It’s fine, Mom, because now I have a sponsor.
The woman and I began drinking a lot of coffee together, and we talked and talked and talked. She gave me a large blue book and took me to a Native American event in a teepee—or, more accurately, an appropriated event by a bunch of white woo-woo types—where we all took our clothes off, got smudged by sage, chanted, and sweated together. It was supposed to be spiritual, but I mostly found it interesting that people who were menstruating weren’t allowed in. Because none of the people were actually Native American, nobody could tell me why.
Once again, I had no idea what the hell anybody was saying in the teepee or in those meetings. I sat foggy and bored, watching the drunks around me, growing irritated when they talked too much, waiting for my turn to explain how it’s done, shunning suspected tweakers as well as anyone with serious grammar deficiencies, and departing before they launched into their weird prayer circle. My understanding of the program was that you sit and drink coffee until something happens that makes you sober.
It also had something to do with God.
At home, I read the big blue book my sponsor gave me and highlighted the parts that resonated with me. I read it like a novel in college. I read it like I was going to write a paper on it. More information. More ideas that were going to kick in any minute now. Ideas to keep me sober, to stand between that drink and me. The meeting people had slogans: “Remember your last drunk,” and “Think it through.” I agreed to believe them. I did everything I could to fill my brain with a million defenses against the moment I’d once again realize I’m afraid to fly, or think, It’s been so long since I took a drink, surely one would be fine. Just one.
After the relapse, I increased my exercise and therapy even more. Rocket and Ava came to visit me on my birthday. They brought me gifts and asked when I was coming home. I realized it was time. I must get back with my children.
“I am so grateful for that relapse,” I told the meeting on my last day in Petaluma, “I learned my lesson. I am terrified of alcohol now.”
• • •
Six months later, I narrowly avoided inpatient psychiatric care.
I had been on a ten-day bender, drinking whiskey in the apartment I had rented to “find myself” before getting the kids back, with my plants all dead on the back patio; Morgan, the little dog I had acquired as my companion, and the laundry in a giant damp heap at the foot of the bed; and me on the couch, in the habitat meticulously constructed to avoid that exact moment.
A few weeks prior, I had found it necessary to make a trip to my mother’s house at nine a.m. to steal change out of Ava’s Hello Kitty piggy bank so I could buy some whiskey to come down off the crack I had been smoking all night. After that, my mother found it necessary to take away my key to her house.
The next day, I walked into work late. I had found a little job at a chain tutoring center in my town, and they told me I was excellent, definitely managerial material. But my boss didn’t say a word when he saw me that morning. As soon as I stepped over the threshold, he looked at me, shook his head “no,” and pointed to the door behind me. I guess I had called in sick one too many times.
I was then locked out of work and out of my mother’s house. I hadn’t seen my children in a month. I didn’t try to call anymore. When Grandma Bonny called, I avoided her. When Grandma Joan called, I avoided her too.
Meanwhile, Mac was a beaming light of sobriety, living back at the dome and apprenticing as an ironworker. Without me, he found a new career. My father was still sober and spending more and more time with my children. Everybody seemed to be getting better except me.
I had met a new friend at a shadowy party of misfits who still lived like they were twenty even though they were all in their thirties. She drank like I drank, and we passed hours in my apartment guzzling Maker’s Mark whiskey (when we could afford the good stuff) and listening to old country music. I wondered how I had ever survived without whiskey. In the past, I thought it tasted like stale fire. With her, though, at that time, it tasted like truth.
My days became Waylon, Johnny, and Hank. I thought I had finally found my people. I am an outlaw. That’s what it is. Since I had no job or family, the drinking turned from night to all day and all night, without end.
One day, Mac knocked on the front door while I sat on the couch, immobile, pretending I wasn’t there. He could hear the music. He could see my car. He pounded on the door, growing angrier with every smack of his fist against the wood. Eventually he left, roaring as he walked down the stairs.
