Nice Recovery

by Susan Juby

  “I got no way to prove you took the money,” he said. “But I hear you got a history with drugs and alcohol. And that’s enough for me.”

  I was instructed to get my things and go. My services were no longer needed.

  So ended my career in music store management and all the image enhancement that brought with it. Strangely, I walked out of Frugal Records as happy as I’d been in a long time. Having a job wasn’t the most important thing! I was sober and unemployed and practically prancing in my tall boots. It turned out I didn’t live or die by what other people thought of me. Who knew the people in the meetings would be so right!

  16

  Higher Power

  ANOTHER THING I felt free to ignore at my first meetings were all those suggestions about staying out of relationships for the first year. I mean, get real! I figured that advice was probably meant for the old people. For a twenty-year-old, a year is a long time. Waiting a year to get into a relationship was not part of my recovery plan.

  I’ve met other people who had similar reactions to the suggestion. Their response was to get into relationships as soon as possible. Some of those relationships worked out. Other ones, not so much. It’s notable that the young people I know who did wait the recommended year (and such people are approximately as rare as Andean cats) seemed better prepared when they finally did get involved. They’d taken the time to focus on themselves and their recovery and hadn’t been distracted by someone else. However, I wasn’t about to allow the experience and suggestions of others to get in the way of what I wanted to do.

  When I was about sixteen it had become evident, even to me, that I was a slave to alcohol and, to a lesser extent, drugs. Sure, getting loaded was fun sometimes and allowed me (at least for short increments) to be the person I wanted to be, but I knew that what looked like teen spirit in my teens was going to look like pathetic sot in my thirties. If there was one thing the beer commercials taught me, it was that hot girls didn’t projectile-vomit into crowds, as well as out the windows of moving vehicles. I was eventually going to have to quit drinking and taking drugs, but not until I was ready, which meant not before I was about to settle down with a nice man.

  I ended up in recovery ten years ahead of schedule. I was twenty but after a binge looked thirty and felt a hard-up fifty. I had no romantic prospects and was a disaster, spiritually, financially, emotionally, and physically. So much for my plan.

  Then I decided that even if I was going to be forced into premature recovery, I could still start working on the fiancé thing ASAP. Being sober would allow me to have a new kind of relationship, one based on mutual admiration, respect, and shared interest rather than one based on the fact that we both liked to get loaded.

  After my initial bad experiences with the barf guy and Hank, I’d had a few semi-serious boyfriends when I was in grades eleven and twelve and during the year when I was waiting to go off to college, also known as the “year of my perpetual blackout.” I liked older guys who drank a lot and who didn’t object to me doing so. They were good guys, but it wasn’t like I wanted to be anyone’s Number One. I was already in a committed relationship with beer and wine coolers and, on special occasions, Crown Royal and cocaine. Anyone I dated had to be prepared to take the back seat to those true loves. At parties, I was always telling my dates to “go ahead and leave without me” when they tried to suggest that 3 a.m. was late enough. The party was over when the booze and drugs were gone and not a minute before.

  My relationships tended to be predictable. I would break up with my boyfriends because they cheated (I loved cheaters, for some reason) or because the relationship interfered with my drinking. Occasionally, some unhealthy part of my boyfriends would kick in and they’d try to reconcile with me. This, I thought, was how relationships worked. Men tried to get back together and sometimes I would agree and sometimes I wouldn’t. The key thing is that I was always in charge and I always cared less than they did.

  When my all-consuming reliance on work was embarrassingly removed multiple times, I decided it was time to find someone to take my mind off my troubles.

  Unfortunately, this meant facing one of my biggest fears— dating sober. The only way I’d ever been able to start dating someone was to drink, heavily. I was usually as surprised as anyone else to find out I was in a new relationship because most of them started when I was in a blackout or at least not in a position to make informed decisions.

  When people, young or old, talk about their fear of being bored in sobriety, what a lot of them mean is that they don’t think they’ll be able to date or have sex without using. When they talk about the excitement of going to clubs and the nightlife, they often mean the excitement of hooking up at the end of the night. Alcoholics and addicts are notoriously lonely, and sexual intimacy is a way to forget about that for at least a little while.

  I didn’t want to be sober and painfully single for the next fifty or sixty years, but I couldn’t see how I could date without getting wasted. Also, the pool of eligible guys seemed so small. I knew that I couldn’t safely go out with a guy who drank or did drugs, because I couldn’t handle being around that life for any length of time. The next time I wound up in a lineup at a bar, they weren’t going to run out of booze. Part of me knew if I got loaded again, I might never want to sober up.

  That left who exactly in the fiancé candidate pile? One of the old guys in the church near my house? Fuck socks.

  My depression was noticed by a woman who attended the meeting at the church.

  “You know,” she said, “you should check out a young people’s meeting.”

  I looked at her. I’d been under the impression that I was the only young person trying to sober up in all of Toronto.

  “It’s held on Friday night. You might like it.”

  THE FIRST THING I noticed about people in the young people’s meeting is that the people weren’t all young. Which was a relief. But they were certainly younger than the people I’d seen so far. Most of them seemed to be in their mid- to late twenties. Also, they were in freakishly high spirits. I slunk into the room and looked around, noting the heads tossed back with raucous laughter, the high fives, the good-natured ribbing.

