The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  the unmistakable feeling of coming home… Ibid.

  Scientists describe addiction as a dysregulation… For a fuller account of the scientific mechanisms underlying addiction, see Carlton Erickson’s The Science of Addiction: From Neurobiology to Treatment (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). In chapter 3 Erickson outlines the basic mechanisms of chemical dependence, while in chapters 5, 6, and 7 he reviews the specific mechanisms of various substances.

  pathological usurpation… Ibid., 64.

  FACTUAL GAIN AND LOSS CHART ON UN-CONTROLLED DRINKING… Factual Gain and Loss Chart on Un-Controlled Drinking, Archives at the Center for Alcohol Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

  spiraling distress/addiction cycle… G. F. Koob and M. Le Moal, “Drug Abuse: Hedonic Homeostatic Dysregulation,” Science 278 (1997): 52–58.

  the chart explaining the spiraling distress/addiction cycle looks like a tornado… Erickson, The Science of Addiction, 59.

  When I look back at a night with a stranger in Nicaragua, I can say the GABA receptors in my neurons were activated by the rum in my veins… For a summary of several accounts of the mechanisms of alcohol on neurotransmitter systems, see Erickson, The Science of Addiction, 69. See also Neurochem Int. 37, no. 4 (October 2000): 369–76. “Alcohol enhances characteristic releases of dopamine and serotonin in the central nucleus of the amygdala.” Yoshimoto et al. “Alcohol and Neurotransmitter Interactions.” C. Fernando Valenzuela. NIAAA, http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh21-2/144.pdf.

  When I’m drunk it’s all right… Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, in The Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 262.

  We’re all dependent people… John Berryman, Recovery (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 154.

  densely affected by alcoholism… NIAA, “Collaborative Studies on Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) Study,” https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/research/major-initiatives/collaborative-studies-genetics-alcoholism-coga-study.

  In so much of your writing… there are so many hooks to hang the pain on, but no explanation of where the poison coat came from… David Gorin, manuscript notes. August 2016.

  The sky was bright red; everything was red… Elizabeth Bishop, “A Drunkard,” Georgia Review (1992). The fire that Bishop remembers witnessing was the Great Salem Fire of 1914. See Claudia Roth Pierpont, “Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Art of Losing,’” The New Yorker, March 6, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/elizabeth-bishops-art-of-losing.

  half-hearted disclaimer… Brett C. Millier, “The Prodigal: Elizabeth Bishop and Alcohol,” Contemporary Literature 39, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 54–76.

  Why do you drink?… (Don’t really answer)… John Berryman, handwritten note, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  I told him I drank a lot… Marguerite Duras, “The Voice in Navire Night,” Practicalities (London: William Collins Sons, 1990).

  The question of why stopped mattering… Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944), 221–22.

  In Junkie, Burroughs anticipates the questions… William Burroughs, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (New York: Ace Books, 1953), 5.

  bottle as breast…Adam Kaplin interview with the author, October 13, 2016.

  V. SHAME

  WHETHER WICKEDNESS WAS SOLUBLE IN ART… John Berryman, from a prefatory sonnet he wrote in 1966, qtd. in John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (London: Methuen & Co., 1984), 183.

  You licking your own old hurt… What the world to Henry… John Berryman, “Dream Song 74,” The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969).

  I am the little man who smokes & smokes… John Berryman, “Dream Song 22,” The Dream Songs.

  in the mood / to be a tulip… John Berryman, “Dream Song 92” (“Room 231: the forth week”), The Dream Songs.

  all regret, swallowing his own vomit… John Berryman, “Dream Song 310,” The Dream Songs.

  the anger of anyone who has been close to an active alcoholic and gotten hurt… Lewis Hyde, “Berryman Revisited,” in Recovering Berryman, ed. Richard Kelly and Alan Lathrop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).

  Diet: poor…John Berryman, handwritten note, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  half crabbed, half generous… Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1945), 43.

