The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  Cutting and writing were the ways I’d found around my chronic shyness, which felt like constant failure. At Iowa, my short stories were the kind that got called character-driven, because they never had plots. But I was suspicious of my characters. They were always passive. They suffered from diseases; they suffered assaults; their dogs got heartworms. They were either fake, or else they were me. They were cruel and cruelly treated. I sent them into suffering because I was sure that suffering was gravity, and gravity was all I wanted. My work followed pain like a heat-seeking missile. Even as a young girl, my princess characters had died by dragon breath more often than they’d gotten married. In tenth grade, I’d been assigned to write a response to another student’s painting, an abstract swirl of red and purple, and I wrote a story about a girl in a wheelchair dying in a house fire.

  That first year at Iowa, I lived with a journalist in her thirties who had spent years writing newspaper articles about the New York City art scene. She knew how to roast a chicken stuffed with whole lemons, hot and pulpy and sour. The fact of cooked lemons seemed undeniably adult to me, a sign of having crossed some sort of threshold. On Wednesday nights we drove out to the farmers’ auction in a big barn just west of town—tractors and livestock and estate sales, old LPs and old swords and old Coke cans, trash and treasure—where you could buy funnel cakes and watch the auctioneers ride their giant high chairs through the aisles, speaking their incomprehensible staccato language: nowfourfifty-canigettafivenow-fivefromtheback. Back home, we sweated in our kitchen, melting goat cheese and torn-up basil into couscous and then spooning it into the little purses of fried squash blossoms. The smell of oil-blistered vegetable skin was everywhere. Those days were like that: humid, insistent. I had this thought that sautéing things would make me an adult.

  Some nights when I got restless and had trouble sleeping, I would drive out to the biggest truck stop in the world, forty miles east on I-80. It had a fifty-foot buffet and showers for the truckers. It even had a dentist and a chapel. I scribbled character-driven dialogue in my notebooks and drank mugs of black coffee filmed with broken lily pads of grease. At three in the morning, I ordered apple dumplings and vanilla ice cream and cleaned the bowl with my tongue, miles of darkened cornfields all around me.

  It seemed like everyone drank in Iowa City. Even if no one drank all the time, there was always someone drinking at any particular time. When I wasn’t pretending to ride a cowboy, trying to earn my seat on the shag, I spent my nights balancing on leather stools at the writers’ bars on Market Street: George’s and the Foxhead. “Writers’ bar” was a nonexclusive term. Really any bar where writers drank could be a writers’ bar: the Deadwood, the Dublin Underground, the Mill, the Hilltop, the Vine, Mickey’s, the Airliner, that place with a patio on the Ped Mall, that other place with a patio on the Ped Mall, that place with a patio just a block from the Ped Mall.

  But the Foxhead was the most writerly bar of all, and also the smokiest. The ventilation system was just a hole someone had shoved a fan into. The girls’ bathroom was covered with marker scrawl about men in the workshop: So-and-so would fuck anyone, so-and-so would fuck you over. Some of the guys called me barely legal, because I was so young, and I wondered if that phrase lived above a urinal in the guys’ room. I hoped. It seemed like living, to be someone who inspired gossip in black marker.

  Even as Iowa got colder, I always wore my cheapest jacket to the Foxhead because I didn’t want to get my other jackets smoky. My cheapest jacket was thin knee-length black velour with a faux-fur trim so large I felt comfortably recessed within it—shivering, arms crossed tight across my chest. Years later, I read about an undergrad in Ames who had gotten drunk and died in the snow, his body found at the bottom of the stairs in some old agricultural warehouse. But back then I wasn’t thinking about dying in the snow. I drank until I couldn’t feel the cold. After the bars closed, I kept drinking in the chilly apartments of boys who were trying to save money on their heating bills.

  One night I ended up in the chilly apartment of a boy I liked, or who I thought might like me—the two possibilities were nearly indistinguishable, or else the first barely mattered. There were a few of us at his place, and someone brought out a baggie of coke. It was my first time ever seeing coke, and it was like stepping into a movie. During high school, it seemed like all the other girls had been doing coke since they were toddlers. Popular Felicity, with her smooth-shaven legs; I was sure she’d done it all the time, while I’d been drinking Diet Cokes at PG-13 movies, spending weeks choosing an ankle- length blue lace semiformal dress.

