Coming Clean: Turning wine into water

My e-mail inbox startled me with the subject line A Voice from the Past.

The last e-mail I received with that heading was from Peanuts LoBianco, a deranged former high school classmate who claimed he had learned to walk on water, change water into wine and then walk on the wine. For all that, he still needed money from me.

This time it was an old girlfriend, from 1979, when I was 28 and she was 20. Thirty-five years ago. She wrote that she was helping her teenage daughter with a literature project for school, and had come across a poem of mine. An internet search showed she had become a lawyer. She also sculpted in her free time and maintained a website showing her artwork. We began a correspondence.

She was always a great reader. At one point she mentioned that The New Yorker made her think of John Cheever. In fact, she had just read a book about him, Raymond Carver and other alcoholic writers. I told her I had known both of them in graduate school, but that I wasn't much interested in the topic of that book.

"It's a little too close to home for me," I said. "I'm always trying to cut down on the martinis, but they only get bigger and stronger."

She wrote back that she, too, could not have read that book a few years ago, that she had struggled with alcoholism her whole life, and was genetically hard-wired for it. But her mother had been sober for 30 years now, and she for four. She apologised for taking the fun out of the exchange and said she hoped she had not been too serious.

I thought back to our time together. It was in Dallas, US; we drank pitchers of margaritas and frequented liquor stores that in those days had drive-through windows. (When the clerk would hand over the bottle, he would also offer "go cups" - plastic tumblers of ice.) We didn't actually eat much on our dates. Just drank.

When I'd offer to order dinner, she'd say, "No, I'll just be a fish", and so would I.

I told her about the memoir I'd recently finished writing, which covered, among other things, my days as a student in Iowa. She said the book sounded as if it was mostly about drinking. I said no, not really, but then I paged through it with her words in mind.

In Iowa I used to drive around with Carver in his old Ford Falcon. One morning, after a long stretch of bar-hopping together into the early hours, Carver phoned me and asked if we had had an accident the night before. Remembering little myself, the most I could say was that I didn't think so. He said he couldn't understand it: When he woke up, he found one side of his car caved in.

"Cheever and I could hardly get it together today to call a cab to take us to the liquor store," he said. Cheever, too, drank heavily then, and at a party one night we all stared at him with concern as he danced alone in the living room, after numerous martinis and as many glasses of wine, his hand over his heart.

I recorded similar conduct over the years in other cities, every city the same in this regard. My stories were mainly about the follies and tragedies of getting smashed: such as cruising around in Malibu, thinking I had two flat tyres on the same side of my car, stopping, getting out and realising I'd been driving with two wheels on the curb. Or my friends who kept track of every two-for-one drink night; the one who gashed his forehead walking into a stop sign; another maimed by a train as he drank on the rails.

My old girlfriend was right. A Moveable Famine, my memoir, is all about drinking. Though it may record a famine of nutrition, funds and fame, my thirst always seems to have found a way to be quenched.

Sometimes, at cocktail hour at my house, friends would take an eight-ounce (250ml) measuring cup, fill it with water and pour it into my empty oversize martini glass, which held it all, no lip room, just to show the staggering amount of alcohol that went into my drinks. It always got a big laugh. But two of those enormous martinis would just get my evening started.

This voice from the past, my ex-girlfriend's, awakened me to my own voice, which had been lying to me. I saw myself through her eyes, clear eyes once as glazed as mine. When I'd gone 30 days without a drink, a small but significant milestone, she sent me a coin from Alcoholics Anonymous stamped with the No1, marking a single month of recovery. Unlike the last voice from the past, the classmate claiming the power to turn water into wine, she made my wine into water. I'm no longer tempted to walk on it. Walking a straight line is enough. - © 2014 The New York Times

• John Skoyles is a poet and writer