The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  I was ostensibly spending the summer in Bolivia to improve my Spanish, to satisfy one of the requirements of my doctoral program—and I suppose I was doing that, too, I was certainly using some of my program’s funding—but the trip was also my way of getting away from a dynamic with Peter that had turned claustrophobic. Our life back in New Haven had begun to seem quarantined by the same routines that had been pleasingly dependable at first: nightly banter about aspiring models on reality television, not enough dinner and too much dessert, endless pictograph wallabies leaping across seven-dollar bottles of Yellow Tail Shiraz. I couldn’t even count all the hours of my life I’d devoted to discussing Peter’s dissertation on Henry James, an author who seemed mainly interested in what his characters thought about feelings. They never actually seemed to feel anything. I was hungry for something that might cut through this web of calculation—like actual emotion, which I defined as sudden, extraordinary, and overpowering, not the daily grind of knowing someone else’s favorite muffin. Peter was utterly committed to me, which gave me a sensation not entirely unlike nausea.

  The trip to Bolivia wasn’t something I could fully afford, despite help from my program, and I’d borrowed money to make it possible. Peter was supposed to join me after a month—down in Sucre, the city where I was staying. Then we’d travel together, and the travel was supposed to deliver our dynamic to broader horizons: the salt flats, the Andes, the jungle.

  Now, a week before Peter arrived, I was seeking some absurd approximation of these broader horizons with someone else, this Irishman, who’d gotten plenty of singani because—like me—he understood that you needed to think ahead when there were days you couldn’t buy booze. Sundays in Connecticut had taught me that. The Irishman was telling me all about his motorcycle voyage across Latin America, and I was imagining the ways I might someday tell someone else about a man telling me about his motorcycle voyage across Latin America, and I was telling him—in the meantime—that maybe I needed a bit less soda, and a bit more singani.

  This Irishman’s hair was long and reddish, falling in corn-silk flaps that framed his pale face. He limped because he’d broken his collarbone and one of his legs in a bad bike accident in rural Chile. His bike was taking longer to fix than he was. That’s why he was hanging around in Sucre. The first spark with him was like a match lit under the kindling of my year with Peter, a year soaked with booze but also dulled and flattened by routine, framed by Ikea bookshelves and uninspired seminar response papers. This election and its injured Irishman were more like the flush and fever of Nicaragua, more like a story unfolding. At the time, I thought this appeal had to do with the boldness of seeking novelty; but in retrospect it looks like something far more ordinary—a fear of familiarity.

  Sucre was the old colonial capital, a city of cobblestone alleys surrounded by rolling brown hills frosted with sharp Andean light. I was staying in a little room above a fern-filled courtyard and eating salteñas for breakfast, cracking holes in their pastry shells to get the meat stew inside. It was cold. We were high in the mountains, and it was winter in the Southern Hemisphere. At the market on the edge of town, I went looking for a coat, walking among street vendors selling fried dough and dishwashers from tarp-covered stalls clustered in a system of old storm drains, hawking tubs of lizard-skinned custard apples and pale salty cheese in sweating blocks the size of dollhouses.

  Once we were good and drunk, the Irishman asked me if I wanted to see the top floor of the house where he was staying. There was a room in the attic that had been rented to an Argentine boy who’d died a few months before. The boy’s family hadn’t come to get his things, and the landlord hadn’t known what to do with them, so they were still there. It was a gruesome sort of tourism—stepping into this dead boy’s room, with his soccer photographs taped to the walls—like slowing to look at a car accident. I stood there wondering if I had it in me to actually go through with what I was about to do. It’s not that I wouldn’t have cheated if I hadn’t been drunk. It was more like I got drunk so I could cheat. I drank myself toward zero gravity, what Hemingway called “rum-brave” and Lowry called “tequila-unafraid.” Our Chuflay eventually gave way to straight singani, which just meant we’d run out of soda.

