The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  I woke to a familiar mess of fragments the next morning: bathroom wall, gritty linoleum, cool porcelain of the toilet throat, hallway slanting like a funhouse; me and Dave in the corner of our crowded kitchen; me accusing him of needing praise so badly, my voice dripping with venom; him saying “I think this is the alcohol talking,” as I tried to open my mouth to explain that it wasn’t.

  Part of me still believed that real drinking stories demanded big tragedies: more broken noses and blood on the streets, fiery explosions you could see clearly against the horizon. My drinking wasn’t that. I hadn’t set off a bomb in the middle of my own life. It had just grown small and curdled. I lived with shame like another organ nestled inside me, swollen with banal regrets: remembering the chicken I’d half cooked drunk the night before, picturing the wet pink flesh at the core of each breast and imagining the spores of bacteria growing in our guts; or waking up five minutes before a seven o’clock bakery shift to find my windshield coated with thick ice, then driving to work with my head stuck out the window—glad for the cold wind ventilating my hangover.

  Dave went back home to Boston for Thanksgiving and I stayed to help with the bakery pie rush. While he was gone, I often found myself at the grocery store buying large amounts of alcohol. There was always a reason. When I showed up at my best friend’s house for Thanksgiving in the early afternoon, she was worried there wasn’t enough booze. Could I go out and buy some? Sure, I said. But maybe someone else should drive. I said I’d had a glass of wine while I was cooking. I didn’t say it was a giant plastic soda cup that I’d poured most of the bottle into, saving a bit so that I wouldn’t have drunk “a whole bottle” before noon. Someone else drove. We picked up a thirty-pack of PBRs. I was happy we’d gotten beer because I didn’t even like beer, and this made me feel less alcoholic because if I was really alcoholic I’d only be buying alcohol I was going to drink; this was just alcohol for other people—so they wouldn’t drink the alcohol I’d gotten for myself.

  At the meal, when I was bringing another bottle of wine back to the table, I knocked over my glass and it splintered into my food. Tiny shards of glass sparkled in my stuffing. My true self—clumsy, desperate to be drunker—had shown herself for a moment, like a wild animal peeking out from the underbrush, foolish and fumbling. I got another glass of wine but didn’t bother to replace my turkey.

  When I went to pick up Dave from the airport, I stopped at the recycling dump to drop off all my empties, then drove from one life to another: from the cold, stinking circle of dumpsters—with broken glass underfoot and bottles sliding out of my hands, shattering into their bins—to the warmth of our car, and Dave on the airport curb, scarf-wrapped and red-cheeked from the cold. I loved when we were apart and missed each other, but I knew he’d been missing somebody other than the person I’d become.

  On my last night of drinking, we had Dave’s poetry students over for dinner and I drank steadily in the kitchen, losing track of how many bouillon cubes I’d added to my chicken noodle soup. It ended up saltier than tears. A female student who sometimes texted Dave to see which bar he was drinking at (“Why did you give her your number?” I’d asked him once) sat on our orange couch and recited all of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” from memory. I was swollen with booze and indignation: It’s so totally predictable to memorize “Prufrock”! That’s MY orange couch. I couldn’t wait for his students to leave, but couldn’t kick them out. They left one by one, impossibly slowly. When Dave took the last stragglers down to the front porch to smoke, I thought, Finally! And carried a big plastic cup of whiskey to my office.

  I don’t know how long I was in there before he came in. I remember he showed me an email he’d just gotten from one of his students, who had written him—clearly drunk, after getting home from wherever she’d been drinking after she’d been at our house—to say she was depressed. She needed help. All this is blurry. Months later, this same girl would leave a drunken voice mail on Dave’s phone saying she was in love with him, and wanted to kill herself, and he called 911, because he was afraid she would. That night he just wrote back to her—and to the dean of his department—to say he was worried. I don’t remember if he asked me what he should do, or if he just did it. I remember thinking some people in the world were crying out for help, and other people were giving it—and I wanted to be one of the people giving it, but I was one of the people crying out for it instead.

