Sixty Meters to Anywhere

by Brendan Leonard

  Amy and I were in another hazily defined stage of our on-again, offagain relationship. I’d first noticed her in my information systems class my junior year at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. She was pretty, with short blonde hair, and she always wore black or gray. A few weeks later, I offered to buy her a drink in a bar, the first time I’d done that for a girl, hoping to go on a date or two. We became a couple a few weeks before I turned twenty-one, when my drinking turned the corner from fun to disastrous. We drank together, sometimes just the two of us, sometimes with my friends. Some nights she babysat us after we’d already had enough to drink to handicap ourselves—the kind of thing you do when you think you’re invincible.

  She moved to Omaha just before my senior year, and we took turns driving the four hours to see each other on weekends. If it was my turn, I usually picked up a twelve-pack of some Budweiser at the QuikTrip off the Merle Hay exit on I-80 to get me through the last two hours of the trip, arriving at her apartment with six empty cans in the backseat and hoping she’d drive us to the bar.

  In the early years of our relationship, I wasn’t good to her. Sober, I opened doors, listened, and tried to be the kind of guy a girl would want to be with. But drunk and a couple hundred miles away, I didn’t often act like a guy with a girlfriend.

  The day after my first DUI arrest, I showed up in Omaha feeling terrible. I didn’t know how I’d ever have enough money to pay for a lawyer, much less the fines. But Amy and I went out drinking. She told me she’d pay for our bar tab, and I drank eleven White Russians, spending money I knew she didn’t have. Another time, I called her from a bar back in Cedar Falls and told her I thought I would drive to see her that night even though I’d already had eight or so drinks. When I arrived, she had a deep cough and was having difficulty breathing, but she insisted she was fine, and we went to sleep. A few days later, she went to the hospital and found out she had aspiration pneumonia from making herself vomit up food. Sometimes I think we were just a couple of fucked-up kids.

  For a lot of people, college can seem like a time where everyone’s partying and making their own bad decisions. I saw plenty of things that helped me rationalize my behavior. I wasn’t that different from the guys who were my neighbors and friends, I thought, and my stories from nights out seemed pretty similar to other people’s. Eventually, though, when my problems with drinking started to outpace everyone else’s, I had to be honest with myself: when I was drinking, I was self-centered, arrogant, and out-of-control.

  Now I have the rest of my life to make up for it. I guess you could call it penance.

  RECONSTRUCTION

  I STEPPED OFF THE ELEVATOR ON the second floor of the Covenant Medical Center and headed for the reception desk. Day one. Here we go. I signed in, and a nurse held up a Breathalyzer.

  I passed—my first time ever. I almost smiled. It was the simplest thing, only proving I hadn’t been dumb enough to drink a bunch of booze right before my first day of treatment, but it made me feel better than I had in a long, long time.

  When everyone arrived, I shuffled into a group therapy room about the size of a guest bedroom, behind three middle-aged guys, an older woman, and a young guy. The introductions, shortened from the typical Alcoholics Anonymous “Hi, my name is Brendan, and I’m an alcoholic,” were: “Wesley, alcoholic.” “Susan, alcoholic.” “Brad, addict.” “Jim, alcoholic.” “Robert, alcoholic.” Then me: “Brendan, alcoholic.” And Mark, the group counselor, also an alcoholic. None of us looked like we’d ever be part of the same social circle outside of that room. Mark made the veteran group members read their homework assignments from the past weekend.

  Wesley was a grandfather with a salt-and-pepper ponytail and fifteen-year-old eyeglasses. His wife left him, all alone in his house in the country, so he started drinking. He had never really drunk much before and wasn’t from a family of alcoholics, but he was bored. After a few months of sitting at home pounding booze, he got pretty used to it. One day, he was driving into town to stock up and a state trooper pulled him over. Because of his high blood alcohol level and a comment that maybe he ought to just end it all, the state recommended he go through a substance abuse treatment program. Wesley was on Antabuse, a drug that would make him vomit and give him vertigo, among other things, if he were to have a drink.

