Over time, Janet has helped me understand how people use alcohol to manage their emotions—that means me, too. I already knew that alcohol was an immediate and welcome relief from the anxiety of figuring out social interactions, and a way to stop working and start having fun. That’s what I learned drinking with my new friends from Juniata who had jobs in Huntingdon for the summer of 1970. Kathy was old enough to legally buy the Southern Comfort we poured into 7 Up and ice and drank sitting out on the fire escape. When I went to Swarthmore, I happily got drunk at the Gay Liberation parties we held. There was a lot of marijuana around the dorms, and some psychedelic drugs, which I enjoyed, but of all the drugs, alcohol became my favorite. Turning the sky purple, as I did when tripping on LSD, was fun, but abating my anxiety and lubricating my social relations were a lot better, taken all in all. In graduate school, I learned that having a drink at the end of the day, while preparing and eating dinner, drained away worries about work and offered an unfocused and immediate release. So I started drinking every day, and didn’t stop until I broke my neck. I really, really miss it. I found that drinking alcohol afforded opportunities to talk with people—at receptions, cocktail parties, and dinners—and relaxed me enough that I felt comfortable conversing with just about anybody. Janet is the one who told me that “connection” is the keyword of Crosby conversation. Alcohol helped me connect.
I discovered when I was sixteen that drinking helped me in my social and emotional uncertainties. By the time I was fifty, I felt something was missing on the days when I couldn’t have something to drink, and I would always think ahead to pick up beer or wine so it would be in the house. I enjoyed drinking, except for the periodic problem of hangovers, which I was finding increasingly unpleasant. Even so, I would sometimes quite consciously choose at a party to suffer in the morning for the pleasures of intoxication at night. That word—intoxication—points to the problem. You’ve put into your body a toxin, which is to say a poison. When at a party, I would often choose bourbon or scotch, because I liked the taste and liked how distilled liquor worked, quickly spreading warmth and well-being.
So was I or was I not a problem drinker? Janet and I found the phrase curious, and in one way the anesthesiologist’s report confirmed that opinion—I had no alcohol in my bloodstream when my broken body was delivered to the emergency room. But even though this quantitative measure showed that I was drinking moderately enough to pass the alcohol out of my system, it’s no answer to the qualitative question about my psychic relation to drink. I find that the word, “addicted,” does, in fact, speak to me—it names precisely how alcohol works. “Latin addictus, ‘given over,’ . . . ad-, to + dicere, to say, pronounce, adjudge.”1 “Given over”—you are dictated to. Alcohol told me that I was pretty, witty, and gay. So instructed, I could put aside whatever was troubling me and relax, and its dictates were compelling.
When I was drinking, I happily anticipated cocktail parties and receptions at Wesleyan. Janet reports that she noticed me at the women’s studies beginning-of-the-year reception that I hosted at the little house I rented from the university, on a leafy cul-de-sac behind a dorm. She was at the Center for the Humanities for the year and completely new to Middletown. When I saw her come in, I went over to welcome her, glass of wine in hand. I recalled that the former director of the Center for the Humanities had mentioned that he had enjoyed a conversation with her about Methodists. He was by the fireplace talking to another of my friends, so I brought Janet over to include her in the conversation. Suddenly Natasha lurched to one side, grabbing at the mantle—the heel on one of her 1950s-era Dalmatian-patterned pumps had suddenly bent. “Wait a minute,” I said with decisiveness, “I’ve got a vise grip in the basement. Let me see if I can fix it.” Even though my dashing effort entirely failed to mend the shoe, Janet closely observed the whole scene and correctly deduced that I liked tools and liked to charm girls in high heels.
