Let's Take the Long Way Home (7 page)

The next few months were a blur of adrenaline and fear, a last-ditch effort to maintain the facade. I arranged to do a story about Boston Light, one of the last manned lighthouses in America, which entailed my spending the
night on Little Brewster Island in Boston Harbor with the lightkeeper and his dog. I still had the morning shakes when the Coast Guard’s cigarette boat arrived to take me over to the island. There were three or four sweet, rowdy fellows in the boat, showing off and gunning the engine, and because I didn’t want them to see how nervous and sick I was, I employed the old Texas maneuver of raising the stakes. “So,” I asked them, “how fast can you guys make this thing go?” They grinned at me and then at one another, and took me across the harbor at about sixty miles per hour. I was pale when I set foot on the island, but they thought I was tough—at least I thought they thought I was tough—and to my addled sense of self, that was what mattered.

But the lightkeeper knew. By now my pride was a tattered camouflage for the problem. At the end of our afternoon together I went upstairs and drank six ounces of vodka in about twenty minutes, then reappeared in the kitchen to watch him cook me a T-bone steak. We were the only people on the island, and he was a big, strapping, shy fellow in his midthirties, and we sat that night in his bright kitchen, drinking Pepsi and eating steak, while he told me a story, seemingly out of nowhere, about how he had given up drinking a few years earlier. I smiled and nodded sympathetically. I had chosen vodka so he wouldn’t smell it, but he knew. The next morning, hungover, I forced myself to climb the dizzying steps to the top of the ninety-foot tower, and I made myself
count the steps as I went so I could put the number in the story. When people say alcoholics have no willpower, they have no idea.

FOR ALL MY MOCK
heroics, my constant recalibrations of the fuel and the facade, I know now that writing is what threw me a rope and let me drag myself to shore: The idea of a world where I kept the drink but lost the writing was even more unbearable to me than one without booze. During those wretched last months, I’d started finding boozy, half-comprehensible notes I had scrawled to myself late at night. By day my sober prose was at least lucid and legible; these notes from the dark side were like coming across an ex-Broadway floozy in a gin palace who had seen better days. I was thirty-three years old. It seemed way too soon for the tragic decline, however much the tortured-romantic myth had driven me onward. I had fostered for years the sodden hall of fame of those writers who lassoed their talent with a bottle of whiskey: Faulkner and Hemingway and Hammett (tellingly, my inner referents were mostly male). What I had conveniently left out of this self-told tale were the endnotes that proved the lie: Faulkner’s discipline, Hammett’s long sobriety, Hemingway’s shotgun. Whiskey didn’t stoke the flame of creativity; it extinguished it, sometimes one slow drop at a time.

The garret where I had thought to live out my
writerly fantasy was a third-floor walk-up on a tree-lined city street. My typewriter was in the front room of the apartment, and I could look out the front windows onto rooftops and the New England sky, and below to the street scene of people going about their lives—the mail carriers and dog walkers and familiar strangers that form the background canvas of urban life. One winter afternoon when I was still housebound with broken ribs, wanting nothing more than to walk to the liquor store for a bottle of bourbon, I stood there watching the snow fly outside and my heart seized with the disparity of the dream delivered: I had come here, all this way, with no job or family or scaffolding, intent on making it as a writer, and now I was trapped three floors up in my own little cell block, removed utterly from the people below and waiting for the day to end so I could drink. The free fall I’d been in for years had ended, and the fear had become despair, and I simply couldn’t bear it anymore.

VICTORY STORIES ARE
usually pretty simple: As I once heard a man in an AA meeting put it, “I got drunk, it got worse, I got here.” By spring I had signed up for an alcoholism education class at my Cambridge health plan, where a tall, easygoing fellow named Rich, a few years older than I, talked each week about the ravages of the disease. I thought he was a fool. I would go home after
class and pour huge tumblers of bourbon and brood about what he’d said. He was too tall, too kind, too unhip. Clearly there had been some mistake—the medical literature had left out a category for tragic heroines with brilliant futures who loved their whiskey. Then the next week I would stagger back in to continue my education.