  Who’s been putting pineapple juice in my pineapple juice… Anecdote cited in John Berryman, Recovery (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 107.

  the fire of the tequila run down his spine… Lowry, Under the Volcano, 278.

  his greatest weakness… into his greatest strength… Malcolm Lowry, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 41.

  when Jackson published The Lost Weekend, in 1944, Lowry was devastated and indignant… For a wonderfully astute account of the Lowry-Jackson rivalry, see John Crowley’s The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).

  swift leathery perfumed alcoholic dusk… Lowry, Under the Volcano, 55.

  were taking an eternal sacrament… Ibid., 50.

  Do you realize that while you’re battling against death… Ibid., 281.

  The will of man is unconquerable… Ibid., 118.

  suddenly overwhelmed by sentiment… Ibid., 168.

  cantina in the early morning… How, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty… Ibid., 62–63.

  Ah none but he knew how beautiful… Ibid., 115.

  a great book about missing grandeur… Michael Wood, “The Passionate Egoist,” New York Review of Books, April 17, 2008.

  Vague images of grief and tragedy… Lowry, Under the Volcano, 111.

  Success may be the worst possible thing… Malcolm Lowry letter qtd. in D. T. Max, “Day of the Dead.” The New Yorker, December 17, 2007.

  He is the original Consul in the book… Dawn Powell qtd. in D. T. Max, “Day of the Dead.”

  His delirium tremens got so bad… Ibid.

  A little self-knowledge is a dangerous thing… Lowry, Under the Volcano, 232.

  He had lost the sun… Ibid., 264.

  creatures with scrawny necks, small mouths, emaciated limbs… Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2008), 1–2.

  They have much in common with the society that ostracizes them… Ibid.

  From the late sixties to the late eighties, the scientific studies that got the most press… John P. Morgan and Lynn Zimmer, “The Social Pharmacology of Smokeable Cocaine: Not All It’s Cracked Up to Be,” in Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice, ed. Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 36.

  the definition of a drug was any substance… Ibid.

  “Cocaine Rat” was the title of a 1988 PSA video… Partnership for a Drug-Free America, “Cocaine Rat,” 1988. The pellets in the video are also misleading: most rats were surgically outfitted with a “permanent injection apparatus” in their backs. They were literally built for addiction, as well as being trapped in conditions that primed them for it.

  In the early eighties, these scientists designed “Rat Park”… Bruce Alexander, “Addiction: The View from Rat Park,” 2010. The original results from Rat Park were published in B. K. Alexander et al., “Effect of Early and Later Colony Housing on Oral Ingestion of Morphine in Rats,” Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior 15, no. 4 (1981): 571–76. Carl Hart also gives an account of the “Rat Park” experiment in High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society (New York: Harper, 2013).

  The results from the original Rat Park experiment have also been replicated. See S. Schenk et al., Neuroscience Letters 81 (1987): 227–31; and M. Solinas et al., Neuropsychopharmacology 34 (2009): 1102–11. For a graphic account of Rat Park, see Stuart McMillen’s “Rat Park.”

  What
was it that did in reality make me an opium eater?… Thomas De Quincey, “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” London Magazine, 1821.

  the interior jigsaw’s missing piece… David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Little, Brown, 1996), 350.

  The Collaborative Studies on Genetics of Alcoholism is an ongoing research project… The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism defines the mission and method of COGA as follows: “To learn more about how our genes affect vulnerability to alcoholism, NIAAA has funded the Collaborative Studies on Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) since 1989. Our goal is to identify the specific genes that can influence a person’s likelihood of developing alcoholism. COGA investigators have collected data on more than 2,255 extended families in which many members are affected by alcoholism. The researchers collected extensive clinical, neuropsychological, electrophysiological, biochemical, and genetic data on the more than 17,702 individuals who are represented in the database. The researchers also have established a repository of cell lines from these individuals to serve as a permanent source of DNA for genetic studies” (https://www.niaaa.nih .gov/research/major-initiatives/collaborative-studies-genetics-alcoholism-coga-study). More information about COGA, along with a fuller account of its findings, can be found in Laura Jean Bierut et al., “Defining Alcohol-Related Phenotypes in Humans: The Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism,” National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, June 2003, https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh26-3/208-213.html.

