Sixty Meters to Anywhere

by Brendan Leonard

  One night after treatment, I sat on the front stoop of the house I shared with Nick and Dave, drinking a cup of coffee and lighting up cigarette after cigarette. I was reading The Old Man and the Sea, and I realized that reading was about the only healthy addiction I’d ever had.

  When I was in third grade, I was obsessed with books. I read all the time. I stayed in to read so often during recess that my teacher told my parents that it might be good for me to go out with the other kids and get some fresh air once in a while. Every time I finished a book, there were others waiting, pulled off my parents’ bookshelves or checked out from the library. I read so many pages for the school reading program that the local newspaper published a small story on me. This, as far as I can remember, was the first thing that had completely consumed me. But other things soon replaced it.

  My dad dressed up for his visit on Family Night, changing out of the black pants and white shirt he’d worn every day for a couple of decades behind the meat counter. I figured a room full of junkies and drunks wouldn’t have judged him if he wore dirty work clothes, but it was a nice gesture. He nodded and listened as I told him about what we did there, showed him the place, and introduced him to some of the folks from my treatment group. I wondered if he was thinking that this might be the strangest thing we’d ever done together.

  Dad had knocked off work early that night, just like he’d knocked off work to be at every single event I had competed in since I was six years old, including the spelling bee in sixth grade. I was never very good at basketball or football or track, but attendance is the love language in my family. On Family Night when he said he was proud of me, I got a lump in my throat and blinked back the tears as Dad talked to a room full of strangers. I resolved to myself that I was not going to suck at sobriety.

  Dad heard Terry’s daughter talk about her high school graduation party, how Terry wasn’t there because he was at a biker bar using meth. She said she was happy he was getting help.

  Dad also got to hear Tom’s wife tell everyone how they got in a fight the other night. When he stormed out of the house, she said she just knew he was going to a pay phone to call his meth dealer, but he didn’t. He just went for a long walk to cool down. She cried as she told the story. Wesley scurried over from our side of the circle to hand her a box of Kleenex.

  When it was our turn, Dad told everyone he wished he hadn’t let me do what I was doing when he knew I was doing it. Like when he came to pick me up to go out to lunch and saw the tickets tacked to the wall of the house where I lived in college: Underage Possession of Alcohol and Possession of an Open Container of Alcohol. I remembered how I thought it was funny and we both laughed about it on the way to the restaurant. I shook my head when he told the group that he could have done something, and I denied that it was his fault in any way. That was the truth.

  The truth is, my mother had always warned me of my genetic predisposition to alcoholism. I had the earliest curfew of any of my friends when I was a teenager. I don’t know if anybody knows what they’re doing when they start raising kids; all they can do is their best. My parents’ best was seventy-hour weeks at a grocery and third shift at the hospital, so my brother and I could have a basketball hoop in the driveway and presents under the tree when our mom got home from work at eight on Christmas morning.

  I had patches on the holes in my jeans when I was a kid, but not before Mom and Dad had patches on theirs. When I think about my tired mom wearing her nurse’s uniform while walking down to the elementary school next to a little kid with snot in his nose and a jar of grasshoppers in his backpack, and I think of my dad staying up all night putting decals on toy fire trucks even though he was beat from smiling and selling Christmas hams for fourteen hours, I know it’s not their fault.

  When I think of all that, I feel tremendous guilt, and the tears well up in my eyes. I want to put my fist through a window.

  Some time after my stint in treatment my friend Craig’s son checked into a Hazelden treatment center to deal with a heroin problem. Craig called me and asked what he could do to help, what he could say to his son. I told him, based on my own battle, I didn’t really think there was anything anyone could say—that you have to figure it out on your own.

  One afternoon on my way out the door, I found a card in the mailbox asking me to RSVP to my five-year high school reunion. Oh, hell no. What was I going to tell people? Reunions are where you go to talk about your accomplishments. That sounded like a nightmare: explaining to everyone that I had graduated from college, become a bartender, and enrolled in substance abuse treatment. Oh, but if things work out with my court case, I’m going to move to Montana in the fall to pursue a master’s degree. No, thank you.