My gentle teacher did two things that were invaluable. The first was that he seemed to expect nothing from his audience: He didn’t browbeat us or try to herd us into sobriety, or even ask us to come back. The second was that he gave a Buddhist-like interpretation of how to survive life without alcohol that had been left out of every pamphlet I’d ever read. Throughout my drinking I had assumed that the slide into alcoholism was a fait accompli failure—that you’d already lost the battle and were consequently beyond redemption. The best one could hope for, I assumed, was a shaky, vigilant life of bleak anxiety. Rich acceded the battle but none of the rest. The concept of AA, he told us in the final class, was one of surrender. I rolled my eyes; I had heard this before. And, he went on, surrender—deciding to lay down the weapon and walk away from the fight—was a way to get back all your power.

The fluorescent lights softened a little, and that grim classroom where I had sat for weeks with other doubters gave off an aura, however transient, of hope. I recognized
what he was talking about: This was the old mythic struggle that had defined heroism throughout the ages. Somehow that night the concept of sobriety, for the first time, had a revolutionary tinge to its message—the idea was life-saving, anti-mainstream, even daring. It might be possible, I thought that night, to give up drinking
and still be cool
. For a frightened young woman who’d spent a decade cultivating an au courant armor to mask her drinking, this was as radical as it got.

He saved my life, of course, this compassionate, low-key man who didn’t give a whit about being cool but cared tremendously about helping people. Having laid down my defense of disdain, I went to see him one afternoon after the class was over, with the ostensible purpose of talking about the alcoholism in my extended family. And even though I was cold sober that day, afterward I remembered almost nothing from the hour we spent in Rich’s office. I know that in the first few minutes I broke down, to my own horror, and said, “I think I drink too much.” The rest was a wash of memory, until he got up nearly an hour later and rushed out to schedule me for outpatient detox the following week. Months later, I asked him about that day and what I had said. He smiled, having seen this amnesia-in-crisis before. “Mostly,” he told me, “you tried to convince me that you weren’t worth saving.”

This shocks me now as it did then, because I always
clung to the flicker of self-regard that I assumed got me in to see him. But alcohol, and the desperation and exhaustion that went along with it, had so worn me down that I didn’t have much fight left in me. I went home that day to finish a deadline for the
Village Voice
. Then I drove to the neighborhood liquor store for what I hoped would be my last stash. I got a quart of Jack Daniel’s and—a splurge, on my freelancer’s income—a quart of Johnnie Walker Red. “Would you like the gift box?” the innocent cashier asked me. “Sure,” I told her. “Why not?” Three days later, I poured what was left down the sink and staggered into Rich’s office, hungover and half an hour late, for an appointment that would let me start again.

IT WAS THE SUMMER
of 1984, and AA in those days was still removed from the social order—it hadn’t yet hit the covers of the newsweeklies, the slogans hadn’t been turned into bumper stickers, and celebrity redemption confessions were a thing of the future. Armed with a schedule of local meetings, I slunk into a Cambridge meeting a few days before my last drink and sat weeping near the back until a soft-voiced, elegant woman elbowed me in the ribs and whispered, “Don’t worry—it’s biochemical.” I found this uplifting: a four-word answer, delivered casually but unequivocally, to the biggest problem in my life. I left there and went home to the Johnnie
Walker, but I went back the next night, and the next, and by the time Monday morning had rolled around and I was scheduled to be back in Rich’s office for my syllabus of a new life, I had finished the scotch, thrown in a lot of bourbon just to be sure, and hauled a bar’s worth of empty bottles down to the street.

Partly because twelve-step programs hadn’t yet saturated the culture, the meetings I went to seemed clandestine and hardscrabble; most of them were held in church basements. There was something incredibly romantic about this—it was like being a Mason with a bad rap sheet. In graduate school I had been immersed in the memoirs of writers who had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and who stole around to secret meetings of their cell groups, smoking and talking and convinced they were changing the world. I’d always envied their passionate focus. One summer evening I was crossing the Boston Common toward another church basement, with the grounds full of people on their way somewhere. For years I had felt removed from this stream of humanity, charging toward moments of what seemed like a realized life. Now I knew the deeper, more varied truth: that a few members of the crowd were headed to an AA meeting. This was a hard-won but brilliant education: I had realized, as life is always willing to instruct, that the world as we see it is only the published version. The subterranean realms, whether churches or hospital rooms or smoke-filled basements, are part of
what hold up the rest. I had gotten ahold of a skeleton key and found my way inside.

