We stopped first in San Francisco to visit my girlfriend—a woman I’d dated in college who had been at the bad end of my erratic behavior but had agreed to one more round. We left my brother at her parents’ house and stayed out all night snorting coke. The morning’s hangover was laden with guilt. While we’d been out partying, my brother had taken himself up to Twin Peaks alone and stared out at the foggy city. Before we left, I wrote a letter to a different ex-girlfriend and explained how well I was doing. I’m going to AA meetings, I said, which was technically true.
My brother was sullen on that day’s drive. Our conversation circled and dead-ended. He spoke in fits and then stared sulkily at the smear of passing highway and trees. I was anxious and suggested that we stop and get a drink. He wasn’t interested. I feared our whole trip would continue like this. I feared that in our breaking, we had broke something between us.
Late that night we wound through Big Sur. The headlights illuminated redwood trunks thick as houses. Those trees and the darkness felt more solid than anything in me. We might have been the only two people on earth. I felt desperate to reach through the clotted silence between us. I missed him so much, this person I’d known his whole life, who knew me in ways no one else ever could.
I want to tell you something, I said.
Yeah?
I have a drug problem, I said. My ears rung with fear.
You do? he said.
Yeah, I said. I’m going to meetings, but I haven’t totally stopped yet. I slowed around a steep curve and the wind slapped a leaf against my window.
Wow, he said.
It’s really fucking hard, I said. Tears instantly fell down my cheeks. It was such a relief to finally say it aloud.
We sat in silence for a few more winding turns. He looked at me.
I’m glad you told me, he said. His voice had softened. You always acted so together. Like everything was easy for you.
Really? I sputtered a nervous laugh.
Yeah. It made it really hard to relate to you.
Together, huh? I laughed for real then and so did he. I felt something seep out of him, and out of me. Giddy with the sudden ease, I took a deep breath. We looked at each other in the dark and started laughing all over again.
The rest of the trip we ate Krispy Kreme donuts and cracked each other up just like when we were kids. As we stared over the edge of the Grand Canyon, I sighed theatrically. I thought it would be better, I said. My brother doubled over. He took a picture of me shrugging with the canyon behind me. We camped that night and he made me laugh so hard that I peed in my sleeping bag. As we crossed the bottom of the Mojave Desert, I took a photograph of my brother standing beside the highway, endless dry earth stretching out behind him like an emptied sea.
Over the next several years, my brother worked his way off of the meds. He was right that there were other ways to ease himself. He has not suffered a manic episode for many years. He still struggles in ways that I attribute to the part of him that he silenced. And that he attributes to that silencing. Our memories of that time are so different.* Of course they are. In my mind, my brother narrowly avoided institutionalization. Though he once said to me, maybe I would have ended up in a psych ward, but at least I would have gotten there following what I believed. I wanted to answer him, but at what cost? Though I understood. Perhaps I am uniquely qualified to understand. I have always been driven to find my own limits, and have often found them in dark places. But I was more scared for him than I have ever been for myself. This is one of love’s many hypocrisies. I want the people I love to do not as I would or have done, but whatever will keep them safe. That is, whatever will not break my heart. We were scared, yes, terrified. And fear narrows our vision. But the choice was still his to make.
I don’t know that I would do anything different if I could, even if my brother wishes I had. I cannot ever know his truth from the inside. I can only know my own. It was not only a thing that happened to my brother. It was a thing that happened to me. To all of us. Our family was forever changed and maybe there will never be a way to reconcile our different stories. We may never trust each other as we once did, or could have. There is a sorrow in me deeper than the regret of any cruelty for the fact of this: none of us could have protected each other. We could not even have protected ourselves. And though it is not a solution or a salve, there is also freedom in this humility. One that I did not have before.
The year after our cross-country trip, I got clean for real. That moment of confidence with my brother was a kind of map—an indication of what I would have to do over and over, for the rest of my life. In the decade of sobriety that has followed, I have replaced my instinct for secrecy with an instinct for confession.
There are still times when he and I fall into our respective labyrinths. I no longer believe that anyone but ourselves can lead us out. The Minotaurs we need to rescue are never our half brothers. They are always those monstrous parts of ourselves. We can never even know for certain that we are free. The best we can offer each other, and ourselves, is a few honest words.
*My brother’s own account of these events and more information can be found here: www.sustainabeast.com/fundamental-illness
ALL OF ME
We are in her bed and she props herself up on one elbow. Her bangs are tangled. Her forehead is damp and her face is soft. We have just made love, and the sun is rising. It glows through the drawn curtains of her bedroom with desert light.
What about this one? she asks, lifting my arm and brushing the inside of my wrist with her fingertips.
My little brother’s nickname.
And this? she touches the anatomical heart on my forearm, and smiles. Heart on your sleeve?
I like to remember that it’s a muscle, I say.
Her hand slides over the crook of my elbow and grasps my bicep. This is my favorite, she says. It is a portrait of Billie Holiday. She is in mid-song. Her features are finely detailed in black. It is my favorite, too.
I inevitably guide new lovers through a tour of my tattoos. It’s a sweet milestone and an easy way to introduce them to my story without having to volunteer unsolicited intimacies. Easier to hand someone a map than to show them where it leads.
