by Dana Bowman
One night the ranch hands—I’m not sure that’s the right term for the men and women who worked there, but we’re going to stick with it because it makes the story have a more rugged appeal—invited the guests out to a honky-tonk in the nearby town of Cody.
I was all over this. For one, I was still single; therefore, I figured all the single cowboys at this place would surely congregate around me like flies with little cowboy hats. Just to clarify here: I was the honey. Also, there would be alcohol. At this point, I had not yet figured out that booze and I needed to break up, so I was more than happy to go have some drinks.
Unfortunately, the drink on tap was beer. I don’t know why I was surprised, given that Cody was all outdoorsy with no frills, so brown liquids would be the main inebriate. So, I ordered a Bud Light and grimaced through it. I’m not a fan of beer. I realize this is a somewhat goofy-sounding thing for an alcoholic to say, but that’s only because the common perception is that we alcoholics lurch about like liquor-slavering zombies, looking for any sort of cocktail to gnaw on. Not true, at least at the beginning. We can carry on with our alcoholism for years while holding on to our wine goblets and tippy martini glasses. The more often we can label/camouflage our drinking with phrases such as “Napa Lover,” “Wine Enthusiast,” or “Mom’s Special Juice” the better.
Anyway, the honky-tonk was fantastic. It was packed tightly with cowboys and loud, twangy music, and how we managed to find a table was a small miracle. I waited with Clara, one of the Swedish cooks. (This means she was from Sweden, not a chef of lutefisk and those wretched meatballs.) The men brought us some beer and Clara said thank you in her adorable lispy accent. Clara had that whole gorgeous Swedish babe thing going, if you’re into that. We both sipped our beers and did the usual look-around, although I think I did so with a lot more anticipation. Clara seemed rather tired, and I imagined her blue eyes and honey-colored hair had collected more suitors than my fly-to-honey analogy ever could. I didn’t mind so much. Clara was quiet and nice, and I was glad to have a sister-in-arms. But after a while, I began to notice that no cowboys were approaching our table. I know this because I was still sitting, and all the other folks were standing around the bar. It’s simple math.
I felt a bit deflated. I had on lipstick after all. I had expectations.
It was then that my life took a wonderful turn. I refer to this historical event as “When Carl Danced with Me.”
Carl was a guide and rancher at the dude ranch. I have changed his name, incidentally, because to reveal his name would give away that this man actually exists, for real, in Wyoming, like right now. No sane woman would remain anywhere else. They would pack up and go looking for Carl, and that’s just not good for the survival of our species. Anyway, Carl had arrived a bit later than our group, and I had yet to meet him. He ambled in, escorting his lovely and hilarious wife, Carla, whose name I also made up. I know I could do better here regarding names, but she just looks like a Carla. She had silvery-white hair that was braided into pigtails, and she made red neckerchiefs work. She had a whole “let me go out and kill a chicken and then make you a pot pie and some peach cobbler” vibe. She was earthy and funny, and I kind of wanted her to adopt me, which would have been rather weird because I also wanted her husband, Carl, to marry me.
Carl looked exactly like Sam Shepard if Sam Shepard was hotter. He had silver hair and a fantastic mustache that could have had its own Twitter handle. He was tall; he took up doorways. He wore slender, dark-blue jeans and a plaid western shirt. He just oozed wholesome hard work, and I’m talking the sexy kind. I never understood the whole “he’s a tall drink of water” thing until I met Carl. He is so wondrous he could be his own water park destination.
So, in sum, Carl was delicious. And then, he asked me to dance. And lo, Carl could dance too.
Carla seemed not to mind, by the way. I think perhaps she was used to this. Perhaps Carl was paid extra to entertain the womenfolk at this ranch, which I realize now sounds really creepy, but Carl doesn’t do creepy. He does honorable and good and all things right in the world, and as it turns out, Carl has some serious honky-tonk moves. Carl dipped and turned me so many times I became dizzy and giggly like that doe-eyed girl who tangos with Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman.
