The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  When I first read Voyage in the Dark, Anna’s abjection made me physically ill. Not because I was disgusted by it, but because I recognized it. I watched her stillborn letters fan across the bed: Dear Walter, Dear Walter, I love you you must love me I love you you must love me. Drinking and missing men, drinking and missing money, drinking and missing home—all these got tangled together. When she’s bleeding out from her illegal abortion, Anna says: “I’d like a drink. There’s some gin in the sideboard.”

  On Christmas Day, 1913—after Lancelot had a tree delivered to her boardinghouse room, months after ending things between them—Rhys decided to drink a whole bottle of gin and then jump out her bedroom window. A friend came over and saw the bottle and asked if she was throwing a party. “Oh no,” Rhys said, “not a party exactly.” When she shared her plans, her friend said she wouldn’t die from jumping; she’d only cripple herself—“and then you’d have to live smashed up.”

  Rhys didn’t jump out the window, but she did drink the gin. And then she bought a notebook and started writing in it. Or at least, that’s how she liked to tell the story: that she almost died, but was reborn to write. In truth, she’d kept notebooks before. But perhaps she managed better prose in this one. Perhaps it appealed to her to imagine the writing as her resurrection.

  During my winter of Saltine sandwiches, I started sleeping with more men. This was easier when I was drunk. There was the stand-up comic, the tow-truck driver, the man building his own house. Drunk sex became a way of purging feeling, siphoning it off and putting it somewhere else, like collecting the rendered fat off cooked meat and pouring it in a jar, storing it away so it wouldn’t clog the drains.

  My workshop instructor that last semester found something seriously wrong with almost every student story we discussed, and he could spend an hour dissecting why the language wasn’t working. One week he flipped through a whole story trying to find a single phrase he liked. It took me a while to accept that he wasn’t an asshole; that he was hard on us because he believed in what our writing could do. He didn’t think my first submission did much. But his intelligence had an integrity and precision that made me hungry for his praise. Not getting it only sharpened the hunger.

  Outside the classroom, I’d met an older man who lived outside of town. I’d show up at his big house, with its oven dial full of actual numbers, and cook him chicken stir-fry, the only dish I knew how to make. We’d get drunk—or I’d get drunk. I actually have no idea if he got drunk. We’d have sex and afterward I’d put on one of his basketball jerseys and go cry in the bathroom. At the time, I felt sorry for myself. Now I look back and feel sorry for him, with this girl showing up at his place to cook her rubbery chicken and demanding his compliments in return, then sobbing in his bathroom, clearly wanting something from him, but what? Neither one of us knew.

  After a few weeks, he told me over dinner one night that he couldn’t taste any of the food I was cooking. He wasn’t being figurative. He had no taste buds. It was a condition he’d had since birth. Somehow this seemed sad to me—not just that he couldn’t taste anything, but that I’d been making these meals without knowing he couldn’t taste them. Whatever we were doing, we weren’t doing it together. My desire to be wanted was like something physically gushing out of me—need need need—and it disgusted me, this broken spigot I’d become. A man telling me he wanted to fuck me, whispering it into my ear, it was like taking the first sip of whiskey, that hit of warmth, straight to my gut. The beginning was usually better than what followed: the cotton-mouthed morning, the strange bed, sweat on the sheets.

  I tried to live better. I tried yoga. I got a little houseplant, and by coincidence my friend got me another little houseplant, and so I decided to throw a little party about it. Maybe we would drink. One of my plants, a weeping ficus, hung in my kitchen above the other one, a little fern. I named them both after an Andrew Marvell poem: “Annihilating all that’s made / to a green thought, in a green shade.” The big plant was Marvell, the little one the Annihilator. I decided my party would be green. Everything would be a green thought in a green shade. This meant lime Jell-O shots, pistachio cookies with food coloring, celery, spinach hummus, and someone else’s pot. I made my Jell-O shots in the morning and couldn’t open my liter of vodka because I’d gotten the cheapest kind and the cap was messed up. I had to run to the corner store as fast as I could—my Jell-O was cooling by the minute!—and demand vodka at eight in the morning.

