Dolan’s Debrief
by Mike McLaughlin
I met Dolan when I was six days sober. It was my second meeting and I was exhausted and half-suicidal and shivering in my chair like I’d just been hauled from the water. When my turn came to speak it wasn’t my voice but a machine’s and I said my name and said I was an alcoholic and if it was okay I would pass because I didn’t know what else to do.
Dolan came up to me afterward and said he was now my sponsor. He said he was sixty-three years old and hadn’t had a drink for the last fourteen. He had been there and done it and if I wanted to make it then I would call him. He demanded my number and I gave it mechanically, like you do when calling the bank and wading through the maze until reaching a living human. He scribbled his own number on a faded receipt from Sears then put it in my hand and said use it.
It wasn’t a request.
*
When you quit drinking there’s no medal.
No drum rolls, no awards, no applause.
There are good wishes, of course. Handshakes and hugs and claps on the back. It’s pro forma, though, because talk is cheap. Because when you finally quit you’re the last living thing on earth. Climbing in the dark, desperate and alone. To fall would be so easy. Blowing out a candle easy. Breaking a soap bubble easy.
And last week I reached a year.
No booze at all.
Not a drop.
A full year.
I’d hit the mark.
I’d gone pro.
And nothing happened.
*
The Eighty-Eight is a diner about ten minutes from my house, likewise from Dolan’s, and we meet there twice a week. It’s also a short walk from our Wednesday night meetings. This geography makes it easy for the student to approach the master. I said this once as a throwaway line, yet Dolan’s response was thoughtful.
“Well, if you seek grand design to the universe, then seek no further.”
By then I had twenty-three days and little faith in anything. I remember the day because of the little notebook I had started carrying. Every morning I would start a page with the date then mark off the hours. The next morning I’d throw it away and start another.
A pointless exercise, I thought, when every damned minute was like a gray Tuesday in March and getting out of bed didn’t seem worth the trouble.
Our gatherings rarely last an hour. Pat had been an Army correspondent and I was an EMT—still am—and neither of us likes sitting around for long.
His counsel remains absurdly simple.
“Did you drink five minutes ago?” he would ask.
“No,” I would answer.
“Gonna drink five minutes from now?”
“No.”
“Interesting.”
And that would pretty much do it.
Mostly we talked about family. About friends near, far or gone. About how the Sox or the Patriots were looking. About books we loved and movies we’d seen more than once. Things that kept us anchored. Things real.
As for divine intent, Dolan said our table was a circle within a circle, inscribed inside a triangle, with the school and our homes for corners.
“Master plan in action,” he added gravely.
Dolan always seems aware of the machinery behind the curtains. Of gears turning just out of sight. He’d be lethal at poker if he ever played.
“Here?” I asked dubiously.
The bench cushion I sat on was cracked in places, held together with plastic tape that didn’t match the original green. The table’s column was bent and needed napkins wedged under it to stop the wobbling. Our window facing the parking lot was still cracked after taking a hit from a crazed seagull years before.
“Here,” I repeated.
“Absolutely,” he declared. “Stonehenge has nothing on this.”
It was late and we had the place nearly to ourselves. The back room was already closed and the lights were off. In the kitchen a phone rang ceaselessly. From the tv in the bar came a gleeful pitch for hemorrhoid cream.
“Devious, isn’t it?”
*
During my first days sober I would cringe at the ads. The ridiculous commercials and posters and neon signs promising it all. This beer is a magic party train. That whiskey puts you in a tux and gets you laid. Images cartoonish while I was drinking went supernova when I quit. Now they were malice personified, summoned to life for the sole purpose of destroying me. They were everywhere. Resisting them took titanic effort.
Then came the dreams. In them I was drinking again, but secretly—like I had always done—while pretending to be sober. I was good at it, after all.
It was agony. They were so absurdly real that on waking I was sure I had done it.
It was in the worst of them that my son figured it out.
He knew.
Getting ready for school, he knew. He wouldn’t look at me or say a word, just went on shoving things into his backpack.
