The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  Clarence Cooper’s novel about his time at Lexington, The Farm, includes a scene in which his narrator (also named Clarence) refuses to play along with its scripts of rehabilitation. When the doctor asks how he feels, Clarence says, “Not very much,” and when the doctor tries to nudge him back toward the right line—“You mean Not Very Well”—Clarence insists: “I mean not very much.”

  Some addicts hated the Narco Farm’s hypocrisy, while others craved the cure it promised. Some felt both: the craving and the betrayal. Even if there was something false about the Narco Farm’s promises, there was nothing false about the desperation of those who craved the rehabilitation it promised: If theres any way in the world to be cured. I am sure suffering in this place.

  In its institutional contradictions, its categorical confusion, and even its architecture, the Narco Farm manifested a more legible version of the same cognitive dissonance that defined America’s relationship to addiction. The intake form of every “vol” mapped out an arrangement of intangibles, a patient who had to present himself as seeking rearrangement:

  Name: Robert Burnes

  Place of Birth: Hallettsville, Texas.

  Personal Description: Age 47, Build slender. Green eyes, neat dresser.

  Means of livelihood: Salesman.

  Reason for addiction: To avoid monotony of living.

  It was autumn in the corn belt and I was thinking about booze all the time. I woke up trying to figure out if it would be an easy night to get drunk or a hard night to get drunk: Was there a party? Was I seeing a friend? Was it a friend who liked to drink? At six in the morning, I got in the shower and thought about relief. At six forty-five, I put on my apron in the bakery bathroom and thought about relief. At seven-fifteen, I flattened cookie dough—ran it through the sheeter and back again, back again, back again—and thought about relief. At eight, I punched out squirrels and thought about relief. At nine, I frosted the same squirrels—with a brown swirl on their tails, and white whiskers—and thought about relief. At noon I ate a sandwich and thought about relief. At six in the evening, while I mopped the floor, I could almost taste it. The day was a tight skin that only booze could help me wriggle my way out of.

  Nights out turned into endless calculations: How many glasses of wine has each person at this table had? What’s the most of anyone? How much can I take, of what’s left, without taking too much? How many people can I pour for, and how much can I pour for them, and still have enough left to pour for myself? How long until the waiter comes back and how likely is it someone else will ask him for another bottle?

  A few months after our move to Iowa, Dave showed me a poem he’d put up for workshop. My stomach thrilled at the dedication, for Leslie, then knotted with shame at how it began: “Last night I spoke in anecdotes. Other people / were parking meters ticking quietly with vague / smiles, while you drank alone behind the house.” I couldn’t even pay attention to how the poem continued—with the speaker putting chipotle pepper in the French-toast batter, or breezing through a video store to pick up the cowboy flick his lover wanted—or how it ended, with an invitation: “Hey partner, whatever story you’re about to tell, I’ve never heard it before. My umbrella / is small, and cheap, and I swear by it.”

  To me, the poem seemed to be about two people who were in love but also lonely—disconnected, even if they were struggling to be otherwise. Dave told me he’d meant it as an affirmation of our relationship, and meant the ending to suggest he would love me even if he’d heard all my stories before; that he would share his umbrella, even if it was small and cheap. But shame veils the world as much as the face, and I could see only what I was ashamed of: drinking alone behind the house.

  Every time I was talking to someone then about anything that wasn’t drinking, I felt like I was lying. But I was overwhelmed by preemptive grief whenever I tried to imagine life as a procession of sober nights—blank, bland, unrelenting: Dave and me sitting at our kitchen table, drinking fucking tea, trying to think of things to talk about.

  One night back in New Haven, a few months into our relationship, I’d been in a terrible mood after we’d come from a party: drunk and insecure, lashing out at Dave, sitting on my futon with my legs clasped to my chest. “It’s like underneath all my efforts to perform,” I told Dave, “if I let them all drop—there’s nothing there.”