  I got my Jell-O shots made, but they were too strong. It was too hot in my kitchen, with too many bodies packed together. Nobody was as amused by the name “the Annihilator” as I’d thought they would be. One friend had just spent the previous night in jail for a drunk-driving arrest. She was teary in the corner. Another friend smoked too much pot and ended up fainting on my kitchen floor. My home seemed toxic, like you could catch something—a state of frailty, or an absurd despair—just from spending time in it.

  Several months after the breakup, my friends started to ask me—gently, kindly—why I was still talking about it so much. Why was I taking it so hard? Honestly, I wasn’t sure. Rejection was a worm that kept burrowing into me, my own humdrum betrayal, and I kept trying to dig it out by getting to the bottom of why I hadn’t been good enough for him. I started seeing a therapist at student services, as an experiment. He had an accent that made it hard to understand some of his similes. “Love is like a toaster,” he told me. “It comes and destroys everything.”

  I thought, No, love is Tom Petty on a boom box. I imagined the burnt bread heels of my toasted heart. It turned out the therapist meant twister, not toaster, and that spring there actually was one. An actual tornado flipped the whole roof off a sorority house. It tore off leafy branches and flipped cars into tree trunks. It tossed the shed from my backyard into the creek. I kept my fingers crossed for the ducks. My ducks. This was Iowa, a pathetic fallacy writ large: You spoke of love and its metaphors came alive; they spun the air all around you.

  I decided to write a story about the breakup, because it was all I could think about. But a breakup story seemed like artistic suicide, and I could already picture my workshop instructor flipping through it in class, pointing out my trite articulations of heartbreak. I wrote the story anyway, but I took care to make my heartbreak more dramatic. My main character smashed a glass of wine against her fridge, and then licked all the red trails of Shiraz running down its beige door. I’d only ever drunk my wine from water glasses and plastic cups, but the shattered glass and licked trails of crimson seemed like more artful articulations of ache than my own redundant glugging.

  The day of my workshop, our instructor said: “The only thing wrong with this story is that it doesn’t have any page numbers.” It was the only thing I wrote at Iowa that anyone really liked, and it confirmed my hunch: Things got dark, and you wrote from that darkness. Heartbreak could become the beginning of a career.

  I wasn’t good at taking care of myself then, myself or my weeping ficus, which withered to a crisp in the heat of July. I put it out on the fire escape so I wouldn’t have to look at it dying. I wanted to believe that this new type of drinking I’d been doing, drinking intentionally and explicitly and self-consciously toward passing out, was introducing me to a part of myself I’d never known before—that I was fumbling to learn its shape, like an object under murky water. In vino veritas was one of the most appealing promises of drinking: that it wasn’t degradation but illumination, that it wasn’t obscuring truth but unveiling it. If that was true, then my truth was passing out partway through the romantic comedies I watched alone at night, before the booze took me under.

  —

  III —

  BLAME

  Every addiction story wants a villain. But America has never been able to decide whether addicts are victims or criminals, whether addiction is an illness or a crime. So we relieve the pressure of cognitive dissonance with various divisions of psychic labor—some addicts get pitied, others get blamed—that keep overlap
ping and evolving to suit our purposes: Alcoholics are tortured geniuses. Drug addicts are deviant zombies. Male drunks are thrilling. Female drunks are bad moms. White addicts get their suffering witnessed. Addicts of color get punished. Celebrity addicts get posh rehab with equine therapy. Poor addicts get hard time. Someone carrying crack gets five years in prison, while someone driving drunk gets a night in jail, even though drunk driving kills more people every year than cocaine. In her seminal account of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow, legal scholar Michelle Alexander points out that many of these biases tell a much larger story about “who is viewed as disposable—someone to be purged from the body politic—and who is not.” They aren’t incidental discrepancies—between black and white addicts, drinkers and drug users—but casualties of our need to vilify some people under the guise of protecting others.