My son. My only child. Not even a teenager yet. Sickened by a world that could give him such a failure for a father. Then he walked out, leaving the door open behind him.
Gone.
I fought it off. I fought them all.
*
As the months slipped away I began branching out. Getting to meetings around the city. Getting better at saying I was an alcoholic. Holding fast.
Dolan kept reminding me that the drink was a predator. Not only pernicious but patient.
I would never be free of it.
Ever.
I said I wished it was cancer instead.
You can defeat cancer—but this was being cancer.
Dolan said that was the point.
*
And yet, little things began happening. They didn’t seem like much at first, but slowly, they began to add up.
In EMS they offer overtime pay like you cannot believe. Now I was turning it down and spending more time at home. Doing things I had put off for years.
I started building model planes with my son.
I went and bought a hummingbird feeder because my wife kept saying she’d love to see them in the garden.
Then I detailed the car. Twice.
Then I painted the kitchen.
My family didn’t know what to make of it but they never complained.
I slept better. I ate better, too—and while I didn’t quit smoking, I started cutting back.
Dropping from a dozen cigarettes a day to eight, then seven. Then it was six, but even with gritted teeth I couldn’t get to five.
Dolan told me to write the date on the next pack I bought. Then do the same with the next, adding the number of days I had made the previous one last. To keep doing, making each last a day longer.
Easy, I thought—like eating gravel was easy.
And at some point during it all, I realized I didn’t need the drink anymore.
Now I was only afraid of it.
*
I was six months gone and well into seven when Dolan recommended a speaker’s meeting at a church in South Boston. I was grateful for this because it gets old, having to be on all the time. Reading passages aloud then saying how they apply to you. Talking about who you were and who you’ve wounded. Talking about who you want to be. At a speaker’s meeting you can sit silently through it all. Showing up is enough.
When I arrived the church was packed, with every row filled and people lining the walls. I stood near the doors as a man in a blue cardigan opened the meeting. He asked for a moment of silence, then began his story. He was followed by a short woman, pale as milk and looking about thirteen. The closer was a painfully thin man who had just turned ninety.
They looked terrific. Standing tall. Good natured. Humorous and kind. Looking like they’d been that way their whole lives.
Then they spoke, and after a minute I grabbed a flyer and started writing.
Combined, they had been arrested seven times. Five were DUI’s. Six hospital trips, all by ambulance. One of them had flatlined during the ride. Five tours in rehab, three of which were court-ordered. Three separations. Two restraining orders. Four divorces. Loss of custody of three children. Two cars wrecked. Two more and a house seized by banks and a total of twenty-seven months served at Walpole and Framingham.
And through the program they had recovered. Nowhere near perfect, but better.
And, all together, they had been sober for fifty-one years.
The applause was thunder.
The usual crowd gathered outside afterward. To talk and smoke and laugh. To look like parents during intermission at their kids’ musical. To look ordinary.
I spoke with people and shook their hands. I learned their names and forgot them. A few invited me along for coffee but I begged off. Saying I had to be somewhere else. Giving a cheery wave when I’m faking that everything’s fine.
I called home and my son answered and caught me up on his day. Then my wife came on and I said to her what I say every day now. That I loved her and that I was okay. That I was on my way home and did we need anything.
Milk, she said, if it wasn’t too much trouble.
It could never be trouble, I said, and meant it.
*
And then it was a year.
No trumpets sounded. No angels sang.
Why would they?
That night I headed to the Eighty-Eight to mark this non-accomplishment.
Dolan was already there, in the back this time where there’s a better view of the harbor. He saw me and even though the crowd was thin he put up his hand. Holding it high and steady as if being sworn in, like an old fisherman ready to testify.
A joke.
Classic Pat.
He was wearing his army green jacket and some paint splattered jeans, plus an electrician’s cap he picked up somewhere. A gift maybe. Now and then he’d lose one and someone would offer a replacement. The last time we met he had one from Texas A&M. I didn’t ask.
