The Best American Essays 2017

by Leslie Jamison

  He adds, hesitantly: “But then the question is: Is that model”—i.e., an unsanctioned facility—“exportable to other cities and states?”

  When I began to follow the media coverage of the new “heroin scourge,” I didn’t have strong ideas about “addiction,” except that I knew it when I saw it. I believed it was a disease, and that it should be treated as such. But the more I read, the more people I speak with, the more I begin to question this framework. It is clear that no one—no neuroscientist, psychologist, psychiatrist, or physician—can explain what addiction is or account for its contradictions. Tobacco, cocaine, heroin, alcohol, MDMA, amphetamines—are they inherently addictive? Common knowledge suggests they are. But all around me I see exceptions more than the rule, my friends who use, have used, some or all of these drugs, including heroin, casually. I, too, am one of the exceptions.

  I conclude that my own point of view is now best represented by the more radical strands of the harm-reduction movement and by legalization; I can argue, morally, intellectually, why these alternatives are better than what we have now.

  Following the lead of those in harm-reduction and drug-users’ rights groups, I decide to scrub the word “addict” from my vocabulary, to avoid using the term “drug abuser.” The alternatives can be awkward on the page, in a sentence, but it is more important not to reduce a person to this one aspect of her life, not to ascribe all the negative valences carried by these words.

  person with a substance-misuse disorder

  person experiencing a drug problem

  person who uses drugs habitually

  person committed to drug use

  I try carrying these over into speech. This, too, is challenging.

  I meet Judith in her studio. She is seventy-five, a painter of Indian peafowl, roseate spoonbills, reddish egrets, and other birds of refined plumage and delicate bills. Earlier in the winter, her son, Spencer, died of a methadone overdose. We face each other, seated in chairs, a small table and a glass of water between us. Judith looks the part of a painter. She is poised, like her subjects, and speaks of her son’s death with surprising ease.

  “Having a son die this way is not the absolute worst thing a mother can experience. I can think of circumstances far worse.”

  Her stoicism is not an act. Despite countless visits to detox programs and rehab centers, a frightening prison stay, longtime family support, and the benefit of resources unavailable to most, Spencer was unable to stop using drugs in a dangerous way. Judith understands that she’s not to blame.

  I examine a framed photograph of Spencer that Judith has pulled out on my behalf. He’s tall and fit-looking, blue-eyed, sensitive.

  Spencer binged. Methadone maintenance never worked for him. Taking anything at all, including methadone, triggered a dangerous cycle. When Spencer overdosed, it was with methadone he received through a program. He had been trying to give up drugs. Judith believes that Spencer was torn between the life he wanted for himself and the life he seemed fated to have. “He had the right to let himself go if he couldn’t be happy.”

  Judith tells me that methadone-maintenance therapy is without a doubt a terrible thing. I want to say: Maybe for some people, like your son, but it has also helped many others. But I can’t say it.

  Judith says that a person on methadone still has that “all about me” attitude. What she means is that there is a kind of heroin mind, a way of behaving particular to a habitual drug user. The person may prioritize access to heroin above all else, including relationships with loved ones. Lying and stealing are constants in the repertoire of behavior. A person on methadone, Judith is saying, is still in heroin mind.

  I make an intellectual case for methadone, say that for some people it can help to stabilize their lives. But Judith stares at me blankly. She is not interested. I want to appeal with a personal example, but I find it hard to come up with one.

  She compares those who rely on methadone with those who seek help, and support others, through Narcotics Anonymous, as her son did. The people who commit to these programs, she explains, commit to a life of service. Spencer may have given up on his own life, but he helped save innumerable others. Judith claims the people she met through NA are among the saintliest she knows.

  “You should disconnect from your uncle, leave him behind, drop him. He is taking from you without ever giving back.”

  I feel defensive, uncomfortable, on your behalf and my own. I feel I’m being perceived as weak for deciding that you, while difficult, are still a person worth knowing.