That dance was over ten years ago, and I remember it with cinematic clarity. In fact, I often revisit that moment when I am irritated with my husband. It’s nice to throw my inner Carl at Brian when he farts on me in his sleep. “Carl doesn’t fart,” I mutter as I stalk around our bedroom, opening windows and shooting Febreze in Brian’s direction. “Carl smells of cedar, and baby birds alight on his shoulder as he walks.”
It’s possible I have put Carl on a bit of a pedestal here. Carl deserves it. He is so wonderful.
Having a vivid imagination had always been a skill of mine. But in my postrelapse days, I let my imagination slip into a sort of “Secret Life of Walter Mitty” existence. I daydreamed. I stared off into long distances. I tried to conjure up Carl with so much regularity that he deserved his own Hallmark Channel. Not only did I pine for Carl, but I also longed for that Wyoming girl to come back. I missed her. She was young and fun, and she could drink a glass of wine, or four, and dance with tall cowboys all night long. Now, my life was dishes and laundry and children, and I found myself slipping into fantasy and not dealing with reality well at all.
But maybe reality is not all we imagine it to be.
The first time I got sober, I was lucky enough to experience what a lot of those in recovery refer to as “the pink cloud.” This experience, which sounds like a very chichi drink, is a period in the early days of recovery where the haze and mire of addiction lifts, and elation follows. I believe, in retrospect, that just walking and breathing after the toxins have left our bloodstream feels like we’re walking on clouds. We’re high on life. Literally.
In those early weeks of recovery, I found myself driving home one night from a meeting, and I burst into tears. These were the happy kind of tears; the ones that flowed simply because the sun was setting, the sky turned a warm coral, and Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” just came on the radio—in other words, heaven. I had to pull over. As I sat there, weeping and allowing the saxophone riff to heal my soul, I figured I could not get more pink-cloudy than this.
But, lo, I did. The following days were filled with these almost religious experiences that involved me doing everyday things. I went on walks and looked at more clouds, sometimes doing both at the same time without walking into a tree. I hugged a tree. I hugged my children. I ate an apple. I hugged my children after feeding them apples. You get the idea. I was in my own bliss blitzkrieg. It was a practical mixture of my body finally feeling better and my Higher Power giving me huge high fives for getting sober.
What a lovely experience.
Also, what a short experience.
The great Christian theologist C. S. Lewis described conversion as initially a spiritual exhilaration. But then, eventually, God sets you down and expects you to walk. Things can’t stay perfect and floaty forever, otherwise it’s not a worthy relationship. It’s the same with recovery. After a while reality sets in, and real life lumbers in with it. The next time you try to give your kid a hug, he reaches up around your neck with his sweet, pudgy little hands, and you notice the reek of poop. Upon horrified, slow-motion investigation, you realize that it is all over his hands because he’s a toddler, and he investigated the poop. (To those of you who think, “Oh, that never actually happens in parenting, right?”—it does. And sometimes more than once in a month’s time. Think potty training. And if that isn’t the best way to truly comprehend responsible birth control, I don’t know what is.)
During my Dana Gets Sober, Part Two, experience, I did not get the pink cloud. I didn’t even get a burnt-orange cloud. This sucked. My days were long, and my recovery seemed nothing but a tedious slog through redoing everything I had already done. After all, I had small children. They open their eyes in the morning and ask t
hemselves, “How often can I make my mom repeat stuff until she snaps?” I was being bludgeoned with the redo, and it was all so exhausting.
I kept waiting for that spiritual energy to arrive, swooping in to save the day and letting me know that yes, I could be Super Sobriety Girl again. The pink cloud and I could become a sort of superhero team, solving crimes and buying gourmet coffee for my home group. But I would demote myself to sidekick this time. I could accept that. Since this was my second go-around, I would allow myself to step down into the Robin role because I was humbled.
