by David Carr
Walking aimlessly around a locked ward, sleeping in a place where others came in my room and rooted around, I was back to where I had been so many years before, standing with a bunch of my peers who were hugging their marks and asking when the next pill roll was. It had been seventeen years, but I remembered all of it.
The message conveyed by waking up with your face suctioned to a plastic institutional mattress by your own sweat is elegant and direct. You are not a nice suburban drunk. Play with whiskey, it will play with you. No, I didn’t shoot dope in my neck or hit anyone or supply hookers with drugs. The bottom still arrived.
I skipped the dance of the low-sloping foreheads—oh, I mean quality time with my fellow addicts in the meds line—on my fourth day, Sunday morning, October 2. True to his word, the doc kicked me loose. “Good luck out there,” he said with a wave.
I waited for Jill on the street. She walked up, took a hard look at me, and asked if I was sure I was ready to come home. “Why, you want me to head back up to Happy Acres? No thanks. Let’s go.”
I got home and had a long talk on the phone with my new friend at work about treatment, about inpatient versus out, about the next step. Money was an issue, and treatment was going to be expensive. I was a little beside myself, not knowing how to act now that I was back to being the problem. “Who is to say that you don’t just need to get back into meetings? Intensely, like ninety in ninety days?” my friend suggested.
“Remember,” he said, before he hung up, “you don’t ever have to feel like this again.” I mentioned that I had been in and out of meetings, that I had drop-kicked away fourteen hard-earned years of sobriety. “Those fourteen years and everything you accomplished are still yours,” he said, adding that this was about the next fourteen.
I went to a beginner’s meeting near my office, raising my hand and offering my paltry count of days sober. Five days, eleven, twenty-three, and so on. I went to meetings in Montclair, downtown, uptown, but mostly in Midtown. I rejoined the cult, showed up early, said hello to people, drank my share of the Kool-Aid, and was suddenly counting weeks, months, now years, and if things go my way, many more.
Sam had told me in very simple words when I got back to work that his support and that of the institution were unconditional. He’d wink when he would see me tearing out for my twelve-thirty recovery meeting. Some of my close friends at work noticed that I had put a cork in it, but it was not a major topic of discussion. Drinking was not something I was anxious to speak about.
Slowly, I remembered who I was. Hope floats. The small pleasures of being a man, of being a drunk who doesn’t drink, an addict who doesn’t use, buoyed me. One thing led to another, as they say. After a couple of years of in and out, drunk and not, I had two-going-on-three years, and not once has the monster snuck up on me, made me feel like I might go back. Beyond experiencing a nice, firm bottom and sticking with the meetings, I started to remember how straightforward and manageable my life had been before I picked up that first drink in the kitchen.
When I went up to the Adirondacks to start on the book in the summer of 2007, I got a call from my friend in recovery at work, who had by now retired. He had a friend who was running a meeting and needed a speaker at a certain Midtown detox, mentioning the place I had flopped into two years before. Had I ever heard of it?
I went down to the city and took the meeting. The place was rugged, like I remembered it. There was a major beef in the middle of the proceedings, and a few of the guys had fresh scars from the street, but this time, remarkably, I felt like I fit right in. Then again, at the end of the meeting, they let me out.
As I sat in our cabin and wrote the book, every day I stared at the wreckage of my past. I went to more meetings. The nice, friendly one in Saratoga, New York, where people talked about parking tickets, sick parents, and their cats having Leukemia. The scary, dark one down the mountain in the washed-up mill town where the meeting is called to order by a gavel that consists of a screwdriver jammed into a piece of wood. I could be picky, but they all look and feel sort of the same to me. No more Goldilocks—this one is too soft, this one is too hard—they all feel just right.
60
HALF-ZEIMERS
The final interviews of the summer confronted me. The twins.
Neither of them knew me as an addict or drunk, but they were now nineteen, and after growing up thinking that I hung the moon, they had watched me face-plant. When the twins did their respective essays for college, what I had thought was a fairly straightforward story—boy meets girl, girl and boy have twins, boy and girl combust, boy and twins live happily ever after—in their eyes had deepened and become more complicated. They were the ones, after all, who grew up without their mother. They were the ones who had to teach me how to be a parent. They were the ones who had to find a place to stand after I got married. And after hearing me say all their lives that all good things came from sobriety, they watched me throw that down a rat hole.
I have enormous regard for who Erin and Meagan have become and how they run their shows. They came from nothing and became their own damn things. I don’t own their successes. Their status as independent, brilliant young women is something that fills me with the kind of wonder I suppose all parents have, but their trip has been all the more remarkable. After spending months staring at the medical records, the pictures, the journals, I think about how much they have gone through traveling in the vapor trail of adults who had a lot of growing up to do themselves.
But to ask them, to talk to them, was a different matter. If they were the nicest things that ever happened to me, was something even close to the reverse true?
