The Last Round

The Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg reveled in his role as a hard-drinking writer in the old mold. Then one awful night, his wife had to call the police

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Staying afloat: Kent (left) and Ross, the Steinbergs' children, at the Pokagon State Park in Indiana in 2005

Neil's wife, Edie, on the lake in Michigan the same year

In the Sun-Times's new location in the Apparel Center, having been displaced from its old site by Trump Tower, Steinberg has a nifty office where he hangs his Burberry trench coat. The space is filled with natural light and books and photographs—Edie astride a horse, with her strawberry blond hair rolling down her back; his sons. Tucked back on the wall next to his desk, where only he can see it, is a sign he made: don't repeat rehab. While he has complained of being lonely and isolated at the paper, he is close friends with Michael Cooke, the vice president of editorial operations. The two of them play racquetball three times a week at the East Bank Club. (Out of 205 games, Cooke has won 109.)

"There is a depth to Neil, but also the common touch," Cooke says. "He can write about the state budget, and he can write about Madonna's navel, and you'll read every word. And he's such a character—one day there will be a musical about him."

But Steinberg admits that he tends to put people off. In Drunkard, Steinberg describes how some fellow writers asked him out to lunch when he returned to the paper after rehab. Their only caveat: They wanted to drink with their meal, even though he was on the wagon.

"I was friends with Mark Jacob for over a decade," says Steinberg. "But once I got arrested, he didn't want to talk to me any more."

"I wish Neil and his family all the best," says Jacob, a former Sunday Sun-Times editor and currently a foreign and national news editor for the Tribune. "That's all I have to say."

Over the years, Steinberg has had his share of critics, like Rhodes and Michael Miner, the press critic at the Chicago Reader—and he has dispensed his share of criticism. In the mid-nineties, under the byline Ed Gold, Steinberg wrote the sarcastic Reader column "Bob Watch," a skewering analysis of the former Tribune columnist Bob Greene. And he has traded public brickbats with the Tribune columnist Eric Zorn.

Other colleagues shy away from commenting for fear, as one says, "of getting on his bad side"—even if what they have to say is relatively benign. "Don't quote me, because it's impossible to tell how Neil will react to anything," says one journalist. "But I think he's a great writer, and he seems like a nice enough guy."

"At work, he's left some hard feelings in his wake," says another colleague, "and he can be prickly and insecure—but that takes nothing away from his writing. And he seems to be making an effort to be more normal now." 

"The word around the paper is that this book could be the breakthrough book for Neil," says the journalist.

Steinberg certainly hopes so. Drunkard is his sixth book. "All the rest of them sank like stones," he says. That is not exactly true. He was invited on the Oprah Winfrey Show to promote Complete and Utter Failure: A Celebration of Also-Rans, Runners-Up, Never-Weres and Total Flops (Doubleday, 1994). Other books by him have garnered good reviews in The Washington Post and Playboy. But, in part, the subjects that have often attracted him—the history of men's hats; college pranks—were too esoteric to be mainstream hits. "I'm worried that this book will sink without a ripple," he says. "That would be the worst thing. But I don't want to turn my life into a big public spectacle."

Of course, if most people felt that way, they might not write a book exposing every gritty detail. But Steinberg hopes that people will read the book and get a better understanding of him. "This is what I do," he says. "I write. I started taking notes the day I got out of jail."

A judge ordered Steinberg to enter an outpatient program at the Chapman Center in the Highland Park Hospital. At night, he returned home to his family.

In some ways, Steinberg's notes were too good. When he turned in the manuscript, his editors cut 120 pages. "I fought, I screamed, I yelled, I withdrew the manuscript twice."  In other words, it was business as usual for Steinberg. "It was very important to me to show the arduous and boring process of going through rehab. It's like 28 days of traffic school." Some of the rehab scenes are the funniest in the book, with Steinberg describing how he is always being told his blood pressure is sky high and how he shouldn't be scared but he could have a stroke or drop dead any minute with no warning. Also, the descriptions of creative relaxation exercises—bouncing balloons across the room or playing Pictionary—are vivid in their deadpan humor.

When Steinberg finally returns to his job, he quickly relapses. He falls into one binge after another; the descriptions of him scuttling around the northern suburbs, thinking up excuses to leave the house so he can buy pint bottles of alcohol (pint bottles so he can hide them in his coat pockets and sneak them into the house), are harrowing.

"Why would anyone want to stop?" he says. "Rehab showed me the reasons I needed to stop." He ticks them off now. "I didn't want to get divorced. I didn't want to lose my job. I didn't want to move into a Red Roof Inn so I could drink. I love my kids. And I love my wife, so I have to stay sober so I don't piss her off." When the book ends, Steinberg has been sober for a year, and he says he stayed that way for another six months. "Have I had relapses since then? Yes. I get into trouble not when I feel like I need a drink, but when I feel fine. That's what is dangerous for me. The anxiety comes and goes, but alcoholism is obsessional. It is on your mind all the time. That 'one day at a time' idea is a huge intellectual blessing."

He is referring to one of the famous slogans of Alcoholics Anonymous. And while Steinberg attended AA meetings during his rehab period and afterward, and writes about it in his book, he is not a big fan of the organization. "I never bonded with the fellowship and God parts of AA. I never go and make the coffee. I'm not big on the higher-power thing."

Still, life is going well for him—as well as he expects it can. "Edie's happy, and that's important to me. Even though I'm the city's most famous wife beater, I'm a pretty easygoing guy. I mean, I'd prefer she would go back to work so we would have more money to travel and to pay off our $50,000 kitchen remodeling job, but it's her decision." (Asked if she dreads the publication of Drunkard, Edie answers, "What happened doesn't define a life—mine or Neil's. You just keep going.")

"I think Edie gets the drinking thing now," says Steinberg. "She used to think it was something I was doing because I'm a jerk. Now she understands it's a compulsion. People say, 'Well, just don't drink.' But it's not that easy. I have learned the power of time. Wait an hour and the anxiety may pass.

"I'm open to being fine someday. I hope that happens. I hope they come up with a little pill or something. But if they don't—will I ever drink again? Probably. Given my history, the answer is probably yes. But not today." 

Photography: Neil Steinberg

This article appears in the June 2008 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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