  That night, he put his arms around my legs and said: “I want to get inside your head and fight that way of thinking until one of us dies.”

  In Iowa, I kept asking him for more intertwining of our lives—landing on that word, “intertwining,” to describe whatever sense of connection we lacked—but this request was driven as much by fear as it was by desire: the fear of being left, or deemed insufficient. And in truth, another part of me had stopped wanting intertwining entirely, had started to prefer the nights we spent apart. If Dave came home late, I could drink alone; or if he was asleep when I got home, then I could keep drinking on my own, without having to explain why I was so drunk or why I wanted to keep getting drunker. Drinking was easiest in the room we called my office, where he couldn’t walk in without at least a knock. I loved Dave, more than I’d ever loved anyone. I just wanted him on one side of the door, and me with my whiskey on the other.

  That autumn was a series of lunges from one unremarkable drunk night to the next. The air was crisp. The wind rustled the brittle yellow leaves and layered them into patchwork quilts across the grass. I was sick with shame. Each morning I showed up to work at seven with a puffy face and pulled my uniform out of a locker, punched three hundred leaves from a thin blanket of cookie dough, and restocked giant bags of sugar from the basement. Sometimes these trips to the basement were convenient opportunities to cry. Sometimes Jamie, my boss, saw the look on my face and said, “What do you need?” and I told her I needed to dip two hundred ghosts into melted white chocolate and not say anything to anyone.

  My first fall at the workshop, five years earlier, still glowed in memory: smoking cloves on a wooden porch, wearing thin jackets with fur trim and imagining my nights unfolding as a row of sparkling question marks, tingling with all the drama crackling through the chilly air around me: gossip, talk of so-and-so’s line breaks, talk of fellowships, the gazes of men. All of that seemed stupid and perfect, looking back.

  Drinking was no longer electric. It was musty routine, little more than a claustrophobic shell game: Will there be a fight at the end of this day or not? I kept drinking wine until my teeth turned red; kept drinking whiskey until my throat flamed; kept crouching in bathrooms with the hiccups, my vision blurred liquid, my back leaned against cool wallpaper, knees tucked into my chest, thinking, When will it stop?

  The final night was just the last ounce of pressure on something already broken. I came home from a bar—already drunk, but looking to ride the buzz even further, to run it straight into the ground—and Dave was asleep. I was relieved because I didn’t have to summon myself for him. I just wanted to keep feeling this righteous sadness at what I’d become, and I wanted to keep feeling it alone. So I filled a big red cup with straight whiskey, maybe eight shots, and took it into my office.

  After that, there are patches of time I don’t remember. I remember panicking when I heard him knocking on the door. I remember putting the cup behind the futon, where he couldn’t see it. But it was clear I was drunk, sitting on this futon with my arms wrapped around my knees. I couldn’t hide what I was doing, and I was too tired to try. He asked me what was wrong, and instead of trying to explain, I just picked up the cup from behind the futon. It felt so good to show him it was there.

  —

  VI —

  SURRENDER

  The night of my first meeting, I drove across the river to an address near the hospital, crying all the way across the Burlington Street bridge, tears streaking the streetlamps into bright white rain. It was almost Halloween: cobwebs on porches, hanging ghosts made from stuffed sheets, jack-o’-lanterns with their crooked grins. Being drunk was like having a
candle lit inside you. I already missed it.

  The first two times I’d stopped drinking, I hadn’t gone to meetings, because it seemed like an irrevocable threshold. Some part of me had known I would drink again, and I hadn’t wanted voices from meetings chiding me. But this time I wanted to cross a line; to make it harder to go back. It was like taking out an insurance policy against the version of myself—days from now, weeks from now, months from now—who would miss the drinking so much she’d say: I want to try again.

