Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery

by Bill Clegg

  I check into a hotel that is also one of the tallest buildings in Ithaca. I am assigned, because of some accident in the booking, a large suite on the top floor, and it seems like the emptiest room I have ever seen. My friend John, who moved to Asia a few years before and whom I’d mostly lost touch with, calls from Saipan the next morning and we stay on the phone for hours before I leave for the wedding. I tell him everything that’s happened over the last two years—returning to New York after rehab, relapsing, The Library, reaching ninety days, Elliot, starting a job at a literary agency, getting back together with Noah and ending it, finally, just days ago. I tell him, as I look out the window to the hills that surround Ithaca and rise shoulder to shoulder against an enormous blue sky, that I’m thirty-six, a year and ten months sober, and on my own. At the reception later, surrounded by Rafe and Polly and Annie, at a table crowded with seltzers and Diet Cokes and coffee cups, I know that I’ve never been less alone in my life.

  Asa arrives late, as the procession music begins, and leaves early. We wave to each other as he’s being seated, but after Annie kisses her new husband and the rice is thrown, he disappears. I look for him at the reception after, but he is gone before I have a chance to say good-bye.

  Polly and I walk down to the lake and sit on a dock as the sun goes down. She is wearing a green dress and her loose hair shines in the late day light. She looks healthier and more beautiful than I’ve ever seen her. She has a year and four months sober that night. She has just over five years now. Here we are, Crackhead, she says, the way she always does. We look out over the lake. Wind skims the surface, swallows dart and swoop above the shimmering water, and the first stars stitch the sky. The dock sways beneath us, laughter sparks above the thumping music of the reception, and neither of us makes a sound as the sun finds its way home, again, behind the formidable hills of Ithaca. I know exactly what she means. Here we are.

  Close

  I had the best gin and tonic in the world in the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. My friend John says these words as we’re sitting on the terrace of a house we’ve rented on a small island in Thailand. It’s early January and we’ve come here for a month to work—him on a book project and a magazine article, me on a book I’ve been writing for two and half years, the one you are reading now. We’ve spent four weeks working from morning to night interrupted only by meals cooked by two shy women who arrive in the morning and leave in the evening and blush when we praise and thank them for the delicious food. It’s dinnertime now. Fading sun and stars commingle in the early evening sky as the women load plates with curried vegetables and steamed rice. I’ve told John I’ve booked a room at the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok on the way back to New York and he tosses a memory of a gin and tonic he drank in his early twenties into the air as casually as he would a receipt in the trash. But I catch it and hold on. This drink he consumed decades ago now sits on the dinner table between us, and nothing else holds my attention—not the last panels of light sliding along the rippling sea below, the flickering candles, the magnificent food. Nothing exists but the drink—its sleek vessel of glass, its magic contents, and the legendary hotel it was consumed in. Over the next four days I imagine the perspiration on the rim of the glass, the thrum of hotel lobby glamour, the garnish of the greenest lime. On the morning I leave for Bangkok I finish a draft of the book, type the last lines, the ones you just read. I send the document to my editor by e-mail and a few hours later ride a longboat to Phuket, where I catch a plane to Bangkok. John will arrive a day after I do and we have planned to meet in an overpriced restaurant along the river to celebrate our last night in Thailand.

  When I arrive in Bangkok I hail a cab in front of the arrivals terminal. The driver is young—twenty-five, maybe thirty—and after I tell him which hotel to take me to, he asks the following questions: You like boys? You like girls? You like drugs? My answer, without thinking, without thought of any kind, as reflexive as a leg shooting straight after a doctor’s tap on the knee, is this: Yes. When we pull up to the hotel the driver scribbles a number on a piece of paper and hands it to me. Tonight, he says. You call tonight. I nod and take the paper and put it in my pocket. What am I thinking as I get out of the taxi with this number, the first of its kind I’ve held in almost six years? Nothing. I am thinking nothing.

