The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  The first time we got together, I sat on a bar stool in Monica’s kitchen—in a brick apartment complex in the suburbs, with a view of a parking lot—and she told me about coming home from work and getting quietly drunk on her futon. The ghosts of those nights whispered around us, stirring her scarves, passed out on her sequined throw pillows. I wanted to help her, and I could see how much she wanted help—how much she wanted to give herself to recovery—which only made me nervous. What future can I give this woman? I wondered, as if her future were mine to give. What’s the right thing to say next? So I grasped at the ladder rungs of what other people had said to me before: my own sponsors, the people I’d heard at meetings. I told her my story, what it was like, and then she told me hers. We followed the script. And honestly, it’s hard to say what she would have gotten if I’d tried to reinvent it.

  The obsession I’d described was exactly what she’d felt, Monica said. It was what a million other people had felt, too. It wasn’t anything original, our yearning—and our conversation wasn’t original either. I could have been anyone, and she could have been anyone. But there we were, on our stools, in that particular Connecticut apartment, in that particular twilight. It wasn’t new, our talk. It was just new for us.

  During those early days of sponsoring Monica—while both of us found solace in the simple fact of communion—a group of incarcerated female addicts was working a chain gang in the Arizona desert. Their guards made them chant: “We are the chain gang, the only female chain gang.” They wore T-shirts that said I WAS A DRUG ADDICT. Or: CLEAN(ING) AND SOBER. They lived in Tent City, a cluster of sweltering tents full of scorpions on the ground and mice in the trash heaps. Temperatures in the tents often hit 140 degrees. “If I had to design a system that was intended to keep people addicted,” clinician Gabor Maté told a journalist, “I’d design exactly the system we have right now.” João Goulão, the architect of Portugal’s drug decriminalization, believes the “terroristic” approach pioneered by Harry Anslinger—dealing with addiction “by chaining, by humiliating”—is “the best way to make [addicts] wish to keep using drugs.”

  But Anslinger’s legacy has endured. Tent City was the brainchild of one of his protégés, Joe Arpaio, who was hired by the Bureau of Narcotics in 1957 and served as sheriff of Maricopa County for twenty-four years, from 1993 through 2016. When journalist Johann Hari interviewed Arpaio for his 2015 book, Chasing the Scream—a dizzying account of the lineage and devastating legacy of drug criminalization—Arpaio proudly showed Anslinger’s signature framed and hanging on his office wall. “You got a good guy there,” Arpaio said. With Tent City, Arpaio had finally—literally—made good on the dreams of the Los Angeles police officer whom Anslinger had quoted years earlier: “These people are in the same category as lepers, and… the only defense society has against them is segregation and isolation whenever possible.”

  In 2009, at a prison twenty-two miles west of Tent City, one prisoner—Number 109416—was literally cooked alive in a cage in the middle of the desert, a bare outdoor holding cell with nothing more than a chain-link roof shielding her from the sun. She’d been sent there as punishment for a minor disciplinary infraction. Prisoner 109416 was serving time for solicitation, but her prostitution had been supporting her meth habit for years. Her addiction got her incarcerated, and it ultimately got her killed. Her body was discovered with blisters and burns all over her skin. According to one witness, her eyeballs were “as dry as parchment.” Her temperature was recorded at 108 degrees before she died. That was as high as the paramedics’ thermometers went.

  Before she died in a holding cell, Prisoner 109416 lived as Marcia Powell. In Chasing the Scream, Hari excavates the human particulars of her life from the dehumanizing tragedy of her death. She was a teenage runaway in California, sleeping on the beach sand for warmth and washing in McDonald’s bathrooms. She was generous and drawn to bodies of water. She loved panning for gold in the lakes of Arizona. She cooked a full breakfast for her boyfriend’s dog each morning: eggs and sausages.

  Marcia Powell died in 2009, the same year I got sober for the first time. While she was in a cage in the middle of the desert, I was getting welcomed into church basements, handed poker chips, bombarded with phone numbers. I was walking into meetings where my body was treated as valuable simply because it was in the room, simply because it was. I didn’t have to march in a chain gang picking up trash tossed by commuters who’d voted for the sheriff who was making me wear a T-shirt that said I WAS A DRUG ADDICT. What luck. What luck not to wake up in a cage, or a 140-degree tent in the Arizona desert; not to serve time for the thrall that had already corroded me.

