The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  Anslinger’s Traffic in Narcotics, published just four years earlier, advertised itself as “the first book to treat with authority the horrifying national problem of drug addiction,” but its posture was precisely the opposite of Baldwin’s: Instead of respecting the contradictions and depth of any addict’s consciousness, it created cartoon villains who would be easy to justify locking away. The book’s flap copy insisted that it had been written “not to satisfy a desire for morbid sensationalism but as a basic description of the current situation.” Its mission was simply to “guide and implement the national desire to strike at the roots of a disturbing menace, a source of crime and wrecker of young lives.”

  No “sensationalism” here, only the wreckage of young lives. Anslinger was just going to tell you about the marijuana fiend who raped a nine-year-old, and the one who killed a widow, the one who “brutally attacked” sixteen women to steal the money “to buy wine and reefers which he consumed at the same time.” You can almost hear the hysteria: At the same time! Anslinger was not going to “satisfy a desire for morbid sensationalism,” but he did want you to know that when judges dished out discretionary “vacations” instead of doling out real hard time, bad things happened. Case in point: the marijuana dealer who was fined only twenty-five dollars for possession of “17,000 grains of marihuana,” and the next year raped a ten-year-old girl “while under marihuana intoxication.”

  Anslinger described his book as a “long-awaited reliable survey,” suggesting that he was refusing to pander to the rising tide of drug panic, but the syntax was a sleight of hand. He’d spent much of the last two decades stoking the flames of this panic in order to generate support for his floundering federal agency. The most toxic agendas often disguise themselves as pure transcription.

  In his manifesto, Anslinger insists he doesn’t like to generalize. He just observes that addicts want to be shielded from the world. While “normal people” feel no need to rise above their “usual emotional plane,” addicts are invariably greedy for more and more pleasure. Anslinger’s accusations summon Derrida’s argument that we resent the addict for taking pleasure “in an experience without truth.”

  Six years after The Traffic in Narcotics, William Burroughs would write that “the face of ‘evil’ is always the face of total need,” but Anslinger was busy reconfiguring the face of total need as evil. His concept of illness was selective and self-serving: He called addicts infectious, but dismissed anyone who called them sick.

  Blueschild Baby—an autobiographical novel about a heroin addict named George Cain, by an author (and heroin addict) named George Cain—was published in 1970, nearly two decades after Anslinger’s manifesto, but still bears the residue of Anslinger’s punitive campaigns. The novel turns on a powerful scene of shaming—when George goes to see a doctor for help in kicking his habit, and gets treated like a criminal—that asks the same question: Are addicts sick?

  It’s not incidental that George is a black man. He’s also fresh from prison, where he was serving time for possession, but by the end of the novel he’s deep in the throes of withdrawal. Even his vomit shows signs of struggle: “Live things, frogs and insects kick in the liquid coming out.” When George’s girlfriend, Nandy, suggests that he see a doctor, George knows better. He tells her, “A doctor won’t help.” And sure enough, as soon as George tells the doctor he’s a drug addict, the doctor immediately proves him right. He backs up from his desk and draws a pistol.

  The scene doesn’t unfold as a conflict between men so much as a conflict between narratives of addiction that don’t agree. George and Nandy insist on addiction as a disease—“He’s a sick man. You’re a doctor,” says Nandy, and George insists, “I’m sick, in pain like anybody else that comes to you”—but the doctor and his gun won’t surrender the narrative of addiction as vice: “Get out of my office before I call the police.”

  I am precisely the kind of nice upper-middle-class white girl whose relationship to substances has been treated as benign or pitiable—a cause for concern, or a shrug, rather than punishment. No one has ever called me a leper or a psychopath. No doctor has ever pointed a gun at me. No cop has ever shot me at an intersection while I was reaching for my wallet, for that matter, or even pulled me over for drunk driving, something I’ve done more times than I could count. My skin is the right color to permit my intoxication. When it comes to addiction, the abstraction of privilege is ultimately a question of what type of story gets told about your body: Do you need to be shielded from harm, or prevented from causing it? My body has been understood as something to be protected, rather than something to be protected from.

