A star debater, as he descended further into addiction he also became expert at defending it as an ethical position. Once, when he was strung out, we watched a documentary about the Syrian civil war and when he saw the image of the dead body of three-year-old refugee Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach, K began to weep. I’d never seen him like that. He said something unintelligible about the tiny bodies of my kids, probably that that kid, too, was somebody’s baby just like our babies, and then he said, Why would I want to be awake in a world where a three-year-old washes up on shore because no one wants to give him a place to live? I’m supposed to just go to work and act like that’s not happening? I had no answer for that question.
Being a junkie, if you really went all in, also eradicated insecurity. All of the worry that people wouldn’t like him, that he wouldn’t be able to sustain the artfully curated character he had become, his impostor complex, his fear that he wasn’t good enough for me and that people around us could see it—all of that was gone instantaneously. Once, he compared his late-stage high to the dull emotional window after jerking off. People do that, he said, before going on a date or a job interview, so they can have a few minutes of calm, of getting to be blanked out like that. Why do all this other shit when I can go buy that sensation and put it in my arm?
I always prided myself on my adaptability, a chameleonic capacity to move between social scenes and navigate their variable expectations with grace and charm. It was a thrill for me to have a foot in two worlds, to experience the polarity of this dual life. Like many codependents, I felt a charge of self-esteem when I surveyed the incomprehensibly contradictory demands I put upon myself, just how vast and complicated and difficult a life I could “handle,” just how many details I could keep in my mind at once, how many plates I could keep spinning. It was the same excitement I felt when I was young, carrying around the secret of having had sex all night, except now I sat in conference rooms in glasses, prim dresses, and tights, pulling my cardigan tightly around me as I listened to a presentation, thinking about watching my boyfriend shoot crack, the moment when the needle went in and I averted my eyes, thinking about what I would make the kids for dinner. Not many people could pull this off, I dementedly thought. This was “keeping it together.”
K had a paradoxical relationship with the truth. On the one hand, he seemed to never tell the truth—he didn’t give a shit about it, he lied to anyone. On the other hand, in his fatalism and nihilism there was something so brutally, undeniably true that it cut through the bourgeois bullshit of my existence. To aspire to lead an ethical life in an ethically bankrupt world was a joke to him. The cognitive dissonance of living alongside war, of living under capitalism—the endless phoniness of adulthood was something he simply could not, would not countenance. I related so strongly to this that sometimes it almost felt good to me that one of us should be able to bow out as he was, in resolute avoidance of the grotesquerie of the world. Why even try? Why not live instead, anesthetized, at the gritty intersection of art and sex and crime. I could see that as punk, as existentialist. A part of me might have liked being connected to that disavowal, funding its shadowy operations like it was some kind of sleeper cell.
Even as I write this, I acknowledge that it may also be ridiculous. Maybe I just wanted to read meaning into his inability to show up and be a good man. And isn’t that just an extension of women’s work, too? The excavation and analysis of men’s trauma—unpaid work they won’t do themselves—the ascription to them of some deeper reasoning, so that we may explain away the ways they mistreat us. How generous we are with context. I hear women do this all the time. But ever so slightly, it did sometimes soften the blow.
