by Bill Clegg
Now, after losing most everything, going to rehab twice, and only eight days from my last relapse, I cannot identify with him at all. What he describes seems superhuman. Why is it so easy for some people? I wonder. It must be that I’m made of lesser matter, I decide, and continue to believe that, later, when I see Oprah heap praise on him for being so strong. When I see the show featuring the author that fall, I am still going to three meetings a day, have no job or other obligations, and watch people in the same situation relapsing as I did again and again and again. And this guy, well, he just chose to stop using. By his own account, he doesn’t go to meetings, certainly not three a day. He’s like those people who don’t have to work out to have perfect bodies. I’d give anything to be one of those people. Pizza, ice cream, bowls and bowls of granola, and six-pack abs. No meetings, no sponsor, no fellowship and—poof!—long-term sobriety. But it’s still April and that author won’t appear on the Oprah show until September. The book is already a big success before Oprah picks it for her book club, and from time to time over that spring and summer I hear people who don’t want to go to meetings or work with a sponsor use the book as an example of how it’s possible to stay clean on one’s own, without help, through sheer willpower.
Eight days sober and finishing my fourth bowl of granola as the Oprah show ends, my willpower isn’t feeling so formidable. I think about skipping the six o’clock at the Meeting House—a Library-like evening meeting I go to at the end of most weekdays—and begin to think about going down to Mark’s to get high. It’s less than a moment between fleeting thought and full-blown fantasy, barely a second before becoming a fully articulated obsessive vision of getting to Mark’s, calling a dealer, loading a pipe, and inhaling that first hit. My phone starts ringing—it’s my father—and as I hear the phone ring a few more times and let the call go to voice mail, the spell is broken long enough for me to bolt out the door toward the Meeting House a few blocks away. The meeting doesn’t start for an hour, so I make phone calls to Kim, Polly, and Jack until the doors are unlocked. I cannot understand why I still want to use. Cannot understand why I have so little defense against picking up once the idea pops into my head. I know the consequences, know it will devolve into paranoid desperation almost as soon as it begins, but smoking crack still seems like a good idea. It’s insane, I think, and not for the first time. I’m insane. Am I one of those people in the rooms whom I hear others talk about, who quite literally cannot get sober—one of those cases who are incapable of being honest with themselves? And what does honesty with oneself have to do with anything?
The doors are still locked and I cross the street so I don’t seem as desperate as I am. What am I doing wrong? I think. I’m getting sober the way Jack has told me to: I go to as many meetings as I can, call him every day, do what he says, and when in doubt or I can’t reach him, I call other addicts and alcoholics in recovery. Which is what I’m doing right now. BUT NOBODY IS PICKING UP THEIR FUCKING PHONE! I lean against a building across from the Meeting House, try to calm down, and think back over the last few weeks. In a short time my days have become predictable: wake up, feed Benny, gym; 12:30 Library meeting, which I arrive at early because it’s much more crowded than the one at two o’clock; a short break to get a coffee and rush back to the same seat for the two o’clock meeting. The 12:30 meeting—filled with well-dressed nine-to-five types wedging a lunch hour meeting into their workday—has a much higher wattage than the two o’clock, which is smaller and attended by a mix of out-of-work and newly sober day counters, artists, actors, writers, evening-shift waiters, and others with flexible schedules. Some of the most articulate, charismatic, persuasive people I have ever encountered are in the 12:30 meeting. The only speaking I do there is to share my day count. The same people tend to be encouraging afterward: Rafe, one of the most visible, is one. He’s super-sober, super-visible, and super-gay. Good to see you, Bill, keep coming back, he’ll say in his particular intonation, with a knowing emphasis on the word Bill. There is also Madge, an ex–Max’s Kansas City intellectual rock chick with an eye patch, a Jane-Fonda-in-Klute shag haircut, and a sandpaper and gravel voice shaped as much by Upper East Side, Martha’s Vineyard privilege as it is by drugs and thousands of hours logged in the smoky urban underground of New York. Madge is the unofficial matriarch of The Library, and when she raises her hand—like a rebel leader about to brief her