  What contributes to being at greater risk for alcoholism? Traits associated with physiology (metabolism and organ sensitivity), with psychopharmacology (structures of reward and aversion in the brain), with personality (impulsivity and sensation-seeking), and with psychopathology (depression and anxiety). Carol A. Prescott, “What Twin Studies Teach Us about the Causes of Alcoholism,” paper for Samuel B. Guze Symposium on Alcoholism, Washington University School of Medicine, 2004, http://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/guzepresentation2004/4. The “alcohol dependence” phenotype was measured according to DSM and WHO classifications.

  The evidence supporting a genetic basis for alcoholism is pretty much indisputable… One study examining alcohol abuse in twins showed a 76% concordance rate in monozygotic twins, and a 61% concordance rate in dizygotic twins. For more information, see Roy Pickens et al., “Heterogeneity in the Inheritance of Alcoholism: A Study of Male and Female Twins,” Archives of General Psychiatry 48, no. 1 (1981): 19–28. See also Erickson, The Science of Addiction: From Neurobiology to Treatment (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 84–85.

  For shame is its own veil… Denis Johnson, “Where the Failed Gods Are Drinking,” The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995).

  The novel takes place in Manhattan during the summer of the 1967 Newark riots, evoking New York as an orchestra of noise and need and possibility… Cain summons the glamour and grit of Harlem at once, the “big shiny cars caught in neon sparkle like jewels” and the way these cars look “dull with dew and exhaustion in the morning,” as he watches from a diner at dawn, drinking coffee, and watching the fluorescence bring out the wrinkles of hungover revelers. When he visits the West Side housing projects where he was born, he describes Lincoln Center (“marble bathroom, carpeted halls, chandeliers”), which is right across the street but a world away—“I ain’t never been anywhere like that,” one woman explains, “wouldn’t know how to act, got nobody to go with.” One of the defining features of Cain’s experience has been feeling like a mascot of upward mobility—a carrier of collective dreams, and an ambassador between worlds: “Did not think of myself as black or white,” he says, “but marginal man, existing somewhere in time and space on the edge of both.” He feels anger at having been expected to carry this burden of upward mobility in the first place, and shame about the ways he has failed. George Cain, Blueschild Baby (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970), 50, 69, 115, 177.

  a strange moon hung in the sky… calm, terribly sudden and infinite… Ibid., 197–99.

  a character who is smart and full of yearning, but often acts aggressively, even callously… The character of George Cain is adamantly—purposefully— objectionable. Much of his aggression directs itself at white characters, and the novel refuses to apologize for it or condemn it—it simply dramatizes this aggression, and never forgets its context. Cain forces himself on a white teenage girl, neglects his daughter’s (white) mother, and fantasizes about killing a white man. Instead of papering over his character’s anger in deference to respectability politics, Cain allows this anger to live on the page, alongside depictions of all the social realities that lie beneath it.

  bones scraping against one another inside… Ibid., 200.

  to live life unhindered… Ibid., 7.

  nodding junkies… victims of the Newark rebellion… no longer [as] the chosen driven to destruction by their awareness and frustration, but only lost victims, too weak to fight… Ibid., 129.

  I knew better… Quotes from Jo Lynne Pool and almost all of the biographical information about George Cain in this section, from the interview conducted on March 30, 2016.

  he had the makings of a book… Jo Lynne Pool interview with the author, March 30, 2016. Cain also had the makings of a book jacket bio. The first edition from McGraw-Hill is careful to disclaim its author’s bio as one Cain himself wrote. “The author writes: ‘George Cain was born Scorpio, 1943, in Harlem Hospital, New York City. Attended public and private schools in the city, and entered Iona College on scholarship. Left in his junior year to travel, spending time in California, Mexico, Texas, and prisons.’”

  the most important work of fiction by an Afro-American… Addison Gayle Jr., review of Blueschild Baby, by George Cain, New York Times, January 17, 1971, 3.

  George Cain, former addict, emerges phoenix-like… Ibid.