  I also wanted Dave to realize I was bottoming out, and somehow this other girl had stolen my bottom. I told him the drinking had gotten bad again, and I didn’t know what to do about it; and I was sorry for the way we fought—I didn’t want to fight, I hated fighting—and he sat beside me on the futon and wrapped his arms around me and I buried my face in his chest, which seemed more honest than trying to say anything. I made weird little animal sounds against him and tried not to wipe my nose with his flannel shirt.

  “We’re not having a fight tonight,” he said. “You were wonderful tonight.”

  Sometimes it hurts to remember how selfish I was, how completely cocooned, and how good he was to me.

  The rest of the night went fuzzy. At some point I was stumbling down the hallway. At some point he told me his student was okay. I thought, Great. At some point I stood over my pot of soup on the stove and picked out noodles and clumps of shredded chicken with my fingers, stuffing them into my mouth, then knelt by the toilet for a while. I’m not sure if I threw up or not. I know I went back into my office with more booze. I thought: This has to be the last night. It was just like the other one, the last night I’d already had—holing myself up with a big red cup of whiskey. Except this time I brought the bottle too, just to be safe.

  —

  IX —

  CONFESSION

  The first day of my second sobriety, I crashed my friend’s car into a concrete wall. I’d borrowed his car because ours wasn’t starting and I needed to get to my morning shift at the hospital so that medical students could diagnose my fake appendicitis. It was a frozen December day and I was jumpy and nervous, hungover and jittery: I need to stop. I don’t want to stop. Stopping didn’t work last time. My hands were having trouble staying still. And then I pulled into a parking space and hit the accelerator instead of the brakes and slammed right into the concrete wall. I remember thinking, Oh shit. And then I wondered if I could pretend it hadn’t happened. Do I definitely have to tell him? And yes, I did, because the front bumper was dangling like a loose Band-Aid and one of the headlights had been cracked into a glass web. My immediate impulse was simply to back out and pull into another parking space, as if that would give me a do-over.

  I was trying to do the right thing, after all—get sober again—and today was supposed to be my big watershed, the first day of the rest of my life. Now my reward, for those intentions, was this battered station wagon? I was indignant. If I was going to stop drinking, I was supposed to discover a spectacular new version of myself, or at least recover the presence of mind not to accelerate into a concrete wall. But sobriety didn’t work like that. It works like this: You go to work. You call your friend. You say, I’m sorry I crashed your car into a wall. You say you’ll fix it. Then you do.

  “Why do you deserve another chance?” one drug-court judge asked his defendant, an addict trying to explain his latest relapse.

  “There’s hope,” said the defendant.

  “What makes you think you have hope now?”

  The defendant said he was getting clean for his kids. He had to give a reason it was different this time.

  “How is life different?”

  “I have better coping skills and listen more.”

  “Do you still know everything?”

  “No. I’m open-minded now.”

  “Humble?” the judge asked. “Willing to listen now?”

  The defendant laughed and shook his head. “It’s been a personal challenge,” the defendant admitted. “I thought I knew everything.”

  It’s an uncomfortable ritual
: the addict asked to perform his humility, expected to regard the judge as both therapist and punisher. It’s just one of many ways that drug courts—the American legal system’s main concession to the possibility that there might be something to do with addicts besides locking them up—still live imperfectly inside their ideals, one of the ways they still treat addiction as a form of failure.

  In drug court, the judge and defendant are meant to collaboratively construct the person the defendant is supposed to become—not just someone recovering but someone who sincerely desires this recovery. But sociologists find that drug courts are full of “tongue lashings” from judges: “I’m tired of your excuses!” “I’m through with you!” Some defendants are treated as “salvageable” while others are deemed “irremediably deficient.”