Opiates really are the great flattener. Heroin addicts don’t often lead dazzling lives. Their interests and relationships steadily disintegrate and disappear. But representations of addiction are so flattened that addicts scarcely seem like people. I think we tell that story simply in order to continue to stigmatize and criminalize drug use, and in order to keep the addict in the realm of the nonhuman. It is easier to remain complicit in consigning opiate addicts to social death if we imagine they are zombie losers shooting one another up all day inside abandoned houses. It’s far more challenging to consider the junkie with a job, the one who parents, the one still embedded in a social world, the one who wants to get clean. The sadness of the addict’s family is also flattened, and typically shown in a simple way: they feel sad because drugs have robbed them of the person they once knew. The letters read by tearful loved ones on the TV show Intervention are the familiar template: Dear addiction, you have stolen the special person I used to know. Much more painful and uneven is the actual experience of loving an addict, because in certain ways, on certain days, they are still precisely, maddeningly themselves. It isn’t all catastrophic. Life goes on. It is punctuated differently, by particular kinds of silences and deceits, arguments and promises, highs—obviously—and all-time lows. But life is also just life, boring and funny and complicated. Ever-changing and always the same. K and I had hours-long debates about the people we knew or about politics or television or books. We ate meals, watched movies, spooned. We drove up the coast, played each other song after song, one of us instructing the other in how to hear it: This part right here. Listen. We fought—a lot. Sometimes it felt like the disease he most acutely suffered from was being a dick. When I was angry with him, all of his problems seemed to spring from a fundamental narcissism, entitlement. You are the most selfish person I’ve ever met, I thought. Of course you’re a drug addict, what else would you be. Other times, I saw it clinically: I loved a man with a fatal disease. It was eminently medical, physical. Arbitrary. Tragic. He could see it that way, too, particularly as it began to close in on him. The times we sat in the emergency room waiting for some poor early-morning nurse to lance and disinfect his pus-filled abscesses. The times he said he was ready to get better but we called every rehab and couldn’t find a bed. People he knew kept dying. This thing is gonna kill me, K said once, lying in my arms, and it all seemed as straightforward, as terminal as a malignant tumor. Sometimes I wished it was cancer, something plainly unfortunate and irreproachable, a proper illness, which might introduce a clarifying mood, might make us want to appreciate the abundance around us, the richness of our own love. Something that would make us want to plant a garden, that would allow me to say to my friends something as simple as “the cancer’s back” and suddenly open the doorway to their solicitous understanding, their casseroles. Addiction, beyond being stigmatized and criminalized, is a disease that mingles so maddeningly with free will that those of us living in its midst can swing wildly between sympathy and cruelty.
* * *
• • •
It whips you up, this love.
You can imagine, then, how the night he turns up with two of his front teeth in his right hand and one eye swollen shut, I don’t even pause to consider turning him away. It is a night I’ve spent waiting for him to come home from work, texting him with no response, a night when my children are with their father and there is no one to fuss over. Alone with my thoughts and nerves, and a small flicker of something else—anger—just forming at the edges of my consciousness, I walk around the apartment, tidying, looking for a task to busy me. I have finally fallen asleep when the doorbell rings.
His mouth is blackly crusted. He’s taken off his bloodied T-shirt, which is wrapped around his fist. Maybe the fist is also bleeding? His jacket is zipped halfway over his bare chest. He looks like G.I. Joe, except he is high as fuck and crying.
Alas, for the codependent, empathy springs eternal. His face is mangled, and looks like it hurts. When he opens his fist to reveal the teeth, I think immediately of the bombed-out cityscape of bone-grey teeth at the back of my own mouth, the two little carved-out caves. They are shells of my shamefully unfinished root canals, a most private despair. I trace these with my tongue instinctually and put my hand out flat
in front of me. He drops his gaze, then drops the teeth into my open hand, and I lead him with my other hand to the bedroom. (“Try not to condemn your alcoholic husband no matter what he says or does,” says the Big Book. “He is just another very sick, unreasonable person.”)
But before this happens, I’ll need to pay the taxi driver, who wants $58 for the drive from San Francisco. (“When he angers you, remember that he is very ill.”)
He lies down in bed, saying, Sorry, baby, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I ask who beat him up but he doesn’t want to talk about it. I look at the gaps in his new smile, though he isn’t smiling, and tell him it doesn’t look that bad. I’m lying. He looks homeless. Of course, the only thing keeping him from actually being homeless at this point is me.
I thought they were gonna kill me. I didn’t even care, I just thought—
Thought what? I ask. He begins to sob. You thought what?
I thought I would never see you again.
