Quitter

by Erica C. Barnett

  Ten

  All Will Be Well

  Iliked working at a place where you could roll in, shoeless and in someone else’s clothes, at eleven or show up so hungover you spent half the day on the couch. But there were some downsides. Not only was dating your boss perfectly acceptable, so was using the paper’s unpaid internship program as a dating pool, or buying booze for a minor, or dropping your pants in the middle of an argument about rape culture. (Whatever question you have about that, the answer is yes.) Upside: I could slip off in the middle of the day for three hours and not have to explain where I was. Downside: When a colleague did a story about a local guy who got in trouble for making vomit porn, guess what played in the background all day in our open office? Upside: If someone heard you puking in the bathroom, you could tell the truth—“hangover”—with no repercussions. They might even offer you a hair-of-the-dog shot from the bottle in their desk. Downside: When someone made a rape joke that crossed the (invisible) line, or said, “Hey, we’re all watching the Paris Hilton sex tape, come join us!” it was hard to know what to do. I know The Stranger had an HR policy of some sort, but the HR practice was to ignore all kinds of gross or questionable behavior until someone complained. This left the definition of “work-appropriate behavior” in the hands of individual staffers. One incident, of many, stands out: I was stretched out on the dirty couch in the paper’s second-floor office, reading over a pile of notes for a story, when Tristan leaped on top of me, grinding his pelvis hard into my crotch until I managed to push him off. “What? It was a joke!” he said in protest. “I’m gay!” I told Josh what had happened, but I never filed any kind of official complaint. I figured, why bother? It happened in full view of plenty of people, and no one said a word.

  I stayed for more than six years, because as much as I sometimes hated my dysfunctional work family, I loved the work. Dan was a temperamental typo machine with a blind spot for his own prejudices (fat people; trans people; women who, like me, dressed in ways he considered provocative), but he was also a deft, incisive editor who could pinpoint the heart of a story, often in some throwaway paragraph, and slash and burn around it until the true theme emerged. And Josh and I had become a team—a somewhat dysfunctional, bickering, brother-sister-style team, but one that turned the paper’s news section and editorial board into a force for change in the city. We made endorsements, broke news, built influence, and threw our weight around.

  But around 2007, the balance of power started to shift. Tristan had been promoted to editor—a meteoric rise from his days as a sulking intern taking notes in the Weekly’s editorial meetings—and he, along with Tiffany, became my fourth and fifth bosses, after Josh, Dan, and Tim. (If you’re keeping track, that’s one woman and four men.) Suddenly, the two of them were making decisions that impacted the news section, which had always been Josh’s and my personal fiefdom, and delivering unparsable edicts like “Make it more like The New Republic” and “News is boring; I want more reported opinions” from on high. Josh and I gritted our teeth at each new indignity and plotted a way out.

  None of my colleagues ever suggested I stop drinking—if they had, I would have assumed they were the ones who had a problem. It was only when I stopped to actually compare myself to everyone else around me that the ready excuses—it’s a stressful job; everybody drinks; I’m just more creative after a few glasses of wine—started to break down. So I tried not to think about it too often. It’s a feature of alcoholism that the more you drink, the more you have to drink to get to the point where you don’t worry so much about your drinking. By 2007, I wasn’t giving myself many opportunities to worry. So stressed that I was popping Advil like jelly beans, I started keeping a liter of box wine in my bottom desk drawer, just in case. (In case what? In case I had to fire the intern for screwing up the endorsement interview schedule. In case Dan added one more goddamn typo to my copy. In case Tiffany floated past my desk again and wanted to know what I was working on and whether I was going to get everything in on time, as if it were any of her business. You know. In case.) I zeroed out the equation every day by spending a furious hour at the gym (conveniently located above the grocery store where I bought my wine), texting a coworker, “Best cure for a hangover: 2 SmartWaters + 1 hour on elliptical.”

  Oh, and I got an alcoholic boyfriend, too.

  You often hear that alcoholics just find each other, and it’s easy to see why—when your weekend routine revolves around flirting with guys in bars, the odds are good you’ll run into a kindred spirit. Alcohol is like a magical potion that turns introverts into extroverts. Sober me would never have met Nick, because I wouldn’t have had the guts to go up to the big, bearded stranger holding court at the Hideout (the darkest bar in town, and therefore my favorite) in the first place, much less plant myself in his way just as he was heading out the door for a smoke. Sober, I was terrified of striking up a conversation. Drunk, I was the kind of girl who’d leap into a stranger’s lap on a dare.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Erica. Can I bum a smoke?” I didn’t smoke, but he didn’t know that.

  “No problem. I’m Nick. I was just—”

  “You heading outside? I’ll go with you.”

  I followed in his huge shadow out the back door.

  Nick was tall—about six foot six—but seemed even bigger, with blue eyes that looked at whoever he was speaking to like they were the only person in the world. He gestured toward his friend, who was just lighting up a bowl.

  “You want a hit?”

  “Obviously.”