  Part of proving that you’re truly ready to recover—in drug court, in a meeting, in a memoir—involves admitting that you don’t know if you can recover at all. Part of getting into the right narrative involves admitting you can’t see the end of it. Like the Narco Farm reports: Prognosis guarded. In Lady Sings the Blues, Billie Holiday warns her readers against believing her own tentative happy ending: “There isn’t a soul on this earth who can say for sure that their fight with dope is over until they’re dead.”

  In the afterword to Beautiful Boy, a memoir about his son Nic’s recovery from meth addiction, journalist David Sheff confesses that Nic relapsed again after the book was published. “Yes, Nic relapsed,” he writes. “Sometimes I tire of the convoluted, messy truth.” Sheff’s afterword doesn’t just disrupt the provisional happy ending we’ve just read, it disrupts the possibility of any certain ending. This is a staple of the addiction memoir genre: the afterword, the epilogue, the “author’s note” confessing that since first publication, things have not gone entirely as hoped. But confessing uncertainty outright—saying no soul on earth can say for sure—isn’t cynicism. It offers an honest hope that doesn’t depend on something impossible: knowing the end of the story before it comes. It’s more ragged than Bill Wilson’s mountaintop vision, and it’s a more frustrating story to tell—just as so many stories I heard at meetings, over the years, involved countless cycles and repetitions. That’s how humility gets built into hope. Old-timers sober for forty years say, “With any luck I’ll stay sober till the end of one more day.”

  When I came back to my first meeting, I said: “When I started drinking again, I promised myself I’d never come back to a meeting. Now I’m here.”

  Iowa City is a small town. When I returned to meetings, I knew I’d see the same people. It made me anxious. They would remember how I’d walked in a year earlier, full of desperation and pathos, and then quit their solution. Now I was back: my sadness stale, my case compromised. It made me picture Civil War deserters branded with a D at the hip, or forced to wear wooden signs proclaiming their cowardice.

  But everyone was happy to see me. People said: “Glad you’re back.” Some said: “It was like that for me, too.” A woman I’d known the first time around knelt on the floor next to my chair and said, “You never have to drink again,” and I thought, Never HAVE to? Drinking was all I wanted to do. I wanted to do it right then.

  Years later I looked back and saw the truth of what she’d said: that I’d taken one step away from that tight crawl space full of endless scheming and apologizing, deciding and redeciding. But that first night back, the trap was still the thing I desired most. It made me anxious that the first thing I’d heard didn’t ring true at all. Had it been a ridiculous mistake to come back? But I was crying, I was a wreck, and that woman had seen that whatever I was in the middle of, I was desperate for relief from it.

  Relief came from sitting still and listening. That night, a man talked about getting drunk for the first time when he was twelve, babysitting his little sisters one night, how he broke into his parents’ liquor stash, then ate a whole bag of licorice and woke up in a puddle of his own black vomit. He talked about how his diabetic wife had died of a blood infection six weeks after he left her. She’d stepped on a piece of glass, drunk—had to get her toes amputated, and then her foot. Then she died. That really sent him off. Survivor’s guilt, he said. He also had that from working in the Marriott World Trade Center on 9/11. After he made it home that day, he turned on the news and drank a whole bottle of wine—then checked how many bottles he had left, in case the world was ending.

  Hearing his voice in that church basement, above the scrape of metal chair legs across linoleum and the percolations of the coffeemaker, I listened to his story as a writer—for its themes and climax—but I mainly heard it another way: as a woman who still wanted to drink more than she wanted to do anything else.

  During the zenith of his involvement in AA, during the mid-1950s, Charles Jackson started to believe that recovery was inspiring him to write in a new way. He had a new angle on the book he was writing, an approach committed to simplicity and honesty, and wrote to one friend that his “stopping-drinking and… enormous interest in AA” had “a lot to do with this new attitude.” At that point, Jackson was working on the book he imagined would become his magnum opus: an epic called What Happened, a “novel of affirmation and acceptance of life” that would tell the story of his old antihero, Don Birnam, once he’d left all his lost weekends behind him.