  I say I appreciate the advice.

  Judith apologizes, tells me what I really need to do is to find a boyfriend who will treat me like a queen.

  I am mistaken. Sophie never does come around. I can’t remember the last time you mentioned her name. Two years, maybe more. By now your grandson must be eight or nine.

  With the right login credentials and some basic biographical information—first and last name, an approximate age, a residential state past or present, a relative’s given name—there’s a lot you can find out about a person, even when Google and Facebook turn up little. When I decide, finally, that I will look for Sophie this way, through databases I can access through my job as a fact-checker, it takes me no more than sixty seconds to locate where she is living.

  A trail of email addresses with varying domain names (aol.com, comcast.com, yahoo.com) reveals a few of the websites she’s created accounts on: a daily-horoscope generator, a payday-loan provider (cash4thanksgiving.com). Presumably these sites have lax privacy policies. My heart sinks a little when I think of her needing a payday loan; it suggests her life has not been an easy one.

  I will write to her, I think.

  HEATHER SELLERS

  Haywire

  FROM Tin House

  My father wore, under his work shirts, a sturdy white brassiere. I hated to hug him, hated to feel that elastic strap across his back, hated having to make myself concave to avoid contact with the empty cups on his chest.

  He painted his nails with clear gloss nail polish. He shaved his face and his chest, arms, and legs. In his bathroom medicine cabinet, tubes of lipstick and mascara and compacts of powder lived among Preparation H, Brut, and an ancient bottle of Old Spice.

  Behind the louvered folding doors of his closet, behind stiff suits he never wore, hung a collection of women’s dresses, wide cotton shifts, large paisley patio dresses. The floor was an orgy of heels and brogans, strappy gold sandals and steel-toe boots. Hustler, Playboy, Genesis, Club, and Oui stacked on the kitchen counters, in the bathroom, on the blue shag carpeting in the hallway.

  When I was an adolescent, my confusion about my father was a frightening and distracting presence that never went away. What was he?

  This was the late 1970s in the American South. If someone used the word “gay” in my world, he meant effeminate and wrong. He meant faggot, homo, fairy, sick, or stupid. He meant a joke or an insult. My father drank Bud, smoked Marlboros, yelled at football, dated brassy blondes and divorced women, a different gal every week. What was he?

  I didn’t know what gay was or wasn’t, not exactly. Sometimes men loved men and women loved women—that made sense to me, but that was not what I was seeing in my house. I was some two decades away from hearing the terms “transsexual,” “transvestite,” and “transvestic fetishist,” and profoundly distant from any understanding of my father, far from even being able to put into thoughtful sentences any of my questions about why and how one’s father might date women, watch porn videos at breakfast with his daughter at the table, and wear panty hose and a bra every day under men’s clothes. My father seemed to live out a large, dark, and shameful secret that no one was supposed to know about. It never occurred to me that my father could be unaware that other people—including his daughter—saw all this. It never occurred to me until quite recently that he might have felt there was actually nothing to hide.

  The two of us shared a household on the south side of Orlando, a
brown concrete block ranch with a sagging roof line. Rangy gardenia sprawled in the sunny doorway, obscuring the front door. Faded plastic flowers lined the front walk. In many ways, with its mixture of beauty, tawdriness, neglect, feminine touches, and strangeness, the dark, low house looked a lot like my father.

  Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night to my dad sitting on the sofa in the living room, where I slept. He chain-smoked; it was always the smoke that woke me.

  “What?” I would say, sensing him there on the far end of the sofa before my eyes adjusted to the dark. “What’s wrong?” How long had he been sitting there? What did he want? Why were tears streaming down his cheeks?

  I didn’t call him Dad or Father or even Pop. I called him by his given name, Fred.

