How to Grow Up
Page 25
Shocker—changing cities didn’t make me feel any better, and Los Angeles sucks without a car. We returned to San Francisco, and within a year or so I was ready to reckon with my drinking. All the while, I never stopped codependently following my ex to the gym, first to the Chinatown YMCA, where Ping-Pong was considered physical activity, then to the Embarcadero YMCA, where the elliptical machines looked out onto the San Francisco Bay. I had stopped putting poison into my body, and slowly my body was coming back to me. Working up a sweat helped squeeze decades of accumulated toxins from my pores a little quicker. No longer depressing my nervous system with booze on the daily, I suddenly had a bunch of excess energy. Sleeping was hard, as I’d become accustomed to not so much drifting into a slumber but passing the fuck out. And I was still drinking coffee at emergency hangover levels, even though I was hungover no more. Working out gave me a place to put all this antsy new energy, and made falling asleep a little bit easier (though I still gobbled down herbs and supplements to help shut off the whir in my mind).
Other things were happening to my body, things I wasn’t quite as aware of in my newly sober haze. The exercise was releasing endorphins, which I needed badly, coming off a booze-induced depression and into the stark screaming anxiety that is life with all its edges intact. Exercise also increases the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a protein that makes you smart and sharp and helps your memory. Every single person benefits from the exercise-related production of this magic stuff, but for people who have been dousing their systems in booze it’s even more crucial: Studies on poor little rats have shown that drinking a bunch of booze actually ruins your brain’s ability to churn out BDNF. Here is scientific proof of what we all already knew—drunks are dopey and foggy and can’t remember shit. But working out can reverse that. The combination of exercise and getting off the sauce not only gave me my body back; it gave me my brain back!
It’s no wonder so many former boozehounds join what I call the “get sober, get buff” lifestyle. When my ex and I split up I no longer needed his codependent peer pressuring to hit the gym; addict that I am, I’d become addicted to working out. I’m not kidding. Just as people can get hooked on sex and shopping and eating, they can get strung out on exercise. My sober body was especially starved for feel-good chemicals, and a half hour on the elliptical let loose a storm of endorphins and enkephalins and endocannabinoids, all of which mimic the effects of various drugs on your nervous system. I felt rad, and I was hooked on feeling rad. It also didn’t hurt that after decades of neglecting my body I was suddenly becoming fit and strong. My postworkout flush had me glowing all day.
After my ex and I split, I switched gyms, moving from the rather posh YMCA downtown to a scuzzy place folks I know had dubbed the Prison Gym, as it resembled the sort of grimy, bare-bones workout space one might find themselves pumping iron in whilst incarcerated. I loved it. I mean, I wish it had been cleaner. I did fear picking up MRSA or some other frightening antibiotic-resistant flesh-eating bacteria each time I lay down on one of their grubby mats to stretch. And I did have my cell phone stolen from my locker by a gang of homosexual teenagers. (Thanks for nothing, comrades!) But the skater dudes who worked the desk were cute and helpful, the monthly rate was dirt cheap, and my fellow exercisers were a refreshingly motley crew. No yoga moms here, no tight-assed gym queens, no muscle-headed athletes. There was the elderly woman in the Pope John Paul II sweatshirt who wore her rosary while she worked out her forearms; the woman with the Satanic tattoos, severe black hair, and the largest bosom I had ever seen, who I was sure had captained an all-girl street gang in the past. There were lots of writers trying to bring some tone to their scrawny writer physiques. And there were bunches of sober drunks I knew from around town. My favorite was rather handsome, in a Dennis Hopper way, and I had a special fondness for him after hearing him tell a friend that his “old lady” had tossed his yoga equipment out the window during a fight. This was not what you’d expect from a biker who had dollar signs tattooed on his eyelids. One afternoon I saw him watching me as I struggled with an ab machine. The Prison Gym’s equipment was pretty busted, and many of the old machines had been built during an era when women didn’t work out as much. It was hard to figure out how to fit my tiny, five-feet-three-inch frame into the chair and use it in a way that wasn’t actually hurting my body.
I grew tense watching Eyelids watching me. I just knew he was going to come over and man-splain the best way to use the machine. I broke off eye contact and put a scowl on my face—what I do when I’m hoping to ward off a helpful man. As much as I admired my eccentric gym-mates, I didn’t want to strike up a friendship with any of them. I was there to get buff and get high on endorphins, not to buddy up with a probable ex-con. But then I stopped. In 12-step we’re taught to be teachable. So many drunks aren’t; we think we know everything. I know that nondrunk humans can have this problem, too, and in general it’s great to remember to be teachable—open, flexible, approachable. I decided to give Eyelids a chance.
I was right. Just as my bitch’s intuition (bitch’s intuition: the sixth sense that tells a lady when her lover is cheating on her and also when a strange man is going to approach her) had told me, Eyelids wanted to show me a more helpful way to use the busted ab machine. He ripped the seat off a different busted machine, stacked it on top of the ab machine’s seat, and voilà! I was now at the correct height to work out my core without throwing my back out. I thanked Eyelids, my stomach got ripped, and the two of us became friendly. “Hey, Muscles!” he’d shout at me in the street. “Lemme see; lemme see!” I’d flex my wimpy peanut muscles at him and he’d give me a high five. This would never have happened at the Y. I went there for years and no one ever spoke to me except to scold me for dragging my gym bag around with me when I forgot to bring quarters for the lockers. At the Prison Gym, the lockers were free. They also had no doors, which is how the Gang of Baby Gays stole my Android, but oh well. You make sacrifices for an interesting life.
