Authors: Ken Grimes
This CEO sits after all the other working stiffs have gone, sits in the dim nickel-plated light in his office overlooking Central Park, or Boston Common, or the Golden Gate Bridge. He's thinking about a trailer. He'd like to go back to it.
A sentimental fantasy. A cliché. But I have to tell myself stories.
I get up from my desk and walk aimlessly in air that looks almost dusty with the light of early October. I am no longer poor. Where I live now is a far cry from that trailer in Morgantown. Only it did have a porch, and I don't have one here. And Ken sat on the porch with a big rabbit. And the trick-or-treaters came.
It's nearly Halloween now.
I walk aimlessly, picking things up, putting them down, a small brass elephant, an ornament, a book . . .
Like a mother who rises at night to seek a childhood picture.
I
'm sitting in a cabin in the woods outside of Frostburg, Maryland, thinking about dinner at the lodge. A menu has been left in the cabin, and the food, I understand, is very good, haute cuisine, indeed, which one wouldn't expect in the woods.
It's seven
P.M.
, and at this time back in the day (as they say), I'd be working on my third martini (and that's a conservative guess). Instead, I'm only thinking of a martini. What I notice most in my mind's eye is the mist clinging to the glass like a rained-on window in which you might trace a heart.
If I could manage to get this description precise enough, if I could cut with a scalpel's precision, I swear I could drink the words straight up.
But I'm not drinking. Right now I'm thinking of stealing that lamp on the table over there. It's quite remarkable. The base is a wooden fish leaping from carved water. I thought the shade was
marbled gold until I turned on the light and the whole panoramic fish scene sprang to life in silhouette. There is one fisherman with a net and another, farther around the shade, in a boat. Amid black pines, fish jump from painted water, black ducks move on the horizon, pigeons nosedive from the sepia sky or, as the incomparable Wallace Stevens put it, sink “downward to darkness, on extended wings.”
If I could write a line like that, I would never, ever need to think about, much less drink, a martini.
They were both fishermen, my father and my brother, my father dead long ago, my brother a few years, though now that seems long ago, too. Time has a way of thinning out, like water over rocks.
My father had a cabin in the woods on an island in the Georgian Bay, the cabin reachable only by water. Although I wasn't there when my father was alive, I did go there when my brother was. It would be hard to beat that scene: sitting around a fireplace, talking and drinking before a supper of freshly caught trout and fried onions and potatoes. The air was so clear, it had a weight to it. There are fishermen who go up there alone. For some, isolation is a thing they can drink in.
I'm told that fishing requires patience. But everything requires patienceâwriting requires patience, standing in line at the supermarket requires it, waiting for the coffeemaker requires it. If we had the patience required of us, we'd be halfway to a peaceful life. Drinking, at least until the arc moves downward, gives the illusion of peace.
This cabin I occupy for a few days has a porch where I sit, rocking and looking up at the windswept treetops, congratulating myself on getting up out of the heat of D.C. on a whim (since
I usually have to plan out a trip to CVS before I make it), patting myself on the back for leaving behind computers and television. I have a cell phone that I don't use often; I don't like e-mail, so I don't check it often. Basically, I live offline, but I look for distractions just like anybody.
I've never been to the MacDowell Colony or Yaddo, those writers' colonies that have proved a godsend for writers and artists who couldn't otherwise find the time or place to work. Your breakfast and lunch are delivered, and except for joining your fellow writers and artists for dinner, you are left on your own.
Here, at this lodge, the same thing: They bring your breakfast in a box and place it on the porch. They do lunch this way, too, if asked. Dinner has one going to the lodge a quarter mile or so down the dirt road. We could be a bunch of writers and artists gathering for a social evening and a meal after a day of isolation.
When I'm at home, rarely does an entire uninterrupted day happen. All writers, if asked, would claim this is what they long for. Me, I don't know. I have a suspicion I would be a total failure at living for a month or six weeks at a writers' colony (where some writers stay, I think, as long as six months). I think to be successful in such a place must require a rigorous exercise of will.
