Fiction Ruined My Family (23 page)

Cassie was cheery and hopeful and she looked a hundred times better than me, she was traveling through Asia in the off-season and just loving everything all the time. I had no idea that she was sober, I just knew that she was a big pain in the ass whenever she came to New York.

“Can I bring anything to the party?” she'd ask.

“Beer.”

“What about something else?”

“Nope, just beer.”

She'd show up with flowers after this exchange, and I assumed she was just too lazy to carry a few six packs from the deli. Or I figured she was doing some kind of cleanse.

I was also pretty sick of her wanting to go to dinner all the time when she visited. Who had money for dinner? Insanity.

I normally didn't talk to Cassie about my problems, because her shelves were nothing but self-help books, full of slogans like “Love yourself through disappointment” and “Feel your feelings!” Over the course of our friendship I had never contracted a slogan or an issue or a boundary or any sense of hope or cheerfulness, so I figured out it was safe to hang around these kinds of people. On the phone I went through the litany of things that were making me feel like killing myself and then, out of nowhere, I said, “And I'm working on a little drinking problem here.” She told me she had been sober for three years (that's what that was?) and maybe I needed to get sober. Well, sure, maybe I needed to do a lot of things: quit smoking, do some actual writing, get a bathroom, get a job. Doesn't mean I'm going to do any of them.

“Why don't you try and not drink tomorrow?” she suggested.

I couldn't believe my life had dried up to the point of taking advice from a woman who once scribbled and left a note on a sleeping homeless man on the F train that read “You matter.” A woman who had only a few years before invited me to her graduation from a self-help program called LifeYes!, where we met all the graduates in a hotel ballroom in midtown and they all had their eyes shut as “Greatest Love of All” played. When Whitney shut up, they opened their eyes, and you, their friend, stood in front of them as they all sobbed uncontrollably about you weren't sure what. Self-help was a bad, bad place as far as I was concerned. The term itself was bad. It wasn't helping yourself, it was just the opposite. If you could help yourself you wouldn't be in a ballroom with all these other losers, you'd be home, solving your problems. Why didn't they call it “can't help self” or just “fucking help me”?

I also disliked the word “recovery,” despised the “language of the heart,” and recovery slogans. It all reminded me of those posters in the high school guidance counselor's office: a picture of a kitten on the end of a rope with “Hang in There!” underneath. It reminded me of secretaries with little notes posted around their desks to get them through the weeklong fake laugh of office life. People who needed little pictures of monkeys skateboarding and toddlers walking down a hall in high-heeled shoes were probably the same people who went to church and went on “journeys” all the time. The same people who thought everything happens for a reason. Dumb people. The only self-help book I saw in our house was
I'm OK, You're OK
, which lived in a drawer of Mom's night table, like a hotel Bible, untouched. That and
The Inner Game of Tennis
were about as deep into self-help reading as my parents went. The aesthetic of sobriety was “god-awful,” my mother would have said, no style at all, no “flair.” Half their friends had been electroshocked when they couldn't get their shit together. Maybe after going to Catholic schools and then seeing the Democratic vice presidential nominee and family friend Thomas Eagleton and other friends torn to shreds for admitting depression, my parents felt the only thing worse than alcoholism and depression was to get help for them.

The thing is, I had no other options. A few days later I said out loud, “I'm an alcoholic.” And I felt like it was the first honest thing I had said in my life. Like the last thing I ever wanted to say. It made me nervous but I knew it was something I had been looking for my whole life. Not sobriety of course, but the truth.

I thought, Well, if I'm considering killing myself here, maybe I'll give this sobriety a chance. I always thought I would drink less, drink better, stop slugging people when I got my shit together. I drank because of my problems and once those went away I wouldn't drink so much. But I agreed to reverse the logical order of things and quit drinking first in order to get a handle on those problems. Not for a lifetime. Just to solve my problems with a clear head, and then I could drink normally again . . . or, you know, for the first time.