  “What do we hold against the drug addict?” asks theorist Avital Ronell, and answers with a quote from Jacques Derrida: “That he cuts himself off from the world, in exile from reality, far from objective reality and the real life of the city and the community; that he escapes into a world of simulacrum and fiction.… We cannot abide the fact that his is a pleasure taken in an experience without truth.” This vision of the addict, as an agent of betrayal, undermining the shared social project, has been an enduring character in what criminologist Drew Humphries calls the drug-scare narrative. It’s a classic American genre that singles out a particular substance as cause for alarm—often arbitrarily, without an increase in use—to scapegoat a marginal community. It happened with Chinese immigrants and opium in nineteenth-century California; with black cocaine use in the early-twentieth-century South; with Mexicans and marijuana in the 1930s; with black heroin use in the 1950s; with the inner-city crack epidemic of the 1980s; with the rise of meth in poor white communities at the turn of the twenty-first century. Meth was called “the most malignant, addictive drug known to mankind.” Barns across America showed graffiti as prophecy scrawled across their peeling paint, METH IS DEATH. Posters and commercials showed ghouls who were strung out, rake-thin, yellow-fanged, picking at their facial sores and neglecting their babies. But by the time a 2005 Newsweek cover story called meth “America’s New Drug Crisis,” meth use had been declining for years.

  Calling the drug-scare narrative a toxic genre isn’t a denial of the damage drugs can cause, or the devastation addiction leaves in its wake, only an acknowledgment of the ways that “addiction” has always been two things at once: a set of disrupted neurotransmitters and a series of stories we’ve told about disruption. Addiction becomes a contagious epidemic, a willful abnegation of civic duty, a valiant rebellion against the social order, or the noble outcry of a tortured soul. It depends on who is doing the telling, and the using. Columbia University neuroscientist Carl Hart writes about the drug story that hasn’t gotten much airtime, the “not particularly exciting nonaddiction story that never gets told,” which—as Hart reminds us—is the experience of most drug users. Yet addiction has been presented as both inevitable and unilaterally devastating in order to serve various social agendas—most notably, the War on Drugs.

  The twentieth-century American crusade against drugs was effectively launched by a man named Harry Anslinger, who took over the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930, just as Prohibition was starting to fall apart. Anslinger effectively channeled the punitive impulse that had fueled Prohibition—the impulse to see addiction in terms of weakness, selfishness, failure, and danger—and redirected it toward narcotics. It wasn’t just a metaphoric connection or a psychic sublimation: Anslinger’s Bureau of Narcotics physically took over the same grim offices that the Prohibition Agency itself had occupied.

  But during the decades that followed, the American legal system would polarize alcohol and drug addictions into separate categories in the public imagination: the former a disease, the latter a crime. It can be tempting to equate “hard” drugs with addiction, or booze with recreational use, but in truth the distinction between them is mainly grounded in social norms and legal practice; and it hasn’t always been this way.

  Before the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, which regulated and taxed the distribution of opiates and cocaine, you could easily order drug works from the Sears, Roebuck catalog, a syringe and cocaine package deal for $1.50, or buy Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, made with morphine, from your local pharmacy. By the 1950s, however, Anslinger was describing the majority of heroin addicts as “psychopaths” who were “created by infectious contact with persons already drug-conditioned.” What do we hold against the drug addict? Anslinger’s language of contagion synthesized competing notions of disease and vice, imagining the addict as a morally culpable patient zero. It resurrected rhetoric he’d used when he’d worked in the Bahamas during Prohibition, urging the Navy to round up bootleggers and smugglers by claiming they carried “loathsome and contagious diseases” that would infect the people who drank their booze. Anslinger understood himself as a moral crusader but dressed like a mafia tough guy, the same guys his policies kept in business, wearing shiny suits and ties printed with Chinese pagodas. He struggled in the early years of his crusade to keep his agency afloat, and after his funding was nearly cut in half in the mid-thirties, he was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown in 1935.

