The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  That’s what I told myself then, when of course I was afraid that I needed these things—needed newness and thrill. That’s part of why I imagined he couldn’t live without them.

  When Dave got out of the shower, I stewed in miserable, sullen silence until he finally asked if we should talk. We sat on the steps of our front porch, side by side, staring at the little gazebo in the park across the street.

  “I looked at your phone,” I told him.

  He glanced at me. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “I saw your texts to Destiny.”

  I paused. He said nothing.

  “You texted her that whole poem,” I said. My words sounded plaintive to my ears, pathetic.

  “Why were you checking my phone?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. But I also felt righteous—like he should be apologizing to me. “I shouldn’t have,” I said. “I know. But—”

  “But what?” he said. There was an edge to his voice.

  “But I was right,” I said, starting to cry. “I mean, that there was something happening.”

  “Nothing’s happening,” he said. His calmness was deliberate and sure-footed.

  “When you flirt like that with someone,” I said, “something is happening.”

  “I have the right to friendships,” he said.

  “I promise you,” I said, “she doesn’t think this is just a friendship.”

  “Whatever she thinks, I know where the lines are,” he said. “I haven’t crossed them.”

  “Remember how you texted me?” I asked. “Before we got together?”

  During the weeks before Dave had finally kissed me, our texts had thrilled me—their constant back-and-forth, like tin-can phones stretched between two bedrooms. I could remember getting out of Peter’s bed to check for them.

  “I wasn’t the one in a relationship,” he said, and of course he was right. “Now I’m with you.”

  “Exactly!” I said. “When you’re with someone, you’re not supposed to be this way with other people.”

  “This way?” he said. “What’s that, exactly?”

  His voice was chilled and steely, almost a shield, as if he were tucking himself behind it. The icier he got, the shriller my own voice became. “Flirting like this!” I said. “Texting every day. Making her—”

  “You call it flirting, I call it friendship,” he said. “How do you define flirting, anyway?”

  “You just know it!” I said. “You know it when you’re doing it.”

  “The real issue,” he said, “is why you wanted to read my texts in the first place.”

  I didn’t answer, couldn’t even look at him—glanced down, instead, at the splintery wood of our porch steps beneath us—but we both knew: I was afraid.

  “Watch out,” he said. “Your fear will make the things you fear come true.”

  The fight we had that night was like many of the fights that would follow, circling around certain questions—What counted as flirting?—that became our ways of talking about freedom and fear. “You can just feel it!” I repeated, yelling now, knowing I sounded ridiculous, but thinking, Can’t you? I hurled myself against his refusal to apologize—apologizing myself, for violating his privacy, though my apologies always returned to some but: Didn’t he understand why a woman wouldn’t want her boyfriend texting poems, line by line, to another woman?

  Eventually he said we should try to fall asleep. It was three in the morning. We’d been fighting for hours. I splashed cold water on my face—watermelon-splotchy, swollen from crying—and tried to imagine him looking at this face, degraded by insecurity and need, and loving it anyway, and I couldn’t imagine it at all.

  In bed, Dave fell asleep quickly. Fighting made him tired. But I was wide awake, on high alert from conflict, and hated sensing the stiffness of his body beside mine, the gap between our limbs. Fighting sent a surge of adrenaline through me, when all I really wanted was to retire from consciousness for a while. I went into my office to drink, because I couldn’t sleep, and kept drinking until I could settle into numbness. Things were still ugly, but their ugliness didn’t much bother me.

  This started to become a pattern: drinking alone, in my office, after Dave was asleep. In the morning, I’d check my Sent folder to see if there were emails I’d sent during blackouts. Once I saw I’d written to my sister-in-law:

  Do you ever feel like you are completely outside outside our life? I feel so lonely. does this make sense to you? it probablty doesn’t. it doesn’t make sense to anyone as bad as i am. i want so much for your to understand this place. i love you.

  Whenever I was drunk, the stakes were huge—all those capital-letter feelings. My darkness was the darkest. Outside outside: so true I wanted to say it twice.

