This is a ritual. I play my part. “I have not,” I lie, as usual, steadying myself against the wall with my left hand as I gesticulate with my right. “I don’t know where you get off making accusations like this. You’re supposed to be supportive.” Josh shoots me a disgusted look and slams his hand into the wall. “You’re going to get fired,” he says, “and I’m not going to be able to protect you. You have to get your shit together. You cannot keep doing this shit!” I glare at him like I glared at my mom when she caught me with a pack of cigarettes. How dare he catch me red-handed.
Finally, the usual conversation ender: “Do you want to just go home? I don’t know if I feel comfortable having you here.” I insist on staying, because that seems like what an innocent person would do. I stumble through a phone interview with a political consultant with Josh in earshot, and after I’m off the phone, he hisses, “What the fuck was that? Your questions didn’t even make any sense! Just—don’t do any more interviews today.” Thus unburdened from the responsibility of human interaction, I go about the day’s remaining tasks: acting normal while maintaining a buzz, heading to the nearby deli for a sandwich that I will barely nibble and two $2.99 mini bottles of Gallo (a store up the street sells them for a dollar less, but Josh will get suspicious if I’m gone too long), and getting through the day with minimal eye contact and even less conversation.
On our way up the outdoor stairs to catch our respective buses that evening, Josh stands behind me and observes that I’m staggering. “No, I’m not,” I tell him; this feeble response is the best I can do. I could probably tell what’s in his eyes if I was able to focus, but I already know—it’s a mixture of frustration, betrayal, sadness, and anger, same as ever. He won’t wait for the bus with me this time. That’s fine by me. As soon as I see him round the corner toward his bus stop, I take off like a shot for the downtown grocery store.
I don’t show up to work for days. I’m supposed to turn in my story about the council member on Monday, but I can’t focus enough to turn on my computer, and I can’t face what I know will be an in-box of accusatory emails from Josh and James. The truth is, I can barely stand up. I’ve been spending most of my time lying in bed, staring at the shifting, colorless patterns on the ceiling—spiders, cobwebs, and whirlwind scribbles—in between sips from the bottle by the bed.
When I do return to work, I can’t focus. I can’t remember what I’m doing from moment to moment. At some point, I shuffle off to the bathroom to get my head straight, which means sitting in the stall and drinking until I feel steady enough to work.
That’s where Emily finds me: passed out on the bathroom floor, my liter box of white wine carefully tucked away in my messenger bag. Calmly, but with a sick-of-this-shit tone, she coaxes me out of the stall and back to my cubicle before handing me off to Josh. “She can’t be here,” she says. Josh, glaring, marches me downstairs, where he furiously calls an Uber, then a cab. (The Uber has trouble finding us. “WE! ARE! IN THE ALLEY! RIGHT BEHIND WESTERN AVENUE!” I hear him shout.) He can barely look at me. “You are going to lose your job,” he growls. I stare at him, insensible, and fumble for my keys, which are suddenly too slippery for my fingers to handle. In the course of this struggle, my bag tips over and the box of wine falls out, splashing on the sidewalk. Panicked, I lunge for it, but Josh gets there first, and dumps out the remaining precious few ounces in a nearby trash can. “Jesus Christ, Erica.” That old refrain. We wait in silence. The cab arrives. Josh tells him where to go—my apartment, no stops on the way—and hands him fifty dollars, telling him to keep all of it. As we pull away, I watched Josh walk back into the building, shoulders hunched in the manner of a man with too many burdens. Time skips forward, and I wake up in my bed the next morning, dirty sheets tangled around me like a rope.
And then, as if trying to erase and rerecord the actions of the previous day, I raise my throbbing head, toss on the same clothes I’d worn a day earlier, and head back to the office, where the same nightmare scenario plays out again, identical in nearly every detail. This time, someone else finds me—a salesperson, heading to the bathroom for a morning pee, only to find an editor passed out on the floor.
