The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  The place was right on the shores of Seneca Creek, just off the Potomac and the C&O Towpath. In the twenties, it had been an old motel where people from the city stayed for the weekend to catch sunfish and bass. By the late sixties, weekend fishing had long since dropped off and the building was falling apart—soft wood, soggy mattresses, everything grimy. But these two sober counselors saw possibility in junk: They had twenty-five filthy beds. They knew a shrink who would volunteer. All they needed was cash.

  That’s where Luther came in. His money helped them lease the building and get it fixed up. Sawyer filled the place with furniture from a secondhand shop he owned. Once it was up and running, Luther was a regular visitor. He would sit at the kitchen table for hours, almost always in silence, chain-smoking his cigarettes. People sat with him, telling him their stories, and he listened quietly, a silent chimney of trailing smoke. People swore they couldn’t have stayed sober without him.

  When it first opened, Seneca charged six hundred dollars for a twenty-eight-day stay. The manager, a former Marine drill sergeant turned carpet cleaner named Craig, made exceptions for guests who couldn’t pay the full amount. He took one guy’s junked old pickup truck in exchange for a month. He let a prostitute barter some of her jewelry. There were bills he never collected. Whenever a new resident came in—bloated and sick, throwing up or soiling himself—Craig gave a hard time to anyone who didn’t pitch in to take care of the newcomer. He said, “We all have to be on the vomit line.”

  This was 1971, the same year Bill Wilson died and Nixon launched his War on Drugs. It was a year of cognitive dissonance. Addiction was the enemy, but it also needed therapy. When Nixon called for the “reclamation” of the addict, he made him a victim and a sinner at once.

  At Seneca, guests did chores every day: painting the lawn furniture, emptying ashtrays, managing the rowboats the house rented for extra income. Craig gave people the duties he knew they hated—cleaning toilets or washing dishes—because he thought it was good for them. The house had its own septic tank and the toilets were temperamental. If you plugged in the toaster at the same time as the coffeemaker, it was anyone’s guess. When the power went out, meetings happened by candlelight.

  The place was a firetrap. Patients weren’t supposed to smoke upstairs, in the maze of old corridors and attic rooms, but of course they did. The furniture Sawyer donated was frayed at the seams and the chairs sagged from years of anonymous bodies. The couches had to get replaced every time the creek flooded the first floor. Meals were basic: cheeseburgers and quesadillas served at tables covered in oilcloth. The walls were cluttered with posters: WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND IT IS US. Old Johnny Mathis records played on the stereo: Look at me, I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree. There were meetings in the basement, which had been a pub back when the place was a fishing hostel. Old guests showed up occasionally, but turned around at their first glimpse of the Serenity Prayer.

  Even though everyone had to go through detox before they were admitted, people still arrived bruised and dazed. The first house nurse was a patient who started working on Day 29 instead of going home, because she had no home to go back to. At first the staff mainly consisted of volunteers who worked for fifty bucks a month, if they got anything at all. It was hard raising money for alcoholism back then. People didn’t see it as something you should raise money for. Sawyer put it like this: “You don’t ever go into a convenience store and see a big jar there that says, ‘Donate to the clap fund.’”

  Seneca residents were often assigned contracts. Sometimes these were phrases written on index cards they were required to read aloud at meals: My “tough guy” mask is just a front for my deep fear. I have to trust you if I am going to get well. God doesn’t make junk, and I AM SOMEBODY. But there were other kinds of contracts, all specifically tailored: Residents who didn’t let others speak had to stay silent for forty-eight hours. Residents who had trouble giving or receiving affection had to spend a week wearing T-shirts saying I AM HUGGABLE or OFFICIAL HUGGER.

  The “Get Grubby” contract was for people who focused too much on how they looked. It meant they had to wear rumpled clothes for a week, or stop shaving or wearing makeup. This contract had started with a surgeon who wore only three-piece suits and got a contract saying he had to wear jeans. He didn’t have any, so they got him sweatpants. The contract was meant to take away the things he thought made him worthy, to convince him he was okay without them. The “Fetch Me” contract was for patients who compulsively devoted themselves to taking care of others. It meant they had to ask someone to do something for them at every meal. People who were always late had to spend a week waking everyone up at seven in the morning. They had to be first in line at every meal, and no one got any food until they showed up.

