In the new rehab, I didn’t care how I compared to you, and I didn’t care if you were sicker than me or not, and I didn’t care what you did in the 1980s. Just leave me the fuck alone. The doctors there explained that I was in “late stage alcoholism” and my liver was not looking good. Ah, whatever. Where can I have a cigarette? It was a nonsmoking facility, so I had to walk up a hill behind the hospital and hide in the bushes to smoke as often as I could. I hung out with a dude who drank hand sanitizer once in jail. At our first AA meeting in the town of St. Helena, I considered making a break for the Chevron across the street, thinking I could hitchhike home, before recalling yet another glitch in my plan: I had been evicted and thus had no home. I figured the outlaw’s trailer was most likely still standing. I’d always be welcome there. Like Alice, I had no real hope of recovery.
But on the second weekend, my mother brought Ava and Rocket to visit me, and Ava handed me a piece of paper with a poem she had written. It read:
March 8, 2008
The skies are so blue
The sun is shining.
I want to see you.
I miss you so much
I really do
Why do you ever want to leave me
ever in these days?
We do not have to be in this world.
We can be flying on unicorns every day.
It seems so difficult every single day.
Why do you have to be gone?
I love you so much.
It seems I haven’t seen you for three years.
I’m so happy
I don’t want to leave you ever.
I read it and knew there was no choice but to stay. My attitude transformed with the words “We do not have to be in this world.” My baby was willing to go anywhere, anywhere to be with me. How could I not listen? How could I not go with her? My heart ached for that place, too.
My mind circled my children’s faces every morning when I awoke, and each day in group, and when we sat in the cafeteria pushing food around our plastic trays. I wrote my children letters and completed every soul-searching therapy assignment. I attended the mindfulness meditations, wrote in my journal, and the whole rehab knew I was going to make it. If rehabs gave a “most likely to succeed” award, I would have won it. I left healthy and energized, with my counselor’s words echoing in my brain: “I’ve been here a long time, Janelle, and I know who’s going to make it. You are going to make it.”
Mac picked me up on my last day. Each night in rehab, I had stood in the hallway leaning against a wall, discussing with him on a pay phone my great turnaround—fighting, crying, planning—until we agreed to reunite our family at his parents’ ranch. He and his friends finished moving my belongings out of the sick apartment and into a storage unit, and on the evening Mac and I drove to his family’s home, where he was living and we had lived many years before, I realized I was as happy and clean and full of love as the day we brought our first baby home.
Six days after that night, six days after the night my children squealed and laughed and jumped into my arms because we were finally together again, a family, I told Mac I needed to go get some bread.
I returned to the trailer where I nearly overdosed. It was my twenty-ninth birthday.
• • •
Nine months later, in December of 2008, Mac let me know he was finished. With me, with the marriage. I knew it was true. While he spoke, I drove north on Highway 5 on my way home from the Anza Borrego desert. I had gone south with a friend in a three a.m. idea, but I drank all my money and expended all my gas. I considered pawning my laptop, but instead called Mac. He deposited fifty dollars in my account, just enough for gas to get home. On my way, I called to thank him.
I tried everything, but he was done. I groveled. I cried and begged, but the more I scrambled, the more calmly he spoke. “Janelle, I’m done waiting for you.” I wished he would at least rage. There’s room for negotiation in anger. But there’s nothing in neutrality. There’s no game in surrender.
I had lost him.
He had not taken a drink since March of 2007. When we would have lunch together, I’d suggest we order Coronas, and he’d say “No, thanks. One is too many and a thousand never enough.” He had now found sobriety in those rooms for drunks I knew were full of lies.
Too bad I’m not like them, I’d think.
Back in Woodland, I weaseled into my mother’s house through lies and manipulation, convincing her I was sober. She posted a list of house rules on the refrigerator as if I were seventeen years old. Curfew, medicine compliance, abstinence from alcohol. I wasn’t doing drugs any more, and my outlaw friend was forced to return to her parents. They too thought she was going to die. From my mother’s house, I managed to pull it together just enough to return to my job at the law firm.