 

 

 

I DIDN'T TELL ANYONE I wasn't drinking, because if I couldn't do it, I didn't want anyone to know I had wanted one more thing and couldn't hack it. And if I didn't ultimately want to quit drinking, I wanted to go back to drinking in peace without being teased endlessly about the time I said I was quitting. My whole life had felt like a good story—something in which I participated in order to create something that could be used for conversation later. Was I using what had happened in my life to create art or was I
making
things happen to create art? This got harder to stomach: “Jeanne, tell the story about the boss who tried to kill you with the lead pipe!” Be entertaining. Stories. For the benefit of others. How did people latch on to emotionally healthy people? They seemed elusive, like trying to scale a smooth interior wall of a museum. How would anyone latch on to me? In “The Jelly-Bean,” Jim Powell loved Nancy Lamar because she was a disaster, a fun, free-spirited, beautiful disaster. No one loves a sane girl. At least they didn't in my house.

Whether I succeeded or failed at quitting drinking it was going to be my success or my failure.

Things were worse than before I quit drinking. I was now living in a couple rooms with wigs drying on a hanger outside my front door and a restless, unpredictable teenage pothead next door and no bathroom and no money, no job, no ascertainable work skills, all without alcohol. This was much worse. I knew I couldn't be around my friends at first because I knew if they asked, “Darst, what are you drinking?” I would have just burst into tears.

So when Cassie called again and said, “Why don't you come get sober out here in Aspen? You have nothing going on there,” I said I'd be out there in two days.

I
'M NOT THAT BIG on dreams, telling other people about them, interpreting them, the symbols. Pretty boring stuff. When I hear “I had the weirdest dream last night . . .” I usually give the throat-slash sign to the speaker. I had a recurring dream for about fifteen years that I never told anyone about for the aforementioned reason. It wasn't noteworthy. Until I stopped having it. In the dream I would fall down, often roll down a hill, and come to the bottom, and I couldn't get up. My legs wouldn't work right and I was weak and unable to stand up. And in the dream I desperately wanted to get up but couldn't. I would fall down every time I tried to stand. When I quit drinking I never had the dream again.

 

 

 

In Aspen, I got a job as a driver for a limo company, driving luxury SUVs. I had a black Denali. My first day as I was backing out of the garage I took off the sideview mirror. I thought, I hope they don't give me a lot of shit for this, seeing as I'm the only woman driver here on the force. A second later I heard one of the guys yell to the manager in the office, “Yup, that was the girl!”

A lot of the runs were from the Aspen airport to the St. Regis hotel in town. It was an easy drive; Aspen is not midtown Manhattan. I kept getting reprimanded because I would pull into the semicircle driveway of the St. Regis and my Denali would be a good three feet from the curb. This was apparently the mark of an amateur. A good driver would get the car right up against the curb for his passengers. Maybe now was not the time to tell my employers that I hadn't even taken my own road test, that my sister Julia took it for me. One day my supervisor, Tad, was in a car ahead of me in the St. Regis driveway and he hopped out of his Denali and came over to my vehicle and said, “Hey, Jeanne, when you have a second, like when you're waiting for a client, it's a great time to do a little maintenance on your vehicle. Like, why don't you hop out, grab a rag and wipe down your vehicle?”

“Because someone might see me?”

A few days later I picked up my assignment sheet for the day and saw that one of the runs out of the airport was Deepak Chopra at twelve forty-five. Cassie thought I was the luckiest person alive; she almost wished she were me for half a second. This could be a real turning point for you and listen to what he has to say and ask him what you're supposed to be doing with your life, don't be negative, be present for the experience and all this “Everything happens for a reason” caca. I was more concerned with not winding up in a ravine with the guru than I was with understanding what the reason is why I couldn't drink anymore and now had to drive people to and from airports. Naturally I had no idea what this joker smoker looked like, so I made a little DEEPAK CHOPRA sign and stood at the gate with it. The whole plane had deboarded after about fifteen minutes. There was nowhere else he could be; the airport is teeny. Then four giant black men, New York Giants it turned out, came toward me. I lowered my Deepak sign.

