I think I dodged a bullet today.

I’ve been sober for so long that I’ve lost track, something like nineteen years now. I can remember my last drink vividly. I was at an El Torito restaurant with my buddy Mike watching an NFL playoff game — Denver against … somebody. I was coming off a series of serious personal fuckups and crises that all revolved around me and my unhealthy love of alcohol, and I had been entertaining the notion that maybe, just maybe, I should quit drinking.

So Mike and I are watching the game and I’m drinking a Corona and Mike says “Let’s go” and gets up to leave. In a situtation like that, halfway through a beer and heading for the door, my standard practice was to guzzle the rest of the beer, kill it. Leave half a beer behind? What, are you nuts?

This time I just put it down, got up, and walked away. I knew in that moment that that was my last drink. I didn’t think about it, but it wasn’t a snap decision. It was just… time. I just didn’t want it any more.

It’s been something like 19 years since I put that beer down, and it really was my last one. I went the first month on my own, then started going to AA after I had 30 days and went nearly daily and was very active in it for a year or so. But then I started slipping away from the meetings and the people, but I never started up drinking again. I had quit and that was it.

But as time has gone by I’ve started to wonder if I really was an alcoholic or if I was just a 24-year old kid with too much time on his hands and not enough to do. I think there’s a little core deep down inside me that thinks I was making a mountain out of a molehill and that now, as an adult with maturity and self control and blah-blah-blah, I could “drink responsibly.” That I could control it.

Those of you readers who are AA or know the principles, you know how fucked up that is, but also how predictable. AA likes to say that alcoholism is sneaky, that it lies in wait, that it’s always waiting to bite you in the ass, that it makes you think exactly the kind of shit I’ve started thinking. And I’ve known that, but dismissed it. Just like AA says we’ll do.

So today I came face-to-face with it. My boss and I are on the road up here in Vancouver, training at a client site. These people we’re training are very laid back, very fun, and very casual. And as we started winding the training down, one of them made a wine run. And I started thinking.

I’ve been tempted over the years, especially with the kind of thinking I’ve been indulging, but I’ve resisted the urge. I’ve figured that even if I’m not an alcoholic, I’ve gone nearly 20 years without booze, so why start back up again now? Doesn’t the fact that I want to suggest that I “need” to and thus that I’m alcoholic? And I’ve agreed with myself on that — sort of — and said “no.”

But today… Suddenly a glass of white wine sounded really good. I was never much of a wine drinker — beer, vodka tonics, 7&7s, and tequila were my flavors — but I did enjoy a jug of white now and then with my old girlfriend Kelli. And now suddenly a glass of white sounded good. Really fucking good.

So I decided I’d leave it up to chance: I decided if they came back with red, then that was a sign and I’d just say no. But if they came back with white, that left it open to interpretation. And so I turned to WAMCO (the Wise And Mighty Coin Of destiny) and flipped a coin — heads for do it, tails for don’t. And it came up heads.

And I felt my decision had been made, sort of. I was a little excited and anticipatory that, wow, I was going to taste wine again! But I was also a little nervous that I was going to be drinking again. But come on, I was a 24-year old kid who was just out of control. I’m an adult now, I can handle it.

But while half my brain had a nervous little party, the other half was running worst-case scenarios about what would happen if it turned out I really was an alcoholic and ended up totally out of control again. And so I sat there listening to this internal cocaphony while my boss continued training and I totally zoned out of everything but the noise in my head and wasn’t even in the room anymore.

And when the wine-runner got back with both red and white and interrupted my reverie to ask which I wanted, habit or instinct or providence or something took over. And I said “No thanks, I don’t drink” without even thinking about it.

Fuck. That was close.

Obviously, I have some issues to work out. And while “Get to a meeting” is the most obvious piece of advice that some of you are muttering to the screen right now, I know myself well enough to know that I won’t. What I will do, I don’t know. But I know that I won’t be drinking. Today scared me.