Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (24 page)

I
T’S CRAZY
I used to think all writers drink. When you quit, you notice how many don’t drink anymore, or never did. This is true for every creative field. Throw a stone in Hollywood, and
you’ll hit a sober person. Rock stars, comics, visual artists—they learn sobriety is the path to longevity. Any tabloid reader knows that walking into certain AA rooms can be like stumbling into a
Vanity Fair
party, which helped kick the fame delusion out of me.

I was a child who worshipped celebrities—Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, River Phoenix—each of them was a hero to me. I spent way too many of my younger years grasping for whatever fame I could get my fingers around. But in the battle for a better life, fame is a flimsy weapon. Those rooms were not divided into famous people and nonfamous people. Just people who had all reached for the same fix.

Sobriety helped to knock a few false prophets out of me. Alcohol. Other people’s approval. Idealized romantic love. So what should I worship now? I didn’t care to find the answer, honestly, but the program kept placing one word back in front of me, even after I pushed it away.
God.

The word made me squirm. Like so many people, I resisted AA, in part, because of the words “higher power.” Even the major work-around of a “God of my understanding” was way too much God for me. I was raised around conservative Christians who did not always strike me as charitable. I was puzzled by the demented winner-takes-all spirit of traditional religion:
I go to heaven, and you do not.
College taught me religion was the opium of the masses. God was for weak people who couldn’t handle their own lives, and it took me a long time to understand that, actually, I was a weak person who couldn’t handle my own life, and I could probably use all the help I could get.

The “higher power” idea came to me in increments. Like sobriety itself, it was not a spectacular, flailing jump but a
tentative inching in the same direction. I thought a lot about storytelling. That was a power way bigger than me. When I listened to someone’s story, when I met the eyes of a person in pain, I was lifted out of my own sadness, and the connection between us felt like a supernatural force I could not explain. Wasn’t that all I needed? A power bigger than me?

I needed to be reminded I was not alone. I needed to be reminded I was not in charge. I needed to be reminded that a human life is infinitesimal, even as its beauty is tremendous. That I am big and small at once.

I worship the actual stars now, the ones above us. Anna lives out in West Texas, where the night sky burns electric, and her back patio is the first place I understood the phrase “a bowl full of stars.” The stars tilt around you, and you can feel the curvature of the earth, and I always end up standing on my tippy-toes out there, just to be two inches closer to the rest of the galaxy.

My spiritual life is in its infancy. But the major epiphany was that I needed one. A lot of my friends are atheists. We don’t talk much about belief, and I wouldn’t presume to know theirs, but I think their stance comes from an intellectual allergy to organized religion, the great wrongs perpetrated in the name of God, the way one book was turned into a tool of violence, greed, and bigotry. I don’t blame them. But I wish belief didn’t feel like a choice between blind faith and blanket disavowal. I’m a little freaked out by the certainty on either side. No one has an answer sheet to this test. How we got here, what we are doing—it’s the greatest blackout there is.

Whether God exists or not, we need him. Humans are born with a God-shaped hole, a yearning, a hunger to be complete. We get to choose how we fill that hole. David Foster Wallace
gave a commencement address at Kenyon College, a speech that is a bit like a sermon for people who don’t want to go to church:

I worshipped alcohol, and it consumed me. I worshipped celebrity and the machines of external validation, and it cratered me. To worship another human being is to set yourself up for failure, because humans are, by their nature, flawed. I worshipped David Foster Wallace once. In some ways, I still do. His suicide is another reminder that all the knowledge and talent in the world will not stop your hands from tying the noose that will hang you.

I seek all the sources of comfort I can find. Music. Old friends. Words that leave my fingers before the sun rises. My guitar, strummed in an empty room. The trees as they turn, telling me that I am not a towering redwood but another leaf scraping the ground. I also hit my knees each morning and bow to the mystery of all I don’t know, and I say thank you. Does anyone hear me? I don’t know. But I do.

A
few months before my cat died, he started sleeping in the closet. I would search the house for him and find those green eyes staring back at me from the corner, underneath the jackets and behind the boots. I knew exactly why he’d chosen that spot, the far-back place where harm couldn’t reach. One night, I pulled my duvet off the bed and lay down beside him to let him know I would stay at his side. About a minute into this routine, he bolted downstairs and hid behind the sofa. What part of “I want to be alone” did I not understand?

I was overwrought about my cat dying. I knew this would be the scariest loss I’d experienced since I gave up drinking. I worried about the incoming grief: when I would lose him, how it might rearrange my heart. But here’s the problem with worry—it doesn’t actually
do
anything.

A cancerous mass was growing on the side of his face. He looked like a squirrel hiding nuts in one cheek. I measured the growth with my fingers each morning. From a nut to a lime to a baseball. I would meet his eyes before we went to sleep.
You
have to tell me when it’s time
, I would say, knowing full well he could not.

