The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  One night, my sister-in-law and I came home to find my grandmother lying naked on the tiles just inside the front door. She told us she’d fallen on her way to the bathroom, but she wasn’t anywhere near the bathroom. She was talking about my grandfather, from whom she had been divorced for decades. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard her say his name. My sister-in-law called 911 and I went into the bathroom to try to gauge which of her pills she’d been taking, because the Lifeline calls had taught me they’d probably ask. But all her pills were spilled across her counter, and in her sinks.

  When the EMT guy arrived, he asked me who took care of her on a regular basis. “You’re twenty-three, and this is a lot for you,” he said. “But she deserves more.”

  After Dell was admitted to the hospital, once she was sleeping in her room, my sister-in-law and I went to an IHOP across from the hospital and got chocolate chip pancakes. I emptied an airplane nip of rum into my coffee, in silent conspiracy with my sister-in-law—this was a time it was okay to drink, understandable—but I longed for another kind of drinking: a bottle of wine alone, in selfish privacy.

  Dell had a heart attack a few days later. She died in a bed in the ICU, her body cluttered with tubes until they took away the life support and there was just the morphine and her swollen face and fingers, puffy with pooling fluid.

  Near the end, she had spoken not about her own physical discomfort but mainly about my father and my aunt, the two children who remained in her life, and how fiercely proud she was of them. She had been a good mother for almost seventy years—and that duration, that constancy, was staggering to me, all those packed lunches and worried nights. I tried to imagine the pain she must have died with, knowing she’d tried as hard as she could with her middle daughter but had somehow lost her anyway.

  After the memorial, my family found an address for Phyllis in Montana and sent her a letter saying that her mother had died. We got a letter back from Phyllis, who said she was living alone in a cabin at the end of a dirt road. She thought it might be a good place for the whole family to gather during end times. There was something in that gesture—the idea she still wanted to provide for us, the ones she hadn’t seen in years or hadn’t ever met—that moved me, even as it suggested the ways she was still ill.

  The novel I was working on began to change its shape. Phyllis was creeping into it—or the idea of Phyllis, anyway. In the novel, the young woman who is taking care of her grandmother begins searching for an aunt she has never met, a woman named Tilly who has been estranged from the family for years. She finds Tilly drinking herself to death in a trailer in the middle of the Nevada desert.

  The plot wasn’t my life, exactly, but a hypothetical version of my life that I hadn’t lived. Tilly was loosely based on Phyllis, which is to say I wrote to fill the blank space of what I didn’t know about Phyllis. But writing from Tilly’s perspective gave me the chance to articulate an alcoholic’s obsession without fully claiming it as my own. Tilly was pointedly not me. While I stole cheap Chardonnay from my job and drank it on a futon, Tilly stole cheap booze from her catering gigs and drank it in a closet—a ghost of the college closet where I’d stepped on a scale every morning. But I described her swollen face by looking in the mirror at my own, hungover in the morning: puffy, slack-jawed, glassy-eyed.

  I was careful to put up some fences between us: I made Tilly like gin most, because I preferred vodka. She binged in a dark closet, full of rotten food and empty bottles, and I drank white wine, got rid of my empties every day, and showed up promptly, with clenched knuckles and determination, for tutoring gigs where I let my teenage clients flirt with me—just a little bit—while I coached them on the crude logic of analogy: Bandage is to blood as cast is to injury? Or Pinot Grigio is to loneliness? Or fiction is to diary?

  I purposefully sketched Tilly’s life as more extreme than my own—a type of situational ventriloquism, throwing my own voice across distances—but I gave her all the parts of myself that were just coming into focus, not just my bone-deep desire to get drunk every night, but my growing sense of drinking as the most important part of my life, my central relief, as well as a clarified vision of how I wanted the drinking to happen: alone, without rules or witnesses, without shame.

  Though of course there was shame. There had been many kinds of shame: tensing up whenever my manager took inventory in the pantry at the inn, worried that she would get suspicious at how many bottles of wine we’d gone through; or reaching for a stick of gum whenever guests returned, so they wouldn’t smell the Chardonnay on my breath. Every Friday, when people put out their recycling bins on the street for pickup, I dropped a plastic shopping bag full of my own empties into a stranger’s bin. Each time it was like I’d gotten away with something. They couldn’t be traced back to me.

