The 13th of October

My second birthday, as I call the day and as I keep it. And it really is a second birthday: 13 October 2016 I drank my last glass of alcohol, one year later, 13 October 2017, I finally, after a long fight, stopped smoking. And that is why it keeps being a day for celebrating and reflecting for me. And so far I have not given this day its due in my public diary. And today I can finally do that. 10 years and 9 years without alcohol and without cigarettes, almost unthinkable for anyone who knew me back then. Smoking was with me my whole life, already in my childhood bedroom. I cannot remember a single point in my life where I was not surrounded by cigarette smoke. And it was only logical that I started myself.

At the age of 15, under the Lein bridge in Leinzell, mornings with Lars, after getting off the bus. One morning I saw him running down the steps and followed him, and then, well, then it began to turn into a morning meeting. Don't worry, Lars, it is not your fault that I wanted to be cool. Nor that I smoked for 26 years. Even if sometimes it was only dry, crumbled tobacco from old pouches, collected and moistened again with a slice of apple, because there was no money left. Or, and I admit this reluctantly, sometimes just cigarette butts, because, well, there was no money. What addiction makes of you. And then the quitting, 2 years of fighting, the relapse again and again, again and again: You think you have it under control, 3 weeks without a cigarette, surely you can allow yourself one. Friday one bummed off someone in the street, Saturday 3, and on Sunday a pack bought again, because of course you can stop any time you like. Then it took another few weeks until you were strong enough for the next attempt. And the things you try. I only smoke when I drink: Suddenly you were sitting in the bar every evening with a beer in your hand, so much for that. Addiction finds its ways. What really helped was a nicotine spray, which you then only had to wean yourself off, like a dummy, only different, and this time I had no grandmother who simply hid it.

That a smoker is an addict, that is general consensus. With alcohol it is different. You are an alcoholic only if you no longer have your life under control, or, and careful, this is where it turns ironic, if you do not drink alcohol. That is the social definition of an alcoholic in Germany. As long as you function, you can drink what you want and as much as you want. I have seen a great many people in my life where I would put the term somewhere else. Back then, blokes who only stopped shaking once they had the first mouthful of Hefeweizen at lunchtime. Hubsi, a Stuttgart West legend, looked and talked like the walking dead, like a man who had died several times over, and every landlord crossed himself three times when he left the pub at night on his own two feet and not in the ambulance again with cardiac arrest. I had him as a regular every evening when I worked, and suddenly he stopped coming. Nearly half a year, and then I saw him again in a Penny. Blooming, colour in his face, flesh on his bones, no more shuffling, looked good. A few weeks later he came back, in the evening, at night, wanted a beer, the cheapest one, and looked like death again. “You know, Ralph, I was six months sober and I wanted to celebrate that, just one small beer, then another one.” Tiger and Martin, the two glassblowers I liked going to see so much. Both dead by now, died in retirement. If you wanted your stuff quickly, you sat downstairs at nine and played dice with them, one beer. After 10 beers you had your stuff and it was 4 in the morning and they went home. As if nothing had happened, while you yourself were in quite a state. Sometimes I went down just to have something trivial repaired, just because, and then the dice would start clacking.

One beer. That is what I always called it when I was on the phone with my wife, and we both knew it was not going to be one beer and stay one beer. The intention was there, maybe, several hours later I came home. In the beginning she still came along. One beer. Certainly not every day, except when I only wanted to smoke if I had been drinking, sometimes several weeks without, no alcohol, but when it happened, it never stayed at one beer, certainly not. Already at 16, tour disco and a bottle of vodka lemon, bought by my mother. Then, when I was in GD, Micha's pub and the Goisenmaß. Micha, sadly also dead by now. The hall of residence in Lindenhof, oh my God, the first day, when I went for the room viewing and walked in with the woman. The kitchen, every centimetre of it taken up by a beer bottle, and on the corner bench of the kitchen someone was just waking up, and I knew: I am home. Then Abi and Jörg & Martin, Chasa and Tess, that is a story all of its own and deserves a frame of its own, some day. During my studies: I worked a lot in bars, beer gardens and pubs. With Nadine and Johannes, we are friends to this day, and to this day they tell me that working with me was always the best. My two favourite colleagues and the Batmans, which we had to subject to quality control during work. You drink when you finance your studies behind a bar. And after the shift, off to the Oblomow or the Dilayla, Nadine was relentless about that. But then she did not have a lecture the next morning. It was still one of the best times of my life, out on the town with her in the evening, no, it was at night, four in the morning. Unforgettable for me. What a great woman.

The time with Fei, my brother, as a postdoc in Stuttgart: Without the evening Hefeweizen and the conversations I probably still would not be able to speak English today. And his feigned interest in football, I think he simply did not want to be alone, and so we spent many evenings together.