She also decided that I was flirtatious, and she was right. Most of the time, flirting was a kind of leavening agent that encouraged conversation to expand. It’s light, bright, inconsequential, insignificant. Girls just want to have fun, oh, oh, oh, girls just want to have fun. Yet if alcohol dictates a desire for pleasure, I discovered when I first began drinking at Juniata that for me it was often the pleasure of sexual desire, and desire mixed with alcohol is seemingly irresistible and imperative. Time slows down to the present moment, and the expansive, consequential world of the sober and responsible is lost to view. It just doesn’t matter—then. Alcohol alone cannot effect this eclipse, but alcohol urges concentration on now and foreshortens perspective. My college years ran alcohol and sex together in unsurprising ways. The stakes were considerably higher in my fully adult life, when I used drinking to help me flirt seriously—not an oxymoron—because I was stoking and yielding to desires I knew would make real trouble, and not only for me. I pursued such flirtations despite the fact that I was in a presumptively monogamous, long-term relationship. Now that’s a problem. I wanted the settled, home-sharing, loving, long-term relationship that I had, yet I also wanted to take my distance and live drenched in exciting newness and urgent desire. My adventures were now and again by no means innocent, and I regret the pain so liberally spread about when I played out my deep ambivalence about domesticity and desire. I was, in fact, a problem drinker insofar as alcohol allowed me to sustain this emotional contradiction for years—I couldn’t have done it without the way alcohol grays out the deliberations of conscience.
At Wesleyan, the drinking that was part of the culture at the Center for the Humanities suited me just fine. The Monday night lectures at the Center for the Humanities were often preceded by drinks and dinner, and followed by a coffee-and-cookies reception. Then the fellows and the fellow travelers would gather at someone’s home for an after-party, where there was always plenty to drink. Janet observed that all of the social events of the Center, where we both held fellowships in 1996–1997, were geared to seeing how well you held your alcohol, which makes sense, given that the Center had been at the height of its fortunes and flush with money in the 1950s, when white men (and Hannah Arendt) sat around writing papers, talking among themselves, and drinking and smoking as a matter of course. Smoking has largely disappeared from my world. I have in my office a glass ashtray with a profile view of John Wesley in the center, a relic of bygone days, now a convenient place to toss my keys. The Center, on the other hand, is still fully stocked with liquor, ranged on shelves in a large closet. Thinking and talking about ideas excited me, and alcohol encouraged my conversation and burnished my thoughts. That culture of socializing through drinking held firm for decades, and I found it a lovely, even delicious social medium. Janet and I pitched headfirst into love at the Center for the Humanities, which had also been the scene of other erotic adventures of mine, affairs that ended badly, hurt others, and left me guilty, heartsick, and bereft. Yet they had begun readily enough in the alcohol-enriched atmosphere and intellectual exchanges of the Center.
My problem drinking stopped when Janet and I got together. Actually, that’s not quite true, I realize, because the worst fight she and I ever had was fueled by alcohol, and is the only time in my drinking life that I ever blacked out and couldn’t recall what had happened when I woke up the next morning. I felt physically wretched and emotionally sick—what the hell had I done? To make what could be a long story short, Janet and I had gone to Huntingdon to visit Mother. With Janet’s help, I had gathered myself to tell Mother that we were not going to sleep over in her one-bedroom apartment, but had a motel room across town on Route 22—a reasonable position, since I knew that we otherwise would be sleeping in her double bed and she would be out in the living room on a small sofa. In order to nerve myself for that moment of saying “no” to my mother and making room, quite literally, for myself with Janet, I drank as I cooked and continued drinking as we ate. When that moment came, Mother was confused and distressed, as I feared she would be. My family valued togetherness above all else
, so the idea that I might value time alone with Janet in the midst of a family visit did not, could not, make sense to my mother. “We’ll be more comfortable in our own room, especially since Jake takes a long time to wake up in the morning,” I tried to explain. “I’ll come here to have breakfast with you, and Janet’ll join us at lunch.” Then we left. In the morning, I vaguely remembered that leave-taking, but had no memory of what followed. “You started fighting as soon as we got in the car,” Janet informed me. “You were drunk and belligerent, downright hostile, and I told you so. You kept it up when we got to the motel. I said I was done talking to you and went to bed. So did you, and you were out like a light.”
Now that’s problem drinking. When I woke up, though I couldn’t recollect any of the details, I knew I had acted very badly. The disinhibiting effects of alcohol clearly had allowed me to both feel and express my anger at needing to leave my mother, which I also desperately wanted to do. A far cry from pretty, witty, and gay.
