The sharp, stinging thrill of my aloneness was like diving into an unheated pool. I told myself You’ll adjust, you’ll adjust, you’ll adjust. All our furniture had been Dave’s, so he let me keep the battered chairs we’d bought together from an Iowa thrift store, upholstered with vinyl roses—we’d been so excited to spot them on the thrift-store sidewalk, so excited to buy something together. Now they sat on a hardwood floor in a room still waiting for a bed, a bookshelf, a table, anything. I was low on cash. Our landlady had kept our security deposit because we’d broken our lease. She said that maybe next time we’d think a little harder about living with somebody if we were going to break the lease after just six months.
At my new place on Lyon Street, I started spotting signs of mice—little droppings like BB pellets by the fridge—but didn’t want to kill them, so I tried to banish them with mint extract, which I’d been told they hated. But they stuck around, savaging my foil pouches of cocoa mix into little shreds of tinsel. One died under my stove, something I realized only once I started to smell his rotting body under the unforgiving peppermint odor that had settled like a blanket over my whole life.
Each morning at dawn I sat on my kitchen counter and watched the cars surge north up I-91. The absence of booze tingled like a ghost limb. The specter of another life felt like someone breathing heavily nearby, another version of this breakup in which I drank myself senseless each night, weeping and blowing my nose into toilet paper, drunk-dialing Dave after midnight to ask: Who are you with right now? I knew I wasn’t supposed to want that other life—unseemly, falling apart—but some part of me longed for it. In that life, I would make a fool of myself, and that foolishness would tell him how much I missed him, better than anything else could. Instead I was just pushing my yogurt around, dry-eyed. Every few weeks a new jam—blackberry, rhubarb, red currant—showed up outside my door, sealed so tightly I could never open it. I ran the jars under water and smacked them against counters, then lied to my neighbors weekly about how much I loved their various jams on my morning toast.
I started chairing the seven-thirty meeting every Wednesday morning, trudging to that warm room through the bitter January cold. Whenever the court-order folks came up to me afterward to get their cards signed, my first impulse was to direct them somewhere else—not because I didn’t want to sign their cards, but because I didn’t think I was qualified. You should get someone more official, I wanted to say, but then realized I was as official as anyone.
I still loved that early-morning meeting. The voices of others still made me want to drop down on my knees in front of them—to thank them for letting me lose myself for a moment by listening to them—and there was also this guy in a maroon tracksuit who’d started looking at me from across the room. My psyche was hungry for sustenance, my outfits carefully chosen. “I don’t care why you newcomers are here,” said Theo, the group’s anchoring old-timer. “You come because you want to get sober or you come because you want the free coffee or you come because you want to get laid, I don’t fucking care. Just keep coming.”
The man across the room, whose name was Luke, told me that every morning before the meeting he walked his dog to the top of East Rock, a huge hill on the edge of town, to watch the sunrise. Did I want to join them sometime? I did. He texted twenty minutes before he picked me up—at five-thirty the next morning—to ask if I wanted milk or sugar in the coffee he was bringing me. We walked uphill, with snow on the ground, and flirted in the early cold, watching dawn spread like a murky juice over the industrial buildings of New Haven. I’d always wondered what sober dating would be like, and here it was—nothing like dipping into the sweet buzz of wine over candlelight. It was walking uphill on a sludgy winter morning, with chapped lips and a mouth sour with the aftertaste of plain black coffee—raw and unknown, thrilling.
In those days, acquaintances who wondered if they had a problem with their drinking often got drunk and pulled me aside to tell me about it. I was like a sober version of them, a hypothetical self they felt accountable to. One night, as I was leaving the Anchor—a dive bar that I still loved for its vinyl and fries—a woman rushed after me onto the sidewalk, holding a can of Sea Hag. She was a friend-of-a-friend from grad school, often drunk at parties, and she told me she was getting scared by her blackouts. Had I gotten blackouts? Was that why I didn’t drink? She’d noticed I didn’t drink. And how had I stopped? And what was it like? I wrote her the next day: A lot of what you said about drinking made sense to me. If you ever want to come to a meeting…And then, ashamed of proselytizing: No pressure at all.
