The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  I remember lying there afterward, going in and out of sleep, not wanting to sleep with him there next to me, not knowing what he’d do—but deeply tired, flattened and confused by where the drunkenness had taken me, with the terrible insect whirring of my fan going on and off as the power cut out and came back. I remember cool air prickling the sweat on my back. Then he tried to turn me over and fuck me again, and I rolled away and fell asleep, and then he woke me up and turned me over again and then I pushed him away again and then he woke me up and turned me over and then I pushed him away and then—I’d be lying if I told you I remembered how many times he rolled my drunk body over and tried to fuck it again. I can tell you that I just lay there for a while afterward with my mind swimming far away from my body, and I prayed for him to leave.

  I had fucked him because it was easier than not fucking him, because it seemed hypocritical to stop what we’d started—like I’d already promised him something just by letting him come back to my room, like I owed him something as payment for the meager gift he’d given me, the affirmation of wanting to fuck me in the first place. My rum-blood believed every man’s desire was a gift he gave to me, and a promise I made to him. But there was also this, beyond and beneath each because: It happened because I was drunk, and because he didn’t stop.

  The next day, the night guard told me: “No more visitors,” and I thought of what we’d done in front of him, how rude and blind it had been.

  I went to school. I taught subtraction. I played Uno. My hangover pounded at my skull like it wanted out. The heat was impossibly thick. I stood in a dry gully behind the classrooms and felt sick, chugged orange Fanta and felt sicker. I apologized to one of my Dutch friends for getting so drunk the night before and she shrugged, not in a bad way, more in a your life, not mine way. I was apologizing to her because it seemed like something had happened that required an apology, and maybe I could get it out of me by apologizing to someone, anyone, enough.

  —

  IV —

  LACK

  During my dry-mouthed mornings in Nicaragua, hangover after hangover, I touched something in myself that wasn’t right, something unguarded and sweat-stained and sloppy. So when I moved back to the States that fall, to start a doctoral program at Yale, I decided to drink differently: no more beer, no more rum. Only clear liquor, which seemed purer when I imagined it traveling through me, and white wine. A lot of it. I lied to the guy at the wine shop on Orange Street—“I’m throwing a little dinner party, what’s good with salmon?”—knowing full well I was drinking alone that night. I might eat some crackers from the box. “We’ll be eight,” I’d say. “Do you think I should get two bottles or three?” Pretending the we of myself, cracker-crumbed and sour-breathed, was a moderate crowd. Pretending I wasn’t used to these kinds of calculations. The nights I actually did have people over, I had to get even more.

  One of my first friends in New Haven was a graduate student named Dave—a charming, gregarious poet. When I’d visited Yale as a prospective student, I’d stayed with him and his girlfriend in their apartment on Humphrey Street, a warm, lamp-glowing place with hardwood floors and endless bookshelves, nothing like my bare room back in California, with its futon mattress and empty wine bottles tucked in a plastic bag in the closet. Dave’s girlfriend was a few years older than us, almost thirty, and their life seemed intoxicating in its domesticity and its adult-ness: granola for breakfast, overdue library books, weekend hikes.

  Oddly enough, I realized I’d actually already met Dave—almost ten years before, when we were seniors in high school, on opposite sides of the country—at a national arts program, a scholarship that had funded twenty high school students to attend a week of classes at a hotel in Miami. “I remember you,” I told him. “You had a goatee! You played your guitar in the lobby!” What I did not say: I’d watched him from the shadows, behind a potted plant—as he’d played to a group of people, all laughing and talking—before disappearing back into my hotel room, too shy to join them.

  “Of course!” he said. “Amazing!” He seemed delighted by the coincidence, though I was stunned he remembered me at all. Although the program had only twenty students, I was sure I’d been invisible.

