Headhunters on My Doorstep

by J. Maarten Troost

  For most alcoholics, it typically takes years until they earn their seat in rehab. I calculated that from the first moment I took a drink until the last, twenty-four years had passed. The first fifteen were great. I loved bars and dinner parties and beers at sunset, and save for the occasional head-shattering hangover, the time ticked by with nothing more than the warm glow of a life well lived. During the following five years, however, drinking had settled into habitual monotony. It’s five o’clock. Time for a beer. We’re having salmon for dinner. Better open up a sauvignon blanc. Slowly, the ease and comfort I’d always felt with the pop of a cork dissipated, replaced with nothing at all, and now suddenly my brain clicked over to the other side, the line had been irrevocably crossed, and soon I was quietly obsessing about the next bottle to be opened, wondering whether this would be the one to bring on the warm glow of yore. And it never came. The alcohol had stopped working. And this irritated me to no end. “I never saw you drunk during this time,” my wife would later note. Well, it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. My tolerance, always high, now increased exponentially, and yet I’d never hit the sweet spot, the moment when I was suffused with a cheery warmth. Within a few short years, though, I’d undergo the physiological change that marks the terminal alcoholic. I’d become dependent on the drink. I never developed the shakes. I never drank while I worked. But come 3:00, 4:00 P.M. my head would feel like a belt was rapidly tightening around it, my anxiety levels would skyrocket, my usual mellow disposition would undergo a Dr. Jekyll–like transformation, and I’d become a short-tempered asshole until I’d had a drink or ten, and suddenly I’d feel “normal,” no better, no worse.

  Until vodka entered the picture. Everyone’s seen that twenty-point questionnaire given to determine whether or not you’re an alcoholic. By the time you’ve been institutionalized, you’ve aced that exam. But frankly, I believe there should be a twenty-first question—Have you recently switched to vodka? It is, in my experience, the beginning of the end, and now, for me, the effects of alcohol became unpredictable. On some days I’d sneak a pint or two and no one would be the wiser. I could function, speak clearly, and because I’d taken up yoga, hold an extended Eagle Pose without even a wobble. On other nights, however, after a few discreet shots of vodka, I’d slur my words, my gait would widen as I’d careen from one hallway wall to another, and finally, as I plopped onto the couch, I’d spend the rest of the night thinking of all the cool stuff I’d do if I wasn’t so fucked up. So the weeks would pass.

  And then I quit. On my own.

  It hurt for a few days. Insomnia, of course. Sheet-soaking night sweats. My BP soaring like a brick had been fastened onto an accelerator. And then it was over. I attended the dawn meetings in Carmel, California, and liked them just fine. No hand-holding. No Lord’s Prayer. Must be a West Coast thing. Just the Serenity Prayer at the end, which is a fine prayer. I met people with tales no worse, no better than mine, save for the DUIs, the divorces, the jail terms, the carnage that I’d so far avoided, and I felt pleased to be among a group of disparate people all united by a shared allergy to alcohol. I paid no mind to these Steps and Promises that people kept yakking about, and in the evenings I popped open a nonalcoholic beer—Buckler or Beck’s N.A., typically—and rejoiced in my sobriety. After thirty days, I decided that this was all well and good, but really, must we go through life without an occasional buzz? It was then that I decided to reward my good behavior by getting a Medical Marijuana License. This, of course, was a brilliant idea. A little problem with the drinkee-drinkee? Why not turn to weed? It’s medicinal. All natural. Organic. It could only be good for you. Woody Harrelson says so.

  I found myself moseying on up to Santa Cruz, where I met with a “doctor,” mumbled something about back pain and insomnia, and because California is a wonderfully enlightened state, I was soon in possession of a laminated ID card that enabled me to buy the finest herb that the great horticulturalists of Humboldt County were able to produce. With license in hand, I used my phone to Google the nearest pot dispensary—no shortage of choices in Santa Cruz—and soon I was met by a couple of twenty-something kids with glazed, dilated 8-ball eyes, wearing officious-looking white lab coats that they must have stolen from an old set of Doogie Howser, M.D., and who kindly walked me through all the different varietals of cannabis. Not having followed advances in the marijuana industry since, like, 1993, this was a revelation to me. Was I interested in the euphoria-inducing Sativa strains or in the mellow, blissful Indica varietals? I ventured to guess that I was likely an Indica-man myself, and as my helpful cannabis technicians filled my order—little baggies of Afghan Kush, Purple Buddha, Death Star, and Yoda OG—they thoughtfully added a prerolled joint of Blueberry Kush, a freebie. “We . . . uh . . . value your . . . um . . . you know . . . like business . . . and stuff.” And then they’d returned to their brownies, the crumbs tumbling down their lab coats.