  Nick was a “planetary futurist” who ran an environmental website and gave lectures—or something. I was always a little hazy on the details, even after he’d shown me a video of his TED Talk and his book’s introduction by Al Gore and his calendar crowded with speaking engagements around the world. That very first night, though, I was struck by his magnetism—he was one of those charismatic people who create their own gravity. I didn’t understand much of what he was talking about—something about systems thinking, and heroic optimism, and the need for insistent urgency on climate change—but I knew I needed to see him again. I came back inside and joined Tiffany and Sarah at the bar, but I kept my eye on Nick, and as soon as I saw him putting on his jacket, I rushed over and hugged him good-bye. He smelled like fuzzy wool and old smoke. “Call me,” I said, and pressed my number into his hand.

  And he did.

  And guess what? He drank more than I did! Score. Pretty soon, we were staying out until 2:00 A.M.; arguing in taxis; stumbling, hungover, to the grocery store for dinner from the deli and a curative bottle of wine; and fucking on the hoods of other people’s cars. I couldn’t believe my luck. I traded my old drinking routine for a new, higher-intensity program. After work, I’d head down to one of the two bars near his house—a brightly lit alehouse that closed at ten and only served wine and beer—his favorite—and a dark, sticky-floored place that poured stiff five-dollar cocktails and never seemed to close, which was mine. Moving my Monday night office hours to Nick’s quiet residential neighborhood felt like a step up the adulthood ladder. I wasn’t a kid looking for a party anymore—I was a young urban sophisticate, sipping Chardonnay (which just happened to be the highest-ABV wine they offered) while I wrote my column for the best alt-weekly paper in the country. And if I was routinely getting wasted trying to keep up with a beer drinker twice my size, at least I wasn’t doing it at home alone, like some kind of alcoholic.

  I could tell you that Nick and I had a whirlwind romance—long, carefree trips to Berlin and Barcelona, nights spent discussing the books we would write together, extravagant plans for the self-sufficient home we’d build—and that is one version of the story. Nick was the kind of guy who spent a lot of time working through big ideas out loud, and around him, I thought big, too—about what life would be like as soon as I started drinking a little less, quit my job, planted a garden, wrote a book. We did get serious very fast. We did go on thos
e trips. If you squinted, you could probably look at Nick and me and see what looked like a happy couple.

  But there’s another, truer version of the story: When I was with Nick, I was the worst version of myself—angrier, pettier, smaller, drunker.

  Nick and I were one of those couples that started fighting pretty much as soon as we got together, and about the littlest stuff—the fact that he didn’t always call me when he was out of town, or the way I acted around his friends, who were well adjusted in ways that made me nervous, with carefully curated lives filled with long-haired, gender-fluid children, camping trips, and backyard chicken coops. Nick was running a business, which he said made him too busy to do adult things like putting his clothes in the closet or exercising or doing the dishes; and I had a stressful job (“insanely stressful,” I told anyone who would listen) and needed to drink to relax. I held my tongue (until I didn’t) about his lax housekeeping, and he held his tongue (until he didn’t) about the amount of time I spent with friends he didn’t like. We were a positive feedback loop of negativity: He would complain about how the board of the nonprofit he had founded was hounding him to come up with money, and I would complain about how The Stranger was a soul-sucking pit of vipers, and we’d drink and drink and drink and drink.

  I didn’t exactly plan to move in with him. At the time, 2008, I had a pretty sweet apartment, a spacious corner unit in a renovated 1920s building with a view of the Space Needle, downtown Seattle, and the Olympic Mountains. Like a lot of rash calls I’d made over the years, moving in with Nick seemed like a fix—in this case, for the fights that came more and more frequently, and the nagging sense that even he was starting to think I was out of control. We had been dating for about a year when I informed him, after six or seven glasses of wine at “our” bar, that I had given notice to my landlord and would be moving into his place at the end of the month. He didn’t act quite as overjoyed as I had expected. In fact, he asked me to go back and tell my landlord I had made a mistake. I told him that it was too late for that now, and that I thought this was what he wanted, and we fought, made up, and had another drink. Play, pause, rewind, repeat.

  Three weeks later, I was standing in Nick’s front yard, arguing with the movers, who were demanding an extra five hundred dollars to move my shiny black upright piano, which had followed me all the way from my parents’ living room in Houston, from their truck. “You pay, or we go to California,” they said. I stood in the doorway, hysterical. “DO something!” Nick pulled his phone out of his pocket and loomed over them, bellowing as he punched at the numbers. “Nine! One!” That did the trick. They dumped the piano on the sidewalk and peeled away. Moments later, it started to rain. I ducked back into the bedroom, where no one could see, and took a long pull off the bottle of vodka I just happened to have tucked away inside my backpack.

  Glassy-eyed but calmer, I wandered back out into the yard. Like a miracle, two drunk guys wandered by and offered to help, and between the four of us, we hauled the thing up the four steps to the house and into the living room. “Wow! It all worked out!” I told Nick when they left. “Sure,” he said, and looked at me doubtfully—this strange woman, whom he’d known barely a year, already bringing chaos into his house.

