The Beer I Waited Eight Weeks For

A few years back, I was watching a documentary on the border and the drug trade. I heard a leading expert on the subjects say something along the lines of, “Americans are huge patriots; they love their country. But only when they are drunk or high.” I don’t recall his name or the exact quote, but I think it says a lot about us as a nation. I don’t think I’ve ever had a substance abuse problem; I think I have definitely had a problem with maturity, or lack thereof. Recently, I had to go sober for eight weeks. Initially, I was nervous about doing it because I made it out to be a bigger deal than it actually was. In the end, I learned a lot about myself.

First, I’ll say that I have every reason to be nervous about substance abuse and addiction to pretty much anything out there, given my family history on my mother’s side. I know I’m not going to be the favorite at the dinner table when I write this, but then again, I don’t care. I’ve always been the black sheep in the family and have never been afraid to expose our family secrets. I have had family members addicted to pretty much anything you can think of: alcohol, street drugs, pills, food, gambling, sex, etc. Two months before I was born, I lost a brother to a heroin overdose.

My grandfather, may he rest in peace, used to own a bus company in Mexico in the early 20th century, much like Greyhound. But he was such a terrible gambler that he bet the company one night in a poker game and lost it in one hand. He then shacked up with his 20-something-year-old secretary, my grandmother went chasing after him, and all the children were left at home to fend for themselves. I shouldn’t be too mad at him about his vices. After all, his gambling is what led to me being born.

In the 1930s and 1940s, my dad was a professional boxer in Mexico, which is like saying he was a lion in a den of lions. My grandfather liked going to the fights and was making good money for a while betting on my dad. He would also take my mom, who was a toddler at the time, to the fights (yes, my father was 16 years older than my mom, and yes, my grandfather was that awful of a parent). Eventually, my dad started getting invited to dinner and became a family friend. He also began babysitting my mom and eventually married her after his divorce many years later.

But I digress. Back to my family issues. My mom’s older brother, Uncle Ray, may he also rest in peace, was a very well-respected accountant at one point in his life. But then his drinking started getting in the way. Eventually, people stopped trusting him to do their accounting, and he just ended up being a lowlife bookie hanging out at dive bars. He would pull benders that were so bad that they would find him on the sidewalk just passed out. And when he would run out of money to buy booze, he would start drinking my mom’s perfume. He would be super drunk, but his breath would smell like a French whorehouse.

Another uncle, Uncle Roberto, who has also passed away, lived in a constant state of depression. His life basically revolved around drinking. In his youth, he killed a man in cold blood at a bar because the man found out his wife was cheating on him with my uncle. The man approached my uncle at a bar with a gun, but someone yelled out, giving my uncle time to turn around and shoot him. The man died from his wounds, and my uncle was on the run from the law until he could bribe the authorities to drop the matter. Keep in mind that this was all happening in Mexico.

He also worked for Mexican customs and was at a checkpoint one night when he had to inspect a semi. Little did he know the semi was filled with drugs. The driver pulled a gun on him, my uncle’s K-9 went after the driver, and my uncle shot and killed the driver.

Years later, around the time I was born in the early ’80s, my aunt and uncle were both at a party, and my uncle, as usual, had a little bit too much to drink. He said he was fine to drive, but the oldest son, Andres, thought otherwise and took the car keys away from him and started driving them both home. Keep in mind that my uncle was a savage to my aunt, constantly beating her. So she could not do or say anything. They were driving down a dirt road when my uncle, in his drunken state, tried to take the wheel from my cousin, sending them into a ditch and instantly killing my cousin.

My uncle never lived that one down. There was never a time when I did not see him with a whiskey jug beside him.

When we moved to that small border town in Texas, my uncle was still working for Mexican customs. Although my uncle was much older than my mother and they were cousins, not siblings, he greatly respected my mother, almost as if she were his older sister, and always referred to her as his sibling. Occasionally, my mom would get a phone call from one of his children or one of his co-workers at the bridge, telling her he was drinking again.

So there we would go, my mom and I. We would make the whopping ten-minute trip down to the international bridge and park the car. She would be greeted very respectfully by all his co-workers, and we would walk over to his post. On the Mexican side, there were drive-up lanes where cars would pass through and be inspected by customs. But at this point in his career, my uncle was a dinosaur, having worked in customs all his life. Plus, he was a drunk. He was always posted in the little hut where pedestrians and bicyclists had to pass if they were going into Mexico.

Inside, you would just find my uncle sitting on a bench in uniform, ARMED, with his whiskey jug at his side. Almost immediately, my mom would start tearing into him, and he would just sit there and take it. He would hang his head low and say, “Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am.” It was quite the sight.

But the fun doesn’t end there. The addict of all addicts was none other than my mother herself, the hypocrite. I know. She talked a big talk when speaking to her siblings and her father, but she was incredibly addicted to pills, specifically benzodiazepines. These include medications such as Xanax, Valium and Ativan, which are commonly used to treat anxiety.

Yes, my mother did suffer from untreated mental health issues, mainly major depression and anxiety, because heaven forbid a proud Mexican woman go to a doctor or therapist to seek help. But I have very vivid memories as a young child standing by the dinner table and watching my mother and my aunts and uncles trade prescription pills like they were poker chips. My mother had very drastic mood swings, which I now attribute to the pills, and later in life, she would be instrumental in introducing them to me.

Like I said before, I don’t think I ever had a problem with addiction; I just had an issue with immaturity. When I first got to college, the world of underage drinking was introduced to me. Keep in mind that this is very different from some addict needing a constant fix and facing withdrawals. I just enjoyed the party scene a bit too much. And who could blame me? I went from a small conservative household in a small border town in Texas to attending one of the biggest party schools in the country, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I never did any hard street drugs because, frankly, I was afraid of what they would do to me and what my mom would do if she found out. I continued drinking in my twenties, but by Wisconsin standards, I was not a heavy drinker by any means. Keep in mind that I live in the beer capital of the country, and I’m a beer super snob, so that has had a lot to do with it.