  To look directly at Fred was almost always difficult. He cried not only when he was sitting on my sofa late at night. He regularly wept driving down Orange Avenue to the ABC. He sobbed during our weeknight dinners. I’d come upon him in the backyard, where I was managing a small garden, and find him standing by the clothesline, smoking, and in tears. Fred’s internal weather was an unpredictable mix of energized intelligence, vibrant humor, despair, and tangled sexuality. I sensed he was not bipolar but multipolar; something inside him pulled his core self in every direction available to a man.

  Curled up tight under my layers of bedsheets, my knees drawn to my chest, I’d ask him again, “What is it?” He’d shake his head, wipe his face with the sleeve of his white Fruit of the Loom tee, light another cigarette, and lean back on the sofa. “Go back to sleep, girl child.”

  I went back to sleep.

  But in photos of my father as a young man, he is bright-eyed and appears completely, beautifully normal. His sparky energy surges out of the frame, but he’s neatly groomed, suited, 1950s clean-cut, square corners. In some photos, he looks more than a little like Elvis, with his cowlick swooping into a thick shock of black hair, T-shirt, and jeans. Riding a horse, holding a fish, or laying concrete, his grin, fiercely sweet, is always lit by a flash of wild.

  I remember him leaving the house for work when I was little—he worked as an accountant at a missile company in central Florida—wearing a brown suit and starched white shirt, looking like all the other dads in skinny ties, folding into their sedans with cigarettes and briefcases. I remember him sitting in our side yard in a lounge chair on the patio, listening to the Saturday-night ball game on a transistor radio, yelling, Go, go, go, you’ve got it! Oh goddamn it. Jeans, work boots. Buddy Holly glasses. Drinking long-necks. Hey, baby. Hey now, girl child. Beer and cigarette in one hand, he’d scoop me up with the other. Come listen to your old daddy.

  There’s a photograph of one of these moments. I’m four or five. I have his dark eyes, dark hair. I’m barefoot in my white nightie, madly in love with my dad. But instead of wild in my eyes, there’s sorry, there’s worry.

  In the 1970s he was gone most of the time. When I saw him, on occasional weekends, I began to notice he’d started perming his hair, wearing floral-patterned shirts, and somehow he seemed both foggy and shiny.

  My parents divorced when I was eleven. My mother turned to wax. She was barely able to leave the house. Always edgy, now she nailed shut the windows, tacked thick bedspreads over the curtains. She decided I really shouldn’t leave the house, either, sometimes not even for school. She had always believed we were being watched. Now that we were alone, the dangers were too great—peril awaited us in the grocery store parking lot, at the bank, on every bridge. Don’t answer the phone. Never give out information.

  Great care was taken to vary our route. I had seen the caravan that followed us home from the grocery store, had I not? And I’d seen the foot of the man in the side yard—that foot exposed to the light, his body in the shadows—hadn’t I?

  Yes. I had seen these things. I had different interpretations than she did and I shared them freely, which increased her fear—this careless spiteful daughter who didn’t really see, didn’t really know how serious it all was.

  My diagnosis of my mother? Super strict. Unreasonably strict. We fought. But I loved my mother and wanted to please her. And when she heard breathing in the house, I heard it too. When she said to crawl on my hands and knees through the house, I did as she asked.

  My father’s visits trickled to nothing and there was a year or so that I didn’t see him at all. Late spring, the year I was fourteen, I finally tracked him down by telephone. I told him my mother was ruining my life—I wasn’t allowed to have friends, talk to boys on the phone, shave my legs. He seemed shocked, curious. He’d gotten out, best move he ever made, and now he said he was mystified by his actions. What had he been thinking, leaving me behind to deal with a mentally disturbed woman?

  I held my breath, waiting for the answer.

  Yeah, he said. He’d come get me as soon as he could and I could be his boarder, pay rent.

  Rent? Was he kidding or serious?

  In the weeks I waited for my father, I envisioned my new bedroom, maybe decorated with a peacock theme. Or fans. I loved Japanese fans.