I’D KNOWN SOMEONE
in Austin, years before, who had joined AA and put her life back together, but what no one could have told me was how uproariously funny the meetings were. I walked into shabby rooms with folding chairs and coffee urns, where people were getting sugar fixes on grocery-store cookies and using old tuna cans as ashtrays. A people’s tribunal of drunks! AA cut across every class line I had ever hoped to breach. There were men in business suits and tough-talking blue-collar women and diffident souls you’d overlook on a subway train; there were scary-looking guys who, once they started talking, you’d have wanted to have your back forever. The stories they told were wrenching and outrageous and sometimes profound, and for the most part they had happier outcomes, at least so far, than what you could expect from a lot of life. I made friends with a beautiful young woman, an artist and filmmaker, who shredded Styrofoam cups throughout the meetings; she did this for about a year, while I chain-smoked next to her. She had discovered the magic Molotov cocktail that was alcohol when she was barely an adolescent, and had recently graduated magna cum laude from Harvard while nearly drinking herself to death. For years we hung out in the front rows of the meetings together, fancying
ourselves the Thelma and Louise of Cambridge AA, until her work took her to New York, where she belonged. Eliza was tough, but inside was a woman of such gentleness and depth that she could lower my blood pressure just by walking into the room. She too had found her way to AA through the Benevolent Alcohol Counselor, and for years we referred to ourselves as graduates of the Rich Caplan Finishing School, where we had learned the careful etiquette of how to avoid consuming a quart of whiskey in one sitting, or at all.

I USED TO THINK
this was an awful story—shameful and dramatic and sad. I don’t think that anymore. Now I just think it’s human, which is why I decided to tell it. And for all the wise words about drinking heard and forgotten over the years, particularly that first blurred hour in Rich’s office, I’ve always remembered one thing he said that day, when I was buried in fear and shame at the idea that I had drunk my way into alcoholism. He asked me why I was so frightened, and I told him, weeping, the first thing that came into my mind: “I’m afraid that no one will ever love me again.” He leaned toward me with a smile of great kindness on his face, his hands clasped in front of him. “Don’t you
know
?” he asked gently. “The flaw is the thing we love.”

SOME OF THE EFFECTS OF STOPPING DRINKING WERE
immediate and dramatic. I cleaned the house, swam a mile every day, nursed my newfound craving for sugar. I went to scores of AA meetings and read stacks of novels at night when I couldn’t sleep. I got a job as an editor at a local literary review, where on the first day of work I met Matthew, a tall, gentle man with a timbre-rich voice who became a good friend, and who seemed to personify my life of second chances—with him, the world had turned from an obstacle course into an amusement park. Matthew and I would sit in the office late into the evening, smoking and reading the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts while the snow flew outside the windows overlooking Mass Ave. Six months later,
The Boston Globe
hired me as its underling book critic. The first day in the newsroom, my colleagues presented me with a bottle of champagne, a civility so unnerving that I carried it to the trunk of my car that night as though it were plutonium,
then unloaded it at a friend’s house on the way home. In 1985, the reputation of the newsroom as a hard-drinking place was still well earned, and I was just learning the skill of meeting deadlines without a drink at the end of the day. One night I asked a fellow critic how he landed the plane after he had filed. “Oh, I just go home and have a few scotches and a couple of Librium,” he told me. “That pretty much does it for me.” I lit another cigarette, filed the review I was writing, and went to an AA meeting.

The self becoming: In my first year of sobriety, I heard a woman at an AA meeting describe the day in, day out pact with tedium and despair that alcoholism had meant for her. “I would go out and live my life,” she said, “and then come home at the end of the day and drink six beers to make it all go away. It was like covering a blackboard with writing every morning and then that night erasing everything you’d learned.”