The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  For six more years, Marcus stayed abroad, working for Saudi Arabian Airlines, based in Jeddah, during the heart of the Saudi oil boom. Oil money was everywhere, and the mayor was investing in sculptures: a car perched on a flying carpet in the middle of a traffic island, a bronze man raising his stump arms to the blue desert sky. Marcus was flying all over the world. In Bangkok he drank with Vietnam vets who couldn’t bring themselves to go home. In Bombay he drank with Europeans hunting for spiritual enlightenment in ashrams. He went to Addis Ababa with a crew of guys who worked for Saudi Air, and they took over an entire hotel floor—met girls in clubs and brought them back, paid no attention to the curfew. This was 1977, under Mengistu, and there was martial law: no one allowed out between midnight and six in the morning. They disobeyed that. They did what they pleased. On the train to Mogadishu, they got fucked up and made noise.

  The first time Marcus ever freebased was 1980, on a vacation back in the States. He’d flown all the way around the world, and he ended up hanging out with a friend’s ex-wife up in White Plains. She called it “baseball.” He put down three hundred dollars and liked it so much he put down another three hundred right away.

  All that drinking, being an asshole all over the world, none of that had felt like trouble. But crack felt like trouble. It was too sweet.

  Thirty-five years later, when Marcus told me about smoking for the first time, he said it three times in a row: “It was too sweet. It was too sweet. It was too sweet.”

  It wasn’t until Marcus moved back to D.C., a few years later, that his crack habit spiraled fully out of control. He tried to start a business driving limousines but he couldn’t balance his expenses. He lost fifty pounds in six months. He was six foot five and down to 149. After his business failed, he started working for his uncle, who owned a trash company. Marcus had been living on top of the world—flying everywhere, money everywhere—and now he was underweight and handling other people’s garbage. He described those six months after he got back to the States as an express train to zero. Once he got there, he called a hotline and someone on the other end suggested Seneca House.

  Marcus didn’t arrive till evening, too late to check in, and had to spend the night with a Seneca alum—a man who worked nearby as a farmhand, taking care of the horses—sleeping on his couch, above the barn. At Seneca the next day, Marcus was wearing one of his nicest suits, though it was falling apart. He could pay only part of the deposit for a twenty-eight-day stay. He was thirty-four years old, and he felt like a dressed-up garbage can.

  Decades later, he would work as a counselor at a 102-bed program for federal prisoners with substance-abuse problems. He’d tell them to look at the buildings outside their windows, and ask, “What’s on this compound?,” trying to show them where they might end up. They pointed at the jail and the hospital. He pointed at the cemetery. In a group session Marcus led, one man asked another, “How did you negotiate that anger?” And the second man said, “Oh, I started to speak.”

  Her name is Shirley, and she’s an alcoholic. When she was nine, she found an open bottle of wine in her living room. The warmth in her throat, then her gut, helped her understand why her father got so drunk it left him retching at the toilet in the middle of the night. Shirley didn’t become alcoholic by accident; she wanted it. She romanticized geniuses like Robert Burns and Edgar Allan Poe, but she was disgusted by drunks who’d failed at their drinking, who had nothing to show for it—like her 250-pound uncle, lumbering and frightening in his cups. That kind of drinking repulsed her.

  During college, she worked for a small-town Oregon paper, keeping tabs on how many crummies full of loggers got sent into the mountains to fight each forest fire. The first time her boss took her to the Portland Press Club, she was hooked on booze and reporting at once, intertwined: all these hard-core reporters getting blitzed from stashes in their private liquor lockers. She had her first highball there, bourbon and ginger ale, and ended that night throwing up in the ladies’ room. The attendant stood by, saying, “Must’ve been something you ate.” They both knew it wasn’t. For her twenty-first birthday, a friend baked her a cake that said BALLOTS OR BOOZE!

