Let's Take the Long Way Home (6 page)

By which she meant that I was still vertical, still functioning in superdrive, and that I hadn’t yet had the external calamities that suggested a problem: no drunk driving citations, crashed marriages, employment woes. The same year I had a routine physical with a male internist who was less benevolent and more obtuse. When he asked me how much I drank, I told him about four drinks a night, not yet aware that the medical profession’s rule of thumb, if a patient’s consumption seemed problematic, was to double whatever quantity the patient confessed. “You’ll want to be careful with that,” he said, refusing to look me in the eye. “There’s nothing more unbecoming than a young lady who drinks too much.”

Such idiocies only fueled my intake. I was in my late twenties by then, a veteran of the counterculture and the women’s movement, and I clung to the belief that my drinking was part of the sine qua non of a new day—it was how women like me functioned in the world; it was an anesthetic for high-strung sensitivity and a lubricant for creativity. The alternative truth was far grimmer. Alcoholics—a word I couldn’t even think of without shame and terror—were broken people who had drunk themselves into a corner, and the only way out for them was to give up the drink. That was unthinkable to me, a gray, gray room without any highs or relief or even
change, and so I clung for years to what I believed was the border between alcoholism and drinking to excess. Every time I voiced my fears it was in the guise of humor, or machismo, or nonchalant rebellion. “I’m afraid that if I stopped drinking, I wouldn’t be interesting anymore,” I said offhandedly to a friend in Austin, an RN whose father had died of alcoholism after sitting in a chair surrounded by beer cans for decades. “Don’t be so sure,” she told me. “Day in and day out, boring is where all alcoholics are headed.”

No one whose first allegiance is to the source of the problem can hear such warnings, at least not until they’ve dragged themselves through a few miles of broken glass. Help in its most benign and unthreatening form—if there is even such a thing for an alcoholic—wasn’t exactly beating down the door; if it had, I’d probably have moved out in the middle of the night. I didn’t want help; I wanted reassurance. Which is to say that I wanted the consolation, however transient or artificial, that I would be able to drink forever and get away with it. It’s like the old joke about the guy on the desert island with the genie who offers him two wishes. The guy asks for a bottle of beer. The genie instantly produces, and tells the man that the bottle will never be empty and will always be cold, and that he still has one more wish. Just to be sure, the man tells the genie, you’d better give me another one.

WHEN I WAS STILL
young and brave enough to crave adventure, I came to the East Coast. I had been an adult the first time I’d ever set foot in New York, a few years earlier, and the city had offered the usual elixir. I walked eighty blocks, from the Guggenheim Museum to Greenwich Village, in a daze of happiness. I stood on a corner amid whirling snow and fleets of cabs and all the other pop culture icons that I had grown up seeing on movie and TV screens; the idea that these things were real—that you could walk into this luminous scene and become a part of it—was humbling and life-altering. I went to the Museum of Modern Art, where Picasso’s
Guernica
was still housed, and I had to hang on to the railing when I turned on the stairs and saw it for the first time. However sophisticated I deemed myself to be, I had grown up with wheat fields and suburbs as the visual constant, with art as something that mostly belonged in books. Being in Manhattan was like running headlong toward your own life, or finding out you could fly. To turn away from it would have seemed the failure of a chance not taken.

Cambridge had its own gorgeous, if more reserved, version of seduction. On my first trip there I had gone to the Orson Welles Cinema, with its arty documentaries and cappuccino machine, and I’d wandered through Harvard Yard in a battered leather jacket, trying to pass as a local—sensing, I think, that I had found a place far
greater and more consuming than the confines of my own sad heart. Maybe this is a common perception of youth, holding back fear with exhilaration. But I look back now and see myself as shadows bumping into light. The light was trying its damnedest to win, and part of the plan, I believed, was to get out of Texas.