Erin and I spent the summer in the Adirondacks together. She tended bar and waited tables, and I was locked in a room typing. We were uneasy roommates—a first-time book writer and a nineteen-year-old soon-to-be college sophomore, two of the most self-involved humans on earth. And now it was time to talk. Erin is a reflexive bright-sider and a bit of a sensualist. When we went for a ride in the car when she was little, she would say, “I love this world because there are so many things I love in it.” She is a kid, by now a person, who has always seen the glass as half full, and when it’s empty, simply finds a way to fill it herself. A pop-culture savant and a very gifted writer and talker, her sunny affect hides abundant resolve.
She is just about to head back to the University of Wisconsin, and you get a clear feeling that she can’t wait—not just to get away from me and the skeevy book I am working on, but because she is building a life there. When we talk, it is clear that she wishes her mom had been different, wishes Jill had been different, wishes I had been different, but she believes that everybody did the best that they could, including her.
“Just looking at my origins and what I was brought up like, the two-pound baby, and all that,” she said. “I read the health records, had so many problems back then, and look at me now. I’m going into my sophomore year of college, I did pretty good, have friends, am smart, I can do certain things well. Yeah, I would say life was kind to me.
“Meagan and I, we’re smarter because you are our dad,” she said, looking into the camera and not to me. “We learned a lot from you.” She turned toward me. “You’re an intelligent guy. Courtesy, respect, all those things that I see some of my peers lacking, I know it’s because of my upbringing, not just solely because of you but because of Kathy, our day-care person, because of Jo-Jo, because of Grandma Diane. It was a group effort, and it turned out. You were our tribal leader.”
Erin is a changeling, ambling through hair colors, piercings, and fashions like other people flick channels. She judges no one and expects no judgment in return. She has little relationship with her mother to speak of—too much drama for her—and an indifferent one with Jill that is morphing into something more substantial now that they are out of each other’s hair.
She and I are connected, not just by our common history but by a love of all forms of pop culture. We trade movies and MP3s, spending hours cha
tting about the aesthetic value of various artifacts. The week before she heads back to college, we get in the car and drive to a run-down but wonderful supper club/bar thirty miles away. Like always, she has an iPod along, rifling through all the songs she wants me to hear. With a bit of a drumroll, she cues up “At the Bottom of Everything” by Bright Eyes, a band we both adore that sings about meeting the future with “our flashlights and our love.” It is ostensibly about a plane crash, but its raucous chorus reminds that there is happiness in taking any trip, even one that ends in a fiery death, together. It’s a gorgeous song, full of hope, terror, and portent, all leavened by the power of human love. We are having a moment. The sun is beginning to hide in the valleys we tear past, and as dusk becomes dark, a very full moon makes a spectacular appearance. Her hand slips into mine. We will be fine.
Much of the collateral damage that went with the life I chose landed on Meagan. She spent her time as a toddler entwined in my legs and became a young girl who wondered if anyone she came across might be her mother, and that search did not yield the warmth and affection she sought. She began to achieve amazing things in school and in sports to bring her a measure of value, but when that didn’t work, she began to comfort herself in negative ways. Food became a measure of worthiness and punishment, while depression joined her for many long nights and days. She ended up in the hospital several times, and we became joined anew in a series of medical appointments, crisscrossing New Jersey in search of some respite for her. Throughout high school, she needed me to be present and attentive. We had many talks in the dark parts of the night. It stressed our relationship and knit it together at the same time. College, despite her achievements, began to seem like a receding hope. And then she took custody of her life, her body, her destiny. There was a lot of discussion about her going to college someplace nearby, but when it came down to it, she chose to go to the University of Michigan, a massive school that was not exactly right down the road.
She is excelling in her course work and seems to be absorbing the bumps that go with living independently. From the time she was an itty bitty, Meagan has been freakishly verbal and extremely direct when speaking about herself or others. As a sophomore, she is already focused on getting a master’s in social work and healing others. And she worries endlessly, as she always has.
“I think I was acutely aware of stress. I don’t really remember being stressed, but I remember being an anxious child at a very, very early age,” she said. But she remembers nothing of being poor, of taking care of me at a very tender age when I had cancer, and has no early memories of her time either with me or her mother. She said we got by because I had a very “practical intelligence. You’re very resourceful.”
Much more so than Erin, Meagan has always had empathy for her mother and her battles. She never wanted to come home after visiting her mother when she was young, and I always thought that part of the reason she wanted to stay on was to take care of her. By now, some of that empathy has worn away.
“People live like they know how, even if it’s not productive, and I think my mom learned very early on how to live life in a pretty destructive way and still get by,” she said. “I don’t think she ever learned any other way. If it’s not drugs, it’s men; if it’s not men, it’s money; if it’s not that, it’s loneliness; if it’s not that, it’s mental illness. There is always just some form of destruction she facilitates for herself.”
It left a gap that no one, not me, not the village, not Jill, could fill. She learned how to be the woman she is mostly by herself.
“I felt like I was watching through, like, a glass, like trying to see,” she said of growing up in our house. “And I don’t think it ever worked very well.”
We are sitting in our kitchen in Montclair. She will be leaving for Michigan soon, and it suddenly seems very important for me to tell her that everything good started with her.