  So now I was happy. I’d stopped drinking. I was reliably sober, alert, and pleasant during the day, and after I read the evening stories to my kids, I’d head out to the deck and fire up the bong. “I think, this, uh, sobriety thing is really working,” I’d tell my wife moments later, as I slunk deeper into the couch. “Yep. Yes, indeed. Best thing I ever did. Quit drinking.” She’d look upon me with stoic blankness. “But you know what would be really good right now?” I’d say, tapping my belly as her eyebrows arched in anticipation. “Tacos.” And now there’d be a flicker in her eyes as she looked at her watch and realized with a sigh that it was too late to call the divorce lawyer.

  Meanwhile, of course, I’m thinking I’m all cutesy and smart, having beaten back the alcohol demon, except of course there was a very good reason why I hadn’t smoked weed in twenty years. I didn’t actually like getting high. It’s just not my thing. I’m a monogamist. The only plant I loved was the grapevine.

  The inevitable happened, of course. I’d gotten some bad news and relapsed on a pint of Sam Adams and a bottle of pinot noir, and so began the last five months of my drinking, which would include a transcontinental move from California to the East Coast, where my wife, who’d been consulting from home for a few years, landed a proper job, having concluded that I was well on my way to becoming an unreliable fuckwit and that it was best to take matters into her own hands, which she did, eventually delivering the ultimatum: Leave now or go to rehab.

  It’s a lovely story, isn’t it? It irks me to this day that I didn’t manage to quit on my own like my own personal sober hero, Duff McKagan, bassist for Guns N’ Roses, whose drinking was so legendary that he became the inspiration for Duff Beer, the preferred beverage of Homer Simpson, and who eventually landed in the hospital when his ten bottles-of-wine-a-day habit caused his pancreas to blow up. When he was discharged, he hopped on a bike, started eating his veggies, and never looked back. Enough, he said, and it was so. I, however, had picked up again and soon it got me once more, and it became something even more monstrous—the drink revealed itself for what it truly was for all those years, just fattening me up for the slaughter, all semblance of control now shattered—and then I ran out of choices until there was nothing left but to be locked up somewhere for a month. It is what it is and it takes what it takes.

  So now here I was, nearly twelve months sober, alone for the first time in a faraway place on a boatful of booze. According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, twenty-four years of drinking entailed twenty-four months of brain-mending. I told you I was good at math. With a little more forehead-scrunching deliberation, I figured I was halfway there. I had no idea where there was, just that it was surely better than the place from whence I’d come.

  The technical term for this cerebral metamorphosis is neuroplasticity, which is now my favorite word ever. After rehab, I plunged into the science of addiction, and now, in the next life, I hope to come back as a neuroscientist. Who knew that the space between your ears could be so interesting? I’d always thought that the brain peaked around the ag
e of seven and then it was all downhill from there. One day you’re creating Lego spaceships, building pagodas made out of twigs, learning languages, and sixty years later you’re lying prone on a La-Z-Boy watching Sean Hannity, the brain cells curdling as you gear up for the War on Christmas. This turns out not to be the case. Or rather, it’s not inevitable that you become a crusty old fart who spends every Thanksgiving bitterly complaining about how Jack Kennedy’s daddy stole the election in Illinois. The brain is mutable, constantly adapting and evolving as it processes new stimuli. This for an addict/alcoholic is good news because our brains are basically fucked. Have you ever seen an MRI of an end-stage alcoholic’s cerebrum? It’s ghastly. Alcohol, no matter how you dress it up, whether in a fruity cocktail glass with a little umbrella or in a wineglass, is essentially ethanol, the same thing we use in sanitizers to kill bacteria. Pour enough of it onto your brain and you turn your noggin into something that looks like a hideously deformed molten doughnut, the booze literally melting the brain from the inside out.

