Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

by Bill Clegg

There is a time, much later, when I imagine what it was like for everyone else, those who were by blood, accident, or inclination involved. Those who were wounded, who wounded. The former came first and fiercest: the employees at the agency who lost their jobs; the writers I represented who depended on me and had to scramble to find new agents; family; friends; Kate. Noah. At first I’m consumed with shame and guilt and regret, but slowly, with the help of kindred spirits, these feelings evolve, are still evolving, into something less self-concerned. The landscape of the latter, with the daily help of those same kindred spirits, is journeyed into. Much remains a frontier.

  I wonder what it was like for my father. How the hours I remember from my childhood were for him. What worry he knew. How that drive back from the doctor in Boston went for him. And after. What did he think after the car doors slammed shut and I’d disappeared into the house? Where did he go? To his den to pour himself a Scotch? Around the side of the house to pee in the pachysandra? Or did he stay in the garage and listen to the cooling engine tick down, the tread of footfalls above him in the kitchen. How long might he have stayed there? Did he worry that he’d taken the wrong tack? Been too tough? Too harsh? How would his father have handled it? How much of that man could he even remember? Nineteen years old, when his father died, was a long time ago. He was in college then, planning to join the navy and fly. Fly away from Boston. Jets, cargo planes, it didn’t matter—just take flight. How far away did nineteen feel to him that day? How far six? Six years old. What did he know about six-year-old boys? How frightened was he? What didn’t he do that day in order to drive his boy to Boston from Fairfield County, Connecticut? What bills didn’t get paid? What lawn didn’t get mowed? What small plane didn’t get fixed or flown in order to do what he thought might help this boy, this boy of his who danced like someone had set him on fire every time he peed? This same boy the doctor said had nothing wrong with him. What the hell was he supposed to do? Wasn’t he supposed to be firm? Isn’t that how children learned? Wasn’t that how men were with their boys?

  I wonder if he worried like this. Or did he simply believe that whatever was broken could be fixed by force, that something bent could be hammered straight.

  I return to New York and find a small, bright studio with a terrace, and from every corner of the place, I’m able to see the Empire State Building. I kiss someone on the Fourth of July, a friend who becomes more, and he loans me money to afford that place. I sell a photograph I had purchased years before, and with that money and the borrowed money, I am able to live in New York, not work for the first time since I was a teenager, and find, with help, a way to get through the days and nights without escaping them. Gradually, mornings become merely mornings, not panic-stricken hours managing the consequences of not coming home before daybreak, and evenings aren’t spent imagining excuses and schemes to get through the next day. Days are just days, not stages where I’m choreographing some complicated piece of theater—the lights, the lines, the costumes—in order to control the outcome, protect myself, get what I think I need.

  Returning to publishing doesn’t seem possible. It feels like a scorched field that can no longer hold life. But I am wrong. A woman I met once at a party, years before, calls and asks me to lunch, and at that lunch she offers me a job. She talks about courage and no new damage and we eat and drink coffee and it feels like home. The first days back are terrifying, but not in the same way as before. I don’t worry about being a fraud or being found out, as I had for all those years. I show up at that office representing one writer—Jean, who, when I told her I was going back to work, wrote her very established agent to say she was switching her representation. Walking through the shiny doors of the agency that day, I somehow trust that if it turns out to be my last one, and she my last client, I will be fine—that the sky won’t fall, that it’s just not meant to be. It turned out that day was not my last. I’m still in that same office, and have other clients to keep Jean company.

  For a long time, I will hear Noah’s despairing voice pleading with me, so many times—from behind closed doors, across tables, through phone lines. I will remember every night at the Knickerbocker, every extra drink I snuck when he went to the bathroom. I will remember his coming out to Oregon for family week, standing in the parking lot in his gray snap-front jacket and beard, looking so clean and honest and faithful and loving. I will remember how grateful I was that he never left me. I will remember how his beautiful hands pulled me up that last time and how I fell away from them—finally, because I had to—and moved through the doorway, alone.

  In the year before I go back to work, I call my father at least a few times a week, often in the morning as I walk along the Hudson River in a lush park I had, before, not even known was there. We talk, for the first time in many years, and each time, I’m amazed. The very first time we speak is when I’m still in White Plains. The phone rings in my room, I answer, and he is on the line. Willie, he says, after a while, I’m sorry. He tells me everything he remembers and I listen, quiet, and grateful that I hadn’t made it all up. I tell him that my being in rehab is not his fault, that my boyhood struggles did not cause what happened, merely shaped it. Time stops during that phone call; I want it to be over and also never to end.

  That October, he asks me to fly in his Cessna from Connecticut to Maine. The small airport is just down the road from where we lived, a few minutes from my high school. I had forgotten how loud small planes are, how light, and how confident my father is in them. His hands glide with easy purpose over the same gadgets and knobs and lights and flaps he handled when I was a boy, and all of it is just as mysterious, just as unknowable. We take off in a field that is also a runway. We shudder along in the way little airplanes do and then, in the split second that always feels as if fairy dust has been sprinkled, we leave the earth, lift quickly, higher and higher, above the towns and schools and the colorful rot of autumn. The roar of the engine and wind make talk impossible. A pile of maps rests in my lap. Side by side, tossing in air, above the fields and hills and roads where everything happened, we are silent.