  The week after I moved to New Haven, I invited Dave and his girlfriend over to my apartment for dinner. They were my first guests. I drank while I cooked, as usual—preparing the same risotto I’d made for my grandmother’s memorial service, cooked with cheddar and Corona, her favorite beer. Slicing pears for a salad, I used my roommate’s mandoline, with its fearsome horizontal blade, to shave layers of fruit so paper-thin I could see their veins. After the third glass of wine, I sent my thumb over the blade. It was less like a cut, and more like a section of my thumb had been removed—a sliver of flesh-colored fruit, salad-possible. I texted Dave: Can you bring a Band-Aid??? And then: actually, a couple. And then: I promise I didn’t bleed in your food!!!! And then, thinking the whole series looked a little suspect, a final message that was just: !!!!!!!!!!!! In the meantime, I wrapped wads of toilet paper around my bleeding thumb and tightened the toilet paper wrapping with a hair band. It looked like a little ghost.

  Dave and his girlfriend arrived with Band-Aids and an olive oil cake. Who knew such a thing existed? I accepted their Band-Aids but was afraid to unwrap my thumb because I didn’t want it to start bleeding again; it had taken long enough to stop the first time. We sat at a round table under my living room skylight, crouching under my slanted attic roof, and I held the stem of my wineglass with four fingers and one puffy white pillow. It stayed numb all through dinner.

  New Haven was a grayish, contradictory city, full of massive brick housing projects and side streets full of quaint Victorian cottages; Gothic dorms and imposing concrete buildings built in the style called Brutalist, with windowless flanks like faces without eyes. You could sense the invisible borders where vegetarian cafés and scruffy secondhand bookstores gave way to dollar shops and methadone clinics; where the botanical garden edged onto an abandoned rifle factory. After getting my nose broken, I was afraid to walk alone at night—though I was also ashamed of my nervousness.

  That fall, I fell immediately, greedily, into a consuming relationship with a man named Peter, another graduate student. In the same way that drinking white wine in an attic apartment seemed safely distanced from stumbling rum-drunk through dark Nicaraguan alleys, getting involved with a whip-smart Henry James acolyte seemed safely removed from letting strangers fuck me on sweaty sheets. Peter and I spent our mornings at a local coffee shop, describing our dreams and splitting muffins the size of softballs; then we parted ways so we could spend the rest of the day writing each other emails about the parts of our dreams we’d forgotten to describe earlier. Sometimes I’d delay reading his message just to keep its unread potential like a warm glow in my gut, not unlike the glow of imagining the first drink. Knowing when I would see Peter again was in fact the same thing as knowing when I would drink again, always that night, because we always drank when we were together. We bought cheap magnum bottles of Shiraz and fixed plates of cheese and crackers and often never even cooked dinner. Falling in love was the only sensation that had ever truly rivaled drinking—for buzz and transportation, sheer immersive force—and with Peter they came conveniently entwined.

  Peter was tall and reserved, but his observations were full of caustic, witty judgment. His eyes were blue and crystalline, adamant, their beauty piercing and skeptical. It felt like victory to be admired by him. He was one of the most intelligent people I’d ever met. His mind was precise and relentless, his phrases like scrimshaw, whittled to intricate perfection. His ability and willingness and actual compulsion to dissect himself at all moments were the only instances of self-consciousness I’d ever encountered that struck me as more obsessive than my own. We were like two twenty-four-hour archeological digs happening side by side—just when you thought we’d pause for lunch, we went deeper.

  It was no wonder we got drunk so much; we just wanted a
fucking break. Booze let me live inside moments without the endless chatter of my own self-conscious annotation. It was like finally going on vacation somewhere beautiful without having to pose for photographs the whole time. Magnums helped us get simple and sloppy. Self-awareness burned off like fog and there we were, watching America’s Next Top Model on his Ikea bed, or my Ikea bed, and speculating about the possibly anorexic identical twins: Who would get kicked off first? How would the other cope?

  The depth and intensity of our relationship provided the perfect alibi for drinking. Peter certainly wasn’t fucking my drunk senseless body when I didn’t want him to. He was figuring out his dissertation, and bringing me baked goods—rum cake and peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. For a year we basically drank, and ate dessert.