But this changed when I went into law enforcement shortly after college. The job was much tougher than I had expected, and eventually, one drink in the evening became two, then three, and then I was just drinking to forget until I couldn’t take it anymore and decided it was time to step away. While I was on patrol with my second department, I faced several traumatic critical incidents I could not get out of my head.

After I walked away and moved back to Madison, I was staying with my mom while I found a place for myself, and I was working for the unemployment insurance office investigating fraud. But I had an M.O.: I would end my day around 3 p.m., go work out at the Y down the street for about an hour, then go to the bar down the street and have a few drinks, including shots with the bartenders. Then I would go down the street to the other bar, have a few more drinks and shots, drive home (yes, that’s right, I regrettably drove home in that state), drink half a bottle of whiskey or brandy, pass out and do it all over again the next day.

My weekends were just nonstop benders. I did this for about six or seven months, all the while abusing the pills that my mother was taking because she had given them to me under the pretense that they would help, when in reality she was my dealer.

Finally, I got home one evening, walked through the door and bent over to untie my shoes. I was so drunk that I just tipped over and cracked my forehead on the floor. My mom came over, and the look on her face said it all. I could not get up, so she called a neighbor and good friend of mine to carry me to bed.

Well, the next morning, I woke up and decided enough was enough. I poured out all the booze at home, got my gym bag and went to the boxing gym, the only place I knew that could set me straight.

When I was a young kid growing up in a border town full of gangs, drugs and guns, boxing kept me off the streets and focused while many of my classmates didn’t make it out of there alive. For the second time in my life, the sweet science had saved my life.

I went completely sober for a good while and had a decent comeback in the amateur ranks, but eventually I started playing with fire again. Since then, I have never been a heavy drinker: maybe two or three beers max on the weekends.

But recently, I’ve had issues with kidney stones. During one of these episodes, they did an ultrasound of my kidneys, and the radiologist made a side note saying he found something called hepatic steatosis in my liver. Basically, it looks as though I drink a lot when I really don’t. That is because even though I only have a couple of beers each week, I also take a lot of medications for issues such as cluster headaches, blood sugar, kidney stones, sleep, mood, etc.

That, combined with the little alcohol I drink, makes it look like I drink a lot and puts me at a huge risk of fatty liver disease or liver cancer. Yes, I said it: the “C” word. My dad died of pancreatic cancer when I was six, my cousin died of lymphoma and my aunt and cousin both died of breast cancer, so that’s a big deal in my family.

I did a little research and found out that if I just went sober for eight weeks, I could check my liver enzymes and see that everything was okay, that there was nothing wrong with me and that it was just a combination of the meds and beer.

Well, after my kidney stone surgery, I took it to the extreme. Not only did I go sober, but I started working out five or six times a week. I also started meal prepping every week. I started reading again and meditating. I was feeling great. But there was something that I was missing. At the very back of my mind, I still missed that buzz.

I didn’t want to get drunk. To be honest, I hate losing control and not remembering what I say or do or not being able to drive my car. I just like that slight buzz from the first or second beer. And this whole thing felt daunting in the first place because I knew I could go a week or two without a drink, but eight weeks? That was the whole summer, and I live in Wisconsin.

Well, whatever. I did it. And I actually ended up feeling better. I was going to bed early and waking up at 5 a.m. to go to the gym. I was living the best version of myself, the Spartan life.

But then I had those labs, and I was super excited not only to see what my liver looked like but also to be able to have a beer. Well, I messed that up. Even though they were fasting labs and I fasted for more than 12 hours, it turns out that lifting weights the day of the tests, or even a few days prior, can affect your liver enzymes. I had actually worked out that morning and the previous three mornings. Who knew working out would be bad for you?

All my numbers were great, but my AST and ALT were way high, higher than last time. Both my doctor and my cousin, who has worked in labs his entire life, told me not to worry because they were sure it was the lifting and that we would just have to meet to run other tests. So I get a Mulligan…

A couple of days after I had my labs, a good friend was in town, and we decided to go grab a cigar and a drink. So there I was, having my first drink in eight weeks, thinking that a stripper was going to pop out of nowhere and start dancing on my lap or something. In reality, I was chasing a whole lot of nothing.

I didn’t feel any better after the two beers. On the contrary, I got gut rot, and I got up early the following morning to go for a run outside and could feel the beer bouncing around inside. On top of that, I had a nightmare about an incident from when I worked for the Department of Corrections: two inmates who bunked together made a suicide pact, and I found their bodies. So I didn’t sleep well either.

So where does this leave me now? I’m not sure. I haven’t had the appointment with my doctor yet, but I am seriously considering going sober for good. Keep in mind that I live in Wisconsin, so I am surrounded by alcohol everywhere I go. But I think it will be better for me in the long run, especially if it takes the anxiety about cancer out of my brain.

Will I be judged for it? Probably. Most definitely. But I don’t really care. No one but me is paying for my medical bills, and no one else is going to go through the pain if I do get diagnosed with something. My advice to you: Don’t chase something that isn’t really worth having in the first place. And don’t drive drunk!

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Nader Gamez is a contributor to The Havok Journal with a background in Wisconsin law enforcement, corrections, and mental health settings. He earned a bachelor’s degree in international studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and has worked with the Dane County Sheriff’s Office, the Waukesha Police Department, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, and Mendota Mental Health Institute. He has also competed in amateur boxing and played rugby with local clubs. For The Havok Journal, he writes personal essays, commentary, and poetry that often reflect on hardship, identity, resilience, and mental health.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.