Let's Take the Long Way Home

by Gail Caldwell

  The exchange hovered through my consciousness for the next three years I would drink. Jackie had dared to ask what I could not; my answer had let someone else in the room with all that fear, if only for a minute. A few months later, I moved down the street to an attic garret, a place with all the romantic underpinnings of the life I hoped to lead and all the bleak corners of what I first had to leave behind. Jackie had the foresight and kindness to understand this darkness and stay nearby while I lived through it. I braved the streets of Boston, landed some freelance writing assignments, came home and poured down drinks while I hammered away on the Adler typewriter. I got a Persian kitten and named him Dashiell Hammett, and he sat on the pillows of my bed while I drank, his huge eyes witness to the staggering and the late-night blackouts I couldn’t stand to endure alone. The Phoenix, an alternative newspaper in Boston, took me on as a regular contributor, and I wrote my columns in the light of morning when I was sober; if I was a drunk, I was also a perfectionist—two traits, I believed, that would ultimately balance each other out. I smuggled pamphlets on alcoholism out of a doctor’s office and took the twenty-question test with a glass of bourbon in my hand. In the early 1980s, the questions still made traditional social assumptions about women; one of them, unforgettably, was “Have your husband and children ever expressed concern about your drinking?” I checked off “No” with a flourish. No husband, no children, no worries.

  The more looming truth was that what had seemed like liberation—the flight from Texas, the brown bags of whiskey, the reinvention of a life—was revealing itself to be unmoored terror. On the advice of an internist, I went to see a psychotherapist and hypnotist who specialized in substance abuse. He placed me in a reclining chair as though I were in a dentist’s office, and every time he hypnotized me I began to weep silently, the tears streaming down my face until my hair was wet. This in itself was evidence that some deep sorrow was trying to get out, but the hypnotist seemed to think aversion therapy was in order. He instructed me to go home and drink as much as I possibly could in the following week, then bring him a quart of scotch to pay for our next appointment.

  I like to think that my compromised state—the drinking, the soggy trances—was what kept me from fleeing this strange milieu. For weeks I went back, hoping somehow he could hit the magic switch that would end my paralyzed attachment. Then one day he came into the room smiling. He told me that he had taken LSD the previous week and had had a vision of me; he knew now that everything was going to be all right. He went on to describe the sexual infatuation he believed existed between us, one that, he was careful to say, would never be acted on. “On a scale of one to ten,” he told me, in a mode of cheerful confession, “you’re about a nine.” After assuring him that this numeric affection belonged to him alone, I fled. I never paid the bill he sent me for that last mystical instruction; I never answered his querulous letters. For years I pondered the damage he could have done, or at least the failure he had visited on me.

  BECAUSE I HAD the sense and the pride not to drive drunk or appear blasted in public, my world got smaller and smaller. I had bruises on my upper arms from running into doorways; when I sprained my ankle, I tied two plastic bags to the crutch handles—one holding ice, the other, a flask of bourbon—and hobbled with my portable bar from the kitchen to the desk. Then one night I went beyond these amateur foibles and took a fall that landed me in the ER. Standing before the bathroom mirror in one of those Leonard Cohen tragic moments, I had collapsed, dead weight, with a glass of scotch in my hand. I landed crosswise against the bathtub and broke four ribs. It was four a.m. Even to my denial-racked mind, this was no longer social drinking.

  The cultural dictates of time and space—of Texas and its drinking culture, of the still provincial understanding about addiction—had always told me that alcoholism was something untreatable and reprehensible. It happened to people who were broken in other ways, or weak, or who didn’t have the willpower to straighten up and fly right, as my dad would have said. What this version always left out was the inner struggle—the want for drink trying to eclipse the light of survival—that someone in the throes of addiction endures. Every morning, waking to the sorrows of another night’s failures, I would swallow my fear and swear that this time, today, I would have only four drinks. I would switch to vodka, or go to a movie, or call Jackie, who now lived in New York, and tell her how bad it was. The tape would play all day long—courage/terror, resolve/yearning, bargaining/surrender—and then I would crack open the freezer for the ice and my whole body would exhale in relief, and the cycle would start to play itself out again.