He looks like Gary Cooper and Paul Newman spun together, but I’ve never seen him in formal gear. Not once, which I still can’t figure. He could bring it off, easy. At heart, though, he’s more like an officer from a Bill Mauldin cartoon. Not some asshole from headquarters but a line captain. A man who cleans his own rifle and is just as tired as his men but makes damned sure they eat before he does.
He looked fit as ever, despite autumn’s shorter days and miserable weather. Not tan but toned enough to defy that eternal winter look. Like he had retired to the Bahamas but still came to town three or four times a week.
It was his relentless drive that did it. His refusal to play the part. Hellbent to stave off the decay that plagues too many men. That damned over-sixty syndrome as he calls it, when men get fatter and no longer care. When they piss away their days yelling at their televisions and bitching about their yards.
After Vietnam, Dolan spent the next forty years on the go. True, there were “the gray eras”—his play on words—but sober or drunk, he’d be damned if he spent the rest of his life just sitting around.
That night his scars showed clearer than usual. With his hair recently cut, the gray bristles couldn’t hide the jagged lines climbing from his left eyebrow to his scalp. More red than white now, as they always get when the weather turns cold and damp.
When I was three months sober he told me how he’d earned them. A legacy of the service, he called it, and when he finished I wondered if my hair had gone gray as his.
“Jeep accident,” he would otherwise say, in a tone to discourage whoever was fool enough to ask.
I sat down and studied his haircut.
“New girlfriend?” I asked.
“Nikki Minaj,” he grumbled wearily.
I coughed violently then couldn’t stop. Unconcerned, Dolan pushed his water glass toward me.
The night manager came over. We were loyal regulars and she knew our routine. We ate little and tipped too well and she would bring coffee then leave us alone. This time she stayed until I recovered. Then she shot a hard look at Dolan—himself the very picture of innocence—and moved on.
“So,” he said mildly, “The prodigal son arrives.”
“Hardly,” I gasped.
“And?”
Buying time, I dumped cream and sweetener in my coffee then stirred a while. As usual he frowned—you took it black or not at all—and as usual I ignored him.
Then I took out the flyer from the meeting in Southie. I carried it like a talisman after writing so much on it that Saint Francis had to wave to be seen. No names or dates, only events. It was getting frayed now, the folds starting to tear. I kept meaning to tape it and kept forgetting.
Dolan studied it carefully, then handed it back.
“Frame it.”
“Kitchen?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Bathroom. Read it when you take a dump.”
“Mixed messages,” I said, not coughing this time. “Shaving maybe?”
“Up to you.”
I shrugged.
“So,” he prodded. “How goes it?”
“The same, I guess.”
“You guess? You’ve got a year, damn it. You look like your puppy died.”
I shook my head.
“Still feels like pissing in the wind, you know?”
“I know.”
“Still don’t believe it.”
“You could say as much about breathing.”
“Spinning my wheels, forever.”
Raising his coffee, he sighed grimly.
“You’ll make it.”
“Christ—how?” I demanded.
Dolan looked out the window. The night was low overcast and there wasn’t much to see. Out by the airport a police boat was gliding along, blue strobes flashing lazily. A lone sentinel, patrolling the mist.
“Well,” he said, turning back, “Allow me to interrogate you. Call it good cop, bad cop.”
“What—you’re both?”
“Sure. Ready?”
I wasn’t.
He took a breath then fixed me with a hard look. It was only for a second but felt longer.
“Mac,” he began.
“Yes?”
“Mac.”
“Yes, Pat—what?”
“Is your life shit or isn’t it?”
“You mean—”
“Yes or no.”
“It’s—well—no. It’s not.”
“When your wife realized what a fuck-up you were, did she throw you out?”
“I don’t think—”
“Don’t think. Did she throw your dumb ass out of the house?”
“She didn’t.”
“Good. Yes or no—got it?”
“Got it.”
“Did she call the cops?”
“No.”
“Say she wanted a divorce?”
