The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  I said, “It’s sort of complicated. Don’t worry about it.” I’m sure no one did.

  Yaddo looked like an illustrated fairy tale—a grand mansion with terraces overlooking rolling green lawns, formal parlors upholstered with crimson fabric, a set of glimmering ponds called the “ghost lakes,” a stone ice house where composers made landscapes of sound. With sheer brute force, I was hurling myself at my Sandinista novel. But the writing had no pulse. I was glad I didn’t have Internet access so I couldn’t spend my days checking to see if my novel had somehow miraculously climbed back into the top 100 on the Amazon Alcoholism sublist. Since there was no cell reception in any of the buildings, I had to wander down a dirt road—to a particular bend—until I could hear Dave’s voice through the phone, at which point I usually spent our conversations trying to figure out if he’d seen Destiny, making feeble attempts to sound casual. “Did you hang out with anyone after the reading?” The suspicion was palpable in my voice and I hated it, just as I hated the tightness in his replies.

  Nights were stiff and uncomfortable. While self-possessed performance artists were turning their studios into installation spaces and getting tipsy before our nightly games of pool—a variation called Pig where you had to jump on the table and push the balls with your hands—I was deeply sober, deeply stymied, and deeply worried about deer ticks, terrified of catching Lyme disease. One night I lay in bed while three artists drank and laughed in the living room just outside my door. It sounded like they were laughing right into my ear. I was coiled tight with resentment. It didn’t even sound funny, whatever they were saying, though I couldn’t quite make it out. I was ashamed of my prim, ascetic life without booze. I hadn’t felt this far outside the world of others since junior high, back when I rocked suspenders holding up a floral skirt that twirled above my unshaved legs. I thought of asking the artists to be quiet, but couldn’t stand the thought of breaking up a party I hadn’t been invited to. Isn’t that the girl who doesn’t drink? They’d giggle. We should let her sleep. My own desires were cramped and joyless: I wanted to go to sleep early so I could wake up early and work, or punish my body by running around the ghost lakes in the cool dawn.

  One day I came back from a run and spotted a tick stuck on my thigh. In a panic, I checked the “Tick Safety” pamphlet in my room. Was the tick partially engorged or fully engorged? I didn’t know. It looked like some kind of engorged. It looked like an evil little button, capable of anything. I pulled it out with special tick tweezers, its fierce grip tenting my skin, and took a panicked ride to a local medical clinic. I went on antibiotics that day, which didn’t seem like a compelling thing to talk about at dinner, but I didn’t feel compelling—about ticks or anything else. I was just a chronic hypochondriac who’d been right a very small but unforgettable number of times. The other residents were natural storytellers who carried quivers full of anecdotes, drank good wine at dinner in our oak-paneled dining room, and then split into smaller cliques to drink harder stuff at night.

  By the time I left Yaddo, I was determined to start drinking again. I spent much of the trip home thinking of how I would present this decision to Dave. It was good to stop drinking for a while, I’d say. But I think I’m ready to start. I had to make it persuasive. More than anything, I had to make it sound casual. I couldn’t say it like someone who’d just spent an entire plane ride trying to figure out how to say it. I was nervous but eager. I was sure I had just the right phrasing.

  —

  VIII —

  RETURN

  My first drink back was a Manhattan. It was May. The air was warm. I loved the cold sugared promise of the sweet vermouth gliding down the back of my throat. Dave made it for me in our kitchen, and I was happy to let him take his time. I’d waited seven months for it; I could wait another half hour.

  Dave believed I could drink differently this time around, because I’d told him I could, and I needed his approval because I was ashamed of how desperately I wanted to drink, and how meticulously I’d crafted my excuses for starting again. This was exactly how I pictured normal drinking: a single cocktail with the man you loved, in a kitchen with a toaster and a rickety three-wheeled dishwasher.

  The moment just before that first drink was the last moment I thought: Maybe I don’t need this. Maybe I just want it. Then I drank, and needed it again.

