The Sidebar: Oh, Alcohol. Again.
Barbara Lynch in a tail spin, Danny Trejo on post-prison sobriety, and pasta, Al Forno-style.
Tail Spin
What if you (hypothetical you) never got sober? What if I (the real me) hadn’t gotten sober 16 years ago? What would a life look like? I found myself thinking about that on Wednesday after reading Julia Moskin’s investigative article in The New York Times about allegations against award-winning Boston chef Barbara Lynch. (If you haven’t read the piece, click on the link – it is a gift link, no paywall.)
Lynch has been accused of various forms of workplace abuse, and it’s easy to file this story – as some of the 996 commenters have – alongside all the others about the horrors of restaurant culture. I worked in restaurant kitchens, so I’m not unfamiliar with the pressures, the shouting, the drinking. But to me, and I’m sure to every alcoholic reading the piece, this is the story of a real-time addiction tragedy playing out publicly. First it made me wince; then it made me sad.
All of Lynch’s increasingly bizarre behavior is drinking-related (including getting sloshed frequently in the bars of her own restaurants, publicly berating employees, inappropriately touching employees…and being unable or unwilling to support her employees with empathy after the fentanyl death of the restaurant group’s well-liked executive chef, Rye Crofter, who had previously been sober for 10 years). This is stuff that non-alcoholics don’t do; it is stuff that late-stage alcoholics who have reached the “I don’t give a s—t stage” do.
I feel so sure that if Barbara Lynch could time travel into a sober future for herself, she would look back at how the last few years unfolded, how she sabotaged her own hard work and success (and how that whirlpooled out to affect so many others), and wish she had opened her parachute sooner.
By some accounts she has been offered help (in one instance, after a DUI); by other accounts she has been enabled and protected (keys taken away, Ubers called, meetings rescheduled). But there’s no doubt in my mind (I know I’m not supposed to take other people’s inventory, but here I go…) that she knows she is sick. I hope she finds the willingness to accept help. And soon.
Only a month or so into my sobriety, I was reluctantly attending a 12-step women’s meeting one night in Norwalk, Connecticut. I didn’t really like this particular meeting and I was always trying to worm my way out of it. But a wise person who was helping me get sober kept “suggesting” that it would be a good idea for me to go. She also astutely pointed out that perhaps I didn’t like listening to these women because I saw something of myself in them that I didn’t like. (Oh, shoot, she was so right about that – I was busted!).
But on this night, the speaker introduced herself by saying she had recently been released from prison. Okay, I’m paying attention.