  As Charles Jackson told countless AA meetings, writing a book about drinking didn’t keep him from doing it. He had been sober for eight years by the time The Lost Weekend was published, in 1944, but he relapsed three years later. His stints of sobriety—sometimes grudging, sometimes passionately committed, always fraught—punctuated the ongoing catalog of wreckage that his life became: a slew of benders and hospitalizations, a growing tally of alienated friends and unpaid debts. His wife had to sell a mink coat to pay the coal bill. He spent decades smoking four packs of cigarettes a day on one post-tubercular lung. His suicide attempts were so frequent they became, if not casual, at least horribly familiar.

  But from certain angles, in the dim lighting of certain midtown bars, Jackson’s drinking carried the gloss and polish of legend. His archives include a bar tab four pages long. A fellow patient at the sanitarium where he went for his tuberculosis remembers waking one morning to find Jackson’s footprint outlined in a dried puddle of wine.

  Jackson first stopped drinking at the age of thirty-three, using something called the Peabody Method. It was an approach grounded in pragmatism rather than psychoanalytic excavation, spirituality, or fellowship. It stressed honesty and reparations. Jackson worked with an unlicensed therapist named Bud Wister on rigorous daily schedules of self-improvement. “We regulate our lives in orderly and profitable fashion without benefit of Freud,” Jackson wrote in one progress report. “I have lately acquired… a sound responsibility based on sobriety and my true self.”

  But The Lost Weekend offers another “true self” in its pages, or asks us to recognize that any self is always plural. You can sense a sober Jackson drinking vicariously through his protagonist: Don drinks whiskey in an uptown bar and a downtown bar, then settles into his favorite drinking pose of faux sophistication, curled up in a leather chair with a full tumbler and some classical music.

  During the years I spent writing this book, about my own drinking—from the vantage point of four years sober, then five years sober, then six years sober—I sometimes sank into the old memories as if they were a comfortable couch, collapsing under the old spell of eerie muted longing. It wasn’t just predictable flavors of nostalgia—the sepia-toned glow of the Advocate’s wooden floor, sticky with gin—but more surprising ones: those restless early-morning hangovers, parched and sour-mouthed, dog tired but unable to sleep. Even that discomfort had started to carry its own shabby glow.

  The Lost Weekend regards even drunken embarrassment with an oddly tender nostalgia. Jackson makes Don drunk-dial F. Scott Fitzgerald, as Jackson himself once did, to tell him how much he loves his work, only to be politely rebuffed: “Why don’t you write me a letter about it? I think you’re a little tight now.”

  Making his protagonist call Fitzgerald in the middle of the novel was a poignant confession of Jackson’s own literary aspirations and insecurities. He wanted to include himself in the ranks of the Great Drunk Writers, but he didn’t know if his own portrait of alcoholism—untethered from Tragic Meaning—was good enough to join the canon. When Don imagines the novel he will write, he conjures a winding yarn full of events punctuated by alcohol (“the long affair with Anna, the drinking”), but eventua
lly the plot is overwhelmed by booze, even in hypothetical outline, until even the commas between binges disappear: “the books begun and dropped, the unfinished short-stories, the drinking the drinking the drinking.”

  Jackson was actually doing something revolutionary in refusing to make his character’s drinking a symbol of psychic complexity, by letting Don dismiss the question “Why do you drink?” as irrelevant: “It had long since ceased to matter Why. You were a drunk; that’s all there was to it. You drank; period.” Don doesn’t want to falsify the story of his drinking by ennobling it with overblown causes, though he’s also worried about the story that remains without them: It wasn’t even decently dramatic. It was nothing. Except it must have been something, because hundreds of thousands of readers were engrossed by a book that kept telling them they should probably put it down. The Lost Weekend is enthralling in an aggressive sense of thrall—a state of servitude or submission. Against my better instincts, I found myself rooting for Don to get his hands on the booze. I appreciated the frustrating force of his desire, and wanted him to stop serving it. But I also wanted to see it satisfied.