  During J-school in Minneapolis, Shirley lived in an apartment above a tea shop and ate one meal a day, at noon: a thirty-five-cent hamburger. She sold her blood for extra cash. She drank only on dates, when a guy was paying. She dated a lot. When she heard she’d gotten a junior reporter job at Life magazine, she screamed so loud she wondered if her screams had embedded themselves permanently in the tea shop walls. She moved to New York in June 1953, the same summer the Rosenbergs were executed. Life kept booze in the office, especially on Saturdays, when the magazine closed. One week Marlene Dietrich had a case of champagne delivered to the office with a note: It’s 4 PM! Love Marlene. But Shirley mainly drank alone in her apartment. She felt perpetually out of place—as a woman, without an Ivy League degree, it seemed impossible she’d ever rise through the ranks.

  She decided to take a job at a small paper in Montana, near the Judith Mountains, where she lived above the Gold Bar Saloon, drank gin upstairs while she listened to the jukebox and the cowboy brawls below. She wrote a piece about a wild-horse roundup; she fried eggs on the sidewalk for a story about the heat; she snapped shots of a forest fire from a two-seater plane. After they closed the paper around ten each night, her boss took her across the street to the Burke Hotel for highballs. The bartender was a guy named Frank, ten years sober, who used to tell them, “You guys are the lost generation.” They loved to hear it. A grocery clerk gave her tango lessons in an abandoned bakery—dipping between the old mixers and dusty countertops—and when they performed their tangos at a roadhouse called Bar 19, they got rounds of free bourbon in return.

  One day Shirley got a fan letter from a man named Lou, a reporter in Pennsylvania, who’d read her cowboy-roundup piece and loved it. They started writing to each other. Less than a year later, on Valentine’s Day, they got married. It turned out Lou was knee-deep in gambling debts; he’d even written bum checks to the priest and the organ player for their wedding. They lived on Christopher Street in the West Village, in New York, and drank whatever they could, whenever they could afford it. Lou worked for a Jersey paper but hated it. He wanted something better. They bought a suit for his job interviews and then they threw his suit a little party, hung it up in the window and toasted it with wine: “To the suit!”

  Over the course of the next decade, Shirley devoted herself fully to Lou’s career—helping him come up with pitches, putting her own career on the back burner, moving for his newspaper jobs in Harrisburg, Tulsa, Oregon, Maine, and eventually Beirut, where he worked for the Daily Star and got paid in cash. They lived in a high-rise overlooking the bay and rode taxis all over town: old Mercedes with watermelon rinds littering the floors, blasting music as they drove past shawarma shops fluttering with flies. People asked why they didn’t have kids, and Lou wanted them badly, but Shirley was secretly relieved she hadn’t gotten pregnant. She thought becoming a mother would mean she’d have to give up her career for good, and she’d already sacrificed so much for her husband’s. Maybe sometimes, sometimes, she had a drink. When the local New York Times correspondent threw a big party for Henry Luce’s arrival in town, with belly dancers and buckets of booze, Shirley got so drunk she collapsed in the bathroom. They had to kick in the door to get her out. “You need to take her home,” her husband was told. “It must have been something she ate.” Déjà vu.

  Back in the States, they adopted a baby girl named Laura. When they stopped for formula on the way home from the adoption office, Lou ran into the store while Shirley stayed in the car and whispered to the baby: “I don’t want you. I don’t want you. I don’t want you.” A few years later, unexpectedly, they had their own biological child—a daughter they named Sonia. Staying at home with the two kids drove Shirley crazy, but it also let her drink as much as she wanted during the day. She lost her temper easily, raging at Laura for spilling the cat food. Lou
kept them moving for his work and traveled constantly. One night, right after they’d moved to a new town, Shirley wanted a drink so badly she took both kids in the car with her and they went out searching. She told them to look out for signs that spelled L-I-Q-U-O-R.

  It was after Lou made a comment about a shelf that hadn’t been properly dusted that Shirley started picking up pieces of her mother-in-law’s crystal and hurling them one by one against the dining room wall. “I’m going mad!” she yelled. “I’m going mad!” Not long after that, the kids came downstairs late one night and saw her making peanut butter sandwiches for their school lunches. She’d been throwing up and her hair was stringy with vomit. She promised them she’d get help, and she did.