  Marcia Powell’s death in the desert is another glitch in the song of my pain as private. It had been possible for that song to play seamlessly in Iowa City, where I ordered my whiskey shots in the company of mythic poets—white men serving the brutal god of their white logic. But in the world where Marcia Powell died in the desert, where Melanie Green faced a grand jury for being a pregnant addict, where Jennifer Johnson was initially convicted of delivering a controlled substance to her own child, where George Cain got a gun pulled on him in a doctor’s office, where Billie Holiday died handcuffed to a hospital bed—in this world, the story of my drinking is not a private story. I used to think it was, or that it only involved me, and maybe also the men I’d been fucked by and fought with, the man who hit me on the street, the men with my last name, who drank before I was born.

  But the story of my sadness was never just mine. It has always included strangers: not just the strangers I met in meetings, but the strangers whose dependence had taken them to highway chain gangs rather than church basements, the strangers who weren’t stopping at the Stop & Shop to pick up off-brand coffee for old-timers. My story included the woman who died in a cage in a desert, or her story included me; not just because of my guilt—the guilt of my privilege, or my survival—but because we both put things inside our bodies to change how we felt.

  It’s easy to forget that Prisoner 109416 and I are part of the same story, because we have been granted the right to tell very different tales about our pain. According to the scripts of our culture, one of us is a victim, and the other a prisoner. But keeping our stories apart, understanding them as unrelated, would ratify the logic that let our fates diverge in the first place: the desert cage, the basement chorus. Our stories are both stories about coming to depend on a substance—to crave it, seek it, use it—and I no longer want to live by the traditions that keep them apart.

  When I finally visited the Narcotic Farm in 2014—eight decades after it opened and fifteen years after it had been converted to a full-fledged prison—I found its soaring brick buildings enclosed by tangled loops of silver barbed wire. Its aspirational architecture, cloisters and courtyards and magisterial art deco facades, seemed sinister beneath these ragged, gleaming coils and their brute reminder of prison’s purpose: keeping punished bodies quarantined.

  My guide, who was in charge of media relations, used the language of rehabilitation, but it was often just as chilling as the language of punishment. “Maybe he’s had a couple of infractions, made a couple bad choices,” he said, describing a typical prisoner deemed eligible for minimum security, “but we still believe he’s programmable.” Programmable: the troubling descendant of an older faith in the ways an institution could “rearrange” someone.

  Since the Lexington facility had been converted to a prison, it was no longer exclusively dedicated to treating addicts, but it still had one major program committed to addiction: a nine-month residential drug abuse program, known as RDAP and housed in something called the Veritas Wing. Posters invited participants to become “Navigators” or “Expeditors,” to follow in the footsteps of cartoon men who fixed things or assisted others. The program preached the dangers of eight major “thinking errors,” including indolence, entitlement, and sentimentality, which it defined as the impulse to invoke self-serving emotional excuses for one’s crimes. In the
community room, a converted bowling alley, I sensed the ghosts of old attempts at rehabilitation: 8,842 hours of bowling logged in 1937. Now inmates gathered in this room to give each other push-ups (compliments) and pull-ups (suggestions). The cell blocks were named after virtues—like Humility Alley, a self-contained set piece of irony that seemed to insist that the disempowerment of incarceration would grant access to virtue. Do you still know everything? the drug-court judge had asked an addict. Willing to LISTEN now?

  My PR guide was proud to show me all the prison’s vocational facilities: the Braille workshop, where inmates designed Braille books for blind kids in pre-K, and the bare wooden frame of a house, in the central open-air courtyard, that got built and rebuilt by various carpentry classes, its roof beams covered with pigeon shit. It seemed strange that the birds could come and go as they pleased, while the men remained. My guide proudly pointed out their Very Pluralist Religious Architecture: the Native American sweat lodge, the Wicca fire pit, the Asatru fire pit—this last one referred to with a smugly casual air, as if I would say, Yes, of course, the Asatru fire pit, but when I asked how many Asatru inmates they’d had I got no solid answer.