  That October, we went to the wedding of one of my best friends, back in New York—held in the garden apartment of her brownstone, rooms full of fashionable people flitting between beet burgers and carrot spears from her husband’s farm-to-table restaurant. The charcuterie and cheese tables were luxuriant, like Dutch still lifes, and Dave went to fill our plates while I sat on the staircase with my friend.

  About twenty minutes later, my friend asked: “Where did Dave go?”

  When we surveyed the room, we saw him in an animated conversation with the woman manning the cheese table, who was laughing at something he’d said. She was beautiful, even in her ridiculous apron-smock, with a messy blond bun.

  “I’d lose my shit if my boyfriend spent twenty minutes talking to another woman like that,” my friend said. “You’re a saint.”

  But I wasn’t a saint. I was humiliated. My gaze kept flicking back to Dave—over and over again, though I tried not to—and I kept taking quick, stubborn gulps of wine. I hated the idea that I’d somehow become the woman whose boyfriend was always flirting with other women. By the time he finally returned, triumphantly presenting me with a plate of cave-aged Gouda and sheep’s-milk Manchego, a switch had flipped in me. I was spoiling for a fight.

  “Let’s go outside,” I said. “We need to talk.”

  We stood on the sidewalk—on a crisp fall night, on a block of brownstones like a movie set—and my wine breath made little puffy clouds in the cold air when I spoke. “Do you know how embarrassing it is for me?” I asked. “The way you flirt?”

  He bristled at the word “flirt”—and his body stiffened. “I don’t want to be policed,” he said.

  I got more insistent, almost frantic: “It’s not just me!” I said, reporting what my friend had said, that it would drive her crazy.

  “This isn’t about her,” he said, “this is about you.”

  Am I being absurd? I thought. Am I totally fucking insane? But I couldn’t get the image of them out of my mind—both laughing, her messy bun, that massive parchment-colored mound of Gouda rising behind them, the whole thing like a meet-cute from a romantic comedy. I could imagine the voice-over: So I was at this wedding with my girlfriend, who was actually pretty drunk…

  “This is my best friend’s wedding!” I said. “I don’t want to spend it on the sidewalk, fighting with you.”

  “It was your idea to come out here,” he said—which was, maddeningly, accurate.

  When we went back into the party, the first thing I spotted was a bar counter covered with orderly rows of brimming wineglasses, big and cold, sweating with beaded moisture. I grabbed one immediately.

  “Are you sure that’s what you need?” Dave asked.

  And yes, I was sure. It was.

  At a party we threw back in Iowa that fall, I got so drunk I had to lock myself in our bedroom and slap myself—hard, across the cheek—to get myself undrunk again. It didn’t work. I sat with my back against the wall, staring at our bed piled with fall coats, and breathed deeply over the hiccups rising under my ribs. I went down to our front porch and found Dave holding court—laughing, animated, gesturing with a three-quarters-full beer he hadn’t bothered to drink—and found myself missing Peter, who
’d seemed irritatingly insecure while we were together but now seemed simply comprehensible, a human full of chinks and needs, while Dave seemed horribly untroubled. He seemed like the human embodiment of not-needing itself. I was very drunk. I wanted to go home, but it was my house.

  Holding a big red Solo cup, full of whiskey to the brim, I walked across the street—to the gazebo in the park—where I sat on the cold stone floor and called my mother. She listened patiently as I told her about Dave’s neglect, how he was probably back there flirting right now with this twenty-two-year-old poet he was friends with. Probably right at this very moment.

  Where was I, exactly? my mother wanted to know. She said I should go home.

  “But my house is full of people,” I told her. She said I could ask them to leave.

  I took another gulp of whiskey—felt it burn, held it down, then took another, tasting the sour tang of righteousness in my throat. My mother clearly didn’t understand the difficulty of my situation, the conspiracy of forces, the immovable obstacles. Everyone was happy all around me.

