Seducing the Demon (12 page)

“O.K.,” she says.

I wait outside in a cubicle, muttering prayers under my breath. I am full of remorse. How could I have let this kid go away to college? How could I have missed all this? How could I have been so immersed in my own problems?

Molly stays with Jim R. an hour or so while my mind races. Then she comes out, her eyes red, her nose running. Jim and I walk her down the hall to Detox and again there are papers to sign. Molly is taken into a little room with a bed and a sink. A nurse comes in and searches her luggage.

“Why don’t you get some sleep?” she says. “We’ll take good care of her.”

“Go, Mom, I’ll be O.K., I promise.”

And I am escorted down a long underground corridor until we come to another building. Upstairs, a locked door and a series of rooms along a hall. One of these rooms is mine. It has two narrow beds bolted to the floor, a few Spartan tables and lamps. The bathroom has a paper bath mat and two tiny white towels. I shed my clothes and crawl into the narrow bed. I am shaking.

“God help me,” I mutter. “God, please be there, please.”

There have been lots of times in my life when I felt I had hit bottom, but this was the lowest. Molly was my future, all the dreams I had not fulfilled—like having a son, having movies made of my work, being the success in show business my father had always wanted to be or me to be for him. I needed Molly to live far more than I needed to live myself.

When I wake up at five in the morning, I find my room looks out on the frozen lake. Little huts are set up on the ice. Small bundled figures are walking across, leaving tracks in the snow. It is the quietest place I have ever been. You can listen to your thoughts here. Minnesota—I love you.

I quickly dress—my city clothes are all wrong, of course—and walk outside in the snow. My thin shoes crunch and I can feel the cold straight through. Still, I find a path through the tall firs and I follow it as long as I can stand the cold. Then I reverse direction and come back.

In one of the lounges of the building where my room is, I find a fire going in a stone fireplace and coffee and donuts laid out. I get some coffee and drink it in front of the fire. I pick up a book called
Serenity
from one of the tables. Here are the words I open to: “When we stop thinking of fears and doubts, they begin to lose their power. When we stop believing good things are impossible, anything becomes possible.”

The rehab had no phones and my cell phone didn’t work. I couldn’t call anyone. This was a blessing. I could think. Thinking is well nigh impossible in our multitasking world. Thinking is good. So is prayer.

After a month in Minnesota, Molly came home sober. I stopped drinking again. I needed to support her and I needed total clarity. Ken supported me in this too. He loved me sober or not.

Her story is not really mine to tell. She has told it from her point of view in
Normal Girl.
The mother’s point of view and the daughter’s converge only occasionally. She will see it differently as her son Maxi grows up and as she grows up more and I grow older.

Perspectives always shift as we age. Thank God for that too.

I have been trying to understand addiction and creative people. Why are we so prone to it?

In order to create something that didn’t exist before, it’s necessary to go into a state where dream and reality are equally available and where time does not exist. Some psychologists refer to this as the “flow state.” It was best defined for me by an unpronounceable writer named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in an excellent book called
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
Optimal experience, or the flow state, is characterized by the suspension of the sense of time, the obliteration of self-consciousness and the feeling that we are doing something for its own sake and not for its outcome. This is a perfect description of writing, or sex, or sailing, or ballet dancing or painting or musical composition, or ... you fill in the blanks. Athletes breaking records are in flow. So are writers writing, dancers dancing, sailors sailing. Immersed in their craft, they find flow—which is its own reward. We awaken from it refreshed and happy, as after a long vacation or an ecstatic dream. The universe seems harmonious. We are doing what we are meant to do within it. We are in tune with the world and ourselves.

I usually find flow only early in the morning when I am scarcely out of the dream world and there are likely to be no interruptions. I like to write before the day begins for other people. The hours between 4 a.m. and 9 a.m. are sacrosanct. I often inhabit them while finishing a book. More often, I work between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. I get more done in those five hours than in a whole day of starts and stops.

Because the flow of writing is so pleasurable when it’s working, it’s not surprising that mind-altering drugs tempt writers. We hope to continue the flow state by artificial means—drugs, alcohol—and in the beginning it seems to work. At least it banishes the inner censor for a while and frees up the hand that moves over the page.

But the wrecked lives of alcoholic American writers testify to the strength of the attraction to alcohol and the way it backfires. Apparently, it’s so painful to make something out of nothing that people never stop hoping for the magic potion.

In his book
The Varieties of Religious Experience,
William James (brother of Henry and Alice) talks about mystical states and their connection to mind-altering drugs. Mystical states, says James, have a noetic quality. Those who experience them believe they are gaining knowledge by blurring the intellect:

James believed that these mystical states, though alcohol or drugs may heighten them, are necessarily fleeting. Sometimes they take the form of déjà vu experiences (“of having ‘been here before”’); sometimes they take the form of a vision of God or of God’s angelic messengers.

We can also access these states through staring at the sea and listening to its roar, through chanting or fasting or wandering in the wilderness for forty days. These things take a lot more discipline than the instantaneous pleasure of a joint or a glass of wine. Mystics tell us that reaching the flow state without chemicals is better than being drunk or stoned, but most of us are not mystics. The quick fix appeals to us. At first it seems to deliver easy ecstasy. Only after a while do most of us realize that blurring the censor through drugs and alcohol also blurs the mind. At first we think we write better this way, but although the feeling is fiercely intense the writing deteriorates. The purpose of writing is to see things as they are, to see the world more clearly and to rejoice in this clarity of vision.