  Nick decided to make the best of it. He even threw me a housewarming party—Barcelona themed, to commemorate our recent trip—and I had such a great time, I passed out on my old bed in the spare bedroom before all the guests had left. I had decided to bring most of my furniture to his house, which made it feel like we were always just about to have a garage sale—tables next to tables and kitchen furniture on the patio and half-empty boxes of books stashed in bedrooms. My stuff got shoved into the empty places in his house, like the basement and the sunken living room that looked out onto Nick’s little-used wooden deck, where my ultramodern brown folding couch—the first piece of “real” furniture I’d ever bought—sat, unused, the whole time I lived there.

  Nick hadn’t done much to make the place feel like home before I moved in, and he didn’t do much after I got there. He had plenty of shelving units, but all his books were scattered in the front bedroom, and he had plenty of money, but as long as I lived with him, he never bought a real bed. Instead, we slept on a full-size futon mattress, tossed on the floor next to a heap of clothes and a completely empty closet. I nagged him about the pile, which he had given the infuriating nickname Piley, and that became one of the things we fought about—along with the dishes, his flirtations with other women, whether he even wanted me there, why he hated all my friends, and, oh yeah, my drinking.

  Not since Josh, in high school, had I had a more volatile sparring partner. We became the couple you’d cross the street to avoid—the crazy lady screaming, “You fucking asshole!” in the middle of the street and the giant, barrel-chested guy grabbing her arm and bellowing, “Calm the fuck down!” Few nights went by without some kind of conflict. Nick told me to get off his back about cleaning the dishes, since he paid for a maid to do “his” part of the housework. I was convinced he was sleeping with someone else, so I went through his emails when he wasn’t in the room. He banished me to the guest room one night and I retaliated by tossing a glass of water on his computer before passing out on the floor. He thought I was drinking too much; well, I thought he was a hypocrite. Anyone who drank as much as Nick did—sometimes nine or ten drinks a night, one pint following another—had no business telling me not to order another round, or snooping through my stuff to see if I had a bottle stashed somewhere, which—not that it was any of his business—I usually did. You would hide your drinking, too, if you lived with someone who was up your ass about it all the time. That’s what I thought.

  Increasingly, we slept apart—him on the futon on the floor, me on my old bed in the guest bedroom, a bottle of wine or vodka secreted away between my folded T-shirts a few feet away. I still wasn’t sleeping well—alcohol, no surprise, is great for falling asleep but tends to wake you up after a couple of hours, a phenomenon known as rebound alertness—so I compensated by always keeping a bottle within reach. Just knowing there was a plastic bottle of Smirnoff in the closet by my bed was a comfort, like sleeping on a mattress filled with money. If I miss anything about drinking, it’s the feeling of security I discovered back then, when I knew I’d never have to stay up all night if I didn’t want to. Whatever else fell apart, there was always one thing that wouldn’t fail me.

  I kept a diary during this period, too. It’s hard to read because the writing jitters drunkenly across the pages, but here’s a sample: “I’m tired of being shouted down, tired of being called a bitch, tired of being told ‘fuck you.’ I deserve better than that. I feel stuck, like I can’t get out of some horrible predicament I’ve put myself in.” All this was true, to a point. I wrote about what Nick did to piss me off. I didn’t write about my part—the shouting, the fuck you’s and accusations I hurled right back at him, or the drinking, much of it now done in secret. I’m not trying to make excuses for Nick—we were both our worst selves around each other—but when drug or alcohol abuse is part of the mix, a toxic relationship can turn into something much uglier, and it becomes harder and harder to do the obvious thing and just get out.

  I had always kept lists of goals—Don’t respond when John texts. Sign up for class in music theory—but I wasn’t doing that anymore. Goals seemed too . . . goal oriented. Most days, it was all I could do to scrawl out a few indignant words before I passed out in the guest bedroom at the end of the day. But if I had, it would have read something like this: 1. Get out of this relationship. 2. Get therapist. 3. Stop drinking.

  Plenty of people had been suggesting number 3. Girlfriends—not Sarah or Tiffany, of course, but the friends I was avoiding, like my old pals Lisa and Stephanie from city hall—were starting to ask if I was okay. (They surely noticed, but didn’t comment on, my sallow skin, puffy face, and bulging waistline.) And a few weeks before I moved into Nick’s place, I had shown up late to Josh’
s birthday party, then babbled at his friends Tom and Lee for an hour or so before passing out on the floor in his living room. That night, Josh had written me a tense, angry letter about my behavior. “I’m worried about you,” it began. “What do we need to do to get you some help?” We were still at the point when my drinking was a “we” problem. We were still at the point where “just quit drinking” seemed like a viable option. The problem was that I drank; the solution was that I had to quit. Not an easy task, maybe, but simple. Right?

  Even Nick said he’d had enough, and for once, I didn’t blame him. A long weekend in San Francisco had recently ended in disaster. The evening started as most of our evenings did—with drinks, which were supposed to be followed by dinner—and ended with us sloppily shutting down the bar, a dim, candlelit trattoria near my aunt and uncle’s house, where we were crashing for a couple of nights before heading back to Seattle at the tail end of a trip down the coast. Somehow, we started fighting on the street, and carried the fight right back into the house, where my aunt Lisa and uncle Alex and their four-year-old son were sleeping.