loyal fighters on the blueprint of their next attack—she always gets called on. She has a dozen sponsees, a lightning-strike clarity, and an aura of cool that is as welcoming as it is daunting. Madge doesn’t so much ever speak to me as she does grin, nod her head in my direction, and wink her non-patched eye to signal that she’s watching and on my side. One generation older than Madge is Pam, who worked in fashion in the seventies and spent as much time at Studio 54 as Madge did at Max’s. Though her era was the seventies and eighties, Pam has a gentle sixties-style vibe to her. Many of her sentences begin with Oh, honey. Her addictions were booze and pills, and what got her sober were her two kids, who were one or two benders away from being removed from her care by Social Services. Pam and Rafe and Madge are all sober for many years, but because of their schedules—Rafe is a nutritionist and singing coach, Madge is a counselor of some kind, and Pam does freelance fashion publicity—all come to the 12:30 and/or the two o’clock each day. I think of them as the Big Kids of the meeting and I’m both intimidated and comforted by them. I usually see Asa at the 12:30 and make sure we sit together. His class schedule allows him to go to meetings in the middle of the day, and sometimes he’ll meet me here or at the Meeting House in the evening, after which we’ll usually hang out at a coffeehouse on Greenwich Avenue or the diner on Seventh Avenue and 15th Street near my apartment.
When I look at Asa and Madge, it amazes me that such successful, happy, long-sober people still bother going to so many meetings. They seem as if they have it licked. I think back on my life when I was working and can’t fathom how I’d have been able to fit as much recovery into my schedule as they do. Were there any sober people in book publishing? I can’t remember any. That world seems forever closed to me now, but even if it wasn’t, I think perhaps it’s not a business one can stay sober in. I couldn’t. When I came back from rehab in Oregon the year before, I went to one meeting a week, somehow couldn’t manage that, and eventually went to none. I had a sponsor, but that guy wanted to meet every week and for me to call every day—just as Jack does now. I was busy and believed that the people who needed all these meetings and phone calls were either lonely or underemployed. I never shared or raised my hand in meetings then, never met one other person besides that sponsor whom my rehab arranged for me to meet when I returned to the city. When I tell Jack about trying to get sober a year ago, he says, It sounds like ME versus THEM and never WE, and the only way to get and stay sober is when it becomes WE. He also tells me that getting and staying sober—even after ninety days—needs to remain forever my first priority; that whatever I put in front of it I will eventually lose. Career, family, boyfriend—all of it—you’ll lose it. Lose again, in your case. He tells me these things for the first time when he visits me in White Plains, and even though the words he is saying are as simple and basic as a child’s box of crayons, I have no idea what he is talking about.
As I pace and fret in front of the Meeting House and watch crisp-suited, shiny-watched Chelsea residents scurry home from their day, it strikes me again, as it has more than once over the last few weeks, that I’m qualified to do absolutely nothing. I don’t even have restaurant experience, save for the four days I waited tables in Connecticut after I was thrown out of school for spraying fire extinguishers in a drunken rampage with my housemates. I was fired on the fourth day of the job for lack of focus and dropping too many dishes. I think of all the pot I smoked back then—from morning until night—and I wonder how I was ever able to crawl out of that haze into any job, to go or get anywhere.
I have no retail experience, no bankable talents. I remember how a colleague
at my first job in New York took copywriting courses at the Learning Annex, left publishing, and became a successful advertising executive. But this guy was brilliant, exceptionally brilliant, and that world would require, I imagine, schmoozing with potential clients, wooing new business over dinners and drinks, and without booze to get me through, it does not seem possible. Graduate school of any kind would be a decent way to delay the oncoming future, but with what money? How could I incur student loans on top of the already formidable and growing debt I’ve amassed from rehab, legal bills, and credit cards? Never mind that my third-tier college transcript is a speckled mess of mediocre grades and summer courses at the University of Connecticut to make up for the semester I lost when I was expelled. What graduate school would have me?
