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He served as a volunteer coach for a private school's debate team. "I told him to shut up and mind his own business." "He said something like, 'Jesus, it's coming out of your pores,'" Leavoy recalls. Once, a colleague at August did confront Leavoy. They're not inclined to get into personal business, like cutting someone off when they've had one too many. Buddies in the restaurant industry often cover for one another, carrying a drunk friend home or letting them sleep off a bender on the sofa. I got into some interesting social circles." "I would 'taste wine' and 'do research,' while drinking. "I couldn't see it then, but now I realize it was the blurring of the lines," he says. Leavoy was good in his role, in part because of his innate ability to memorize facts and recall important details, like what a big-spender enjoyed on his last visit. It was fruity, mysterious," he says, mockingly assigning the lofty descriptors of the expensive wine he served to the customers who trusted his discerning palate. "At the time, I was drinking super classy things like flavored vodka with Sprite and a little lime. He managed to hide his habit as he rose through the ranks in just a year and a half, he moved from busboy to wine director. Leavoy found jobs at fine dining establishments, eventually landing at August. After graduation, Leavoy and Alfonso, who met and started living together at LSU, moved to New Orleans, where Alfonso enrolled in medical school. Leavoy moved on to whiskey, which, as the country song goes, is quicker for getting drunk. Soon it wasn't just the end of the day, and it wasn't just beer. "I was studying political science, but really, it was my minor. "I bought into the idea that having a drink at the end of the day signified that you were taking the necessary steps to becoming an adult," he says. Alcohol loosened Leavoy up to new experiences, like going to gay bars. Underage drinking was simply part of the culture on a campus long regarded as one of the country's top party schools. He didn't taste booze until he arrived in Baton Rouge as an eighteen-year-old Louisiana State freshman. A standout on his high school's debate team, he had friends who drank and smoked pot. Leavoy grew up in a small town near Birmingham, Alabama. If he wanted to remain in his field as a wine director, not to mention grow old with his faithful partner, he needed to make some very severe changes. Terrified of losing so much that was dear to himespecially Clayton Alfonso, who he would marry in October 2014, and his hard-earned job at August, the flagship of acclaimed chef John BeshLeavoy admitted something he had angrily denied for years: he was an alcoholic. But after that night, I couldn't ignore it anymore." "I thought, 'That's your problem, not mine.' I was so sick of hearing about it. "I would get so annoyed when people told me I was drinking too much," Leavoy recalls over a stiff mug of coffee, one chilly morning at the Durham coffee shop Cocoa Cinnamon, stumbling distance from his office at Piedmont. There were messages from his longtime partner, too, a medical student who had spent hours trying to find him at the places he typically got wasted.įor Leavoy, this had become business as usual. His head was pounding when he checked his phone to discover dozens of texts from concerned friends, including a few bartenders who had grown weary of watching the charming wine director from one of the city's most respected restaurants turn repeatedly into a foul-mouthed boor. When Leavoy finally opened his eyes around noon the next day, he was not entirely surprised to find himself in someone else's apartment. In 2011, a week ahead of the party, Leavoy did what he'd been doing a lot of: he got blackout drunk.
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For years, he was at the epicenter of the American Mardi Gras experience, the infamously booze-fueled, bacchanalian launch of Lent, during which the faithful give up something dear. What he's blurry about is what happened in the hours, weeks, and even months that came before.Īt the time, Leavoy, the current general manager of Durham's Piedmont restaurant, lived in New Orleans. Based on the dates of other nearby holidays, it's not as easy to remember as, say, Christmas, a date children master as quickly as their own birthday.īut Crawford Leavoy remembers that, five years ago, Mardi Gras arrived March 8.
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Two weeks after finishing his first marathon, Crawford Leavoy waits in the starting chute of Cary's Tobacco Road Marathon.