  The lobby of the Mandarin Oriental. It is thrumming, as I had imagined, but it is modern and familiar and Americans are everywhere. I am taken to my room, where a middle-aged man in a hotel uniform shows me the bathroom, the various electrical outlets, the bar, which I see has only Smirnoff vodka, and the balcony overlooking the river. He takes my credit card and looks at my passport. I sign something and he leaves. It is now late afternoon and the sun is like a chunk of molten lava hanging in the sky and the air around it is hazy and orange. From the balcony I see boats crowding the river and dozens of hotel guests pacing the terraces below. Bangkok seems caught in something heavier than air, everything and everyone pushing sluggishly through the thick atmosphere. Planes labor across the sky so slowly they seem about to drop from exhaustion.

  The ice bucket above the bar is full. The butler buzzes my room to find out if I need anything. I ask him if they have Stolichnaya and he says he’ll go see. On the bed my phone buzzes to signal it has received an e-mail. I don’t go to it. It buzzes again and I lean against the desk and wait for the butler to return. Ice is bursting from the bucket. I’ve never seen ice so abundant, so refreshing. I fill a glass. A thick, low glass, the kind my father drank scotch from when I was a kid. There are no limes in the place but there is a fruit basket and in it an orange that I slice a small wedge from. I squeeze a bit of juice onto the ice and shove the rind between the ice and the glass. No butler. No Stoli. My phone buzzes again and I grab the bottle of Smirnoff and pour the drink. There it is. Vodka not gin. Orange not lime. Smirnoff not Ketel One. Smirnoff not Stoli. By no means the best vodka in the world. By no means even the second best. But it’s here. And no one else is. No one is watching. No one is waiting for me and it’s been almost six years. A drink, just one, on the balcony of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Why does this feel necessary? Why has it seemed inevitable since John uttered those words four days ago? I do not know. But it does. And so I pick up the drink, put the glass to my lips, and swallow a mouthful of vodka. It tastes like poison. Cold, foul, thick. Is it because it’s Smirnoff? Is it because there is an orange and not a lime? A balcony and not a lobby? Or is it because I haven’t had a drink in so many years? Agitated, I drink more. I pour a second and a third, and the vodka tastes no better. I don’t feel anything more than a gathering heaviness. A slowness like the air around me. A dulling. In the room I pour a fourth and return to the balcony. Six floors up. I palm the piece of paper. It’s too soon to call. It is not night. How many drinks until it will be late enough to call? I can see the fuzzy mural of the near future: the cab ride, the cash machine, the bag of crack or its equivalent, the stems, the lighter, the skin, calling for more, bottles of vodka, the dizzying crash. I don’t want it but I want it. But want feels more like acceptance of a kind of sentence. There is no turning back. I’ve begun something that will be finished, and as I look down the six stories to the terrace and alley below, I know that death is where this will go. Hours ago I sent off a manuscript about early recovery, how difficult getting and staying sober is, how it cannot be done alone. Alone, I down most of the fourth drink. I don’t bother with the orange now. Dying in Bangkok. It feels suddenly like the most logical, inevitable outcome. The cabdriver, the phone number, this terrace, this drink, the coming night and all it will entail—each piece clicks into place, the intended path becomes visible. It’s clear now. The book is finished, my use expired. A new slow wind moves warm air across the balcony and lights blink across the river from hotels and apartment buildings. My death will remind people how serious addiction is, how lethal. Death will be useful.

  I finger the scrap of paper. I finish the drink, which tastes just as awful as the first. My phone buz
zes again. Before I pour a fifth drink, before I call that number, I go to the bed and check the phone to see who has been sending me messages. Hey, you around? Free to talk? What’s up? Can we talk? Four messages—each one from my new sponsee. The one who relapsed while I was in Thailand, the one who has seen me at The Library every day for months and because of that asked me to be his sponsor. The one who, more than anyone else I’ve met, reminds me of myself in early sobriety. The determination to appear in control, the relentless relapsing, the recurring courtship with death. There he is, reaching out from the other side of the world. And here I am, about to pour a fifth vodka. About to call the number in my pocket.