One afternoon, I kissed his nose, and only half of his little face squinted.
That’s odd.
I ran one hand over his eyes, and his left eye refused to close. It had turned glassy. I called Jennifer at her vet clinic, and her soft voice told me what I already knew. The next morning, she came to my house in her blue scrubs and sat cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom and let me hold Bubba as she inserted the IV into his tiny orange paw.

“This will be fast,” she said. “Are you ready?” And I was not, but I was as ready as I was going to be.

She pushed the plunger on the first syringe, and he made a purr like an engine coming to a stop. His body slumped in my arms. I don’t remember the second syringe. What I remember is opening my eyes, and Jennifer leaning over him with a stethoscope, and the way she met my gaze to tell me he was gone. His body was warm against my face.

My mind couldn’t keep pace with the change. I carried Bubba to Jennifer’s car and lay him gingerly in the front passenger seat. As I walked back into my carriage house, tears dripping off my chin, what I expected to find, more than anything, was him at the top of the stairs to help me through this ordeal.

The pain of his loss was enormous, but I never once thought:
Drinking would make this better. You know what this horrible day calls for? Booze.
I finally understood alcohol was not a cure for pain; it was merely a postponement.

I don’t know when it happened, but I stopped longing for the drink. I’m not saying I never miss drinking, because I do on occasion, but the craving and the clawing is gone. Happy hour comes and goes, and I don’t notice. A foamy pint no longer
beckons to me like a crooked finger. Bar signs lit up with blinking neon look exactly like what they are: beautiful distractions.

This shift seemed impossible at one time. The woman hiding in the closet knew her life was over, and she was on some artificial lung now. I wish I could have known how much easier it would be on this side.

For so many years, I was stuck in a spin cycle of worry and questioning.
Am I an alcoholic? Is alcoholism a “disease”? What if this, or that, or the other thing?
Overthinkers are the most exhausting alcoholics. I have left a trail of soggy Kleenex that could stretch to the sun, but the equation is simple. When I cut out alcohol, my life got better. When I cut out alcohol, my spirit came back. An evolved life requires balance. Sometimes you have to cut out one thing to find balance everywhere else.

I watch women at bars sometimes. I watch them holding the wineglass in their hands, the wet curve of the lip forever finding the light. I watch them in their skirts small as cocktail napkins and their skyscraper heels, but I don’t envy them anymore. Maybe at some advanced age, we get the gift of being happy where we are. Or maybe where I am right now got a whole lot easier to take.

A woman I know told me a story once, about how she’d always been the girl in the front row at live shows. Pushing her way to the place where the spotlight burned tracers in her eyes and the speakers rattled her insides. When she quit drinking, she missed that full-throttle part of herself, but then she realized:
Sobriety is full throttle
. No earplugs. No safe distance. Everything at its highest volume. All the complications of the world, vibrating your sternum.

I go to meetings, and I can’t believe the grief people walk through. Losing their children, losing their spouse. I can’t believe how sheltered I’ve been. Here I am, undone by the loss of my 17-year-old cat.

“I wish I was tougher,” I complained to my friend Mary.

“Well, you’re not tough,” she told me, and I laughed. “Tough is a posture anyway. You’re something better. You’re resilient.”

I still cry most mornings when I awake and he’s not there. I hate looking up in the second-story window where he will never sit, breaking into excited noise when I come through the gate. But I know how to start over now, which means I can start over as many times as I need. I’m all too aware that the biggest challenges of my life are still in front of me. And I feel a little worried about that. Mostly, I feel prepared.

It’s funny how I used to think drinking made me a grown-up. Back when I was a little girl, I would slip a crystal wineglass off the shelf of my parents’ cabinet, and the heft of it felt like independence. I played cocktail party, not tea party, because that’s what glamorous adults on TV did. But drinking was actually an extended adolescence for me. An insanely fun, wonderfully complicated, emotionally arrested adolescence. And quitting drinking was the first true act of my adulthood. A coming-of-age for a woman who came of age a long time ago.

E
ACH YEAR,
I drive out to see Anna. It takes ten hours to get to her West Texas home from Dallas, but I don’t mind. The rumble of the tires is like a meditative hum. The perpetual motion shuts down my brain. The sky is a blue that contains many blues: the milky blue of the prairie, the electric blue of the desert.

I listen to pop songs in the car, three-minute blasts of
feel-good, a buzz that never fails. My Honda is like a portable ’70s disco: ELO, the BeeGees, Queen. As I drive across the empty roads, I sing with the surrender that booze used to bring, and I wonder if it would ever be possible to take this starlit feeling and somehow stretch it across the rest of my life.