  Decades after Shirley had stopped drinking, one of her children—now an adult, and newly sober—called her from the hospital after a suicide attempt, and Shirley read from the Big Book over the phone: Remember that we deal with alcohol—cunning, baffling, powerful! Without help it is too much for us.

  Six months into my second sobriety, I took a trip down to Memphis with my friend Emily—glamorous in tortoiseshell sunglasses, sober since twenty-two. In college, we’d eaten tacos at three in the morning to soak up the vodka in our stomachs. She’d drunk until she reached the place she called the fuck-it point, where she just didn’t care. She’d spent a summer drinking her way across Nicaragua on a freelance writing gig—lush days that landed her in a Managua hospital with dengue fever. Now that she was sober, Emily’s life had a certain thickness. She salvaged furniture and finished it herself. She’d once taken me to a North Carolina gas station for boiled peanuts and hush puppies in a plastic basket, spotting their paper with grease, then shown me the Beaufort cemetery at night, the graves of bootleggers and pirates. Her sobriety was contagious. The world vibrated under her gaze.

  In Memphis, she took me to watch the Peabody Hotel ducks, marching on a red carpet from the lobby fountain to a glass elevator. We went to an old converted bordello with claw-foot bathtubs, where we drank Coke from plastic cups and she told me about the upstairs bartender, a man who’d been sober for decades. I loved thinking that the world had been full of sober people all this time, hidden in plain sight. Emily told me about the first few months after she’d quit drinking, those long nights spent baking elaborate cakes and watching endless TV, and I remembered pacing the tofu factory, watching that miniseries about Manchester—panicking when I reached the last episode, that last scene on a railway platform, because I was scared of the silence.

  We drove around Memphis looking at the Big Empties: huge buildings the city couldn’t afford to tear down. They stood thirty, forty stories high, with cracked windows and boarded doors, walls moldering with asbestos. We went to an old cemetery shrine with a secret grotto of quartz inside a concrete tree stump, with jittery music fluted from interior speakers. I needed that, something twinkling inside. I needed the world to tell me there was more out there, waiting.

  “What you really want,” Berryman wrote, “is to stay just who you are and not drink. That’s not possible, of course. Jack-Who-Drinks has got to alter into Jack-Who-Does-Not-Drink-And-Likes-It.” Who was that Jack in me, the Jack who didn’t like to drink? And what did she like instead? I’d always associated drinking with falling in love and driving to New Orleans; dancing on wooden bars, between foam-crusted beers; taking swigs from a bottle of cheap red in a graveyard—wriggling out of the tight swaddling of self-awareness.

  But in sobriety, it was getting easier to take myself less seriously. At the bakery, during morning production, Jamie liked to tease me by putting on a playlist she called the Wounded Mix, full of my favorite songs. Mazzy Star crooned, “I want to hold the hand inside you,” while I tried and failed to properly ice a cake. During my first year at the bakery, I’d made the mistake of telling Jamie that my mom and I had sometimes made collages together when I was young, and whenever I came to work in a bad mood she immediately asked if I needed to take some time to collage about it.

  Jamie was a funny, generous, candid woman whom I hadn’t been able to see fully—at first—because I felt muted and intimidated by her. Now she was teaching me alternatives to taking a long warm bath in your own pain, like waking up and getting shit done. EFD was our catchphrase for necessary daily commitments: Every Fucking Day. Whenever Jamie needed me to draw her out, she’d say, “Take me to your emo igloo,” and one time when we were talking over coffee she started crying, describing the exhaustion of her days—her kids, the bakery—how she sank into a black zone after bedtime. It was strange to see her cry, this brash no-bullshit woman. But this was something that kept happening in sobriety, understanding that everyone—your boss, your bank teller, your baker, even your partner—was waking up every fucking day and dealing with shit you couldn’t even imagine.