Ha! she wrote back. I don’t even remember saying any of that!
Through meetings, I became friends with a woman who’d been in the nurse-anesthetist program at Yale New Haven Hospital. She’d been stealing opiates from work and she’d accidentally overdosed in a hospital bathroom and gone into cardiac arrest. “If you’re going to go into cardiac arrest, a hospital bathroom isn’t a bad place to do it,” she told me over lunch one day. “Just don’t lock the door.” When she described her stubborn desire to court that sweet blackness, I didn’t feel pity or disgust. Part of me just craved the surrender.
We finished our lentil soup—our green smoothies, our tiny bread loaves, icons of our wholesomeness—and then I went home and Googled “What does Dilaudid feel like?” and found a user-forum thread called “What’s all the hype about?” A user called SWIM talked about trying Dilaudid and counting to ten. At seven seconds, it hit him like a wave—better than anything he’d ever experienced. But in the very next post, SWIM said he couldn’t understand why anyone would choose Dilaudid over heroin. What was the deal with SWIM? He kept changing his mind. He seemed to have six different minds. Then I realized: Someone Who Isn’t Me. It was the name everyone used. One SWIM said the Dillie rush could literally knock you down. Another put a blotter under his tongue so he could save the rest of his saliva for later. Maybe someone who wasn’t him could get a little high from what was left. Another SWIM loved his first fentanyl high so much he decided to write about it on the Dilaudid thread. He posted the play-by-play of his second time: SWIM is starting to feel more and more stoned. Unfortunenately his whole body doesn’t feel like it’s glowing of warmth like it felt with the previous experience with fentanyl… SWIM is feeling more happy and contend, but not enough in his opinion. I imagined someone who wasn’t me sitting there one night, all alone with her computer and her disappointing high, faithfully narrating it for a world of strangers.
When Amy Winehouse was getting high or drunk, the paparazzi photos always tried to zoom in as close as possible on her cuts and bruises, the residue of her benders. These little wounds were like openings in the tent flaps of her privacy. It was as if the photos were trying to get inside the wounds themselves, the closest thing to fucking her that the camera could possibly manage.
After she died, one journalist reflected that her death forced the public to “choke a bit on the rock mythology that’s been crammed down our collective throats.… The tortured genius, the hellion libertine, the martyr dying for the noble cause of nihilism.” It was unending, our collective fascination with the self-inflicted pain of a beautiful woman. It was another incarnation of Elizabeth Hardwick’s awe at Billie Holiday’s “luminous self-destruction,” though it was Holiday who’d said, “If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you’re out of your mind.”
If only that were true. But I’ve always perked up at drunkalogs. The night Amy Winehouse won five Grammys, she told her friend Jules: “This is so boring without drugs.” The answer on the Narco Farm intake form had stated it so simply. Reason for addiction: To avoid monotony of living. My dad had always been irritated by the ways my high school Human Development class seemed to whitewash the truth. “How can they keep you from getting into trouble with drugs,” he said, “if they aren’t honest about how good they feel?” He always told me that one of the most dangerous things about drugs was the fact that they were illegal—this from a man born in 1
943, the same year as George Cain, who never did time for the drugs he did, but knew that others had.
It’s not that there aren’t thrills. It’s just a question of aftermath. Holiday might have continued: If you think dope is for kicks, then think of a woman spreading foundation on the sores across her face, asking her bodyguard why she’s not getting her period, as Winehouse did after years of boozing and bulimia—when she was utterly cloistered by her fame and by her using, her body battered. She wasn’t just a legend but also a woman who couldn’t walk straight, a woman on a bed who wasn’t sleeping but gone. When she died, her blood alcohol content was 0.4 percent, a level well above deadly. The coroner ruled it “death by misadventure.”
