Lit

by Mary Karr

  Big accomplishment, he says, those first few months. Mind if I smoke?

  The automatic windows hum down an inch, and he pats around his pockets for a cigarette. His overbite makes him look very eager for it.

  That coming in and out of sobriety? Hard. He depresses the lighter in its socket. You detox over and over. You never get to the good part.

  I’m ready for the good part.

  The lighter pops, and he presses it to the end of his smoke.

  I have to admit, I say, I do feel better since I started taking Joan’s suggestions.

  As James goes to replug the cigarette lighter in the hole, you can see how—from his perspective—the hole keeps edging side to side to thwart him. His head sways a little as he jabs at the dashboard three or four times. Despite the lighter’s having gone cold, he presses it again to the end of his burning stogie, sending sparks all over his lap. Finally, he just drops the lighter in the ashtray like it belongs there.

  This, I think, is as drunk a motherfucker as I’ve ever seen, fixing to steer the car I’m in. As a kid, I was trained to give the shitfaced room. Small white droplets of rain tap on the windshield when a knock on the back car door makes me startle.

  In climbs big-footed David, red bandana around his head, along with a guy from our group named Jack.

  Jack of the red curly hair, skittery-eyed Jack, who—on being introduced to me first—explained that he had a little touch of the schizophrenia, as he held index finger one inch from thumb. Mostly he stays medicated enough to hold down a job at the box factory. But he once showed up to arrange chairs with tinfoil over his head molded into a knight’s helmet with a kind of swan shape on top, convinced his girlfriend was beaming messages to him through the radio. It’s a tribute to the radical equality of the room that I never overheard anybody ever challenge the reasoning.

  We say our hellos, David inquiring after my son and Joan. Then everybody sits in unwieldy silence. I keep waiting for another passenger to ask where the hell the gin is, and when they don’t, I convince myself I don’t smell it. Paranoid—jeez. But then I look at the cigarette lighter lolling in the vast ashtray and wonder.

  Jack says, I have a Tab I’d like to open, but I don’t have enough to share around. We all tell him go ahead.

  About that time, a whoosh of damp air sweeps in as another trench-coated lawyer, Gerry, swings open the back door. He squeezes Jack in the middle with his knees up, and he’s holding the Tab like a bazooka he’s about to fire off. I strap on my seat belt.

  At intervals, streetlights flash across James, who squints at the road like a pilot trying to feel his plane toward a fogged runway, and to his credit, he drives slow enough. Ultimately, we halt alongside a whitewashed church. Stepping out, I see enough tilted motorcycles to ferry a whole clubhouse full of Hells Angels. The crowd out front is mostly ponytailed guys in leather jackets and vests and black chaps. Chains hang off their belt loops, and each foot is shod in a storm trooper’s boot. I spy nary a female.

  James heads for the bathroom, and I grab Gerry’s elbow to tell him—a total stranger, nicely as I can—his pal James is shitfaced.

  The rain’s stopped, and a few shy stars are trying to blink.

  You’re mistaken, Gerry says. I know him. We’ve made coffee together in Lexington for four years.

  Trust me. A drunk man. Extremely.

  If that’s true, Gerry says a little wearily, he can’t speak. I’ll take his keys away. But where is he, anyway?

  Through the church full of assembling bikers, I follow Gerry back to check the men’s room. We’re outside looking around in the few seconds before Gerry’s meant to start speaking when a guy with frizzled muttonchop sideburns says, You looking for the trench-coat dude? He’s under that big low-growing Christmas tree over yonder.

  Sure enough, James had crawled under the giant evergreen, curling around the trunk like a cut worm to pass out.

  We figured he was too clean for homeless, a guy with a shaved head edges up to say.

  James! Gerry hisses. He’s squatted down to peer under the branches. James!

  Y’all want us to pull him out? the guy with muttonchops asks. A nod from Gerry, and two fellows wiggle under the tree and drag James toward us.

