This River

by James Brown

  I don’t know.

  I don’t know a lot of things about my mother. I don’t know a lot of things about my father, either, or of the other photos I find after his funeral, in the bottom of a box, faded snapshots of Barry and Marilyn and myself, just a baby, when for a short while we resembled something of a family.

  At this point, I lose count of the X-rays and doctor appointments. I resign myself once again to another visit to the Palm Imaging Institute for the hairline fracture to her arm and then, of course, the follow-up with the doctor to make sure that arm is healing correctly. They’ve become a nuisance, these trips, and I’m losing more time now than I’m willing to forsake. But I also realize that she’s my duty, my care, and my responsibility.

  At the age of fourteen I leave her, my brother, and my sister in Los Angeles and return to my father in San Jose, nearly four hundred miles across the state. I don’t know how it is that my mother and I first give up on each other, who doesn’t return the other’s calls, or letters, if it’s me, the irresponsible teenager, or her, the negligent parent. Who misses whose birthday? Who forgets to send a Christmas card, let alone a present? Although this sort of carelessness contributes to our estrangement, it is Barry’s suicide that drives us furthest apart, accounting for our nearly twenty years of relative silence. And ironically it is suicide again, this time my sister’s, that brings us back together. We are the sole survivors of a family that seems almost fated to self-destruct, and time for us is running out.

  I pick her up a full hour early.

  The Palm Imaging Institute isn’t more than a few miles away, and I’ve arrived in plenty of time, but my mother feels otherwise.

  “What took you so long? Now we have to rush.”

  I don’t argue. I don’t see the point. In my truck, she informs me that we also need to do her grocery shopping after the X-rays, that she needs stamps, too, which means a trip to the post office, and since the bank is right next door she’d like to drop in there as well. Her dry cleaning, she says, can wait until next week, though she brings it with her in a brown paper bag “just in case it’s not too much trouble to swing by the cleaners on the way back.”

  I take a deep breath.

  The day will be longer than I expected, and here is how I see it unfolding: There will be more X-rays, if not for this injury then another. There will be more doctor visits, too, more prescriptions to fill, and I don’t suppose, no matter what I tell myself, or how hard I might try, that my mother and I will ever be very close. As a parent myself, I can imagine nothing more devastating than losing a child to suicide, and for my mother there can be no abdication, no resolution, no peace. This is something we will both take to the grave, as my father does for his oldest son, never understanding, never reconciling, and it is good that he at least dies before his daughter. I don’t suppose I’ll ever entirely forgive my mother just as I am certain there are those who will never entirely forgive me. In this way we are the same, joined by blood and duplicity. We have ruined marriages, mine through drinking and using, hers over the compulsion for money, and our separate paths both leave behind a long line of wounded. We are the last of a troubled family, and when our day comes, I pray the legacy ends with us.

  INSTRUCTIONS ON THE USE OF ALCOHOL

  I

  You’re young, maybe nine or ten, and your parents are throwing a party. All the adults are laughing and talking too loudly, in general having a good time, and you put two and two together. What makes them happy comes out of those bottles on the kitchen counter.

  The brown ones, you learn soon enough, contain whiskey and scotch. The clear ones hold vodka and gin and that oddshaped bottle with the long neck, something called Midori, contains a thick, syrupy green liquid. That’s the one that intrigues you most, and when the adults aren’t looking you pour yourself a glass. You sneak it into your room. You lock the door. At first you sniff at it, the green liquid, and because it doesn’t smell so good you pinch your nostrils shut before you take a swallow.

  It burns the back of your throat. It makes your eyes water. You shake your head, and for a few minutes, until the alcohol takes effect, you can’t understand how anyone in their right mind could drink this stuff. But then a tingling sensation begins to spread through your chest, your face is warm and flushed, and you’re suddenly light-headed. You feel good. In fact, you feel great, and now you understand why it’s worth braving the foul taste, the burn in your throat, and the watery eyes. It’s as if you’ve made a major discovery, a real inroad to the secret of a good life, and it only makes sense that if one drink has this effect on you that a second will make you feel even better. You finish the glass and sneak another. You repeat this action several more times.