Fighting scares me, so my apologies were pretty abject. Janet is not one to stick around for abuse, so I consider myself fortunate that she didn’t pack it in then and there, but she reasoned that she had never before seen me act badly when drunk. We nonetheless had to work through what had happened that night, which took considerably longer than a day or two. That long, recursive conversation was focused largely on my relation to my family, and especially to Mother, a long reckoning spelled out in this account of myself. About drinking, we agreed that for the most part it helped me to be relaxed, talkative, flirtatious, and fun loving, and wasn’t itself a point of conflict. Over time, we figured out how to fight productively, and I didn’t again use drink to steel myself as I had done to leave my mother, though the big question of how I continued to depend on alcohol remained open.
So the misery of that night passed away. We’re now able to joke about the Huntingdon Motor Inn, where every room was furnished with a flyswatter, and outside the office two vending machines sat side by side, one selling Coca-Cola and the other live bait.
When Janet got her job in New York City, and we were in Middletown for the summer, we decided to have a party, and determined it should feature a cocktail paired with a lawn game, the more incongruous the better—martinis and horseshoes, for instance. We told our guests to “dress appropriately,” leaving it to them to decide on the leading event. Some came in their slinky silk sophisticated best, while others wore old blue jeans and sneakers, prepared for the horseshoe pit. The horseshoe pitching picked up as afternoon turned into evening. Dick offered play-by-play coverage of the action, bringing to horseshoes the exacting detail of baseball announcing. In the end, when it had grown so late that a tipsy partygoer could easily throw a wild pitch, he declared a final victor, and awarded the garishly golden, plastic martini-glass trophy in a brief but moving ceremony. The winner? An eminence in the field of queer studies, who could not remember a single sporting contest he’d won before. In Henry’s victory remarks to the crowd, he noted that the competition had been fierce—his defeated rival was a visibly pregnant woman in a short black dress, wearing high heels. I had a blast, and then a parched hangover when I woke up the next morning. No matter. What I remember is the summer sun filtered through the canopy of trees, the taste of the cocktails, the comedy of the games, and the pure joyful fun of it all.
In my two decades at Wesleyan before I broke my neck, I had worked with colleagues I both liked and respected, and with whom I elaborated a social life of drinking, dinners, and parties. That was the happy part of my drinking, which most of the time felt not like a problem but a pleasure. Betsy, who lived one street over, is a very accomplished cook and hosted some of the most memorable events. To get to her parties after evening lectures, I cut through a neighbor’s back yard, and there I was. I ate and drank and talked so many times in her house that I can see vividly before me the scene in her dining room—a big oval table laden with her gorgeously prepared and savory ham, surrounded by patés, bowls of jerkins and olives, fragrant cheeses, and sliced baguette. Bottles of liquor and various wines were set out just beyond in the kitchen, the refrigerator was full of Anchor Steam beer, and the counters littered with the half-empty glasses of a party in full swing. The rooms were crowded with partygoers and loud with conversation. I had such fun.
A few years ago, Betsy invited me to a party she was hosting to celebrate the promotion of one of her colleagues. I hadn’t been in her house since I broke my neck. I remembered a concrete stoop with steps, so I arranged for my friend MJ to help me get in. When I was outside, I called her on my cell phone. She came out and got from the back of the van the extendable ramps that I carry around, and set them up at the right width for my wheels. We got the wheelchair up the steps and bumped me over the threshold, into the vestibule—just barely, because the room was packed. There I stayed. The living room was loud and crowded with people. The rooms beyond—and the food and drink—were utterly inaccessible to me. Right away, Betsy came over to welcome me, and quickly returned with a glass of wine. So, too, some friends made their way through the crowd to say hello, including my newly tenured friend. I was so happy for her! Someone retrieved for me a little plate of food, as delicious as ever. Increasingly free laughter and talk came from the crowded rooms, and, sitting there, stuck just inside the front door, the party felt largely inaccessible to me, despite my ramps. I left after about an hour and went home sober and sad.