I like to think I want only uninterrupted pieces of time to write; after all, I define myself that wayâwriting. Then again, I could be a fraud. Maybe I don't want that at all. Maybe I just want to shuffle ahead in bits and pieces, writing for a few minutes or hours. A blank page of time affects me, well, like a blank page. A threat. Do you think you can fill me up? it says. You?
The threat was much worse when I was drinking. I kept stumbling over writer's block. The inability to write for, say, fifteen whole minutes convinced me that I was washed up. I had absolutely no faith in my ability to pick myself up and go on.
The cabin-in-the-woods illusion goes skipping right along with the cottage by the sea, or the small house “of clay and wattles made.” Such domains are for those souls who are just this side of living in hermitages and who don't need a Barnes & Noble on one side and a coffee shop on the other. I have always kidded myself about the cabin in the woods, when I wasn't looking at real estate photos in
Country Life
of ruined castle keeps in Scotland. Like the good little writer I am, I see myself in a house overlooking miles of wheat fields, or in a bayou with the alligators breaking the surface, and me, writing, writing, writing uninterruptedly all day long. The stuff of nightmares.
So I sit on the porch rocking, and looking at the treetops, and getting bored, and siding with Woody Allen: “Nature and I are two.”
Inside, I'm stranded between a menu and a lamp. I'm thinking that this food deserves wine. Actually, I deserve wine, but I'll hold the food responsible.
A glass of wine. I stopped going to the clinic the first time after several months because I disliked my recovery group and its self-satisfied air. Within a couple of weeks of leaving, I had a glass of wine. I drank wine for a while, a few weeks or perhaps months, then, eventually and predictably, started in on the martinis again.
I get up to turn the lamp off and on again, so the dark images appear as if by magic. The fish leap out of parchment water; the fishermen cast their lines.
I wish they'd come back, my father and my brother, with their rods and reels.
I'm either going to have a glass of wine or steal that lamp.
Hello, my name is Martha, and I'm an alcoholic. Or a thief.
O
ne of the first things I heard when I got sober that I didn't understand until later was “Alcoholics are people whose lives get worse after they stop drinking.”
In my third week of sobriety, my neck suddenly froze. I couldn't turn it to the left or right. I panicked and told a coworker that I was in pain. She directed me to Dr. John Sarno, an MD at New York University who had developed a theory and treatment for neck and back pain named tension myositis syndrome.
I called his office, and instead of a bored receptionist, a nurse asked how I felt. I told her I had stopped drinking and my neck was frozen, and she got me in to see Dr. Sarno the next day.
Dr. Sarno evaluated me through an extensive question-and-answer session, looked at my neck, and told me that he thought I had TMS. He explained that it was caused by suppressed emotions, the principal emotion being anger. He had me complete
some written exercises and read his book. Within ten days, my neck was fine.
The following summer, after a year of sobriety, I quit smoking, only to be greeted by an explosion of anger. I had no idea how smoking cigarettes had masked my emotions. Even without alcohol and pot, as long as I could smoke those Marlboro Lights, I was okay. The minute I began to feel sad or frustrated or off-kilter, lighting up a cigarette made it all float away in a puff of smoke.
One day I wandered back to my office with a guy from my lunchtime twelve-step meeting. We talked about the first year. I said, “Man, I really didn't think I could do it. I didn't think I would make it. It was so hard.”
He stopped, looked at me, and said, “Yeah, that first year was hard, but I'm warning you, the second year is much harder.”
I wanted to kill him. Thanks for letting me enjoy my sobriety “anniversary.” That was on top of the two-page hate letter that had just arrived at my office from a woman I had recently broken up with. She had five years of sobriety and was technically breaking the rules by dating someone with under a year, but she forgot that in her vitriol.
A month later, on one of the hottest days of the summer, I was walking down my block in Chelsea. I stopped to look at the broken glass on my street from a smashed car window, and I opened up a pack of cigarettes. I had tried to quit smoking numerous times when I was drinking, but I couldn't do it. I hadn't tried yet in sobriety; I had been too frightened to quit drinking
and
smoking at the same time.