“Dope never helped anyone sing any better,” Holiday insisted, though it’s true that if Winehouse had gone to rehab that first time, we might never have gotten Back to Black, the album that made her famous. I wonder what we would have gotten instead. “She had the complete gift,” said her idol Tony Bennett. “If she had lived, I would have said, Life teaches you, really, how to live it, if you live long enough.”
I would have loved to hear Amy Winehouse sing sober. Not just two weeks sober, but three years sober, twenty years sober. I never lived her life and she never lived mine, but I know that when I was twenty-seven I stopped and when she was twenty-seven she died. I know that when I watch a video of her onstage in Belgrade—drunk out of her mind, like she’s been air-dropped into a moment she can’t possibly fathom—I think of coming out of a blackout into the strange new world of a Mexican bathroom stall, or a dirt basement in Cambridge, or a breezeless bedroom in Nicaragua where it was easier to let a man finish fucking me than to stop him.
When she lurches across that Belgrade stage and finally squats there—still and quiet, smiling—just waiting for something to happen or for something to stop happening, it’s less that I know what’s happening in her, and more that her eyes know something that happened in me. I hate that she didn’t have years of ordinary coffee dates and people saying, I get that, that she stayed doomed to her singularity and her vodka-thinned blood and her drunken stumbling under the broken tower of her beehive, her body barely holding up the weight—until it wasn’t, until it couldn’t any longer.
Alone in my new apartment, I was constantly imagining Dave in his new apartment across town. I’d ended things because I was sick of obsessing about the exhausting question of whether we should be together—but now that we weren’t together, I only obsessed about us more. It was a familiar vein of disappointment. I’d stopped drinking so that I wouldn’t think about drinking, but after I stopped, I thought about it constantly, without respite or relief.
Plenty of nights, I wanted to text Dave drunk. But I didn’t drink anymore, so I couldn’t. Instead I texted him sober. We texted to say nothing, and by saying nothing we also said: I am still here. Some nights we said more. “I still feel like you’re my real life,” I told him. “Nothing else feels like my real life.”
I’d picked up a second job—adjunct teaching at a college forty minutes upstate—to pay back the credit card debt on a room’s worth of Ikea furniture, and to distract myself from my quiet nights with more essays to grade. My students wrote about varsity swim team politics and the acid residue of overbearing mothers, and I marked up their work with my own agendas: Gratuitous cynicism, I wrote, or Irony without a point?
With colleagues at this job, I had slipped into a strange set of white lies: after referring to “my partner” once in conversation, as if I still had one, I’d kept up the lie. It was as if I’d created a parallel universe in which Dave and I had made it work.
In class, I started our discussion of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son by asking my students if they had a favorite story from the collection. “Don’t worry,” I said. “There’s no right answer.” But I was lying. There was a right answer. Their favorite story was supposed to be my favorite story, which was now “Beverly Home,” the only one about recovery. Johnson’s narrator, Fuckhead, is working at a rehabilitation center for the elderly and disabled. He spends his evenings going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings where sober addicts sit “around collapsible tables looking very much like people stuck in a swamp.” It’s no postcard vision of salvation. Meetings make Fuckhead feel like a swamp creature. He’s a caregiver in a rehab center full of despair. He sleeps with a woman he meets in NA who has black-widow bad luck. The men she loves all die—from trains or car crashes or overdoses—and when Fuckhead hears about them he is filled with “a sweet pity… sad that they would never live again, drunk with sadness.” He thinks, “I couldn’t get enough of it.” The same way he’d responded to a grieving woman’s scream, how he’d gone “looking for that feeling everywhere.” Fuckhead spends his days walking the O-shaped circuit of the rehab center with the deformed and the desperate: “All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them,” he says. “I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”
I read that line, the closing line of the story, aloud to my students. I read it—once, twice, three times—while they quietly swept up crumbs from the doughnuts I’d brought to class to bribe them into loving me. On the first day of class, I’d shown up with two dozen doughnuts and a cardboard box of coffee, and then I kept bringing them each week—along with a stack of paper cups, sweeteners and creamers, plastic swizzle sticks, an anxious bouquet—afraid that if I stopped bringing them, the students would be disappointed. It was going to cost four hundred dollars over the course of the semester, more than half a month’s rent, just to stave off the possibility that they’d stop liking me.
