The Recovering

—I—

WONDER

The first time I ever felt it—the buzz—I was almost thirteen. I didn’t vomit or black out or even embarrass myself. I just loved it. I loved the crackle of champagne, its hot pine needles down my throat. We were celebrating my brother’s college graduation, and I wore a long muslin dress that made me feel like a child, until I felt something else: initiated, aglow. The whole world stood accused: You never told me it felt this good.

The first time I ever drank in secret, I was fifteen. My mom was out of town. My friends and I spread a blanket across living room hardwood and drank whatever we could find in the fridge, Chardonnay wedged between the orange juice and the mayonnaise. We were giddy from a sense of trespass.

The first time I ever got high, I was smoking pot on a stranger’s couch, my fingers dripping pool water as I dampened the joint with my grip. A friend-of-a-friend had invited me to a swimming party. My hair smelled like chlorine and my body quivered against my damp bikini. Strange little animals blossomed through my elbows and shoulders, where the parts of me bent and connected. I thought: What is this? And how can it keep being this? With a good feeling, it was always: More. Again. Forever.

The first time I ever drank with a boy, I let him put his hands under my shirt on the wooden balcony of a lifeguard station. Dark waves shushed the sand below our dangling feet. My first boyfriend: He liked to get high. He liked to get his cat high. We used to make out in his mother’s minivan. He came to a family meal at my house fully wired on speed. “So talkative!” said my grandma, deeply smitten. At Disneyland, he broke open a baggie of withered mushroom caps and started breathing fast and shallow in line for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, sweating through his shirt, pawing at the orange rocks of the fake frontier.

If I had to say where my drinking began, which first time began it, I might say it started with my first blackout, or maybe the first time I sought blackout, the first time I wanted nothing more than to be absent from my own life. Maybe it started the first time I threw up from drinking, the first time I dreamed about drinking, the first time I lied about drinking, the first time I dreamed about lying about drinking, when the craving had gotten so deep there wasn’t much of me that wasn’t committed to either serving or fighting it.

Maybe my drinking began with patterns rather than moments, once I started drinking every day. Which happened in Iowa City, where the drinking didn’t seem dramatic and pronounced so much as encompassing and inevitable. There were so many ways and places to get drunk: the fiction bar in a smoky double-wide trailer, with a stuffed fox head and a bunch of broken clocks; or the poetry bar down the street, with its anemic cheeseburgers and glowing Schlitz ad, a scrolling electric landscape: the gurgling stream, the neon grassy banks, the flickering waterfall. I mashed the lime in my vodka tonic and glimpsed—in the sweet spot between two drinks and three, then three and four, then four and five—my life as something illuminated from the inside.

There were parties at a place called the Farm House, out in the cornfields, past Friday fish fries at the American Legion. These were parties where poets wrestled in a kiddie pool full of Jell-O, and everyone’s profile looked beautiful in the crackling light of a mattress bonfire. Winters were cold enough to kill you. There were endless potlucks where older writers brought braised meats and younger writers brought plastic tubs of hummus, and everyone brought whiskey, and everyone brought wine. Winter kept going; we kept drinking. Then it was spring. We kept drinking then, too.

Sitting on a folding chair in a church basement, you always face the question of how to begin. “It has always been a hazard for me to speak at an AA meeting,” a man named Charlie told a Cleveland AA meeting in 1959, “because I knew that I could do better than other people. I really had a story to tell. I was more articulate. I could dramatize it. And I would really knock them dead.” He explained the hazard like this: He’d gotten praised. He’d gotten proud. He’d gotten drunk. Now he was talking to a big crowd about how dangerous it was for him to talk to a big crowd. He was describing the perils of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. He was being articulate about being articulate. He was dramatizing what the art of dramatizing had done to him. He said: “I think I got tired of being my own hero.” Fifteen years earlier, he’d published a best-selling novel about alcoholism while sober. But he relapsed a few years after it became a bestseller. “I’ve written a book that’s been called the definitive portrait of the alcoholic,” he told the group, “and it did me no good.”

It was only after five minutes of talking that Charlie finally thought to begin the way others began. “My name is Charles Jackson,” he said, “and I’m an alcoholic.” By coming back to the common refrain, he was reminding himself that commonality could be its own saving grace. “My story isn’t much different from anyone’s,” he said. “It’s the story of a man who was made a fool of by alcohol, over and over and over, year after year after year, until finally the day came when I learned that I could not handle this alone.”

