings she attended or what advice she tried to follow, and one day returned
home to that garage, ran a hose, turned on the ignition, and gassed herself to
death.
When you have seen as much of that as I have in my
sobriety, in the last twenty years, how can I not regard my own reflection with
amazement that I am still here. Why me? How did I get so lucky? Really, I don’t
know. I want to think that I’ve done something right, but in truth, I know
better. I do believe in a Higher Power and I do work the 12 steps and go to
meetings and work with drunks of every kind and description, yet it doesn’t
seem like enough, it never does. I never feel that I can repay what has been
given to me. The love that has been shown. The patience and straight-shooting
counsel that has saved my butt time and again. I have met in recovery men and
women who are the greatest human beings I have ever known but don’t want their
names advertised. Anonymous, quiet angels, invaded by death, propelled by
light, who move among us with quiet grace and private suffering and seek each
day to help those around them without fanfare or reward.
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