May 29, 2025 • 21 mins
For the better part of his adult life, drinking was Jonathan’s great comfort. But after getting laid off, something changed.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. About a year ago, Heavyweight was canceled, and for
the first time in my adult life, I was without
a job. Luckily, I had a plan b drinking. Drinking
has always been my safety net. It makes me feel
bulletproof in a state of grace. Who needs a job
(00:38):
when you're in a state of grace? So job or
no job, Health insurance or no. At the end of
the day, there was still booze, just like there'd always been,
which is to say that every night for twenty five
years I have drank. But after getting laid off, something shifted.
(01:01):
Along with losing my job, I lost my sense of identity,
and booze only amplified the feeling night of drinking. I'd
wake up at three am in a panic, not knowing
who or what or why I was. I'd always turned
to alcohol for solace, but now I found myself too
scared to drink. Over the course of Heavyweights eight seasons,
(01:30):
I've acted as an interlocutor between friends, family, and strangers.
Now I needed to interlock you between me and me,
the me that wanted to keep drinking and the me
that didn't. So I started a journal to reflect on
my relationship to drinking. How it all began, how much
I have loved it, and whether it was time to stop.
(01:53):
These are exerts. Day six without a drink, New Year's Eve,
our new neighbors stop by, the wife sells pet supplies,
and the husband does something with money. Even though I
interview people for a living, after ten minutes, I run
out of new things to ask. Since I'm not drinking,
(02:13):
I don't know what to do. Emily has put out
frozen pepperoni pizza, so I eat slice after slice. Rum
Das says that at a certain point he cared less
about getting high and more about getting free. The pepperoni
pizza gets me neither high nor free. Week three without
(02:39):
a drink. I remember when my friend Paul quit drinking.
It was because he found himself thinking about drinking all
day and looking forward to it too much. That's called
being an adult, I had said, dismissively. Children have their
sense of wonder, adults have booze. Week five. I don't
(03:00):
think I drink the way other people do. I prefer
to drink and the spaces in between on subway rides,
while taking long walks in darkened movie theaters. And although
I'll drink with others. My preference is to drink alone.
I'm not sure what constitutes alcoholism, so I've lately been googling.
Is drinking alone alcoholism? Or does drinking every night make
(03:24):
you an alcoholic? Even using the word alcoholic makes me
feel disloyal, like I'm bad mouthing a friend behind their back.
Maybe if you think of alcohol as a friend, you've
got a problem. Maybe if you're asking Google, if you've
got a problem, you've got a problem. Week eight. It
(03:45):
might have all begun at the age of four, with
the joy of spinning around and around until the living
room ceiling became the floor, the chandelier a stalagmite. Life
felt easier upside down. Or maybe it began at five,
breathing in and out as fast as I could to
make myself lightheaded. Before there was beer and whiskey, there
(04:08):
were quick in talk xicating breaths. My drinking began in
earnest during my teen years. I drank to be less shy,
to make myself more comfortable, and as I grew older,
I drank because it was what I did. My identity
became so fused to whisky that at my fortieth birthday party,
every one of my friends and family gifted me with
(04:30):
a bottle of bourbon or Scotch. At the end of
the night, I counted fourteen bottles. My friend Steve says
that plain and simple human beings need to get fucked up.
Week eleven, I'm on a flight to New York, and
for the first time in twenty five years, I haven't
packed small bottles of whiskey for each of my front pockets.
(04:52):
I'm not a good flyer, and I keep the bottles
with me in case the flight gets rough and I
can't get booze from the flight attendant quick enough. But
in all honesty, sometimes turbulence was a relief because it
was permission to crack open a pocket whisky before noon.
When you're in town. That's where we meet is at
a bar that'll be our first up in New York.
(05:16):
I visit my friend Sean. Sean is one of my
favorite people to drink with. For him, it's simple. If
you drink, you're a drinker, and a drinker drinks. Can
you describe what it is about the feeling of drinking
that you like? Getting a hug from the inside. Sean
and I can talk and drink laid into the night.