  The party ends around midnight, but you wouldn’t know it because you’re deathly ill. Because you’ve lost all that sugary green liqueur along with dinner and hors d’oeuvres before you promptly passed out in bed. In the morning, you wake with a miserable headache. Your mouth is so dry you can hardly swallow, you’re still nauseous, too, and right then and there you swear never again to so much as look at a bottle of Midori. But what the seasoned drunk knows that the apprentice does not is that those of us predisposed to alcoholism are hardwired to quickly forget our unfortunate drinking experiences. In a day or two, all you remember is how good the liquor made you feel. So when you go over to a relative’s house for dinner that following weekend, you find yourself sneaking into the kitchen again. You open the cupboard with the colorful bottles, and instead of the green stuff, because there is no green stuff in this household, you choose the liquid in the clear bottle with the Russian name of Stolichnaya. This brand burns more than the Midori but it also packs a faster, more effective punch, and that’s exactly what you’re after. Drunk, you find yourself smarter and funnier and stronger and braver and even better looking. For the budding alcoholic, booze seems to do more for you than it does for others, and your only regret, at least to date, is that you didn’t come across this miracle potion sooner.

  II

  You’re older now, maybe fifteen or sixteen, and by no stretch of the word would anyone outside of an uptight substance abuse counselor consider you a problem drinker, let alone an alcoholic. Liquor has actually lost some of its initial luster, and you rarely sneak drinks anymore, say, only once or twice a week. What currently interests you is marijuana and the intrigue that surrounds it. Booze just isn’t as cool, and besides, you like the subterfuge, the cloak-and-dagger melodrama of doing something forbidden. Breaking the law is a high in itself and, just as importantly, it befits the rebel image of your teenage years. You enjoy scoring the weed behind the bleachers at James Lick High School almost as much as you do smoking it. You enjoy showing off to your friends how well you can roll a joint, and because the dope world has its own language, all the slang and clever code words, you feel special when you speak it. Tough. Street wise. And you don’t for a minute believe all those lies you hear about marijuana being addicting. About how it damages the brain. If you want proof, just ask someone who’s been smoking it daily for twenty years, but ask him slowly, and don’t be surprised if you have to repeat the question.

  Then one day you try to connect with that kid behind the bleachers, the guy with all the Bob Marley stickers on his notebook, and it isn’t happening.

  “It’s bone-dry out there,” he says. “Fucking drought season, man.”

  Apparently some big bust went down in Humboldt County where they grow some of the world’s best sensimilla, and now everyone’s hoarding what they have and scrambling to find more. But he does have something else, if you’re interested, this stuff he calls blow, a white powder you put up your nose. “It’s good shit,” he tells you. “Eighty percent pure.” Since you’ve been such a loyal customer, he’s willing to cut you a deal: a gram for fifty bucks, or an eight ball, three-anda-half grams, for a hundred and twenty. It’s too good to pass up, especially since there’s no weed around, and there’s also a party this weekend where you’d look pretty c
ool laying out some lines of coke in the bathroom for a few select friends. Or that girl you like. With some good dope and a little luck, you might even get laid. Blow, you’ve been told, is something of an aphrodisiac.

  You enjoy making the buy, even more so now, because the stakes are higher with narcotics, the penalties worse if you’re caught. You enjoy the preparations, carefully chopping the crystals with a shiny razor blade, drawing out neat even lines and scraping the bag, or bindle, for every last particle. And as it happens with your first drink, so it is with the coke. It makes you feel great. It makes you stronger and smarter and braver and even better looking. All your fears and insecurities fall to the wayside when you’re wired, and you dismiss those lies you’ve heard about coke being addicting. Getting hooked is for weaklings, the idiots who can’t control themselves, those losers who end up broke and penniless, wandering the streets at night like zombies, like the walking dead. You’ll never be one of them, though you can see how the stuff might drain your bank account, since the rush is so short, and the more you use, the more it takes to get the same high. Where a couple of grams used to last you a week, now you’re lucky if you can stretch that amount a full day. For the budding addict, the supply is never enough, but your only regret, at least to date, is that you didn’t come across this miracle potion sooner.