  I wasn’t quitting because I wanted to quit. I had woken up that morning, just like every other morning, wanting to drink more than I wanted to do anything else. But quitting seemed like the only way I would ever arrive at a life where drinking wasn’t the thing I wanted to do most when I woke up. When I imagined a meeting, I pictured grizzled men in a church basement talking about their DTs and their time in detox wards, gripping their Styrofoam cups with trembling hands. I pictured what I’d seen on television—slow claps and nodding heads, earnest mmm-hmms. But I didn’t know what else to try.

  When I reached the gravel parking lot of the address I’d copied down, it was just a clapboard house, not a church. But the lights were on. For ten minutes I sat in my car without killing the engine, heat blasting, wiping my snotty nose with the back of my wrist, jamming my fisted hands into my eyes to make them stop crying. I was searching for a story I could tell myself that would take me back home: Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow, maybe I don’t have to be here, maybe I can do this on my own, maybe I don’t have to do it at all.

  The meeting itself—once I willed myself out of the car, into the cold, and through the lit doorway—was just a bunch of strangers gathered around a huge wooden table, past a kitchen tracked with footprints, old linoleum curling upward at the edges of the room. People smiled like they were glad to see me, almost like they’d been expecting me to come. A sheet cake on the table was frosted with muted sunset tones. A man named Bug was celebrating an unthinkable amount of time without booze. I tucked myself quietly in a corner. I wasn’t sure what to say but my name. Which, as it turns out, was enough.

  Bug talked about staying in his apartment for forty days straight—without leaving, without going anywhere, like Christ in the desert of a low-rent Iowa condo—and getting big handles of vodka delivered to his door. I thought: I never got that bad. And then: Vodka delivery actually sounds pretty great. When Bug described how he’d gotten there—starting with the ritual of a vodka tonic with the six o’clock news, his whole day built around it—I thought, Yep. When I got a white chip to mark that I was in my first twenty-four hours of sobriety, it summoned those shacks marked by white flags down in Bolivia: the giddy anticipation of knowing what they sold. Imagining the rest of my life without that relief made me sick to my stomach.

  But in that room I felt a different relief, just an inkling: the eerie immediacy of hearing myself spoken out loud. These people didn’t know anything about me, but they knew one part of me—the part that thought about drinking all day, every day—better than anyone else. While I’d been outside telling myself that I didn’t have to be here, maybe I could do this on my own, maybe I didn’t have to do it at all, someone inside might have been saying, I remember when I tried to tell myself: Maybe I don’t have to be here, maybe I can do this on my own, maybe I don’t have to do it at all.

  No matter how long you sit in the car, somebody is waiting in that wooden building. Maybe he will tell you through his silver mustache, Your disease is patient, but so are we. Maybe he will look like a farmer, or an ad exec with a sharply creased suit; or maybe she’ll look like the annoying sorority girl who lives down the block, or a tired supermarket clerk with bitten fingernails. Maybe he’s called Bug, or maybe he has a name you can’t pronounce. Maybe he likes that sunset cake or maybe he can’t stand it. Maybe he’s just another old-timer you confuse with all the other old-timers, except for the moment when he opens his mouth and says something that gets you absolutely right.

  That first winter, sobriety was the smell of oranges and wood smoke. It was the rabid, dangerous glare of sunlight on snow, and the warmth of car vents. It was insomnia. It was a woman at a meeting telling me she’d gotten custody of her son but they were still living in her van, and me standing there, hurting for her, grateful for the common currency of a phrase like Take it one day at a time, which seemed stupid until it didn’t. Sobriety was brittle and uncomfortable, and it was also the only thing I hadn’t tried for the long haul, so I was trying it. It stripped the world to a series of hours I had to get through. It made me raw. My nerves were open. Radio commercials made me cry.

  I’ll always associate sobriety with a quality of light that I’ve only ever seen in the broad winter horizons of Iowa: hard, expansive, exposing. It came from huge and frozen skies, their dwarfing blue, and glinted off snow mounds the size of bedrooms. I was nothing but naked in it—a brightness so clean and uncluttered it hurt.