The next day, I told my outlaw girlfriend that he broke the door down and came at me physically. This was an outright lie, but I wanted some sympathy. I wanted people to understand I was the victim here.
• • •
Sitting across from the hospital psychiatrist, I tried to explain that it was just Morgan and me in the apartment, and due to the drinking situation, I couldn’t manage to get him outside anymore to pee and poop. The apartment manager, I explained, was overreacting.
“Plus, I covered it with paper towels, doctor, so I didn’t have to step in it.” I didn’t tell him I had lived that way for weeks, covering every stain and hopping around them like a child trying to avoid the cracks on a sidewalk.
I thought this would clear it all up for him, but he said, “Nobody sane would live that way.”
This startled me. I am not insane, I thought. I was just drinking! It was a lot of drinking.
I got off with a month of intensive outpatient treatment, so each day I drove to Sacramento to sit in the corner of yet another group therapy room with my hood up, promising not to drink and trying hard to schedule psych appointments that conflicted with art therapy. I hated art.
This place was not like the rehabs of a year before. This place was for the poorest people, the crazies on the street, the ones chattering to themselves in Central Park.
But the psychiatrist was not done with me.
“You know, Janelle, you went from living a good life to fired and in a mental healthcare facility in eight weeks. Why did you start drinking again?”
“I don’t know. I thought it would be different this time.”
“What led you to that conclusion?” I looked down, and I watched his hand move across the yellow legal pad in an open manila folder. Who knew what kind of lies he was telling about me.
I thought about the way I had started drinking after that stretch of sobriety between the sober living house and my new apartment. I thought about living with my mother, and deciding with her that I shouldn’t yet return to Mac and the kids, and how I went to meetings every week and exercised, and how my job at the law firm said I could take a few more months off to “get well,” so I got a job at the tutoring center. I thought about the night I picked up a six-month token from the cult meetings, and stood in front of them declaring the miracle of sobriety, and how they all cheered for me. I thought of my sober friends asking me to ice cream after the meeting, and me saying no, and how I fully intended to drive home, but by the time I got to the freeway, I remembered that alcohol was never my problem. It was cocaine that turned me into a blithering idiot. I recalled the words of my friends in the meetings, “If you aren’t sure you’re an alcoholic, go try some controlled drinking.” And I knew what I needed to do. I needed to try some controlled drinking.
How do I explain all that to you, normal doctor guy?
I couldn’t, so I said, “I thought because it was so bad before, I would drink differently this time. I wanted to prove I wasn’t an alcoholic.” It was the most honest answer I had ever given a doctor. I yearned for help this time. I was so tired.
He didn’t respond to my answer, but instead asked, “Are you med-compliant?” which is code for “Do you take what’s prescribed?”
“Yes, I am.” I said, resigned. This fucking guy doesn’t care.
He scribbled more lies on his page and looked right at me, stating, “You were living in a house full of dog feces and urine.” He see
med to desire an explanation, again.
“I know. It was raining a lot. I told you. I couldn’t get outside.”
“Why are you cutting your arms again, Janelle?”
“Because I like watching the blood come up,” I said, pausing before saying, “It feels manageable.”
“Are you still drinking, Janelle?” He was simply moving through his checklist of questions. He didn’t respond directly to a single one of my answers. I wondered why I bothered with these doctors.
“No. Yes. Well, I didn’t today.” And that was true, although last night’s alcohol was probably drifting out of my pores.
He snapped the file shut, leaned forward, and asked loudly, “Are you always this difficult?”
I sat stunned and terrified. I knew I was in bad shape, so I had promised myself to tell the doctor the absolute truth. I did so. And now he thinks I’m crazier than ever. He hates me because he thinks I’m messing with him, and yet, I am being honest. I am trying to get help.
Is my truth more horrible than my lies?
His reaction confused me, and I began wondering if I was telling the truth at all.