  The worst psychic legacy of this endless loop was the ongoing feeling of betrayal. Each day I made a contract not to drink, and every night by eight or nine I had broken it again. The erosion, like water on stone, was gradual and constant. I had been blessed with parents whose separate strengths had been passed on to me; I had my mother’s independence and my father’s tough-minded resolve. And I had a trust in myself that was based on three decades of pretty good outcomes. But this adversary was far crueler, stronger, more persistent than any challenge I had faced. The last year had proven that it was no longer a deadlock; I had actually had a dream that I was in the ring with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and I was being beaten to a pulp. For more than a decade I had negotiated with the gods so that I could keep the booze: Meet the deadline, get the bottle. Get the writing assignment, have the drink. The better I felt about the prose at the end of the day, the greater the reward.

  WHICH MIGHT EXPLAIN the cliffwalker behavior I engaged in as a writer, going after stories that I thought would somehow legitimate my intake. I had been scheduled to leave two days after my fall on an assignment to the weather observatory atop Mount Washington in New Hampshire, a moonlike outpost that boasted the worst weather in the world. Because of the broken ribs, I postponed the trip for six weeks. When I made the three-hour bus ride in February to Gorham, New Hampshire, at the base of the mountain, my ribs were still wrapped and I had painkillers and two quarts of whiskey in my luggage. We left Boston at six p.m., and the bus headed north into the dark. I sat on that lonely bus in the cold with my aching ribs and my Percocet, eating a bleak little ham sandwich I had packed for the trip, trying not to think about the frightening state I found myself in. By the time we got to Gorham, the end of the line, there was only one other passenger, a creepy-looking man who made eyes my way and acted as though he might follow me. I got off the bus using a walking stick to navigate the ice and made it to the local hostel, and as soon as I got to my room I threw down eight ounces of bourbon. The next morning when the Sno-Cat arrived to drive me and a couple of geologists up the mountain, I was more worried about the glass bottles I had stashed in my backpack than I was about my own fractured anatomy.

  Consciously or inadvertently, I had picked a drinker’s hermitic paradise at the observatory. The meteorologists were used to being locked in by inclement weather for weeks at a time, and they had a full liquor reserve along with their gallons of tomato sauce and industrial-size spices. My two housemates gave me a glass-lined office overlooking the ravines of Mount Washington; evenings, we would meet to cook dinner over a few drinks. Their morning shift began at five a.m., so by eight every night I could retire to my bunkbeds and my bottle of bourbon. And every night I made a scratch on the bottle so I could be sure the rations would last.

  The next few months were a blur of adrenaline and fear, a last-ditch effort to maintain the facade. I arranged to do a story about Boston Light, one of the last manned lighthouses in America, which entailed my spending the night on Little Brewster Island in Boston Harbor with the lightkeeper and his dog. I still had the morning shakes when the Coast Guard’s cigarette boat arrived to take me over to the island. There were three or four sweet, rowdy fellows in the boat, showing off and gunning the engine, and because I didn’t want them to see how nervous and sick I was, I employed the old Texas maneuver of raising the stakes. “So,” I asked them, “how fast can yo
u guys make this thing go?” They grinned at me and then at one another, and took me across the harbor at about sixty miles per hour. I was pale when I set foot on the island, but they thought I was tough—at least I thought they thought I was tough—and to my addled sense of self, that was what mattered.

  But the lightkeeper knew. By now my pride was a tattered camouflage for the problem. At the end of our afternoon together I went upstairs and drank six ounces of vodka in about twenty minutes, then reappeared in the kitchen to watch him cook me a T-bone steak. We were the only people on the island, and he was a big, strapping, shy fellow in his midthirties, and we sat that night in his bright kitchen, drinking Pepsi and eating steak, while he told me a story, seemingly out of nowhere, about how he had given up drinking a few years earlier. I smiled and nodded sympathetically. I had chosen vodka so he wouldn’t smell it, but he knew. The next morning, hungover, I forced myself to climb the dizzying steps to the top of the ninety-foot tower, and I made myself count the steps as I went so I could put the number in the story. When people say alcoholics have no willpower, they have no idea.