I started to light up and felt an immediate revulsion. It was so hot, I didn't want to smoke. But I had the urge. It reminded me of drinking: not wanting to but having to. I threw the pack in the
trash, and I haven't smoked a cigarette in twenty-one years. I had a flirtation with cigars in the mid-nineties when they were trendy, but I had to stop smoking them, too, because they made me sick to my stomach. Not that I didn't keep trying, even after they made me feel terrible.
I detoxified from cigarettes by returning to chewing tobacco. I would chew at Random House, spitting tobacco juice in an empty Pepsi can while Pulitzer Prizeâwinning authors were wandering the halls.
The chewing tobacco helped quell my physical urge to smoke but not the anger and frustration I felt more and more often. It blew straight out of me like a volcano. I broke two phones in my office by slamming down the receiver so hard, the plastic cracked. Once I broke the metal and plastic case surrounding the keyboard on my typewriter.
One day a coworker saw a hole in the wall near the floor, and she asked me, “Did you do that?”
I turned red with embarrassment. “No, why do you ask?”
She just stared at me and said, “Why do I ask? Because kicking a hole in the wall is exactly the kind of thing you would do.”
I told my therapist these stories. He became visibly alarmed and told me to hit a heavy bag at the gym. “You need a safety valve.”
I took the suggestion (after I stopped drinking, I was able to take suggestions) and found that I liked hitting a heavy bag while thinking of all the people who pissed me off, from the bullies who tormented me, growing up, to my father, who abandoned me.
Soon just hitting a heavy bag wasn't enough. Within three months, I was taking lessons at the legendary Gleason's boxing gym in Brooklyn. My trainer, Angel, moved me along quickly, to
the point where I was ready for my first bout, against a forty-six-year-old money manager renowned for being the oldest man to win a professional fight in New York.
Angel made two mistakes: First, I didn't have a mouth guard. Second, my opponent was insanely aggressive.
I guess the “old guy” wasn't ready for me to fight. I stepped in and rained jabs, rights, and hooks at his head and stomach, pushing him back against the ropes. He quickly regained his composure, counterpunched, and decked me with a clean uppercut that I never saw coming.
I landed on my back, my head bouncing against the canvas floor. Angel jumped into the ring, completely pissed, as the old guy danced around me, shouting, “Yeah, that's how it's done!” in his guttural Brooklyn accent.
Angel yelled at him, helped me up, and told me he was sorry about the mouth guard. He added, “Look, man, it's the punch you don't see that knocks you out.” I staggered off to the showers and got dressed. My jaw ached, and there was a ringing in my ears for the next two days.
I was undeterred. Next Saturday morning, I was back, with the cacophony of bells ringing their three-minute rounds, the thwacking of the heavy bags, and the gunfire rotation of the speed bags. In the corner, amateur wrestlers practiced diving off the ropes onto each other with a sudden crash. I loved it. I realized that Norman Mailer was right: Boxing is hard, not because you have to overcome your fear of getting hurt, but because you have to get over the fear of hurting someone else.
A few years later, I almost broke my nose in a white-collar boxing match at Kingsway gym in Manhattan. Another uppercut, this time right on the nose. I didn't go down, but the referee stopped
the match when the deep-mahogany-colored blood from my nose spattered onto the canvas floor. I wandered back to the locker room, where my only solace was a visit by ex-heavyweight fighter Michael Grant. He said, “Hey, man, you gotta move your head. Gotta move your head.”
That was many years ago, and I still have to work to contain my anger. Now I realize that my feelings were the tail that wagged the dog. I couldn't live with them. Other people seem to manage fear, loneliness, and disappointment without having to kill them with a chemical or raging at someone or something. It's as if I were born without the ability to process certain feelings, and I'm still overwhelmed by them today.
It's too easy to pin all the anger on my father's disappearing act or my mother's alcoholism. A degree of pain will be with me forever. It's more formless than that, to be restless, irritable, and discontent unless I'm getting my way all the time. So I go to a meeting, or meditate, or talk about my current predicament to a friend in recovery. I've come to realize that no matter how I feel, I shouldn't take it too seriously, because three hours from now, I'll feel differently.