  Sometimes we met at an Irish bar on State Street—with baskets of peanuts on the tables, broken shells all over the floor—and drank vodka tonics till we stumbled home through the sharp autumn cold. I started getting there early enough to drink one vodka before Peter arrived; then early enough to drink two, and then three. And then once Peter came we always had so much to talk about: every thought I’d ever had about Victorian illness memoirs, or the stuffed tiger my dad had given me as a kid, or the etymology of the word “render.” I was never out of class, always trying to impress. There was no amount of myself I could give Peter that seemed like too much. He wanted every observation, every impulse. After several years of men who’d wanted a night, or a month, this was like a homecoming. I wanted to deposit myself inside him, like putting myself in a vault for safekeeping. We wrote enough letters to sustain a long-distance relationship, but we lived only three blocks apart.

  It was hard to imagine we were trying to escape anything, much less each other; but in truth I was escaping something subtler: the possibility of any distance, any fissure, any silence, any seam. We talked about everything, including how maybe we drank too much. So we decided we wouldn’t drink on Mondays. I grew to dread Mondays. Then it wasn’t every Monday. That was better. Then it was forgotten entirely.

  All my life I had believed—at first unwittingly, then explicitly—that I had to earn affection and love by being interesting, and so I had frantically tried to become really fucking interesting. Once I hit the right relationship, I planned to hurl my interestingness at it, like a final exam I’d spent my whole life studying for. This was it.

  The theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that addiction isn’t about the substance so much as “the surplus of mystical properties” the addict projects onto it. Granting the substance the ability to provide “consolation, repose, beauty, or energy,” she writes, can “operate only corrosively on the self thus self-construed as lack.” The more you start to need a thing, whether it’s a man or a bottle of wine, the more you are unwittingly—reflexively, implicitly—convincing yourself you’re not enough without it.

  For much of my twenties, I scribbled different versions of the same question in my diary, always when I was drunk: Am I an alcoholic? Is this what it’s like to be an alcoholic? My shame about drinking wasn’t mainly about embarrassment at what I did when I was drunk; it was about how much I wanted to get drunk in the first place. Intoxication had become the feeling I was most interested in having. In “Dream Song 14,” Berryman’s speaker remembers what his mother told him when he was young: “Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no / Inner Resources.” Wanting to get drunk—at least, as much as I wanted to get drunk—seemed like a similar confession.

  Years later, I interviewed a clinician who described addiction as a “narrowing of repertoire.” For me, that meant my whole life contracting around booze: not just the hours I spent drinking, but the hours I spent anticipating drinking, regretting drinking, apologizing for drinking, figuring out when and how to drink again.

  It’s nothing new, the desire to disrupt consciousness—to soften it, blunt it, sharpen it, distort it, flood it with bliss, paper over its disenchantments. The desire to alter consciousness is as old as consciousness itself. It’s another way to describe the act of living. We just keep discovering things we can put into our bodies to change ourselves more dramatically, more suddenly: to feel relief or euphoria or the dulling of anxiety, to feel different, to feel the world made strange, more spellbinding or simply more possible. The temperance movement called liquor “demon drink,” a way to externalize the desires—for escape, for weightlessness, for euphoria, for extremity—that seek fluid or powder forms beyond our bodies.

  Addiction doesn’t surprise me. It seems more surprising that some people aren’t addicted to anything. From the night of my first buzz, I didn’t understand why everyone in the world wasn’t getting drunk every night. Addicts often describe every high as chasing the first one—the purest, the most revelatory—trying to recapture, as psychiatrist Adam Kaplin puts it, that first time going “through the turnstile.” Dr. Kaplin told me that one of his alcoholic patients, an artist, remembered his first cup of vodka as warmth filling his entire body, scalp to toes—the unmistakable feeling of coming home.

  Scientists describe addiction as a dysregulation of the neurotransmitter functions of the mesolimbic dopamine system. Which basically means your reward pathways get fucked up. It’s a “pathological usurpation” of survival impulses. The compulsion to use overrides normal survival behaviors like seeking food, shelter, and mating. It’s the narrowing again: this, only this.