  Patients who were always serious had to carry around stuffed animals and make them speak. Patients who hated themselves had to look into a mirror and figure out what they liked. Tough guys had to read The Velveteen Rabbit aloud. Some of them cried when they read the words of the Skin Horse, praising the shabbiest stuffed animals: “Once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” When you wanted resonance, it was everywhere. The Toys that became Real were the ones that looked most broken.

  At Seneca, they knew that having fun without booze was something you had to learn how to do, like developing a muscle you’d never used. On Monte Carlo night, guests made bets with “Senecash” and sipped lemonade at the blackjack table. In summer, there was an ice cream truck; and in fall, guests picked out jack-o’-lanterns at the local pumpkin patch.

  Some patients held funeral services for their addictions, burying bottles in the backyard—and later, once addicts started coming, syringes too. But sometimes the old thirst rose up. The house cook, an Irishman with a thick brogue who made eggs and waffles for breakfast, relapsed on a trip to visit his sister in California. Back at the house, trying to go cold turkey, he went into DTs and had to be driven away by ambulance. Lips Lackowitz—sober front man of the band Tough Luck, self-taught on the harmonica—came out to Seneca House to perform and relapsed a short while later, after fifteen years clean.

  But Seneca House saw only three deaths during the twenty years it was open, all suicides: two in the building and one right outside of it, when a former patient showed up drunk and drowned herself in the creek. A priest was found in his room one Sunday morning with a dry-cleaning bag over his head, and a shrink stabbed himself with a dinner knife. Another patient came into the hallway and saw it sticking out of his chest. After he died, the house mutt—named Molly—went to every single room, offering whatever comfort she could.

  Every spring the creek swelled with rain and snowmelt, but in the early days of Seneca, once-in-a-century floods came twice in two years. When Hurricane Agnes flooded the whole house, everyone had to move to a motel nearby. There was a bar in the lobby, but no one drank, which was a triumph. During bad storms, when the creek flooded Riley’s Lock Road, someone had to take the rowboat out to the main road to pick up new residents. “You came here to dry out, did you?” they’d joke. “Well, get in the boat.” It’s easy to imagine how many times that joke got rolled out, washed off, and used again. During the spring floods of 1984, an Australian named Raquel was the one who took out the rowboat to pick up the new residents. She loved the adrenaline rush, a boozeless thrill.

  When Raquel first arrived at Seneca House, she was so nervous she was actually shaking—in a way she hadn’t since she was a kid, right before she was about to get hit. What was she afraid of now? She was afraid that if she opened her mouth, she’d start screaming; and afraid that if she started screaming, she wouldn’t be able to stop. Instead she opened her mouth and started talking. Craig said if something haunted you, you should talk about it three times: The first time would be almost unbearable, and the second time would still be pretty bad, but by the third time you’d finally be able to say it without breaking down entirely.

  Simple, plain, human: The story
of Seneca was the story of twenty years of cheeseburgers and vomit lines, meetings that felt like salvation and meetings that felt like dental drills; twenty years of popsicles from the general store down the creek and forbidden sex in the bushes and thighs covered in angry little red-ant bites; twenty years of lemonade at barbecues, and women wondering how they’d fuck their husbands sober, men wondering how they’d go back home and face everyone they’d disappointed, wondering how their roommates would go back home and face everyone they’d disappointed—twenty years of starting to believe it might be possible.

  More than four thousand people came through Seneca over the course of two decades. They weren’t famous. Their drinking wasn’t famous. They hadn’t turned their pain into dream songs or best-selling novels. They’d just arrived craving relief: a social worker named Gwen, who drank room-temperature vodka and Kool-Aid while hosting her son’s Boy Scout troop; a journalist named Shirley who showed up after hurling all her mother-in-law’s crystal against her dining room walls; a crack addict named Marcus, who claimed he’d flown all over the world, but had bottomed out working for his uncle’s trash business. When he showed up, he was utterly emaciated. His dirty linen suit hung off his skinny body like a coat on a rack.