  In her memoir, Negroland, Margo Jefferson describes the ways black women in America have been “denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity.” That is a luxury available to white women. It’s been “glorified in the literature of white female suffering.”

  It took me years to understand that my interior had never been interior—that my relationship to my own pain, a relationship that felt essentially private, was not private at all. It owed its existence to narratives that made it very possible for a white girl to hurt: stories that suggested her pain was interesting; that it was proof of vulnerability rather than guilt, worthy of sympathy rather than punishment.

  When I started to drink, to really drink, to become conscious of my drinking not just in terms of pleasure but escape, I was ashamed, but also proud. My urgent attempts to disappear from myself suggested there was something dark and important—depression, neurosis, psychic complexity—that required disappearing from. It wasn’t that I slipped on pain as a garment. It was more that I tried to understand the pain as psychic compost, something with an aesthetic purpose. I wanted it to complicate and deepen me.

  I did most of my unpunished drunk driving in California, during the winter after I graduated from the Writers’ Workshop, when I lived with my grandmother—Dell, my father’s mother—in her sun-struck home at the top of a hill, the house my family and I had lived in for much of my childhood. I was trying to write a novel. She was dying.

  During those months, I stayed in a bare room without much furniture to speak of. I lived for the relief of drinking alone on my futon mattress, after night shifts as an innkeeper at a bed-and-breakfast by the ocean, a ten-minute drive away, and often drank at work, in secret, then drove home tipsy—always anxious—to drink more, back in my room, where I didn’t have to worry about anything.

  Each day, I woke as early as I could and smoked on a little wooden balcony. The days were perfect blue skies and sun, eerily identical, and every day I grimed the salt air with puffs of smoke; left tiny gray piles of crumbled ash on the slats of wind-scoured wood. My fingers yellowed. I made Dell oatmeal and sat with her while she ate it, resenting this time because I wanted to be writing, and feeling guilty about my resentment because I wanted to be someone who didn’t feel it.

  Dell had been a constant presence through my childhood, had lived with my family for years—a generous, resourceful, steely-nerved, and intensely loyal woman who loved us fiercely, me and my brothers, who’d raised two manic-depressive daughters and survived her marriage to an alcoholic husband, who’d left the Daughters of the American Revolution because she didn’t agree with their politics. My favorite memories of Dell, though, were of little things: our weekly bridge lessons, with every trick carefully observed by the porcelain mice on her bookshelves. She always warned against the dangers of bidding too high, but bid aggressively in practice. We played for nickels and dimes in the pot. I loved Dell, respected her stoicism and her selflessness and remembered all the ways she’d cared for me—wanted to return that care, but felt overwhelmed by what she needed, and hated to see her need so much.

  My brother and sister-in-law were also living with Dell, and I kept my empty bottles away from our communal recycling, in a separate plastic bag in my closet, so they wouldn’t see how many I’d accumulated. Dell was falling
more frequently, sometimes falling asleep on the couch beside a cooling patch of spilled coffee. She was mixing up her pills, and I didn’t even know what pills she was on. I was terrified for her, and for myself. How was I supposed to take care of her? There was a photo of us I loved in her bedroom, her holding me in her arms when I was a baby. She looked so happy, so utterly capable. In those winter months, she almost never complained about pain, or her decreasing mobility. By contrast, with little to complain about, I was animated by self-pity like toxic electricity.

  We eventually installed something called a Lifeline medical alert system, a direct phone line Dell could activate—if she fell—using a button that hung around her neck. Sometimes I would come home to find she had fallen in her bathroom, or that she was bleeding on the carpet with spilled chicken soup hardening beside her. One morning I found the machine beeping in the corner, a voice on the other end of the line asking, “Are you okay?” And then I tried to talk to it: “I’m here,” I said, and the voice asked: “Are you the caregiver?” And I honestly didn’t know what to say. I was, and I wasn’t. I was trying to help Dell change out of her bathrobe, because it was soaked in coffee, and I was crying, and Dell was asking me why I was crying, and I was trying to pretend I wasn’t crying, and I was picturing that photograph, me as a baby in her arms, and now the voice was asking: “Is this the caregiving situation?” It was like some distant, useless god was living in that machine and judging us.