  I woke up in a strange bed, in a bare white room, physically ill, the liquor curdling in me. I wanted to turn my body inside out and wring myself free of everything, like a piece of wet laundry. I was surprised that I’d actually cheated on Peter. Can I do this? you think, and then watch yourself: I guess so. It was less like becoming a cheater and more like discovering that I’d been one all along. The singani had wiped away my upper layers, dissolving their varnish to show the grimy truth below. It didn’t escape me then, the notion of inheritance—what might run in the blood.

  In retrospect, this random cheating—with someone who meant nothing, inside a relationship I wasn’t obligated to stay inside of—seems explicable and unextraordinary. It was a way of choosing the drama of a minor train wreck over the more mundane work of recovering a relationship that had gone stale. The loud volume of my guilt was a buffer against the quieter actuality of uncertainty. I ducked into dusty Internet cafés and wrote oddly punctuated notes to friends back home, doomed by unfamiliar keyboards: What have I done}

  Many scientists prefer the phrase “chemical dependence” to terms like “addiction” and “drug abuse.” Once Berryman started to identify as an alcoholic, he put it like this: “We’re all dependent people. Take our chemicals away, we have to find something else to depend on.” But we’re all dependent people, literally all of us—anyone human. So what primes you for a particular chemical dependence?

  You could say I’m made of need. You could say everyone is. You could say my dad’s absence for stretches of my childhood created need, or else inspired a certain relationship to men that kept creating need. You could say that my dad drank, and his sister drank, and their dad drank before they drank. You could point to the twenty-year study that found chromosomal patterns in more than 2,255 families “densely affected by alcoholism,” and conclude that certain brains are more disposed to the neural adaptations that enable chemical dependence. You could say it all depends on how your neurons respond to the neuromodulators in your system; that it all depends on a complicated constellation of particularities in your genotype, and that how these responses are treated or punished depends on the money you have, and the color of your skin—and all of these explanations would be true, and none would be sufficient. What often seems truest is the confession of every explanation as partial and provisional, a possible shape to fill the empty space of why?

  Whenever I was drunk, I could tell you exactly why I drank. The reason was rarely the same river twice: because I deserved relief from the burden of my own self-consciousness, the endless chatter of my inner monologues and self-appraisals; or else because there was something dark and broken at the core of me that I covered up with excess functionality, and getting drunk was the only way I could acknowledge it. Drinking was self-escape or else it was self-encounter, depending on the story I was telling myself.

  But I was also interested in the ways these stories weren’t sufficient. In the novel I was writing, there was no good reason that either of my characters was so sad. In early drafts, there were no explicit traumas in the narrative that produced their self-destructive impulses. The mystery of these impulses was what I wanted to explore, the possibility that you might damage yourself to figure out why you wanted to damage yourself—the way exhaling into cold air makes your breath visible. “In so much of your writing,” one boyfriend told me, “there are so many hooks to hang the pain on, but no explanation of where the poison coat came from.” He was right. It can seem dishonest to attach certain kinds of pain to the syllogisms of cause, to pretend you can source the fabric of the poison coat.

  That’s part of why I loved The Lost Weekend—for its rejection of the idea that you could easily or automatically turn drinking into meaning. It insisted that you couldn’t alw
ays trace the self-destruction back to a tidy psychological myth of origins: It had long since ceased to matter Why. You were a drunk; that’s all there was to it. You drank; period. Jackson’s account suggested that drinking was more mysterious than that, and maybe less noble, a wreckage less fully constituted by the Grand Profundities.

  In “A Drunkard,” a poem left unpublished in her lifetime, Elizabeth Bishop traces the origins of her drinking to the aftermath of a fire she witnessed as a toddler. “The sky was bright red; everything was red,” the speaker remembers, “I was terribly thirsty but mama didn’t hear / me calling her.” Mama was busy giving food and coffee to strangers whose homes had been destroyed in the fire.