(05:37):
The drink and the talk run parallel to each other
and make a good combination, but sometimes the drink will
overtake the talk.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
I don't black out as much as I used to it.
Everybody's gonna think I'm like a raging alcoholic, but like
and we'd be at the bar and I'd have like
one and another and another, and at a certain point
during the evening it got to the point where I
was I would be having a conversation with somebody and
looking at their face and going to myself, Oh, this
(06:09):
is the conversation that I'm not going to remember.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
And I was always right. As a drinker, you exchange
memory for intensity. I ask Sean if my sobriety might
threaten our friendship.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Oh oh, I don't know. I don't think so, but
I feel like you and I like it too much.
I think you and I are cut from a certain
cloth where we're just.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Drinkers. So what do you call a drinker who doesn't drink?
Week twenty one? Without drinking, everything isn't as weighted towards
the night when the first drink is drunk. As a result,
(07:05):
there's more evenness. The points of intensity are scattered throughout
the day, a run in the morning, aggie walking through
the door after school, the taste of dessert after dinner.
Week twenty four. It's after several months without a drink
when I begin to bargain with myself. Maybe I can
enjoy a glass of wine with dinner once in a while.
(07:28):
After all, it's been five months. Have I not demonstrated
self mastery? The problem is, as the saying goes, that
that first drink makes you feel like a new person,
and that a new person needs a drink, and so
on and so on. But somehow moderation always feels within
my grasp? Is this for me? What passes for hope?
Speaker 3 (07:51):
The first times I got drunk, it was like, where
has this been my whole life? Like this is what
everything should feel like all the time.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
My friend Tony went into rehab for heroin addiction in
his mid twenties, it meant having to give up all drugs,
including alcohol. But recently, after twenty five years of sobriety,
Tony started drinking again. Just a drink here and there
is such a thing possible.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
I had just gotten out of a meditation retreat, actually,
and I was sitting around on a Friday evening with
a bunch of people at the retreat center, including the
meditation teachers, and somebody offered me a shot, a very
expensive scotch, but I said no. At first, I don't drink.
(08:37):
And then as I was sitting there watching other people's
shot glasses get filled and thinking about how I identified.
After twenty five years, I still identified as a recovering addict,
recovering alcoholic ex addict X or just plain old addict alcoholic.
I still identified with that, and I thought, well, I'm
am I still that? Like what It was a question
(08:59):
that came up kind of naturally. It was like, why
am I saying no? Is it because I really am
afraid that something bad's gonna happen? Or am I just
identified with it? And it's part of kind of like
an ego structure where it's kind of like a notch
in my belt and a pride thing. You know, I've
been cleaned for this long. So I kind of had
(09:20):
a shot and it was no big deal, and I
thought I could do this once in a while, and
I kind of gave myself permission to keep doing that.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
And how long now have you been doing that?
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Oh? God, it's been about three and a half years.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Do you find, you know, drinking in front of friends
and family that their shows of concern harsher buzz in
a way?
Speaker 3 (09:47):
No, not really, nobody's actually. I mean a couple of
people have asked, a few people have said, oh, oh,
you're drinking now, and most people are like, oh good, huh.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
I think most people have felt like I took it
a bit too far. I think you're the only one
who's actually expressed concern.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Am I overthinking Tony's situation? Am I overthinking my own?
To that question, my father would probably say absolutely. Is
there Do you think there's any benefit to not drinking?
Speaker 5 (10:24):
Nope?
Speaker 1 (10:26):
After the break the man who raised me Week twenty eight,
I suggest to my therapist that maybe I've quit drinking
(10:47):
out of a kind of masochism and an ability to
just allow myself pleasure. I have friends who have quit
and feel better. They have more energy, their skin looks better.
I experience none of that. My therapist says, I drink
to avoid my feelings, which might be true, but I
also think it's helped me to embrace my feelings, to
(11:07):
love more freely. For one thing, drinking has helped me
bond with my father. When I go home to visit,
he leads me down to the basement, where in the
storage space under the stairs, alongside his high school diploma
and tax forms from the past thirty years, he keeps
a plastic jug of vodka. You go first, he whispers.