  I pointedly drank only one Manhattan that night. It was miraculous to get a buzz from just one. I told Dave I didn’t want another drink, even though all I wanted was another drink. Like, six other drinks. But I wanted it to look good, this first drink back—controlled. The lie wasn’t just saying I didn’t want another; it was saying it casually, with such calculated weightlessness, when I knew exactly how drunk I wanted to get.

  For the first few months, I tried to follow some of the rules I’d cooked up while daydreaming during Big Book sessions. It was clear to me from the beginning that I’d rather get drunk three nights a week than restrict myself to “a drink or two” every night. Without getting drunk, there was no point to drinking at all. Nights I didn’t drink at all were trophies of restraint—enough of these sober credits in my pocket meant I’d earned a night of total abandon.

  For my birthday that June, Dave took me to a water park in Wisconsin that called itself the biggest water park in America, where we spiraled around the open whirlpool of a funnel slide, its chlorinated hiss and rush, and then played laser tag, and then mini golf, and scored exactly the same, which was surely a signal from the universe—approving of our venture, and of my decision to drink again. We were bandits and brainstormers and coconspirators once more. We stayed at a B&B with sayings carved into decorative lawn stones, and somewhere in the middle of all that I turned twenty-seven. That night I had one margarita. Of course I spent a good chunk of the evening wondering Will we get drunk? Can I get drunk if he doesn’t get drunk? What will he think if he sees me trying to get drunk? But we didn’t get drunk, and we were happy anyway. Things were going to be better this time around, I was sure of it. I would drink like a person who never thought about drinking. On the way back home, we stopped in a little town called Solon and had pork tenderloins so big that their buns looked like little hats perched on top. The world was full of waterslides! Full of giant tenderloins wearing little hats of bread!

  That summer I was doing wedding-cake deliveries for the bakery. Every Saturday, after my regular hours in the kitchen, I delivered three-tiers to barns strung with Christmas lights, their gemstone colors reflected in rows of glimmering mason jars. On these deliveries I thought mainly about two things: Will Dave and I ever get married? And: Will I drop this cake? I became obsessed with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, its constancy, that unending dark bloom in the water: right now, and now, and now. At every moment I thought about the spill, it was happening. At every moment I didn’t think about the spill, it was still happening. Until they finally plugged it up with enough mud and cement: a static kill.

  Now that I’d disavowed the identity of being an alcoholic, I knew I was supposed to drink moderately, but I felt entitled to do just the opposite: My months of abstinence meant I deserved to drink everything. It was like the experiment where kids were rewarded with an extra marshmallow if they could restrain themselves—for a certain length of time—from eating the marshmallow placed directly in front of them. For seven months, I’d been sitting across from the marshmallow. Now I deserved some special reward, double what the other kids had gotten.

  Dave was going to Greece for all of July on a writing fellowship, and I was secretly excited he was leaving because it meant I could drink as much as I wanted, alone in our apartment, with no one watching. A house where no one was home, no one coming back, and all I could drink. What a relief not to drink at bars. Fuck bars. Fuck the glacial pace of someone else’s G&T, letting all the ice melt.

  But I also imagined what the trip would hold for Dave: long late-night conversations with other women, moments they mistook for possibility, moments he’d eventually mistak
e for possibility as well. I’d always feared that my karmic punishment for cheating on Peter would be that I’d get cheated on. It took me years to consider the possibility that maybe my punishment was the fear itself.

  I was irritated that my mother—whom I loved deeply, and loved spending time with—was coming to stay with me for a week, because this would be a week I couldn’t drink as much as I wanted. The night before she arrived, I sat down with two bottles of wine, ready to fortify myself for a week of scripted functionality: I WILL get the best kind of drunk tonight. The last vestiges of syrupy light filtered through our beautiful westward windows and Chardonnay melted me into our orange couch. The gloaming was like wine itself, with a certain thickness and sweetness, getting into my blood and humming through me. Sometimes I pictured booze moving through my veins like the catheter they’d used in my ablation surgery, threaded from my hips to my heart, attempting its miraculous, necessary work.

