by Jeanne Darst
I was thirty years old. I saw the genome on the wall. It read: Beware ye who cross that line into a life of lies and selfdeception. You may not make it back. Who would visit this apartment and think I was in good shape? Even my father, king of the depressing domiciles, a man who scribbled the letters of the Greek alphabet on pieces of paper and taped them to his walls so he could engage his brain while using his rowing machine, had a bathroom. I had one fork and one spoon and two knives. I had a couple plates and three mugs. I had one blanket and a purple sleeping bag Jed had bought me for a camping trip. It was super-warm and nice, but every time I stuffed my feet into that little pocket at the bottom I thought, I need a decent comforter. This is pretty depressing.
I was trying to get help. I was seeing a shrink in therapyville, the highly concentrated area of downtown therapist offices between Fourteenth Street and Eighth Street from University Place to Fifth Avenue. Hildey was great. Very motherly, and I needed that at first. She was about fifty and very gentle. She was cheap and when I couldn’t afford cheap she let me run a tab with her. We talked a lot about my mother and how difficult it was to watch her give up on herself, how she was seemingly rehab-proof, how she was a total shut-in now, having all her booze delivered, how she looked, how she smelled, how awful it was to mourn someone while they are still alive. Hildey was a great listener and remembered things I said long past the point when I thought it was charming to be quoted directly by your therapist. But she just kept pushing a regular job on me, kept trying to get me to see how being a writer was this terrible, terrible thing. I think that as a regular person she just couldn’t understand all the dumb shit I did and the pathetic ways I got by, scraping by on no money, never going to the doctor or the dentist, calling my painter friend Linda who was equally broke to come with me when I needed to go to the bank to check my balance, for moral support. This was probably an unsettling thing for Hildey to witness. Things weren’t going well for me, I wasn’t denying that, but I was doing what I wanted to despite the number of times I opened mail and saw the words “overdue,” “past due,” and “delinquent.” She didn’t understand I didn’t want the stockbroker hubby and the framed photo of Ronald Reagan in his ranch hat over the bed. I had had the opportunity for a regular life, to be a missus, and had decided that that was not going to get my word count up. She didn’t understand this was what being an artist looks like, disaster, total personal ruin. God. Get with it, lady.
“Jeanne, I think you’re a wonderful person with a family history that can only be described as ‘chilling,’ and I’m trying to get you to see how you can utilize your talents in a healthy way.”
“There’s no healthy way to use talent, Hildey.”
It seemed she was always trying to get me to give up the only thing I had, the only thing that gave meaning to my life.
Hildey had some issues of her own that were annoying but not deal breakers. Hildey had Lyme disease and had trouble keeping weight on, so she snacked discreetly during our sessions. I saw nothing wrong with this. I did, however, think it was odd that she answered the phone during my sessions, and when I suggested she get an answering machine she balked as if she wasn’t one of those techie people. An answering machine in 1999 was hardly cutting-edge. Most New York City chipmunks had them at the time. It had been weeks since I asked her to get one, and she was still picking up the phone when it rang.
“I’m sorry, Jeanne, but I have to be available to patients. What if it’s a real emergency? Fifty minutes is too long to wait.”
I would grumble and go on.
One day she let me know she was having some Lymerelated procedure at the hospital the following day and she would need to pick up the phone if the hospital called.
I told her that was fine, and on my end I might have some feelings about her picking up the phone and these feelings might lead to some actions. “Just so you know,” I told her. She nervously put some leftovers into the microwave that she shared with the other therapists down the hall, and came back in and closed the door.
About twenty minutes into the session her phone rang. She looked at me as if to say, “I have to get this.” I gave her my best death stare, really put some effort into this and into maintaining it for the whole phone call, which was three or four minutes. I was doing really well, she looked incredibly scared of me, when a strange small explosion sound in the hall happened, followed by people murmuring, “Looks like chicken vindaloo.” “No, more like a regular yellow curry.” “Wow. Whose food is that?” “What a mess.”
Hildey opened her door to wave at the other therapists and let them know it was her mess, she’d deal with it, and then the person on the phone audibly screamed something. Hildey said, “I have not called you twenty times today, I need to know what time the procedure is tomorrow. I am not bothering you,” and she looked at me and just started bawling right there in her little therapist’s office. I was totally taken aback. The death stare melted into a shocked zombie.
The other therapists headed off in a clump back to their offices as if they might catch what she had. Hildey ended her phone call and slumped in her chair, weeping. I didn’t want to comfort her or even deal with her but I also didn’t want to be mean and ignore her, so I got my bag and said, “I guess I’ll see you next week, Hildey,” and I headed to the elevator.
I walked out onto University Place wondering why all the people who were supposed to be in the stability biz—mothers, fathers, therapists—fell apart on me.
The next week I went back, and Hildey wanted to talk about what had happened like it was some kind of international incident. Each week after that I was meaner and meaner to Hildey. I couldn’t help it. She wasn’t capable of doing her job. She lost her shit. Maybe she should have taken a day off.