(11:29):
He whispers because he and my mother play a game
in which he pretends to hide his drinking and she
pretends not to know that he is hiding it. Since
stopping drinking, every time I see my dad, I remind
him that I've stopped drinking, but all the same, every
time he offers me a drink.
Speaker 5 (11:48):
I'm beer. You don't drink beer at all?
Speaker 1 (11:50):
No, no, no, I've found mind shift. I'm not drinking.
Then beer is drinking. Okay, it's still an alcoholic beverage,
right right right. My father is now ninety years old.
Would you say that overall drinking has had a positive
(12:12):
effect on your life or negative?
Speaker 5 (12:15):
I'd say, for me positive because you know, sometimes you
get life gets a little boring. You got something a
little to look forward to. I have my what you
call my cocktail hour. Yeah, at night, when i know
I'm not going anywhere, I have a couple of shots.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Yes, and your shots, I mean I've seen your shots
are they're they're very generous, like a half a glass.
Speaker 5 (12:38):
It's pretty far up above the bottom.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Yeah, that's one way of putting it, I guess.
Speaker 5 (12:44):
And I never get drunk, never, never, never get drunk.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Well, what do you what do you call getting drunk?
Speaker 5 (12:51):
Drunk is when the room shots spinning, and your you
feel like I want to throw up and you start whirling.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Around, right, But I mean that's getting that's getting sick already,
that's getting ill.
Speaker 5 (13:02):
Yeah, but no, I never get drunk where I'm stupid
and I'm insulting or I'm this or that. No.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
The first time I ever got drunk was with my father.
I was fourteen and we'd been invited to a rabbi's
house for Sukkot. I sat beside an Israeli man in
a paper yamulka who filled and refilled my plastic cup
with vodka. We talked about deep things like God and creation.
It felt like this kind of talk was fueled on vodka.
(13:30):
That vodka allowed a person to see that the world
was really all spirit. The rabbi explained how we were
on the edge of the Messianic age and that at
any time now the Messiah or Mashiah would appear. Slowly
and with some effort. My father rose from his chair
and quieted down the room. I remember it took a while,
(13:52):
but my father was insistent. It was then that he
pointed to the rabbi and made his great declaration. Oh
that's right, you announced. He announced the rabbi as the Messiah.
Speaker 5 (14:04):
That. Yeah, I was. I was drunk. I mean that
was that was too much?
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Do you remember the response that it got kind of stupid,
just silent. Everyone was stunned.
Speaker 5 (14:21):
Yeah, it was kind of stupid.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
The next morning, I awoke in our basement, on the
floor and still dressed from the night before. My head hurt,
but it felt adult a fair price to pay for
the evening. Just as I drank with my father, My
father drank with his father. Did he drink much?
Speaker 5 (14:47):
Oh yeah, I'm sure he did. When I got older,
I started joining. Um huh, kind of dreaded, you know.
But he would get really stupid, and then he would
throw up, and he gets sloppy. It was, you know, nisty.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
No, did he ever get violent when he was drinking.
Speaker 5 (15:04):
Not while he was drunk. No, No, he was only
got violent when he was sober. Yeah, yeah, he was
good nature when he was drunk.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Week forty four. In the early days just after Oggie
was born, I'd sit in our tiny Brooklyn kitchen sipping
bourbon until all hours of the night. All day was
spent with worries was our baby peeing enough, eating enough?
But at night I drank. It evened me out and
allowed for a feeling of bliss, perhaps the only bliss
(15:36):
I've ever known. While other forms of joy were complicated
by guilt or intrusive thoughts, drinking alone in that kitchen
was always simple. There was a liquor store across the street,
and seeing it through the window, luminous in the night,
stalked with all those bottles representing the nights of drinking
that lay ahead, made me feel like everything was going
(15:58):
to be all right. Night after night in that small
Brooklyn kitchen, I drank and watched YouTube videos of old
Jerry Lewis appearances on talk shows, and kissed the top
of our baby head. Each night was like biting into
the first square of a mile long Hershey's chocolate bar.