  Truth be told, I wasn’t sure exactly how to do coke. I knew you snorted it, but I didn’t know what that looked like. I tried to summon every movie I’d ever seen. How close did you get? How close had that girl gotten in Cruel Intentions, snorting from a secret stash in her silver crucifix? I didn’t want to tell this guy it was my first time doing coke. I wanted to have done coke so many times I couldn’t even count how many times I’d done coke. Instead I was someone who needed to be reminded, gently, to use the cut straw.

  “I feel like I’m corrupting you,” this guy said. He was twenty-four but acted like those three years were a canyon between us. They were. I wanted to say: Corrupt me! I was wearing bright white pants with a big silver buckle attached, kneeling in front of this guy’s coffee table, doing a line straightened by a credit card that was honestly probably a debit card, sniffing loudly.

  There was nothing feigned about how much I loved that icy swell, that sense of so much to say. We had all night. The woman who’d brought the coke was gone. Everyone was gone. We could talk till dawn. I imagined him saying: I’ve always wondered what you were thinking. Other people were always the ones who got noticed, the Felicitys of the world, but now this guy was putting on a record, Blood on the Tracks, and Dylan’s scratchy voice filled the cold room, and the coke charged my pitter-pattering heart and it was finally my turn. The icy swell believed in me, and it believed in what this night could become. I’d only ever kissed three guys. With every one of them, I’d imagined an entire future unfolding between us. Now I was imagining it with this one. I hadn’t told him about it yet, but maybe I would. Maybe I’d tell him while dawn broke over the park beyond his bay windows.

  “Who actually wears white pants?” he asked me. “You see them, but you don’t think of anyone actually wearing them.”

  I kept sitting on his couch, for hours and hours, waiting for him to kiss me. I finally asked him, “Are you going to kiss me?”—meaning, Are you going to try to sleep with me?—because there was enough coke and vodka inside me to ask out loud, to peel away whatever feeble skin remained between the world and my need to be affirmed by it.

  The answer was no. He wasn’t going to try to sleep with me. The closest he got to trying to sleep with me was saying, just before I left, “Hey, not everybody can pull off white pants,” as a kind of consolation prize.

  As I was leaving, he kissed me in his doorway. “Is that what you wanted?” he said, and a sob rose in my throat, salty and swollen. I was drunk but not drunk enough. It was the worst humiliation: to be seen like this, not desired but desiring. I couldn’t let myself cry in front of him. So I did it on the way home, walking through the cold, at four in the morning, my white pants gleaming like stretched headlights in the dark.

  When I got home that night, I stumbled upstairs, tripped, and fell face-first onto the steps, hard enough that the next day a huge bruise ripened on my shin. That night, freshly spurned, I wanted to see what he’d seen when he turned me away. In the mirror, I was someone red-eyed—someone who had been crying, or maybe had allergies. She had some white dust under her nose. She took it on her fingertip and rubbed it on her gums. She’d seen them do that in the movies, too. She was sure of it.

  We weren’t the first people who’d gotten drunk in Iowa. We knew that. The myths of Iowa City drinking ran like subterranean rivers beneath the drinking we were doing. They surged with dreamlike tales of dysfunction: Ray
mond Carver and John Cheever tire-squealing through early-morning grocery-store parking lots to restock their liquor stash; John Berryman opening bar tabs on Dubuque Street and ranting about Whitman till dawn, playing chess and leaving his bishops vulnerable; Denis Johnson getting drunk at the Vine and writing short stories about getting drunk at the Vine. We got drunk at the Vine too, though it was in a different building now, on a different block. We knew this too: how imprecisely we squatted in the old tales, how we only got them in glimpses and imperfect replicas.

  I often thought about Iowa with that we: We drank here. We drank there. We drank somehow with those who would drink after us, just as we drank with those who had come before. One of Johnson’s poems described being “just a poor mortal human” who had “stumbled onto / the glen where the failed gods are drinking.”