“Are you our ride?” one of them said.

“Yes, yes, right this way,” I said, forgetting to ask if I could carry anything for them. I turned back.

“Do you have luggage?” I asked.

“No, missy, it's your lucky day,” one of them said. They were laughing at me but I didn't take it personally. They were Giants.

We headed out to the car. I opened the back to put their carry-ons in.

“Let me take those,” I said, looking at their big bags.

“Oh, give me a break, girl,” and they laughed, hoisting their bags into the back. I was relieved. The drive to the St. Regis was uneventful. I felt fairly competent as we cruised out of the airport; I remembered the speed bump on the way out and slowed accordingly, saving me from having to apologize for bumping their heads. I felt like a good driver. I was certain I was going to nail the curb thing this time, too.

The Giants remarked that the village looked like “fuckin' Hansel and Gretel town,” which was true. They wondered how much “cheddar you gotta have to have a house here.” They guessed “Will Smith cheddar,” and then I got sort of near the curb and dropped them all off. I headed back to the garage. My boss was waiting for me as I pulled in.

“Jeanne, what happened to Deepak Chopra?” Bob asked.

“I don't know.”

“Well, I do. There was nobody there to meet him at the airport and after standing around waiting for one of our guys for twenty minutes, he took a cab. A cab. To his hotel.”

I thought that didn't seem like the worst thing that could happen to someone. I mean, if anyone should be able to handle this it's Deepak fucking Chopra. But my boss didn't see it that way. I hopped on the thirty-year-old yellow ten-speed that Cassie had coaxed her landlord into letting me use for the summer, and rode to the supermarket for a newspaper. I was going to need another job.

 

 

 

I had had clear skin my whole life, but when I quit drinking I got this weird acne. (Who knew all that beer and Maker's Mark was making my skin look so fabulous?) Despite looking horrible, I managed to find someone to spoon my boils, this former drug addict mechanic in Aspen, Sam. Sam couldn't remember anything. His whole life was a blackout and he was pretty sensitive about it so I tried to keep questions like “Do you like mustard?” to a minimum. Sam looked at me with amazement when he saw me after we'd been apart a day or two, and I was convinced he eyed me with such delight because he'd actually forgotten about me and so it was like meeting me for the first time every time we went out, like every day was a Christopher Nolan movie for him. “Hey there . . . beautiful.” Sam lived at his shop across from the airport. The garage was packed with cars he was working on and outside were a zillion cars waiting to be worked on. He lived above the garage, an area you got to by climbing a ladder. There was a makeshift kitchen he and the other mechanics used with a fridge and a microwave, and Sam would toddle down there at night after we'd fool around and come back up the ladder with a pint of ice cream.

Like Sam, I didn't know how to do anything, and the biggest shock of early sobriety was how uncomfortable I really was, how reliant on alcohol. I hoped my entire being wasn't dependent on alcohol to operate: my sense of humor, my brain, my ability to talk to people and the pleasure I took in meeting new people. I hoped some normal person would emerge out of all this, me, that I was still in there, but there was no way to predict if that was true—if I would become someone different, or just a sober, less violent version of myself. After about four months it was time to answer this question by getting back to my regular life.

When I got back to Brooklyn, the first party I went to sober was at a good friend's house in Park Slope, the place where I had partied and eaten dinner and lunch and hung out endlessly, often sleeping over even though I lived nearby because I couldn't make it home. I was chatting with someone I didn't know, someone who in my former life would have been mere set-dressing, as people were when I drank, and I poured myself a seltzer and sipped and talked uncomfortably. I had the distinct feeling that something was missing from my drink, alcohol obviously, but surely there was something I could put in my seltzer that would jazz it up, so I reached for a banana on the counter, pulled down the peel and sliced a big piece of it on a plastic cutting board and dropped it in my seltzer. The woman I was talking to said, “Did you just put banana in your seltzer?” and I looked down at my drink and defensively shot back, “Yes,” as if she were completely unaware of drink trends.