  I look again at his messages. So persistent, so willing. Finally, after months of relapsing and dodging his former sponsor, he is asking for help. Asking me for help. Reaching out to end the agony he’s thrashed around in for years. Agony I know, agony I had been released from. I close the phone and put it back on the bed. And just like that, it’s over. I’m done. Whatever started days ago on the terrace with John and led to four vodkas in this hotel room has stopped. I rip up the piece of paper, grab my hotel room key, and head for the door. I walk through the lobby and out to the front drive and into the street. I call my brother. It is morning in Maine where he lives and I leave him a message. I tell him an almost-truth. I tell him I almost picked up, almost drank, almost used. I walk until I find a guy selling large bottles of water. I buy one and dump half of it on my head and down the rest in a few long gulps. I walk through the hurdy-gurdy streets of Bangkok, past the bars with boys and girls for sale, past fruit stands and T-shirt vendors, past the empty streets in the now shut business districts. I walk until I am about to collapse and signal a tuk-tuk, a cross between a moped and a rickshaw, and tell the driver the name of the hotel. When I enter the room for the second time that day I am as far from wanting a drink or a drug as I can be.

  The next night, with green and red and white fireworks streaking above the river, I tell John every part of the story except for the drinking. I expand the almost-truth I left on my brother’s voice mail. I tell him I read my sponsee’s messages and didn’t drink, and as I do I feel that old distance return, that old barrier rise up between me and the people who think they know me. He suspects nothing, is an arm’s length from where I sit, but word by word he recedes further and further away.

  After I return to New York, I tell the same story to everyone at The Library and I tell the same story there twice again. The story of how I almost picked up. The story of how close I came. How close. It’s the story I tell my brother, my sponsee, my family, Rafe, and everyone else close to me. I tell this story and in the space it creates between me and everyone else, a second self, a hidden one, returns. And with it the fear of being found out. The little thread of almost true gathers and braids with other threads and soon the thread is a rope and from the rope a noose that chafes and tugs, just like it always had. But no good can come from telling this, I remind myself. No good at all. I can’t worry the people in my life—my family, my clients, my friends, my colleagues. I can’t put the threat of relapse back on the table again, it’s not fair. But I know it’s not them I’m thinking of, it’s me. I’m afraid of losing what I have—respect, trust, success, financial security, love; afraid of not getting what I want—more of all these things. Again, as it once did, fear shoots through every thought, every action, every minute. I sit in The Library and hear people—newly sober, long sober—talk about how once they lived in fear and now do not. They say things like The truth will set you free, and I think they are speaking directly to me. My sponsee, the same one whose messages stopped me in Bangkok, refuses to count days in meetings. I beg him to come to The Library and raise his hand and he refuses. I’ll go to meetings, he says, but I won’t count days. I don’t want people to know I relapsed. It’s no one’s business. I tell him, again and again, he needs to come clean in the rooms, to be seen and heard there, to let people help him. I say these words and it’s as if they are coming from someone else’s mouth and throat and are meant for me.

  A friend, not someone who struggles with drugs and alcohol, is embroiled in a complicated situation, a house of cards of deception and secrecy involving many people that is toppling in on him, and one night he comes to my apartment in desperation. There seems to be no solution, and for a while I get caught up in the faulty logic that delivered him to this mess. At first the situation appears just as hopeless as he describes. And then it’s clear. The truth is the only answer, the only chance of moving ahead toward any sane future. When I say this he responds as if it is the last and least likely solution. Citing all the imagined consequences—what will be lost, what won’t be gained—he rejects the idea, and I do everything I can to convince him it’s the only way. The truth will set you free, I say cornily, passionately, and again a voice that is mine and not mine is speaking to me.