  And with this move, I knew, there’d be restaurants, and maybe a wardrobe of Jordache jeans, Candies high-heel platform slides in hot pink, friends, parties, one of those makeup sets with one hundred eye shadows and a spectrum of lipsticks and glosses with brushes, all in one giant box that you could haul anywhere.

  My own stereo. A curling iron.

  I remembered my dad well. I thought about him all the time. I knew exactly what I was getting into: fun. A lot of fun and, at last, a normal life.

  In late March he picked me up at the end of the street—we wanted to avoid a scene with my mother. I slid my suitcase into the backseat and climbed into the brown Olds Delta 88, a ship of a car. I reached to hug him. This was when I first felt the straps under his shirt, going over his shoulders. I assumed it was something medical. Did he have a bad back? A recent surgery?

  His eyes were vague, watery, sad. The whole man had drifted, hard, to the left, and it was as if he’d sunk to the bottom of a swamp and come up completely transformed. His hair, permed and gold, looked like pale seaweed. His arms were shaved. I cried out when I saw them—I couldn’t help myself. What? He looked at me when I yelped, raised an eyebrow, and returned his gaze to the road. I saw his hands on the steering wheel: his fingernails were painted with clear nail polish. Why? Panty hose peeked out from under the hems of his pants.

  I wanted my other father, the one who looked like a dad.

  But I couldn’t go back to my mother’s house. I was moving in with an alcoholic man who wore women’s panty hose under polyester Sansabelts but I knew in my heart that however horrible this was going to be, it would be an improvement over life with my mother.

  When we pulled up to his house, which I’d never seen before, he asked me what I thought.

  I was quiet for a moment. “It has a number of sad features,” I said. I’m sure I grimaced. The place looked as if it was sinking into Florida and the mixture of abandonment and decorations—dead grass and wild vines in the trees and a brightly painted Dutch placard by the garage that said welkom!—was hard to understand.

  “What are you saying?” He gazed at the low bungalow as though it were a beloved palace.

  Every night when I went to sleep I believed that when I woke up, I would find him back to normal. And every day I worked hard to figure him out. What was he, what category did my father go into?

  Saturday afternoons, when we went down to the Pine Castle Winn-Dixie and he ordered Lebanon baloney and reached across the counter for the packet of meat with his painted nails and a little bit of makeup on, acting all friendly, talking as though no one could see how totally bizarre he was, I pretended that if I didn’t see, no one saw.

  What else did I want from the deli?

  I pretended we were normal.

  What else did we need? he asked impatiently.

  What did we need? I wondered.

  I had no idea. To not be in the grocery s
tore, out in public. To not be the people we were. To be completely, utterly, not us.

  As I followed him through the grocery store, I felt such shame over being ashamed of my father. I wanted him to think I loved him. I did love him.

  In the evening, it was my job to make dinner for us. This life was not quite the amazing teen bedroom and delicious restaurant future I’d had in mind, but at least we could eat normally, my father and I, whereas my mother had complicated rituals around food. Tampering was a constant theme for her, and her diet (and so mine) was restricted to toast, plain chicken, applesauce, grapes, and occasionally baked potatoes.

  My father’s fridge spilled over with bottles of papaya juice, coconut milk, packets of liverwurst, smoked herring, coleslaw in white plastic towers, banana peppers, a garden of fresh vegetables, and packet after packet of meat. He had two books side by side on the kitchen island: The Joy of Cooking and the joy of the other thing. I covered the second book with mail and studied recipes. As I prepared buttered almond rice pilaf for my father, or salad dressing, or set tiny jalapeño slices on carefully laid-out nacho chips for Mexican night, Fred, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and beaded macramé necklace, his ankles weirdly uniform beige with panty hose, would roll into the kitchen, grab me by the shoulders, and insist I invite a friend over for dinner. He’d hand me the phone receiver. Call Karen. Call Sally. Call Miriam next door. Call anyone. My father seemed both to expect normal friendships and not to have any idea how bizarre he was, in equal measure.

  “No one can come,” I’d demur. “Everyone’s busy.”