This, finally, is where drinking took me—to the dirty floor of an office bathroom in downtown Seattle, passed out cold at 11:00 A.M., not once, but twice in two days’ time. Of many rock bottoms I’d hit, this one is, if not the lowest, the most brutally humiliating. Emily and Josh hustle me out of the building and across the street. It’s important, Josh insists, that I get away from magazine “property,” because James is threatening to call the cops, and Josh thinks I can’t be arrested if I’m on public property.
Time passes. Hours, maybe a day. I drink. I sleep. And when I wake up, I know, without hesitation, that if I don’t make some kind of decision I will meet my end here, in this rancid apartment, alone. This, I think, is what they call a moment of truth. Or a rock bottom. Whatever.
I pick up the phone, pause for a few ragged breaths, and call Melissa.
Twenty-nine
Collapse
Hello?”
“Um . . . hi, is this Melissa?”
“Yes?”
“Hi, it’s Erica. Um. Ineedtogotodetoxcanyoutakeme?”
The words poured out in a jumble. “Slow down. Slow down. What are you asking?”
I was crying now—hysterically crying, river-of-snot crying, unintelligibly crying—but also trying not to throw up while I was on the phone with the publisher of the magazine that, for the moment, still employed me. “I’m at home, and I feel like I’m dying, and I relapsed, and I need to go to detox. But I owe James a story, and I don’t want to get fired, and I don’t know what to do, and I’m wondering if you can help me. Can you help me find a detox? Can you take me? I don’t know where else to turn.”
And, as an afterthought: “Please.”
Melissa was calm, but her voice was clipped. “I’ll call you back.”
I collapsed back onto the bed, every bit of my energy expended in dialing the ten digits, putting my problems in someone else’s hands. I stared at the ceiling, willing the familiar patterns to go away. A minute, or an hour, later, the phone rang.
“It’s Melissa. I got you a bed at Fairfax.” Fairfax was a mental hospital in the nearby suburb of Kirkland, the same suburb where Residence XII was located—the kind of place where my childhood friend Jennie’s parents locked her up when her depression became too much to handle. They also had a small detox wing. “Emily and I will be there in an hour. Get dressed and try to have something to eat.”
Eating was unthinkable. I hadn’t been hungry in weeks—my stomach, by now, was swollen and hollowed out, a poisoned sac sloshing bile. There was still time to walk across the street to the Busy Bee convenience store, where I knew I could buy a couple of mini bottles of Gallo or a half-liter box of Chardonnay, before Melissa and Emily arrived. So instead of eating (the food in the fridge mostly rotten anyway, vegetables liquefying in their bags, half-burned attempts at curries molding in their Tupperware), I pulled on a T-shirt, jeans, and a hoodie and walked to the store in the cool, early-autumn air. The wine, cold and acid going down, restored me enough to run a comb through my hair, scrub under my arms, and fill a stained white canvas bag with the clothes that seemed cleanest—T-shirts, pajama bottoms, sweats, and a few thongs from the dregs of my underwear drawer. I struggled down the stairs and waited. The alcohol had softened the edges of my resolve, but it was too late to reverse what I’d set in motion. Melissa and Emily would pull up in my parking lot, I would get in the car, and they would drive me to Fairfax. I would walk through the sliding doors. I would do what they told me to do. Once I was admitted, someone else would take over—someone in a white jacket, with drugs that would knock back the shakes and make the hallucinations recede. I didn’t know if my insurance would cover any of this (and, ultimately, they didn’t). I didn’t care.
Melissa squealed into my parking lot
in her big, champagne-colored SUV. I was the reason she, Emily, and I were in this car together, but they acted like I wasn’t there. After a few perfunctory questions about how I was feeling and a stop at Starbucks for a breakfast sandwich I could barely stand to look at, I stared out the open window and sobbed self-pityingly, trying to hold down a single bite of egg and English muffin while Melissa and Emily chattered amiably about the work day they had ahead, after they finished dealing with this distasteful errand. “I don’t know how we’re going to close on this issue on time if Amy doesn’t nail down the ad copy for the rest of the bridal section.” “Yeah, what is up with her? Do you think she’s looking for another job or something?” Why don’t they seem more concerned about me? I wondered, sulking into my sandwich. So this is what it’s come to—the only people left to take me to detox are two yammering women from work who cared more about the stupid magazine than they did about me, the human being sitting next to them in agony. “Do you think I’m going to lose my job?” I blurt. Melissa gave me a chilly glance. Paused. “Let’s just worry about getting you better.”