No longer drinking daily, I clenched my fists through three dry days, then drank again. I’d drink for two or three or four days straight, then, after a night of withdrawal, I’d maybe make it to work. Then I would swear it off. Then three more sober days would pass, and it would all start over again. I emerged from each binge in confused, gray hopelessness, but soon I didn’t care anymore.
I couldn’t get relief. I couldn’t help but try.
My neighbor, a young man whose kindness seemed limitless, offered me a shot of Dilaudid one day. I watched him flick the tip of the needle. “Why do you do that?”
“To remove air bubbles. If one gets in your vein, it will kill you.” He laughed, as if that were funny.
Here was the suicide rock star vibe I used to admire from afar. How tough. How cool. I didn’t feel tough. I didn’t feel cool. He tied my arm and pulled it and plunged the syringe. Red-orange light coursed through me. I dropped onto the couch and didn’t move for three hours. I understood the appeal immediately, but I didn’t want to die.
I did it only three more times.
• • •
I saw my children for a few moments two or three days a week, but only at my mother’s house. I didn’t take them places. I didn’t make them meals. I didn’t stick around.
I have reasons to go, kids. I’m sorry. I have reasons I can’t be there. The alcohol has stopped working. I have to keep trying.
I never bought the replacement silk streamer. Ava never asked. She still had the box by her bed. I missed her graduation from primary school. My mother sent me photos, and I showed them to the people I was with. “Look at my little girl!” I beamed.
In the throes of the morning, I heard Rocket’s voice again.
“Mama, home.”
But I knew I couldn’t stay.
11
I Found God in a Leaf Blower, and I Fucking Hate Leaf Blowers
Nothing happened on March 5, 2009, that had not happened a thousand times before. I woke at nine or ten or eleven a.m. in a bed in my mother’s house, where I was still living, under a big window with no screen and blinds that didn’t shut all the way because I had broken them. Sometimes I needed to crawl in through the window because I smelled like alcohol and was lying.
The sun beat me through the blinds that wouldn’t shut, relentless against my pounding head. I was supposed to be at work, but I had called in sick again. They were probably going to let me go soon. I could feel I was riding the last few feet of their tolerance. My mother drove Ava and Rocket to school that morning. Mac, my mother, father, grandparents, and in-laws were working. Everybody was working. Everybody was away in the world, living their day.
I sweated and shook, closed and opened my eyes in the fog and pain behind them. It was nothing. One more time. One more day. Here we go, old friend.
I rolled over and looked at the pile of books on the bedside table—literature, some self-help stuff. An AA book. A glass half full of water. A journal I hadn’t written in for years. I rolled over and stared at those books and felt a burn in my eyes and brain as something sunk into the realm of knowing. I closed my eyes, flipped onto my back, then to the other side, and back again—enraged, despera
te, and agitated, moving for the sake of passing the time, to shake the frenetic feeling from my blood. I stared at the pile of books again, and when I saw them this time, for some reason, I saw the end of my life.
I saw it roll out in front of me like a carpet might unroll, the years unfolding one at a time down a street or giant hallway, and I saw the end of it. I saw it with my whole body and felt it with every shred of vision I had in that condition.
I would die a hopeless, useless alcoholic, and there was nothing I could do about it.
That was the part that killed me right there: I had no defense. I was out of ideas. I had no strategy, and I had no person or thing left to blame. I was dying. Or dead. My children and family were gone because they should be. My family had disintegrated, my life was in ruins, because I had no idea how to live it. I couldn’t take one more step sober, and I couldn’t take one more step drunk. I accepted that end. I accepted it in my bones.