We all want this in love—for our lovers to spot the marks of our losses, the scars that note how we have been changed, how we became the person they love. It’s not easy to offer these details. Sometimes, it is impossible. My tattoos make the first move.
They are also an invitation to strangers, who reach for me through this social loophole on the subway, the sidewalk, in cafes and gyms. The pull of an illustrated body overrides even classroom hierarchies, and sometimes my students lean so close to inspect the images decorating my shoulders that I can feel their breath on me. Not only do my tattoos erase the invisible membrane between our bodies, but they also dissolve what manners prevent strangers from commenting on others’ bodies.
I understand the impulse. I have willfully exposed something that draws their attention and thus invited it. The same flawed logic drives men in the street to whistle, hiss, honk, or comment on the bodies of passing women, though I offer them no such pass. Their impulse is also one to remind me of their power. I did not choose my female body. But I chose every image painted on it.
Billie Holiday’s voice first spoke to me as a girl. Though a gregarious child, I became an anguished adolescent—sensitive, empathic, secretive, and sexual. The marriage of pain and sweetness in her crooning hit notes I couldn’t approximate in language or any bodily expression. Books were my obsession, but music more succinctly captured emotion than any combination of words I found. The nights I didn’t spend reading by flashlight, I curled around the radio, finger over the record button. I filled blank cassettes with songs I’d replay over and over and over. But Billie’s voice was best. She sounded haunted and at twelve and thirteen, I felt haunted, visited by surges of feeling invisible on my outsides.
I was already calling myself a writer. I furiously scrawled
poems in notebooks. I romanticized my angst and toted Kerouac and Anaïs Nin around in my backpack. I guarded my vulnerabilities but longed to externalize them. Writing was the obvious choice. But music was the shortcut. Learning an instrument appeared too laden in technique, so I asked my mother for voice lessons.
My singing teacher’s name was Shirley. Round and blonde, with an upturned nose and equestrian penchant, she ran scales with me every Wednesday after school in a stuffy room above our town’s only guitar shop. Though gifted with range, volume, and feeling, my pitch needed work. I loathed practicing to the cassettes we recorded of exercises. Listening to my own voice stagger up and down the scales filled me with a tedious embarrassment. I wanted only the rush of breath from my heart to my mouth.
Shirley wanted me to sing from the books of singers, women who sprawled across their book covers in long skirts, kitten heels, and artfully applied lipstick. After a few months of compliance, I found my own songbook: Torch Songs. It was full of numbers made famous by Nina Simone, Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughan, and Billie Holiday.
Shirley encouraged me to sing opera, but instead I sang “Black Coffee,” “Don’t Explain,” and “Stormy Weather.” For a few months, I actually practiced, squeezed my eyes closed and belted “God Bless the Child” in the shower before school. Somewhere, there is a VHS recording of a recital at our local Unitarian Church, for which I sung “Summertime” (my choice) and Judy Garland’s “Smile” (a compromise with Shirley).
I discovered that Billie had been a junkie around the same time I became one. A particularly bad-news boyfriend and I watched Diana Ross’s hysterical performance in Lady Sings the Blues while nodding out on dope in his Brockton bedroom. A year later, I turned nineteen and moved to New York, hoping I could leave heroin behind, along with that boyfriend. On the wall of my tiny SRO in Chelsea, I tacked a poster of that iconic Billie portrait, first published in DownBeat magazine in February 1947. Stage lights illuminate her profile and throw everything else into darkness. The singer’s head tilts back as she sings, eyes closed, mouth open, neck tensed yet graceful. Though a simulacrum of pain, there is yielding in her open throat and smooth brow. There was pain in her, yes, but other things, too.
There wasn’t a lot of grace in my fight with heroin. But there was a kind of surrender, as there is every time one slides a needle into a vein. Every time, I was not willing to face what feelings existed in me, my vulnerability to the great influx of this life—its vastness of love and hurt and the infinities of other people. The consequences of drugs were known, at least, and I surrendered to their comfort. Though I took great pains to conceal my addiction from everyone who knew me, I naively believed that they would discern my troubles before my troubles killed me. Still, in those early New York days, I kept a packet of razor blades under my mattress, comforted by the promise of that final escape, if I needed it. Junkie belief systems have a capacity for juggling an astounding number of opposing truths at once.
Nights after I drew that needle out of my arm, I dropped the needle on my record player and drew words across notebook pages. Their rhythms rocked my body and pulled something out of me that had no other exit. I chased that other surrender and hoped I could trade one for the other, though I feared the link between them.
As a dope fiend, Billie had known the ease of familiar pains. But she had also surrendered to those songs, to the ribboning moans they pulled from her. She never escaped heroin, but she did leave that haunted voice in whose howl and murmur I heard my own phantoms. I wanted my pain to be worth something, too. Though I could never look at those pages the next morning.
Even at nineteen, my hubris was not so great that I saw much comparison between my and Billie’s troubles. She was an African American woman who had been abandoned, raped, arrested, and who came of age in brothels. I was a middle-class child of ambiguous ethnic background who had dropped out of high school, picked up drugs, and become a sex worker. I saw my dark turns as choices. More so than hers, at least. Still, every time I looked at that picture it tugged the part of me to whom her voice had first spoken, before I chose any of that darkness, or it chose me.
