The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  She spent that year on Antabuse terrified of relapsing. One time she accidentally swallowed crème de menthe that had been poured on a sundae; she tasted it as the ice cream melted over her tongue. After that, she carried the suspicion that even the pleasures still available to her, even hot fudge sundaes, might get her in trouble. But she also wasn’t sure what was left of her without drinking. “If you carve me out,” she wondered, “will there be enough here to be a person?”

  What came after all that humbling? After serving her time as Hobby Lady, Gwen became a counselor at Seneca, and eventually director. She started working there seven days a week, often ten hours a day. By this point, at home, her marriage was in trouble. Her husband just wanted to get back the little girl he’d married, he said. But Gwen told him that little girl had never existed. They eventually divorced, and Gwen threw herself into Seneca House work—a new marriage to replace the old one.

  After five years sober, Gwen reread her own letter of resignation from AA. The woman she’d given it to had kept it for years, just so she could give it back. Gwen had effectively sent her resignation letter to a future version of herself, who was living a sobriety she couldn’t have imagined.

  Four decades later, Gwen told me she was grateful for her grandchildren, who had offered her a second chance to do the things she hadn’t done with her own kids. She’d gotten down on the floor to play with them. She’d given them that.

  Marcus told his sobriety story as a version of the Icarus legend: He’d flown too close to the sun, in a hundred Saudi airplanes, and then smoked himself skeletal. If drinking and drugging were all about restlessness—flying all over the world, making money, feeling special—then recovery was about giving up the delusion of his own exceptionality. During his first days at Seneca, Marcus could identify with the other residents’ cravings but not with their experiences. He’d lived more. But no one believed he’d traveled Bombay to Bangkok to Manila to Honolulu to San Francisco in a month. They’d heard so much bullshit from so many addicts.

  Marcus’s breakthrough happened in a session with a Seneca counselor named Bart, an older black man with a steady government job. These were things Marcus wanted: a decent salary, a résumé that demanded respect. Marcus was doing a halfhearted First Step in front of the group and Bart said, “Why don’t you get real?” That’s when something snapped in Marcus. He got so mad he threw his chair across the room and started to see how much anger he had: at his country—at its racism, its hypocrisy—and at himself, too, though he couldn’t quite see that yet. He sat on a front-porch bench with the house dog, a beagle named Snoopy, thinking, I made such a mess. His family hadn’t been a family where you talked about your feelings. He hadn’t talked about his feelings much on the train to Mogadishu, or playing baseball with a crack pipe in White Plains, or in those bleary Bangkok bars. But decades later, by the time I met him at a café near Dupont Circle, he’d been talking for years. He’d just come back from a stint working as an election observer in Haiti, where he’d gone to AA meetings in Port-au-Prince, whose slogans were in Creole though the message was the same: Yon sèl jou nan yon moman (“One day at a time”). He’d ended up committing much of his professional life to giving other men—the prisoners in his federal rehabilitation program—the tools they needed to speak.

  Shirley’s sobriety story was about reclamation. For much of her adult life, she’d put herself in servitude—to her husband, to their home, to her children—and drank to make it tolerable. Getting sober was about waking up and saying she needed something for herself. At first she didn’t think she’d be able to do twenty-eight days at Seneca, because who would take care of her kids? But one of the Seneca counselors, Madeline, said that Shirley needed to put her sobriety before everything else—kids, marriage, career. Couldn’t her husband take care of their children for once?

  When Shirley showed up at Seneca, in 1973, she was its 269th guest. She spent her first lunch weeping at a long wooden table, eating a cheeseburger while “Keep On Loving You” played on the stereo. A gruff old man brought her a carton of milk and told her everyone cried when they arrived and everyone cried again when they left. Shirley was happier doing housework at Seneca than she had been doing it at home, because it was more reciprocal—everyone else had chores too—and less like indentured servitude. She cooked for forty people when the cook relapsed and went AWOL. One time she put Tide in the dishwasher instead of Cascade, then spent the next few hours trying to sweep up all the suds as foam crept all the way into the living room.