But as blissful as that time was, when I think
(16:19):
back on it, I'm unable to recall very much. It's
all a vague talgone bath. That is the exchange I made.
What did you have for breakfast? Week fifty two?
Speaker 4 (16:34):
Yogurt with gia seeds and pumpkin seeds and apple sauce.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
You know what I find fun about gia seeds is
like finding them in your teeth an hour after you
ate and enjoying them.
Speaker 4 (16:48):
If you really like every want to kiss me ever again,
I would suggest stopping this conversation right now.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
My wife, Emily and I are about to walk to
Aggie school to pick him up. Aggie's now in the
second grade. Before we set out, I asked Emily if
we could talk for a minute. It's now been over
a year that I have stopped drinking. Did you ever
think i'd I get here?
Speaker 4 (17:13):
I'm sure there was specific incidents where I expected you
to relapse. If we're going to call it that, I'm
not gonna lie. I've missed it every once in a while.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
You knows missed my drinking.
Speaker 4 (17:30):
Yeah, you weren't a stumbling drunk, You weren't a mean drunk.
You weren't really a drunk. And I think that that
was confusing to me in some ways because you drank
every night, I mean kind of a lot. I can
only remember a handful or fewer fewer than a handful
(17:50):
of times where I ever looked at you and thought
to myself, oh, he's drunk. There was one night, do
you know what I'm going to say?
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Was this the oceans night?
Speaker 4 (18:01):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Wait, I was roofed that night.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
You were not roofed. You were drunk drunk.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
I think we were targeted by thieves.
Speaker 4 (18:12):
I was sober. I mean I had probably had a
drink or two. There weren't any roofies in my drink. No,
you too. It was your birthday, right, Yeah, and it
got incredibly excessive and I had to essentially carry you
about six blocks home. I kind of want to take
my glasses off so I can't really see your face
(18:34):
at this moment. Is that okay? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Why? I don't know.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
It's a little hard to talk about. I mean, I
want to say this, just like, very clearly. I'm very
happy you stopped drinking. I do think that you are
a significantly better parent than you were when you were drinking.
(19:04):
I think you're just here with us in a different way.
I think you're more present I think you're more consistent.
I think you're more stable. It's just like you have
access to a different part of yourself. It seems to
me now. I even just want to say, you have
access to yourself now in a way that you just didn't.
(19:27):
And I think I feel that, but I think he
feels it more. And I feel like he's proud of you.
And I don't mean proud in the sense that he's like, oh,
my dad doesn't drink. I think he's just more proud
of and attracted to the person that you are sober
(19:51):
than the person that you were before.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Week fifty three. Today is the first real snowfall of
the year, and I'm walking along a path in the
woods nearer house. At a certain point, I can feel
my pace begin to slow, and eventually I come to
a standstill. It's serene, and a part of me just
wants to melt into the scene. I don't mean I
want to admire it or write a poem about it.
(20:24):
A part of me just wants to wander off the path,
curl up beside a tree, and let the snow cover me.
I don't know that i'd call this feeling depressive or anything.
It's just a feeling of wanting to hit the pause
button on life. It's a feeling of wanting, if only
for a while, the pleasure of complete surrender, of giving up,
(20:45):
but instead I keep going. This episode of Heavyweight was
(21:10):
produced by me Jonathan Goldstein, along with senior producer Khalila Holt,
Supervising producer Stevie Lane, and Phoebe Flanagain. Our production council
is Jake Flanagin. Marcelo de Olivera mixed the episode with
original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson, Blue Dot Sessions,
and Bobby Lord. A special shout out to Howard Chakowitz,
(21:31):
who Tony wanted it known also expressed concern. Follow us
on Twitter at Heavyweight, Instagram at Heavyweight podcast, or email
us at Heavyweight at Pushkin dot Fm. We're still looking
for your stories, so please keep them coming. We'll be
back next week with an encore presentation of the Gregor episode,
which will include an update from the titular Gregor, so
(21:53):
tune in
Pushkin. About a year ago, Heavyweight was canceled, and for
the first time in my adult life, I was without
a job. Luckily, I had a plan b drinking. Drinking
has always been my safety net. It makes me feel
bulletproof in a state of grace. Who needs a job
(00:38):
when you're in a state of grace? So job or
no job, Health insurance or no. At the end of
the day, there was still booze, just like there'd always been,
which is to say that every night for twenty five
years I have drank. But after getting laid off, something shifted.