THAT FIRST SUMMER
in New England, I lived in a sprawling three-story house with six other people. The household included a physician, a physicist, a dancer, and a couple of puppet makers, and somehow this glamorous cast found me exotic—partly, I feel sure, because of the hard-drinking image I was still trying to pull off. I had the boots and macho countenance and two bottles of whiskey I kept in brown bags on a closet shelf, and my housemates seemed amused by the drawling Texan who had invaded their genteel counterculture. My closest friend in the house was Jackie, the dancer, who attired herself for a normal outing in faux leopard hats and pink elbow gloves, and each evening at the dinner table would begin the recitation of her day by saying, “First, I got up!” We adored each other—she was the revolutionary Dr. Joyce Brothers to my tragic heroine—and one afternoon, the day after a summer party at the house, we were sprawled in the backyard, comparing notes. I had a worse hangover than usual, and in a moment of candor, said so. Besides being a dancer and an eccentric, Jackie was also
an RN; she had worked in the trenches of the medical field and seen the psychic casualties of the sixties and seventies. We were lying next to each other with our eyes closed—the peer-analytic position—and out of the blue she said, “Are you an alcoholic?”

She might as well have been asking if I were a Pisces, the question was so gentle. And I was so surprised that I answered honestly. “I don’t know,” I told her. “I know that I’m psychologically addicted.”

The exchange hovered through my consciousness for the next three years I would drink. Jackie had dared to ask what I could not; my answer had let someone else in the room with all that fear, if only for a minute. A few months later, I moved down the street to an attic garret, a place with all the romantic underpinnings of the life I hoped to lead and all the bleak corners of what I first had to leave behind. Jackie had the foresight and kindness to understand this darkness and stay nearby while I lived through it. I braved the streets of Boston, landed some freelance writing assignments, came home and poured down drinks while I hammered away on the Adler typewriter. I got a Persian kitten and named him Dashiell Hammett, and he sat on the pillows of my bed while I drank, his huge eyes witness to the staggering and the late-night blackouts I couldn’t stand to endure alone. The
Phoenix
, an alternative newspaper in Boston, took me on as a regular contributor, and I wrote my columns in the light of morning when I was sober; if I was a
drunk, I was also a perfectionist—two traits, I believed, that would ultimately balance each other out. I smuggled pamphlets on alcoholism out of a doctor’s office and took the twenty-question test with a glass of bourbon in my hand. In the early 1980s, the questions still made traditional social assumptions about women; one of them, unforgettably, was “Have your husband and children ever expressed concern about your drinking?” I checked off “No” with a flourish. No husband, no children, no worries.

The more looming truth was that what had seemed like liberation—the flight from Texas, the brown bags of whiskey, the reinvention of a life—was revealing itself to be unmoored terror. On the advice of an internist, I went to see a psychotherapist and hypnotist who specialized in substance abuse. He placed me in a reclining chair as though I were in a dentist’s office, and every time he hypnotized me I began to weep silently, the tears streaming down my face until my hair was wet. This in itself was evidence that some deep sorrow was trying to get out, but the hypnotist seemed to think aversion therapy was in order. He instructed me to go home and drink as much as I possibly could in the following week, then bring him a quart of scotch to pay for our next appointment.

I like to think that my compromised state—the drinking, the soggy trances—was what kept me from fleeing this strange milieu. For weeks I went back, hoping
somehow he could hit the magic switch that would end my paralyzed attachment. Then one day he came into the room smiling. He told me that he had taken LSD the previous week and had had a vision of me; he knew now that everything was going to be all right. He went on to describe the sexual infatuation he believed existed between us, one that, he was careful to say, would never be acted on. “On a scale of one to ten,” he told me, in a mode of cheerful confession, “you’re about a nine.” After assuring him that this numeric affection belonged to him alone, I fled. I never paid the bill he sent me for that last mystical instruction; I never answered his querulous letters. For years I pondered the damage he could have done, or at least the failure he had visited on me.

