The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  The problem with media scripts about the crack mother wasn’t that crack addiction wasn’t devastating individuals and communities (it was) but that the public outrage around crack mothers effectively redirected public notions of addiction away from disease and back to vice. This indignation offered a convenient scapegoat for the deeper ills fueling addiction—urban poverty, trickle-down economics, systemic racism—and obscured the science itself. Dr. Ira Chasnoff, whose early reports on the effects of cocaine in utero had fueled the press frenzy, eventually pushed back against what he called the media’s early “rush to judgment,” explaining he had “never seen a ‘crack kid’” and doubted he ever would.

  The figure of the crack mother sharpened to a vindictive blade the notion of addiction as something you were guilty of, rather than something you suffered from. A crack mother wasn’t just damaging herself; she was damaging another body inside her own. “If you give drugs to your child because you can’t help it,” said Jeffrey Deen, one of the prosecutors who eventually put a crack mom on trial, “that’s child abuse.” Deen’s phrasing held a contradiction he couldn’t acknowledge: you can’t help it suggested illness, but child abuse was a crime.

  It wasn’t just that crack mothers were portrayed as irresponsible, it was that they appeared to have the wrong feelings about motherhood. “Instead of showing shame, Tracy was defiant in the face of obvious censure,” Humphries writes. “Instead of revealing remorse, Stephanie was indifferent to the baby she had left in the hospital.” As opposed to those male geniuses whose addictions were understood as badges of psychic complexity or inner anguish, these women were portrayed as emotionally stunted or deformed by their addictions; or else guilty of some latent emotional deficiency that their addictions had exposed. And when white pregnant drug addicts were covered in the media (rarely), they were usually powder cocaine users depicted in states of contrition and recovery, and were often shown bathing or otherwise caring for their babies. But minority crack mothers fit neatly into preexisting racist stereotypes. Now they weren’t just part of the “undeserving” poor, welfare junkies who were corroding the civic body; they were actively destroying their own children.

  Crack mothers weren’t just criticized for their addictions; they were prosecuted for them. Unlike most addicts, they entered the criminal justice system through the hospital, where doctors were asked to start turning over their pregnant patients to the legal system. Prosecutors twisted familiar laws in new ways: They sought an indictment for Melanie Green on manslaughter charges after her infant daughter, Bianca, died during the first week of her life. Jennifer Johnson was convicted of delivering a controlled substance to her unborn child. In Johnson’s case, the prosecution claimed that Johnson had effectively been “trafficking” cocaine to her newborn, rewriting the umbilical cord as a state highway and their shared blood as a drug deal. “Maybe sending a woman to jail is like killing a fly with a shotgun,” said one judge. “But I had other concerns. I had concerns about an unborn helpless child to be.”

  The crack mother was the negative image of the addict genius: She wasn’t someone whose dependence fueled her creative powers. She was someone whose dependence meant she’d failed to create the way she was supposed to.

  When Billie Holiday told her own story—in Lady Sings the Blues, her 1956 autobiography—she wasn’t interested in peddling either of the addict myths that had been projected onto her: luminous self-destroyer or depraved villain. She was mainly interested in telling people heroin wouldn’t do them any favors. “If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you’re out of your mind,” she wrote. “There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio or by living in an iron lung.”

  Holiday’s coauthor, journalist William Dufty, thought addiction would be a good “gimmick” to help them sell the memoir to publishers. But its account of addiction was actually remarkably unsensational, more concerned with tiring logistics than luminescence. “I’ve been on and I’ve been off,” Holiday explains. “I’ve spent a small fortune on the stuff.” She was less interested in waxing lyrical about her own pain than in honoring the maddening back-and-forth of addiction, its reversals and regressions, its tedium and stubborn siren call. With every relapse, she called herself No Guts Holiday. Rather than presenting her addiction as proof of psychic depth, she wanted to confess the ways others had suffered because of it: “A habit is no damn private hell.” And she was clear on one point: “Dope never helped anybody sing better, or play music better, or do anything better. Take it from Lady Day. She took enough of it to know.” It wasn’t just a moralizing persona constructed for the pages of her book. To her pianist, Carl, she once said: “Don’t you ever use this shit! It’s no good for you! Stay away from it! You don’t want to end up like me!”