“I think the transference has gone bad, Jeanne. Between therapist and patient,” she said to me one day.
“Oh, really? I think I might know when that happened. It might have been the moment you became my mother and I had to comfort you while you cried and charged me and cried and charged me. Bad as things may have been with my mother, she never charged me. Angry? Why, yes, I am, Hildey! Is there a problem with that? Anger is not just important to me. It’s essential. I need it. In my relationships with men, my father, my mother and to turn into material, frankly. Why is everybody so down on anger when to me, it’s so bloody practical.”
I never saw Hildey again, and what eats at me is I probably owe her some money. But then I think, Okay, I owe her for three sessions, but she cried at one and the other two we talked about how I felt about her crying on me, so do I actually owe her anything?
I tried talking to Julia about how I felt like blowing my head off. We had dinner, and when I said as much she threw her glove at me, hitting me in the face. I’m not entirely sure why she did this. I then threw my glove at her, and then the miso soup arrived.
One night I listened to Nina Simone and drank grappa I had stolen from my father. I called my friend Cassie from college who lived in Aspen and was an acupuncturist. Her life had seemed to just get better and better in the last few years, at the exact rate that mine was getting worse and worse. She was doing what she wanted to do, she kept making more and more money, she was making $90,000 a year, while I was buying loaves of bread and jars of peanut butter as the cheapest way to make it through a week. I would babysit my niece and bring my laundry over, use my sister’s detergent, and take things to eat later that I knew they probably wouldn’t miss: one PowerBar, three bags of mint tea, some small boxes of kidsized raisins, an apple, a hunk of cheddar. I always wanted to take coffee but it would smell too much, wafting out of my backpack. I classified this behavior as advanced mooching, something I was doing because I didn’t have time to go to the grocery store—that was what boring, married people with kids did. I was too edgy for the grocery store. Please.
Cassie was cheery and hopeful and she looked a hundred times better than me, she was traveling through Asia in the off-season and just loving everything
all the time. I had no idea that she was sober, I just knew that she was a big pain in the ass whenever she came to New York.
“Can I bring anything to the party?” she’d ask.
“Beer.”
“What about something else?”
“Nope, just beer.”
She’d show up with flowers after this exchange, and I assumed she was just too lazy to carry a few six packs from the deli. Or I figured she was doing some kind of cleanse.
I was also pretty sick of her wanting to go to dinner all the time when she visited. Who had money for dinner? Insanity.
I normally didn’t talk to Cassie about my problems, because her shelves were nothing but self-help books, full of slogans like “Love yourself through disappointment” and “Feel your feelings!” Over the course of our friendship I had never contracted a slogan or an issue or a boundary or any sense of hope or cheerfulness, so I figured out it was safe to hang around these kinds of people. On the phone I went through the litany of things that were making me feel like killing myself and then, out of nowhere, I said, “And I’m working on a little drinking problem here.” She told me she had been sober for three years (that’s what that was?) and maybe I needed to get sober. Well, sure, maybe I needed to do a lot of things: quit smoking, do some actual writing, get a bathroom, get a job. Doesn’t mean I’m going to do any of them.
“Why don’t you try and not drink tomorrow?” she suggested.
I couldn’t believe my life had dried up to the point of taking advice from a woman who once scribbled and left a note on a sleeping homeless man on the F train that read “You matter.” A woman who had only a few years before invited me to her graduation from a self-help program called LifeYes!, where we met all the graduates in a hotel ballroom in midtown and they all had their eyes shut as “Greatest Love of All” played. When Whitney shut up, they opened their eyes, and you, their friend, stood in front of them as they all sobbed uncontrollably about you weren’t sure what. Self-help was a bad, bad place as far as I was concerned. The term itself was bad. It wasn’t helping yourself, it was just the opposite. If you could help yourself you wouldn’t be in a ballroom with all these other losers, you’d be home, solving your problems. Why didn’t they call it “can’t help self” or just “fucking help me”?
I also disliked the word “recovery,” despised the “language of the heart,” and recovery slogans. It all reminded me of those posters in the high school guidance counselor’s office: a picture of a kitten on the end of a rope with “Hang in There!” underneath. It reminded me of secretaries with little notes posted around their desks to get them through the weeklong fake laugh of office life. People who needed little pictures of monkeys skateboarding and toddlers walking down a hall in high-heeled shoes were probably the same people who went to church and went on “journeys” all the time. The same people who thought everything happens for a reason. Dumb people. The only self-help book I saw in our house was I’m OK, You’re OK, which lived in a drawer of Mom’s night table, like a hotel Bible, untouched. That and The Inner Game of Tennis were about as deep into self-help reading as my parents went. The aesthetic of sobriety was “god-awful,” my mother would have said, no style at all, no “flair.” Half their friends had been electroshocked when they couldn’t get their shit together. Maybe after going to Catholic schools and then seeing the Democratic vice presidential nominee and family friend Thomas Eagleton and other friends torn to shreds for admitting depression, my parents felt the only thing worse than alcoholism and depression was to get help for them.