The custodian of the Meeting House has still not shown up to unlock the doors. I’ve left messages everywhere and still no one is picking up. The meeting begins in half an hour, and as my future prospects seem less and less appealing I start to think again of going to Mark’s. It’s the end of the day, Mark is no doubt ready to get high, and the dealers are about to turn their cell phones on. Fuck it, I say and start walking down 16th Street, away from the Meeting House, toward Sixth Avenue, toward Mark’s. I can feel the adrenaline spark through my veins and the doomy clouds of my futureless future begin to streak away. Just as I approach Sixth Avenue I see someone on the north side of 16th Street waving. It’s Asa. Neat as a pin, fit as a fiddle, and heading right toward me. You going to the meeting? he chirps, and I can’t muster an answer. He looks especially crisp today in his usual uniform. What’s going on? he asks, and as I struggle to come up with something to say to get away from him, he puts his freckled hand on my upper arm and says, OK, let’s go.
By the time we get to the Meeting House, the door has been unlocked and someone is inside making coffee. The dusty schoolhouse smell mingling with the aroma of cheap, freshly brewed coffee acts as an antidote to the giddy, pre-high adrenaline of just minutes before. The obsession to use fades just as quickly as it had arrived, and while I watch Asa help the old guy who’s setting up the meeting move a bench to the far wall, it hits me how close I just came to relapsing, and what a miracle it is that he materialized precisely when he did. Jesus, I’m sick, I think. Unlike the people who can get sober on willpower, I need cheap coffee, church basements, serendipitous sidewalk interventions, and relapsing cokehead dog walkers. But what is most discouraging is that all these things and more—Jack, Polly, Madge, Asa, The Library, my family, my remaining friends, the staggering losses and humiliations of the past few months, the empire of people I’ve hurt—are still, it seems, not enough to keep me clean.
People come in from their day, mostly nine-to-five types who can’t make the midday meetings like the ones at The Library. They start filling the chairs and benches of the large room which doubles, depending on the hour, as a Quaker meeting house, a dance studio, and a gathering space for other programs of recovery. Chic, chatty, confident—these people seem a world away from the struggles that must have brought them here. How the hell did they do it? I wonder, as I remember how close I just came to picking up. If Asa hadn’t hauled me in from the street, I’d be right now pressing the buzzer at Mark’s apartment. Right now waiting for him to buzz me in and hand me a crack pipe. It was Asa and nothing else that kept me from using just minutes ago.
I look around from sober face to sober face and wonder again how these people found their way. How will I? I sense that just being here and in places like it will not be enough. I’m in the room but not of it. Present but not a part of. Saved, for a little while, but not sober. Not really. I come like a beggar to these meetings and I’m fed, yes, pulled in off the street even, as I was today. But it’s clear that something beyond my own need and ability to ask for help will keep me here, involve me in what is going on, connect me to something greater than my addiction, and give me a fighting chance of staying clean and getting on with my life. But what?
The meeting begins. As the basket is passed and people toss in their bills, I raise my hand and say that I have eight days, and as I do I know that eventually, not today, and probably not tonight, but at some point soon, I will pick up. I don’t know what I’ll do with my life, if I’ll ever have a full-time job again, another love, where I’ll live or even if I will, but I will use again, this much I know.
The Mother Lode
My parents divorce the year I move to New York. I am twenty-one and they sell the deep-in-the-woods Connecticut house I grew up in and move to New Hampshire. They go there to save their marriage, but soon after they get settled, everything falls apart. It is my mother who leaves, finally, after years of threatening to, and in her flight back to Connecticut, as my father cancels credit cards and makes bank accounts inaccessible to her, she somehow lays her hands on a little pile of silver—ingots and coins they’d purchased as investments decades before.