  Shirley was such a good listener that another resident gave her a tourniquet for her bleeding heart. But in group sessions, Madeline pushed her to get honest. “Let’s talk about your mother-in-law’s crystal,” she said, and on Shirley’s last day at Seneca, Madeline put her through a marathon session. She got ten counselors in a room and locked the doors, then said, “Let’s see how truthful you can be.” When Shirley asked what would happen if she needed to go to the bathroom, Madeline said: “You will not piss away your emotions!”

  Shirley adored Madeline, who eventually became her sponsor: fierce, but fully present. “I’m right here, love,” she’d say.

  Before Madeline had become an exhibitionist drunk, running naked in the snow with her husband chasing after her, she’d been a child without parents. She’d grown up in India, orphaned at the age of ten when her stepfather shot her mother and her mother’s lover in a Delhi hotel. Her stepfather had tried to molest Madeline years before that. One day at Seneca when Madeline and Shirley were walking by the creek, Madeline picked up a branch that had been hit by lightning and pointed to its charred core. “You see that blackness?” she told Shirley. “That’s how I felt when things happened to me.”

  To celebrate three years together, our first October back in New Haven, Dave and I went out for dinner at the pizza joint with vinyl booths behind our apartment. We ate clams on a white pie and toasted with white birch beer. House special. “I know it’s basically the length of a bathroom break in the scale of your relationship,” I wrote to a friend who’d been with his wife for a decade, “but for me three years is forever. I’m proud of us.”

  We signed up to collect weekly installments of produce from a farm in Woodbridge, a half hour northwest of us: torpedo onions, parsley and collards, bok choy, tatsoi, greens I’d never heard of and had no idea what to do with. Signing up for these weekly bundles was like putting a down payment on the life I wanted to be living but wasn’t, quite—a life in which we happily drank seltzer and followed the recipes that came over email from the farm: tangy glazed carrots with cranberries, browned butter pasta with tatsoi, chocolate beet cake. Mostly, the greens wilted in our crisper and left little puddles of brown juice at the corners of the plastic drawer.

  Back in Iowa, Dave and his distances—or the ways I projected these distances onto him—had kept our relationship charged by longing. The fact that I could never fully have him meant I always wanted him. Now that he was more available, I was often gone, leaving our apartment many nights to write at a diner outside of town that stayed open twenty-four hours a day. It was called the Athenian, with big glass windows and stone siding, and at two in the morning it was pretty much empty—just a few cops and a tired graveyard-shift waitress. I got curly fries or apple pie and worked on the proposal for my dissertation about writers who had gotten sober. I liked the adrenaline I got from going to the diner late at night, surrounded by desolate strangers. It made sobriety surge with electricity, with late-night caffeine spikes of bitter coffee, and it was often easier to be away from home, away from Dave—as if I were proving something about independence, proving what I didn’t need from him any longer.

  When I started visiting the archives of writers who had gotten drunk and gotten sober, I was looking for the underbelly of the whiskey-and-ink mythology—for the blood and sweat and vomit of what their drinking had been, and also for what their sobriety had made possible. Finding their voices in the archives reminded me of being at a meeting
: all those savage losses lurking under the ways strangers composed themselves.

  Every archive had its own rituals: Leave your bags here. Sign your name there. Get your key over here. Use these folders. Use this code. Use this room for your conspiracy research. Wear these headphones for the scratchy recording of the old Creole songs. Buy this postcard of a beat-up kitchen table. Write to this widow for permission. Everything depends upon this pencil stub.

  Every archive held the same imperative of careful touch. Every archive was a shrine to the futile task of preserving a life. Every archive was a siren song coaxing the same intimate, deluded ventriloquism—wanting to speak the truth of someone who couldn’t speak. Every archive breathed quietly against the shameless volumes of the past, the lost noise of everything broken and breaking, all that violence crackling under fragile yellowed pages.