  We love our drunk heroes intoxicated. We don’t want to watch them get sober. When critic Lewis Hyde wrote about The Dream Songs three years after Berryman’s death, he railed against the ways people had romanticized Berryman’s drinking. “I am not saying that the critics could have cured Berryman of his disease,” Hyde wrote. “But we could have provided a less sickening atmosphere.” Hyde hated the vision of Berryman conjured by his “Whisky and Ink” profile in Life—the drunken poet as icon, holding court in Dublin pubs. Hyde resented the people who had seen Berryman’s body as a symbol, with his windblown beard and a cigarette between his fingertips, his liquor as proof of his wisdom rather than the sick, glugging heart of his disease.

  For his part, Berryman loved the Life profile. It showed him a side of himself he wanted to believe in—a prophet surveying his kingdom of empty shot glasses—and fed the delusions that were feeding his drinking. The why-less drinking that Charles Jackson had proposed in The Lost Weekend would have been harder to absorb. That type of buffoonish drinking—with its vaguely comic desperation—didn’t strike the same appealing pose as the poet with his quivering psychic antennae pointed toward death.

  Hyde’s essay on Berryman is a fascinating artifact of anger. It’s an attack on The Dream Songs waged in Berryman’s own name. “It is my thesis here,” Hyde argues, “that [a] war, between alcohol and Berryman’s creative powers, is at the root of the Dream Songs.” Hyde resists the ways these poems can be interpreted “under the fancy handle of ‘the epistemology of loss,’” insisting they were really just sung by “an alcoholic poet on his pity pot.” If the poems stage a war between booze and creativity, Hyde insists, it’s the booze that wins: “We can hear the booze talking. Its tone is a moan that doesn’t revolve. Its themes are unjust pain, resentment, self-pity, pride and a desperate desire to run the world. It has the con-man’s style and the con-game’s plot.”

  Hyde wasn’t blaming Berryman for his disease, but he was angry at the sheen Berryman’s sickness had acquired—and angry because he wished Berryman could have gotten better. He wanted a different ending to the story: not Berryman jumping off the Washington Avenue Bridge in a bitter Minnesota winter, but Berryman living One Day at a Time into the future. “It would not have been easy,” Hyde speculates. “He would have had to leave behind a lot of his own work. He would have had to leave his friends who had helped him live off his pain for twenty years.”

  When I first read Hyde on Berryman, a few years into my own sobriety, I whispered a secret “Amen.” I wanted to believe that giving up booze didn’t mean giving up electricity, and Hyde was suggesting that the fruits of alcoholic composition weren’t glorious but deeply compromised. Here was someone saying “Fuck off” to a mythology that I’d come to see as corrosive and misguided. I loved Hyde for pushing back against the toxic filters that turned addiction into romance, and I loved him for articulating a version of the anger I carried toward a prior version of myself, consumed by self-pity that had come to seem grossly self-indulgent.

  It would be easy to dismiss Hyde’s piece as shrill or puritanical, the rambling ad hominem attacks of a teetotaler stick-in-the-mud—like a girl pacing around a swimming pool, as I once did, shrill-voiced, telling everyone to get out of the Jacuzzi because it just wasn’t safe to be there stoned. (I was stoned too.) But that’s what I loved about Hyde’s essay, its unfashionable indignation—its insistence on the horrors of drinking, rubbed bare of their gloss, and its conviction that these horrors weren’t the engine of creativity but its straitjacket.

  Where had all Hyde’s anger come from, anyway? At the start of the essay, he confesses that for two years he worked as an orderly in a detox ward. He spent time in the trenches. That’s part of why he needed to acknowledge that behind the photograph of the poet with his whiskey, there had been an actual man. Berryman’s mythology offered its own supernatural alchemy—whiskey was the fluid he ingested and ink was the fluid he produced, both were alternatives to ordinary human blood—but Berryman was full of ordinary human blood, blood that his drinking slowly poisoned, and his life was full of fluids that weren’t ink: the sweat of tremors and withdrawal; the vomit of illness, the piss and shit on his pants. Behind the mantra of whiskey and ink, those lyric parallels, there was a man with bruised shins living half his life in blackouts. His liver was so swollen with toxins it was palpable through his skin. This wasn’t drinking as swagger or farce. This was drinking as seepage toward death.