A few years after their divorce is finalized, my mother gives me the silver to sell for her in the city. At the time, the market for precious metals is low and we decide to wait and sell later. The silver sits in the back of my closet for years in an old red and blue nylon knapsack I picked up in Scotland on my study-abroad semester in college. She asks about it occasionally but either I am too busy or it’s not quite the right moment to sell. Eventually, she stops asking. The market crests and crashes dozens of times while the silver sits, unsold and unseen, in closets of apartments I move to in Midtown, the Upper East Side, Chelsea, and Greenwich Village. As I move, the silver moves. I forget it exists until I am packing up my things to leave One Fifth and see the familiar old knapsack. I don’t remember, at first, what it holds but notice how unbelievably heavy it is when I pull it down from the shelf in the hall closet. It goes with the rest of my things to the studio on 15th Street, gets shoved to the back of another closet, and there it sits.
Meanwhile, my eight days become eleven and Polly’s four become seven and then—after she joins Heather on a long, coke-crazed night—one. We raise our hands at The Library, count our days; people clap, encourage, and pass us their phone numbers. My routine calcifies: wake up, feed Benny, long workout at the gym, Library meetings at 12:30 and two o’clock, dog run with Polly, Oprah, Meeting House at six, diner dinner with Asa or others from the meeting, and phone calls to Jack, Kim, Asa, Jean, and Polly in between, before, and after. Once or twice a week I’ll see Dave or Jean or Cy for dinner or a movie, but Jack has warned against straying too far outside the fold of recovery until I have ninety days. Bags of food arrive at least once a week from Jean, and when we see each other she’ll ask if I enjoyed this or that and if there’s anything special I’d like. I will never have much to say in response other than Thank you.
On Saturdays there is a 10:30 a.m. meeting that many people from The Library go to, and on Saturday evenings a big gay group that, God help me, because Asa goes, I go to. The skinny boys with white belts are crawling all over the Saturday night meeting. Rafe is usually there, too, always says Bill in his particular tone and clocks me in his laser-like way, making it clear he sees me far more clearly than I see myself. Most of these guys talk about dance clubs and Fire Island, and they’re all young and cute and skinny, and I don’t belong. I feel uncouth and lumpy and unkempt and listen only for the differences in their stories, not the similarities. I’m gay but in this place I feel as if there’s a manual for gays that covers everything from clothes, hairstyle, and slang to eating, drinking, and using habits, and everyone in the room owns it but me. I tell Jack this one night on the phone and he asks me if there have been other experiences, other times, when I felt as if I never got the manual. When I think back to high school, college, book publishing, crack dens even—every world I entered—I felt exactly the same way: that there was a set of rules, a primer of some kind, that everyone else had read and understood but I had never seen. Like so many of my worries, Jack tells me, this one—right down to the word manual—is one of the bedrock feelings of most alcoholics and addicts. Agai
n I’m relieved in some way, but also humiliated and annoyed that most everything I complain about he is able to label and place within both his own experience and the broader population of alcoholics and addicts. You’re just a garden variety junkie, he tells me yet again and says good night.
At one of the gay meetings I meet, or re-meet, a guy named Luke whom I met a few times through mutual friends over the years and who, to my surprise, is sober. He’s a screenwriter, my age, has a sober boyfriend, and has stories of using that make me wish we’d gotten sloppy together at least a few times. He feels like family from the second we reconnect, and even though he is only a year and a half sober, he seems like one of the Big Kids, like Madge and Rafe and Pam. Luke went to college with Noah and they know each other vaguely. The mutual friends, Noah connection, and similar stories of using make Luke one of the few people from the rooms who bridge both my old life and new. Everyone else is a world away from book publishing and my life with Noah, which is mainly a relief, but sometimes, when I am trying to relate details of the life I lived and ruined to people like Polly and Asa, it can be frustrating. When I try to explain this frustration to Jack, he just laughs and says, Honey, keep coming back (an expression, minus the honey, people use in the rooms, usually when people counting days raise their hands and share).