(01:01):
Along with losing my job, I lost my sense of identity,
and booze only amplified the feeling night of drinking. I'd
wake up at three am in a panic, not knowing
who or what or why I was. I'd always turned
to alcohol for solace, but now I found myself too
scared to drink. Over the course of Heavyweights eight seasons,
(01:30):
I've acted as an interlocutor between friends, family, and strangers.
Now I needed to interlock you between me and me,
the me that wanted to keep drinking and the me
that didn't. So I started a journal to reflect on
my relationship to drinking. How it all began, how much
I have loved it, and whether it was time to stop.
(01:53):
These are exerts. Day six without a drink, New Year's Eve,
our new neighbors stop by, the wife sells pet supplies,
and the husband does something with money. Even though I
interview people for a living, after ten minutes, I run
out of new things to ask. Since I'm not drinking,
(02:13):
I don't know what to do. Emily has put out
frozen pepperoni pizza, so I eat slice after slice. Rum
Das says that at a certain point he cared less
about getting high and more about getting free. The pepperoni
pizza gets me neither high nor free. Week three without
(02:39):
a drink. I remember when my friend Paul quit drinking.
It was because he found himself thinking about drinking all
day and looking forward to it too much. That's called
being an adult, I had said, dismissively. Children have their
sense of wonder, adults have booze. Week five. I don't
(03:00):
think I drink the way other people do. I prefer
to drink and the spaces in between on subway rides,
while taking long walks in darkened movie theaters. And although
I'll drink with others. My preference is to drink alone.
I'm not sure what constitutes alcoholism, so I've lately been googling.
Is drinking alone alcoholism? Or does drinking every night make
(03:24):
you an alcoholic? Even using the word alcoholic makes me
feel disloyal, like I'm bad mouthing a friend behind their back.
Maybe if you think of alcohol as a friend, you've
got a problem. Maybe if you're asking Google, if you've
got a problem, you've got a problem. Week eight. It
(03:45):
might have all begun at the age of four, with
the joy of spinning around and around until the living
room ceiling became the floor, the chandelier a stalagmite. Life
felt easier upside down. Or maybe it began at five,
breathing in and out as fast as I could to
make myself lightheaded. Before there was beer and whiskey, there
(04:08):
were quick in talk xicating breaths. My drinking began in
earnest during my teen years. I drank to be less shy,
to make myself more comfortable, and as I grew older,
I drank because it was what I did. My identity
became so fused to whisky that at my fortieth birthday party,
every one of my friends and family gifted me with
(04:30):
a bottle of bourbon or Scotch. At the end of
the night, I counted fourteen bottles. My friend Steve says
that plain and simple human beings need to get fucked up.
Week eleven, I'm on a flight to New York, and
for the first time in twenty five years, I haven't
packed small bottles of whiskey for each of my front pockets.
(04:52):
I'm not a good flyer, and I keep the bottles
with me in case the flight gets rough and I
can't get booze from the flight attendant quick enough. But
in all honesty, sometimes turbulence was a relief because it
was permission to crack open a pocket whisky before noon.
When you're in town. That's where we meet is at
a bar that'll be our first up in New York.
(05:16):
I visit my friend Sean. Sean is one of my
favorite people to drink with. For him, it's simple. If
you drink, you're a drinker, and a drinker drinks. Can
you describe what it is about the feeling of drinking
that you like? Getting a hug from the inside. Sean
and I can talk and drink laid into the night.