  Holiday genuinely wanted to stop using—plenty of oral histories attest to that—but she had nothing but disdain for a system in which the cure was little more than a cloak for punishment. “I want you to know you stand convicted as a wrongdoer,” one judge told her. But Holiday wanted to know: Would he treat a diabetic like a criminal?

  Holiday had been treated like a criminal for as long as she could remember. She was born just a month after the Harrison Act came into effect in 1915, targeting the use and sale of opium and cocaine, and it was as if she’d been fated to a life bound up in its ongoing legacy. For a citizen like her, poor and black, the law was more likely to punish than protect. When she was almost raped at ten, she was treated as a criminal—arrested for solicitation and then sent away to a disciplinary school. When she spurned a customer as a teenage call girl, she got treated as a criminal—sent away to jail for prostitution. When she got sick as an addict, she was treated as a criminal—sent away to Alderson. In Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday wrote that she wanted her country to “wake up” to its narcotics problem “for the sake of young kids whose whole life will be ruined because they are sent to jail instead of a hospital.” But this plea was made in 1956, the same year Congress passed the Narcotic Control Act, mandating more drastic minimum sentencing.

  In the face of increasingly harsh drug legislation in the 1950s, another figure started to gain a cultish appeal: the unrepentant addict. William Burroughs’s Junkie, subtitled Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, was published in 1953, the same year as Anslinger’s Traffic in Narcotics. The cover was pure pulp: a man in wild disarray, necktie flailing, restraining a blond vixen as she reaches for her dope works. (Though, in truth, Burroughs’s junkie didn’t try to keep anyone away from her dope.) The novel’s antihero isn’t interested in going along with the establishment’s redemption narratives. “Given cooperation,” the narrator knows, his doctor “was ready to take down my psyche and reassemble it in eight days.” But he doesn’t want to play along. Elizabeth Hardwick’s vision of Holiday as an addict with “no pleading need to quit, to modify” was another version of this figure. “With cold anger,” Hardwick wrote, Holiday “spoke of various cures that had been forced upon her.”

  The allure of the unrepentant addict has endured. When Amy Winehouse’s single “Rehab” became a hit in 2007, half a century after Holiday published Lady Sings the Blues, it tapped into our running obsession: They tried to make me go to rehab, I said no, no, no. It’s a great song—straight up and flat out, jaunty and sublime—with Winehouse’s singular voice all acrobatic and vaulting and rich, like vinyl and leather; the chorus blunt and surprising, full of defiance where you might expect to find the keening croon of self-pity. Refusing rehab becomes its own statement of power: When I come back, you’ll know, know, know. No turns into know: Resistance becomes knowledge. This isn’t just refusal; it’s a declaration of presence, and the success of “Rehab” as an anti-rehab anthem was attached to the appeal of Winehouse as an un-rehabilitated woman. At one concert on the Isle of Wight, drunk and slurring her words, she ended “Rehab” by throwing a plastic cup full of wine. An arc of crimson sprayed across the stage. No, no, no, she sang. She wouldn’t go to rehab. She was doin
g this instead.

  The online clips of Winehouse’s concerts, especially the ones that show her visibly intoxicated or tweaking onstage, have thousands of comments. People offer judgment: So many people dream of being a Singer and being on stage and Amy just threw it all away. Or else self-congratulatory sympathy: I see someone with a broken heart.

  After her final concert, in Belgrade, which she spent muttering senselessly into the mike, one newscaster wondered: “Why do they keep putting her on stage? Surely they know she has a problem.” Another said: “This was supposed to be a comeback, and she TOTALLY. BLEW. IT.” Something about her addiction made people angry. But their anger wasn’t simple. The woman who wrote Amy just threw it all away had a story of her own. As for accidentally OD’ing that’s bullshit. My dad didn’t have a fucking accident when he overdosed on heroin. Me and my brothers just stood and watched as the paramedics revived him.