  Now hopefully you’ve quit before that happens, but in the meantime your prefrontal cortex—responding to years of alcohol and drugs—has pretty much abandoned its original mission, which is to act as the CEO of your being, the executive in charge of decision making. This is the rational part of you, the voice that does the internal cost-benefit analysis, judiciously measuring the likely consequences of a course of action and sternly clamping down on destructive impulses. It’s the voice that says, yes, we are going to study for that history exam, and, no, we’re not going to max out our credit card on a diamond nose stud. Drugs and alcohol completely mess up the prefrontal cortex, however. All those neural pathways that were meant to allow you to live a productive, happy, balanced life become redirected, and now it’s your reptilian brain—the amygdala—that assumes the pilot’s seat. And your inner lizard is indeed a lounge lizard. He wants to feel good now. People often wonder why on earth an alcoholic or addict continues to use despite all these, shall we say, adverse consequences. It’s because our own personal planes have been hijacked by fucking lizards. Have you ever tried to reason with a Komodo dragon? Exactly. Ain’t nothing stopping him from his fix.

  But then you quit, most often due to some particularly bad adverse consequence, and then it’s all good, right? This is where the really depressing part comes in. Your brain is so messed up that you cannot properly feel pleasure. Not for a long time. On its own, your brain produces a certain amount of dopamine naturally. It’s the little smiley face on your day, the happy neurotransmitter that causes you to laugh at cat videos on YouTube. Your brain tends to regulate your dopamine at a fairly fixed level, which is why normal people never get tired of cat videos. It’s also why they don’t drink too much or mainline heroin into their genitals. Something in the genetic code of the alcoholic/addict, however, causes their dopamine levels to spike to stratospheric levels as soon as they encounter the substance their bodies were wired for. You never hear of stories that begin with: “Gosh, the first time I drank/snorted/inhaled/swallowed/injected, I really hated it. It was yucky and it made me feel icky.” No, what you hear about that first encounter with their particular substance of choice is how the heavens opened, the sun shone, Handel’s Messiah and the trumpets of angels greeted them as they attained a whole new level of consciousness, and for the first time, they felt the grace of God. Seriously. But what’s really happening is a rush of dopamine flooding the brain. And you want more. And then you have more. And then your brain goes, hey, wait a minute, there is just way too much dopamine floating around in here. So, to keep things in balance, it decides to produce less and less of it on its own, which creates its own vicious feedback loop as the addict/alcoholic seeks to compensate for the brain’s stubborn unwillingness to get back on the dopamine assembly line by ingesting more of the substance, leading, of course, to the brain’s own dopamine assembly workers basically going on strike, like they lived in France or something.

  And these dopamine transmitters? They are difficult to rouse out of their slumber. They will not be hurried. There is no magic pill for them. Prozac and the like are useless. In rehab, we had a neurobiologist tell us that not even sex will equate the dopamine rush that the addict/alcoholic feels when using. Really? Were we that pathetic? The only thing is time, the good doctor assured us. Well, someone asked, what if we had vigorous sex with our partners five times a day? Would that speed up the dopamine normalization process? No, he informed us. That was just so sad we all agreed. What strange mutant creatures we had become.

  Fortunately, in the interim, while our brains normalized, there were a few things we could do to help mosey things along. It turns out that those early twelve-steppers back in the 1930s were on to something with their suggestion that it might be a good idea to develop some kind of relationship with a Higher Power. This is what trips a lot of people up, of course. Do you mean to say, I thought early on, that my sobriety is somehow dependent on my settling, right here and now, essentially five thousand years of religious conflict and sectarian strife, and that I had to choose a well-defined interpretation of God, a corresponding religion, a subgenus denomination, and a particular congregation/community, otherwise I’m destined to die a gutter-drunk? No, dipshit, I was told. Just find whatever floats your boat, whether Buddha, Ganesh, Jesus, Satan, your family, your group, the Nature Goddess, whatever. Just make it be something larger than yourself and every day toss a little prayer balloon its way. And if that doesn’t work for you, then learn how to meditate. The point here is to transform your selfish, self-absorbed ass into someone that connects with a living world in all its wonder and glory. No one gives a shit about anyone’s particular religion; it’s all about spirituality, dude.