I always had a next move. As soon as this one thing happened I would be happy, and my life would work, and I would stop drinking. As soon as this one thing happened, I would manage my drinking. But I had exhausted every plan, every move, every belief. Every therapist, every geographic rearrangement, every theory, every book, every rehab, every medication. I tried love and unlove and job and no job, rock-n-roll and hiding out, desk jobs and grad school and no school. I tried babies and friends and no babies and no friends. I tried living alone and living with others. I tried talking through it and living lies in silence. I tried churches and swearing with oaths and getting naked with women in teepees. I tried cutting it out of me with blades. I tried begging the gods. I tried retreats. I tried gurus. I tried pills.
And it all failed.
I failed.
I drank. That was my future. No matter what, I would always drink again.
Leveled under that window, I wanted nothing back. I knew I had no footing to demand a return of the people or life I loved.
I suppose the bottle killed me that day—the fighter, the one who kicks and screams and rails against powerlessness. It killed the one who hated the tweakers, who wanted to be better than others, who whined and cried—postured and fought—about what she “deserved.” Those Nikes. A more intellectually challenging job. Respect. It killed the one who resented my father for being gone those years, and it killed the one who strategized, polished things up, set it up one more time. Above all, it killed my self-pity.
I saw in that moment I had already received everything I “deserved,” everything I had built, brick by brick, one day at a time.
I would always drink again, and alcohol was my God.
The truth descended like a veil of black around me, pushed out in every direction of my mind and the room. I heard lawnmowers outside, people tending to their yards, leaf blowers—those fucking things—people driving by. I heard a dog yap here and there, somebody’s pet that was cared for, fed, walked. People on their way to work, maybe visiting a friend, an errand, a quick stop home for lunch. I heard the world right outside that window. I heard it happening, moving, bustling, alive, and for the first time in my life I wanted more than anything to be a part of that world. I wanted to wake up and know where I would be that evening. I wanted to pick my children up from school. I wanted to take my trash out, answer mail, get up and make coffee, go to work, and have it all mean something. I wanted to find some satisfaction in these tasks, these tiny stupid life things we do.
I wanted to be a wife. Mother. Employee. Friend. I didn’t want my kids back, my family, my husband. I didn’t want anything but to live one single day free. I wanted freedom.
I wanted freedom.
The bottle killed me that day. I found God in a leaf blower, got up, and walked into the sound.
• • •
I never would have thought to look there, in total defeat. I never would have thought giving up would bring me to life, that surrender would be my hope. It’s almost funny. All those rehabs were about bolstering me, telling me I was capable and smart and worth more. It was always about arming myself and fighting, beating this alcoholism. We talked about my childhood and what I deserved and didn’t get and how that wounded and broke me.
Well, that’s nice, but it still doesn’t give me a solution, does it? I’m still not showing up to my kid’s birthday celebrations, and I’m still somehow unable to silence the voices that insist, “Go ahead. Take a drink. It’s going to be different this time.” I still can’t seem to make myself change no matter what I throw at it or how hard I want it. I always go back to the booze, and the drugs, and the same nonsense of my entire life. I know my problem inside out and backwards and all the catchphrases, and Jung and I are best friends and DBT and CBT and all the rest. I get it all, I know it all—I am no fool. But you’re trying to fix a broken brain with the broken brain, and if that isn’t insanity then I don’t know what is.
When I died at the bottom of that bottle I abandoned the fight. I stopped caring what my brain said, realized my life was what it was because I was running it. My ego, my thoughts, my plans, and my “needs.” I spent years trying to manage it all, trying to control and fix things. If I thought it, it was true. Even though the results of that reliance were disastrous, it never occurred to me I could ignore it, that I could rely on something else, something outside of me, something that perhaps wanted better for me than shitting in bags and loneliness.
Of course I did not figure these things out on my own. From that bed, I went to the only place I knew would accept me, the only place that might understand, the place I had gone for two years without ever staying sober, the place I’d go on cold nights after a bottle of whiskey, where I would bang on the table and tell them they were full of shit, the place where the people put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Keep coming back, Janelle.”