  Susan was probably in her early fifties, and eight months ago her doctor had given her six months to live. She had cirrhosis, thanks to the vodka she drank every day to kill the boredom of her life as a housewife. She had three daughters, a granddaughter, and a shitload of other health problems. She had quit drinking with both feet in the grave.

  Brad was twenty years old and had a cocaine problem. He lived with his grandparents. When he started treatment, he began to make his bed every day to signal a fresh start and remember to take it one day at a time. Brad was positive and honest, one of those people who was good right to the core. I felt better about myself if he just asked me how I was doing. I made my bed every morning for the next five years.

  Jim was a wiry guy with a mustache and a few hard years showing on his face. He was tan, wore a thin gold chain, and looked fifty-five instead of his actual forty-five. He had graduated from treatment, but he still showed up once a week to sit in on group therapy.

  Robert was originally from a poor neighborhood in Chicago and had worked his way into what sounded like a pretty successful life. He was on his second marriage in his early forties and was in a layperson position of leadership in his church. He made it sound like he got drunk in his garage a lot.

  I felt like Randle Patrick McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, when he met all his goofy new neighbors in the psych ward.

  I do not belong here. These people are not my people, but they’re all I’ve got for now.

  Mark gave me a notebook to use for my homework. My first assignment: write ten “interferences,” or ways I interfered in the lives of other people when I was drinking. This was a nightly assignment. Easy enough. I felt I could probably keep writing out ten interferences a day for the rest of my life and still not be done.

  When the evening’s treatment session was over, we all stood up in a circle, held hands, and recited the Serenity Prayer: God grant me the serenity / To accept the things I cannot change; / Courage to change the things I can; / And wisdom to know the difference.

  Mark said that the word “God” didn’t have to mean “God.” It could just be a “higher power,” which was anything we needed it to be. It could be the program itself. But I decided that for the time being I was going to go ahead and believe in God, because cigarettes and coffee didn’t seem to be quite enough.

  I felt hopeful about treatment as I sat on a bench in front of the building, watching the sun set.

  My roommate, Nick, rolled up in his red sedan, and I hopped in the passenger side.

  “I don’t think it’s going to be that bad,” I said.

  The next morning, I made my single bed, tucking the flannel sheets neatly under the pillow. I only had a few minutes before I had to walk to my lunch bartending shift. I had burned the Peter Gabriel song “Solsbury Hill” onto a CD after hearing it in the movie Vanilla Sky, and had it turned up loud as I shuffled around my small bedroom picking things up.

  The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I figured even if Peter Gabriel hadn’t intended the lyrics to be about substance abuse treatment, that’s what they would mean to me, especially the part about my heart beating, and going home. By myself in my bedroom, I smiled. For the first time in more than a year, I felt like I had a chance.

  As part of treatment, I completed a homework assignment every day like “Finish the sentence: I feel good about being sober because ___________” or “Finish the sentence: For recovery, I’m willing to ___________.” Writing down my interferences, though, was like going to confession. Since I knew I was going to read them aloud in group, I kept them kind of tame. I left out the really bad shit. No one needed to know that I’d cheated on Amy, or
that I’d stolen someone’s car so I could run over stop signs with it. No one had to know that I broke my dad’s heart one summer Sunday when we missed a Cardinals–Twins game because I got drunk the night before and overslept in someone’s basement, where I’d passed out the night before.

  The important part was that I understood that I was an asshole. And I did. I got it. I knew I was an asshole when I hit bottom, or “rock bottom,” which is what addicts call the ultimate fuckup—the one that makes you realize it’s time to quit.

  My first Thursday of treatment, I looked at all the unfamiliar faces around the circle of chairs: all the wives, husbands, fathers, and kids who had come for Family Night. All the damaged but hopeful loved ones who had all been fucked over by one of us in some way. They were there to help, if someone could tell them how.