  The hiccups returned—jolting my whole body, turning my obstacles to slapstick. I told my mom I had to go, hung up, and sat there in the dark, breathing as hard as I could, gulping air. Eventually I crossed the street. As I approached my own house from the darkness of the park, someone on the porch asked where I’d gone. “I had a call,” I said, as if I’d been consulting on a hostile corporate takeover.

  By the next morning, the rest of the night had splintered into patchy blackout: a beeline for the bathroom, crying over the toilet, throwing up or wanting to throw up, voices in the hallway and then no voices in the hallway.

  I told Dave “I’m sorry,” and asked him what had happened the night before.

  “You kept saying, ‘I’m sorry,’” he said. “You said ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’”

  We made coffee and Dave scrambled our eggs like he did, with herbs and cheese and just the right amount of milk. But my face was swollen. My mouth felt crusted with nicotine, like I was gently forking his well-scrambled eggs into an ashtray. Everything beautiful was nothing I deserved. “For shame is its own veil,” Denis Johnson wrote, “and veils the world as much as the face.”

  Although Blueschild Baby is a novel about a heroin addict named George Cain getting clean, George Cain was using heroin the whole time he wrote it. It reads like a book-length reckoning with dependence and rebellion, an attempt to exorcise with fiction what Cain couldn’t purge from his body.

  The novel takes place in Manhattan during the summer of the 1967 Newark riots, evoking New York as an orchestra of noise and need and possibility, all din and overwhelm: projects buzzing with hawkers and flapping curtains and ice cream truck bells; alive at night with dope fiends trying to cop and young couples kissing in doorway shadows; Sam Cooke lilting from a kitchen radio: It’s been too hard living but I’m afraid to die. The novel is a love song to Harlem and also a primal cry of despair, a picaresque of scoring and trying to quit. George seeks out “Sun the Pusher” in his drug den just off Amsterdam and shoots up in the bathroom of a Newark courthouse before meeting his parole officer, walking past the “marks of rebellion” on Springfield Avenue, blackened storefronts and broken glass. He spends the night with his toddler daughter and her white mother in Greenwich Village before running into an old friend named Nandy, taking her to a jazz club and deciding he wants to get clean for her. (His parole officer has also threatened to send him back to prison if he fails a urine test in seventy-two hours.)

  The novel closes with George recalling the first night he shot heroin, when “a strange moon hung in the sky” and he was first swallowed by that “calm, terribly sudden and infinite,” before he renounces it for good. Cain resists respectability politics at every turn—by presenting a character who is smart and full of yearning, but often acts aggressively, even callously—in order to suggest that someone doesn’t need to be blameless to deserve care.

  The arc of Blueschild Baby stages a conflict between various narratives of addiction—addiction as repressive political rhetoric, addiction as social rebellion—but it never forgets addiction as a bodily reality: jangling nerves and dry skin, gaunt bodies and sweat, the sensation of “bones scraping against one another inside.” Over the course of the novel, Cain dramatizes a shift away from his old political justifications for using—as a fuck you to the social order, a way “to live life unhindered” by rebelling against white power structures or the tyrannical demands of racial upward mobility—and ultimately resists the siren call of extolling addiction as social protest. When George sees a crowd of “nodding junkies” on the street, listening to a man who is calling for support for “victims of the Newark rebellion,” he sees them “no longer [as] the chosen driven to destruction by their awareness and frustration, but only lost victims, too weak to fight.”

  If Cain’s novel resists those easy alchemies that might fetishize addiction as rebellion, refusing to ignore its human cost, then his own life thwarts the impulse to narrate self-awareness as salvation. Cain’s lived addiction brought together several driving forces—the allure of the tortured artist spinning darkness into gold, and the stress of being a black man in a country that had cosigned on the notion of his criminality before he was born—but dissecting these motivations in his novel wasn’t enough to liberate him from the physical imperatives of dependence itself.

  When I asked Cain’s ex-wife, Jo Lynne Pool, if she ever tried to get him to stop using, she said simply: “I knew better.”