  Is this the caregiving situation? My brother and sister-in-law and I were doing what we could. It clearly wasn’t enough. My father and my aunt, both passionately devoted to their mother, were calling every day, but they both lived on the other side of the country. Intellectually, I knew it wasn’t my job to keep her from dying, but it still felt like what I was supposed to do.

  Sometimes my sister-in-law and I went to the grocery store and loaded our shopping cart with sweet things—boxed coffee cake, mint chocolate chip ice cream, pink champagne—and binged on it all, just for the relief and escape of total indulgence, putting things into our bodies to remind ourselves we weren’t anywhere near dying. My life with food was a boom-bust cycle, composed of succumbing to fits of indulgence and then compensating by eating very little for days. It was still easier to eat when I was drunk. One night when I was sick we rented Legends of the Fall and I took a shot of liquid Benadryl and passed out after three paper cups of cheap pink champagne, curled into the couch. Staying awake meant unimaginable exhaustion. I fell asleep with Brad Pitt’s long hair swinging like a curtain between one state of consciousness and the next.

  In those days, I tutored students who went to the same high school I’d attended. Their parents were impressed by my credentials, and slightly dismayed by the life these credentials had secured for me—full of days spent tutoring their children. After tutoring, I drove to the bed-and-breakfast and showed guests to their rooms: suites with tasseled curtains and floral patterns and Jacuzzis. When they made their reservations over the phone, married women often said, “We need a king bed,” and you knew they meant it. I also imagined being all the guests that I checked in, with longing or schadenfreude, as I carried their luggage and wormed my way into the inner lives I had constructed for them, cheating on their spouses, or else—miraculously—still loving them, with a full or partial ocean view as backdrop to their love.

  Every evening I put out wine and cheese for the guests, and after it got quiet enough, I put out wine and cheese for myself. I never thought of this as drinking on the job, although strictly speaking—or really any way of speaking—it was. I drank carefully, usually, enough to get a good buzz but not so much that I’d show it, or mess up the nightly credit card batch; not so much that I’d lose my specially cultivated innkeeper serenity when guests came into the kitchen to make small talk. I imagined myself blurting out, At home my grandma fell down again, saying, Pull up a chair. I ate little cheese cubes on crackers to soak up the excess booze inside me, or dug a spoon into the bowl of cookie dough in the fridge and ate it like yogurt. I usually left with an extra bottle or two from the pantry, tucked into my purse, walking out gingerly so they wouldn’t clank together. Sometimes I tucked a sweater between them. The great secret of evening wine and cheese was that the guests could drink half a bottle of Chardonnay or three, who would know? I had a margin.

  Driving home every night in my red Dodge Neon, a thousand-dollar buy with a ragged stick shift, I was especially anxious about the stop sign on the steep hill just behind the inn. I always revved the engine when I pulled off the clutch, perpetually scared that my revving would draw the cops from secret perches in the darkness. Even on the flat stretches, I drove slowly—no doubt suspiciously so—jerking and wrenching as I toggled between gears.

  Once I got home, I would go up to my little bedroom and drink one of the bottles I’d stolen from work. I didn’t care that the wine wasn’t chilled. When you’re drinking cheap Chardonnay called Two-Buck Chuck—and drinking it alone, on a futon mattress, Googling people from high school and scanning the real estate firms they work for—it turns out temperature isn’t the point. On that futon mattress, drinking tepid wine, it was impossible to deny that getting drunk was the point, just like it had always been the point.

  During those California days, I still nursed a certain romantic notion of myself as a lonely writer, drinking heavily but waking every morning to write my novel—not but, actually, something more like and, something more like because. My nights of lonely drinking were part of the same psychic descent that was producing the grim novel I was starting to imagine, about a lonely young woman taking care of her dying grandmother. It didn’t have a plot beyond that.