(05:37):
The drink and the talk run parallel to each other
and make a good combination, but sometimes the drink will
overtake the talk.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
I don't black out as much as I used to it.
Everybody's gonna think I'm like a raging alcoholic, but like
and we'd be at the bar and I'd have like
one and another and another, and at a certain point
during the evening it got to the point where I
was I would be having a conversation with somebody and
looking at their face and going to myself, Oh, this
(06:09):
is the conversation that I'm not going to remember.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
And I was always right. As a drinker, you exchange
memory for intensity. I ask Sean if my sobriety might
threaten our friendship.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Oh oh, I don't know. I don't think so, but
I feel like you and I like it too much.
I think you and I are cut from a certain
cloth where we're just.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Drinkers. So what do you call a drinker who doesn't drink?
Week twenty one? Without drinking, everything isn't as weighted towards
the night when the first drink is drunk. As a result,
(07:05):
there's more evenness. The points of intensity are scattered throughout
the day, a run in the morning, aggie walking through
the door after school, the taste of dessert after dinner.
Week twenty four. It's after several months without a drink
when I begin to bargain with myself. Maybe I can
enjoy a glass of wine with dinner once in a while.
(07:28):
After all, it's been five months. Have I not demonstrated
self mastery? The problem is, as the saying goes, that
that first drink makes you feel like a new person,
and that a new person needs a drink, and so
on and so on. But somehow moderation always feels within
my grasp? Is this for me? What passes for hope?
Speaker 3 (07:51):
The first times I got drunk, it was like, where
has this been my whole life? Like this is what
everything should feel like all the time.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
My friend Tony went into rehab for heroin addiction in
his mid twenties, it meant having to give up all drugs,
including alcohol. But recently, after twenty five years of sobriety,
Tony started drinking again. Just a drink here and there
is such a thing possible.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
I had just gotten out of a meditation retreat, actually,
and I was sitting around on a Friday evening with
a bunch of people at the retreat center, including the
meditation teachers, and somebody offered me a shot, a very
expensive scotch, but I said no. At first, I don't drink.
(08:37):
And then as I was sitting there watching other people's
shot glasses get filled and thinking about how I identified.
After twenty five years, I still identified as a recovering addict,
recovering alcoholic ex addict X or just plain old addict alcoholic.
I still identified with that, and I thought, well, I'm
am I still that? Like what It was a question
(08:59):
that came up kind of naturally. It was like, why
am I saying no? Is it because I really am
afraid that something bad's gonna happen? Or am I just
identified with it? And it's part of kind of like
an ego structure where it's kind of like a notch
in my belt and a pride thing. You know, I've
been cleaned for this long. So I kind of had
(09:20):
a shot and it was no big deal, and I
thought I could do this once in a while, and
I kind of gave myself permission to keep doing that.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
And how long now have you been doing that?
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Oh? God, it's been about three and a half years.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Do you find, you know, drinking in front of friends
and family that their shows of concern harsher buzz in
a way?
Speaker 3 (09:47):
No, not really, nobody's actually. I mean a couple of
people have asked, a few people have said, oh, oh,
you're drinking now, and most people are like, oh good, huh.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
I think most people have felt like I took it
a bit too far. I think you're the only one
who's actually expressed concern.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Am I overthinking Tony's situation? Am I overthinking my own?
To that question, my father would probably say absolutely. Is
there Do you think there's any benefit to not drinking?
Speaker 5 (10:24):
Nope?
Speaker 1 (10:26):
After the break the man who raised me Week twenty eight,
I suggest to my therapist that maybe I've quit drinking
(10:47):
out of a kind of masochism and an ability to
just allow myself pleasure. I have friends who have quit
and feel better. They have more energy, their skin looks better.
I experience none of that. My therapist says, I drink
to avoid my feelings, which might be true, but I
also think it's helped me to embrace my feelings, to
(11:07):
love more freely. For one thing, drinking has helped me
bond with my father. When I go home to visit,
he leads me down to the basement, where in the
storage space under the stairs, alongside his high school diploma
and tax forms from the past thirty years, he keeps
a plastic jug of vodka. You go first, he whispers.