  When Cheever showed up to teach in Iowa, he was grateful for the glen. It was a place where he could drink without his family asking why he was killing himself. Back home, he’d been hiding bottles under car seats and lacing his iced tea with gin. But in Iowa, there was no need to pretend. Carver drove him to the liquor store first thing in the morning—it opened at nine, so they left at eight forty-five—and Cheever would be opening the car door before the car was fully stopped. Of their friendship, Carver said: “He and I did nothing but drink.”

  These were the legends I inherited. The air was thick with them. Richard Yates spent his hungover mornings at a booth in the Airliner, eating hard-boiled eggs and listening to Barbra Streisand on the jukebox. One of his students, Andre Dubus, offered to lend him his wife during a rough patch. Yates took Dubus drinking after his first novel didn’t sell, and I took my best friend drinking when her first novel didn’t sell—at the Deadwood, during the part of the afternoon called Angry Hour, which came just before Happy Hour and had even steeper discounts. I tried and failed to think of what to say, and wondered if I’d ever finish a novel, and how much it would sell for.

  In John Barleycorn, a novel published in 1913, Jack London conjured two kinds of drunks: the ones who stumbled through the gutters hallucinating “blue mice and pink elephants,” and the ones to whom the “white light of alcohol” had granted access to bleak truths: “the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic.”

  The first type of drunk had his mind ravaged by booze, “bitten numbly by numb maggots,” but the second type had his mind sharpened instead. He could see more clearly than ordinary men: “[He] sees through all illusions.… God is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke.… Wife, children, friends—in the clear white light of his logic they are exposed as frauds and shams… he sees their frailty, their meagerness, their sordidness, their pitifulness.” The “imaginative” drunk bore this vision as gift and curse at once. Booze granted sight and charged for it, with “a sudden spill or a gradual oozing away.” London called the sadness of drinking a “cosmic sadness,” not a small sorrow but a grand one. In the old British folk song in which he’d first appeared, John Barleycorn was the personification of grain alcohol itself—a spirit attacked by drunkards laid low by booze, men seeking revenge for what he had done to them. In London’s novel, he was more like a sadistic fairy godmother, granting the harsh gift of bleak wisdom. He’d certainly visited the writer legends of Iowa, the ones who cast their long, staggering shadows over our carved-up bar booths.

  Carver’s shadow was the drunkest of them all. His stories were painful and precise, like carefully bitten fingernails, full of silence and whiskey, just-one-more rounds and next-one’s-on-me rounds. His characters cheated and got cheated on. They got each other drunk and dragged each other’s passed-out bodies onto porches. People got roughed up, no big shucks. A vitamin saleswoman got drunk and broke her finger, then woke up with a hangover “so bad it was like somebody was sticking wires in her brain.”

  The stories I’d heard about Carver’s life suggested a rogue running on booze and fumes: leaving meals unfinished because he was getting all his sugar from liquor, walking out of restaurants before he’d paid the bills, moving the class he taught from the English department to the back room of the Mill, one of his favorite bars. “You can’t tell a bunch of writers not to smoke,” he insisted, as his department had tried to do. One time he ended up with a stranger he’d let crash in his hotel room after a hard night of drinking: The young man stripped to leopard-print briefs and pulled out a jar of Vaseline. Another time Carver showed up uninvited at the home of a colleague, holding a bottle of Wild Turkey, and said: “Now we are going to tell each other our life stories.”

  I pictured Carver in terms of hijinks and love triangles, petty theft and seductions, ash falling unnoticed from the tip of his cigarette as he sat engrossed at his typewriter, riding the comet’s tail of a bender into its ruthless wisdom. Whatever psychic ledges his long drunks had taken him to, whatever voids he had glimpsed from those perches, I pictured him deftly smuggling that desperation into the quiet betrayals and pregnant pauses of his fiction. One of Carver’s friends put it like this: “Ray was our designated Dylan Thomas, I think—our contact with the courage to face all possible darkness and survive.”