  III

  You survive your teenage years. You even make it through college, drinking and drugging whenever you get a chance, which is about every other night, with all stops pulled out on the weekends. At this point, you’re in your late twenties and still have no idea that you might have a slight problem. Who, after all, doesn’t like to party? Who, after all, doesn’t deserve a couple of drinks at the end of a hard day? A joint now and then never killed anybody, either. The same goes for a few lines of coke, a hit of Ecstasy now and then, or LSD, and a little heroin is actually a good thing if you’re strung out on speed and need to settle your nerves.

  Imagine how boring life would be if you had to live it straight twenty-four-seven. Imagine how boring you’d be as a person if you couldn’t get a little loose, a little crazy from time to time. The whole idea is to escape our dull existence, to find some amusement, some relief from the monotony of the day-to-day grind. This is how you rationalize it, anyway, and through the years you become very good at it. If you have a rough day, it’s reason to drink. If you had a good one, it’s reason to celebrate. And if you get into it with your wife, because somewhere in this chemical fog you fall in love and marry, that is definitely grounds for storming out of the house and holing up in the neighborhood bar. Lately this is the only place you seem to find any real peace, among men and women like yourself, the ones who don’t judge you. So what if you like to drink yourself into a stupor. So what if you have a DUI or two. Half the people in this bar do, and like you they all chalk it up to the same thing: bad luck. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You actually drive better now after a couple of drinks, because you’re safer, you take less chances, because you don’t want to get busted again. And furthermore, if anyone’s complaining, your drinking hasn’t caused you to miss a day of work in months. That you’re so hungover or strung out and frequently have to go home after lunch doesn’t count.

  You just can’t understand why your wife continues to nag or break down in tears. All the bills are paid. The kids are clothed and fed and you and she both drive newer cars. For a drunk, you think, for a junkie, none of this would be possible. You’d have already lost it all or never made it to begin with. But whether you know it or not, and you don’t know it yet, things are changing deep inside you and have been for some time: hormones, genes, brain chemistry, all of it adapts to the alcohol and drugs you continually dump into your body. The cells habituate. The cells literally mutate to accommodate your cravings and now they crave too. Now your addiction has more to do with physiology than psychology. Now it’s the body that robs the mind of its power to choose, and it’s not long before you’ll wish you never came across that miracle potion, those powders and pills.

  IV

  Add a few years to this story and you’re in your thirties, still going strong. God knows what happened to your old college buddies who used to match you shot for shot, line for line. They can’t keep up with you anymore and not a single one even wants to try. How they just turned their back on you and the partying life, simply because they landed good jobs and married and had kids, you can’t understand. What you think has been your dirty little secret for years has in fact been no secret at all to anyone who’s ever made the mistake of loving or caring about you.

  “It’s time to grow up,” one says, when you call him late at night, drunk out of your mind.

  Grow up, you think. Sure. Your friends have sold out to the doldrums of suburban middle-age. The truth is, you are and always have been tougher than them, blessed from the beginning with an iron constitution. A special ability to tolerate alcohol and whatever other poisons you consume. What you don’t realize, however, is that this high tolerance is no gift but a liability, another sign and symptom of your addiction. And oddly enough, as you continue along this evernarrowing path, your tolerance will work exactly in the reverse, at least for the alcohol: where before it took ten drinks to get you reasonably drunk, now five will have you stumbling.

