Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

by Bill Clegg

  In your childhood flashbacks, up until the point of your first trying crack, you refer to yourself in the third person, much the way J. M. Coetzee does in his series of “memoirs.” For example, you wrote, “All through the ’80s, when he was in high school, crack made headlines for ruining neighborhoods, driving up crime, being famously addictive. A hideous, monstrous scourge, utterly taboo. Something he has always been drawn to, something he has always wanted to try.” Does observing your younger self from the distance of third person make it easier to “make sense” of your addiction, or discover the patterns that shaped your susceptibility?

  Writing in the third person happened without thinking about it. Like the transcriptions of my using, which just came out in the first person present, I didn’t question the tense, I just went with it. I think because that time is much farther away and it is more difficult to occupy the minute-by-minute sensations and thoughts of specific events, it felt more comfortable to name what was going on from the middle distance of a closely focused third person. When I first put the two strands of writing next to each other I liked the tension that occurred between the two and so when I began to imagine it as a book I kept it. In fact, it was the tension between the two that first instigated the idea that these passages, expanded and arranged alongside each other, could be a book.

  Originally published in Guernica on June 29, 2010. Reprinted with permission.

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  Have you ever learned that a coworker or a loved one was an addict? What would you do if you were in the same situation as Bill Clegg’s friends and family?

  Bill Clegg was often able to find public spaces where he could take drugs—bathrooms, dressing rooms, even offices. Were you surprised by how much of his drug use was hidden in plain sight?

  Do you think that the “Penneys” the author saw were real or hallucinatory? Did a point come when you had a hard time deciding which they were? Why?

  The author seemed to have had a sixth sense about which other people “liked to party.” What signs do you think he picked up on?

  James Joyce wrote A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Why do you think Bill Clegg chose to call his memoir Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man? Do you think the two books are in any way similar?

  Do you think Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man can serve as a cautionary tale for readers? Do you think it can help people who are dealing with past or current drug or alcohol addiction? How?

  Several reviewers referred to the beauty of this memoir. Do you think that its prose style or content or both contributed to this response? What did you find to be beautiful about the book?

  Have you had experiences in your own life that didn’t involve substance abuse but compared in some ways to that kind of addiction? Discuss.

  “You don’t have to be in recovery to understand that the world often looks better from a considerable distance,” wrote the Chicago Tribune reviewer of Portrait. What do you think caused Bill Clegg to want to travel the ultimate distance from reality—to take his own life?

  How does love—familial, romantic, collegial, and between friends—influence the course of events in this memoir?

  We learn in Portrait that Bill Clegg has always been a voracious reader. Do you think this inclination informed his desire for alternate states of reality? Why or why not? How might strong feelings about books have contributed to his eventual desire to live and work again?

  … and his most recent book

  In April 2012, Little, Brown and Company will publish Bill Clegg’s Ninety Days. Following is an excerpt from that book.

  When I look at people like Asa and Madge, it amazes me that these successful, happy, long-sober people still bother going to so many meetings. They seem as if they have it licked. I think back on my life when I was working and can’t fathom how I’d have been able to fit as much recovery into my schedule as they do. Were there any sober people in book publishing? I can’t remember any. That world seems forever closed to me now, but even if it wasn’t, I think perhaps it’s not a business one can stay sober in. I couldn’t. When I came back from rehab in Oregon the year before, I went to one meeting a week, somehow couldn’t even manage that, and eventually went to none. I had a sponsor, but that guy wanted to meet every week and for me to call every day—just as Jack does now. I got busy and believed that the people who needed all these meetings and phone calls were either lonely or underemployed. I never shared or raised my hand in meetings then, never met one other person besides that sponsor whom my rehab arranged for me to meet when I returned to the city. When I tell Jack about trying to get sober a year ago, he says, It sounds like ME vs. THEM and never WE, and the only way to get and stay sober is when it becomes WE. He also tells me that getting and staying sober—even after ninety days—needs to forever remain my first priority; that whatever I put in front of it, I will eventually lose. Career, family, boyfriend—all of it—you’ll lose it. Lose again, in your case. He tells me these things for the first time when he visits me in White Plains, and even though the words he is saying are as simple and basic as a box of crayons, I have no idea what he is talking about.

  As I pace and fret in front of the Meeting House and watch crisp-suited, shiny-watched Chelsea residents scurry home from their day, it strikes me again, as it has more than once over the past few weeks, that I’m qualified to do absolutely nothing. I don’t even have restaurant experience, save for the four days I waited tables in Connecticut after I was thrown out of school for spraying fire extinguishers in a drunken rampage with my housemates. I was fired on the fourth day of the job for lack of focus and dropping too many dishes. I think of all the pot I smoked back then—from morning until night—and I wonder how I was ever able to crawl out of that haze into any job, to go or get anywhere.

