Chapter 42: Have you broken any habits over the years?
Originally written October 5, 2021
It wasn’t long after the turn of the century that I got rid of a couple of bad habits: drinking and smoking.
It was not as if I was a helpless slave to either Old Demon Alcohol or the devil tobacco, though both habits, especially alcohol, caused problems in my life. (I’ve already written about my drunken-driving accident and my dumb-ass failure to completely stop drinking and driving for several decades after that.)
In fact the biggest surprise in quitting drinking and smoking was how effortlessly easy it was to stop.
Lavern Baker knew what I’m talking about — though I still cuss and fuss and given the chance, I’d likely dance the hoochie coo:
As far as the booze goes, I started drinking when I was a junior in high school. I believe the first time I got drunk was at a Teen Age Republican convention in Santa Fe, when I got rather bombed on Scotch.
Except for my first semester, when I had joined the Bahá'í Faith which calls for abstinence, I probably got drunk every weekend in college. (To be clear, early on my motto was “Weekend begins on Thursday” but Sunday through Wednesday I usually stayed sober.)
Out of college, the boozing continued. When in the early 1980s I realized that my first wife was a pretty serious alcoholic, I slowed down considerably, especially after Molly was born in 1981. But I never completely stopped.
But by the early 1990s, my drinking gradually but noticeably slowed down. And by the end of the century, I was hardly imbibing at all. I just didn’t like it that much by then.
I didn’t even get drunk on Dec. 31, 1999, which I’d always envisioned, perhaps thanks to Prince, as a huge blowout of Biblical proportions.
To be honest though, the main reason that I didn’t party like it’s 1999 that night in 1999 is because I had to work.
The Y2K hysteria was pretty strong in Santa Fe then, so in case civilization as we know it melted down at the stroke of midnight, my editors wanted an experienced police reporter to be ready to spring into action.
So that night I zipped around to several bars, interviewed a few joyful drunks and a couple of law-enforcement spokesmen for what turned out to be a very boring story in ring in the new millennium.
Then I quit drinking just a couple of years later because of diabetes.
In the late summer of 2002 I went to a conference for statehouse reporters in Washington, D.C. One of my best friends, a former colleague named Chuck lives in our nation’s capital, so every night he and I would go hit the town.
On the last night, Chuck and I went to a bar in Virginia to hear Nick Lowe play. Though Chuck was enjoying a couple of beers, something in me said that beer wouldn’t sit well in me.
I drank vast quantities of iced tea that night.
(Despite what Nick sings here, everything I write in Snazzy Tales is all true … )
Too much information alert: Then, the next week, back in Santa Fe, something strange happened. One of my testicles swelled up so big it was uncomfortable to sit.
I went to see my doctor who did some tests and determined that I had diabetes. My blood sugar was through the roof. I’m still not sure that this is what caused my inflated ball, but the doc said I was going to have to start medications and drastically reduce my carbohydrate intake.
And this meant NO MORE BEER!
Fortunately, the testical swellng soon went down, never to return.
But the diabetes stayed on.
At first the doctor said I could have alcohol with low carbohydrates. So at one party not long afterwards, I got a little high on wine. Then, not long afterwards at an Elvis Costello concert at Paolo Soleri amphitheater, I indulged in a little whiskey from a friend’s flask. (Hey, it was an outdoor show and it was damned cold!)
But soon after that, my doctor told me that my diabetes meds weren’t really doing the trick. He wanted to prescribe another medicine, but that would mean no alcohol at all.
I said OK.
So since that Elvis Costello show, I can count the times that liquor touched my lips.
Once when my daughter and her husband made a batch of beer, I had exactly one sip. The beer tasted pretty good but it didn’t trigger any cravings.
Then, maybe a couple of years later at a Christmas party at La Fonda, my date ordered a gin and tonic while I ordered my usual soda and lime. In picking up the drinks, I grabbed the wrong cup and sure enough got a little snort of gin. I immediately traded cups with my date.
In the summer of 2017 I went to Ireland. It was my first (and so far only) time I’d been there and I’d decided in advance that I wasn’t going to leave Dublin without having a Guinness Stout or two.
And so I did.
In a pub not far from the Guinness factory, I actually ordered my first beer in about 15 years. I drank it, enjoyed it, and ordered one more. I told my friend I was with that night, “This tastes great! In another 15 years, I’m coming back here and get another one!”
I got pretty buzzed from those two bottles of Guinness, so I was happy that Dublin has a good public transportation system and I didn’t have to drive to the downtown restaurant where we had dinner or drive back to my hotel.
But, at least so far, I haven’t had another sip of liquor. I didn’t even have a drink with dinner that night.
I wasn’t even tempted a few days later when I went to the Mekonville festival in rural England (And The Mekons are a pretty hard-drinking crew as are their fans.)
But this abstinence is not a testament to my great willpower. To be honest, I really don’t miss it.
During my first couple of dry summers, sometimes on a hot day I’d think, “A cold beer would be nice.” But I never obsessed over it. And in recent years, despite many hot summer days, I haven’t felt a longing for beer.
I don’t actually remember exactly when I first quit tobacco, but I do know it was sometime before I quit drinking and sometime after I moved into my house in January 2000.
To be clear, I never smoked cigarettes. But I smoked a pipe for nearly 30 years.
My first pipe was one my mom bought me for Christmas circa 1973. It was a Sherlock Holmes-style calabash with a large meerschaum bowl.
Why did Mom give me that? My brother convinced her it would be a great gift.
However, Jack assumed I’d end up using it to smoke marijuana — and he thought it would be subversive and funny to have Mom buy it for me. He figured I’d just throw away the bag of pipe tobacco she bought with the pipe.
Imagine the look of disappointment in my brother’s eyes that Christmas Eve when, right after unwrapping my gift, I loaded a bowl of tobacco — a pretty good latakia blend — and started smoking it.
But I was curious. So I smoked that tobacco — and countless bags after that. After college I started working at Stag Tobacconists, where I had a generous district manager who gave me several great pipes.
I was hardly seen after that without a pipe in my mouth. I never inhaled — most pipe smokers don’t — so lung cancer never was a concern. But every time I’d go to get my teeth cleaned, my dentists couldn’t hide their disgust.
Yet, as with alcohol, it was a medical problem that led to my quitting smoking.
I was suffering badly from sleep apnea and after a sleep study I got a C-Pap that was hooked up to an oxygen machine. I was told that I was not to smoke in my bedroom for fear a spark would cause that machine to explode.
So for a few weeks I’d just smoke in my living room (or my car or outside). But one Saturday I’d run out of tobacco. I was pretty much a tobacco snob, so I wouldn’t touch any drugstore tobacco. Stag was the only place in town that sold decent tobacco, and that store was all the way across town and I was too lazy to drive that day.
But when the next day rolled around, I was not craving a smoke. I decided to see how long I could last without one.
So far it’s been more than 20 years.
Let’s end with a special tune from Tiny Tim with Brave Combo:
