The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  I Don’t Know Why I’m Telling You All This: Jackson was ashamed of his own story as he wrote it, and he outsourced that shame to his protagonist. Don is ashamed not simply of his actions but of his genre, the fact that his own drinking doesn’t amount to anything compelling: “It wasn’t even decently dramatic or sad or tragic or a shame or comic or ironic or anything else—it was nothing.”

  One afternoon when I was nine, and my father was forty-nine, I asked him about drinking. Why did people drink? Why did some people do it so much? We were standing in my parents’ bedroom. The huge glass windows were hot with sunlight, the sky blue and shameless beyond.

  I can still remember where my father was standing, as he closed the rolling cedar door of his closet, wheels squeaking in their tracks; and I can remember his creased khaki slacks, the cloud of intensity and distraction he moved through like a private weather system. I remember these details as if they were seared into me, saying, Pay attention, saying, Listen up. Listen to what?

  A single moment: That day, my father told me drinking wasn’t wrong, but it was dangerous. It wasn’t dangerous for everyone, but it was dangerous for us.

  It was thrilling to share any type of us with my father, who was a magical figure to me. There was always some part of him that was elsewhere. Every few weeks my family had “calendar sessions,” nights of curt tones, explanations, bargaining, when my father drew his work trips as color-coded blue and purple lines across the grid of days on a dry-erase whiteboard calendar. Sometimes he joked that he wanted a color to mark the trips he hadn’t taken. He had grown up moving constantly, as an Air Force brat—to Japan, California, Maryland—son of an alcoholic pilot. As an adult, my father was part of all the frequent-flier clubs named after precious stones and metals. He was the mileage king.

  He was an economist working on health policy in the developing world, and his work took him to Thailand, Switzerland, Rwanda, India, Kenya, Burma, Mexico, distant places where he met with other influential people—always men, I imagined—to figure out how to spend money most efficiently to alleviate global disease burden, a phrase I learned young. The things he was interested in talking about always seemed to involve things I didn’t know. What did I know about? Hopi kachinas, and Mark Twain’s real name. Whenever my father praised my intelligence, it was like a bread crumb in the forest. If I could just keep doing that, he’d keep paying attention.

  I listened hard, to show him that I was a good student, absorbing everything he was telling me. He told me about the Concorde, which went faster than the speed of sound; how your pee went backward if you went to the bathroom while it was decelerating. He had seen places I couldn’t imagine. He once told me about an acid trip he’d taken that was the first time he’d ever believed it might be okay to die. He loved amaretto cookies and good Burgundy. He played tennis in striped sweatbands. His laugh was everything. He brought me miniature shampoos from all the hotels—an apology paid against the ledger tally of his absence, all those lines on the whiteboard calendar. Years later, I would learn about his affairs. He was often cheating, even on his mistresses—driven not by malice, never that, only a certain restlessness.

  When I was young, six or seven, my dad gave me a stuffed tiger named Winifred. He chose her name, which was much better than if I’d named her myself. It was like he’d embedded a piece of himself right in her plush stripes. When he went away on trips, Winifred stayed. When he returned, he told me stories about the adventures she’d had, wherever he’d been: If he’d been to Bangkok, she’d had adventures in the jungle. If he’d been to China, she’d had adventures in the Gobi Desert. I don’t remember how I squared the logic of these tales—how Winifred’s body stayed behind, while another version of her lived a gossamer life beyond my reach—but I imagine it was comforting to consider the possibilities of a split self: how a person’s heart or mind might stay at home, while the body traveled elsewhere.

  My father loved to tell a story about seeing me as a newborn, in the hospital hallway, and I loved to hear him tell it: how he’d looked into my eyes, under my pink beanie, and seen something piercing in my gaze—a curiosity he’d loved from the start. It signified some primal bond that lay between us. The few times I stayed alone with him, when my mother went out of town for work, all we ate was ramen and popcorn and milk shakes. It was divine. It was our secret, another bond sealed—like when he said drinking was dangerous for us, including me in the same danger.

  When I was nine, he moved across the country for eighteen months, for work, and when he moved back to Los Angeles, my parents separated officially. This was the same window of years when my brothers—nine and ten years older—moved to college. In only a few years, we went from a family of five to a family of two: just my mom and me. The men were gone. After my second brother left for college, I drew a picture of myself crying in his bedroom, because I missed him so much. I even gave it a title: Jealous Sorrow. Certain truths had turned transparent as glass, because they were so ingrained: People would probably leave, it was just a question of when. Attention was something I had to earn, not something I could take for granted. I had to seduce at all moments.

  My brothers were witty and kind but also a tough crowd, smart and reserved—not willing to give up their laughter or praise for just anything. (My oldest brother, Julian, taught me how to solve an equation for x when I was seven. “Great,” he said, “but can you solve when x is on both sides?”) I loved my brothers wildly, extravagantly. Loving them was like flinging myself against something—as I often flung myself at their tall bodies to hug them, demanding their love with the sheer force of my hurtling forty-pound body. I was always loved, but I always wondered, also, what that love depended on. It did not seem unconditional. I wondered what I had to do to keep deserving it. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t trying to figure out what to say at the dinner table, especially on French nights—when everyone was practicing a language I didn’t speak.

  After my parents divorced, when I was eleven, my father got an apartment overlooking a grove of eucalyptus trees. Maybe once a year I spent the night, scouring the fridge for things to pack in my school lunches: a half-drunk bottle of mineral water, leftover sushi with a torn packet of soy sauce jammed underneath. In those days, I didn’t know how to talk to my dad, so I stared blank-faced at a TV while he asked me why I was getting a B minus in World Cultures on my midterm progress report. I craved his approval like I craved perfect grades, perfect test scores, or I craved these things like I craved his approval. Getting good grades was the natural extension of being a little girl trying to figure out the next right thing to say at the dinner table. I was alternately stone-faced and sarcastic in those days of early adolescence—shy at school, convinced I smelled bad, that I loomed like a giraffe—and quiet with my father. I couldn’t ask for what I wanted then because I didn’t know I wanted it. Loving him was always like reaching for something luminous. Reaching was what love felt like.

  My father’s love was always there—in a tiger, in milk shakes, in his gaze, in his laugh—but I was most sharply aware of his care when my own body was in danger. When he visited me during the year of my eating disorder, in college, he left me with hundreds of pages of photocopied academic-journal articles about anorexia. He fixed me in the full glare of his concern.

  I remember a particular moment between us as strangely sublime: It was just before my jaw surgery, after freshman year of college, when I was headed into six hours in the OR, lying under a heated hospital blanket, giddy from the pre-anesthesia laughing gas, Valium making me feel tucked in like a soft quilt. My dad watched as they wheeled me away on the gurney, his eyes glistening with tears, and I wanted to tell him—from the comfort of my laughing gas, my Valium perch—that everything would be okay.

  If drinking was dangerous for us, I came to learn that drinking had been particularly dangerous for one of us: my aunt Phyllis. Phyllis was my father’s middle sister, a woman I had never met. The history of her estrangement from our family had been e
xplained to me vaguely, a blurry story, but as I grew older, her distance from the family was always described in terms of drinking and mental illness, like twin knobs bringing the microscope slide into focus. Phyllis had started fights. She’d slapped my grandmother. She’d once chased someone with a knife.

  As a girl, I was obsessed with Phyllis—with the fact of her distance and the mystery of its cause, with questions about what she had been like before and what she was like now. My father wasn’t even sure where she lived. I begged for the most recent address we had, and sent her hopeful letters—Hi, I’m your niece!—that never got a reply. As I grew older, I began to identify with Phyllis, or with the ghostly shape of her absence, for no logical reason I could name, except that she’d clearly been someone who had trouble living in the world as she was supposed to live in it. I always lived in the world as I was supposed to live in it, but I sensed there was an animal in me—beneath all that obedient living—some part of me that wanted to do what she had done: start fights, make scenes, fall apart.

  When I was young, I turned Phyllis into a romantic hero—blaming her estrangement on my family, imagining her all alone somewhere out there, in exile—but as I got older I realized it had been more complicated, that you can commit yourself to a troubled person, over and over again, and it might never be enough.

  Back in my childhood home, watching my grandmother die, I kept imagining Phyllis: Where was she? Did she miss her mother, wherever she was? How could she not? My drinking didn’t look like her drinking had, but I wondered if there were blueprints inside both of us that weren’t so different. When I went outside to smoke each morning, I passed the closet door where I could still picture my father standing, saying: Drinking isn’t dangerous for everyone, but it’s dangerous for us.

  Addiction has always been more dangerous for some people than for others. When Nixon launched the original War on Drugs in June 1971, he called drugs “public enemy number one.” But it was actual human beings who were imprisoned.

  Blueschild Baby—George Cain’s novel, published just a year earlier—had effectively predicted Nixon’s war before it officially began: “They say you’re arrested for crime, narcotics, prostitution, robbery, murder,” George thinks in the novel, “but these are not the reasons for locking you away.” In an interview decades later, Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, confessed precisely this: “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” He said the Nixon administration couldn’t make it illegal to be black, but they could link the black community to heroin: “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.”

  Cain understood the ravages of heroin as well as anyone, and his novel summons that devastation without mercy or reserve: a pusher shoving ice up a woman’s vagina to bring her back from an overdose, or a “haunted huddle” of junkies “nodding, stinking, burning, high,” lit by the glow of a TV playing cartoons. When George visits the projects where he was born, he gets a junkie named Fix to cop for him, a guy so sick he’s desperate for a cut: “gaunt and hollow… skin strapped tight around the skull… there’s not enough junk in the world to quench his need.” But Cain also understood that criminalizing addicts only compounded the damages that addiction itself had wrought, and Blueschild Baby is a difficult, prickly book in part because it’s trying to tell two stories that sit together uneasily: the damage of drugs and the ways this damage is deployed as moralizing rhetoric.