(11:29):
He whispers because he and my mother play a game
in which he pretends to hide his drinking and she
pretends not to know that he is hiding it. Since
stopping drinking, every time I see my dad, I remind
him that I've stopped drinking, but all the same, every
time he offers me a drink.
Speaker 5 (11:48):
I'm beer. You don't drink beer at all?
Speaker 1 (11:50):
No, no, no, I've found mind shift. I'm not drinking.
Then beer is drinking. Okay, it's still an alcoholic beverage,
right right right. My father is now ninety years old.
Would you say that overall drinking has had a positive
(12:12):
effect on your life or negative?
Speaker 5 (12:15):
I'd say, for me positive because you know, sometimes you
get life gets a little boring. You got something a
little to look forward to. I have my what you
call my cocktail hour. Yeah, at night, when i know
I'm not going anywhere, I have a couple of shots.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Yes, and your shots, I mean I've seen your shots
are they're they're very generous, like a half a glass.
Speaker 5 (12:38):
It's pretty far up above the bottom.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Yeah, that's one way of putting it, I guess.
Speaker 5 (12:44):
And I never get drunk, never, never, never get drunk.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Well, what do you what do you call getting drunk?
Speaker 5 (12:51):
Drunk is when the room shots spinning, and your you
feel like I want to throw up and you start whirling.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Around, right, But I mean that's getting that's getting sick already,
that's getting ill.
Speaker 5 (13:02):
Yeah, but no, I never get drunk where I'm stupid
and I'm insulting or I'm this or that. No.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
The first time I ever got drunk was with my father.
I was fourteen and we'd been invited to a rabbi's
house for Sukkot. I sat beside an Israeli man in
a paper yamulka who filled and refilled my plastic cup
with vodka. We talked about deep things like God and creation.
It felt like this kind of talk was fueled on vodka.
(13:30):
That vodka allowed a person to see that the world
was really all spirit. The rabbi explained how we were
on the edge of the Messianic age and that at
any time now the Messiah or Mashiah would appear. Slowly
and with some effort. My father rose from his chair
and quieted down the room. I remember it took a while,
(13:52):
but my father was insistent. It was then that he
pointed to the rabbi and made his great declaration. Oh
that's right, you announced. He announced the rabbi as the Messiah.
Speaker 5 (14:04):
That. Yeah, I was. I was drunk. I mean that
was that was too much?
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Do you remember the response that it got kind of stupid,
just silent. Everyone was stunned.
Speaker 5 (14:21):
Yeah, it was kind of stupid.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
The next morning, I awoke in our basement, on the
floor and still dressed from the night before. My head hurt,
but it felt adult a fair price to pay for
the evening. Just as I drank with my father, My
father drank with his father. Did he drink much?
Speaker 5 (14:47):
Oh yeah, I'm sure he did. When I got older,
I started joining. Um huh, kind of dreaded, you know.
But he would get really stupid, and then he would
throw up, and he gets sloppy. It was, you know, nisty.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
No, did he ever get violent when he was drinking.
Speaker 5 (15:04):
Not while he was drunk. No, No, he was only
got violent when he was sober. Yeah, yeah, he was
good nature when he was drunk.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Week forty four. In the early days just after Oggie
was born, I'd sit in our tiny Brooklyn kitchen sipping
bourbon until all hours of the night. All day was
spent with worries was our baby peeing enough, eating enough?
But at night I drank. It evened me out and
allowed for a feeling of bliss, perhaps the only bliss
(15:36):
I've ever known. While other forms of joy were complicated
by guilt or intrusive thoughts, drinking alone in that kitchen
was always simple. There was a liquor store across the street,
and seeing it through the window, luminous in the night,
stalked with all those bottles representing the nights of drinking
that lay ahead, made me feel like everything was going
(15:58):
to be all right. Night after night in that small
Brooklyn kitchen, I drank and watched YouTube videos of old
Jerry Lewis appearances on talk shows, and kissed the top
of our baby head. Each night was like biting into
the first square of a mile long Hershey's chocolate bar.