  The next morning, sifting through the charred debris from the fire, the little girl picks up a woman’s stocking: “Put that down!” her mother says. This moment of scolding is identified as the seed of a desire that will haunt the girl for years:

  But since that night, that day, that reprimand

  I have suffered from abnormal thirst—

  I swear it’s true—and by the age

  of twenty or twenty-one I had begun

  to drink, & drink—I can’t get enough…

  All this rings true to me: the idea that thirst might rise from an abiding longing for the one who would not come, that hunger becomes constitutional in the shadow of absence or departure. Compulsion might find its roots in reprimand—from a sense of being scolded by the world, or found wanting by it.

  But it’s really the final lines of the poem that interest me most, not the ones that explain but the ones suggesting that any definitive explanation would be futile:

  … as you must have noticed,

  I’m half drunk now…

  And all I’m telling you may be a lie…

  One critic calls this a “half-hearted disclaimer,” but to me it’s the point of the poem—the way it calls out the instability of any thesis statement about need, and recognizes the desire for clear-cut causality as another powerful thirst: The drinking came from my mother, from my mother’s absence, from this moment, from this trauma. Instead, the poem withholds the clarity of that origins myth, suggesting that the drinking (I’m half drunk now) has invented its own domino trail of causes.

  “Why do you drink?” Berryman once asked himself in a note, then wrote: “(Don’t really answer).” But he answered anyway: to “animate boredom… calm down excitement… dull pain.” He listed other reasons:

  Insecure grandiosity self-destructive: I am just as great, and as desperate, as Dylan T., Poe etc etc

  Delusion: “I need it” for my art

  Defiance: Fuck you. I can handle it.

  He didn’t believe in any single reason. He believed in all of them, and also none of them. Don’t really answer. But what else could he do? Returning to his reasons was one of the things he kept doing, in hopes that it would help him stop.

  Gabor Maté, a Vancouver clinician who spent more than a decade working with addicts on skid row, traces every addiction back to childhood trauma—drawing neat boundaries around its thrall like a chalk outline at a crime scene. In Grand Central Winter, Lee Stringer’s memoir about his days as a homeless crack addict living in the subterranean tunnels of New York’s Grand Central Station, Stringer frames the causes of his addiction as a three-act play anchored by the death of his brother. He puts the whole thing in italics: Act I, Act II, Act III. The form allows him to connect his addiction to his grief while still acknowledging the crafted nature of this connection—how it imposes its neat structure on a much messier root system of craving.

  Stories of addiction are full of this insistence that addiction can’t be fully explained. It’s a trope of the genre. “I told him I drank a lot,” Marguerite Duras writes, describing a young man she’d just met, “that I’d been in hospital because of it, and that I didn’t know why I drank so much.” As Jackson put it: The question of why stopped mattering a long time ago. In Junkie, Burroughs anticipates the questions—“Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict?”—but refuses to answer them: “Junk wins by default.” Most addicts, he writes, “did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember.”

  These refusals aren’t statements of objective truth. They’re descriptions of the texture of experience. In resisting definitive explanations, they testify to the way addiction creates its own momentum, its own logic, its own self-sustaining warp speed; the ways it can seem autonomous and untethered, born of itself. These refusals resist the simplicity of syllogism, any neat one-to-one correspondence between trauma and addiction, insisting that the self is always more opaque than we’re prepared to imagine. There is no simple key to turn the lock of why.

  When I posed the question of why to Dr. Kaplin, the psychiatrist and Johns Hopkins professor who had described an addict’s first time going “through the turnstile,” he expressed frustration with the limited psychoanalytic accounts that held a monopoly on the medical establishment’s ideas about addiction for much of the mid-twentieth century: bottle as breast. Dr. Kaplin wasn’t dismissing the importance of childhood, or the enduring desire for affection. He was simply resisting the cookie-cutter simplicity of a single predetermined psychological story line, just as Stringer’s italics questioned the origin story of his addiction even as he offered it.