  One of his wing tips is missing. He sits on the ground with his head hung down. His hair has come unpasted, the stiff strands flipping up like a car hood popped open. A few stray pine needles stick to one cheek.

  Looks like you been to a party tonight, brotha, the shaved-head guy says.

  I’m sorry, James is saying at random intervals. His hands cover his face as he busts out in backbreaking sobs.

  The bald guy pats his back, saying, That’s all right, honey, we all been there.

  A guy with a tear tattoo says, You’re in the right place, buddy.

  After a while, tear-tattoo asks me what James does for a living, and when I say lawyer, he says, Maybe I should get his card.

  Gerry fishes around in James’s coat pocket to drag out his car keys. Then the two bikers sling him up and shoulder him, spread-armed as if for crucifixion. They transport him up the church steps with the unwieldy shuffle of good bouncers. The bald guy asks if this is where we want him. When I say sure, they deposit him, aslant, onto the back pew.

  In corner chairs in the back kitchen, we find David and Jack bent over a can of pink cake frosting, each holding a tablespoon. David’s spoonful of icing has twin teeth marks raked through it like Jeep tracks in mud.

  Busted, David says.

  This was extra from the cupcakes, Jack explains.

  Gerry tells them about James’s fall off the wagon. Jack sits folded in half, hugging his knees as his forehead creases. With the toe of his shoe, he outlines the same linoleum tile over and over.

  David strokes his beard, saying, That is genuinely terrifying. Why’d he go out drinking?

  Gerry shakes his head, saying, Mood and happenstance don’t drive us to drink. Turning to Jack, he says, Explain it to the newcomers.

  He got drunk, Jack says, because he’s an alcoholic. We are given a daily reprieve based on our spiritual condition. Without spiritual help, the lure of the drink is too much for most of us.

  Is he quoting something? I ask David.

  It’s their book, he says. The once über-logical David tells me with aficionado’s conviction that at the halfway house where he’s a current resident—and Jack a former one—there’s a hard-core book study every Sunday. I should go.

  Riding back to Lexington in the backseat, I sit between passed-out, openmouthed James—his breath on the side window spreading and receding like a tide—and curly-headed Jack. I think with rue of Joan the Bone’s injunction to ask the first person I saw about my marriage. I’m still angling to prove what crazy bullshit her much vaunted surrender-to-the-group concept is. Whatever Jack’s brief spells of clarity, he rarely goes to a meeting without jabbering out something nutty.

  So I start whispering my tale of marital woe to Jack, who sits in the hunched posture of somebody tensing against a blow. Occasionally, he’ll tug a red curl over the crease in his forehead.

  Eventually, I wind down and ask, what should I do? And I wait for the word salad of his scrambled cortex to spew forth. Instead, his eyes meet mine evenly, and he says—as it seems everybody says—You should pray about it.

  But what if I don’t believe in God? It’s like they’ve sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can’t will feeling.

  What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this:

  Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball shape about midchest, saying, Let go. Surrender, Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky. Surrender, Mary.

  I want to surrender but have no idea what that means.

  He goes on with a level gaze and a steady tone: Yield up what sca
res you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. It’s a cathedral. It’s an empty football stadium with all the lights on. And pray to be an instrument of peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is conflict, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope…

  What if I get no answer there?

  If God hasn’t spoken, do nothing. Fulfill the contract you entered into at the box factory, amen. Make the containers you promised to tape and staple. Go quietly and shine. Wait. Those not impelled to act must remain in the cathedral. Don’t be lonely. I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger. But I have to go to a meeting and make the chairs circle perfect.

  He kisses his index finger and plants it in the middle of my forehead, and I swear it burns like it had eucalyptus on it. Like a coal from the archangel onto the mouth of Moses.

  The night sky edges across our windows, and I’m carried inside this tank of a car. James wanting to get drunk makes sense to me, and I like how nobody rebuked him after. But there were also no-bullshit acts like not letting him speak—crazily he’d wanted to testify about his sobriety. But Gerry took his car keys, and made him sit through the meeting.