  The Friday before my fifth, and what I hoped was my final, week of treatment, I sat at the rehearsal dinner before Chris and Kerry’s wedding, my first friends from high school to get married. I couldn’t drink enough cups of coffee as everyone else ordered another beer and another beer and another beer. I would have given anything not to be there, but Chris had asked me to be an usher, so I showed up. I left the rehearsal dinner before anyone else and I made it early to the church the next day. After the ceremony, the wedding party boarded a bus, and everyone except me started pounding more cans of cheap beer. A few miles down the road, we stopped to visit Chris’s mom’s grave.

  She had contracted some sort of rare illness, degenerated quickly, and died a couple of months before the wedding. I had hitched a ride to her funeral with another high school buddy and three of his friends, who drank all the way to the service and all the way back.

  Now after Chris and Kerry’s wedding ceremony, we stood there in front of Linda’s grave, and Chris’s dad, Franny, held up his beer and said, “Here’s to ya.” Everyone else held up their beers, and I shoved my hands deeper in my tuxedo pants pockets. Standing in front of your friend’s mother’s grave on his wedding day and not having a beer to hoist in tribute is a bit too much for anyone to be asked to deal with. I left the reception early, hoping Chris and Kerry would understand.

  On Monday afternoon, I tucked into our cozy little group treatment room for my last week of rehab. When it was my turn to talk, Mark asked how the wedding had gone. I told everyone that I had, in fact, controlled myself. As I spoke, it suddenly struck me that there was a possibility they might not believe me. But as I glanced quickly at Wesley and Mark, I was relieved to see that actually, yes, they did. This room full of people who had been strangers now knew my struggle better than anybody in at that wedding reception.

  On my final Thursday, my graduation night, I read my last homework assignment, my After-Care Plan. I wondered if I’d ever write another thing in that spiral notebook. After five weeks of picking me up at the front door of the building, Nick came in for Family Night and introduced himself as my brother.

  Nick was my best friend, for many reasons. I had met him at the Applebee’s restaurant where we worked during college. He was always ready for some fun. We met when we were twenty and found out we shared the same birthplace, Le Mars, and that we had been baptized by the same Catholic priest.

  I liked Nick because he would never turn down a couple of beers, he was funny and animated, and he knew a lot of girls. I think they liked him because they could tell he wasn’t trying to sleep with them. He was looking for a girlfriend, not a one-night stand. We played off each other’s jokes and introduced each other to new people. We even looked a little bit alike. Sometimes people would ask us if we were brothers. He was never in a bad mood and once loaned me $300 so I could pay my rent that month, not knowing if I’d be able to pay it back. I did. And now he gave me rides home from treatment every night. He had earned the privilege of sitting in a circle with a bunch of addicts and alcoholics and their family members.

  At the end of Family Night, and my last group session, Wesley gave me a big desperate smile, and we hugged as he planted a wet kiss on my cheek. Sometimes I think about that look. We both knew we’d never see each other again,
and his eyes pleaded, Goddamn it, kid, I hope you do it, because I don’t know if I can.

  When Nick and I got home, he went in the house, and I sat on the front stoop, smoking a cigarette that felt like a five-minute exhalation. I still had a weeklong jail sentence to serve before I moved to Montana, but a huge chunk of my sentence was finished.

  The next week, I had to attend one after-care meeting, the last time I’d ever see the Covenant Medical Center and the Horizons program. I told Nick I’d get a ride home from someone at the meeting, but really I wanted to walk. It was a chance to remind myself how grateful I was that he had interrupted his life four nights a week for five weeks just to pick me up.

  It was nine miles home, and it took me three hours to walk it in the dark, in sandals. That was the end, my certified completion of a court-ordered twelve-step substance abuse treatment program.

