by James Brown
On your way back to bed that night it occurs to you that for some crazy reason maybe your husband hid your pills. You can’t fathom why but just the possibility of it, the very idea that he might think you have some kind of problem infuriates you. This is your medication. This is doctor prescribed. You shake him awake. You ask him point-blank what he did with your Valium and he pretends like he doesn’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not so much what he says as that sleepy dumb look on his face, that bullshit innocent look that makes you even angrier, and for what happens next you have no explanation. Something just snaps. You don’t know what it is, or where it comes from, but suddenly you’re out of control, screaming and pounding on him with your fists.
Tonight he doesn’t strike back but eventually, as your addiction grows, as you continue to rage, he, too, will lose control. You will both fight. You will both hurt each other. I am living in San Francisco, going to college, when you phone in the middle of the night in tears.
“I’ve had it,” you say. “It’s over. I’m leaving the son of a bitch . . .”
In midsentence he yanks the phone from your hand and all I hear is your screaming. A moment later he’s on the line.
“Jimmy,” he says.
“What the hell’s going on?”
“I’m really sorry but it’s crazy around here. She’ll have to call you back.”
From some other part of the house I hear your child crying, and before the line goes dead there is another sound, the thud of a hard blow, your fist landing solid in the hollow of his back. All night long I try to get ahold of you but the line is off the hook. It’s not until late the next afternoon when it finally rings, and when you pick it up your voice is cheerful. You even laugh.
“I guess I owe you an apology. We were drinking last night and things just got a little out of hand. You know how it is. You remember Mom and Dad.”
“But he never hit her,” I say. “It never was that bad.” You give me a heavy sigh like you think you know something that I couldn’t possibly understand.
“Married people fight. That’s just how it is. Don’t make a big deal out of it. We’re all right,” you say. “I mean it, really, everything’s fine.”
At the time I judge you. I think you’re lying to yourself and that your problems go far deeper than you’re willing to admit. How, I wonder, can you be so blind? But my drinking and drugging will one day take me down the same path in my own marriage, and I will fight with my wife. I’ll explode for no reason and phone you late at night, drunk and wired, while my children cry in the background. These memories hurt, and I have others, many far worse. They accumulate over the years and instead of fading with time they only grow more vivid. The shame and remorse builds. The load grows heavier as we age and I understand now how every day you find yourself a little closer to that overpass above the Los Angeles River.
After Barry dies the vodka and Valium are no longer enough. The cocaine works for a while, makes you pretty and smart, but where a few lines once took you to a better place now it requires much more. Between you and your husband the supply often runs out and soon he’s pulling money from his contracting business, charging up the credit cards to cover the difference, bouncing checks and borrowing from friends. Staying high is a full-time job and you begin to let the small things slide. The beds don’t get made. The dishes aren’t washed. The laundry piles up and there’s no point in vacuuming when you have a little brat who can’t remember to wipe her feet no matter how many times you tell her.
What is she now? Four, five? I lose track of time. But she’s growing up fast, and occasionally it strikes you, how you’re missing out on some special years, how you can’t ever get them back. Half the day you keep her in preschool and as soon as she gets home she locks herself in her room and stays there, watching TV, afraid to come out, afraid of what mood she might find you in. Sometimes you feel as if you hardly know her, your own daughter, and it pulls at your heart. You try to go without the drugs and booze for a couple of days and make plans to do something together. Go to a movie. Have a picnic at the park. Your intentions are good but somehow things just never seem to turn out right. The traits you see in your daughter are the same ones you see in yourself and have never liked. Her shyness. Her constant fidgeting and nail biting. The worst is how she always walks with her head down as if she has no pride, no confidence in herself. Part of you sympathizes with her while the other part, the sick part, condemns. You are already a person with little patience, but without the drugs and alcohol you’re far worse. Inside of twenty-four hours you’re depressed and tired and beginning to feel nauseous. Your moods swing from one extreme to the other. One moment you are raging at her for spilling her milk, and the next you are cooing in her ear, promising to read her a book. That fear you see in your daughter’s eyes is a fear you know well. Later you’re sick with remorse and you have a realization, one that’s visited you before, and that is that you are a better person and a better mother when you’re stoned out of your mind. For your sake and that of your child you have to feed the demons or they will destroy what is left of the goodness in your heart. I understand how you feel because I have done similar harm to my sons.
Going straight, even for a couple of days, isn’t and can never be a viable option. You are convinced of this. You are resigned. If you need more evidence just remember the time that your dealer got busted and it took your husband two long agonizing weeks to hook up with another. Meanwhile you’re crawling out of your skin, jonesing bad and drinking more than ever to kill the pain. You have to do something so you pay a visit to one of your old friends from high school, though he’s not actually a friend, in fact you’ve never liked him, he’s a seedy motherfucker but he’s a seedy motherfucker with dope. The trouble is, you don’t have enough money, and there you are again, doing something that you promised yourself you never would.