  The Hollow

  He’s almost two. Walking now. Chubby and cheerful, eats everything put in front of him and always wants more. He disappears into daydreams and collapses into fits of uncontrollable laughter. His sister is skinny and fair, his father is dark and smells of smoke, and his mother is every color in between, every shape, every smell. She has the bluest eyes. She plants flowers, plants them everywhere—in rock gardens that rise from the lawn into the woods, along walkways, in pots that sit on windowsills, on steps.

  She is planting flowers now, and he is nearby, on a blanket littered with toys. They are on the lawn behind the house, just at its edge, where it rises and descends into what they call the hollow, a low, damp bowl of lawn spotted with outcroppings of granite ledge. Along the ridge and down along the hollow, there are thickets of blueberry bushes and, behind those, the woods.

  His mother calls to him in her singsong way from behind an enormous straw hat. The two cats sit at the edge of the blanket and watch him. He can hear them purring and he wants to hold them and somehow bring their softness and their sounds closer, into him. He reaches for them and they meow, slink patiently away, and settle in the just-far-enough-away grass.

  Past the cats the dark green lawn stretches toward the woods. These things, these places, the whole world beyond the immediate perimeter of his blanket and his mother, have only lately begun to occur to him. Each new miracle hatches alive, new and beguiling. A bee, a plane flying overhead, an anthill at the edge of the blanket, a great wind roaring in the trees. He wants to see it all at once and right away.

  This is the first summer he can walk. The first summer he can move himself closer to what he wants. Away from what he does not want. He is still in diapers but those will be gone soon. He looks up past the little ridge, beyond the hollow, and sees a great shimmering of branches and leaves rising from an army of tree trunks. A gust of wind sends the leaves into hyst
erics, and he hears the sound, like water thundering from the faucet when his mother draws him a bath. But this new sound is greater, wilder, more thrilling than anything he’s ever heard.

  His mother, in her flowers, hums a song, swats flies from her face. He stands up from the blanket and rocks on his dimpled legs. A blast of wind in the trees stirs up another momentary chaos. His heart races, and he tilts toward the tree line on the other side of the hollow and begins to move. The swooping birds, the cresting green lawn, the buzzing insects, the tufts of seed and summer flotsam drifting in slow motion through the air, the blueberry bushes at the edge of the wood—all of it dazzles before him. Every gorgeous new inch of it beckons as he walks faster, more deliberately, faster still, until walking isn’t fast enough and he begins to run. He’s running now, to the top of the lawn, toward the creaking branches, the flashing leaves, the avalanche of sound.

  He clears the ridge and, all at once, the slope on the other side is steeper than he expects. His legs whirl beneath him and he struggles not to fall. He’s running faster than he has ever run before, and for a second he feels a distance between himself and his body—as if one has departed from the other and is a witness to its new speed and not its cause. The lawn, his legs, his body all blur below him, and he begins to let go, to allow the momentum to carry him.

  A great wind pounds through the hollow and he feels on the verge of flight, that the earth will release him and he will surge beyond the lawn, over the vegetable garden and swing set, to the treetops. His mother calls out from somewhere. She is shouting his name, but her voice is small and known and behind him now. Everything that once held his attention, every little and large thing he has remembered, disappears as he races ahead, legs pumping under him, air rushing at his face, terror and wonder bursting from his small heart.

  As he careens down the slope, another first, another new magic: calm, like peaceful lightning, flashing through his rioting limbs, stilling every streaking inch of him, caressing him in the half seconds before he stumbles, before he scrapes his elbows and knees and face on the outcropping of granite ledge. Before he wails with shock and his mother descends on him in a flap of hat and tears. Before she gathers him into her and he forgets his fright because he is held in familiar arms that smell of potting soil and flowers. Before all this, a God-kissed, God-cursed calm, debuting at the zenith of his velocity, the peak of his want—a moment that’s over before it’s even a moment, the one he will scrape his skin hundreds of times to recapture. Before, despite, and because of all the things he senses await him, he leans, then leaps, into the wind, away.

  Acknowledgments

  Great Force Who Came: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh; Perfect Editor: Pat Strachan; Brilliant Publishers: Michael Pietsch, David Young; Wise Comrade: Robin Robertson; Right Hand: Matt Hudson; Beloved Team: Jonathan Galassi, Nick Flynn, John Bowe, Jill Bialosky, Christopher Potter; Care and Counsel: Adam McLaughlin, David Gilbert, Lili Taylor, Cy O’Neal, Julia Eisenman, James Lecesne, Chris Pomeroy, Laura Gersh, Courtney Hodell, Eliza Griswold, Lee Brackstone, Lisa Story, Roger Manix, Susannah Meadows, Ally Watson, Monica Martin; Love: Jean Stein; Hero: Kim Nichols; My Enduring Family: Mom, Dad, Kim, Lisa, Sean, Matt, Ben, Brian.