  They do incredible things for you, all those open, understanding, hopeful faces and voices in the group therapy room. They know you can beat your addiction, some days more than you do. But one day you have to leave that cozy little womb of hugs and Serenity Prayers, and you have to step out the clinic’s sliding doors all by yourself. A chapter is over. You wait at the curb for a bus or a friend with a car, and you light a cigarette, and maybe then you realize that no one told you what to do with the rest of your life.

  They don’t tell you that you’ll have to reinvent yourself, which is difficult when all you really know is that you used to love to get fucked-up. That’s not much of a starting point when you’re making small talk with someone new at a party. Hi, my name’s Brendan, and I don’t drink anymore. That’s the absolute first thing I want to tell you about myself, because learning how to not drink anymore has pretty much consumed my life for the past year. So, what about you? What are you into?

  I felt like the only examples I saw for life after treatment were people who either found Jesus, became more or less addicted to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, or relapsed. Recovery is a great time to be “saved” or “reborn” religiously, and being addicted to AA meetings is of course healthier than alcohol.

  If you don’t stay strong, you relapse, and even if you stay strong, relapsing sounds like heaven—you just shut off that voice in your head by giving it what it wants: buckets of cold beer, whiskey Cokes, gin and tonics, and tequila shots. You resign yourself to being a loser and singing along with “Piano Man” every time it comes on.

  If, however, you don’t decide on Jesus, AA, or falling off the wagon, you have to find something else. I had no ideas, but I was intent on escaping Iowa. Now five months sober, I had to talk to someone about leaving the state while on probation. I wasn’t sure it was possible.

  It was raining in the not-so-great part of Waterloo, where my dad drove me to meet Dave Davis, the man who would be my probation officer. We waited with everyone else in a big room and listened to a guy tell us about random piss tests and how our probation officer could call or stop by at any time to make sure we were home by curfew. If we screwed up in the least, it was a year in county jail.

  After the rules guy left, we waited for our individual appointments with our probation officers. I was pessimistic about my chances. I couldn’t imagine that Dave Davis would let me leave the county, let alone go to graduate school three states away.

  But Dave was a great guy. Once we started talking, it was clear that he didn’t have a lot of appointments with people who were pursuing advanced degrees in the liberal arts. Everything was going to be just fine. The system? He’d sign this little piece of paper from the Iowa Department of Corrections, and I could show it to a cop if for some reason he needed to run my ID. All I had to do was send in one hundred dollars of my fine per month, along with the corresponding payment coupon for Dave.

  When we walked out of Dave’s office, I was sure no one else there was even headed to college. I felt grateful—and guilty. What if Wesley did this same sort of meeting with a probation officer? He’d drive into Waterloo, check in, and then drive back out to his lonely farmhouse. No potentially bright future, no new scenery—just the same situation that led him to drinking in the first place.

  CRIMINAL

  I BROUGHT A TWO-FOOT-HIGH STACK OF books with me to the Chickasaw County Jail in New Hampton, my hometown, my last obligation before I left Iowa for grad school. For my first stint in jail, in Iowa City, I hadn’t brought anything with me, so I’d had to borrow my cellmate’s only book, something by Louis L’Amour. I read that book from cover to cover, like any sane man would have if the alternative was staring at the ceiling or out the six-inch-high diamond-wire-glass window on a cold, gray October day.

  This time, I made damn sure I had enough books, and I brought War and Peace as a backup. If ever there was going to be a point in my life when I had enough time to read a thousand-plus-page chunk of Russian literature, it would be while doing time in the county jail.

  Marty, the county sheriff, was kind enough to let me take up a bunk in the jail for seven days near the end of the summer. Even kinder, he let me split my sentence up into two three-and-a-half-day segments so I could attend a drinking driver education class over the weekend. He was sort of familiar with my dad from around town, so we talked a little bit about football and other stuff before getting to the standard intake interview.

  “Height?” he asked.