  The War on Drugs was officially launched twice. Nixon announced his war in 1971, but it wasn’t until Ronald Reagan’s call to arms—a decade later, in 1982—that the war truly took off. Drug use was actually declining in 1982, and only 2 percent of Americans thought drugs constituted the most important issue facing the nation. But by launching its war, the Reagan administration effectively created an enemy—another version of the figure Anslinger had called “the addict violator.” As sociologists Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine put it, it was easier to place the “ideological fig leaf” of a crack epidemic over the devastating impact of trickle-down economics than face this impact directly.

  Reagan’s War on Drugs picked up where Anslinger’s crusade against addicts left off, placing a new set of addict archetypes—crack mothers, tweakers, base heads—inside familiar narrative dioramas about moral deviance, reality avoidance, and epidemic irresponsibility. A 1986 feature in Time magazine called “The House Is on Fire,” one of the first major media accounts of crack, presented its addicts as villains in a doomed morality play:

  The argument began, police say, when Beverli Black accused her boyfriend of spending their last $15 on crack. She stormed out of their one-room apartment in Freeport, L.I., late one night last week to try to borrow some food stamps. Daren Jenkins, 23, an unemployed cabinetmaker, stalked over to the bed where Black’s son Batik was sleeping. High on crack, an extremely potent and addictive form of cocaine, Jenkins allegedly beat the little boy to death. Batik would have been three years old this month.

  It was a horrible act—unthinkable—but it was also carefully deployed to incite public outrage at addict-villains whose lineage reached back to Anslinger’s child-raping-widow-killing marijuana fiends. The article didn’t present any addicts suffering, just an addict killing a baby. Daren was unemployed, too busy copping drugs to make any cabinets, and his girlfriend wasn’t letting her habit get in the way of her determination to abuse the welfare state. Like a piece of exotic travel writing, the article ushered middle-class readers into an illicit underworld, summoned by suggestive ellipses: “‘Crack it up, crack it up,’ the drug dealers murmur from the leafy parks…”

  The crack scare managed to combine the narratives of addiction as disease and vice by imagining crack as a predatory “epidemic” spread by black addicts who were morally responsible for what they carried. These scare tactics invited the narrative thrill and ethical imperatives of combat. As a director of the DEA’s New York office noted, “Crack was the hottest combat reporting story to come along since the end of the Vietnam War,” and by the mid-nineties, the metaphor of war had turned into something more concrete. Police departments got millions of dollars in military equipment from the Pentagon: bazookas, grenade launchers, helicopters, night-vision goggles. They got military training and SWAT teams. They were allowed to confiscate the cash, cars, and homes of everyone arrested in drug busts.

  But many of the people waging that war hated it. One politician would call government antidrug policies the legislative “equivalent to crack.” They would offer a short-term high, he argued, but would be catastrophic in the long run. One San Francisco judge wept on the bench after imposing a ten-year sentence on a shipyard worker who’d carried drugs to help a friend.

  The public stories told about addiction had consequences. Between 1980 and 2014, the number of incarcerated drug offenders increased from just over 40,000 to almost 490,000, and the majority of those incarcerated were people of color. A 1993 study found that only 19 percent of drug dealers were African American, but they made up 64 percent of arrests. Michelle Alexander put it like this: “By waging a war on drug users and dealers, Reagan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined ‘others’—the undeserving.”

  When Nancy Reagan launched her famous Just Say No campaign in 1982, its slogan didn’t offer advice so much as implicit recrimination: Just say no meant also, Some said yes. As George H. W. Bush’s National Drug Control Strategy would put it a decade later: “The drug problem reflects bad decisions by individuals with free wills.” In its insistence that addicts not be seen as victims, U.S. drug policy continued to echo Anslinger’s frustration with the “altruists” who called addicts sick. When Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, he implemented mandatory sentencing for first-time drug convictions, and put in place the infamous 100-to-1 ratio—which mandated vastly disproportionate sentencing for those caught with crack rather than powder cocaine, a policy that converted the racial scare tac
tics of the War on Drugs into actual prison terms.

  One 1995 survey asked participants: “Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me?” Even though African Americans constituted only 15 percent of the nation’s drug users, 95 percent of the respondents pictured someone black. This hypothetical drug user was the product of decades of effective storytelling.

  The story I got to live was a different one: throwing up during blackouts, bruises on my shins from stumbling up stairs, coke dusted under my nose like powdered sugar from a slice of coffee cake, these legible residues of fairly unremarkable dysfunction. Some parts of my drinking life have become comfortable grooves in memory—whiskey shots, reckless nights—but those months with my dying grandmother aren’t comfortable to remember. It’s the resentment I regret most, the ways I wished myself away instead of being where I was; the ways I resented showing up to make her oatmeal each morning.

  One night after coming home from my night shift at the inn, I drank my bottle of room-temperature wine and watched a movie on my laptop—about a man who had squatted in an abandoned bus in the Alaska woods, then gotten stuck there when the creeks swelled during spring thaws. By one in the morning, I was imagining myself into his trailer, wishing myself alone though that was hardly the moral of the story.

  During those days in California, I discovered that I actually preferred drinking alone. It was easier without anyone watching how much I was drinking, or expecting me to produce anything—wit, good cheer, or explanation. “I enjoy it much more, because I don’t go to bars,” Berryman once said. “I just order it in and settle down with it.”