  A chart from the early years of AA frames alcoholism as reckless bookkeeping: “FACTUAL GAIN AND LOSS CHART ON UN-CONTROLLED DRINKING.” It’s composed of two columns presented side by side: “Assets” and “Liabilities.” Every asset has its corresponding liability, which is to say: its price. The “pleasure of disregarding conventions” sits alongside the “Penalty of Indiscretions,” and the “Satisfying Flight from Reality” produces the “Fear of Being Sober Enough to See Depleted Self in True Light.” The liabilities column grows wider and wider near the bottom of the page, representing the progress of the disease, forcing the assets column to grow narrower and narrower, and the whole thing ends in capital letters and exclamation points: “WET BRAIN. INSTITUTIONS. DEATH!!!”

  Neuropharmacologist George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, would call this vertical disintegration a “spiraling distress/addiction cycle” comprising three interconnected stages: preoccupation/anticipation, binge/intoxication, and withdrawal/negative effect. In one popular-science volume about addiction, the chart explaining the spiraling distress/addiction cycle looks like a tornado with an arrow pointing straight down through the middle. In a nearby illustration of neurotransmitter activity, the neuron receptors look cheerful, just waiting to get activated. They have no idea what’s ahead.

  It’s a strange type of double vision to rewatch certain moments of my own life with the subtitles of biology playing underneath, like watching a thriller once the trick ending has been explained. I can understand sniffing lines of coke off a boy’s coffee table as the activation of a receptor that blocked dopamine reuptake, so the dopamine stuck around longer in my synapses. But I felt that blocked dopamine reuptake as the surge of my own voice. It was the sloughing of a snakeskin, the shedding of fear.

  When I look back at a night with a stranger in Nicaragua, I can say the GABA receptors in my neurons were activated by the rum in my veins—an agonist, they say—and the dopamine accumulated in my nucleus accumbens and my amygdaloid complex, these parts of my brain that sound like foreign lands, even though they’re where large portions of my sense of self resides. When I look back at sweaty bedsheets, I can see the disinhibition the booze produced when it depressed my prefrontal cortex. I can see the hangover I woke to—the jittery, anxious, guilty headache—and see the unrestrained glutamate that made me irritable and restless, trying to remember what he’d done to my body, sick to my stomach, sick of myself, uncomfortable enough to crave another drink.

  Part of the bind of coming to depend on drinking is that it becomes nearly impossibl
e to imagine a life without it. Inevitability becomes an alibi, or an excuse. “When I’m drunk it’s all right,” says one of Rhys’s heroines. “I know that I couldn’t have done anything else.” The drunk self becomes the self revealed rather than the self transformed, an identity that has been lurking inside all along: needy, desperate, shameless. When I saw the night guard in Nicaragua, the morning after I’d fucked a stranger in front of him, I believed he’d glimpsed a version of me that was truer than the self I showed the world. It was a version of myself I was usually too cautious or prudent or fearful to reveal: a self with no limits, all hurt, always grasping.

  It’s more accurate, I think, to say that booze expresses and creates this self at once. Getting drunk didn’t reveal the self I was—in some absolute, static, categorical way—but a version of myself I feared becoming. When I was drunk, I believed I was nothing but need.

  When I talk about that man in Nicaragua—which isn’t often, and usually happens in the context of how and why I got sober—I always say, “I mean, it wasn’t rape.” I was giving him certain signals of consent, like the absence of its stated opposite. But consent when you’re drunk means something I still don’t have a good language for. It was as if I’d already made myself available as someone without pride, and it would have been hypocritical to become someone different. By that point, getting drunk was usually about reaching a point of giving up on myself. That time, it just happened with him.

  After nearly a year with Peter, I found myself drunk in a Bolivian courtyard, about to sleep with someone else. It was the day before the country’s gubernatorial elections. Because it was illegal to buy booze during election weekends, we’d already stocked up. We were mixing orange soda with singani, a local brandy made from grapes grown high in the Andes, to make something unholy called Chuflay.