  Because I was totally geeking out on neuroplasticity I’d decided to look this up—ye have so little faith, I was told, not for the first time—but indeed it’s true. MRIs taken of the brains of Zen Buddhists in deep meditation and Franciscan monks immersed in prayer all light up like a Christmas tree in the prefrontal cortex, which for the addict/alcoholic in rehab, of course, has long ago gone as dark as North Korea. So I decided to do both. I meditated for me and I prayed for you, and now sometimes whole hours would pass without an evil thought.

  And yet I still missed that kinetic buzz, that surge of something, the rush of pleasure and calm that accompanied drinking back when it still worked. This is called euphoric recall, when the addict/alcoholic conveniently skips over the last, miserable days of their using, and lets their mind wander back in time, to the nights when all it took was two or three glasses of a really good red zinfandel to get their groove on.

  Fortunately, while my dopamine transmitters were still a little wobbly, I could depend on good old reliable endorphins to give me the kick that I craved. And like so many who had only recently ended their relationship with their substance of choice, I too found myself spending enormous amounts of time at the Bikram Yoga studio, the gym, or, especially, the running trails, pursuing the endorphin high with all the devotion of the addict. The fact that this also entailed pain and suffering was an extra-special bonus, given that I was generally feeling guilty and repentant, and so I liked the medieval hair-shirt element involved in pushing myself to the point of cracking.

  So to say that I was eager to get off the boat and commit to some hardy endorphin-stimulating exercise would be an understatement. That intense craving I’d had just a few days prior left me tremulous with worry. It would be so easy, I knew, to relapse here, on a small ship in the middle of nowhere, filled with people drinking from noon to night, like vacationers without a worry in the world, passing the time over long wine-soaked lunches and dinners because there wasn’t much else to do. This, I knew, was not an ideal milieu for me. From time to time, my brain would zap me a message: Hey, it said, how about we change our no-drinking rule to no-drinking-on-terra-firma? That could work, right? That would free up boats, airplanes, and inner tubes. What do you say? After a few days of this, I w
as fairly frothing like a racehorse locked in the gate, looking forward to nothing more than a long trek on a dirt trail.

  But then, standing on the deck during the first blue wisp of dawn, as we cruised slowly into the bay at Omoa, one of two small settlements on the island of Fatu Hiva, for a brief moment all thoughts of strenuous exertion left me as the first morning rays of sunlight illuminated what, I thought, could very well be the most beautiful island in the world, and now I was grateful to be sober, because if I’d been drinking, there’s no fucking way I’d be up this early.

  Chapter Five

  Robert Louis Stevenson, upon sighting the Marquesas, associated the experience with the loss of one’s virginity. Actually, technically speaking, he said that it “touched a virginity of sense,” but since I make no claim to being any kind of official biographer, I feel free to extrapolate. In any event, Fatu Hiva is that breathtaking, provided of course that you equate the loss of your virginity with something that was beautiful and novel, which changed you forever, and not with something that was sad, pathetic, and fumbling, which left you thinking, Wait, that’s it? But Fatu Hiva, encountering it, seeing it, inhaling it, is like an entirely new sensory experience. It is unlike any island I have ever seen.

  It wasn’t merely the light. Dawn can make a snowdrift in North Dakota look like the frozen tear of God. Or, no, perhaps it was the light, the emerging clarity of the equatorial sun, illuminating a tumble of ravines and coarse, ragged cliffs; a vegetation that seemed to change its composition the higher one looked; a lush jungle cacophony below, and then as you gazed higher, up to the lofty, eminent peaks of jagged mountains, where a few clouds swirled around saw-toothed summits, a sharp, barren greenness, the crests of newborn mountains. It was like some strange fusion of island types, a hybrid of the tropical combined with something rougher, more temperamental and moody, like the isles one sees off distant coasts in the higher and lower latitudes, recalling some scene from Where the Wild Things Are.