“Well—”
Dolan glared.
“No.”
“Did she call her mother?”
“Yes.”
“So your in-laws found out what an asshole you were?”
“Yes.”
“Are you an asshole now?”
When I didn’t answer he put his cup down. Hard.
“No,” I said dully.
“But she didn’t call a lawyer?”
“No.”
“Are you sleeping on the couch these days?”
“No.”
“Did you that night?”
“Yes.”
“Ever since?”
“Uh—maybe a couple times, yeah.”
“‘Maybe a couple’?”
“Yes,” I sighed.
“But not lately?”
“No.”
“So, she’s a kindly soul?”
“Yes, thank God.”
“At some point later, did she kiss you? Hug you?”
“Later on, yes. I—”
“Yes or no.”
“Yes.”
“How about sex? You back in the game?”
Of course, he would ask.
“Yes.”
“Any good?”
I didn’t answer.
“I’ll rephrase—during the act, does she sound disgusted?”
“No.”
“Tell you to hurry it up?”
“No.”
He changed course again.
“Are you sleeping all right?”
“Yes.”
“Is waking up like climbing out of your grave?”
“Not at all.”
“Do you bring her coffee every morning? The paper, that kind of thing?”
“Yes.”
“Were you hungover today?”
“No.”
“Yesterday?”
“No.”
“Tomorrow?”
“No,” I said instantly, not even thinking about it.
“Back then, did you get headaches? Pop a lot of Tylenol?”
“Yes.”
“Stomach give you hell? Need Rolaids all the time?”
“Jesus—yes.”
“Need any of that shit now?”
“No.”
“Feel sharper at work?”
“Yes.”
“Do you love your son?”
I leaned hard into that one.
“Yes.”
He nodded, his approval genuine.
“Does your son hate you?”
“No—I—I don’t think so.”
“Do you love him?” he asked again.
“Goddamn it—YES.”
“Do you tell him?”
“Every day.”
“Does he say the same?”
“Sometimes. He’s eleven, so—”
“How about your wife? Love her?”
“Of course.”
“When you come home do you get a chilly reception?”
“No.”
“Feel like you got dumped at the morgue?”
“God, no.”
“So they’re glad you’re there?”
“Yes.”
He scratched the back of his neck a while, then resumed.
“Are dinners slow? Quiet?”
“No.”
“So, you actually talk?”
“Yes.”
“All glad to be together?”
“Yes.”
“When you woke up today did you need a drink?”
I stopped cold.
Dolan waited, expressionless.
“No,” I said at last.
“Do you want a drink?”
I shook my head slowly. It felt strange.
He raised his cup, drained it in one haul then set it aside.
“So, Mac—in total, would you say life’s pretty good?”
“I would.”
Eyes fixed on mine, he nodded again, but slowly. Very slowly, like a cop would do when your alibi may not be bullshit after all. It just might hold up.
“Interesting.”
I expected more but he just went on looking at me.
Then he started drumming his fingers on the table.
I was ready for it. The next question. Next riddle. Next field problem.
It never came.
Instead, he pulled out his cigarettes and shook the pack. From the sound I knew there was only one.
“Ah, shit.”
Sighing, he put it away.
Then he got up.
Reeling from it all, I moved to stand with him, but he stopped me.
“Gotta go,” he said, dropping a twenty on the table.
Then he shook my hand.
His grip was firm as ever, but this time he held on for a while.
There should be more, I thought.
Hell, I had made it a year—hadn’t I?
But there wasn’t.
He just let go.
Then he left.
Mike McLaughlin is a writer for Vietnam Veterans of America. His works have appeared in The Wrath-Bearing Tree, The American Veteran, WWII History and American Heritage. Not to be outdone, he has written three novels and dozens of short stories. He lives in Boston, MA with his family.
He wrote “Dolan’s Debrief” to evaluate his progress after a full year sober. It is a work of “faction” drawn from his experiences and those of countless veterans who prove daily that not doing a thing is often the most powerful act of all.