Instead? I had days where the most interesting part of my twenty-four hours was taking a hot shower. I was not energized. I slumped a lot. If anyone even asked me, “Paper or plastic?” I would start crying at having to make a decision. I felt, often, that my Higher Power was watching me, arms crossed, in an omnipotent “Mmm-hmm? You gonna listen now?” kind of way.
I know this makes my Higher Power sound really mean, which he is not. My Higher Power is Jesus, after all, and Jesus doesn’t really do mean. He doesn’t say, “Well, neener-neener, Dana. I TOLD YOU, didn’t I?” and flounce off like a mean girl.
But he did, I think, let me do relapse all on my own. I’m sure there were a whole lot of reasons for this, outlined in some great Higher Power file in the sky labeled “Dana—Tough Love.” One day, when I get really smart or die, I will get my answers. For now, I will go with the command that my dad used to bark at me about yard work: “Dana! Do it right the first time!” So, let’s review: recovery should never be done half-assed.
The thing is, I have a loosey-goosey take on reality. I liked that my existence needed to be draped with a lot of daydreaming, romantic expectations, and soaring soundtracks. For crying out loud, I’m a teacher who lives in the Midwest; what else am I going to do?
My mom told me a story once about her mother-in-law that describes this inclination toward dreaminess. Mary was a farmer’s wife. She had what we like to think of as “grit,” also known as “She’s a total badass but also a little bit bonkers.” She worked achingly hard her whole life and then said, “Wait, I’m not done,” and went off to scrub a floor afterward.
She said things such as “Well, daggone” whenever she saw us. We still don’t really know what that means, but that word had grit, too. Mary didn’t have a lot of time for romantic comedies on television or daydreaming. Daydreaming was what Dorothy did in The Wizard of Oz, and look what happened to her.
Enter Julie, my mom. I don’t think grit when I think of Julie. Actually, that’s not true. She has been married to my dad for over fifty years, and the two of them should earn a true grit medal for this miracle. But Julie is a woman of Beethoven, flower arrangements, and Hepburn-and-Tracy movies. She likes to write long letters and has a total love for all the Anne of Green Gables books. I am thinking Mary didn’t read much. She was too busy butchering hogs.
Julie recounted talking with Mary one afternoon, and Mary eyed her and said, “Well. You’re kind of a fairy-tale type of person, aren’t you?”
I’m thinking Mary might not have meant that as a compliment.
Julie and I are kindred spirits in the whole fairy-tale thing. Granted, with age and wisdom, she has put aside some of the whimsy. Marriage, tragedy, or parenting will do that to you.
For the record, my mom is so not an alcoholic. I think I remember her telling me that alcohol to her just sort of “tasted bad” and some other nonsense. When pressed, she said she’d order an Irish coffee once in a great while, but mainly that was because of the whipped cream. I find this weird. Alcohol that has the extra step of scraping off a topping, and is scalding hot? That’s just too much work.
But I get the fairy-tale thing. I so often love to hunker down in my head instead of in the cold, hard world. I think a lot of alcoholics do. And, I mean, why not? Did I not just say the world is cold and hard? Do you remember 2017? Just, like, the entire year of 2017? Need I say more?
Julie reminds me that life has magic moments, and if I can’t find any, then I need to simply orchestrate some of my own. This gives me strength on the days when I have to clean the bathrooms, and the futility of such an act nearly makes me sob because I am surrounded by small boys with really bad aim. Reality, shmeality. Why is this so bad? I mean, unless I’m talking to the electrical outlets, or leaving my family to begin my career as fire-baton twirler for the Moscow Circus, we’re good. Fairy tales are just stories. I love stories! And as far as I’m concerned, living happily ever after, at least in my head, is not totally bonkers. It’s creative. Yes, I am convinced. Everybody needs a Julie.
When I returned from my dude ranch adventure, I was more than happy to relate to my friends and family how I had been rugged and outdoorsy for an entire week, and survived. I rode a horse up the side of a mountain at such an angle that the ride began to take on a sort of funhouse tilt that terrified me and irritated the horse. I saw a moose. Up close. He seemed grumpy about it. I shot rapids. I drank whiskey and learned to tie my own fly lures and my behind got saddle-sore, and I was proud of it. I conquered the West, surrounded by real cowboys, real horses, and a really big sky.
