Fiction Ruined My Family (24 page)

 

 

 

 

“SO YOU'RE JUST on wine now, is that it? That seems very smart,” my father says when I tell him I'm sober.

“No, Dad. No wine, no—”

“I think that's a fine idea. Stick to beer.”

“No beer, Dad, nothing—”

“A good beer is just as well. Might even try that myself.”

 

 

 

 

“YOU SEE I LIKE to have one gin and tonic on summer nights,” Eleanor confides on a warm summer night sitting on her back lawn in Connecticut when I tell her I'm sober. “That's why I never overdo it. Ever. Because I like to have one drink on summer nights sitting outside.”

“That's great. But, I've already overdone it so I can't have anything.”

“That's why I never overdid it.”

“Well, I did.”

“Okay, okay. Do you want a . . . juice box?”

 

 

 

 

DESPITE WHAT ALL the triumphant recovery movies and books might have you believe, it's possible to get sober and have nobody really give a shit. So our lives have been ravaged by alcoholism for the last twenty years. What is it that you want me to say?

 

 

 

 

I HAD COFFEE with Julia around this time and I apologized for the way I had treated her when I was drinking. She said, “Big fucking deal, Jeanne. You're a total psycho, drunk or sober.”

 

 

 

 

I NEEDED TO SEE Grandpa (Jed). If we had broken up because I was a lushy mess and he was sober, my mind told me there was now a new equation, math even I could get, a simple fraction: sober/man = sober/woman. I was now, well, pulling my weight in the equation of our love. I went over to his house to announce the good news, the news of my return to him. He made me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a coffee and listened.

“This is the best news I've gotten in a long time,” he said.

“So, I mean, I thought we could give it another shot—”

“Another what? Another shot? Are you crazy?” He lit a cigarette.

“Now that I'm sober,” I reminded him.

“Listen, I want you to have the happiest life you can possibly have. I want you to have everything you ever wanted”—he gestured with his hands—“over there. Like way over there.”

“You wanted to get married.”

“Yeah, well, that's before we broke up. I had no idea how happy I was going to be without you. Which is why I'm not mad about all the shit you pulled—the roast beef sandwiches you ate drunk out of your mind in our bed, the time you were drunk and tried to stick that long-stemmed rose up my ass, the cheating, none of it. Because you were the one who ended it and for that I will always owe you.”

“Look, you don't have to answer now. Maybe you want to take some time to think about what it would be like with me sober now—”

“No. Nope. No way.”

I finished my PB and J and we smoked a cig together and I took a look around at the old luxury SoHo loft and left.

 

 

 

 

MY MOTHER WASN'T IMPRESSED or amazed and she didn't want to know how I'd done it or when or what it was like or was it difficult or how did I feel now. She probably thought I was pretending to be sober to get her sober. I don't know. We didn't talk about it much.

Being sober is the most important thing to me, and yet I really hate people who blab on and on about being sober and how they did it and why they're so much better than people who can't get sober. Alcoholism is horrible and all alcoholics would like to get good and stinky regularly if they could. What people who get sober don't talk about is that sobriety can be monotonous, can feel like your personality is living in a gated community, that sometimes it's hard to access fun and wildness because it might be located in the same region of your brain that says, “Have four hundred beers right now and then show someone your butt!” I don't like feeling so protective of myself. Some sober people do a lot of processing and healing and going on journeys, and that stuff doesn't feel like the most fun, it feels like self-obsession, overthinking life, instead of living. I'm sure that I'm meant to be sober. But that doesn't mean that I always want to be sober.

I never know what to drink. “What'll you have?” is such an absurd question to me now. What'll I have? Well, I can't have anything, if you want to know the truth. Bring me whatever you want. It doesn't matter. I'm sober. None of it's gonna be any fun.

But being sober was this amazing trip into regular life, what normal people do every day—pay their phone bills, get stains out of shirts, poo in toilets—an adventure in normalcy. One morning I woke up and made coffee and realized that I had no milk. I was annoyed that I'd have to go out so early and get milk and just as I was shutting the fridge I saw a brown bag I had gotten the night before. I opened it, amazed, delighted, baffled. Backup milk! I had bought backup milk! I am so fucking sober it's crazy!!! I want major awards for doing stuff normal people do all day long. If I'm at my sister's and I'm helping clean up after dinner I want acknowledgment for not being a fuckface. “Do you SEE ME? Do you SEE me wiping this table? Pretty amazing, right?” I'll knock over a lamp while dusting if I think I'm not being noticed being helpful. I find myself phoning friends if I'm walking to a mailbox to mail some bills.

“Hey, Linda, it's Jeanne. Thought I'd call and say hi. I'm just mailing my Con Ed bill on Court Street. Call me back, I'll tell you all about it.”

And as I walked around without a hangover I realized I could do some writing now. I was physically able to do it unlike when I was drinking. Maybe I could manage a few words just on cigarettes. And yes, the Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, the Faulkners and the Capotes. Drank while writing. Drink next to the typewriter. But the longer I lived in Brooklyn, the more writers I met, and I guess I was just too drunk to put it together before but now I realized about half of them were sober. So you
could
be a writer and be sober. Very interesting.

I
WAS WORKING in a coffee shop in Brooklyn and got a call from a guy who had done the women's film festival website and was now a vice president at Sundance Channel. He liked the writing I did for the festival's website and catalog and offered me my first real job, working for Sundance Channel. I was going to get paid to be a writer. I knew getting paid and being good had nothing to do with each other, but that didn't mean it didn't feel great. It was a full-time job. I had a nameplate on my office door with the word WRITER underneath it.