  “Every inmate is a walking testimonial to a victim,” one of the wardens told me, which I knew wasn’t true, at least not as he meant it, and seemed a sentimental thinking error of its own. The warden translated the tattoo on my arm perfectly from Latin (“I am human, nothing human is alien to me”), then said: “Not sure it’s true, though.” He assured me there were prisoners who were alien to me, people who had done things so bad I couldn’t possibly understand them. But I didn’t believe in the same categorical divide he believed in, and I agreed with what he said only insofar as it insisted on the limits of my knowledge. I knew there was plenty I couldn’t understand about the men incarcerated here, plenty I couldn’t see behind the barbed wire and the scenic inmate-built gazebo, past the welding simulators and the A-frame caked in bird shit, the sweat lodge and the fire pits, past the actual and straw-men victims who stood behind the fully human inmates all around me, men to whom I was not allowed to speak.

  I asked the education warden what he knew about the prison-hospital this place had been, and he told me he knew all about it. It had been an experiment in rehabilitation, he said, and it failed.

  Instead of a cage in the desert, or a cell on Humility Alley, I got fellowship. I got to hear people describe their first drink, always so specifically conjured. It usually came out tender and liberated, like a eulogy for a bully, and carried the whiff of unfinished business in its particulars: the gleam of a whiskey bottle, the nauseating sweetness of cooking sherry, the walnut shelves or squeaky metal trolley. I was humbled, almost scared, by how sharply I remembered my own first drink, at my brother’s graduation party: the upholstery grain of the couch; the jutting stone fireplace; the flinty crackle of champagne. How could I remember it so well if some part of me didn’t still crave it?

  If memory and longing were two radio dials tuned to the same frequency, then others were listening as well. A woman with multiple sclerosis named Petra said, “It was all day, every day.” She talked about drinking to forget the fact of living in her ill body, and the embarrassment of knocking her wheelchair into chairs and tables, but there was also something in her voice, almost wistful, that missed the escape. A woman named Lorrie—obese and impeccably made up, crying so hard she shook—came to a meeting drunk and said she’d once gotten drunk with her rapist after he raped her. Just this morning, she’d gotten up at six-thirty so she’d have time to buy liquor before the seven-thirty meeting. I took her out to a diner afterward, where she got an Oreo milk shake and I drank so much black coffee I thought I was going to pee for hours. She told me she tried to hit a meeting during every available spot of free time because she was afraid she might drink otherwise, and I thought: I want to help you. I don’t know how. I told her about getting drunk and letting a guy finish fucking me because it was easier than stopping him. She said, “Exactly.” I don’t think she meant it was exactly what had happened to her, because it wasn’t what had happened to her. I think she meant there was a place drinking can take you where you forget that your body even matters, and we’d both spent time there.

  I started giving rides to Wendy, twenty years old, the girl with a colostomy bag I’d met in a church basement across town. One morning when I came to pick her up, she was clearly drunk, holding a huge Styrofoam cup full of 7-Eleven coffee from the night before that she’d microwaved that morning, she explained in a slurred voice, because she didn’t want to be wasteful. It was as if she wanted to compensate for being drunk by explaining some small thing she’d done right. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t just leave her in her driveway. Or could I? The story I’d told myself about her recovery went something like this: This cool older woman started giving me rides, and showed me that sobriety could be something I actually WANTED. But her sobriety story wasn’t mine to write. I drove her to the meeting anyway.

  If I understood anything that winter, I understood how difficult it could be to let go of what you loved, even if you’d decided it wasn’t what you needed. It was the claw marks all over again. A few months after breaking up, Dave and I met one night at a swanky hotel on his block downtown. It was the kind of get-together where you’d say, “Let’s get drinks,” except we both knew I’d get a seltzer and cranberry with lime. We sat on low leather couches, in the dim light, and ordered dessert to give ourselves a reason to stay: doughnuts dusted in cinnamon sugar, served alongside a ramekin of hot vanilla cream. It reminded me of the first night we’d ever kissed—how we’d stood by the kitchen sink of our friend’s house for hours, refilling our cups of water, just so we could keep talking. We stayed at the hotel bar until it closed, sometime past midnight, like strangers who’d just met, like people without a history. It was recklessness without the alibi of drunkenness, running on the fuel of club soda and juice. I woke up in his bed the next morning, baked with late-winter light—in his home that was not my home, under his sheets that were not my sheets.