  Several of the guys in the room, while not fiancé material, were not hideous either. Several of them smiled warmly at me. I was immensely reassured by this. I still had it!

  As the meeting got started, I realized that these people were similar to the ones I’d already met. Some of them were drug addicts, some were alcoholic. There was a smattering of the eating disordered. But where the older people talked about destroying their marriages and losing their careers, these people talked about getting kicked out of school and college and about being sent to juvenile detention centres. They complained about angry parents rather than upset spouses.

  The other major difference with the young people’s meeting was that there was enough sexual energy floating around the room to power a Greek shipping magnate’s yacht. It was really quite bracing.

  When the meeting was over, a few of the guys came up to me and introduced themselves. Our greetings were awkward, since I was pathologically shy, but I left elated.

  Most treatment centres consider relationships in early recovery a virtual guarantee of relapse. People who get involved during treatment generally get asked to leave. If they hook up right after treatment, they may not be allowed to attend “alumni” or group meetings as a couple. Not long ago I was talking to my sponsor about how worried I was about a friend who got into a relationship days after he completed treatment. “Most of the people who don’t get into relationships in the first year are the ones who can’t,” she told me flatly. Well, there is that. But the risk is very real, especially when both parties are new in recovery.

  All I can say is that the short, electrically charged encounters at that young people’s meeting were enough to keep me from slitting my wrists until the following week, when I got to go back.

  The second young people’s meeting gav
e me a chance to do a more in-depth analysis of the guys in the room. There were the perky cokeheads, the funny crack heads, the morose junkies who specialized in bitter, entertaining stories about morbid subjects. Then there were the beefy alcoholic former jocks. This was my new dating pool. Every single one of them looked good to me. They gave me a new lease on life. Sick, I know. It was bad enough that I was going to have to be sober while everyone else my age was going to clubs and getting loaded and living the life, but the thought that I had to be single while doing it was too much. I wanted to get sober, not join a nunnery.

  Also, my basic insecurity about dating and social situations in general, combined with my new and rather shaky sober identity, made me feel completely untouchable to a regular guy. Who the hell was going to want to date an alcoholic twenty-year-old who’d been to the places and done the things I had? I hadn’t even been cool about it. I hadn’t been in a band or in prison or anything. It’s one thing to clean up after wreaking some real damage and making an impression on the world. It’s another thing entirely to do all the damage to yourself, pretty much, and glean nothing from it but a serious vitamin B deficiency, bad gums, poor self-esteem, and a collection of stories that centred mostly on gravel pit parties.

  Who was going to want to go out with someone like me? No one normal, I was sure. Then I started going to the young people’s meeting and I knew. Some of these guys would like to go out with someone like me.

  I also got a clearer sense of why experienced people and experts worried about relationships in early recovery. I listened as a girl in her mid-twenties with a badly set broken nose spent several minutes detailing her hideously abusive childhood. She said she knew that “new people should avoid relationships for the first year” but didn’t feel like that applied to her, since she’d been sober like almost eight months. Then she went on to say that she’d recently begun dating a sixty-year-old man she’d met in a meeting. “Too bad about the guy’s wife,” she said, with a shrug. “But he owns malls.”

  After she spoke, other people discussed the “thirteenth step,” which was an imaginary step in which a person with a decent length of sobriety picks up a new person under the guise of helping. Sign me up! I thought. I wasn’t into old men with malls, but a young one with a car would be good.

  The third time I went to the young people’s meeting, I made it my home group, which meant that I put my name and phone number on the group list. The following night, I got a call from one of the other members.

  “Jerry” was a genuine preppy, the kind I’d only seen in movies. In grade eleven, I’d attempted to turn myself into a prep, based entirely on my love of the Sparks’ “Eaten by the Monster of Love” on the Valley Girl soundtrack, as well as Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough.” As a small-town, blue-collar, heavy-drinking high school girl, I’d missed the prepster mark in almost every way (I was poor, I had iffy taste, and my only home was the one in the country, which had a septic system and vinyl rather than clapboard siding), but I was still fascinated with preps. And here was a real one, in the flesh. Well, on the phone.

  Jerry wasn’t very old, maybe twenty-six or so, but he had large permanent bags under his eyes which made him look like he’d spent too much time hanging around with Jay McInerney, which he may have. He wore oversized, expensive-looking sweaters with white T-shirts poking out underneath. His large jeans were held up by interesting belts, and his hair was a combination of spiky and tousled. I’d gathered from his comments at meetings that he was in art school and was recovering from an addiction to cocaine as well as booze.

  “Hey,” he said into the phone. “This is Jerry. From the young people’s group on Friday night.”

  I swallowed and tried not to hyperventilate. I could do this, I told myself. I could have a conversation with a strange but perfectly normal guy.

  “Hi,” I said, my voice shaking a bit. God, no wonder I drank. Talking while sober was awful.

  “I hope you don’t mind me calling.”

  “No,” I said, attempting not to sound like I was strangling on my own trachea.