  That was my default sense of all possible darkness, back then: Carver, Thomas, London, Cheever, these white scribes and their epic troubles. When I thought of addiction, I certainly wasn’t thinking about Billie Holiday incarcerated for a year in West Virginia, or handcuffed to her deathbed at a midtown Manhattan hospital. I wasn’t thinking of the elderly white drunks gathering every morning at the nonwriters’ bars at the edges of our cornfields, veterans and farmers—the ones for whom intoxication wasn’t mythic fuel but daily, numbing relief, the ones who didn’t narrate their drunken binges as brushes against existential wisdom. Back then, I was too busy imagining Carver falling asleep past dawn with polka-dot burns on his hands and a stack of heartbroken pages in his lap, a diplomat from the bleakest reaches of his own wrecked life. I kept expecting to see notes for one of his stories carved into a wooden booth at the Foxhead. I could only imagine the bathroom-marker gossip he’d inspired.

  “It was really difficult even to look at him,” one acquaintance said, “the booze and the cigarettes were so much there that they seemed like another person with us in the room.” During the worst of his drinking, Carver claimed he was spending twelve hundred dollars a month on liquor, a handsome monthly salary he paid the other person in the room. “Of course there’s a mythology that goes along with the drinking,” Carver once said. “But I was never into that. I was into the drinking itself.”

  I was into the drinking, too, but I was also into the mythology of the guy who wasn’t into its myth. I was pretty sure we all were.

  Carver loved London’s John Barleycorn. He recommended it to an editor over noon drinks, told him—emphatically—that it dealt with “invisible forces,” then left the table and walked out of the restaurant. Early the next morning, that same editor got a call from county jail, where Carver was sleeping on a cement floor behind bars.

  Daniel was a poet who lived above a falafel shop and drove a garbage truck. I met him at the Deadwood, a downtown bar full of pinball machines. We were drunk, of course, blinking against the sudden lights of closing time. Daniel had dark hair and blue eyes and when someone said he looked like Morrissey I had to look up who Morrissey was. I let him take me home and lay me down across his lumpy futon mattress. We ate chocolate ice cream from the carton, under his scratchy wool blanket, and watched porn. I’d never seen porn. I wanted to know if the delivery guy was going to fall in love with the nurse. “There’s not really a plot,” he said. But he was a plot. Daniel had a history of misadventures that I always wanted to hear more about, as if I were a pickpocket rummaging for anecdotes: that time he’d dressed up as a pirate and woken up in his apartment stairwell covered in vomit, that time his ex had contacted spirits using a Ouija board on a picnic bench outside a doughnut shop in Wyoming.

  Life with Daniel was weird and ragged and unexpected. It tingled. He was a messy eater. There were bits of ca
bbage in his beard, patches of ice cream melted on his sheets, crusted pots and pans in his sink, tiny beard hairs all over his bathroom counter. He left scraps of possible poetry scribbled on the covers of old New Yorkers piled around my bedroom: “Reality is survival… equipped with drawers of underwear, a few bathroom candles, and maybe a scepter… hidden up somewhere in the attic.” When we went to a party where everyone was drinking single-malt scotch and writing tasting notes, other people wrote, Mossy, smoky, earthy, while Daniel wrote, Tastes like the dust thrown up by the wheels of a chariot in ancient Rome. When we did coke together, it wasn’t the first time I was doing it. We had sex one night in a graveyard at the edge of town. We drove to New Orleans because we had a car. I canceled the classes I was supposed to teach—or got friends to cover—so we could watch the History Channel under mustard-yellow scratchy motel blankets in the middle of Wherever, Mississippi. We got shots of well whiskey in the early afternoon and ran through the back alleys of the French Quarter.

  Daniel and his friends, a crew of older poets, spent evenings shooting air rifles at empty PBR cans. I watched his profile flicker in the glow of bonfires. I was self-conscious about being so young, only twenty-one, so I lied and told Daniel I was twenty-two. That math felt right at the time. Daniel’s friends intimidated me. He told me his friend Jack had slept with 125 women. I wondered if Jack wanted to sleep with me. One night I told Jack that I sometimes drove out to the truck stop in the middle of the night and worked in the vinyl booths by the supply shop, overlooking all those chrome hubcaps in the aisles. “You just got a hundred times more interesting,” he said, and I tried to divide myself by a hundred, right there in front of him, to figure out what I’d been before.