  Reading Group Guide

  BILL CLEGG

  A Conversation with Bill Clegg

  The author of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

  talks with Rebecca Bates of Guernica

  Bill Clegg’s memoir Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man documents a two-month crack binge that saw the literary agent fleeing from hotel to hotel in a labyrinth of paranoia as his wallet—and waistline—shrank. Interrupting the narrative frame are stories from Clegg’s childhood, memories that foretell the downward spiral to come and expose a terrifying affinity for death. Below, Clegg answers a few questions about the process of preserving his experiences in print.

  What makes this addiction story different from the slew of others (David Carr’s, Susan Cheever’s, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s, etc.) we’ve seen?

  I haven’t read the books you mention so I have no idea how it differs; but to the extent that the experience of alcoholism and addiction has certain commonalities—the failed struggle to manage the progression, the decreasing pleasures, the increasing amounts, the wreckage, the resulting despair—I suspect in some ways there are similarities. But the particulars of each story, and, one hopes, their expression, are specific to each.

  How do you feel this book plays with the conventions of narrative, if at all? Does a story of addiction have to follow a journalistic formula? Does presenting the scenes in such a matter-of-fact way lend validity to the story? Does an addiction narrative need that to seem “real”?

  I’m sure there are at least as many ways one can write a memoir as there are lives to write about—addict, Catholic, strawberry farmer, hostage. I wouldn’t dare make generalizations about the genre or how one should go about writing within it. As a reader I’m much more interested in books that tell stories in new ways, so I tend not to think of literature in terms of rules or parameters or generalizations.

  In your interview with Vogue, you said that you originally wrote down your story because you were afraid your memories were perishable. At what point did you think the pages you’d written would be valuable to others? What do you hope readers will discover?

  When I surfaced, to my surprise and initial regret, from that two-month period, which resulted in a suicide attempt, it was like surfacing from a nightmare. I’d have these vivid and sudden recollections of things that had happened—what I heard and saw and felt—and I worried, as one does when waking from a dream, that I would not always have access to those memories. And much of it was confusing. There was still a residual paranoia and I could not tell what was real and what was delusional. I believed that if I wrote it down, then, when I had access to those memories, I’d be able to see it all clearly later, with more distance. There was a period, a few years later, when, separately, I began writing about my childhood. This writing, and the thinking around it, were completely separate from the transcriptions of what I could remember from the time I did drugs. Or so I thought. A few months into this other writing I began to notice that the language used to describe the experience of having a double life as a kid and the double life I led as an adult was similar. As well, the patterns of managing that earlier life mirrored the later one—the concealing and cleaning up, the consequence of having people knocking on doors looking for me, the terror of being found out. I kept writing both and at a certain point the shape of a book emerged and then I became obsessed with tracing not how those patterns made me more susceptible (I was an addict from my first breath) but how my childhood experiences and struggles laid out something of a blueprint for the expression of my addiction. I would have been an addict no matter what, but those experiences in my childhood and afterward shaped how it unfolded. So the project of creating an account of the darkest period of my using and the exploration of childhood experiences that influenced it began as separate writings. What I would hope a reader would take away would be, mainly, an identification with the powerlessness one has over drugs and alcohol, an identification with any aspect of my story that would motivate him or her to see that it’s not manageable, that there is no controlling one’s use, and that if one doesn’t admit that and get help it will eventually go where it went for me—namely to a place where one decides that nothing else but drugs and alcohol matter, that no consequence is too great, even death. Everything beyond that is literary gravy: any insight, comfort, camaraderie, inspiration, escape that can be had from reading a book.

  You write in the penultimate chapter that upon getting sober you are at first “consumed with shame and guilt and regret, but slowly… these feelings evolve, are still evolving, into something less self-centered.” Can you talk, please, about that evolution? What is the impetus of each “step”?

  Shame and guilt and regret were so overwhelming in the first days and weeks and months of getting sober. I could see
and feel little else. Which is to say I couldn’t see beyond my own feelings. But other alcoholics and addicts helped me, are still helping me, see how there is a difference between being consumed with those feelings, wallowing in them, and examining one’s role in the harm he or she has caused as a result of their using. The goal is to see past that emotional, self-involved fog to the place where one understands what they’ve done clearly enough so that one can attempt to right the wrongs and avoid repeating the harmful behavior in the future. My using went on from the age of twelve to thirty-four. Twenty-two years of addictive and alcoholic mistakes. I’ve been sober for five. I expect to be engaged in this process for a long, long time.

  In the promotional video from Hachette you say that even as a child “the experience of being me was such that I regularly wished to die.” If the wish to die was present even before becoming an addict, do you still have this fixation with death now that you are sober? If so, how do you deal with it? If not, do you think having gone through this addiction nightmare is the reason you no longer view an early death as inevitable?

  It’s there. It’s fundamentally always there, not as a fixation or believed-in solution but a drift, a tendency. It may be hard to understand but in some ways I’m grateful for it, it’s a reminder of where things went, the time when I did believe that death was the only answer. I deal with it, or rather I keep it from ever again seeming like the only solution by staying sober, continuing to help and to be helped by other alcoholics and addicts, and to be grateful that I didn’t die so perhaps my experience—difficult and destructive though it was—can be of some use to others.