  The epic’s first installment, titled Farther and Wilder, would begin with a two-hundred-page overture constructed around the central event of a massive family reunion. Don “would be host to the gathering, they should come to him and be his guests, and he would not only take care of them all but be able to take care of them all.” Jackson wanted to write a different Don than the one the world knew from The Lost Weekend. This Don would be stable and affluent, not only taking care of his family but able to take care of them. The syntax is poignant in its repetition.

  Jackson had been stymied by the book for years—his biographer Blake Bailey has observed that Jackson was a master of “working on every conceivable thing but [this] novel”—but in the months after Jackson got involved in AA in 1953, he was finally able to generate more than two hundred pages. As he wrote to a friend:

  it’s far & away the best thing I’ve done, simpler, more honest, and, for the first time, out of myself—that is, not self-tortured or -absorbed or -eviscerated. No, it’s about people—life, if I may say so.… My stopping-drinking and my enormous interest in AA, if you’ll pardon the expression, have a lot to do with this new attitude—well, everything to do with it, I think.

  The novel was anchored in the ordinary texture of a sober alcoholic’s daily experience. “I can put it best,” Jackson told his editor, Roger Straus, “by saying the story happens, is happening—taking place, like daily living—on every page.” He wanted to write a novel that humbled its content—by taking up the topic of ordinary people and ordinary living—as well as its style, by resisting the siren call of virtuosic performance. These were both ways of trying to write away from his ego. In another letter to Straus, Jackson described his approach: “It is really wonderful, simple, plain, human, life itself—nothing in the dazzling intellectual class… but unless you are James Joyce, the ‘relaxed’ novel is good enough.”

  Jackson wanted to believe his novel could be wondrous in its attention to ordinary human life. But he was also worried. You can hear the doubt seeping into his justifications. Although he argued that the novel “can do just about what it pleases,” and announced, “I please to make it plain, like everyday people,” his underlined “I” suggested a fragile sense of his own prerogative. It was as if his social self-consciousness about his AA fellows (who were, as his wife said, “not very bright or interesting or anything”) had its corollary in his anxiety about whether this new style would seem ambitious or intellectual enough. At times, he openly confessed his anxiety that this approach of “life unfolding moment by moment” could seem “careless and rambling,” or just marked by a “total lack of originality”—the very lack of originality that AA was teaching him to embr
ace. Jackson’s conflicted attitude toward the project had everything to do with the split he perceived between the spheres of literature and recovery. How could he write a novel that would satisfy the demands of both? He feared the judgment of a shrewish literati that wasn’t much like the crowd at his AA meetings, people whose ethos of fellowship had asked him to imagine himself into their “everyday” lives and away from his own.

  If Jackson had gotten drunk because he couldn’t get outside himself, as he would tell AA crowds, then getting out of himself in the novel translated this newfound sense of sober purpose into prose. As he wrote to one friend, he wanted “all of it outside of myself—outside!” It was a curious claim for Jackson to make, that his project—another semi-autobiographical novel—was somehow leaving his own life behind. The AA ethos was key to these paradoxical ambitions: the belief that every person was simply a vehicle for delivering a story, and the faith that illuminating your own life was a way to be of service beyond yourself.

  That first winter of my second sobriety, my sponsor gave me a chart to fill out for my Fourth Step, which involved making an inventory of all my resentments.

  “Just that?” I joked. “How long do you have?”

  She smiled patiently and said: “Trust me, I’ve seen worse.”

  My sponsor—Stacy—was a funny, generous woman who’d gotten sober before she was legal. She was nothing like me, except that neither of us had ever wanted to drink any other way besides a deep dive into drunk. She was matter-of-fact about her own experiences, and listened patiently to my rambling, comprehensive monologues, nodding but not particularly impressed, often distilling them to their core urgencies: So you were afraid of being left? Her distillations weren’t reductions. They captured something it was useful for me to see starkly, without the webbing of so much language. Every time I thanked her profusely for taking the time to meet with me, she told me the same thing: “This keeps me sober, too.”