After years of working out, it has become a solid part of my life. I might fall off—especially with round after round of IVF treatments, which require no sudden moves while waiting for a zygote to hopefully implant itself into your soothing, serene uterus—but I always get back on. While living in my eleven-hundred-dollar birthday apartment I’d hoof it into the Castro and plunk myself down on the rowing machine beside a batch of brawny gym queens. Now I’m living out by the ocean with my husband-wife-spouse-person. (Dashiell’s a female, but she looks like a male model and I just can’t figure out what to call her!) It’s the most suburban place I’ve ever lived in my life, and there are no gyms close by, prison-esque or otherwise. But there is the sea. In the morning I pull on the running shoes Dashiell bought me after I horrified her by trying to hike in a pair of thrifted cowboy boots. What do you think cowboys hiked around in? I’d asked her, and she admitted I had a point, but she still bought me a pair of hideous, embarrassing hot-pink-and-neon-green sneakers. I became somewhat less ashamed of them after I watched Texas senator Wendy Davis do her feminist filibuster in the exact same pair, but still. Running shoes aren’t really my style. Neither is the athletic headband I stretch over my ears, or the weird thin black gloves that keep my hands warm, or the fanny pack I stuff my house keys and cell phone in. When I go jogging in the morning, I look like someone else. Tali wanted to see, so I texted her a picture of me, cozy in the giant BOSTON hoodie I stole from my sister.
You better wear a punk T-shirt or something; you look like a yuppie, Tali texted. To which I replied, I got a neck tattoo, bitch. I don’t need to prove shit! My tattoos really come in handy sometimes, like when I get a little nervous about what a suburban yuppie I’ve become.
The first time I jogged on the beach I worried I would hate it. In spite of this love letter to exercise, I often find myself counting the minutes till my workout is done. Always the addict, I want instant gratification—endorphins ASAP—and on lazier days those twenty minutes
on the elliptical can feel endless. At the gym I distracted myself with the banks of TVs hanging from the ceiling, blaring Real Housewives or Rachel Maddow. What would I do on the beach to make my workout fly by?
Well, I would be on the beach, face-to-face with the motherfucking ocean. What is more glorious than running alongside this big, heaving, wondrous mass of liquid life, with the morning sky a pastel watercolor of lavender and periwinkle? Nothing. Nothing in the whole world. The roar of the waves is hypnotic; the sight of the surfers in the butt-ass-cold Northern California water, handling the brutal waves, was majestic. Seabirds scattered in a flock as I approached, making me giggle. There were men in waders, fishing, their poles jammed into the sand. Once there was a pod of dolphins. Dolphins! Dolphins are about as close as we come to unicorns in real life. I stood on the shore and watched their fins break the surface, dozens of them. I was so jealous. I wished I wasn’t completely terrified of the ocean and could be out there with the animals like the surfers and the paddleboarder and that one hard-core swimmer.
At the end of my beach jog I felt amazing. Sure, I’d just started a new course of antidepressants, and the Zoloft was just kicking in, but it wasn’t only synthetic. Jogging became a habit, and as with all habits I would lapse occasionally, sick with a cold or busy with a morning meeting. On those days I just didn’t feel as awesome. I woke up anxious. I entertained gloomy-doomy thoughts about my future. But on days that I ran alongside the ocean, forget it. Life was fantastic. Jogging produced in me a peacefulness, an ability to accept it all as it is. And after a lifetime of childishly chasing various highs, the ability to feel content where I am strikes me as strikingly adult. On my way home from my runs, I scan the shore for treasures, bringing home a shell or a piece of sea glass, a sand dollar or a special stone. I lay them out on my front steps and see them as I come and go. These tangible bits of beauty remind me of the beauty of my runs, of the planet, of myself. The way I’ve allowed myself to be transformed by life is gorgeous, and sometimes it’s hard to remember when you get caught up in the daily chaos of texting and e-mailing and cooking and cleaning. When I see this pile of treasure I remember these morning jogs, just me and the ocean, me in my body and the ocean in its depths, alive and grateful, grown-up but still a bit forever young in the face of its ancient tides.
Acknowledgments
Gigantic thanks to Lindsay Edgecombe, without whom this book would not exist. Thank you for your belief and enthusiasm and sharp eye, and for always having my back. To Kathleen Napolitano, also for her belief and enthusiasm and sharp eye, for helping me structure the original manuscript from a rambling tangent to something legitimately readable. To the many beloved people who have helped me grow up: Kathleen Black, Ali Liebegott, Alexis Persyko, Tara Perkins, Beth Pickens, and Tara Jepsen. And to the biggest reward for all lessons learned, Dashiell Lippman. Thank you for your constant support and highest-quality love.
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