I was taught these things by a washed-up ex-gutter drunk who had spent a good portion of his life shooting cocaine in a refrigerator box. He was in his late forties, with a wife and two children. He had blond hair and glasses and shimmering blue eyes. I met him while I was smoking out in front of the alcoholics’ meeting hall. He watched me tell my story of woe to a poor sot next to me, but when he got up, he handed me a piece of paper and said, “You need help? Call me tomorrow.” And I did.
I was taught this by the group of drunks I had been hanging out with for years but could never hear or see because I wasn’t like them yet. I wasn’t leveled yet. My ideas were better than theirs. Until that day I was rearranged, ran out of ideas, and lost faith in my ability to make new ones. I showed up broken, fumbling for words, and they didn’t care. They offered me a new perception.
Universe, take it. Take it all. God, whatever. I don’t know about God. I don’t know if he or she or it is up there looking at me or sent me that desperation and surrender. I don’t know a single thing about any of that, but I know when I died, when I stepped out of the way and my bones knew I was utterly powerless, help started flooding in like the man from Sebastopol who happened upon us on the beach on an island in the Caribbean, took us home, and didn’t murder us.
I got some help from that washed-up gutter drunk because somebody helped him. He didn’t tell me warm and beautiful things. He said I was a dead woman. He said, “We’re all in various stages of ‘my case is different.’” He said I was just another drunk.
He told me, “Janelle, in your case, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a fire hydrant.” His words taught me I had an unreliable brain, and it would always lead me to another drink. For the first time, I realized my perceptions were wrong, and if I wanted to live, I had to get a new set of eyes. I called him Good News Jack, because he was full of news that sounded mean and awful except it was setting me free, and I knew it. It sounded like this: “If your ideas worked so well, what the fuck are you doing here?”
It sounded like this, too: “We aren’t looking for another idea, another mental construct, more mind candy. We’re looking for a rebuilding, access to a power that can
save your sorry ass.”
And I believed him, because I had nothing else. I decided I’d give his suggestions a try because I had exhausted all other options, and I figured at least this way there was potential for change.
When I told Good News Jack I had a bit of a shady past with God, he said, “Janelle, if you’re sittin’ there and your ass is on fire, and I walk up with a fire hose, offering to put it out, are you going to tell me, ‘Hold up. No thanks. I don’t believe in fire hoses?’ No, motherfucker, of course you’re not. You’re going to say ‘Yes, please’ and hope it works.”
I said “Yes, please” and hoped it worked. I did not think it would. Why would I? Nothing ever worked. I fully expected to drink again. I even told that room of ex-drunks: “Look, I’m going to do everything your book says so that when it fails, I can drink again with a clear conscience.”
• • •
Good News Jack told me that people trying to live on their own and failing desperately is an ancient process, and some of them are lucky enough to fail so badly they die while breathing, and surrender brings them to God, or life, which is one and the same. I’m not talking about Jesus or baptism or any other ritual thing. I’m talking about really, truthfully not being able to live, and somehow having the ability to recognize it, admit it, and try something new. I’m talking about a rebirth that happens from the bottom up, not as a great new belief, but as a complete rearrangement from a flattening, when everything you thought you knew to be true, that you thought you knew about yourself, turns out to be wrong. A decimation. Leveled, and rebuilt. With new eyes. New ground. New power.
They say many of the mystics had that experience. I was not a mystic. St. Francis was, and he was something of a drunken loser. He too found himself miserable. He wrote that when you “die unto self you awaken to eternal life.” Not heaven. Fuck heaven. Fuck the afterlife. I had enough of that as a kid in church wondering if the Big Guy could ever overlook last night. Eternal life, as in literally the element of life that is eternal. The power. The energy. The pulse holding the stars. The pull of the planets. The universe beyond human comprehension. The thing that makes me alive beyond breath.
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