  We were required to have a family member attend group therapy with us on at least one Family Night during our five-week treatment, and my mom was the first of my family members to join me. She was a sweet little ball of nervous energy sitting in the chair next to mine, leaning forward like always. I felt 45 percent shame that she had to do something like this and 55 percent gratitude to have her there.

  She looked at me and smiled as she introduced herself to the group. I swallowed a lump in my throat. She told them she was proud of me for getting help, even though I knew she was disappointed with me for getting myself there in the first place. When she looked at me, I wanted to be fifteen again. I wanted to start over and never take that first drink. I wanted to never put cigarettes out on myself or get tattoos, or have sex with girls I didn’t know. I wanted to be that kid on the math team in middle school, the kid who got selected to be in the talented-and-gifted class. I wanted to be an architect or a law student or a physicist, or whatever all those other talented-and-gifted kids are now, not in substance abuse treatment with cokeheads and meth addicts and drunks.

  At the break, we all went outside to smoke cigarettes. That’s what addicts do: We rely on the last acceptable drug. This was the first time I had ever smoked in front of my mom, the nurse practitioner. She didn’t say anything about it.

  When we went back inside, Mom turned to me and said, “I always liked Sundays, because Grandpa never drank on Sundays.”

  This was the most detailed information I had ever received about her father’s drinking problem. He was only around until I was seven years old, when he died of a heart attack at age fifty-nine. When I was a kid, I had no idea that Grandpa was a drunk. I remembered him as a guy who ribbed me about my Dukes of Hazzard obsession and took my brother, Chad, and me down to the Emmetsburg fire station to climb all over the fire trucks, where he let us split a bottle of Bubble Up from the soda machine while he did some stuff in the office. Maybe he was sipping a bottle of whiskey back there while we played—who knows.

  I asked Chad about it once. He said that all those times I’d asked Grandpa if I could have a piece of gum, the mint we smelled on Grandpa’s breath was probably peppermint schnapps. I have never pressed Grandma or Mom or any of her six brothers and sisters for details about what he was like on the days he did drink, if he’d done something that they all carried with them.

  On Family Night, when Mom met Mark, I thought how similar it was to the time I’d introduced her to my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Moore, at parent-teacher conferences. I showed Mom the closet where we hung our tiny jackets and backpacks every morning, and then my sloppy crayon writing on a worksheet hanging next to twenty-five other kids’ work. I thought now about how, in a way, I was still a lost kid. In first grade, I was trying to learn how to tie my shoes and walk all the way to school by myself, and now I was trying to learn how to stop drinking beer, something a lot of kids my age had already figured out.

  Robert, the guy from Chicago, relapsed the weekend between my second and third week of treatment. No one really knew what happened, but he didn’t show up for group that Monday. His second wife had probably left him. Even so, I thought he was a chickenshit for relapsing, but I didn’t say that to anybody. Then I wondered whether he’d decided to take a couple of weeks to go on a pretty good bender before he gave it another shot, because that was sure as hell what I’d do. No sense half-assing it.

  I never got the point of doing anything halfway. I’d always been like that to a certain extent, but after treatment it became the one guiding principle of everything I did—especially when it came to staying dry. Growing up, I never shoveled half the driveway or mowed half the lawn, left a homework assignment undone, or tried to get away with slacking at my job washing dishes at a restaurant. So even if I was in the treatment program only because it was one of the terms of my probation, I was going to finish. It was tough, but not tougher than me. This, I later found, was the same mantra that got me to the top of mountains when I felt too exhausted to take another step.

  At night after I got home from treatment, I usually spent some time writing, watching movies, or sitting on the front stoop reading and smoking cigarettes. Friday nights were the real bitch, especially during the summer, when I felt like I should be in a lawn chair or sitting out on some bar’s back patio drinking myself into a thick mellow hum. The sun would sink, the music would begin to sound great, and all the girls would look beautiful in their dresses, and everyone would wish the whole year would feel like that. It was all I could do to stay home clutching a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes.