  This was the same year he oversaw the introduction of a radical new step in American drug legislation: the Narcotic Farm, a federal facility for addicts that opened outside Lexington, Kentucky, in May of that year. Part prison, part hospital, jointly administered by the Bureau of Prisons and the Public Health Service, the Narco Farm was the institutional embodiment of America’s ambivalent relationship to addiction. (It was also a working dairy farm, the source of its nickname; although more than one administrator worried that it would be mistaken for a facility that actually grew opium.) At any given time, roughly two-thirds of the fifteen hundred “patients” at Lexington were prisoners who had been convicted of violating federal drug laws, and the other third were volunteers seeking treatment—though often these “volunteers” had been in trouble with the law themselves, and were seeking an alternative to legal punishment. If addiction was both vice and disease, then residents at the Narco Farm were both prisoners and patients: “vols” and “cons.” They were being simultaneously punished and rehabilitated.

  By the time the Narco Farm opened, in 1935, America didn’t know what story to believe about addiction—whether to punish it or heal it—and everything about the Narco Farm reflected this confusion: the names it was called, the press coverage it got, how it was run, even how it was built. It had towering walls and barred windows like a prison, but it was also full of day rooms with huge windows overlooking the rolling green hills of Kentucky, and its vaulted ceilings and soaring arches suggested something more religious, like a monastery—the architecture of possible salvation.

  Harry Anslinger wasn’t just a policy maker, he was a storyteller. But most of his addiction stories didn’t get to the part about redemption; they were just stories about deviance—meant to inspire fear and to justify punishment. In his case for “making war on the narcotic addict,” Anslinger was fond of quoting a Los Angeles police officer: “I feel that these people are in the same category as lepers, and that the only defense society has against them is segregation and isolation whenever possible.”

  After Anslinger’s budget was slashed, his fearmongering became more urgent. He spent the rest of the thirties creating a reason for his agency to matter by drumming up public anxiety about drugs, and he ruthlessly exploited racial fears in his campaigns. Arguing that marijuana unleashed black male lust for white women, he gave the House Committee on Appropriations a speech about “colored students” partying with white coeds “and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result: pregnancy.”

  Racial paranoia has been part of American drug-scare narratives as long as they’ve been told, even though the majority of drug users have always been white. Even before Anslinger, this paranoia f
ueled public support for the Harrison Act. NEGRO COCAINE “FIENDS” NEW SOUTHERN MENACE ran a New York Times headline in 1914, and similar articles spread the myth of the black “fiend” as an almost supernatural enemy. In 1914, a Literary Digest article claimed that “most of the attacks upon white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain.”

  In 1953, Anslinger published a book called The Traffic in Narcotics, a manifesto defending the drug war he’d spent the last two decades waging. It was also meant to pave the way for legislation he supported: the Narcotic Control Act of 1956 mandated minimum sentences for distribution—five years for a first offense, ten years for a second one—and expanded the provisions of the Boggs Act of 1951, which allowed the death penalty for selling heroin.

  Later that decade, James Baldwin published “Sonny’s Blues,” a short story that dramatizes the fact that every addiction lives at the intersection between public and private experience. It’s a story about trying to understand addiction from the outside, and it focuses on the relationship between two brothers, both black men raised in Harlem: a schoolteacher trying to parse his jazz-musician brother’s inscrutable dependence. In Baldwin’s account, addiction is both social and interior. Though heroin is part of the reality of being black—in Harlem, in the middle of the twentieth century—it’s also part of a deeply individual inner conflict. Sonny struggles with the junk that brings him bliss—that feels like a woman singing in his veins—but also traps him alone “at the bottom of something” that is often unbearable.