  Billie Holiday was an addict whose life staged the collision of two addict myths: the romantic notion of the tortured artist, and the morality tale of the deviant junkie. She was worshipped as a gloriously self-destructive genius, but she was also persecuted as a criminal. As a black woman raised poor in Baltimore in the 1920s, dogged by the justice system’s double standards all her life, she wasn’t granted the same unfettered access to the same mythologies as windblown Berryman.

  From the beginning, however, Holiday’s legend was similarly tied up in the gloss and heat of her hurt, as if the beauty of her singing rose off her pain like steam off boiling water. The writer Elizabeth Hardwick was enchanted by Holiday’s “luminous self-destruction,” while Harry Anslinger, during the late thirties and early forties, made Holiday one of his personal crusades. One of the federal narcotic agents assigned to her case called her a “very attractive customer,” because he knew it would be great publicity for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics if they could bring her down.

  When Holiday started shooting heroin, in her mid-twenties, it gave her back a stronger sense of herself. “I got a habit and I know it’s no good,” she wrote, “but it’s the one thing that makes me know there’s a person called Billie Holiday.” A friend said she had a “shyness so vast that she spoke in practically a whisper,” but when she sang, her voice made her a legend in the jazz clubs of Manhattan. She was told nobody could sing the word “hunger” like she sang it. She sang the clubs on West Fifty-second, tucked into brownstone basements, and loved Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, where the whiskey was served in teacups. Holiday gave gin to her Chihuahuas, Chiquita and Pepe, and it was rumored she shot up her little boxer, Mister. Hardwick marveled at the “sheer enormity of her vices,” admiring the powerful alchemy by which Holiday was able to transform them into her extraordinary art. It was as if Holiday had risen to the occasion of her own pain. “For the grand destruction one must be worthy,” Hardwick wrote, in awe of Holiday’s “ruthless talent and the opulent devastation.”

  For Harry Anslinger, the enormity of Holiday’s vices offered another type of opportunity. Her self-destruction wasn’t luminous but criminal, and her celebrity was a convenient hook upon which he could hang the racist scripts he’d already been writing for years to bolster his crusade against drugs. His vendetta wasn’t just about constructing the addict-villain but constructing the black addict-villain, since at the same time he was hunting
Holiday, he was busy telling Judy Garland that she should get over her heroin habit by taking longer vacations between movie shoots.

  Anslinger assigned several agents to Holiday’s case during the late 1940s, and they busted her on multiple occasions, including the 1947 conviction that sent her to Alderson Federal Prison Camp, in West Virginia, for almost a year. At Alderson, Holiday got Christmas cards from more than three thousand fans all over the world. When her whiskey cravings got bad enough, she made moonshine from potato peelings in the commissary.

  Jimmy Fletcher, one of the men Anslinger assigned to track Holiday, ended up becoming quite fond of her. They once danced together at a club, and another night he sat with her and Chiquita, talking for hours. Years later, he remembered their relationship with regret. “When you form some sort of friendship with anybody,” he said, “it’s not pleasant to get involved in criminal activities against that person.” The first time Fletcher busted Holiday, in the spring of 1947, she was staying at the Braddock Hotel, in Harlem. Fletcher pretended he was delivering a telegram. During her strip search, Holiday forced Fletcher to watch her pee: a way of demanding that he face the degrading, invasive nature of his work.

  Some forty years after that bust, in July 1986, ABC News introduced the American public to Jane—an addict with a five-hundred-dollar-a-day freebase habit—and her premature twins, who each weighed two pounds three ounces. In October 1988, NBC News introduced Tracy, Erocelia, and Stephanie: Erocelia was recovering on a hospital bed after giving birth to her premature baby. Stephanie had left her baby at the hospital and was headed for a crack house. Tracy smoked crack on national TV. As criminologist Drew Humphries argues, the media effectively created the “crack mother” as a sensational character, almost exclusively targeting minority women although the majority of pregnant addicts were white. Occasionally contrite but frequently shameless, the crack mother was almost always black or Latina, and she was invariably a failure at the primal task of motherhood.