But as blissful as that time was, when I think
(16:19):
back on it, I'm unable to recall very much. It's
all a vague talgone bath. That is the exchange I made.
What did you have for breakfast? Week fifty two?
Speaker 4 (16:34):
Yogurt with gia seeds and pumpkin seeds and apple sauce.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
You know what I find fun about gia seeds is
like finding them in your teeth an hour after you
ate and enjoying them.
Speaker 4 (16:48):
If you really like every want to kiss me ever again,
I would suggest stopping this conversation right now.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
My wife, Emily and I are about to walk to
Aggie school to pick him up. Aggie's now in the
second grade. Before we set out, I asked Emily if
we could talk for a minute. It's now been over
a year that I have stopped drinking. Did you ever
think i'd I get here?
Speaker 4 (17:13):
I'm sure there was specific incidents where I expected you
to relapse. If we're going to call it that, I'm
not gonna lie. I've missed it every once in a while.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
You knows missed my drinking.
Speaker 4 (17:30):
Yeah, you weren't a stumbling drunk, You weren't a mean drunk.
You weren't really a drunk. And I think that that
was confusing to me in some ways because you drank
every night, I mean kind of a lot. I can
only remember a handful or fewer fewer than a handful
(17:50):
of times where I ever looked at you and thought
to myself, oh, he's drunk. There was one night, do
you know what I'm going to say?
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Was this the oceans night?
Speaker 4 (18:01):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Wait, I was roofed that night.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
You were not roofed. You were drunk drunk.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
I think we were targeted by thieves.
Speaker 4 (18:12):
I was sober. I mean I had probably had a
drink or two. There weren't any roofies in my drink. No,
you too. It was your birthday, right, Yeah, and it
got incredibly excessive and I had to essentially carry you
about six blocks home. I kind of want to take
my glasses off so I can't really see your face
(18:34):
at this moment. Is that okay? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Why? I don't know.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
It's a little hard to talk about. I mean, I
want to say this, just like, very clearly. I'm very
happy you stopped drinking. I do think that you are
a significantly better parent than you were when you were drinking.
(19:04):
I think you're just here with us in a different way.
I think you're more present I think you're more consistent.
I think you're more stable. It's just like you have
access to a different part of yourself. It seems to
me now. I even just want to say, you have
access to yourself now in a way that you just didn't.
(19:27):
And I think I feel that, but I think he
feels it more. And I feel like he's proud of you.
And I don't mean proud in the sense that he's like, oh,
my dad doesn't drink. I think he's just more proud
of and attracted to the person that you are sober
(19:51):
than the person that you were before.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Week fifty three. Today is the first real snowfall of
the year, and I'm walking along a path in the
woods nearer house. At a certain point, I can feel
my pace begin to slow, and eventually I come to
a standstill. It's serene, and a part of me just
wants to melt into the scene. I don't mean I
want to admire it or write a poem about it.
(20:24):
A part of me just wants to wander off the path,
curl up beside a tree, and let the snow cover me.
I don't know that i'd call this feeling depressive or anything.
It's just a feeling of wanting to hit the pause
button on life. It's a feeling of wanting, if only
for a while, the pleasure of complete surrender, of giving up,
(20:45):
but instead I keep going. This episode of Heavyweight was
(21:10):
produced by me Jonathan Goldstein, along with senior producer Khalila Holt,
Supervising producer Stevie Lane, and Phoebe Flanagain. Our production council
is Jake Flanagin. Marcelo de Olivera mixed the episode with
original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson, Blue Dot Sessions,
and Bobby Lord. A special shout out to Howard Chakowitz,
(21:31):
who Tony wanted it known also expressed concern. Follow us
on Twitter at Heavyweight, Instagram at Heavyweight podcast, or email
us at Heavyweight at Pushkin dot Fm. We're still looking
for your stories, so please keep them coming. We'll be
back next week with an encore presentation of the Gregor episode,
which will include an update from the titular Gregor, so
(21:53):
tune in
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