The thing is, I had no other options. A few days later I said out loud, “I’m an alcoholic.” And I felt like it was the first honest thing I had said in my life. Like the last thing I ever wanted to say. It made me nervous but I knew it was something I had been looking for my whole life. Not sobriety of course, but the truth.
I thought, Well, if I’m considering killing myself here, maybe I’ll give this sobriety a chance. I always thought I would drink less, drink better, stop slugging people when I got my shit together. I drank because of my problems and once those went away I wouldn’t drink so much. But I agreed to reverse the logical order of things and quit drinking first in order to get a handle on those problems. Not for a lifetime. Just to solve my problems with a clear head, and then I could drink normally again . . . or, you know, for the first time.
I DIDN’T TELL ANYONE I wasn’t drinking, because if I couldn’t do it, I didn’t want anyone to know I had wanted one more thing and couldn’t hack it. And if I didn’t ultimately want to quit drinking, I wanted to go back to drinking in peace without being teased endlessly about the time I said I was quitting. My whole life had felt like a good story—something in which I participated in order to create something that could be used for conversation later. Was I using what had happened in my life to create art or was I making things happen to create art? This got harder to stomach: “Jeanne, tell the story about the boss who tried to kill you with the lead pipe!” Be entertaining. Stories. For the benefit of others. How did people latch on to emotionally healthy people? They seemed elusive, like trying to scale a smooth interior wall of a museum. How would anyone latch on to me? In “The Jelly-Bean,” Jim Powell loved Nancy Lamar because she was a disaster, a fun, free-spirited, beautiful disaster. No one loves a sane girl. At least they didn’t in my house.
Whether I succeeded or failed at quitting drinking it was going to be my success or my failure.
Things were worse than before I quit drinking. I was now living in a couple rooms with wigs drying on a hanger outside my front door and a restless, unpredictable teenage pothead next door and no bathroom and no money, no job, no ascertainable work skills, all without alcohol. This was much worse. I knew I couldn’t be around my friends at first because I knew if they asked, “Darst, what are you drinking?” I would have just burst into tears.
So when Cassie called again and said, “Why don’t you come get sober out here in Aspen? You have nothing going on there,” I said I’d be out there in two days.
SOBER SCHMOBER
I’M NOT THAT BIG on dreams, telling other people about them, interpreting them, the symbols. Pretty boring stuff. When I hear “I had the weirdest dream last night . . .” I usually give the throat-slash sign to the speaker. I had a recurring dream for about fifteen years that I never told anyone about for the aforementioned reason. It wasn’t noteworthy. Until I stopped having it. In the dream I would fall down, often roll down a hill, and come to the bottom, and I couldn’t get up. My legs wouldn’t work right and I was weak and unable to stand up. And in the dream I desperately wanted to get up but couldn’t. I would fall down every time I tried to stand. When I quit drinking I never had the dream again.
In Aspen, I got a job as a driver for a limo company, driving luxury SUVs. I had a black Denali. My first day as I was backing out of the garage I took off the sideview mirror. I thought, I hope they don’t give me a lot of shit for this, seeing as I’m the only woman driver here on the force. A second later I heard one of the guys yell to the manager in the office, “Yup, that was the girl!”
A lot of the runs were from the Aspen airport to the St. Regis hotel in town. It was an easy drive; Aspen is not midtown Manhattan. I kept getting reprimanded because I would pull into the semicircle driveway of the St. Regis and my Denali would be a good three feet from the curb. This was apparently the mark of an amateur. A good driver would get the car right up against the curb for his passengers. Maybe now was not the time to tell my employers that I hadn’t even taken my own road test, that my sister Julia took it for me. One day my supervisor, Tad, was in a car ahead of me in the St. Regis driveway and he hopped out of his Denali and came over to my vehicle and said, “Hey, Jeanne, when you have a second, like when you’re waiting for a client, it’s a great time to do a little maintenance on your vehicle. Like, why don’t you hop out, grab a rag and wipe down your vehicle?”
“Because someone might see me?”
A few days lat
er I picked up my assignment sheet for the day and saw that one of the runs out of the airport was Deepak Chopra at twelve forty-five. Cassie thought I was the luckiest person alive; she almost wished she were me for half a second. This could be a real turning point for you and listen to what he has to say and ask him what you’re supposed to be doing with your life, don’t be negative, be present for the experience and all this “Everything happens for a reason” caca. I was more concerned with not winding up in a ravine with the guru than I was with understanding what the reason is why I couldn’t drink anymore and now had to drive people to and from airports. Naturally I had no idea what this joker smoker looked like, so I made a little DEEPAK CHOPRA sign and stood at the gate with it. The whole plane had deboarded after about fifteen minutes. There was nowhere else he could be; the airport is teeny. Then four giant black men, New York Giants it turned out, came toward me. I lowered my Deepak sign.