  When Burroughs refuses to answer the question of Why, he’s also refusing the demands of respectability politics. He won’t give the doctors—the ones who want to dissect him in order to heal him—exactly what they want. Burroughs doesn’t want to be broken into explanations and reassembled into well-being. He wants to stand behind his subtitle: Unredeemed. The syllogisms of cause and effect dangle the prospect of transformation, but he’s not interested in that kind of redemption.

  By the end of my summer in Bolivia, I’d made my way to an island called Isla del Sol, in the middle of Lake Titicaca—where I got drunk each day, alone, by early afternoon. I spent a week in Yumani, a settlement on the south side of the island, where I had a concrete room with a lidless broken toilet, clogged by toilet paper soaked in the urine of strangers. Isla del Sol was quite possibly the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, but its beauty was merciless: The water glittered like shards of glass. The blue sky was so bright it hurt. The dry light left you with chapped skin and sun fever. Llamas humped each other in wooden-fenced pens on the terraced hills.

  After Peter had come down to join me in Sucre, we’d spent a terrible month together. I hadn’t told him about cheating on him, but it seeped into our weeks anyway—through my irritation and the nettles in my voice, my ways of pushing our dynamic toward breakage because I was tired of its tense sedation and distances. I thought of myself as selfish, and this had become a familiar vein of self-deprecation, but the underside of my selfishness was stitched with fear. I’d never thought of myself as someone with a fear of intimacy, because I loved talking about feelings—it seemed I was rarely doing anything else. But there were other kinds of intimacy I was scared of: tension, tedium, familiarity.

  And I was scared of silence, wherever it found us: in the bar where we watched the bartender teach his ten-year-old son how to make sangria with crushed strawberries and red Fanta; or in the dirt-road town called Sipe Sipe, where we hiked up hilly trails to ruins littered with broken Taquiña bottles and looked for shacks marked with the white flags that meant they sold chicha, a type of moonshine made from fermented corn that people had chewed to a pulp in their mouths. At one of the white-flag shacks, an elderly woman dipped two clay bowls into a blue plastic vat maybe four feet high. We drank standing on the dirt. It was the old familiar wash of relief. It didn’t matter if I got it from a vodka tonic in a sconce-lit bar, or a room-temperature bottle of wine on a futon mattress, or a clay bowl on a dirt road, drinking something straight from the inside of a stranger’s mouth. It was the same softening: Okay. Here it is. Here we go.

  At a dusty cantina outside of town, we drank Taquiñas and ate a massive
platter of pique a lo macho—chopped steak, silky disks of chorizo, boiled eggs, and fried potatoes—underneath a pair of empty whiskey bottles hanging on the wall: one dressed in a tiny wedding dress, the other in a tux. We took an overnight bus to Cochabamba, and around three in the morning I got off to pee on the side of the road, in the full glare of the headlights, and then leaned against Peter for the rest of the ride, bleary and tired, grateful for his presence. He seemed safe. His mind glowed bright. I wanted to feel a different way than I did. We watched a circus in a battered little tent on Avenida Ayacucho: dancers in silver bells and silver thongs, a clown in a pink unitard who looked hungover. Lots of people look hungover when you’re hungover.

  Certain parts of Peter began to repel me: his insecurities about our relationship and about himself, his hunger for my reassurance. These parts of him echoed the parts of me that had been hungry for reassurance all my life; that was probably why they disgusted me. But I couldn’t see that then. I could only see that he’d gotten the same lip balm I’d gotten; he hadn’t even been able to choose his own brand.

  This double bind with men wasn’t anything new. It was an enduring pattern: I gave myself utterly to the pursuit of what seemed unattainable, convinced myself I wanted their full devotion, and then got claustrophobic once I got it—restless without the vectoring purpose of pursuit. As Dr. Kaplin said: You keep seeking the first time through the turnstile. It was a pattern that had started with my high school boyfriend, the minivan-driving, kindhearted mushroom eater: I was heartbroken he didn’t want to stay together for college, but once he changed his mind, I immediately started imagining our breakup.