  “So, you want to go out?”

  If there’d been a stick in my mouth I’d have bitten it in half right about then. I was having a seizure.

  I croaked out a yes and asked when. I was hoping he’d say in a week or two. That would give me time to get my breathing and heart rate under control. With any luck, I might stroke out and die and wouldn’t have to go.

  “How about now?” “Now?”

  It was 9:30 at night. Since I’d sobered up, I’d started going to bed early. That’s because the waking hours were the hardest ones. It was early August and the night outside was hot and still. Getting out of bed, getting dressed, and going out to meet a strange preppy felt far odder and more unexpected than anything I’d done while drinking.

  Jerry pulled up outside the house in an old blue Ford truck, the kind one of my old boyfriends from home might have driven. There were not a lot of old blue trucks on Toronto’s streets, at least not ones driven by art students as ironic accessories.

  I was four months into my sobriety and my new mod look had solidified. The hyper-neat was a good fit psychologically, as I was trying to get some control in my life. I wore only small black clothing and had cut my hair into a short, severe bob with startled-schoolgirl bangs. I wore only square-toed black shoes or the tall black boots. Elaborate fashion overhauls were something I noticed other young, newly sober people undertaking. One day someone would show up looking like a hippie. At the next meeting they were a rocker. It was like we were trying on identities to replace the ones we’d lost.

  Jerry didn’t open the door for me but watched me as I pulled myself into the passenger seat. I saw him stare at the boots. He smiled. He looked so complete to me. Self-possessed and finished somehow. Everyone I knew seemed half-finished. Especially me. Jerry drove us to Yonge Street and parked across the street from an enormous games arcade. We played video games for an hour and barely spoke. Then we browsed in a huge record store and after that went to an all-night café.

  Jerry started talking. He’d been sober since he was nineteen. He’d gone to a very expensive prep school in the United States, where he’d begun doing cocaine, then selling to his classmates. He started failing his classes and then got caught dealing. Instead of being sent to jail, he was shipped off to a famous treatment centre. The first thing he’d done when he arrived was to demand that they uncover and fill the pool that was being used as the floor of a meeting room. His sense of entitlement seemed glamorous and unreasonable. I could tell from the way he laughed about it, he agreed.

  While he was in treatment, his anorexic college girlfriend had been sent to treatment for her eating disorder. There she met an anorexic male model and the two had hooked up. Jerry informed me that he’d basically been depressed ever since.

  I thought Jerry’s story was the best I’d ever heard. That’s what addiction and love should look like! So classy! Like a movie!

  I felt unworthy in comparison and told him almost nothing about myself. There was no need to go babbling on about my embarrassing small-town past, my unfancy and incomplete education, and my homely, unvarnished alcoholism with a side order of minor drug addiction and workaholism.

  Jerry and I went out a few times a week. In a city where many students lived piled up two or three to a room, Jerry lived by himself in a renovated two-bedroom apartment that his mother paid for. It was just down the block from his art college. Sometimes I’d stay over at his place. I spent my time there feeling breathless at being in contact with so much good taste. He had very good dishes. High-thread-count sheets and handsome bedding. His furniture was new. He had none of the usual Escher, Munch, Monet, or Klimt student prints I saw in other students’ rooms. In fact, he scorned university students and their tastes as naïve. His walls were hung with original art, some of it his. Works in progress leaned against walls and filled most of the guest room.

  Around the time we started dating, althou
gh he made sure never to call it that, I’d pushed myself through a painful wall of fear to enroll myself in an English class at the University of Toronto. It was part of a program that allowed mature students who didn’t have the proper prerequisites to take one class. If you got a good enough mark in the course, you’d be allowed to enroll in the regular program. In other words, my high school marks (dreadful) and my college performance (worse) would be forgiven and I could be a real university student. I was beyond excited to be in school again, especially at U of T.

  One afternoon, Jerry dropped me off on campus for my class. Students swarmed all around us.

  “God,” he said. “Look at them.”

  I looked around and saw the students through his eyes. Most of them displayed no fashion sense to speak of (we were, after all, near the Engineering building). They wore jeans and backpacks. They looked preoccupied.

  “Yeah,” I said and gave a rueful laugh, pretending I was appalled by them, too, while all I wanted was to be one of them.

  “See you,” he said. I slammed the door and he drove away. He was not one to engage in PDAs. At least not yet.

  I waited for him to begin to pursue me. In my experience, that’s how romance worked. I had a dependency on alcohol and dated people who developed a dependency on me. In high school I’d become a minor legend for the cavalier way in which I treated some of my boyfriends. To my enemies, it was a sign that I was the most cold-hearted bitch to ever drink an Old Style. To my admirers … well, I didn’t really have many of those.

  But everything was upside down with Jerry. I was sober, and still painfully nervous around him, even though he was my boyfriend. Not that he ever used that word. But we spent a few nights a week together and were always together on weekends.

  I was sure that if I remained aloof and never let him know that I had feelings for him, he’d come around. He’d wake up one day and realize that he couldn’t live without me. And the balance of power would shift. That day would be a huge relief because somehow without my intending it, I’d become almost completely dependent on him.