  In a pristine room at Dartmouth, full of cold New Hampshire sunlight, I wanted to refute Charles Jackson’s fear of becoming a sapped soul like the other AA folks, not very bright or interesting or anything. But when I went looking for the fruits of his sober creativity, I found a manuscript that bored me. When I went looking for the promise that I wasn’t losing myself in recovery, I didn’t find the resolution of my fears but their reflection—lurking with its gleaming eyes, waiting me out.

  Jackson may have told an AA meeting that writing The Lost Weekend didn’t help him stay sober, but it did console him in the wake of one devastating relapse: “It was absolutely honest, syllable for syllable,” he wrote to a friend. “It was a writer really on the beam, telling nothing but universal truth.” In his archives, his scribbled handwriting on a cardboard box holding the first typescript evokes his conflicted view of the book: “Original MS of The Lost Weekend Not Valuable but Please Save.”

  When I read Jackson’s letters, I stared down the glowing comet trails of my impossible counterfactual desires: What if he’d treated his wife better, fought his ego better, stayed sober longer? My desires lived in an awkward tense—an impossible past perfect—and at night I went back to the room I was renting in the hills of Vermont from a lesbian couple who lived with their daughters in a bright farmhouse with a Finnish wood-burning stove. Their duck pond was frozen for the season but their chickens were still laying, and they scrambled fresh eggs for breakfast every morning. The residue of their home, its warmth, lingered with me in the archives as I sifted through letters from Jackson’s wife, Rhoda, and imagined the marriage she’d never had. “I keep dreaming of what a good and happy marriage could have meant to me,” she wrote to her brother-in-law. “How different it would be with love.” Years later she told her daughter that Charles was the best thing that had ever happened to her. This was the trick of living, that both feelings could be true at once.

  At the Center of Alcohol Studies at Rutgers, where Rhoda worked for decades while her husband kept relapsing, early AA newsletters listed loner meetings with only one member: Waldo in Caracas, Alessandro in Colombia, Mildred at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Delhi. One flyer announced a “30th Anniversary Celebration” where Bill W. would make a live appearance: “In person! In person! In person!”

  By the time I got to Stepping Stones, Wilson’s home in Westchester, New York—a brown barn-style colonial revival, hobbit-quaint but oddly large—it had become a pilgrimage site. “We always say it’s not a successful tour,” the director once said, “unless at least one person cries.” People cried at the big wooden bed where Wilson and his wife, Lois, read recovery literature to each other every morning. They cried at the artifacts of their daily lives—the can of hair spray, the single bobby pin—and at the kitchen table where Wilson drank gin and pineapple juice while Ebby talked to him about sobriety and Wilson told himself that his gin would last longer than his friend’s preaching. They cried at the little silver stove-top coffeepot perched beneath a wall of mugs, the same pot that had brewed coffee for hundreds of newly sober addicts. (My own eyes welled up.) But if this place was a house of worship, Bill Wilson wasn’t its god. The god was communion itself: the cups of coffee, the possibility of penetrating the ordinary loneliness of being a drunk.

  In Wilson’s archives, on an early manuscript of the Big Book, I saw a line he had crossed out from another man’s testimony: At “no time did I ever find a place where I could not get liquor when I wanted it.” When I wanted it. Had there been a time when he didn’t? The words were already implied. Something in me rose to salute Wilson’s strike-through. It was like nodding at a meeting: Amen.

  The evening I left Berryman’s archives for the last time—after days spent poring over AA step work covered with coffee stains and cigarette burns—my Uber driver was a man named Kyle who’d recently come back to Minnesota from the West Coast, where he had been working graveyard shifts as a poker dealer in a speakeasy. He had come back to get away from a life that had grown toxic, he told me—too much drinking, a full-fledged gambling addiction—and because he wanted to reconnect to his core passion: Christian rap. In his teens he’d been unstoppable, playing churches all over the Midwest, and when things had gotten bad back in California, all Kyle had wanted was to write raps again. But now that he was back—no longer gambling, and drinking less—he had writer’s block.