In the beer garden there was a special mix that carried my name. Andre always ordered it from me: die Mische. Sweet fizzy lemonade (sugar), rosé wine and strong beer on top. Sounds terrible, and it is, but it was fun. And that is how, over the years, I got used to consuming alcohol. After the whole of the noughties really only the alcohol was left, and it was and is socially accepted. Only I myself did not like my behaviour, my drinking behaviour, this resolving, only one beer, where it never stayed at one. And then, 10 years ago, when I had a long evening with my dear friend George from Georgia, with a conversation somewhere between theoretical physics and applied chemistry and clearly more beers than was good, I had my last evening. Or that is how it began, at the Römer Hof, the only restaurant that was within reach for us that day. After that he went home and I went on, Kaffee Schl**d (if you know it, you know it) again, a pet name for the coffee room of a research group that was known for its excesses, I was not welcome there, had not been for a long time. Then the lab of an old fellow student who was still, let us say, working. I had no aim and no errand, just drinking for the sake of drinking.

The next morning I had made the decision: That is it, no more alcohol for me. And that was the 13th of October, and this date was and is an arbitrary one, not chosen, but wanted. And since I have a memory like a sieve and the 13th of October had worked so well, I took another run at it on the 13th of October to stop smoking, one year later. 2 weeks before I started in cancer research, and what can I say, it worked, to this day.

The decision, it did not come overnight. I had probably been carrying it around with me for a long time, every time things escalated too far again, when the hangover was too strong and you tortured yourself through the day anyway. Gaps in what I knew about the evening before, the sour taste of puke in my mouth on waking, the bank balance, the looks the first time you met afterwards, sometimes. I think the people around me knew long before I did that I had no good relationship with alcohol, but what is socially normed is a very different thing. And on that morning, the 13th of October, a Thursday, that was simply that. I was always good at doing something in excess and swinging to the extreme. But I am also damned good at closing a door and keeping it closed.

It is still odd, even after 10 years, to be holding a glass of water in a crowd that is drinking alcohol. The looks at the water. Do you still have to drive? What do you mean, you have no driving licence? Never had one, ah, right. Nothing makes you more suspect of being an alcoholic than not drinking and not having a driving licence. To give the truth its due: Nothing makes me more tired than listening to drunk people. Even after one glass people get louder, and what they say becomes less and less comprehensible, in terms of content. Back then, in pubs, while working, never a problem; today, seen from a sober distance, simply exhausting. I am always glad to be away again from tipsy people or people who are drinking, to close the door and go. Does it make you lonely?

In the beginning I still felt sorry for myself, but that changed. I was also not happy with my position at the time, long-term contract or not, 60 to 80 hours a week, mostly busy with some administrative shit instead of doing science, and I knew I had to change something. On top of that a dud of a colleague, the wanker. My wife was already living where her new job was, and I was still drifting around at the university. What I set in motion with the decision to stop drinking, I do not know to this day. Was I not, after all, an outstanding barstool warrior. What followed was a period of unemployment, the first time in my life in 25 years without a clear goal, definition and pressure. I had resigned from my long-term contract and wanted to reorient myself, to come back to myself, to make something meaningful of my life, and then came cancer research, which I had always wanted to do but for which there had never been an opportunity in Stuttgart.

The phase of coming back to myself, the discovery of cycling, the long tours. I had started with that before, to Rome, the first one in 2015, still smoking and with a bottle of wine or a few bottles of beer every evening. That was a tour. Unforgotten to this day. I got better over the years, the tours got longer, to the Mediterranean, several times, the Black Sea, Malta, Sardinia, Spain, would I have done all of that if I had still been drinking?

Then the opportunity to emigrate, I did not think about it for five minutes, out of a situation again that I did not like at all any more. The time in Essen was psychologically very demanding, none of the promises made at the beginning were kept, all the effort and all the work only talked down and made small, with phases in which I had suicidal thoughts almost daily, that is how shit it was. Not that I would have to solve temporary problems terminally, but that too is part of a truth. In that phase too, not one thought about alcohol or smoking, stable. Not like during my studies and my doctorate, when the alcohol was there to save yourself, to flood the marble, to format it, to reset it, as people also used to call it. Then the emigrating, the escape from the situation, and the realisation, after only a few moments, that I was homesick.

And in all that partly dark time I never wasted a thought on having to take a sip of alcohol now or smoke a cigarette. And I am proud of that. Although: 10 years without drinking, that is not quite right. In Australia a colleague ordered me a root beer at a meal, and whether on purpose or not, it was an alcoholic one. Nothing makes you more suspect of being an alcoholic than being someone who does not drink alcohol; that is the same in other cultures. I took one sip and noticed immediately, not from the taste but from the relaxing effect, what it was. That was it, one sip, and then I left the glass standing.

But no light without shadow. It is not as if everything goes easily and smoothly and the sun shines out of my arse and I now celebrate 2 birthdays. Without alcohol, everything I described above, the names, the people, the occasions, is gone. For me as an introverted person, and yes, I am introverted and shy, it is very difficult to find new people. Friends, that is what they call it. I do not know whether it is down to age, to my introversion, or after all to the fact that with alcohol it is simply much easier. It used to be no problem to get to know a woman, or two; today it seems impossible to me and far too complicated to talk to a woman or to have an interesting conversation. Alcohol was good for that. And honestly: Even then it was a good trade-off. Loneliness is not so bad at all, once you know the dark side that lurks behind the closed social door. The ugly grin of the one beer.