Anna and I have had 20 years of these reunions. Twenty years of hugs and how-was-the-drives, and both of us politely disagreeing over who is going to carry the bags to the doorstep. And whenever Anna and I feel far apart, even as we are sitting next to each other on the couch, I tell myself 20 years was a good run.

The distance of these past years has spooked me. A couple years ago, I came out to visit, and we had a tense disagreement in her car. It was nighttime, and we were stopped at the railroad that cuts through town, the red light flashing as the boxcars hurtled past. I said to her, with too much grit in my voice, “I don’t think you know how hard it is to be single and alone.”

And she said, with perfect calm, “I don’t think you know how hard it is to be married with a kid.”

It was the full summary of the standoff we’d been having for years. The white arm of the gate lifted, and we crossed the tracks.

This time, I want it to be different. I know that her life has changed, but I want to believe that I might still have a place in it. I turn into the gravel road that leads to her place. I pull up to find Anna doing her jokey dance, guiding me into the driveway. Alice stands behind the screen door, watching. It’s hard to imagine a world farther from New York. There’s a clothesline on her patio, an ocotillo cactus growing in her front yard.

“You made it,” she says, and I smile. “I did.”

The next afternoon, we drive through the red-rock mountains heading to a natural spring. The vista makes you wonder why
anyone ever moved to a city. I keep feeling the urge for some monumental conversation, but Anna and I have had two decades of monumental conversations. Maybe what we need are smaller conversations now. So we talk about the latest
New Yorker
. We talk about films. We talk about the view outside the window, a view we share for a change.

Best friends.
For so long, those two words contained music to me, but also a threat of possession. I hung the words like pelts in my room. I had best friends for every life phase, every season. The words were meant to express love, but wasn’t I also expressing competition? There was a ranking, and I needed to be at the top. Anna’s closest friend now is a woman she works with at the legal aid office. They take care of each other’s children and giggle with the familiarity of twins. It’s exactly the kind of companionship Anna and I had once, and it stings sometimes when I feel replaced, but I wouldn’t wish anything different for her.

I know Anna and I will never be friends like we were at 19, because we’ll never be 19 again. I also know this is nothing I did. That while drinking wrecks precious things, it never wrecked our friendship. Sometimes people drift in and out of your life, and the real agony is fighting it. You can gulp down an awful lot of seawater, trying to change the tides.

At the springs, Anna and I lay down a blanket on the grass and splay out our imperfect bodies. I tell her about what I’m writing, and she talks about Alice’s new Montessori preschool. We don’t share the same language anymore, but we are both trying to learn the other’s vocabulary.

I wonder if our lives will track closer after I have a baby, and she once again becomes the mentor she was to me in my younger days. Then again, I may never have a baby, and I feel all right with that. So many women my age are torn up over the question
mark of motherhood, but on this topic—if nothing else—I feel a total zen. I don’t know what comes next. It’s like a novel whose ending I haven’t read yet.

The sun is hot, and pools of sweat start dripping down our bare bellies. We walk out to the spring and touch a toe in the water. It’s bracingly cold. A short diving board leads out into the middle of the murky pool, and we stand there like kids, hunched and laughing, our skin covered with goose bumps.

“You go,” I say, nudging her, and she says, “No, you go.” And we giggle until she gathers herself up, serious now. “OK, do you want me to go?” And I nod. So she walks out on the platform, like she always has, and jumps first.

O
NE
S
UNDAY MORNING,
my mother and I are having coffee. We’re still in our yoga clothes, sitting on the empty patio of a café. Out of nowhere, she says, “I’m just so glad you’re sober.”

My mom didn’t say much about my drinking for a long time, and now that the subject is out in the open, I feel uncomfortable dwelling here. The words can make me feel stuck, branded. I’m four years sober now. When do these pronouncements end?

But I understand my mother needs to give voice to these feelings. She is an emotional blurter. In the middle of family dinner, she’ll say to me and my brother, “I just love you two kids so much,” and it’s like: OK, but can you pass the chicken?

My mother stares at her teacup, getting a contemplative look in her eye. “I wish I could have been there more for you when you were a little girl,” she says, and her green eyes turn watery.

“Mom, stop,” I say, waving off the emotional charge of the conversation. “Don’t you like who I am?”

She nods that yes, she does.

“Do you think you screwed up so badly that it requires all this apologizing?”

She shakes her head that no, she doesn’t. She tries to explain gently, what I might not understand: the impossible hope of parenthood, the need to shelter your child from pain. It’s hard to live with the mistakes, she says. She wishes she’d been better.

I do understand. We all live in the long shadow of the person we could have been. I regret how selfish and irresponsible I’ve been as their daughter. How many things I took for granted. My mother’s constant emotional nourishment. My father’s hard work and unwavering support.