  Just that afternoon, I’d been reading the note from Berryman’s analyst (your creative skills are not so intertwined with your emotional problems) and I asked Kyle if he thought he wrote better from crisis or stability. Kyle thought for a while, then said he wrote from both, though the raps turned out differently. But if he had to choose, he’d choose stability in a heartbeat—even if it meant he never wrote again. For a simple reason: Stability was when he felt closest to God.

  Just before Halloween, I asked Dave if he thought Iowa had broken something between us that couldn’t be fixed. It was easier to construct the sentence like that: Iowa had done it.

  “It’s like something has gone numb,” I told him. “Can’t you sense that?”

  “Yes,” he said simply. “I can.”

  I’d been ready to convince him, but it was horrible when he agreed immediately. He told me he’d been trying to explain to a friend what it felt like to hug me when we got home at the end of the day: how stiff, how empty. This made me flinch, imagining all the times we’d hugged and he’d been thinking, This is empty. I’d wanted to believe in intention, intention, intention—going through the motions, showing up for commitments, all that program language that had given me a rudder when my own instincts seemed totally fucked—but apparently sometimes going through the motions could be just that, nothing saving, only hollow. Like hugging a corpse.

  Whatever was broken, I told him, I wasn’t sure we could fix it. When I said that, Dave started crying. This was something I’d never seen him do. A flurry of snow fell beyond our giant picture window, sifting a layer of powdered white onto the bricks of the old corset factory where we’d been drunk, falling in love, three years earlier. It was the beginning of the massive early nor’easter they’d call Snowtober.

  Not for the first time, I accused Dave of thrilling toward my strength and pulling away from my weakness, from those times I’d been needy, or dull, or low. But for the first time, he agreed.

  “I know that coldness,” he said, after a long silence. “I’m ashamed of it.”

  In three years, he’d never really owned this—and I felt a sudden wash of relief, like an exhalation, that I hadn’t been crazy all this time.

  But it was never because he only wanted the good parts of me, he explained. It was never that he didn’t want my sadness. That was just the story I’d written. He hadn’t been pulling away from my fear, only the ways I’d blamed him for it.

  “I didn’t blame you—” I started to say, then thought of all the times I’d cried at him, like a weapon.

  “What I gave was never enough,” he continued. “It was exhausting.” He said there was an ice that ran through him sometimes—a sense of shutting down—and he wanted to fight it. But he’d never been repulsed by my need, only tired
of the ways I constantly forgot how much he’d given me.

  That first time I’d seen the coldness on his face? The night before my surgery, when I said I was scared? Had it ever occurred to me, he asked, that he might have been scared, too?

  And honestly, it never had.

  Had it ever occurred to me, he asked, that the day after we’d first kissed, down in Newport News, canvassing for Obama, that the whole time I’d been waiting for a sign from him, he’d been waiting for a sign from me?

  It sounds ridiculous, but it stunned me. I’d always assumed his assurance.

  I’d never seen him like this before, pleading. Could we try? Could we keep trying? We agreed that we could, we would. This was sobriety, I thought—not the clean break, the clear-cut-and-burn-it-down approach, but something else. This was staying inside the mess and seeing it through. Coming down from all our crying that night, Dave and I watched Blade Runner and I cried some more. Nobody believed the replicant could feel anything, but it turned out he’d been moved by so much: attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, C-beams glittering in the dark.

  In the morality play I’d written, things had been simple: I suffered and Dave recoiled from my suffering. So many times, I’d told Dave that he hated being around me when I was sad, but I was starting to see that he’d just hated how I’d accused him of hating being around me when I was sad. I’d convinced myself that the problem between us was about Dave’s aversion to my needs—that he was the embodiment of not-needing itself, an absence in human form—but perhaps the problem was that I’d translated need so immediately into accusation, your stone face, when in truth his face was many things: often kind, often listening, often curious. I just feared the stone face so much I’d started to expect it, to feel him retracting, to feel my own inadequacy as cause, to feel, feel, feel. Emotion was my compulsion and obsession, the organ through which I processed the world—turning it to praise and harm like the liver turns ethyl alcohol to acetaldehyde and acid. I could do better.