The first time I ever told the story of my drinking, I sat among other drinkers who no longer drank. Ours was a familiar scene: plastic folding chairs, Styrofoam cups of coffee gone lukewarm, phone numbers exchanged. Before the meeting, I had imagined what might happen after it was done: People would compliment my story or the way I’d told it, and I’d demur, Well, I’m a writer, shrugging, trying not to make too big a deal out of it. I’d have the Charlie Jackson problem, my humility imperiled by my storytelling prowess. I practiced with note cards beforehand, though I didn’t use them when I spoke—because I didn’t want to make it seem like I’d been practicing.

It was after I’d gone through the part about my abortion, and how much I’d been drinking pregnant; after the part about the night I don’t call date rape, and the etiquette of reconstructing blackouts; after I’d gone through the talking points of my pain, which seemed like nothing compared to what the other people in that room had lived—it was somewhere in the muddled territory of sobriety, getting to the repetitions of apology, or the physical mechanics of prayer, that an old man in a wheelchair, sitting in the front row, started shouting: “This is boring!”

We all knew him, this old man. He’d been instrumental in setting up a gay recovery community in our town, back in the seventies, and now he was in the care of his much younger partner, a soft-spoken book lover who changed the man’s diapers and wheeled him faithfully to meetings where he shouted obscenities. “You dumb cunt!” he’d called out once. Another time he’d held my hand for our closing prayer and said, “Kiss me, wench!”

He was ill, losing the parts of his mind that filtered and restrained his speech. But he often sounded like our collective id, saying all the things that never got said aloud in meetings: I don’t care; this is tedious; I’ve heard this before. He was nasty and sour and he’d also saved a lot of people’s lives. Now he was bored.

Other people at the meeting shifted uncomfortably in their seats. The woman sitting beside me touched my arm, a way of saying Don’t stop. So I didn’t. I kept going—stuttering, eyes hot, throat swollen—but this man had managed to tap veins of primal insecurity: that my story wasn’t good enough, or that I’d failed to tell it right, that I’d somehow failed at my dysfunction, failed to make it bad or bold or interesting enough; that recovery had flatlined my story past narrative repair.

When I decided to write a book about recovery, I worried about all of these possible failures. I was wary of trotting out the tired tropes of the addictive spiral, and wary of the tedious architecture and tawdry self-congratulation of a redemption story: It hurt. It got worse. I got better. Who would care? This is boring! When I told people I was writing a book about addiction and recovery, I often saw their eyes glaze. Oh, that book, they seemed to say, I’ve already read that book.

I wanted to tell them that I was writing a book about that glazed look in their eyes, about the way an addiction story can make you think, I’ve heard that story before, before you’ve even heard it. I wanted to tell them I was trying to write a book about the ways addiction is a hard story to tell, because addiction is always a story that has already been told, because it inevitably repeats itself, because it grinds down—ultimately, for everyone—to the same demolished and reductive and recycled core: Desire. Use. Repeat.

In recovery, I found a community that resisted what I’d always been told about stories—that they had to be unique—suggesting instead that a story was most useful when it wasn’t unique at all, when it understood itself as something that had been lived before and would be lived again. Our stories were valuable because of this redundancy, not despite it. Originality wasn’t the ideal, and beauty wasn’t the point.

When I decided to write a book about recovery, I didn’t want to make it singular. Nothing about recovery had been singular. I needed the first-person plural, because recovery had been about immersion in the lives of others. Finding the first-person plural meant spending time in archives and interviews, so I could write a book that might work like a meeting—that would place my story alongside the stories of others. I could not handle this alone. That had already been said. I wanted to say it again. I wanted to write a book that was honest about the grit and bliss and tedium of learning to live in this way—in chorus, without the numbing privacy of getting drunk. I wanted to find an articulation of freedom that didn’t need scare quotes or lacquer, that didn’t insist on distinction as the only mark of a story worth telling, that wondered why we took that truth to be self-evident, or why I’d always taken it that way.

If addiction stories run on the fuel of darkness—the hypnotic spiral of an ongoing, deepening crisis—then recovery is often seen as the narrative slack, the dull terrain of wellness, a tedious addendum to the riveting blaze. I wasn’t immune; I’d always been enthralled by stories of wreckage. But I wanted to know if stories about getting better could ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart. I needed to believe they could.