  In February I go to Miami for a long weekend. It is just after the breakup of an almost-year-long relationship and getting out of New York seems like a good idea. It is the weekend of the Academy Awards and I invite the friends I am with to my room to watch the show. After they leave I begin to clean up, collect the dirty dishes, the empty glasses. I notice a glass of white wine. It is full and untouched and perspiration beads on its rim. I pick it up and take a sip. Just like that. The sip of wine is in my mouth and down my throat and I recoil as if bitten by a snake. I spit the remaining wine out of my mouth and sit down on the couch as if the sip had happened to me, as if I am somehow its victim. I don’t want more but I know I am in trouble. I leave the room, take the stairs down to the lobby, head out past the pool, the boardwalk, and onto the beach. Halfway between the boardwalk and the ocean, I drop to my knees and lie down face-first in the sand. Six years ago, at the rehab in White Plains, just a few nights before returning to Manhattan, I lay down in a muddy field under a raining sky and asked for help. I was lost then. I am lost now. I don’t have a plan or any answers. I am powerless and fearful and into the damp sand I ask for help. Help me. Help me, God. The answer almost six years before was the faintest streak of light in a sky crowded with rain clouds. The answer now is the roar of the ocean, thumping music from the hotel lounges, and the sound of teenagers shouting in Spanish from the boardwalk.

  There is a phrase I’ve heard at The Library and in other rooms hundreds of times. It’s a phrase that sounded loudly in my ears in the months after Bangkok, after Miami: We are only as sick as our secrets. I missed not being sick. Eventually, weeks later, I call Annie. We hadn’t spoken in months. An occasional text, a voice mail here and there. She picks up on the first ring and I tell her everything. OK, she says after a short silence. OK. We talk for a long time and as we do I feel the noose loosen, the rope go slack. As the call ends she says, Stay close, lambchop. And I do. I tell Luke and then John and Kim and Cy. I tell my brother and my parents and I tell Polly, who will respond without words but with the tightest hug. I tell my sponsee, who, two days later, turns up at The Library, raises his hand, and announces his day count. Three days later he does it again, and at the end of the meeting he is surrounded. I tell Rafe, who says, among other things, exactly what Annie had said and what Jack, years ago, used to say: Stay close.

  Later, three months from that sip of wine in Miami, I will raise my hand in a meeting I rarely go to in Midtown and say, shakily but with great relief, I have ninety days. Three days later, at The Library, with Polly in the seat next to me, her hand on my back, I raise my hand and tell everyone in the room what happened. And now I’m telling you.

  Five and a half years and then one day. For me, there are no finish lines. No recovered, just recovering. My sobriety, that delicate state that can, for years at a time, feel unshakable, is completely dependent on my connection to other alcoholics and addicts, my seeking their help and my offering it. I went to an island for a month where there were no rooms where alcoholics and addicts gather to stay sober. If we learn at the speed of pain, the painful lesson here was that I need th
ose rooms, those addicts and alcoholics. I need them like oxygen. No matter how good, how sober, how in control I feel. There are many programs of recovery. Paid, free, anonymous, not anonymous. I don’t name here which one I go to because I don’t want that program held responsible for anything I do or say or write. I don’t want anything to get in the way of your finding it if it can help you. Alcoholics and addicts create enough obstacles to getting sober and I don’t want to add more.

  If you are struggling with drugs and alcohol, go to the rooms where alcoholics and addicts go to get and stay sober. These rooms and the people in them are your best chance. Listen to them, be honest with them. Help them—even if you think you have nothing to offer. Be helped by them. Depend on them and be depended on. And if the only thing you can do is show up, do it. Then do it again. And when it’s the last thing you want to do and the last place you want to go, go. Just go. You have no idea who you might be helping just by sitting there or who might help you. I’ve heard many alcoholics and addicts describe a voice that tells them to drift, to detach, to follow their own counsel and cut off. It’s the same voice that told me I could be on an island for a month without meetings; suggested that a drink was better than all others—the best—because it happened to be in a hotel; that no good could come from telling the truth and that death was useful. In my experience only one thing has been able to quiet that voice: other alcoholics and addicts in recovery. Their voices have been louder than the one that lies, louder than my own. They have, one day at a time, guided me toward honesty, usefulness, and they have saved my life. Together, they stay sober. Together, they end years of agony and isolation. If you are struggling with drugs and alcohol, they can help you, too. Find them now.