The lobby at Fairfax was designed to project a sense of order and calm. Even as orderlies rushed through pushing a stretcher to which a large, screaming teenage boy had been strapped, there was a hush about the place, decorated in placid blond wood and taupe plastic benches and soothing shades of yellow and mauve. Just get through the next five minutes, I told myself, my sweaty arms adhering to the faux-leather bench. Just get through the next thirty seconds. Finally, an officious-looking man in a white coat and wire-rimmed glasses called me back to give me a Breathalyzer test. “Have you done one of these before?” he asked. “No,” I said. (This was true. Despite all the times I’d driven drunk, I’d never been pulled over, and the only alcohol tester I had ever seen up close was attached to the ignition of a car belonging to a guy I met in outpatient treatment and convinced to drive my drunk ass home.) “Just blow in the tube as hard as you can until I say stop.” I did as he said.
“Okay . . . 0.242,” he said. I pictured the signs you see on the side of the road, the ones that say: ALCOHOL LIMIT .08. Technically speaking, I was three times over the limit. According to studies on the effects of alcohol intoxication, a blood alcohol level between 0.21 and 0.29 is characterized by stupor, loss of consciousness, blackout, and severe motor impairment. And yet here I was, walking upright and carrying on polite if stilted conversations, with a level of alcohol in my system that would put a normal person on a stretcher. There was a part of me that felt a little proud. Holy shit, look at what your body can handle! But I didn’t say that part out loud. Instead, I asked, “Do you think you can admit me soon?” My BAC may have suggested otherwise, but the wine was wearing off, and my body was starting to shudder into a familiar state of hyperarousal.
If the northwest Seattle hospital where I’d detoxed six years earlier was the Four Seasons, and Recovery Centers of King County, where I’d been earlier that same year, was a fleabag SRO in the seediest part of town, Fairfax was a roadside motel where twenty-nine dollars would get you a mattress with busted springs, sheets of dubious cleanliness, and triple locks on the door. Except, of course, that there were no locks on the doors—nor, effectively, doors at all, since the rules stipulated that they could never be closed. As at RCKC, tweezers, shoelaces, and pens were viewed as potential suicide implements. The funhouse mirror in my room was familiar from the county detox, too—mental institution standard issue, made of warped, unbreakable metal. Each room was spare, with three plastic-covered beds, austere nightstands, and a small cubby for hanging clothes.
With nothing to do until the nurse came back to do my intake, I introduced myself to my roommates—Sara, a stringy-haired heroin and pill addict whose mom brought her to Fairfax and stood in the lobby so she couldn’t leave, and Hannah, a go-getter, type A alcoholic who spent her free time walking up and down the ward’s single hallway, counting steps. “I love to walk!” she told me cheerfully as she made a U-turn at the end of the hall. “Three thousand seven hundred seventy-four, three thousand seven hundred seventy-five . . .” After two days, Sara would go AMA and get into her junkie boyfriend’s car. One day later, Hannah would finish her term and bounce out the doors, reunited with her Fitbit.
I started pacing up and down the long hallway, peeking inside people’s rooms. The place appeared to be packed to the rafters with junkies, degenerates, and drunks like me—the puffy-faced lady in sweatpants and a stained T-shirt, clutching the walls and itching for a handful of Librium. I noticed a woman with scraggly gray hair perched on a folding chair outside the nurses’ station, waving some kind of scribbled manifesto. “Why won’t they let me out of here?” she wanted to know. “I’m not supposed to be here! Can you tell them I’m not supposed to be here?” Involuntary commitment cases like hers were fairly unusual. While Fairfax was a lockdown facility—once you were in, you couldn’t just walk out the door—most of the people on the detox wing had walked in under their own power, and many went AMA once they started feeling better, or wheedled their way out early, like me.
