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Former Drunkard Redeems Himself In Honest Look At His Life

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By ROGER K. MILLER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 13, 2008

"Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life," by Neil Steinberg (Dutton, $24.95)

Back when newsrooms had a spittoon next to every desk and pneumatic tubes running to the composing room, it used to be charged that newspapermen drank a lot. The newspapermen's answer to that was: Yes, they did drink a lot - a lot like judges, policemen, teachers, barbers and other upstanding members of the citizenry.

Neil Steinberg, popular columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of five other books, updates the truth of that accusation and answer in "Drunkard." One night in 2005, during an argument - fueled on his side by alcohol - he reached out and slapped his wife, Edie, in their Northbrook home.

End of argument. Seemingly within minutes, the police arrived, and he was hauled off in handcuffs to jail and then to court, the first steps - involuntary, like those to come - on his path to attempted alcoholism rehabilitation in the company of citizens from every walk of life.

Steinberg calls himself "a functioning drunkard," a more colorful "slur" he prefers over the clinical word "alcoholic." It fits his sometimes debased behavior, including fishing a bottle of cherry brandy out of the recycling bin to lap the dregs and "snorting" booze by inserting an empty airline minibottle into his nostril and inhaling the alcohol vapors.

It's hard to believe, this well-off suburban professional who hasn't enough sense not to drink himself silly, but, of course, it is not pathetic, nor uncommon. If anything, it is tragic, a tragedy in the classical sense of something we bring on ourselves. He comes to see alcoholism not so much as a struggle not to drink, but "to not constantly think about drinking." And he makes it. In an epilogue, he says it has been "a year and counting" since his last drink.

How he made it is not totally clear, even to him. AA meetings helped, but he doesn't know why. Mostly it was Edie, who, he says, may have been his Higher Power. Much as he loved drink, he loved Edie more.

As in his column, Steinberg has a fresh, lightly humorous way with metaphor, simile and description in general. Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, he says, "flushes out the closet Jews, blinking into the glare of their loosely held faith."

As a former ink-stained wretch myself, I greatly admire Steinberg's reason for writing "Drunkard." Not to help others avoid going through what he did - the high-sounding motive you typically get from people who write about struggles they went through - but because telling their stories is what writers do and "because doing so somehow redeems us."

It is part and parcel of his honesty in examining his life. Steinberg, consider yourself redeemed.

Roger K. Miller, author of the novel "Invisible Hero," writes the blog graustark.blogspot.com.

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