  Pool was surprised I’d even tracked her down, surprised that anyone still cared about her husband—whose genius had largely fallen in obscurity, as his life dissolved into addiction—but she was glad to talk to me about his troubled brilliance. Pool told me that he started shooting heroin after dropping out of college, operating under the notion, as she put it, that “writers needed conflict and adversity. So he deliberately went out to find some.” After dropping out of Iona College, a Catholic school in New York where he’d been given a basketball scholarship, lauded as a triumph of upward mobility in a way he found suffocating, Cain headed west through Texas, and eventually spent six months in a Mexican jail on marijuana charges. When he got out of jail, Pool said, “he had the makings of a book.”

  By the time Pool first met Cain, in the late sixties, he was already a full-blown addict, though Pool didn’t realize it. She’d come to New York from Texarkana, Texas, to study at Pratt, and she’d never met “a dope fiend, or a heroin addict, or any other kind of addict.” She was immediately drawn to Cain, with his “green snake eyes” and his evident and overwhelming intelligence. He always walked around with two or three composition books tucked under his arm, full of notes for his novel. “He never let them out of his sight,” she said. He even took them up to Harlem whenever he went uptown to buy drugs.

  After Pool and Cain had their first child, it was like he lived two lives. In one life, he was trying to be a more present father. He became a Sunni Muslim and joined a mosque that was like a surrogate family. But he would also disappear for days at a time—go up to Harlem and come back glazed. He’d nod out in the middle of dinner. One time he had a few friends over and while Pool was in the bathroom, his friends took off with half her clothes and armfuls of their baby supplies. Cain had to chase them down the street to get it all back.

  When Blueschild Baby was published, the New York Times called it “the most important work of fiction by an Afro-American since Native Son.” In his review, Addison Gayle Jr. interprets Cain’s recovery story as a narrative of racial self-possession, as he “redeem[s]” himself in the “72 hours of living hell” that constitute his withdrawal. “In that time,” Gayle writes, “George Cain, former addict, emerges phoenix-like from the ashes, as George Cain, black man.” In this interpretation, sobriety—rather than addiction—becomes the way he resists white oppression.

  The publication of Blueschild Baby brought Cain the buzz and affirmation he had been craving—that sense of
arrival. His publisher, McGraw-Hill, threw him a party in a beautiful loft down in SoHo. A few days after getting his first royalty check, he ran into one of his friend’s little brothers on the street and took him to a record store nearby—told him to choose all the records he wanted and Cain would buy them for him. James Baldwin invited himself over for dinner, requesting fried chicken, though he never came. “People assume black women can cook,” Pool told me, “so I thought, ‘I have to figure out how to fry chicken.’” Everyone loved the book; Cain’s mother was only disappointed she couldn’t recommend it to her friends from church. The affirmation of this reception quieted something in Cain, and for a few years, at least, he was using less.

  But by the time he got a temporary appointment at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, on the merits of the book and its success, and moved to Iowa City with Pool and their infant daughter, Cain was restless without easy access to drugs. He started flying back to New York every weekend. When Pool told him they couldn’t afford his commutes, he took a bus to Davenport—about an hour away, right by the Mississippi—and didn’t come back for days. Eventually Pool took a bus there herself, with their baby in tow, and when she asked a cabbie to take her to the junkie part of town, he pulled up to a run-down building where she found George inside and “dragged him out by his ear.”

  But his using kept getting worse. Back in Brooklyn, after his temporary appointment at Iowa was over, Cain kept trying to commit himself to a second novel. He didn’t want to fall into the “one and only” trap to which he thought so many black writers had succumbed. He was using more because his writing wasn’t going well, and his writing wasn’t going well because of all his using. He was juggling a full-time teaching gig at Staten Island Community College and a full-time addiction, an infant son in addition to his young daughter. For Pool, their marriage ended the night she picked up the phone and heard a woman tell her that Cain had gotten her pregnant; he’d told her he lived with his sister.

  Pool left Cain without telling him where she was going—she needed distance—and ended up moving to Houston with their two kids. After years, Cain found them and came out to visit. But he didn’t like it out there. “He said the sky was too open,” Pool told me. “He felt like God could see him.”