  A few days after getting his first royalty check, he ran into one of his friend’s little brothers on the street and took him to a record store nearby… Rasheed Ali, “Tribute to a ‘Ghetto Genius,’” The Black American Muslim, http://www.theblackamericanmuslim.com/george-cain/.

  What were you like when you were doing well?… Adam Kaplin interview with the author, October 13, 2016.

  Drugs dashed these hopes… William Grimes, “George Cain, Writer of ‘Blueschild Baby,’ Dies at 66,” New York Times, October 29, 2010.

  The book was subtitled A Love Story…Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story (New York: The Dial Press, 1996).

  Last year our drunken quarrels had no explanation… Robert Lowell, “Summer Tides,” New Selected Poems, ed. Katie Peterson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2017.

  Dear Sir: This is a funny letter… Ervin Cornell letter to the US Bureau of Narcotics, June 26, 1939. RG 511—Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, National Institute of Mental Health, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

  nearly three thousand people showed up each year requesting entry… Nancy D. Campbell, J. P. Olsen, and Luke Walden, The Narcotic Farm (New York: Abrams, 2010), 63.

  If theres any way in the world to be cured I wont to try it… J. S. Northcutt to Federal Bureau of Narcotics, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

  I have been smoking marijuana cigarettes for six years… Milton Moses to Federal Bureau of Narcotics, May 8, 1938, RG 511, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

  Dear Sir, I would like very much… Paul Youngman to Federal Bureau of Narcotics, December 1, 1945. RG 511, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

  PLEASE SEND APPLICATION FORMS… Chester Socar telegraph to “Bureau of Narcotics,” September 6, 1941. RG 511, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

  The press called the Narco Farm a “New Deal for Addicts”… Campbell et al., The Narcotic Farm, 12.

  a Lexington newspaper ran a contest to get suggestions from local residents… Ibid., 36–37.

  In truth, the prison-hospital-Big-Shot-Dream-Castle
was still figuring out what it was… In addition to “rehabilitating” addicts—or ostensibly in service of the rehabilitation of addicts everywhere—the Narco Farm also used its residents as test subjects in a series of ongoing experiments (ostensibly in service of the rehabilitation of addicts everywhere). Many of these experiments were questioned by ethical boards decades later, during the 1950s. The Narco Farm’s Addiction Research Center was conducting groundbreaking but deeply controversial experiments into the mechanisms of withdrawal and the possibilities of a non-addictive opiate painkiller, and was one of the first places that ever tested methadone treatments. For more information, see Campbell et al., The Narcotic Farm.

  courteous treatment that we discovered at the farm… Ibid., 83. The other details of life at Lexington in this paragraph are also taken from this history, including the particulars of labor and recreation: tomatoes and dentistry and dairy farming.

  a magician named Lippincott performed at the Narco Farm… “Magician to Appear at Hospital Tonight,” Lexington Leader, November 15, 1948. RG 511, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

  In 1937, the hospital logged 4,473 collective patient hours of horseshoe tossing and 8,842 hours of bowling… Campbell et al., The Narcotic Farm, 142.

  banana-smoking epidemic… William Burroughs Jr., Kentucky Ham (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 100.

  So many musicians… at Lexington… Campbell et al., The Narcotic Farm, 152.

  The treatment is, for the most part, a skillful rearrangement… Robert Casey, “Destiny of Man ‘Traded In’ at Kentucky Laboratory,” Chicago Daily News, August 23, 1938. RG 511, National Archives, College Park, Maryland. A front-page story in the Atlanta Georgian ran under a cartoon showing a long line of addicts marching toward the soaring towers of the Narco Farm with a blinding sun captioned as “Public Enlightenment.” The story’s message was earnest: Every state should have a Narco Farm because it was a necessary humanitarian reform. But the Narco Farm was uneasily perched between grand rhetoric and de facto punishment, and much of its rhetoric of rehabilitation rang hollow in practice. Many addicts had come to their addictions to escape the trap of their lives, then found themselves trapped again, inside the habit itself, and so they’d sought the promised liberty of another containment—the Narco Farm itself.