In my next apartment, I hung a different poster—an image of Billie’s last recording session in 1958, less than a year before her death. She holds a drink and looks decades older than her forty-three years. It is also an image of surrender, but a different kind. She has the vacant pallor that years of addiction give a face. She is dying. A friend of mine once said that it felt wrong to look at her that way. Too intimate. No one should see that much of a person, he meant. But I knew that she wouldn’t have cared. The image of that kind of pain is an echo, a dead star’s light reaching the eye long after its end.
I was preparing for my own death, studying my likely end. I tried to build a story around it that I could live with, or die to. I stopped writing and stopped listening to music. Skinny and silent, I searched the night-sown city, but found only one more ghost-eyed addict to cop for me.
I crouched between the bed and sink of my little room with the phone wedged against my shoulder. I wish I could tell you what’s wrong with me, I whispered, tears dripping onto my knees. It was a lie and also true.
You can tell me anything, honey, my mother said. After she—or one of my few remaining friends—hung up, I would smoke and stare at that poster of Billie. People had recognized Billie’s trouble. She could never conceal it. She was arrested for the last time in her hospital deathbed. I had always identified with her and in those darkest days I also envied her.
Being recognized hadn’t saved Billie from death, but it saved me. By some gift of grace or desperation, I found my way to church basements full of people who knew that darkness and had groped their way out. They had words for my unutterables and I listened to them. I surrendered to these people, to the truth that this world—in all its pain and light—would not disappear if I hid from it. I needed to remember this. If I forgot it, nothing else would matter.
The summer I got clean, I carried a photocopied image of that 1947 photograph into a Lower East Side tattoo shop. I asked the artist to render it against a solid black rectangle just above the crook of my arm, where my track marks were still faintly visible. He began with the outline and filled it in quickly, a darkening doorway smudged with my blood. After the first searing minutes, I relaxed and watched Billie’s face emerge from the frame of black ink as if she were rising from some depth to the surface of my body. When he finished, the artist swabbed away the blood and ink with a wet cloth and we both stared down at her in admiration.
As a little girl, my hips and elbows seemed magnetically attracted to table corners and my forehead never met a car door it didn’t like. My family nickname was Crash. Even then I chose the familiar consequences of escape. I crashed into things because I was lost in fantasy or worry or the books I read even as I walked to the school bus stop.
The thing about pain is that it pins you to the moment, to your body. People are often surprised that most of my tattoos came after I got clean, but I didn’t need tattoos when I had heroin. Heroin erases the body. It erases the pain of the moment. It consolidates your troubles in one place: the need to get more heroin. Tattoos helped prepare me for life without heroin—they taught me to hurt without leaving. I discovered that surrendering to the pain lessened it, and let me move through it.
But these scars are also a way of remembering.
When I was a little girl, my father would hold me up to the night sky and name its stars. Head flung back, I squinted at their fiery pinpricks, stunned by my own smallness. The two etched on my left shoulder—Mizar and its orbiting binary, Alcor, sometimes referred to as “horse and rider”—were my favorites. I always searched for that tiny rider, imagined yielding to the pull of such gravity, of possessing it.
The creature that kneels beside those stars has a woman’s torso and the flexed neck of a swan, her chin to the ground. Wings arc from her shoulders and bend behind her prostrate form—at once an image of beauty and bondage. Folded
forever in this surrender and struggle, she is one of William Blake’s “daughters of Albion,” an engraving from his prophetic poem “Jerusalem,” a figure of thwarted female sexuality, a wish for freedom and a unified self and an oracle foretelling it.
The Virgin Mary who covers my right calf hurt most of all—facedown on the table, I wept onto my arms, the first tears I cried for the death of my abuela, whose name swells beneath that sacred heart.
And the letter B on the back of my hip is proof that I have been in love. That what feels permanent rarely is.
As a kid, I used to bury small objects on our property, detail their locations on paper, then hide the maps. No one ever found these objects, but there was satisfaction in their record. When the secret world of my adolescent desires became too much and I could not ask for help, I left my diary in my parents’ minivan and was genuinely shocked when they read it. The machinations of my own psyche were still mysterious.
As a young woman, I created another secret world in drugs and desire, and it, too, became a lonely hiding place. Without ever consciously acknowledging my own desire to be seen, I wrote a memoir about that world, a story full of things I’d never spoken aloud to anyone.
It is a violent way to emerge, to tell a secret. There is the delay between the telling and its reaction. The time it takes for someone to lift their eyes from the object onto me. Tattoos are a silent way to say: here are my wounds, my scars, my tender places. We are always doing this anyway, aren’t we? We leave clues and hope someone will find them, will care enough to follow. I’ve never been the type to spill my life story into a stranger’s ear. But there are other ways of undressing. In writing, I find the tender spot and start to push, to peel, to name. Then, I send it out into the world—a pretty, throbbing thing; dulled by handling. Look at me, I say. No, look over there, at my image.
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