  I have no retail experience, no bankable talents. I remember how a colleague at my first job in New York took copywriting courses at the Learning Annex and left publishing to become an ad exec. But this guy was brilliant, exceptionally brilliant, and that world would require, I imagine, schmoozing with potential clients, wooing new business over dinners and drinks, and without booze to get me through, it does not seem possible. Graduate school of any kind would be a decent way to delay the oncoming future, but with what money? How could I incur student loans on top of the already formidable and growing debt I’ve amassed from rehab, legal bills, and credit cards? Never mind that my college transcript is a speckled mess of mediocre grades and summer courses at the University of Connecticut to make up for the semester I lost when I was expelled. What graduate school would have me?

  The custodian of the Meeting House has still not showed up to unlock the doors. I’ve left messages everywhere, and no one is picking up. The meeting begins in half an hour, and as my future prospects seem less and less appealing, I start to think again of going to Mark’s. It’s the end of the day, Mark is no doubt ready to get high, and the dealers are all about to turn their cell phones on. Fuck it, I say and start walking down 16th Street, away from the Meeting House, toward Sixth Avenue, toward Mark’s. I can feel the adrenaline spark through my veins, and the doomy clouds of my futureless future begin to streak away. Just as I approach Sixth Avenue, I see someone on the north side of 16th Street, waving. It’s Asa. Neat as a pin, fit as a fiddle, and heading right toward me. You going to the meeting? he chirps, and I can’t muster an answer. He looks especially shiny today in his usual uniform. What’s going on? he asks, and as I struggle to come up with something to say to get away from him, he puts his hand on my upper arm and says, Okay, let’s go.

  By the time we get to the Meeting House, the door has been unlocked and someone is inside making coffee. The dusty schoolhouse smell mingled with the aroma of cheap, freshly brewed coffee acts as an antidote to the giddy, pre-high adrenaline of just minutes before. The obsession to use fades as quickly as it came, and while I watch Asa help the old guy who’s setting up the meeting move a bench to the far wall, it hits me how close I
just came to relapsing, and what a miracle it is that Asa materialized precisely when he did. Jesus, I’m sick, I think. Unlike people who can get sober on willpower, I need cheap coffee, church basements, and serendipitous sidewalk interventions. But what is discouraging is that all these things, and more—Jack, Madge, the Library, my family, my remaining friends, the staggering losses and humiliations of the past few months, the empire of people I’ve hurt—are still, it seems, not enough to keep me clean.

  People come in from their day, mostly nine-to-five types who can’t make the afternoon meetings like the ones at the Library. They start filling the chairs and benches of the large room, which doubles, depending on the hour, as a Quaker meetinghouse, a dance studio, and a gathering space for other programs of recovery. Chic, chatty, confident—these people seem a world away from the struggles that must have brought them here. How the hell did they do it? I wonder as I remember how close I just came to picking up. If Asa hadn’t hauled me in from the street, I’d be right now pressing the buzzer at Mark’s apartment. Right now waiting for him to buzz me in and hand me a crack pipe. It is Asa and nothing else that kept me from using just minutes ago.

  I look around from sober face to sober face and wonder again how these people found their way. I sense that just being here and in places like it will not be enough. I’m in the room but not of it. Present but not a part of. Saved for a little while, but not sober. Not really. I come like a beggar to these meetings, and I am fed, yes, pulled in off the street, even, as I was today. But it’s clear that something beyond my own need and ability to ask for help will keep me here, make me a part of what is going on, connect me to something greater than my addiction, and give me a fighting chance of staying clean and getting on with my life. But what?

  Contents

  Front Cover Image

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Reading Group Guide

  A Preview of Ninety Days

  Scrapers

  Cheers

  First Door

  Flight

  Bringing Down the House

  Complicated Theater

  Under Control

  Morning

  Where

  Another Door

  Uptown

  Idiot Wind

  Beginnings of the End

  Family Reunion

  In the Clear

  Where

  Love

  Blackout

  Shelter

  Just Here

  Where

  The Jesus Year

  Last Door

  White Plains

  The Hollow

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Bill Clegg’s Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York. Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man is his first book.

  Praise for Bill Clegg’s

  PORTRAIT OF AN ADDICT

  AS A YOUNG MAN

  A New York Times Book Review

  Editors’ Choice

  “Bill Clegg has written an exceptionally fine addition to a genre largely bereft of style, intelligence, and moral complexity…. Clegg’s memoir is ‘the gestation of a soul,’ as Richard Ellman once said of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man…. Beautifully rendered in spare and elegant prose, a rumination on the human condition that recalls William Styron’s memoir of depression, Darkness Visible…. He writes with rare precision and delicacy about the many-headed hydra that is addiction. For this reason alone, Portrait of an Addict deserves to become a classic of psychiatric literature. It should be read in a single sitting. No one I know has been able to put the book down…. Bill Clegg has repaired his career and, with this book, he joins the company of writers worth hearing from again…. It’s plain to see that people stuck by him because they enjoy his company, because he inspires fierce loyalty. Now, at last, Bill Clegg seems capable of believing it.”