  It’s my life outside these oddballs that scares me.

  David? I say, leaning forward.

  Yes, ma’am. He turns down the radio.

  Any chance you cadged that frosting?

  Gross, Gerry says. You’re not gonna eat that.

  David unzips his backpack, flips off the frosting lid, and hands it back, saying, I feel like I should wipe the edge on my T-shirt. You know, sanitize it.

  Taking the can, I dig in and run my finger around the edge, then stick it in my mouth just as Gerry’s hand reaches back, hovering for the handoff.

  28

  Halfway Home

  …Everyone I met

  Wore part of my destiny like a carnival mask.

  “I’m Bartleby the Scrivener,” I told the Italian waiter.

  “Me, too,” he replied.

  —Charles Simic, “St. Thomas Aquinas”

  Rather than rejoice about the grant, I start to steel myself against the ceremony now rushing toward me like a jail on wheels. David and Jack convince me to join their Sunday study group at a shambling halfway house. The place sits on hospital grounds across from a methadone dispensary. A favorite joke of the residents is to use magic markers to manufacture a closed sign on the clinic, so eventually the panicked methadone addicts holler and pound the door.

  Walking into the house, I expect to find tattooed thugs and strippers and former felons, which I do. But most are working stiffs, plus a professor. There’s even a disbarred lawyer who’d once passed out in a snow bank and woke in a hospital with neither hand nor foot—the blackened appendages having been amputated—a fairly common injury among the homeless, it turns out.

  On my first afternoon there, David bends over a former hooker’s study guide for her high school equivalency exam, and I see the hooker later help a Boston banker handle his own toddler during a visit—the same unlikely, democratic exchange of skills as my Cambridge meeting.

  The house director is a woman I hate on sight: a stork-thin blonde with manners that strike me as prissy, like she’s instituting a no-cussing rule for the house, for one: say a bad word, you chip in a buck to the party fund. Save for a slightly spastic right hand, she looks like a runway model, being nearly six feet tall with long hair the color of sunflowers. In the recovery community, she’s legendary. Mother Teresa with altitude, I overhear one resident say. She did biochemical research for NASA before her career in chemical dependency. The white Mustang convertible she drives has a high-test engine, and I once heard a felon remark she looks like a dentist’s wife, i.e., never done a day’s work in her life and somebody always taking care of her teeth.

  Her name is Deb, and when I whine about how hard it is not to drink on afternoons alone with Dev, she invites the two of us to stop by the house for a snack. I can bring a video for him. She’ll even personally counsel me if she has time.

  Fat chance, I think at first, but the lure of a sober hangout proves too great to stay away. The writers I once passed flasks of vodka back and forth with have been scarce since I pledged off.

  On Dev’s first visit to the house, he passes two residents exhaling plumes of cigarette smoke, transfixed by a Thai kickboxing movie. I tuck Dev’s head under my coat, and he says, What’re they watching?

  Grown-up show, I say.

  In the director’s office, Deb stands to greet us, and her shaggy dog licks Dev’s face, almost knocking him over. She holds out her slightly drawn-up hand for him, and he wastes no time in asking what’s wrong with it.

  She bends to fix her brown eyes level with his blue ones to explain that she got drunk and overdosed on a nasty drug called cocaine.

  I try to steer Dev off the subject, but Deb says, It’s normal to be curious. Anybody with a disability needs to be comfortable with answering questions about it. She holds out her arm, saying to Dev, You can touch it if you want to.

  He pinches it like a melon, then grabs her wrist and pulls it away from her body, as if to straighten it through his own grunting will, saying, Does that hurt?

  Deb says, No, it just feels tight.

  You were drinking cocaine, and your arm just spronged up that way? Dev wants to know.

  Oh, no, she says. The stuff kind of poisoned my head, and I fell down and hit it. I woke up and I couldn’t move at all. Paralyzed. Couldn’t talk, either, not even yes or no.