Maybe I thought I was being honest, but I was actually lying? Maybe I am truly insane? The truth was melding with the lies, and I couldn’t tell him what was happening in my mind because I just told him pure truth and he’s asking why I’m being so difficult.
He prescribed more and different pills.
• • •
On my way home from the loony bin that night, I bought a pint of Ancient Age whiskey and a pack of Pall Malls, just like Alice used to smoke. I paid for them with the twenty dollars my mother had given me. The next morning, I started thinking of my mother the second my eyes opened. I saw her face and smile and felt her hug as she handed me the twenty dollars I had said I needed for groceries. I thought of my children. My mom, she was always so kind. I promised myself I would visit them that day.
When I opened her door, Rocket, who was two, ran to me as fast as he could, and I went down on my knees again to hug and kiss and hold him. He grabbed my face and declared, “Mama, home!”
I couldn’t even respond. I couldn’t tell him I would stay. I could not tell my boy when I’d be back again. I didn’t even bother.
Ava was six. She kept a box by her bed of trinkets and notes I had written her, from rehab and elsewhere. When she missed me, she read them, and maybe cried. Mac told me about the box to get me to sober up and come home.
Instead, I drew pictures during art therapy and sent them to her, pictures of rainbows and houses and suns, the same stupid drawings I’d made as a kid when all the other kids drew more interesting things. Those birds that were just two curved lines connecting in the middle. The house with the flowers along the outside and a tree in the corner and a big yellow sun with lines of orange.
I fucking hate art, I thought. But I’m glad I can send her pictures of the home I can’t make.
During breaks at the outpatient center we stood outside in total silence, smoking. The victim Olympics were over in that place, the pecking order gone, the hierarchy of sickness no longer fun. Nobody cared anymore. The souls around there were too lost, too poor to posture, too tired to fight. We showed up unwashed. We showed up stained, dosed on legal drugs, to tell them what they needed to hear. When we talked, it was only to compare release dates.
Every day I watched with agitated jealousy the people who got out. The staff there had no personal stories of salvation, no hopeful anecdotes or phrases. In fact, I was convinced they preferred us dead or in jail. They recited canned platitudes and worn-out “inspirations,” checked little boxes, and fed us out of Styrofoam trays on a pushcart. I refused to eat anything except Snickers from the vending machine. I never took my hood off.
• • •
On the day I graduated Lightweight Loony Bin, I headed straight to my outlaw friend’s trailer to celebrate.
Six days later, I took a shit in a bag and put it in my trunk. The toilet in her trailer was broken and I needed to go to the bathroom, so I placed the bag in the toilet and went. Then I found myself in possession of a bag of shit, but telling people around me I was carrying such a thing was out of the question, although perhaps they would not have found it so odd. Absolutely stranger things had happened in that trailer park—for example, the man who wore masking tape on his head, or the man who stood in his parking spot directing nonexistent traffic and protesting capitalism. Still, the situation struck me as rather difficult to explain, so I concealed the bag in a larger bag, and then hid it in my trunk.
I then got distracted and left it there for probably two days, which is two days longer than anyone should have feces in her trunk.
I could have walked four minutes down to the gas station to relieve myself, or the fast food joint right next to the gas station, or I could have even shit in the dirt. I could have thrown the bag away in the dumpster twenty feet from the trailer. Just about any plan was better than the one I came up with, but after six days of what I called “maintenance whiskey”—which is when you’re drinking around the clock simply to kill the shakes—things get weird.
Every idea was a three a.m. idea, and nobody was left to question them.
• • •
My days became maintenance whiskey and trips between my apartment and the outlaw’s trailer. At her place, hippies and Hank III fans with questionable dental hygiene occasionally showed up with drugs I couldn’t afford, and I would marvel at their generosity. They would show up with soma and ecstasy, and I would take all that was offered. If I had recently refilled my Xanax and Ambien, I’d take that too. Somebody would come by with Percocet or cocaine, and I’d take that as well.