  FOR ALL MY MOCK heroics, my constant recalibrations of the fuel and the facade, I know now that writing is what threw me a rope and let me drag myself to shore: The idea of a world where I kept the drink but lost the writing was even more unbearable to me than one without booze. During those wretched last months, I’d started finding boozy, half-comprehensible notes I had scrawled to myself late at night. By day my sober prose was at least lucid and legible; these notes from the dark side were like coming across an ex-Broadway floozy in a gin palace who had seen better days. I was thirty-three years old. It seemed way too soon for the tragic decline, however much the tortured-romantic myth had driven me onward. I had fostered for years the sodden hall of fame of those writers who lassoed their talent with a bottle of whiskey: Faulkner and Hemingway and Hammett (tellingly, my inner referents were mostly male). What I had conveniently left out of this self-told tale were the endnotes that proved the lie: Faulkner’s discipline, Hammett’s long sobriety, Hemingway’s shotgun. Whiskey didn’t stoke the flame of creativity; it extinguished it, sometimes one slow drop at a time.

  The garret where I had thought to live out my writerly fantasy was a third-floor walk-up on a tree-lined city street. My typewriter was in the front room of the apartment, and I could look out the front windows onto rooftops and the New England sky, and below to the street scene of people going about their lives—the mail carriers and dog walkers and familiar strangers that form the background canvas of urban life. One winter afternoon when I was still housebound with broken ribs, wanting nothing more than to walk to the liquor store for a bottle of bourbon, I stood there watching the snow fly outside and my heart seized with the disparity of the dream delivered: I had come here, all this way, with no job or family or scaffolding, intent on making it as a writer, and now I was trapped three floors up in my own little cell block, removed utterly from the people below and waiting for the day to end so I could drink. The free fall I’d been in for years had ended, and the fear had become despair, and I simply couldn’t bear it anymore.

  VICTORY STORIES ARE usually pretty simple: As I once heard a man in an AA meeting put it, “I got drunk, it got worse, I got here.” By spring I had signed up for an alcoholism education class at my Cambridge health plan, where a tall, easygoing fellow named Rich, a few years older than I, talked each week about the ravages of the disease. I thought he was a fool. I would go home after class and pour huge tumblers of bourbon and brood about what he’d said. He was too tall, too kind, too unhip. Clearly there had been some mistake—the medical literature had left out a category for tragic heroines with brilliant futures who loved their whiskey. Then the next week I would stagger back in to continue my education.

  My gentle teacher did two things that were invaluable. The first was that he seemed to expect nothing from his audience: He didn’t browbeat us or try to herd us into sobriety, or even ask us to come back. The second was that he gave a Buddhist-like interpretation of how to survive life without alcohol that had been left out of every pamphlet I’d ever read. Throughout my drinking I had assumed that the slide into alcoholism was a fait accompli failure—that you’d already lost the battle and were consequently beyond redemption. The best one could hope for, I assumed, was a shaky, vigilant life of bleak anxiety. Rich acceded the battle but none of the rest. The concept of AA, he told us in the final class, was one of surrender. I rolled my eyes; I had heard this before. And, he went on, surrender—deciding to lay down the weapon and walk away from the fight—was a way to get back all your power.

  The fluorescent lights softened a little, and that grim classroom where I had sat for weeks with other doubters gave off an aura, however transient, of hope. I recognized what he was talking about: This was the old mythic struggle that had defined heroism throughout the ages. Somehow that night the concept of sobriety, for the first time, had a revolutionary tinge to its message—the idea was life-saving, anti-mainstream, even daring. It might be possible, I thought that night, to give up drinking and still be cool. For a frightened young woman who’d spent a decade cultivating an au courant armor to mask her drinking, this was as radical as it got.

  He saved my life, of course, this compassionate, low-key man who didn’t give a whit about being cool but cared tremendously about helping people. Having laid down my defense of disdain, I went to see him one afternoon after the class was over, with the ostensible purpose of talking about the alcoholism in my extended family. And even though I was cold sober that day, afterward I remembered almost nothing from the hour we spent in Rich’s office. I know that in the first few minutes I broke down, to my own horror, and said, “I think I drink too much.” The rest was a wash of memory, until he got up nearly an hour later and rushed out to schedule me for outpatient detox the following week. Months later, I asked him about that day and what I had said. He smiled, having seen this amnesia-in-crisis before. “Mostly,” he told me, “you tried to convince me that you weren’t worth saving.”