  My story “The Relapse,” about a woman who didn’t, was published in July, two months after I did. Though I didn’t think of my drinking as a relapse then, more like the correction of a category error: I’d gotten myself wrong. Now I’d figured it out. The recovery phrase going back out had always made me think of an Arctic explorer heading back onto the tundra without a compass. But I no longer believed that recovery phrases applied to me. I’d exited the circuitry of that system, and this was summer—with late sunsets and white-wine light.

  While Dave was in Greece, we sent each other dispatches. He told me about watching the World Cup projected onto the white walls of the old fort on Corfu. I told him about hosting the bakery girls for pesto salad and rosé in our kitchen, about my boss wearing ripped white denim and taking us to a teen vampire romance at the megaplex in Coralville. He told me about memorizing a path through the cobblestone labyrinths to the gyros place, about eating in the warm night with tomato juice dripping down his chin. I told him about playing bingo at the Beef Days festival in Solon. He wrote to say he’d been swimming in the ocean, late at night, and he’d gotten a sea urchin spine stuck in his foot. I wanted to wash his foot and bandage it, and maybe also ask him: Who were you swimming with?

  When my mom saw the wine in my fridge, she said, “You never told me you’d started drinking again,” and I said, “Oh, I thought I had.” I’d practiced the conversation with her so many times in my head, it was as if we’d actually had it. Now, I could see her trying not to say the wrong thing. I hated trying to justify that it was okay for me to drink, since the justification itself already suggested it wasn’t. Stopping and starting again was a messy story. It meant I was either calling my past self a liar for saying I was an alcoholic, or making myself a liar now by saying I wasn’t.

  Part of the tremendous generosity of Lee Stringer’s memoir Grand Central Winter is its willingness to let recovery be messy. You can call Stringer’s story the story of a homeless man getting off the streets, an addict putting down his crack pipe, or a storyteller finding his voice, but it’s certainly no mountaintop vision cleaving the world into before and after. Its opening scene might offer the promise of an easy conversion—Stringer finds a pencil on the floor of his basement boiler room while trying to smoke the last residue from his crack pipe—but the rest of his memoir insists on portraying his recovery in more complicated terms.

  In this first scene, the book suggests itself as the triumphant conclusion of its own narrative arc: crack pipe traded for pencil. But that day he finds the pencil? He still smokes whatever resin he can. Even after he starts writing a regular column for the newspaper Street News, “there were four things [he] did every day. Hustle up money, cop some stuff, beam up, and write.” For Stringer, there was overlap—he was writing and smoking. It was no easy substitution of the former for the latter. He sat at his computer with his mind out the window and his soul “in the pipe.” He remembers the “yeasty anticipation” of wanting it, remembers cream-colored nuggets the size of lima beans and their “caramel-and-ammonia smoke,” remembers the “yellow-orange glow” that “blossoms, wavers, recedes.”

  Even once Stringer finally does get sober, he relapses. There’s the time he gets a craving and goes to see a movie instead of getting high; but also the time he steals five thousand dollars from an elderly woman to fund a three-week crack binge. Stringer even confesses going on binges with his book under contract; maybe because the book is under contract. When one of the counselors at his outpatient program asks if he’d be willing to give up his writing for his recovery, Stringer realizes that he has been “clinging to the idea of finishing Grand Central Winter the way a shipwrecked man clings to a reef.” He observes a continuous ribbon of desire running through his life: not just his longing for the drug, but his longing for writing as its substitute. The rough edges of his recovery story resist the burden of providing a seamless arc: Get addicted. Tell the story. Get better. His book confesses that his story won’t be over, even after it gets told.

  The summer of my relapse, I did much of my drinking on crutches. The month after Dave returned from Greece, a car ran over my right foot, leaving the bruised imprint of tire tracks across my swollen arch. I’d been wearing flip-flops. At the ER, I mainly wondered which painkillers they’d prescribe. At home, in the aftermath, I tried to be as self-sufficient as I could—fetching things for myself, balancing coffee and plates while I crutched—because I hated the idea that I would yet again be asking Dave to care for me. Though of course, part of me wanted that more than anything.