The shame and guilt eat at you until one night you can’t take it any longer and you get so drunk it just spills out. Even as it’s happening, before the words escape from your mouth, you know that you are making a terrible mistake. You tell me that you confess out of respect for your husband but you know that it’s really about saving yourself. Add this to your list of best worst memories. It’s another that only gets heavier through the years. I know this from my own experience. Though I’m not foolish enough to confess, my wife senses my infidelities well enough, and trying to carry on as if nothing has happened, as if I could ever reclaim her trust, is just another act of deception. But we are drunks. We are addicts and we behave recklessly without regard for the consequences of our actions. Sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, we destroy the ones we love as surely as we destroy ourselves.
The years slip by. I quit your husband and the plumbing trade and return to school. I know you don’t begrudge me for attempting to make a better life for myself but you also can’t help seeing my leaving in the same light as you do Barry’s suicide. You see it as a form of desertion, a kind of betrayal reminiscent of the first time I left you, years before, to live with our father. You feel I’ve used you and your husband and taken advantage of your generosity with drugs and that the only reason I ever came around was to get high.
You couldn’t be more wrong.
What is true is that I care about my writing, as you once cared about your acting, and I had to make a break or my dream, like yours, would fade away. So I make that break and marry my first real love, as you married yours. Heidi and I met back in high school and she is good for me, she gives me strength, love and purpose, and for this I will always be indebted. Although she knows going into our marriage that I drink and use she believes that it will pass in time, that I’ll grow out of it. In the early years she even does some experimenting herself, but drinking makes her feel out of control and cocaine just puts her on edge. “What’s the point?” she says. “I wouldn’t exactly call it fun, being wired or slurring my words.” So she quits, except for an occasional drink or hit of marijuana, and this is why our
marriage probably lasts as long as it does. Imagine if Heidi and I both used, how far we would’ve made it.
For a while I comport myself well enough. I keep my drinking and drugging to a minimum, and in trying to make a better life for us I enroll in graduate school at U.C. Irvine and continue work on my first novel, a novel that eventually gets published, gets optioned for a movie, sells paperback rights and sets us on our way. Meanwhile Heidi and I have our first child and I am there for her in the delivery room, stone-cold sober, holding her hand and giving whatever support a husband can give his wife when he is powerless to ease her pain.
I’ve never liked children.
They annoy me. They’re loud and often obnoxious. They cry and make too many demands and I’ve never had the patience for them. But when Andy comes into the world I love him immediately in a way I never before knew I was capable of loving. He is a quiet, easy baby with few demands, and when Heidi returns to work as a display artist, while I’m completing my last year of graduate school, I take our son to classes with me. I carry him in a pouch that straps around my shoulders and rests on my stomach. I feed him. I change him. I love and comfort him.
I have not always been a bad father.
Later I will become a professor of English and jump from job to job—Irvine, Santa Clara University, Hayward State—until I settle, back in Southern California again, in the desert wastelands of San Bernardino. In that time my wife and I have had our second child, and this one is harder on us. He is colicky. He is hypersensitive to light and noise and prone to ear infections. His needs put an additional strain on our marriage, and I am strangely proud of myself, for despite my growing addictions I am for the most part there for the boy when his mother has reached her limits. Somewhere in through here I also publish a second novel, this one about the family, mainly Barry, and I fail to include you, my sister.
“Where am I?” you ask me, after you’ve read it. “Don’t I matter? I lived this story with you. I mean, Christ, I was there.”
Now that I’m older I realize the magnitude of my mistake. I realize that you are right. I do you and the novel a serious injustice by not sticking closer to the truth and the story ultimately suffers because of it. But at the time, in my selfishness, I tell you that you don’t understand the constraints of the novel, what can and can’t be included, and if you just look more closely you’ll see how I leave out all sorts of things, all sorts of people, and it’s not because these things didn’t happen or that these people don’t exist. It’s because they don’t fit. Don’t belong. After all it is just fiction. After all it is about making things up, and you know it is easier to lie about the dead than the living.
By now your daughter is all grown up. She is your age when you gave birth to her and despite her childhood, or maybe because of it, she turns out to be a fine, responsible young woman who’s seen what drugs and alcohol did to you and her father and won’t touch them herself. You’re in your late thirties now and still going strong. You’ve racked up three DUIs. You’ve wrecked two cars. Your husband has filed for bankruptcy but the coke is still plentiful, and your marriage, like mine, continues to erode. But there is hope. People change. Addicts and alcoholics can get better instead of sicker and I’ve seen it in you. You break the news to me over the phone.
“Are you sitting down?” you say. “Because you won’t believe this. I don’t believe it myself but I’m pregnant again.”
Maybe neither of us voice it but we both know that this is your chance to turn your life and marriage around. This is the motivation you need to quit drinking and doping, and for the most part you do. In the months to follow you cut back to just a couple of drinks a day, and in the evening, to quell the withdrawal symptoms, you only take one Valium or Xanax instead of your usual three or four. And so far as the coke goes, because you’ve heard all those terrible things about crack babies, you use it only on the weekends and in moderation. Those who know little about addiction might see it as a moral weakness and expect nothing less from you than complete sobriety. But for someone who has drunk and used so much for so long I know that any step forward is a tremendous one and I am proud of you. At least you acknowledge your problem. At least the desire and effort to change is there, and even if it is not yet enough, you deserve a certain respect.
