At one point in Episode 25, Jane and I were talking about keeping the plates spinning while drinking and I said something to the effect that being an alcoholic requires you to be leading at least two lives at the same time. That got me thinking about spies.

Paul McCartney wrote one of the greatest spy movie themes ever. When I first heard “Live and Let Die,” I was 10 or 11 and I thought it was just the coolest song.

One of the advantages of having an early morning paper route is that you can sing and hum and no one can hear you. I can remember softly singing this as I delivered papers in the dark:

When you’ve got a job to do

You’ve got to do it well

You’ve got to give the other fellow hell.

I don’t think the Des Moines Register was necessarily looking for that level of commitment from their carriers, but I was ready. So, like I said, Paul McCartney wrote one of the great spy movie themes of all time and then he wrote this:

I’ve always been obsessed with spies and espionage. I was a lonely, shy kid and spent a lot of time watching everyone else. I had a difficult time connecting with people and always felt very awkward. Consequently, I tried to be a really keen observer of other people, why did they do the things they did, what were the appropriate reactions? I was a little like the young boy at the school befriended by Jim Prideaux in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy”: “You’re a good watcher, aren’t you? You notice things.”

Like every good spy story, mine evolved from being simply a “good watcher,” to realizing that I had tracks to cover, secrets to keep. I’m not sure when thoughts like that began to creep into my consciousness, but I quickly determined that my success in life, my ability to make friends, connect with people, generally get along in the world, required me to keep an awful lot of stuff secret. I came to believe there was a part of me that was so shameful, humiliating, wrong, bad, defective, that it could simply never be shared with other people.

I’m pretty sure that narrative was a big part of the reason I saw such a bright light when I started drinking at 15 or 16. The strain of carrying around all of those secrets was already a lot. I’m sorry, don’t get the idea that I drank because I liked the taste or just wanted to be popular at parties. By 17, I was sitting by myself at a bar in the afternoon. That’s how deeply ingrained it was in me, how deeply cut that groove already was. I needed to drink—that question was already settled.

I’ve told the story about the night I realized I was an alcoholic: The sudden realization, of course while drinking alone, that drinking was way too important to me, occupied way too big a part of my life, was really already beyond my control. The icy churn in my gut came from knowing that I couldn’t even conceive of a situation where I could or would stop drinking. Now I had a real secret to keep:

I was an actual teenage alcoholic.

This was not a game to me, what was at stake was the most important thing in my life: My drinking. If I couldn’t keep this secret, I’d lose it and that simply couldn’t happen. It was a huge secret to keep and I did. I was a pretty f*****g awesome spy.

By my Junior year of high school I was a pretty ferocious everyday drinker and weed smoker. I also played basketball, had a part-time job after school at the local newspaper and was the state debate champion. I think my debate coach was the only person who knew I was drinking, and he had no inkling how much. He walked past the scene of a Beach Party I had staged in my room at the Cedar Rapids Marriott and came to my very hungover breakfast table the next morning expressing concern, but suggesting that he knew it had been the work of "older kids." That was another important piece of the puzzle for this budding spy: I realized that people really didn't want to believe I was an alcoholic or had a problem. That was very, very useful knowledge and helped me keep drinking for the next four decades.

I managed a pretty successful career, raised a family, had what looked like a pretty idyllic life and no one really suspected anything until it all finally blew up in 2011. My alcoholism came as a complete surprise to everyone, that’s how well disguised it was. Well, I knew it was coming. I had known since that night at Magoo’s in 1981. I knew there would be a day of catastrophe, when everything finally got discovered—I just didn’t know when that was going to be.

I’m fascinated by the story of how the British and Americans ultimately broke the German and Soviet codes in World War II. I think about Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, who reached the highest levels of British society and the intelligence establishment, all while spying for the Soviets. Philby, who had risen to head of Counter Intelligence at MI6, had to know the Americans were steadily decrypting all of the intercepted Soviet communications from the war and that there was inevitably going to be a day when he would finally and inexorably be exposed as traitor.

Back when I was 17, I listened to the Beatles, a lot. I loved the medley on the B side of Abbey Road, but I used to think it was weird that the words that resonated with this 17-year-old were from “Golden Slumber”:

Once there was a way to get back homeward

Once there was a way to get back home

Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight,

Carry that weight a long time

I didn’t understand why those words always hit me so hard until I read about Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, then I completely understood the feeling of being incrementally crushed, a little every day, by the knowledge of the impending catastrophic discovery. The other thing that really struck me was the story of how the British, aided by the ULTRA decrypts, intercepted almost all of the German spies sent during the war and then doubled them back to provide false intelligence to the Nazis. The British literally hired an army of writers to concoct the back stories and fake intelligence and managed to keep the Germans thinking they had an intact ring of spies for most of the war. I thought that was brilliant and took careful note.

I started trying to get sober in 2010 and quickly realized that I wasn’t interested in actually giving up drinking. It occurred to me that most of my problems came from people knowing that I was drinking. If I could just do a better job of hiding it, well, that would be way better than having to give it up. For the next 10 years, my life was a mix of actual attempts to get sober interspersed with fictional periods of sobriety. It was a horrifying, wilderness of mirrors way to live. I’m not sure I knew myself when I was trying and when I was pretending.

I dated someone for 18 months and pretended to be sober the entire time. I drank almost every day and even though she lived only three blocks from my house and we saw each other nearly every day, well, she had no idea until the very end. When she broke up with me, she asked if I had been drunk on the night of our first date. The first date where I told her that I was a “recovering alcoholic” and had been sober for “ a while.” I fooled everyone, friends, wives, colleagues, bosses, my kids, everyone, and for a long, long time. That doesn't really generate any feelings of pride in my tradecraft.