“You tell me that on a regular basis. I have no reason not to believe you,” she said. “It was always made clear that you guys had your own life, and your children weren’t your whole life, but you also made it clear at the same time that us becoming part of your life was integral, like saving it. I always believed you when you said that.”
Even when I ended up drunk after all those years?
“I knew you were going to screw up, and I knew it was gonna be tough, but I never pictured you throwing your life away.”
Something else she never planned on? A book coming out of all that.
“I just never pictured you to be someone who would find this type of thing cathartic.”
Bingo. That’s my girl.
61
NOT NEARLY NORMAL
Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.
—SIGMUND FREUD
In the spring of 2007, I returned to New Orleans. The trip included a bit of reporting on the resurgence of the Times-Picayune there, but anybody who checked the calendar would have noticed that it was the first weekend of Jazz Fest, the annual hoedown to celebrate indigenous music. Jill and I have dear friends in New Orleans and make a point of going as often as we can. It was a last hurrah: Joan and Jeff, longtime New Orleanians, were pulling out because they could not abide raising their little girls in a city that had quit working in many respects and showed no signs of coming back soon.
When Jill and I were discussing the trip, Maddie, ten at the time, spoke up and said it sounded like fun. You’re in, I told her. The three of us pulled into Louis Armstrong Airport. The last time I was there, the luggage carousels were serving as a triage point for evacuees who were ill or weak. I had made my way out to the airport along with the throng—there was talk of another hurricane on the way—and then proceeded to sit on the floor and get morosely hammered before getting on my flight. I can remember staring at the scene and thinking dark thoughts about the world, about this place, about my future.
On my return, the casualties had been replaced by plain old luggage, and the place had the generic look and feel of all airports. The metaphorical allusion was not lost on me, having brushed aside recently acquired rubble and now standing on safe ground. We grabbed a rental car and tore off to our pals’ house on Esplanade, just a few blocks from the fairgrounds.
For the next three days, we grabbed all the food and music we could with both hands. At night when a big group of us went out to eat, I’d flip my wineglass over when the time came. And in the morning, before the house stirred, I walked over to a meeting of like minds at a nearby coffee shop and talked about the joys of the Jazz Fest and how to navigate its boozy shoals. There is a saying that wherever there is heavy drinking, there is heavy recovery, and the meetings were a revelation, full of frank talk and dead serious commitment. Those small efforts to mind my sobriety seemed like a tiny price to pay for all the fun I had.
Which raised the question of why I flopped around for three years before admitting that I was right the first time when I said I was powerless over alcohol. But there are benefits to a long, hot soak in booze, especially for the drunk. You say you’re a bit bored by the banal splendors of everyday life? Try taking them away. When I was in the midst of an off-and-on jag with booze, I would have given anything to go to bed like a normal person and get up and go to work, with no consideration of dosage the night before or the shakes that inevitably arrived the following morning. As a drunk, every question asked of me seemed freighted with threat. A simple inquiry like, “What have you been up to?” becomes an indictment in the drunk’s ears. Oh, not much, sneaking drinks at every opportunity, having occasional blackouts, and doing my level best to generate a patina of normalcy over all the mayhem.
Being normal has some significant practical upsides. In the years that I have been back sober, I have navigated three full seasons of Oscar reporting that were marked with alcohol-fueled parties at every turn and occasional bathrooms where every other stall seemed to have a b
ad case of the sniffles. I mingled, made the rounds, and then went happily back to the hotel to work.
As a sober person, I drove cross-country to drop Erin and Meagan off at college, and when we had dinner in South Bend, Indiana, the girls had their first legit drink with their parents. I was able to talk credibly about the benefits and drawbacks of the drinking life, and the role their heritage might play in their choices and the ensuing consequences.
Clear eyed and in the moment, I have put my hands in the air at a Hold Steady show, pushed my family down double-black-diamond ski runs at Lake Tahoe, gone ocean kayaking in Maine, and laid on the dock on a small lake in the Adirondacks, waiting to show Maddie her first “real” shooting star. It arrived on schedule.
None of that would have happened for the drinking version of me. I might still have a job, I might have stayed away from the coke, I might still be married, and I might still have a relationship with my kids, but all those bets were on the table.
To people who do not have the allergy, there is no clear way to explain the unmanageability that goes with addiction. A drunk or an addict picks up a shot or a dose because, same as everyone, he just wants to feel a little different. But it never stops there. I could be drunk tomorrow or shooting dope even as you read this, but the chances of that are low as long as I make a daily decision to embrace who I really am and then be satisfied with that at the end of the day.
I have my regrets at having had to spin out again to remember those very basic lessons, but I wasn’t done. It took that trip, all of it, to realize that I’m not normal. Part of the reason that I tried drinking after fourteen years was that I had become so comfortable in a life that was wrapped in the raiment of the normal that I thought I was normal. Not cured, not remade, just normal. Two years of reporting and a lot of awkward conversations later, I realized that even though I live in a normal midcentury Colonial on a normal street in a normal town, that doesn’t mean I am too. I’m nice—friendly, even—but I am a maniac who simply enjoys the fruits of acting normal.