BECAUSE I HAD
the sense and the pride not to drive drunk or appear blasted in public, my world got smaller and smaller. I had bruises on my upper arms from running into doorways; when I sprained my ankle, I tied two plastic bags to the crutch handles—one holding ice, the other, a flask of bourbon—and hobbled with my portable bar from the kitchen to the desk. Then one night I went beyond these amateur foibles and took a fall that landed me in the ER. Standing before the bathroom mirror in one of those Leonard Cohen tragic moments, I had collapsed, dead weight, with a glass of scotch in my hand. I
landed crosswise against the bathtub and broke four ribs. It was four a.m. Even to my denial-racked mind, this was no longer social drinking.

The cultural dictates of time and space—of Texas and its drinking culture, of the still provincial understanding about addiction—had always told me that alcoholism was something untreatable and reprehensible. It happened to people who were broken in other ways, or weak, or who didn’t have the willpower to straighten up and fly right, as my dad would have said. What this version always left out was the inner struggle—the want for drink trying to eclipse the light of survival—that someone in the throes of addiction endures. Every morning, waking to the sorrows of another night’s failures, I would swallow my fear and swear that this time, today, I would have only four drinks. I would switch to vodka, or go to a movie, or call Jackie, who now lived in New York, and tell her how bad it was. The tape would play all day long—courage/terror, resolve/yearning, bargaining/surrender—and then I would crack open the freezer for the ice and my whole body would exhale in relief, and the cycle would start to play itself out again.

The worst psychic legacy of this endless loop was the ongoing feeling of betrayal. Each day I made a contract not to drink, and every night by eight or nine I had broken it again. The erosion, like water on stone, was gradual and constant. I had been blessed with parents whose separate strengths had been passed on to me; I had my
mother’s independence and my father’s tough-minded resolve. And I had a trust in myself that was based on three decades of pretty good outcomes. But this adversary was far crueler, stronger, more persistent than any challenge I had faced. The last year had proven that it was no longer a deadlock; I had actually had a dream that I was in the ring with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and I was being beaten to a pulp. For more than a decade I had negotiated with the gods so that I could keep the booze: Meet the deadline, get the bottle. Get the writing assignment, have the drink. The better I felt about the prose at the end of the day, the greater the reward.

WHICH MIGHT EXPLAIN
the cliffwalker behavior I engaged in as a writer, going after stories that I thought would somehow legitimate my intake. I had been scheduled to leave two days after my fall on an assignment to the weather observatory atop Mount Washington in New Hampshire, a moonlike outpost that boasted the worst weather in the world. Because of the broken ribs, I postponed the trip for six weeks. When I made the three-hour bus ride in February to Gorham, New Hampshire, at the base of the mountain, my ribs were still wrapped and I had painkillers and two quarts of whiskey in my luggage. We left Boston at six p.m., and the bus headed north into the dark. I sat on that lonely bus in the cold with my aching ribs and my Percocet, eating a bleak little
ham sandwich I had packed for the trip, trying not to think about the frightening state I found myself in. By the time we got to Gorham, the end of the line, there was only one other passenger, a creepy-looking man who made eyes my way and acted as though he might follow me. I got off the bus using a walking stick to navigate the ice and made it to the local hostel, and as soon as I got to my room I threw down eight ounces of bourbon. The next morning when the Sno-Cat arrived to drive me and a couple of geologists up the mountain, I was more worried about the glass bottles I had stashed in my backpack than I was about my own fractured anatomy.

Consciously or inadvertently, I had picked a drinker’s hermitic paradise at the observatory. The meteorologists were used to being locked in by inclement weather for weeks at a time, and they had a full liquor reserve along with their gallons of tomato sauce and industrial-size spices. My two housemates gave me a glass-lined office overlooking the ravines of Mount Washington; evenings, we would meet to cook dinner over a few drinks. Their morning shift began at five a.m., so by eight every night I could retire to my bunkbeds and my bottle of bourbon. And every night I made a scratch on the bottle so I could be sure the rations would last.