We look for spiritual transcendence in mind-altering drugs, and for a time it seems to be found there. And then it’s gone. And in its place is depression and fear. I have found through long, excruciating experience that for me the most enduring transcendence is found in the trance of writing.

The key is probably moderation, but I have never been good at moderation. I am always hoping I will learn it so I can access the ecstasy without letting it devour me. One of my novels,
Any Woman’s Blues,
chronicles this struggle through the life of a painter called Leila Sand. Leila hates the jargon of AA, but she finds herself mysteriously helped by it. She drags her addict lover, Dart (the character inspired by the meat van man), into sobriety, but when he falls off the wagon she decides to let him go and stay herself. Through this alter ego, I tried to make sense of my own attraction to mystical states, my own longing for moderation and my own addictive behavior. I wrote about the connection between addictive sex and addictive substances, the connection between mystical ecstasy and ecstatic sex, how they both come from the
more
demon. Writing the novel did help me begin to understand and exorcize my own addictions. Leila was a version of myself through whose struggles against addiction I could comprehend my own inner battles.

In recent years, there have been many books about the struggle for sobriety. Some of them are thoughtful. Others use the experiences of drink and drugs for special unearned effects.

Sometimes it seems that as soon as someone brags about recovery, she falls off the wagon immediately. No sooner does a celebrity boast of the wonders of rehab on the cover of
People
than that celebrity gets arrested for drunk driving. Better not to talk too publicly of cures. Better to fight one’s own battles privately. It may be bad luck to gloat about recovery—which is why I will never write that I’ve recovered. There are so many ways to self-destruct with addiction—shopping, eating, gambling, going into debt. The whole American economy would collapse if we all recovered.

 

The first time I got drunk I was fifteen and I drank fifteen screwdrivers—just a year after I saw Dorothy Parker and vowed never to drink. It was on my parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary at their apartment on Central Park West. A picture of me exists from that party. I am falling out of my black strapless gown, my long blond hair shadows my eyes and I look like I just saw a vision of paradise. Probably that’s one of the few times I ever saw paradise while drunk—though I was always looking for it.

My parents were of the generation that associated champagne with a good time—and when they got really prosperous after World War II, they delighted in buying cases of good champagne for their friends.

“I love to eat! I love to drink! I love to fuck!” I remember one of their arty friends shouting, as she stripped off her sheer blouse at one of their parties. Was I shocked? Not really, but I retreated upstairs to hide behind a book, as usual. My parents’ parties always had a raffish, bohemian flair—even after they acquired the accoutrements of bourgeois success. Drinking just went with being creative and flush. Nobody thought there was anything wrong with being drunk. But celebratory drinking is entirely different from the drinking we do in search of ecstasy. The door into the unconscious has to be pried open somehow, and we always think alcohol will facilitate that. For a while it does and then it may well slam shut. I often think of alcohol as a genie in a bottle. It promises everything but eventually imprisons you in the bottle itself. You write with great freedom but in the morning discover only gobbledygook. You finally admit that Shakespeare is a better poet than Drunkspeare.

I try to make my love of good wine jibe with my understanding of the genie in the bottle. I never write after a glass of wine.

The people who can drink moderately don’t have this problem, but they are probably not seekers of ecstasy, either. People who most crave ecstasy are probably least capable of moderation. I long to be proven wrong about this.

Blake says:
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
But what if you die on that road? Is that the wisdom you were meant to have? Is death the final revelation? The Polish Jews waiting for the Holocaust at the end of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s great novel
The Family Moskat
tell each other sadly that perhaps death is the only Messiah they can hope for.

 

 

The number of writers who have chronicled the sorrows of gin is great, but for me John Cheever transcends them all. The darkness of
The Journals of John Cheever
is very much the darkness of the struggle with alcohol. I know of no book that makes alcohol less appealing. And yet the protagonist of these journals has to learn this over and over. “The battle with booze goes on. I weed the chrysanthemums and hold away from the bottle until half past eleven but not a second longer.”

What is Cheever looking for? “What he would have liked, what he dreamed of, was some elixir, some magical, brightly colored pill that would put the spring back in his step, the gleam in his eye, the joy of life in his heart.”

The magic elixir seems to be a cure for depression. And there is no doubt that alcohol abuse and depression are connected. At first, alcohol seems to take off the depressive edge and bring that spring to the step, but, since it’s a depressant, for many people it only ends by making depression worse. This is hard to see in yourself because the substance changes its effects over time.

Stephen King has a very honest account of his own alcoholism in
On Writing.
He even sees his novel
Misery
as a struggle with addiction. He acknowledges that the marriage between alcoholism and creative endeavor “is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.” Writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Sherwood Anderson unwittingly romanticized alcoholism. But if you read the biographies of these writers you will see that alcohol cut short their creative lives—as it did Edna St. Vincent Millay’s and Dylan Thomas’s. The search for the elixir, the search for relief from depression, becomes a search for the death of consciousness. I think we are ready for some new myths. But if the devil has the best tunes and the angels bore us with their unending serenity, how shall we find them? Destruction always makes a better story than perfection. Perfection usually makes us feel we are being lectured.