  That last summer in Iowa, I befriended a woman who was newly sober and struggling. Her pain seemed expansive and unyielding, beyond speech, and I was often not sure what to say to her. Sometimes I told her how obsessed I had been with drinking, and that seemed to help. I wanted to give her some version of the sparkling grotto I’d seen in Memphis—proof of the world as interesting, infinite, still unknown—and so I decided to take her to the raptor center just outside town, a refuge for wounded birds of prey: spooky owls with swivel heads; a pair of mated hawks who barely tolerated each other’s feathered bodies on the same tree branch. Almost past saving, these birds had been given a new home. I didn’t care how obvious it was.

  I got lost, though. I couldn’t find the raptor center. We found a picnic bench and smoked there instead. It wasn’t what I’d bargained for. If I helped this woman, I was supposed to get a fucking raptor center! She was supposed to get a raptor center. But we didn’t. We just got a picnic bench. We got each other’s company for a while.

  —

  XII —

  SALVAGE

  When Dave and I moved back to New Haven after two years in Iowa, I envisioned it as our second chance. We would return to our doctoral program to write our dissertations, and we’d live a thousand miles away from that second-floor apartment that held the ghosts of all our arguments—far from the gazebo where I’d fled our party, drunk; far from the streets I’d walked in the hours before dawn, sober and fuming.

  New Haven was the city where our relationship had begun. The air was crisp. Our shared life felt possible. The trees broke out in cherry blossoms like hives every spring. I gathered the materials of our new neighborhood as talismans: the sullen boy selling chocolate milk at the farmers’ market with his mom; the curly-haired tutor who was always running everywhere, backpack bouncing; the Italian grocery store with veal hearts for sale, with osso buco and homemade bologna and a Ten Commandments mural painted on the wall by the exit, to strike guilt in the hearts of would-be shoplifters. These particulars helped me write the story of our love’s recovery. We didn’t know whether we’d make it or not, but then we moved to that place in Wooster Square and that was when we really pulled it together.

  But the city almost immediately saturated me with nostalgia for the ways I used to drink. I knew there were meetings in New Haven, like a secret city happening underneath the city I lived in. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to visit them. If I never followed another set of darkened stairs into another church basement, maybe I could be someone who didn’t need to. Sometimes, walking home from campus after teaching, I took the long way up State Street, past the bar with peanut shells where I’d gotten drunk with Peter years earlier. Its sidewalk still gave me chills: This sidewalk, by this tree, had been full of the taste of vodka, just about to happen.

  The firm belief that I could probably start drinking again arrived about three weeks after the last meeting I attended—back in Iowa City, before the move—like a train pulling into the station on schedule. It was mild-mannered and persuasive, this faith in my own ability to drink. It knocked very politely. It anticipated my skepticism. I’m not saying you can DEFINITELY drink, it said. It would just be an experiment. The shimme
ring alternate world had grown close once more, its long nights wondrous, its floors covered in peanut shells. It lay just beyond the drudge work of recanting: I know I said I was an alcoholic and then took it back and said I wasn’t really and then took that back and said I actually was but the thing is I’m really not, I promise. Then I’d be back in the sweet autumnal swirl of red wine and hard cider, the chilled salt slide of dirty martinis. It would be like finally crawling back under the covers on a cold morning—back into the swell, as Rhys would have it, letting the river become an ocean again.

  “I’m thinking about drinking again,” I told Dave calmly over dinner. “I really think I could do it better.”

  At that point I was nine months sober, after seven months back out, after seven months sober, after two tries before that. I kept my voice measured and upbeat, like I was talking to a cop who’d pulled me over for speeding and I didn’t want him to find the pot in my glove compartment.

  Dave didn’t tell me I shouldn’t drink. “Go to a meeting,” he said. “See how you feel after that.”

  I went to a church the next night and tried a door. It was locked. Thank God. I walked back to my car; at least I could say I’d tried. But something in my gut wasn’t right—something in me knew that trying wasn’t enough—so I turned back and circled around the church. There they were, farther back, the telltale signs: lit basement windows, a brick propping open the door, the stranger in a camo jacket ashing his cigarette outside.