  The third Monday night of treatment, I met the new guy, Steve. We’d met before, only once, but we recognized each other immediately. During the Christmas season my senior year of college, I worked at a steak house for about three weeks. One of the managers there was nice to me, and one night when I was working she introduced me to her husband, Steve, who came in to have a beer at the bar.

  Steve had checked himself into inpatient treatment Friday night, and they’d kept him basically locked in the treatment center, because that’s what “inpatient” meant. Among other things, they looked through your stuff to make sure you didn’t bring in any cologne or alcohol-based mouthwash or any pills.

  He and his wife had two kids, he told the group, and he drank too much and made an ass out of himself at times. He once did a shot of Bacardi 151 and blew a fireball the length of the bar in the steak house where his wife worked. It wasn’t the type of place where people got drunk—or expected fireballs—as they enjoyed some country music and waited to dig into a nice slab of beef.

  During a break, Steve told me he had gotten so drunk at his own wedding reception that he was passed out by 9 p.m. His wife didn’t party nearly as hard, because she was six months pregnant with their first kid.

  I nodded, silently confirming that, yes, he should be in rehab. I didn’t know a lot of dads who blew fireballs with 151. Most just played golf.

  It felt good to have Steve there, as he was the only other person younger than thirty-five since Brad had graduated.

  I kept up my routine: Work a lunch shift at the bar, find a ride across town to Horizons in the afternoon, wait for Nick to pick me up, get up the next morning, and walk to work.

  When you’re just getting used to calling yourself a “recovering alcoholic,” working in a bar is not ideal. Though I worked mainly lunch shifts, on Saturday nights I poured hundreds of beers, popping the tap handles forward, then back, watching each glass fill, not too much foam. It all happened twelve inches from my mouth, the smell of beer constant as I poured fifty gallons, dumped out the leftovers, and washed the glasses. I was the gatekeeper for those people doing my favorite thing, just on the other side of the bar. I didn’t have another way to make a living, or I would have quit. Instead, I steeled myself as best I could, and gave my free shift beer to whoever tended bar with me that night.

  One Wednesday afternoon, after the lunch rush had died down, a guy walked in the door and sat at the bar. I thought I recognized him. He ordered a gin and tonic, and when he spoke, it clicked. I walked around the bar to pour a one-shot count into a short rocks glass and peered at him over th
e upturned gin bottle.

  “Jim?” I said.

  “Yeah?” He seemed unfazed by the fact that I knew his name.

  “You recognize me from anywhere?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Never seen you before.”

  “Jim, I know you from treatment,” I said. “Brendan? Horizons?” Ring a bell? Jesus.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “How you doin’?”

  “I’m good. Listen, should I be serving you this drink?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “It’s fine. I fell off the wagon last weekend.”

  “Oh,” I said. “All right then.”

  “Yeah, we found out my wife was pregnant,” he said.

  What?

  I shot the shit with him for a few more minutes, and he ordered another drink. He took off before my shift was over. He didn’t even tip me. I didn’t tell anyone from treatment about that evening. I figured it wasn’t a positive development for anyone.

  In that group therapy room, I experienced true, authentic empathy for the first time. It felt so safe when all the normal walls were knocked down. I could be vulnerable, and in turn care deeply for people I’d only known a few weeks. I didn’t want Wesley to kill himself. I wanted DHS to leave Susan’s family the hell alone, even if her daughter smoked too much pot. I wanted her to survive cirrhosis so she could take care of her granddaughter, who didn’t sound like she would have much of a chance.

  By the end of a session, I felt like we had all been through the Normandy Invasion, and I didn’t mind hugging people I didn’t know at the end of the night. On Family Nights, our group met in a big room with another treatment group the same size as ours. I didn’t know those people as well, but I wasn’t jaded or cynical. When they spoke, I nodded and gave encouraging smiles. As much as possible, I told them they were doing the right thing.