Soon after I returned to work half-time, teaching one course a semester and slowly picking up my research and writing, I read a smashingly intelligent book, The Ideas in Things, by Elaine Freedgood. She details how the material things that proliferate in nineteenth-century British novels speak to us of imperial power and the furnished interiors of Victorian psychic life. The darkly polished old mahogany furniture of the red room where Jane Eyre is imprisoned by the vindictive Mrs. Reed, for example, reappears when Jane redecorates rooms in St. John’s Moor House. This latter furniture Freedgood calls “a souvenir of sadism,” recollecting both the destruction of the forests and implementation of plantation slavery in Madeira and the Caribbean and the sadistic torments Jane endured at Gateshead.2 I wrote a review of the book, my first post-accident publication. I also recommended to my colleagues in the English Department that we bring the author for a colloquium. Elaine and I spoke together briefly in my office before the event, and then, as I sat directly facing her at the end of the seminar table, I struggled against sleep—and lost. Again and again my eyes closed, and again and again I jerked awake. As you know, I take OxyContin against pain, and I will continue to take it despite the fact that it slows down my whole system. I was nodding off, to use the phrase we associate with heroin, which is what the opiate addicts turn to when the pharmaceutical stuff is out of reach. When the seminar was over, I got in my van to go downtown to the restaurant where I had reserved seats for the speaker, several of my colleagues, and myself. The key simply clicked. Nothing. The battery to the van was dead, which happens all too often because the adaptive technology continually draws down energy. The van had nodded off, too.
Instead of joining my colleagues for the colloquium dinner, where there’d be drinking, eating, and talking, the very sort of gathering that once gave me such pleasure, I called with my apologies. Thank God the battery was dead so that I had a truthful excuse, because I was simply mortified that I had fallen asleep in the face of the speaker. More than embarrassed, I suffered what felt like a kind of social death, as the word “mortification” suggests. I was miserable. I’m well aware that this event doubtless mattered very little to others. That did not then, nor does it now, assuage my bitter sense that a way of living I highly valued and actively enjoyed is no longer fully available to me. I’ve learned to take a thermos of coffee with me to lectures, and (impolitely) drink it during the talk to avoid the misery of heavy eyelids and a heavy head, and have managed to stay awake and even join the discussion.
That’s a far cry, however, from the fun I used to have when warmed by al
cohol and the excitement of ideas. I don’t know whether I ever would have decided that responding to alcohol bound me to the drug so tightly as to distort my life. I never came to that reckoning. The world has also changed around me, and I don’t know how I would have participated in the Wesleyan of the new millennium had I not broken my neck. I only know that as I drink wine oh-so-moderately, I miss martinis. I miss Manhattans. I miss our cocktail parties. I miss the ease that came when I drank, and the social connections and excitement that alcohol facilitated. Alcohol no longer dictates to me, and rather than the happy assurance that I’m pretty, witty, and gay, I hear nothing, or only the vaguest murmur.
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The Horror! The Horror!
Years before my accident, I was sitting in my study preparing to teach George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss to the thirty-two students in my course titled Reading the Victorians. Tears were running down my cheeks, and I knew that I wanted the students to understand how words on a page could elicit such strong emotion. So I worked that afternoon to teach the class how the conventions of realism project a space-time populated with “round” characters whose imagined lives we follow, often with real interest. We discussed how the happenings of this fictional world can move readers even when—or perhaps especially when—melodramatic conventions intrude. The Mill on the Floss is the second of Eliot’s eight novels, written before she had fully mastered the genre, so the opening scenes prefigure somewhat too heavily the tragedy that will overtake the novel’s passionate heroine, Maggie, who conforms only with difficulty and great inward effort to the narrow dictates that tell her how to be a good girl. The conclusion is flawed, too, veering close to melodrama as the heroine’s virtues—manifestly evident to us throughout, but unrecognized by those she loves—are at last witnessed by her upright and judgmental brother, Tom, just moments before they are together overwhelmed by the waters of a great flood she has braved to rescue him. “In their death they were not divided.” It’s a story about a brother and sister, so of course I was moved. Melodramatic tactics work, and I was crying not only over the death of the heroine, but over missed chances to overcome the painful distance from her brother, the impossibility of turning back the flow of time so that Maggie’s life could be different, the impossible regret of “if only” so central to melodrama.
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