  This wasn’t exactly the romance of the white logic, Jack London’s myth of the drunk prophet and his truth serum of booze. I was living with my grandmother and my brother and my sister-in-law, barely supporting myself with two jobs, ducking like a coward out of my meager responsibilities; passing out on pink champagne and cold medicine, a long-haired Brad Pitt haunting my strange dreams. This life wasn’t backyard parties with bratwurst on the grill and lights in the trees; it wasn’t drinking with other drunk writers at bar tables carved up with the initials of more famous drunk writers. This was just a futon and a bottle of room-temperature Chardonnay. Sometimes I poured the wine and sometimes I didn’t. The glass had started to seem like little more than a contrivance.

  In 1944, a novel came along that rejected the white logic entirely. Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend refused the idea of drinking as metaphysical portal. In the novel, alcoholism isn’t particularly meaningful, it just is. The plot moves roughly like this: A guy named Don Birnam gets drunk. He’s gotten drunk before and he’ll get drunk again. He drinks, passes out, wakes up. He keeps drinking till he runs out of money, then he finds some more money and picks up where he left off. At one point he tries to pawn his typewriter for cash, and walks almost a hundred blocks before realizing all the pawnshops are closed for Yom Kippur. Another time he steals a woman’s purse to see if he can get away with it. He doesn’t.

  That’s pretty much the whole story: drinking, and then more of it. As critic John Crowley has observed, the novel was revolutionary in its unrelenting simplicity and redundancy—its rejection of an abiding mythos. Don Birnam wasn’t a new type of protagonist because he was a drunk. He was a new type of protagonist because his drunkenness marked him as a man with a disease rather than an existential albatross around his neck. Don isn’t broken by the fallen world, or the horrors of war, or the cruelties of love, like Ernest Hemingway’s drunken specimens of masculinity, or William Faulkner’s wasted southern patriarchs, or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prodigal patrician husbands. Don is just dependent on a particular physical substance. His drinking is pathetic and repetitive. It doesn’t deliver him into the subtle clutches of metaphysical angst, it simply means he makes a fool of himself all over midtown Manhattan.

  Published when Jackson was forty-one years old, eight years after he got sober (for the first time) i
n 1936, The Lost Weekend was an immediate bestseller. It ended up selling almost a million copies over the course of Jackson’s lifetime. The New York Times called it “the most compelling gift to the literature of addiction since De Quincey,” and argued that it could be a “textbook for such organizations as Alcoholics Anonymous,” an organization that—at that point—Jackson despised.

  When he was drafting the novel in 1942, Jackson wrote to a psychiatrist at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, Dr. Stephen Sherman, to request permission to visit his alcoholic ward for research purposes. Jackson had been there himself as a patient, but—not surprisingly—couldn’t remember much. He also sent Dr. Sherman his first few chapters, looking for feedback, or probably just affirmation. Dr. Sherman thought the novel “should have definite clinical value,” and said it had taught him “more about what the alcoholic is really thinking” than most of his patients, especially in its evocation of loneliness and an “identification with forlorn genius.”

  In the novel, Don has big plans to write the story of his life. “If he were able to write fast enough,” he thinks—and, presumably, keep his typewriter out of pawn—then “he could set it down in all its final perfection.” But the titles Don imagines for his book suggest his insecurities: “Don Birnam: A Hero Without a Novel” or “I Don’t Know Why I’m Telling You All This.” He wonders why anyone would be interested in the story of his life: “Who would ever want to read a novel about a punk and a drunk!” The joke is clearly on us, his readers, who are doing exactly what Don can’t imagine anyone wanting to do: reading a novel about a punk and a drunk, a would-be writer who can’t summon enough sobriety to tell the story of his own intoxication.

  Don helpfully catalogs all the aesthetic failures of his own story: It has no climax or closure. It holds no emotional suspense. He already knows how he will feel after the first drink and after the tenth, how he will feel after he wakes up hungover the next morning, because he has already felt all these ways before. During a particularly embarrassing “climactic moment” near the end of the book, Don finds himself facing off against a maid, trying to get her to unlock the liquor cabinet, and is overwhelmed by a distinctly literary moment of self-loathing: “Melodrama! In all his life he had never been in any situation so corny, so ham. He felt like an idiot. His taste was offended, his sense of the fitness of things, his deepest intelligence.”