But my first real job confirmed a hunch I'd had for a while: I don't want a real job. The job was great. It really was. I could go have a cig downstairs, make a phone call without being “on a break.” I could take lunch when I felt like it. Adult. Professional. I wrote for the website, interstitial promos, and for two actual film shows. Being a normal person was a lot easier than what I'd been doing for the last decade—but being normal was scary because it seemed like, if I go down this road who knows what will happen to me? It's just not safe for an artist to blend into the working world. I could, well, I could get used to it for one thing. I was starting to buy “work clothes,” aching for sweaters that would look right for the Monday staff meeting, so my thrift store old man sweaters wouldn't, you know, draw attention to me.

I was able to move to a studio a few blocks away with a bathroom. Nothing fancy but a regular apartment. I had no credit or credibility so I couldn't rent an apartment on my own. I got it by just moving my stuff in when a friend was moving out. I had a real job and a real apartment. Which let me tell you felt . . . boring.

Some people I knew, dancers, writers, painters, did work like answering phones in day spas or something completely unrelated to their interest or talent, saving their mental energy for their own creative work. I also knew writers who worked in something related, like an ad agency, and then came home and wrote their book at night. These people liked to do something for money that “uses their brain.” I fell into the “not using your brain for work” category. When I went to work at a cable TV station I felt like someone who works at a cable TV station, and not like someone who was doing this in order to go home and write.

One day at Sundance, I got a call from Dad, who had moved from the West Village to Brooklyn a few years earlier, just around the corner from me and Katharine and Henry. He had taken over the apartment that Julia was leaving, because it was a lot cheaper than his place on West Fourth Street. He lived there a short while until he decided to move in with my mother again. I don't know how they'd cooked up this idea but they had thought it was a winner: he got to save money and she got an
“au père”
of sorts, a father of her children to take out her garbage and answer the door when the liquor store delivery guy came by. They lasted about six days, until the night Dad went out to get an ink cartridge for his printer and when he came back Mom had bolted the inside lock and wouldn't let him back in, not even to get his things. That's when he called me. He came and slept on the blue couch in my living room and for the next few days we were roomies. While at my house, he asked what I was reading, what I was writing, and I lied about both, pretending to be very diligently “on” a play. He told me what he was reading and lied about what he was writing. We talked about day jobs and money problems and joked that jail would be a wonderful place to get some work done, three meals a day served to you, no preparation time, get a lot of reading done, a little exercise to keep the mind sharp, no rent to worry about, no distractions except the occasional visit from a loved one. Then he went to Katharine and Henry's for a few nights, and then he slept at Eleanor's until he found a new place in Brooklyn.

This could have been the moment when I said, Wow, do I want to be sleeping on some couch of my kid's when I'm sixty-seven? I got it good. I gotta hang on to this job thing or it's back to peeing in sinks for me. But instead, I quit.

I left partly because in a staff meeting one day I couldn't remember what our actual product was. We were talking about the website routing people to the channel, which routed people to our magazine, which directed viewers to the news show we aired about the shows on the channel, and I thought, I can't be the only person in this room who can't keep straight what we sell. When I quit, the reactions from people who'd watched me be broke all my life were quite dramatic. I suppose just because you quit drinking doesn't mean you know how to do stuff—keep a good job, or do things that make sense. But the way I saw it, I needed to get back to crummy jobs, only this time I would write while working these crummy jobs.

I got a job working at a friend's high-end modern furniture store and art gallery. I wrote humor pieces and a profile of a former WPA sculptor who hung around the store. I wrote a lot of my own stuff. Then my friend got a permanent employee so I had to find another job. That was September 10, 2001. There was now no work available, crummy or not so crummy. Nothing. Over the next seven months I sent out résumés for hundreds of jobs—receptionist at an animal clinic, where I would have to wear colorful scrubs with kittens on them; a job signing people up for long-distance phone plans at college campuses; part-time nanny; assembler of boxes for shipping art; ESL teacher at a women's center—knowing I would never get those jobs. There were no jobs for anyone in New York. I was about to get evicted but I was halfway through writing a play. Maybe I did need poverty and instability to write.

It didn't seem to be a successful recipe for Dad, though. I was watching him make do with less and less, and I didn't know whom to worry about. My dad, my mom, myself. My dad was offered a full-time permanent job by a law firm as a kind of impeccable in-house grammarian. He must have been sixty-eight when he was offered this job, but he turned it down because he was getting “very close” with the Fitzgerald book. The whole family was astounded that this book project was still going strong. It was stronger than his desire for a regular paycheck, which would mean it was stronger than his need to know his rent would be paid, stronger than food, a movie here and there, dinner out with his daughters and grandkids, a cab in the rain. It seemed there was nothing more important than “the project.” And it was always almost there. It was more than a decade at least at this point. “A few months at the outside and it's ready.” I knew what he was doing looked crazy to everyone else and it looked crazy to me, too. But I had just done the very same thing. Left a really good job. My mind could say, “That is crazy behavior. Fantasy. Delusion.” My soul, however, said, “That's what we do. That is just what we do.”

 

 

 

 

I HAD NO IDEA how to help him. He was in total denial that he even needed help, but he ate almost everything off our plates at restaurants. For our birthdays we always got a check from him that he'd tell us to “wait a couple days on that one, would you?” And the birthday girl would wait and ask a few days later if it could be deposited. “Better hold off a day or two just to be sure,” until eventually it became like an acting exercise, pretending the check was something other than a piece of paper. Sometimes I would see my father a couple blocks down Court Street, coming out of a bakery with a loaf of bread under his arm, and I would turn the corner. It was too painful sometimes to talk to him, he seemed like a real-life Court Street tragic hero/figure. Like running into King Lear outside his Clinton Street walk-up. He may not have enough work, enough, God forbid, to eat, and my life was no different.