  This shocks me now as it did then, because I always clung to the flicker of self-regard that I assumed got me in to see him. But alcohol, and the desperation and exhaustion that went along with it, had so worn me down that I didn’t have much fight left in me. I went home that day to finish a deadline for the Village Voice. Then I drove to the neighborhood liquor store for what I hoped would be my last stash. I got a quart of Jack Daniel’s and—a splurge, on my freelancer’s income—a quart of Johnnie Walker Red. “Would you like the gift box?” the innocent cashier asked me. “Sure,” I told her. “Why not?” Three days later, I poured what was left down the sink and staggered into Rich’s office, hungover and half an hour late, for an appointment that would let me start again.

  IT WAS THE SUMMER of 1984, and AA in those days was still removed from the social order—it hadn’t yet hit the covers of the newsweeklies, the slogans hadn’t been turned into bumper stickers, and celebrity redemption confessions were a thing of the future. Armed with a schedule of local meetings, I slunk into a Cambridge meeting a few days before my last drink and sat weeping near the back until a soft-voiced, elegant woman elbowed me in the ribs and whispered, “Don’t worry—it’s biochemical.” I found this uplifting: a four-word answer, delivered casually but unequivocally, to the biggest problem in my life. I left there and went home to the Johnnie Walker, but I went back the next night, and the next, and by the time Monday morning had rolled around and I was scheduled to be back in Rich’s office for my syllabus of a new life, I had finished the scotch, thrown in a lot of bourbon just to be sure, and hauled a bar’s worth of empty bottles down to the street.

  Partly because twelve-step programs hadn’t yet saturated the culture, the meetings I went to seemed clandestine and hardscrabble; most of them were held in church basements. There was something incredibly romantic about this—it was like being a Mason with a bad rap sheet. In graduate school I had been immersed in the memoirs of writers who ha
d joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and who stole around to secret meetings of their cell groups, smoking and talking and convinced they were changing the world. I’d always envied their passionate focus. One summer evening I was crossing the Boston Common toward another church basement, with the grounds full of people on their way somewhere. For years I had felt removed from this stream of humanity, charging toward moments of what seemed like a realized life. Now I knew the deeper, more varied truth: that a few members of the crowd were headed to an AA meeting. This was a hard-won but brilliant education: I had realized, as life is always willing to instruct, that the world as we see it is only the published version. The subterranean realms, whether churches or hospital rooms or smoke-filled basements, are part of what hold up the rest. I had gotten ahold of a skeleton key and found my way inside.

  I’D KNOWN SOMEONE in Austin, years before, who had joined AA and put her life back together, but what no one could have told me was how uproariously funny the meetings were. I walked into shabby rooms with folding chairs and coffee urns, where people were getting sugar fixes on grocery-store cookies and using old tuna cans as ashtrays. A people’s tribunal of drunks! AA cut across every class line I had ever hoped to breach. There were men in business suits and tough-talking blue-collar women and diffident souls you’d overlook on a subway train; there were scary-looking guys who, once they started talking, you’d have wanted to have your back forever. The stories they told were wrenching and outrageous and sometimes profound, and for the most part they had happier outcomes, at least so far, than what you could expect from a lot of life. I made friends with a beautiful young woman, an artist and filmmaker, who shredded Styrofoam cups throughout the meetings; she did this for about a year, while I chain-smoked next to her. She had discovered the magic Molotov cocktail that was alcohol when she was barely an adolescent, and had recently graduated magna cum laude from Harvard while nearly drinking herself to death. For years we hung out in the front rows of the meetings together, fancying ourselves the Thelma and Louise of Cambridge AA, until her work took her to New York, where she belonged. Eliza was tough, but inside was a woman of such gentleness and depth that she could lower my blood pressure just by walking into the room. She too had found her way to AA through the Benevolent Alcohol Counselor, and for years we referred to ourselves as graduates of the Rich Caplan Finishing School, where we had learned the careful etiquette of how to avoid consuming a quart of whiskey in one sitting, or at all.