  Whenever I drank on crutches, I felt like a cartoon character. One night I tripped coming down the Foxhead stairs—crutches clattering as my palms braced against the asphalt—and thought of that one-legged magician back in Nicaragua. Back then I’d thought, You should take better care of yourself. Now I was the one hopping along, balancing my crutches against tables so that I’d have a free hand to hold my drink.

  Most mornings, I faced my fictional Sandinistas with puffy eyes and a dry mouth, from the other side of a gauzy curtain. I’d hoped writing could burn off my hangovers—like sunlight burning off fog—but they were stubborn. The novel was still inert, which seemed like little more than a confirmation of my solipsism. Once I tried to write beyond myself, it seemed I had nothing to offer. As Charles Jackson lamented to a friend about his sober attempts to write “outside” himself: “As soon as I am not able to be personal, my writing falls apart.” I would hit the end of a paragraph and stare into the blank space beyond it. I could go anywhere, I’d tell myself, trying to remember what possible had felt like. I’d think of what we had in the fridge: half a bottle of Chardonnay, three PBRs. I’d check the clock. How many hours till dusk?

  It was impossible to do bakery work on crutches and I missed being useful in a simple, basic way. Jamie brought me little Tupperware containers of melted chocolate and cones of parchment paper so I could make cake decorations from home, where I sat on the floor—next to our window-unit air conditioner, because every other part of the apartment was too hot for the chocolate to harden—and sculpted rows of little daisies.

  Meanwhile, I tried to reboot my novel as magical realism, something I’d sworn I’d never do. Who wanted to see a woman in Iowa writing her magical realist account of a Nicaraguan revolution? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes the way an addict projects “consolation, repose, beauty, or energy” onto his substance, what she calls “beauty delusively attributed to the magical element,” and I was doing that in prose and life, looking for gods from the machine—asking drinking to supply my pulse, asking my jungle guerrillas to spot luminous beehives in the trees.

  I spent long chunks of time in my hot apartment trying to tell myself I had the drinking figured out. It had gotten bad because of my depression, but now I was medicated. Or it had gotten bad because of me and Dave, but now we would work better. Or it had been recovery itself, convincing me I was alcoholic with the Möbius strip of its logic: If you don’t think you are an alcoholic, then you probably are one. What bullshit was that? There was no way out
of it. Sure, it felt true that I wanted a drink every fucking night, but maybe I just felt that way because I’d sat through enough meetings where people talked about feeling that way. I’d taken on the identity because it had been a useful way to sort out my sense of self at the time. Now I resented meetings for polluting my relationship to drinking. It was like the joke about two drunks who’d seen The Lost Weekend. When they came staggering out of the movie theater, the first one said, “My God I’ll never take another drink,” and the second replied, “My God I’ll never go to another movie.”

  There was a little voice in me that considered the possibility that perhaps there were people who didn’t spend hours every day trying to decide if their desperate desire to drink had preceded recovery meetings or been created by them. But it irritated me, that voice. I tried not to listen to it.

  The whole project of moderate drinking was maddening. The first time I ever heard the phrase drinking to get drunk, I actually found it humorously tautological. Of course you drank to get drunk. Just like you breathed to get oxygen. Which was part of why moderation was like constant acrobatic contortion.

  After work one night, at a pub called the Sanctuary, the other girls from the bakery were ordering beer—the Sanctuary was known for its beer—so I ordered beer too, instead of something stronger. But I carefully checked the proof for every beer on the menu, so I could order the highest one. “I always go for an ironic name,” I said, explaining why I’d ordered the Delirium Tremens, then added, “I hate beer,” before ordering three more.

  In August, I organized a birthday dinner for Dave at a farmhouse outside town where a French expat had a wood-burning oven in which she charred pizzas to black-blistered perfection: walnut and sage, blue cheese and mushrooms. We ate on her porch while a lightning storm lit up the cornfields, and it was insanely beautiful: that humid night breathing through the screens, crackling fingers of electricity across the sky, hot cheese and crisp dough in our mouths. I crutched across the rough-hewn floorboards, nearly fell headfirst on the way to the bathroom, and wondered: Why do I have to get drunk to find this beautiful?