Fairfax didn’t hide the fact that it was a mental hospital—my stay there began with a full strip and cavity search, and people were always coming and going between the mental and detox wards. The impression was enhanced by the fact that most patients on the detox ward spent their days doing what was universally called the “Librium shuffle,” a slow, sedated walk that looked like you were sweeping the floor with your shoes. Everything seemed designed to hold patients in a state of stupefied dependency. The refrigerator was stocked with an endless supply of apple sauce, milk, and those foil-covered orange and apple juice containers you get in middle school. When I wasn’t shotgunning those, I spent most of my time in the TV room, watching Xtreme Off-Road, Bar Rescue, and Auction Hunters, and waiting for everyone to leave for meals so I could switch the channel to the Food Network. (Men outnumbered women at Fairfax three to one when I was there, which helped explain why the TV was always tuned to Spike TV.) When I wasn’t vegging on the couch or dodging the attention of one of the many predatory guys on the ward—truly, there isn’t a single place in the world where men won’t try to get in women’s pants—I was worrying about my overdue story, calling James, and leaving messages for Marianne, my nominal AA sponsor.
Marianne and I had left things on pretty shaky terms. Since that first meeting outside Cherry Hall six weeks earlier, she had had me create daily gratitude lists and mail them to her every day, which I did—sporadically. “Today I am grateful for: The changing of the seasons. The fact that I made rent. No arguments with Josh. Sunshine.” She asked me to call her every day, which I did—sort of. Once I started drinking again, I responded to her voice mails with texts. “I can’t sponsor you by text,” she protested. So I called her, drunk, trying to hide my condition by speaking slowly and E-Nun-Ci-A-Ting every syllable. “Recite the ninth step promises,” she demanded one night. “If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through,” I slurred. “We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will lose interest in ourselves . . . and gain interest in . . . others?” Why hadn’t I just looked up the fucking thing? “You aren’t serious about this,” Marianne said. Then the line went dead.
After that, we kind of fell out of touch. But now, I needed her. Panicked at the idea of leaving Fairfax without a sponsor, I left messages for her at Cherry Hall. But when she didn’t call me back at the hospital, I wrote her off. Fuck that bitch. Some sponsor she is.
Thirty
Fired
Fairfax let me leave after just four days—less than the five-to-seven-day recommended stay, but enough to pronounce me “stabilized” and free up a bed for the next quavering addict. Kevin picked me up, or maybe I took the bus; that day, or the ones that followed, have been ripped from my mental calendar.
How fast did I start drinking again after leaving? Was it right away? After I saw how hopeless things w
ere at work? Or was it not until the day of my big meeting with James, the Monday after I left the hospital, and four days before I fell on my face, in the rain, after taking the train to the office to pick up the stuff I hadn’t been allowed to carry with me out the door?
Let’s say it was that Monday, and I came in to work after drinking a half liter of wine—just enough to take the edge off what I knew was going to be a tough meeting with James. At 10:00 sharp, James summoned me into his new corner office and sat down behind the swimming-pool expanse of his enormous glass desk. Ariella, the managing editor, was already waiting. “Sit down,” she said, and pointed to a chair.
Rattled by her official-seeming presence, I launched into my speech. “I know I haven’t been present at work, and I truly apologize. I’ve outlined some steps that I plan to take in the future to ensure that nothing like this ever—”
Ariella cut me off.
“Given your performance over the last few months, and the fact that we did give you every opportunity to deal with your issues by taking some time off a month ago”—my stay at Rez XII—“we believe we have no other alternative at this point than to terminate your employment, effective immediately. We need you to take your bag and leave the building.”
I had never been fired before. I had known this was a possibility, but at the moment, my brain couldn’t process what was happening. I did the only thing I could think of: I tried to argue my way out of it.
“Wait—wait. How about if you put me on probation for six months? Or let me take some time off to get my shit together? Unpaid, even. I would be willing to do that. This takes time. What about if—”
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