I drank every day to kill the shakes. I did drugs when they came around but I had no money or energy left to find them. I was on a pure Ancient Age and Pall Mall maintenance plan.
Yet no matter what I consumed, I got no relief. I found no calm. I was driven by a compulsion beyond my mind, heart, love of my kids, or life itself. I held on each day to a vague memory of the peace alcohol once brought, of the way it blanketed my throat and belly with warm relief, my whole heart, actually, the way it connected me to others and my life and future. The way it took me straight to serenity, to comfort in my mind, in the universe. In those meetings they told me, “One day, alcohol will stop working for you.” I scribbled those words in the front of the big book they gave me, thinking, My God, that cannot possibly be true. In that trailer, I learned it was true. I learned that one day, I would grow physically drunk—stumbling, vomiting, slurring my words—but my mind would remain clean, stripped, and still starving. The relief alcohol once brought would never return. Like a rat on a wheel, I would frantically chase a drifting memory.
On the morning I woke up in my apartment with not a single dollar or drop of booze, I took a swig of vanilla extract from my kitchen cupboard and shuddered, thinking, At least it isn’t face toner. While I was sleeping, my mother had dropped off on my porch a package of sliced turkey breast and loaf of bread, with a note attached that read, “I love you, Janelle!” With a smiley face. I couldn’t eat the food. The smiley face broke my fucking heart. I detoxed and shivered until I got my unemployment check, then went back to the trailer.
• • •
Four days later, my eyes rolled back in my head after I took a pull of Ancient Age. I was back on that maintenance plan. Someone put me in my beige Ford Taurus, a gift from Grandma Bonny, who, at that moment, was dying of dementia and old age without my attention, two counties away. They drove me to the emergency room and dropped me off, leaving me with my keys and car in the lot, finding their own way home so I could leave when they released me.
I fell asleep on the hospital bed, and when I woke, disoriented and restless, I looked around at the patients next to me, at the people surrounding them, and I noticed my only companion was a new bracelet around my wrist. I tried to rip the oxygen tubes out of my nose, but a nurse materialized and leaned down right in my face, slowly
articulating in one long, compassionate snarl, “Do you want to live?”
I nodded. “Then focus on your breathing,” she said with equal severity. “Because your brain is not getting enough oxygen.” She was about fifty years old and quite apparently fed up with my kind. Her tone was bulletproof. It didn’t even occur to me to disobey her. I nodded and lay back and focused on deep breaths and the people bustling around me. I was in a spot in the hospital where they didn’t even close the curtains. I looked down and noticed I had no shoes, and my skirt was ripped.
Eventually the doctor arrived and announced he was sending me back to the loony bin because I had so many substances in my body it was “obvious you were trying to commit suicide.”
“Oh no, doctor, I’m not trying to kill myself,” I explained. “I do this every day.”
He gazed at me in silence. I thought he was going to say something, but he only looked at me with resigned disgust and signed my release papers. He handed them to me and walked out. On my way to the exit, the nurse approached me in the hallway and said, “You know, girl, you’re gonna die.” I nodded and kept walking, as did she. It wasn’t news to me.
In the parking lot, I looked down at the bracelet and wondered when I had become a person without companions in an emergency room. I had a mother, father, husband, and children, but they had no idea where I was and had long since stopped expecting such information. I called my mother yet again.
“I almost overdosed. This has to be the end.”
I meant it no more or less than every other time I meant it.
My family rallied and booked me into St. Helena, one of the oldest and most revered treatment centers in California. My mother and her friends from church cleaned up the horrifying mess of my apartment and wrote me encouraging notes in a little red book of thoughts and prayers. My mother gave me the little book on her first visit, telling me how when she was cleaning my apartment she had found some little shoes and a shirt I had bought at the thrift store for Rocket, carefully folded on my counter, and when she saw them she had dropped her head into her arms and wept, because she knew in that moment how hard I was trying, and how I was dying.
I'm Just Happy to Be Here Page 15