  Someone else asked: Does she want to go back to rehab now :P

  It was a fantasy that Winehouse never tried to get clean (she went to rehab four times) just as it was a fantasy that Holiday had no need to quit or modify, as if the only alternative to a woman completely victimized by her addiction was a woman who had no desire to live past it. Though Holiday spoke “with cold anger” about the “cures that had been forced upon her,” as Hardwick put it, it was more that Holiday was angry about the forcing, and the punishments disguised as “cures,” rather than the idea of a cure itself.

  The unrepentant addict pushes back—in thrilling, necessary ways—against rabid moralizing rhetoric and the kinds of social control that often masquerade as rehabilitation. Her open-ended story is an appealing antidote to the bow-tied conversion narrative. But fetishizing the unrepentant addict can also ignore her genuine desire to get well. It might have been appealing for Hardwick to imagine Holiday as a woman facing the wreckage of her life with unrepentant grandeur, but it’s no accident that a white woman called Holiday’s self-destruction luminous while Holiday didn’t see it that way at all. She was too aware of the price.

  After my grandmother died, I spent five months working two jobs, tutoring and innkeeping, to save the money I needed for an airplane ticket to Nicaragua and a month’s rent once I got there: a room with a single bed in a small yellow house. I craved luminosity—the glimmering constellation points of a life told as anecdotes—and a world removed from the home where my grandmother had died. In a city called Granada, I volunteered at a two-room schoolhouse during the day, pretending to bite off my own fingers to teach second-graders subtraction, and drank at night, more recklessly and more dramatically than I ever had before. This drinking looked more exotic than it had at my grandmother’s house, when it had been about lukewarm wine bottles on a bare futon mattress, but it was still daily and necessary, still the relief I woke up craving.

  My first diary entry from Nicaragua began, No thoughts. Just things. Piles of burning trash along the road from Managua. Salsa music wailing from a stereo perched in front of a miniature bouncy castle. Tiny pancakes bubbling on hot griddles outside the church. The mohawk spine of fur along a dog’s back. I made sandwiches on shriveled bread with mashed avocados from the market, and shook big flakes of salt into my cupped palm to sprinkle on top of campesino cheese purchased from clattering carts. I used a liter soda bottle with the top cut away to pour water for my laundry. I never killed the cockroaches in my room because someone had told me that if you crushed a pregnant cockroach, all the eggs inside her belly would hatch. I was sure the stray dogs could smell my period when it came.

  In Granada, I was part of an ongoing ecosystem of tourists and parachute do-gooders and locals. Whenever a man stole a purse from one of the cantinas on Calle Calzada, a small flock of expats exploded after him, their flip-flops scattering to the side of the road; and then another man carefully collected these flip-flops and lined them up again, hoping for a tip, checking our discarded Toña bottles to see if any had a few drops of beer left. I fell in with a crew of Dutch girls who were older and more cosmopolitan than I was. My Spanish was better than theirs, but it was my second language and their fourth. We passed an afternoon in hammocks by the Laguna de Apoyo, with cold beers and a warm breeze, eating whole fish roasted over flames, swimming in a volcanic basin with ribbons of chilly water and hot water swirled together like scarves. After a day in the ragged sunlight I dreamed about fever, and then a few nights later I got one. I could feel it stroking my bones. I turned twenty-four by candlelight and woke up with the sour taste of the last night’s sangria in my mouth, my clothes smelling like smoke.

  Every afternoon I drank Toñas with the Dutch girls and every night we drank rum. I wasn’t a huge rum fan. But it was all you could get in Nicaragua, so I drank it: Flor de Caña, the local favorite. Or Nica Libres, which were just rum and cokes, like Cuba Libres, as if the revolution had been a little sibling, formed in its elder’s image. Those were the early days of Ortega’s second lease on the dream, and it went black for hours at a time each night. The government was figuring out how to make electricity a public industry. When la luz se fue, the light left, we watched flame jugglers outside the cathedral. Boys pushed their baskets of cashews into our elbows. A caustic man from Quebec wondered what they did with all the fallen mangoes every morning. The warm darkness fell over my buzz like a blanket fort at dusk. We bought tamales from the woman at the corner of the parque central and ate them somewhere with candles, or without candles—just fumbling with our hands—and some nights we piled into unmarked black taxis and rode down the lake to Oscar’s, where people danced and snorted lines of coke, where little black flies lifted in a fluttering scrim over the water at dawn. There was a traveling magician on crutches who came around most nights; he was missing one leg from the knee down. He was clearly a drunk. I remember thinking: You should take better care of yourself.