  “Five ten,” I said.

  “Weight?”

  “One sixty-five.”

  “Hair?”

  “Brown.”

  “Eyes?”

  “Blue.”

  “Scars?”

  From my past experience, I decided it was easier to just show him. “One here,” I said and pointed to the two-inch scar running across my left forearm. I had run into a barbed-wire fence one time when I got drunk my senior year of high school.

  “And one here,” I said, lifting up my shirt to show him the scar that ran armpit to armpit just under my nipples, another souvenir from the fence.

  “Four cigarette burns on my arms—here, here, here, and here.” I never remembered how much the previous time had hurt.

  “All right. Any tattoos?”

  “One here.” I patted underneath my right arm. “5-31-97.” I had gotten it right next to the armpit-to-armpit scar to remember the date it happened.

  “Okay.”

  “And one on my lower back. ‘Too weird to live, too rare to die.’ ” I looked at the form he was filling out to see if he would misspell “weird.” It was one of those words that usually took everyone, including me, a couple of tries.

  “Any others?”

  “One more on my ass. It says ‘A tattoo.’ ”

  “No shit?” He smiled as he wrote it down.

  “Yeah. Once upon a time, it was a great party joke.”

  “I’m sure it was. Have you ever tested positive for the HIV virus?”

  “No.”

  “Use intravenous drugs?”

  “Nope.”

  “Ever have a seizure?”

  “Nope.”

  “Homosexual?”

  “Nope.”

  “Ever tried to kill yourself?”

  “Nope.”

  “Thinkin’ about tryin’ it while you’re in here?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay. This next part probably isn’t your favorite. Strip down, turn around, and face the wall.”

  Up until this point, I could pretty much rationalize that I wasn’t a real criminal; I was just a guy who drove after having a little too much to drink.

  “Show me the bottoms of your feet . . . Bend over and spread your cheeks . . . All right, stand up and turn around . . . Arms over your head . . . Okay, arms down. Lift up your scrotum . . . Okay, get dressed.”

  When an officer looks in your ass for drugs, though, the line between you and the “real criminals” is suddenly a lot blurrier. I followed the sheriff down a steel hallway. I had always wondered what was in this building when I drove by it in high school, never really expecting to find
out.

  “We’ll put you down here by yourself until we need this cell,” he said. He carried my books, and I carried my rubber mattress and pillow, sheets, blanket, towel, soap, toothbrush, comb, deodorant, and plastic water cup.

  Down the corridor we went. I wanted to knock on one of the walls, but my hands were full. There must have been a bolt driven into them every three inches along the seams. I wondered if the same people who built ships also built jails.

  My cell door double-locked, tight enough to keep out a rush of water should the jail go under in a tsunami. Inside was a shower, sink, toilet, television, and two bunks. Steel bars on one side, steel walls on the others. Even the toilet was made of steel, with a push-button flush and no seat. You had to sit on the rim of the toilet, which most folks only do in the middle of the night when someone else has forgotten to put the lid down. You could wash your hands only one at a time, as your other hand held down the sink button that made the water run.

  The bunks had one-inch holes to provide a little air under the bodyfluid-proof mattress. The holes would also ensure that any cellmate on the upper bunk who pissed his bed also pissed on the lower bunk, and me.

  I threw my collection of jail-issue stuff on the bottom bunk and turned on the TV. Antenna broken off, no knobs, just a safe plastic tenkey cable box to change the channels. I walked back across the cell to my bunk. Three steps.

  Above the toilet, there was a video camera, which would give whoever was on the other end of the closed circuit a full-frontal shot every time I urinated.

  I moved my books from the bed to the floor, flipped through the television channels, and settled in. The mattress was lumpy and hard, and the pillow was little more than a waterproof bag of loose stuffing. It was like being quarantined in my college dorm room for a week straight, but with even crappier food and no interaction. I wanted to tell the sheriff I had changed my mind about doing my sentence just then.