  Everything that happened next happened without booze as pretext or excuse: I saw Dave sober. I slept with him sober. We ate late-night cookies from the cookie shop on his block, sober. But it didn’t exactly feel sober. Before our early-morning meetings, I was still going on hikes with Luke. When it got warm enough, another man I’d met in meetings took me sailing on the Long Island Sound, where I lay on the canvas mesh stretched across the bow, glazed by sun, and loved the uncluttered sense of possibility that lived in the company of someone with whom I carried no baggage, no resentment, no mistakes. When I went on early-morning hikes with Luke, I kept our flirtation at a certain distance: far enough away that it wouldn’t become an actual relationship, close enough to sense its glow. These times with other men were not against the rules—in those months of purgatory, Dave and I had none—but they felt selfish anyway, a way of hoarding affirmation so I wouldn’t ask for more of it from Dave. I no longer believed I deserved it from him. Because I wasn’t in a relationship with Dave any longer, I no longer expected as much from him—which reminded me, in an uncomfortable way, of giving up drinking: how possible it felt to drink, once I wasn’t drinking, how it shimmered in the rearview mirror.

  That winter Susan and I started meeting at a downtown bistro for our sponsor meetings. The restaurant was always empty, the flagging business of a friend she was trying to support. The long tally of my second Fifth Step was bound up with the hush of that room in the late afternoons, the light thick and milky as cappuccino foam, the paired tastes of sweet milky coffee and french fries. So much of sobriety was full of oddly twined tastes: mint gum and cream-filled vanilla cookies at meetings; onion rings and milk shakes and omelets on postmeeting diner runs, with everyone on different sleeping schedules, swapping bites off one another’s plates.

  I didn’t talk to Susan about the fact that I’d started seeing Dave again. It seemed messy and inexplicable and maybe unwise, what we were doing, and I did
n’t know how to put it in the context of my sober narrative. It was the blemish of a ragged plotline. One day Susan told me—with real pain in her voice—that she could feel me pulling away from her. It was hard to make a date with me and then I kept postponing them. At first I wanted to protest: I did everything I was supposed to! I filled out everything on my inventory! But it felt good to tell Susan the truth—that I hadn’t told her about things with Dave because they seemed too messy to fit inside our conversations or my step work.

  “That’s exactly your problem,” Susan told me. “You don’t know how to say anything when it’s still a mess inside you. You need to have everything figured out before you say it out loud.”

  Berryman started Recovery as an ode to fellowship, but the novel wasn’t an account of his recovery so much as a projected vision of the recovery he never fully experienced. It was an exhortation to himself to recover better, but Berryman couldn’t stay sober the whole time he was writing it. A friend of mine once observed that writing about yourself is “like trying to make a bed while you’re still in it,” and in Recovery the lump under the sheets is palpable. Even the chapter titles expose the novel as a document of maddening repetition rather than progressive redemption: “The First Step” is followed by “The Last Two First Steps,” which is followed by “Dry Drunk.” After the first First Step, there’s another First Step, and then another First Step, and after all that Severance is somehow still a dry drunk.

  Berryman’s marginal notes on an early draft of the novel, when he’s listing the “symptoms” of an alcoholic, suggest that he’s still reckoning with self-diagnosis (“drinking in the morning—drinking on the job—These are not the marks of a social drinker”) and they testify to his relapses: “infinite resolutions—periods on the wagon—terrible remorse.” As Severance confesses on the eighth page of Recovery, “‘Sincerity’ was nothing in this game.” A hundred and sixty pages later he says: “I have lately given up the words ‘sincerely’ and ‘honestly’ as mere con-words designed by my diseased brain to support its lying products.” He has given up on sincerity again, more than a hundred pages after he gave up on it the first time. One character accidentally writes his Third Step prayer, May I Do Thy Will Always, as May I Do My Will Always.