There might be a place for people like us. Every voice I’d ever heard in meetings was somehow part of that closing line. Maybe some of my students found it sappy or maudlin, that sense of belonging, but my heart swelled righteously against their imagined accusations. I told myself that the students who liked the early stories best, the ones full of drugs and fever-dream escapades, were still caught up in deluded fantasies of meaningful wreckage. Who knew what drugs they were doing after the end of our Friday-afternoon class? One told me he’d recently discovered his totem animal during a shamanic ritual. But the students who liked “Beverly Home” best, they were the ones who got it. That story believed in something besides the self-immolating antics of dysfunction—their flickering, intoxicating glow. It was gazing somewhere beyond the horizon, past the blaze.
One of Johnson’s early drafts of “Beverly Home” began like this:
I had sobered up just in time to have a nervous breakdown.
I had no ide
I had
I was a wi a whimpering dog inside. nothing more than that.
Johnson first tried to dry out in 1978, in his parents’ home in Tucson, where he was living with his “eccentric” grandmother Mimi, but he didn’t get sober for good until the early 1980s. “I was addicted to everything,” he told an interviewer decades later. “Now I just drink a lot of coffee.”
Johnson was “concerned about getting sober,” and knew this was “typical of people who feel artistic,” but he’d written only two stories and a handful of poems in ten years (while he was actively using) so he figured he didn’t have much to lose. In the decade after he got sober, he produced four novels, one collection of poetry, a collection of stories, and a screenplay. His was the arc I’d been looking for: the possibility of sobriety as jet fuel. He dedicated two of his novels to H.P., which I never would have recognized, years earlier, as shorthand for a Higher Power. He wrote the whimpering dog inside, without apology or instant redemption—and every once in a while, he wrote about the consolations this dog might find. “Approval was something I craved more than drugs or alcohol,” he wrote in an early draft of “Beverly Home.” “I hadn’t been able to get it in the bars, but it seemed attainable in the rooms.” He meant the rooms of recovery.
Are we really all that tormented? Jackson had wondered. Or is it something we
hang onto, foster, even cherish? In 1996, a younger writer wrote to Johnson: “I want to thank you for your unfailing support and friendship in helping me get acquainted with my alcoholism. It seems there are two kinds of American writers. Those who drink, and those who used to. You introduced me to the latter. Thanks, brother.”
At one Thursday-night meeting, I met a woman who was beautiful but fidgety—maybe mid-twenties, a few years younger than me, olive-skinned, with tight jeans, a shimmery blouse, and hair in a wispy brown bun. She moved as if she were breaking a rule by inhabiting her own skin, and didn’t want to get caught. Her eyes had dark hollows beneath them; she kept tucking back stray wisps of hair behind her ear. At a party in Iowa, I might have been threatened by her—might have watched how she talked to men, or to Dave—but in that church basement I recognized her discomfort so immediately and strongly that it made me fidget in my seat.
Shifting in her plastic chair, she spoke during the meeting about how hard it was to be in her first week, her tone clipped and uncertain. Afterward, I went up to her and introduced myself. “I really connected to what you said,” I told her, which was less about her words than the way she’d said them.
“I didn’t know what to say,” she said.
“That’s part of what I connected to,” I said. “And the part about drinking alone.”
She nodded and looked down. She seemed pleased. “Could I,” she started. “I mean, if it’s not strange…” I knew those pauses well, or at least my own version of them: Am I basically hurling myself on this stranger, right here in this basement?
“Exchange numbers?” I smiled. “I was just about to suggest it.”
Her name was Monica, and she was the first woman I ever sponsored. When she initially asked, I almost said, You might want a sponsor with a different drinking history. You might want a sponsor who knows the program better than I do. But what did I know about what she wanted? Maybe she drank like I drank; maybe she needed to hear from me that your drinking could be boring and still pretty fucking demoralizing. Maybe she needed to hear about the program from someone who was still learning it.
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