Even from inside of it, I can see just how classic this moment is—it lives everywhere, from M.A.S.H. to Raging Bull to The English Patient. The man comes in freshly bloodied and the woman hops to, with a washcloth dipped in—what do you dip it in? Soapy water? Isopropyl? No matter, men think we’re expert at this type of crisis caretaking, he won’t even ask. He winces as I clean his wounds. Then he pukes. And then he sleeps.
In the wake of these minor tragedies, the house is suffused with fresh purpose. I vibrate with motivation. I have a reason, I am a reason. I am concerned, loving, and singularly useful. I am his war medic, smoothing my skirt as I close the door gently to let him rest.
Sometimes, in response to these reminders of my powerlessness, I find myself trying to make everything natural and calm. I make smoothies with kale, and cook hippie comfort food, gliding through the kitchen in a caftan, humming. I burn incense, bake bread, steep orange peels in vinegar to make my own countertop cleaner. A kitchen project, cooking or cleaning, is a particularly effective way to calm my nerves and imbue the space with an energy that is both healing and productive. I try to “green” my life in desperation. Out, out, damn spot.
But this time, the kids won’t return for a few days. I think of the handful of teeth and I go the other way. (The Big Book again: “In desperation, we have even got tight ourselves—the drunk to end all drunks. The unexpected result was that our husbands seem to like it.”) When he breaks out a baggie of Norcos the next morning—for the pain—I take two with my coffee.
I shouldn’t do things like that, but the pills are for my own pain, and also for my panic—about my boyfriend, who is suddenly missing important teeth, about the knowledge that I might lose him any day, about my own rage, which is growing harder to ignore and about which I have never, ever known what to do.
(“[O]nly by occupation in the day, by morphine at night, could she stifle the fearful thought of what would be if he ceased to love her.” Tolstoy on Anna Karenina and her Vronsky.)
(Alternatively: “If you hang around the barbershop long enough, you’re gonna get a haircut.” My mother.)
I shouldn’t do things like this, but more and more, I like to. What naughtiness and novelty, trashiness and tragedy in the sunny swaths of afternoon we’ve blotted out together on pills. There’s the feeling of being high, but almost as good is the feeling of deciding to get high, drawing the shades and feeling the house darken, the pointless day unfurl.
When the alarm of life goes off, however, only one of us resumes being a responsible adult.
* * *
• • •
Lois and Bill Wilson were married in 1918 just before Bill, who was in the army, went overseas. When he returned in 1919, he had no idea what he ought to do with his life. He tried taking small jobs but was ill-suited to them all, so the couple decided they would take a walking trip through New England. “When we were tired or unable to solve some problem, we would go off by ourselves in the woods or occasionally by the sea,” she wrote. Lois wore “knickerbockers”—rare for a woman of the era, as was a cross-country walking trek—so the two drew the curious stares of all those they passed. In her 1979 memoir, Lois writes that she had feared that it might be awkward to be with Bill after a long stretch of independence, but as soon as he was back, they fell again into playful, happy love. She kept a diary during their walk, in which Bill himself asked to make an entry on one of the days of the trip. “Dictated to me by W.C.W,” Lois wrote beneath his entry, “while under the influence of sunshine and two quarts of Maine blueberries. I disclaim all responsibility for the above and will not vouch for its authenticity. Signed L.B.W.”
Early in our affair, K and I also dispatched ourselves, tired or unable to solve some problem, to other towns. We drove through the thick, English fog of San Francisco’s beaches, down Highway 1 to Santa Cruz. Along the coastline, harsh winds battered the grasses and made the water slap against the bleached rocks. The sky grew bluer as we wound south. Under the influence of sunshine and a mint-chip milkshake, we drew with a pen fished from my purse on the back of a diner napkin. “Two mice, one milkshake,” I wrote inside a banner, beside a line drawing of two nerdy rodents. “Be my ghoulfriend,” he wrote, and then drew a little Ramones-style girl band, a cartoon of gangly rockers with long curtains of black hair.