A week later, I received an email from my ranch. They were excited to share that the ranch had been selected for a photo shoot for a little-known publication called the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Some raw shots had been sent as part of the newsletter. In one photo, a blonde woman was leaning back over a hay bale, wearing something about as substantial as two pieces of twine and some hope. The whole thing made me smirk. This was about as fake as it gets. But then I looked closer, noting her cowboy hat.
Mine was way cooler.
My Super-Duper Scientific Spectrum of Reality
CHAPTER NINE
HOW TO
recover
FROM
being human
Setting: Therapist’s office sometime in my thirties, or what I refer to as my “in-between time.” I remember I sat on a large leather armchair that made awkward farting noises every time I moved. Thus, most of the hour occurred with me trying to remain perfectly still. And this pretty much sums up the whole appointment.
“So, can I have a hug?”
My therapist was the one asking, and it wasn’t a good kind of hug, and it hadn’t been a good kind of therapy. I tried to extricate myself from the chair without sounding like I needed Pepto-Bismol.
“No!” I blurted with more emphasis than I think either of us expected. I hoped Mr. Creepy Therapist Guy made a note of my newly acquired assertiveness because I still wanted to gain imaginary therapy points, even though his request was completely inappropriate.
Mr. Creepy Therapist Guy looked disappointed. “Well, we talked quite a bit about how you don’t like physical touch from men,” he continued. “So, I was thinking we could hug and that could be a start on getting better.”
Yes, he really did say that.
And that was our first, and last, appointment together.
Mr. Creepy Therapist Guy might still be working somewhere, but not with me. During the entire hour, he had questioned me at length about sex, and things went from uncomfortable to smarmy in about ten minutes. But something happens when you sit in that overstuffed leather chair, and you see the certificates on the wall: you keep talking. You just keep talking.
“Well, I had a relationship that didn’t go well. And he left me. And since then, I guess, I haven’t really trusted anyone.”
“And what about your physical relationships with men after this?”
I looked around the room as if to find an answer that fit how I was feeling. I wanted to say, “It’s so much more than that question. There is always so much more to it than just sex. Sex is only a bit of string I have tied around the huge bundle of mess that I am carrying around with me. Sex keeps the mess tidy—at least for now. And would you stop asking me about it with that look on your face?”
I don’t remember what I actually said to him. It was probably some of the truth and some not. So much of my life during m
y in-between time followed this script, a balancing act between reality and my own fiction.
Reality was so overrated in my world back then. Still is. But once I embraced sobriety, I was able to embrace the magic and the truth of my existence. Back then, fictional living only occurred because it was for survival. Fairy tales, under duress, are not nearly as fun.
My therapy session had not been fun. As I left the office and walked past the reception area, I glanced at the woman at the front desk. She looked up at me and said in a low voice, “Are you scheduling another appointment?” And I shook my head no. Maybe it was my imagination, but she didn’t look surprised.
I have thought about Mr. Creepy Therapist Guy a lot since our session. A toxic relationship with a man who I thought would be my husband had ended, sending me into a tailspin of depression and despair. As a result, I had found my faith, but I still had so much pain, hurt, and messiness to deal with. I was in between. My thirties felt like I was standing on an empty road, looking back at burning ruins. Ahead, there was only a long, empty road. I had Jesus with me, though, so I figured I would walk that road for a bit, hand in hand with him, and then at some point he would smile knowingly and hand me off to my future husband and I would be so happy. Because that’s how Jesus works. He’s like eHarmony, only less expensive. With him, I would find love, healing, and, perhaps, a rainbow.
Instead, I spent about eight years single, wandering and often drinking a little too much. I may have gotten out of a bad relationship with a man, but I was beginning one with alcohol. So, I was between a drinking life and a sober one, but I didn’t know that then.