  At Seneca, people put their past lives in chorus in order to craft new plotlines for themselves. Residents often stayed in touch after they left. “I’m all alone,” one wrote from Cairo. “I need fellowship.” So they sent him letters. Whatever those letters said, they always said one thing beneath everything else: We are here.

  At my own meetings in Iowa, the chorus came as relief. Greg had followed dirt roads into the hills of North Carolina, to cinder-block houses where the moonshiners drank and sold. Chloe was a grandmother in periwinkle fleece, who said simply, “My drinking broke so much.” Sylvie had torn jeans, red eyes, and a daughter sitting at her feet, cutting out paper snowflakes. My friend Andrea had to puff into her Breathalyzer before she drove me to lunch. Getting drunk had always carried me deeper into myself, into that velvet apathy, but listening to another person speaking—whatever he was saying, whatever she remembered—was the undeniable opposite of that descent.

  AA skeptics often assume that its members insist on it as the only answer. But an AA meeting was the first place I ever heard someone say AA isn’t for everyone. Dr. Greg Hobelmann, a psychiatrist in twelve-step recovery who was once an anesthesiologist with an opiate habit, put it like this: “There are a hundred ways to skin a cat.”

  For me, no skinning was quite like this one. When people spoke at meetings they were real about what hurt—maybe they were still angry at their mothers, or the IRS, or the jobs they hadn’t gotten—but they were showing up anyway, to listen to other people’s problems, and other people’s hope. Many addiction researchers predict that we’ll eventually be able to track the impact of meetings on the brain itself. The sheer fact of putting your body in a room—a hundred rooms, a thousand times—and listening hard, or hard enough, can neurally reconfigure what addiction has unraveled.

  Dr. Kaplin believes in a symbiotic relationship between twelve-step recovery and other forms of addiction treatment. He told me that the medications we have for addiction now—drugs like buprenorphine, that target specific neurotransmitters—are incredibly useful, but they’re still just “knocking on the door of the mechanism.” When he described his “big picture” dream for addiction medicine, a drug that could recondition the mechanisms of dependence itself, I asked if this would render recovery obsolete. Was it just another way of knocking on the door? Would it eventually, ideally, be unnecessary, if we could rejigger the mechanism itself?

  “You can give someone as much methadone as you want,” he told me. “But they will still need a social network.”

  Writing about Berryman’s drinking, Lewis Hyde described “the thirst of the self to feel that it is part of something larger” as something comparable to the “body’s need for salt.” That thirst is Jackson craving the street full of strangers, or Duras dreaming the ones who never sang for her. “An animal who has found salt in the forest,” Hyde wrote, “will return time and time again to the spot.”

  The Big Book of AA was initially called The Way Out. Out of what? Not just drinking, but the claustrophobic crawl space of the self. When he comes off heroin in Blueschild Baby, dope-sick and despairing, George Cain finds glimpses of hope in moments of self-escape: listening to jazz at a smoky club on 116th—“Feel myself outside myself as we follow the music, shattered into a million tiny fragments chasing the sound, all outside ourselves”—or sleeping with a woman, for the first time, clean, sweating and shaking: “naked and defenseless.… another device to get outside yourself.” Critic Alfred Kazin, in a review of William Burroughs’s novel The Wild Boys, described the addict-author as someone struggling to escape an “infatuation with the storeroom of his own mind.”

  Writing could be part of this escape, Kazin argued, but only if it looked outward: “All stream of consciousness writing, in order to rise above the terrible fascination with itself, has to find something other than itself to love.” David Foster Wallace, too, believed that great art came from “having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.” He knew what it meant to consider yourself just 1/500,000th. “You’re special—it’s OK,” he wrote to a friend, “but so’s the guy across the table who’s raising two kids sober and rebuilding a ’73 Mustang. It’s a magical thing with 4,000,000,000 forms. It kind of takes your breath away.”

  The way out: the salt in the forest, the street full of strangers. The hunger to escape myself had always manifested in physical ways: I’d tried to bleed it out when I cut, to whittle myself to nothing but bones when I starved. Drinking myself senseless had been another way of getting rid of myself for a while. When I was hungover, I tried to sweat out my insides by running—booze trickling out of my pores.