Lois, who was the well-educated daughter of a Brooklyn Heights surgeon, writes in a staid manner and with restraint in her memoir, Lois Remembers. The reader doesn’t glean much from her description of the couple’s romance. But we do learn that she suffered three ectopic pregnancies, and by the third, Bill was often too drunk, “for days at a time,” to visit her in the hospital. She writes that Bill always took the disappointment of being unable to have children with “grace and kindness”—what a guy—but his drinking increased throughout this period, often leaving her to shoulder the emotional burden. The pair pursued adoption but it didn’t work out. As Lois wouldn’t learn until later, it was Bill’s drinking that deterred the agency from pushing the adoption through.
Even as Al-Anon posed a challenge to traditional femininity by urging its members to speak freely and honestly about their harrowing experiences with alcoholism, the program also reproduced and reinforced existing gender norms in many ways. Those with a cursory familiarity with the Wilsons’ story know that Lois and Bill loved each other in that crazy alcoholic-codependent way. But their relationship was complicated by Bill’s womanizing. A New York Times book review of Susan Cheever’s biography of Bill Wilson calls Lois a “remarkable woman who married beneath her social station, devoted her life to Bill’s personal salvation and crusade as a redeemer of lost souls, and nursed him as he died of emphysema in 1971.” She is remarkable not only for her decades-long devotion to Bill, but because she reportedly also had to deal with Bill’s affairs, including one extramarital relationship with an actress named Helen Wynn that lasted fifteen years. He even bequeathed to her a ten percent share of the royalties from the Big Book. The other ninety percent went to Lois.
If Lois was ever full of rage, she didn’t show it. In her memoir, she tells a favorite story of being so fed up with Bill going to so many meetings (of the Oxford Group, which preceded AA) early in his sobriety that she threw a shoe at him, shouting, “Damn your old meetings!” That was apparently the peak of her anger, and a wake-up call to look at her own behaviors. Bill wasn’t even drinking anymore—the solution that family members always say they most want—and still Lois was “self-righteous and smug” and was carrying around a lot of old resentments. She writes that she wasn’t dismayed when she first realized Bill was an alcoholic. “I had faith in my own power to change him,” she writes. “Living with me would be such an inspiration, I thought, that he would not need the balm of alcohol.” It was a “great blow” to realize that that plan hadn’t worked and that once sober, Bill didn’t need her in the same way anymore. In his quitting drinking, her primary purpose in life had been “canceled out.” Over time, s
he saw the ways “my ego had been nourished during his drinking years by the important roles I had to fill: mother, nurse, breadwinner, decision maker.”
Lois found serenity through fellowship in Al-Anon, namely talking with other wives about the experience of living with men’s alcoholism. Before Al-Anon had a name, wives would simply gather while their husbands were in AA meetings. “At first, we either played bridge or gossiped,” Lois writes, “but soon we began to discuss our own problems and what we could do about them.” In a CBS 2010 Hallmark Hall of Fame movie When Love is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story, in which Winona Ryder plays Lois, a long line of cars stands outside the Wilsons’ home during an early AA meeting. The camera pans and the viewer sees that the idling drivers are the wives, who have driven their husbands here and are standing by, lest the men end up at the bar drinking their whole paycheck. In the film, the very first gesture of Al-Anon fellowship is Lois walking out to ask the nervous women if they’d like to come in for a cup of coffee.
I like that Al-Anon’s origin story is in cake, gossip, and bridge, though I have sometimes marveled at the way these women funneled what must have been an epic store of cold resentments into warm womanly buzzing, thousands of rides and bundt cakes and pots of coffee for recovering drunks. Part of the reason why is that during this period, many recovering codependents had their eye on the prize of remaining married to their alcoholics.
The alcoholic dyad was at the center of medical and psychological thinking about alcoholism for a long time. And addressing of alcoholism and the attendant problem of codependency was often seen in terms of managing (or at least managing one’s responses to) an excess of feeling.
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls Page 23