  In those early months, I was grateful for the structure of my bakery work. Its regularity offered relief. It wasn’t supposed to be pleasurable, it just needed to happen. Every morning, no matter how I felt, there was a production list stuck to the cooler with my name on it. I was so lost in my head most of the time, so agitated and elegiac without booze, that just doing something—frosting an acorn, or a hundred—gave me a way out, for a moment, standing in my apron and sending the dough along the sheeter belt, back and forth, thinner and thinner, punching out shapes that strangers might enjoy.

  On my days off from the bakery, I went to a second job, at the hospital, where I worked as a medical actor—play-acting various ailments for medical students to diagnose. I envied the actors playing DUI car-crash victims, who got to splash themselves with gin like it was cologne, when all I got was fake appendicitis.

  On the days I had off both jobs, I tried to write and usually couldn’t. So I went on long drives through the cornfields, or past the ugly strip malls across the river—a self-imposed exile. I’d gotten sick of how melodramatic I was when I was drunk, but now sobriety seemed to come with melodrama of its own: I was a martyr. For what larger cause, I wasn’t sure. My breath curled into a sky so cold it felt like an insult. In those days I took everything personally, even the weather.

  Dave was glad I’d started going to meetings. This was the third time I’d told him I had to give up drinking, and twice now he’d seen me start drinking again. He could see that my drinking carried me to terrible places, though it was hard to explain to him what powerless felt like, that word meetings had given me—hard to bring him inside its obliterating constancy.

  I tried to charge sobriety with energy. For Halloween, a week after I stopped drinking, I made a graveyard cake with chocolate pudding and crumbled Oreo soil and cookie tombstones and gummy worms feeding on the graves. But all of it felt dull and dry, like getting kissed by a pair of chapped lips. When Dave and I went to a costume party dressed as vampires, I repurposed my yearly Girl Scout costume with badges in coffin making and blood mixology. But I seethed with resentment the whole time, pulling a Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi from my purse, embarrassed to expose it, and watched Dave across the room, enmeshed in conversation with Destiny or just about to be enmeshed in conversation with Destiny. To me, it seemed she was always lurking just outside the frame, her body a vessel for ordinary fears—about getting left, or fallen out of love with—that didn’t have much to do with her.

  With Dave, I tried to attach my vast desire to particular requests: nights together at home, texting more, coordinating plans, not spending parties apart or losing each other to the room. These requests seemed trivial as I made them, grasping at tallies or logistics, but they were the only ways I knew how to ask him to make me feel less alone now that I’d lost the thing that had made consciousness seem possible. (“Need you with me for three days, need you every minute,” George tells Nandy when he’s getting clean, “can’t be out of sight for any time cause I’m not strong enough without you.”) My requests were just scratching the sur
face of what I really wanted, anyway—a guarantee that Dave would never stop loving me. A promise we would never end.

  Three or four days a week, I went to a noon meeting full of bikers and housewives, businessmen on lunch breaks, a few farmers. Participating was called “sharing” or “qualifying.” The verb itself, “qualify,” made me anxious. Had my drinking been bad enough? They called speaking “earning your seat,” but they also said that all you had to do to earn your seat was to believe you needed it.

  Meetings worked all kinds of different ways. Some had a speaker who gave her story, and then other people shared in response. Others started with everyone taking turns reading paragraphs of an alcoholic’s story from the Big Book, or with someone choosing a topic: Shame. Not forgetting the past. Anger. Changing habits. I began to realize why it was important to have a script, a set of motions you followed: First we’ll say this invocation. Then we’ll read from this book. Then we’ll raise hands. It meant you didn’t have to build the rituals of fellowship from scratch. You lived in the caves and hollows of what had worked before. You weren’t responsible for what got said, because you were all parts of a machine bigger than any one of you, and older than anyone’s sobriety. Clichés were the dialect of that machine, its ancient tongue: Feelings aren’t facts. Sometimes the solution has nothing to do with the problem. Maybe stopping drinking didn’t have to do with introspection but paying attention to everything else.