Like CIA agents working in Moscow, I needed to generate time in the “Black” to do my drinking. Since my drinking occupied several hours a day, every day, it became necessary to generate an entire fictional life to cover over the fact that my real life was mostly spent on a collection of carefully located and concealed bar stools. I told my girlfriend I was seeing friends, going to church, going to a meeting, going to a game, whatever lie was necessary to generate an hour or two when I could peacefully drink without fear of being discovered. I was exactly like the British writers conjuring up lives of actually-imprisoned spies.

There’s always a whiff of romance and intrigue and elegance in spy movies. But that is a fantasy. The actual life of a spy is small and dark and lonely and limned with fear. I lived that way for 40 years and did it in service to what I thought was my most important strategic interest—my drinking. That’s not a pleasant realization.

Kim Philby drank away the last years of his life in Moscow and though he had the Order of Lenin pinned to his jacket, I’ll bet he also realized that he had given his entire life in the service of a monstrous lie. When my very elaborately-conceived deception operation finally collapsed, I realized the secret I had been protecting almost my entire life was the thing actually destroying it.

“Spies Like Us” was a terrible movie and Dan Ackroyd and Chevy Chase were horrible at even acting like spies. I wish I’d been more like them. I wish I had been a shittier spy, a less accomplished liar, a little less skilled at sowing doubt and confusion. I wish I hadn’t made people believe me so much. I wish I’d been hapless and bungling and hadn’t been able to keep my stories straight. That would have saved a lot of people a lot of heartache. I look back on big chunks of my life and wonder whether it was really ever me or was all it just an operation? Was it all just a cover I was building? Those questions are sort of academic at this point. That water is well past the bridge.

The adult version of me took complete responsibility for my decision to live life like a spy. The choice I thought I had made to conceal and protect what was most important to me: drinking. I’ve never really told that part of my story before and revisiting that young secret agent really stirred up a lot in me. I usually speak very matter of factly about the origin story of my alcoholism. If I qualify at a meeting, I typically just say that I started drinking at 15 or 16 and was a “white light drinker.” That’s my pet phrase, Dr. Ruth Fox, who wrote an amazing book in 1955 titled simply, “Alcoholism: Its Scope, Cause and Treatment” describes someone like me as a “Primary Addict:”

The primary addict, from his first introduction to beverage alcohol, uses it as an aid to adjust to his environment.

Alcoholism, p. 142

She goes on to describe me a little more thoroughly:

The primary addict is one in whom the predisposing traits are so developed and so sharply marked that his first recourse to this socially approved narcotic is only a matter of time..In the case of the primary addict, the decisive symptom, loss of control, appears early in his drinking history. Thereafter, his own sense of self-esteem, depreciated to begin with, will take a merciless pounding…If he thought he was unworthy before, now he is given proof.

Alcoholism, p. 143-44

The process of recruiting agents, “assets,” usually involves identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities. It’s not a very pretty or kind process and it often involves luring someone to cross a line they may not have even known was even there. That’s pretty much how alcohol worked on me. Once that line is crossed and the subject realizes they are now complicit, how much they now have to lose, well, that’s when the trap closes and no one has too much of a choice after that. “Choice” is the funny word. People often like to describe addicts and alcoholics as people who make “bad choices.” For sure we do, lots and lots of them. I am coming to see those “choices” as symptoms of my addiction, not the cause of it.

Sure, I made that choice to drink that first drink, take that first hit of weed way back in 1977 or 1978. I had no real idea back then, that “choice” meant enlisting in a lifetime of deception in service of a terrible secret. I only knew that from the time I first started drinking, it was something that was “necessary” for me, not something I did for fun. Drinking for me was kind of how I imagined eating without taste buds would be. It’s something I had to have. I was convinced I couldn’t navigate the world without it.

The Big Book talks about alcoholics reaching the point of no return, for me, that happened frighteningly early. I had no idea where I was headed or how long I would struggle. I had no idea there was even a line to be crossed. The horrible thing is that I think, even if someone blessed with foreknowledge of all of the pain and struggle and heartbreak that was waiting in front of me had been siting in that awful black vinyl booth with me at Magoo’s that night back in 1981, I’m pretty sure I would have still ordered that third drink. I see now that I never had a choice. I did what I thought was necessary and once I crossed that invisible line, well, it became an imperative. Already weighed down with the crushing shame and fear of being an alcoholic, that 17 year-old didn’t make a choice, didn’t really have a choice. He just knew he had to keep the secret.

It turns out the secret wasn’t so terrible and wasn’t much of a secret by the end. What was terrible, was living that way for 40 years. It’s heartbreaking to look back. The sadness is for someone who took on the burden of an overwhelming secret way too early. Keeping that secret for so long cost him a lot and was a very, very lonely business. I know him pretty well, he never meant to hurt anyone, and that’s still the hardest thing he carries around. He just knew he didn’t fit in the world as is and he did the best he could. I have a ton of respect for him; he took on that pretty heavy burden and carried it for a long, long time. He was resourceful, never quit and was so brave. And despite it all, all of the failures to come, the losses, the relapses, everything, I realize now he never gave up believing there was a way back home.

In real life, espionage is a capital crime That’s why, in the real world, being discovered as a spy is typically a pretty unfortunate thing. Me finally being discovered as a spy? I think the end of my career as a spy is probably when my life actually began again.

Thanks for Letting Me Share

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