  Meetings were another way out entirely. They were one of the first places I could ever fully sit still in my own body. Listening to other people speak was an alternative to bleeding, and an alternative to the scale in the closet, with its glowing red verdict. It was an alternative to the closet full of gin in my novel. It was another type of escape hatch, into another type of relief.

  It’s hard to write this way, full-throated and shameless, with such crude awe at what recovery came to mean in my life. But it’s the only language that feels accurate, holding recovery the way a sail holds the air—not made of wind, only moved by it.

  What’s a meeting? It’s just one life after another: an anthology held together by earnestness. It might begin with an ordinary woman at an old fishing hostel in Maryland. Her name is Gwen, and she’s an alcoholic.

  During the days of her drinking, Gwen worked as a social worker and served as the social-ministry chair at her church. She helped poor families who had gotten moved to public housing. She wasn’t supposed to be the one with a problem. At church, she won Citizen of the Year. At home, she poured Kool-Aid for her son’s Boy Scout troop with her own vodka and Kool-Aid perched on the fridge above their reach. She tried to keep her drinking hidden, but it was impossible to keep people from noticing what happened when she got drunk. One day a stranger knocked on her door and said he’d found a little girl, just a toddler, wandering outside. Did the little girl belong to her? She did. Tiffany was three.

  When Gwen’s son came home from school one day and told her he never knew if he’d find her “sad, mad, bad, or glad,” she slapped him across the face. Another day she told her kids that if they finished their homework she’d take them over to Leesburg, Virginia, on White’s Ferry. “But we went last week,” they told her. “You took us last week.” And she had, in a blackout—put her kids in the station wagon and taken them across the river. She couldn’t remember it at all.

  For her son’s birthday one year, Gwen took him and his friends to a baseball game. It was a party she was proud of planning: He’d get an autographed ball, a free
cake, and his name in lights at the stadium. But as she was drinking beer out there in the sun, kicking the empty paper cups, he turned and said: “I wish we’d left you at home.”

  Back at home she’d started pouring vodka into empty white vinegar bottles—her husband never cooked, her kids would never try to drink it—so she could secretly refill her martinis. That way it never looked like she was having more than one a night. When she went out, she tucked plastic formula bottles full of booze into her purse, so she could drink from them in secret, in bathrooms. From reading Lillian Roth’s memoir, I’ll Cry Tomorrow, she’d learned that glass bottles in a purse would make too much noise. She was putting a little vodka in her Kool-Aid, and eventually a little Kool-Aid in her vodka. At home one afternoon, she woke up groggy—passed out from booze, now coming back—to find her toddler daughter standing over her with a wet washcloth, saying: “Tiffany make it all better.”

  What’s a meeting? It takes you from one life to another—easy as that, with a raised hand, no segue or apology necessary.

  His name is Marcus, and he’s an alcoholic and an addict—born in D.C. in 1949, a black man in a divided city. He never saw his parents drunk. Can’t put that on them, he thinks now. He got a scholarship to play basketball at Cleveland State, where the whole team got drunk, then went down to the gym and played until dawn. They drank Mad Dog 20/20, which was nearly forty proof but tasted like candy. They felt immortal.

  When Marcus joined the Peace Corps after college, he was sent to a city called Buchanan on the Liberian coast. He taught English and coached basketball. He was thousands of miles from home and—he believed—any possible consequences. In Buchanan he drank palm wine with the locals. In Monrovia he drank with the other Peace Corps volunteers at a place on Gurley Street, where one guy liked cane juice, white lightning, but when Marcus tried it, it made him sick as a dog. He stuck to the national favorite, Club Beer. They liked to say it stood for “Come Let Us Booze, Be Ever Ready.” That pretty much summed up Marcus’s time in Liberia, where you could get a liter of Club for seventy-five cents. Marcus had too much time, too much freedom, too much room to do whatever he pleased—which meant drinking as much as he wanted. He started to learn how much ex-pats loved to drink: They were often restless, and rarely wanted to stay inside the mistakes they’d made.