  If you’re not quite to this point yet, you’re close. Your liver is enlarged. Your doctor has warned you, as has your boss, for all the days of work you’ve been missing lately, assuming she hasn’t already fired you. Your marriage is in ruins, and you’re up to your neck in debt. It makes you cringe to think of the thousands of dollars you’ve put up your nose or slapped down on the bar. The shame and guilt just compels you to drink more, and to start earlier, sometimes first thing in the morning, if only to quell the horrible hangover from imbibing too heavily the night before.

  Hair of the dog.

  That’s the cure, and since you’re always worn-out, since you’re not getting any younger, you need a little bump—compliments of methamphetamine—to get you through the long, hard day. Crank is cheaper than blow. It better fits your budget. Crank is also stronger, seven times stronger on the central nervous system, and at night you absolutely have to drink if you hope to sleep at all. At this stage of your addiction, your drinking and using has little to do with pleasure, or even escape. From here on out, it’s about maintenance. From here on out, it’s about feeding those mutated cells, fighting off the intense depression that follows a binge, and trying, to the best of your weakened abilities, to carry on the bare semblance of a life. You are teetering on the edge of becoming the very thing you most feared: another loser, another zombie, one of the walking dead who wander the streets late at night, nameless, lost, and forgotten.

  V

  Believe it or not, you hobble along like this for a couple more years. Obviously you’ve lost your job by now, or more likely several jobs, and your wife has left you and taken the kids. You’re at a cold, ugly place in your life, and there doesn’t appear to be any way out, any hope or chance of going anywhere but down. Then something happens. It could be a number of things. A close brush with death. A tragedy in the family, say, another DUI, a car wreck, or just a realization one morning when you look in the mirror and barely recognize the face before you. Somewhere in this haze, between sobering up and getting wasted again, it finally dawns on you that maybe, just maybe, you might have a problem.

  These moments, however, are fleeting, especially when you try to quit, and you’ll try many times in the next several months, only to find that by noon your hands are shaking so badly you can’t hold a pen to sign your own name. Nausea quickly sets in, you sweat profusely, your head throbs, and you think to yourself: What the fuck am I doing? Give me a drink. A line. A pill. Anything to stop the pain. The cure is worse than the illness, and you’re far less sick when you’re drinking and using than when you attempt to stop. Inside of a day you’re back at square one, and you hate yourself as you lift the bottle to your lips, as you split open t
he bindle of coke or crank or whatever you could get your hands on. You hate yourself because you made a promise not to drink or drug for the day, and here you are, loaded again.

  You’re weak.

  You’re pathetic.

  You consider killing yourself, since that’s what you’re doing anyway, albeit slowly, and you probably would if you didn’t have kids. If you’d lost entirely your ability to love. Sometimes that’s the only difference between life and death, and it surprises you; it takes you completely off guard that anyone in your family, that any of your old friends, still actually care about you. How is it that they see something in you that you can’t see in yourself, something worth salvaging, when for the most part you’ve caused them nothing but disappointment, hurt, and shame? But they do, and one day when you come home to your crummy little apartment, or motel room if you’ve sunk that far, and find a half dozen friends and family waiting for you—the same ones who wouldn’t return your late night calls because they knew you’d only phoned to ask for money.

  “You’re sick,” they tell you. “You need help. This is something you can’t do alone.”

  In a matter of minutes you’re in the backseat of a relative’s car, being kidnapped really, whisked away to a hospital for junkies and drunks where you remain for the next twenty-eight days.

  That first week they keep you pretty anesthetized. To combat the onset of delirium tremens, the nurses give you round-the-clock doses of Valium, and because your blood pressure has rocketed off the charts you’re also administered Clonidine, a powerful antihypertensive, to further reduce the possibility of stroke. For the harder cases, detoxing from drugs and alcohol without medical supervision can and occasionally does kill. Fortunately this is not your case, and just days after you’ve weathered the worst of it, you wake up one morning actually feeling rested, actually sober for the first time in you-don’t-know-how-many years, and it occurs to you right then and there that you might have a chance. That there is at least hope, even for a sorry bastard like yourself.