  At the school where I volunteered, I ran an Uno game during recess. I learned how the kids played: Leticia was merciless, and impatient with anyone who wasn’t. One Gloria played fast; the other Gloria played slow enough to give the others a chance to plead their cases about which color she should choose: Amarillo! Rojo! Verde! She liked the power. My students colored between the lines on their paper payasitos, little paper clowns. From the woman who stood beside the rusted metal swings, they bought plantain chips and something that looked like toothpaste made of sugar. After I saw lice crawling through Sol’s hair, I went to the dim concrete box of our local farmacia—where I mimed the bugs crawling across my scalp to make sure I got the right little brown bottle of poison.

  For the first time in my life, I started getting real hangovers: a sour mouth and twin heartbeats of pain in my temples; a head stuffed with crumpled-up pieces of paper like a trash can, all of them rasping against each other whenever I nodded. Nursing a hangover: You have to care for the aftermath, like a child you’ve given birth to.

  I started drinking with a guy named Felipe, from Managua, and whenever we got drunk he talked about being alcoholic. The way he put it, being alcoholic wasn’t anything that made him special. It was just true for him and for a lot of the guys he’d grown up with. He wasn’t packing up his drinking and taking it on an international flight or to his job at a Santa Monica inn. He wasn’t busy blaming his frequent-flier father. He didn’t feel particularly sorry for himself—this was just a way of being, and it wasn’t his alone.

  Felipe and I got blind drunk and went dancing at Oscar’s by the lake, kissed as dawn brightened the sky. A mist of flies rose off the greenish water and fluttered around us in the early light. Felipe told me things in Spanish that it would have embarrassed me to hear in English: Quiero tu boca, quieres mi boca?.… I started to translate—“I want your mouth, do you want my mouth?”—until I forced myself to let go, to stop translating, to lean into his body and into the drunkenness itself.

  My drinking was still winding its tentacles into everything, as it had in Los Angeles, and Iowa before that, but now it was happening on a different stage set, with dar
k cobblestone streets and mangoes six for a dollar, with unreliable electricity and candlelight that wavered like a voice about to break into crying. There was more narrative action in this play than there had been when I drank on a futon, in front of movies on my laptop, but the central themes were the same: wanting it, getting it, wanting it again. One night I was walking from one bar to another—drunk, on a quiet street—and got punched by a stranger, who took my purse after breaking my nose. The blood splattered all over my skirt.

  There was a night with a stranger named Mackey. I can’t remember if that was his last name or just a nickname. My memory is a pile of scraps, sodden and souring. I remember riding in an unmarked black cab, my knees against other knees, voices filling the small car, jostling over rutted roads, with the jutting rebar of unfinished second stories profiled against the night, barbed fences and trash piles catching stray vectors of street light. I remember sitting on his lap, in a huge group of strangers, and feeling him push his fingers into me and not wanting them there but being too drunk to tell him to stop—and too embarrassed, somehow, as if my drunkenness had invited them.

  I don’t remember asking him to come back to my room, though I do remember him taking off my clothes in an open courtyard outside my bedroom, and realizing that the night guard was standing nearby in the shadows—not because he wanted to be there, but because it was his job.

  At a certain point we were on my bed and I didn’t want to fuck him—but I was too drunk and too tired to figure out how not to fuck him, so I just lay there, still and quiet, while he finished. The situation would sharpen into awareness, in fleeting moments, and I’d think, This isn’t what I want, and then it would dissolve into soft focus again.