  Which dramatic bottoming out is hard to assign to one so put together as Deb. You can believe that she was married to an Oxford biochemist, that she modeled, that she ran a lab—all true. But that she drank like me and couldn’t quit? Impossible to picture.

  I was four or five years in and out of rehab, she tells us. On the night of my head injury, a cabdriver—actually an Indian guy I’d met in one detox—found me passed out in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. He’d driven by the house and seen my car parked sideways in the driveway, gotten worried, and broken in.

  Dev says, What did you think when you woke up and couldn’t move?

  I’ll tell you exactly what it was, she says. Boy, do I need a drink.

  Dev giggles at this. Part of me thinks, Maybe if I’d heard this at his age, I wouldn’t have wound up such a sot.

  It took me a long time to learn how to talk again, she says. I could show you how to eat with a spoon, but I couldn’t say the word spoon.

  Over months and months in long-term rehab, she learned to speak again, then read, then write with her left hand.

  Let me see you walk, Dev says.

  She rises, and the dog rises. She walks across the room, doing a kind of swaying swagger to heft the less mobile right leg forward apace. She does it with a rock star’s prance, adding a runway spin at the end.

  Dev says, You walk pretty good. That leg goes a little crooked, but you go fast.

  She looks at me and says, Do you need to have a grown-up talk?

  It pains me how visible my shakiness is, but it touches me also. (Such small kindnesses—so commonplace in my life now—dismantled me then.) I’ve spent so long hiding how I really feel; now that my brassy attitude’s stripped off, I feel naked as a frog.

  She tells Dev to put in the video we’ve just picked up. I tell her the guys in the front room are in the middle of kickboxing, and Deb says, They won’t mind. From her doorway, she announces to the two guys on the sofa that the afternoon movie is a cartoon of a Rudyard Kipling story from India about a mongoose who has to fight a cobra.

  Picture the blond tyke on the couch with a paper plate holding potato chips in his lap. He’s flanked by two muscled and tattooed guys named Sam and Joe. (I’ll later learn that black-haired, wasp-waisted Sam was a former Mob henchman who once trafficked in pallets of stolen government cheese.)

  At a nearby table, I ask Deb how she came back from the head injury. Looking
at her, I figure rich parents bailed her out.

  Both my parents had just passed, she says, about a year apart, and I was an only child. Then my doctor husband divorced me the second I woke up.

  Told she’d never walk again, by month three, she wowed the once skeptical staff by using a brace and a cane to perambulate around.

  And when I came to this house…

  As a resident? You were checked in here?

  Yeah, she says, from a public detox, because all my insurance had run out. I got here still not quite mobile, and my counselor told me I had one day to feel sorry for myself, then I had to get to work. I started praying all the time, took a clerical job at a bookstore. Soon as I had enough money, I bought a broken-down Mustang convertible, hiring guys in the house to rebuild it in bits and pieces. The doctors had told me I’d never use my right hand again, and I knew the stick shift would loosen my arm up.

  I’m staring at her as if for the first time, for it would never occur to me that somebody as well turned out as Deb had suffered trials that dwarf my own.

  Part of me clings to the idea that I am the most disadvantaged person trying to get sober—a joke, given that I’m thin and white and employed, HIV-negative, with insurance and reasonably straight teeth. Before I judge somebody or indulge a groundless fear, Joan says I’m supposed to ask myself: What is your source of information? If the answer is—as it usually is—I thought it up, I should dismiss the idea.

  Deb sips her coffee as I say, A head injury and a divorce—what an excuse to drink.

  The head injury convinced me I had to get sober or die, she says. I was on the surgical table twenty-four hours. If the cabdriver from rehab hadn’t come by, I’d have died for sure—a lot of coincidences went into getting me here. Plus, they said I’d never walk again. Those things were gifts.

  A gift? I say, blinking with disbelief, for this is the kind of shit people said that makes me nuts.

  Without my brain injury, Deb says, I’d never have quit drinking. It saved my life. It was a higher-power thing.

  I don’t get that stuff, I say.