  —Kirk Davis Swinehart, Chicago Tribune

  “Bill Clegg’s Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man stands up to Frederick Exley’s great memoir of alcoholism, A Fan’s Notes…. But really, forget comparisons. Read the book.”

  —Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

  and By Nightfall

  “Mesmerizing…. Reading it is like letting the needle down on a Nick Drake album. Clegg tells his story in short, atmospheric paragraphs, each separated by white space, each its own strobe-lighted snapshot of decadent poetic memory…. One of the reasons to stick with Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man is the lightly narcotized sensorium of Mr. Clegg’s prose…. He can write.”

  —Dwight Garner, New York Times

  “This is a heartbreaking and completely absorbing look at the wreckage of cocaine addiction.”

  —Vanessa Bush, Booklist

  “You won’t be able to stop reading until it’s all gone—and you will crave more…. What makes Clegg’s book especially riveting is the remarkable speed of his vertiginous fall from grace…. Portrait is a spare, elegant book, one that shows admirable restraint in the face of extreme, even pathological behavior. (A Million Little Pieces this is not.) Clegg may not have been able to control his demons, but he is utterly in charge of this material, with a voice that is knowing and self-deprecating in exactly the right measure.”

  —Jonathan Van Meter, Vogue

  “Clegg’s descent into hell is pegged one cinch of the belt at a time, each new hole punched marking new depths plumbed…. Few memoirs, so clearly, in crisp, absorbing prose, depict such a telling likeness of an addict.”

  —J. David Santen Jr., Oregonian

  “Addiction’s highs and lows often level into tedium on the page, but literary agent Clegg avoids that trap in this devastating memoir of the years he spent under crack’s spell…. His book is both harrowing and hopeful: a triumph.”

  —Kim Hubbard, People

  “Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man is a book that will not soon be forgotten…. The narrative has a floating quality that manages to be at once brutally specific and oddly poetic…. Clegg’s descent is a skillfully conjured, slow-motion wreck from which it’s impossible to look away. His handling of time, especially wasted time, has an undulating, telescoping quality. I raced through the book in an evening…. That Clegg survived and is well enough to write a book this good is incredible.”

  —Susan Juby, Globe and Mail

  “It’s a remarkable achievement when a writer can evoke the most desperate episodes of addiction with the unflinching honesty required to make such a memoir worth reading, yet somehow manage to completely transcend sleaze, sordidness, and vapid self-justification. Bill Clegg’s story of a man—largely locked in hotel rooms, engaged in a desperate, heart-wrenching battle with himself—is destined to become a cult classic of writing on drug addiction.”

  —Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting

  “For all the literary musings on drugs, the business of literature is a rather sober and cerebral place. That fact may explain why the memoir of literary agent Bill Clegg, which recounts a nosedive not so very long ago into crack addiction, seems as shocking as his ability to construct gorgeously poetic scenes seems intuitive…. Clegg barrels full force into a spiraling Manhattan phantasmagoria of hot-boxed hotel bathrooms, more-than-willing drug dealers, boyfriend betrayal, insane paranoia, days gone missing, and the endless hunger of wanting just one more taste of the very thing that’s eating you whole.”

  —Christopher Bollen, Interview

  “Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man by Bill Clegg isn’t coming out until June, and I hesitate to review it six months in advance of its publication date. But the book is so damn good (I read it in two sittings) that I don’t want to wait and let its impact fade…. This is going to be a big one, folks. It’s not often I’m floored by a memoir, and I am by this one.”

  —Jen A. Miller, Goodreads.com

  “C
legg cuts through the addiction-memoir noise, recounting the glamour and pathos of self-destruction with efficiency and disturbing clarity.”

  —Details

  “Portrait reads like a detailed report from a particularly scalding corner of hell…. The unwavering pursuit of oblivion is riveting, yet one of Clegg’s achievements is that he manages to spin an enthralling account of addiction without the romanticism characteristic of many books about drugs…. In light of the often horrifying subject matter, one of the charms of this book is its sheer sprezzatura—taking a soul-shattering experience and transmuting it into a seemingly effortless narrative, from aphoristic paragraphs that create a page-turning momentum…. Clegg’s voice, in fact, is the real find here—an illuminating, unflinching, whip-smart guide through a merciless delirium of his own making. It’s a tour de force of self-examination and a heartbreaking tale of self-destruction. The moments of hard-earned atonement, when they finally arrive, are sharply beautiful.”

  —William Morassutti, TORO Magazine

  “Bill Clegg has produced a lyrical, moving crack addiction memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, that is utterly frank and utterly readable.”

  —Out

  “It turns out there is room on the shelf for one more addiction memoir…. Clegg spares no one’s feelings, least of all his own; it’s not the brutality that makes this worthwhile but rather the strange beauty of the stream-of-consciousness prose. We’re voyeurs, as helpless to stop the carnage as the author himself.”