My Ego Had a Vice Grip on the Illusion of Control for Thirty Straight Years — Liz A.

About This Speaker Tape

Liz tells a Memphis-to-Atlanta story of a long, slow-motion alcoholism that took fifty-nine years to bring her to her knees. She grew up the second of six children in eight years to a trauma surgeon father and a pediatric-nurse mother who both drank every night — what she calls country club alcoholics. Her older sister was the Fulbright valedictorian, so Liz carved out an identity as the fun one, the cheerleader, the beauty queen, dating older boys and faking drinks at high school parties because she just wanted to be a grown-up.

At 19 in Dallas she fell in with the Castaneda-Hunter Thompson-Ram Dass counterculture, waited tables at a Hilton in fishnets, married her fun, brilliant husband, and had a daughter in Lawrence, Kansas. The marriage collapsed, she took over a roadhouse bar, shared custody a week on and a week off, and found cocaine so she could stay up and drink as much as she wanted. One dawn she felt her life going down the drain like Jenny in Forrest Gump, packed the Chevrolet, and moved her four-year-old home to Atlanta to start over.

For thirty years she white-knuckled it as a full-commission recruiter, a single mother in heels and hose, protecting her drinking by hosting dinner parties where she could refill the vodka in the kitchen. She turned down a TV weather-girl job so she wouldn't miss cocktail hour. Her daughter once asked if she could quit for a month; she couldn't. The bruises, the cracked rib she hid, the nights she slipped out to Buckhead after her daughter was in bed — her ironclad will kept the illusion of control until she fell and gashed her eyelid open.

She called her little sister Julie — twenty years sober and the one who never proselytized — who drove her to the ER for sixteen stitches. She had one last drink at 3 a.m. and walked into her first meeting on November 24, 2013. Steps Two and Three came easy because the little sane man she had felt as a child at age nine came right back once she put the alcohol down. She closes on page 89 and Daily Reflections, and says the program delivered everything the bottle promised and never gave: belonging, peace, laughter, and never being alone.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Julie opens the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers meeting at the Napa Club and introduces her older sister Liz with the childhood memory of crawling under the covers to be tickled
• 3:30 Liz takes the podium — sobriety date November 24, 2013, came in at 59 — and describes her trauma-surgeon father and the Von Trapp competition among six children in eight years
• 10:00 First spiritual experience at age eight or nine — the knowing with a capital K, and the little sane man who kept pulling her and her friends back from the precipice
• 16:00 Dallas counterculture years — Carlos Castaneda, Hunter S. Thompson, Ram Dass, Timothy Leary — working the Marriott cafe then the top of the Hilton in fishnet stockings
• 22:00 Tampa wedding week — discovers white wine as a solution to social pressure, the beginning of the fatal progression
• 26:00 Teaching art and music to adjudicated juvenile offenders in the East Texas piney woods with the cigarette-butt guitar, drinking six beers on the hour drive home
• 32:00 Lawrence, Kansas — divorces, manages a roadhouse bar, adds cocaine to stay up and drink through shared-custody weeks
• 38:00 Forrest Gump Jenny-on-the-ledge moment — moves back to Atlanta broke with her five-year-old, becomes a full-commission recruiter
• 48:00 Daughter catches the bourbon glass in the bathroom mirror after two weeks of Liz's promised dry month — the devastating look Liz couldn't stop for
• 55:00 The eyelid gash, Julie driving her to the ER for sixteen stitches, one last drink at 3 a.m., first meeting the next day — and closing with page 89 and Daily Reflections