Your daughter is off at college, her room is empty, and again you begin making preparations. Because you never expected to have another child, you gave away the crib. You gave away the bassinet, threw out the old clothes and broken toys, and now you rise early in the morning, with a renewed sense of purpose, and look for replacements at garage sales and swap meets. You scour the papers for good deals. Hunt for bargains at department stores. You are eager to fill that room back up but mostly you are eager to fill yourself up again, and the baby offers you this chance, the promise of a new start. Things will be different this time. You will be a responsible mother, you will do the job right, make amends with the past and free yourself of your guilt and shame. The old wounds of your marriage will heal and you and your husband will fall in love all over again, only this time it will be a stronger, more mature love because you have had to overcome so many obstacles to finally get there. In some ways you see this baby as your last hope for a so-called normal, happy life, and it takes you back to earlier days when you were a churchgoer, a firm believer in God.
“I know you’re not religious,” you say, “and I’m not big on it either anymore. But I really believe this is my wake-up call. I really believe this baby is a gift from God.”
Since you are no longer a young woman, you have an amniocentesis done. You take a sonogram. The doctor tells you that everything is fine, the baby is perfectly healthy. Is it a boy? you ask. A girl? Where with your first you wanted to be surprised, this time you want to know up front so that you can be better prepared, if only for the baby shower. You say it’s the practical thing to do but I have a feeling that you’re just too excited to wait, and I like that about you. It’s part of your charm. You and your husband name her Katherine and paint her room a light shade of pink.
When your water breaks and the contractions start, your husband drives you to the hospital. You don’t have medical insurance so the care isn’t what it should be and they hook you up to a fetal monitor and leave you in the room alone. The intervals between contractions grow closer together and more intense. You’re nervous. You’re scared. You feel the baby moving inside you and know the time is near. But where is your husband? He should be here holding your hand and dabbing your forehead with cool, damp washcloths. He calls me late at night, shortly after you’re admitted. I worked with this man for several years and I suspect, by the way he speaks, that he is high.
“Congratulations,” he says. “You’re about to be an uncle again.”
“How’s she holding up?”
“She was doing fine when I left.”
“What’d you mean? Where are you?”
“At home,” he says. “I couldn’t find a parking space and I had to run back and get some money. I forgot my wallet.”
It doesn’t make sense. You double-park, you take a ticket or let your car be towed, but you don’t leave your wife alone in the hospital when she’s having your baby. Did he really need the money? Or did he really go home for more dope? Either way he now has to live with this. While you are alone in that strange room in that hospital, the fetal monitor makes an odd noise but at first you think nothing of it and there’s no one around, no doctors or nurses, not even your husband to tell you different. Still, to be on the safe side, you press the button on the rail of the bed. A minute passes. No one comes. You press it again and then you feel something or maybe it’s that you don’t feel anything at all. The baby is floating motionless inside you with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.
Maybe if your husband had been there he could’ve gone for help. Maybe because you don’t have any insurance the nurses don’t respond as quickly. This is a busy hospital that serves more than its share of the poor and
they’ll get to you when they can. The Christian God is a punishing god and hereafter you will believe that He has taken your child in payment for your sins as a drug addict and alcoholic. The guilt and shame weigh heavy on you but the loss of baby Katherine is in one way still a gift: For the next four years you and your husband remain clean and sober.
He quits cold turkey. You check yourself into rehab. You join A.A. and replace the compulsion to drink and use with the compulsion to attend meetings twice a day, seven days a week, and they add up to possibly the best years of your life. Somehow you rebuild your relationship with your daughter. Somehow you and your husband are able to put the past behind you and love one another in ways you were both never before capable. You are a different person, even-tempered and calm, and now you assume a role in my children’s lives. You read them bedtime stories when they spend the night. You throw them birthday parties and take them to movies and surprise them with goblin and ghost costumes for Halloween and insist that we visit every Fourth of July to light fireworks in your driveway.
“It’s like the old days,” you tell me. “It’s like when we were kids and could still enjoy life without having to get loaded.”
I hardly remember those times myself, since I was even younger than you when we first started drinking and using, and I have only a vague sense of what you mean. Dope and alcohol are still my good friends and I’m not yet willing to let them go. While you are busy staying sober, I am busy getting high. I have graduated from cocaine to methamphetamine. Where a gram of coke might last you a day, the same amount of this dope wires you for a week, and it’s taking me down fast. I have to drink more in order to sleep at night, if I sleep at all, and in the morning I have to double up on the meth to offset the hangover. I wake up mean. I wake up angry at myself and the world and my moods swing from one extreme to another as yours once did. I belittle my wife. I ignore my children. One moment I am raging, the next I’m apologizing for saying or doing something I should never have said or done.