I moved to Iowa City just after my twenty-first birthday, in a little black Toyota with a television riding shotgun and a winter coat that wasn’t even thick enough to keep me warm through autumn. I lived in a white clapboard house on Dodge Street, just below Burlington, and hit the circuit right away: backyard parties under branches strung with tiny white Christmas lights, mason jars full of red wine, local bratwurst on the grill. The grass shimmered with mosquitoes, and fireflies blinked on and off like the eyes of some coy, elusive god. Maybe that sounds ridiculous. It was magic.

Writers ten years older than I was—twenty years older, thirty years older—talked about their drumming careers and prior bylines, their prior marriages, while I found myself without much life to talk about. I’d come to live. I was going to do things at parties here that I might talk about at parties later, elsewhere. I was thrumming with that promise, and nervous. I drank quietly, quickly, staining my teeth with Shiraz.

I’d come to get my master’s degree at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an institution barnacled with history. It seemed to me the program was always asking you to prove why you deserved to be there, and I wasn’t sure I did. I’d been rejected from every other program I’d applied to.

One night I showed up at a potluck—brick building, basement unit, carpeted floors—and found everyone sitting in a circle. It was a game: You had to tell your best story, your absolute best. I can’t remember anyone else’s. I’m not sure I even listened to anyone else, I was so afraid no one would like what I said. When it was finally my turn, I pulled out the only story of mine that reliably made people laugh. It was about the community-service trip I’d taken to a Costa Rican village when I was fifteen. I’d run into a wild horse on a dirt road, on my walk home one day, and then later confused the words for caballo and caballero while I was trying to tell my host family about the encounter. When I saw the concern on their faces, I tried to reassure them that I actually loved horses and ended up telling them how much I enjoyed riding gentlemen. At this point, in the carpeted basement, I got onto my feet and mimed riding a horse, as I’d mimed it for my host family years earlier. People laughed, a little bit. In my horse-riding position, I felt like an overzealous charades player. I quietly arranged myself cross-legged again.

The structure of that basement game was nearly identical to the structure of the program itself: Every Tuesday afternoon we gathered in workshops to critique each other’s stories. These discussions happened in an old wooden building by the river, beige with dark green trim. When we clustered on the porch before class, under the red-leafed October trees, I smoked cloves and listened to their sweet crackle. Someone had once told me cloves had little bits of glass in them, and I always pictured shards glittering through the smoky chambers of my lungs.

Whenever it was your week to get critiqued, copies of your story were stacked on a wooden shelf—always more than enough copies for everyone in your class. If other people in the program were interested in your work, all the copies of your story would disappear. You’d sell out. Or else you wouldn’t. Either way, you’d sit at a round table for an hour and listen to twelve other people dissect the virtues and failures of what you’d written. Then you were expected to go out afterward, with those same people, and drink.

If most days in Iowa were like a test, some version of that first night swapping stories in a basement, then sometimes I passed, and sometimes I failed. Sometimes I got high and worried about sounding stupid, even though the whole point of getting high was that you weren’t supposed to worry if you sounded stupid. Sometimes I went home at the end of the night and cut myself.

Cutting was a habit I’d picked up in high school. It was something my first boyfriend had done, the same one who took enough mushrooms at Disneyland to get scared of the frontier. He’d had his reasons, traumas in his past. At first, I told myself I was doing it because I wanted to get closer to him. But eventually I had to admit I was drawn to cutting for reasons of my own. It let me carve onto my skin a sense of inadequacy I’d never managed to find words for; a sense of hurt whose vagueness—shadowed, always, by the belief it was unjustified—granted appeal to the concrete clarity of a blade drawing blood. It was a pain I could claim, because it was physical and irrefutable, even if I was always ashamed of it for being voluntary.

I’d been shy for most of my childhood, afraid to speak because I was afraid of saying the wrong thing: afraid of popular Felicity, a girl in eighth grade who’d cornered me by the lockers to ask why I didn’t shave my legs; afraid of the girls in the locker room who laughed in a huddle and finally asked me why I never wore deodorant; afraid even of the kinder girls on my cross-country team, the ones who asked why I never spoke; afraid of dinners with my father, which happened maybe once a month, when I wasn’t sure what to say, and often ended up saying something sullen or bratty, something that might compel his attention. Cutting was a way to do something. When my high school boyfriend told me he thought we should break up, I felt so powerless—so spurned—that I threw a stack of plastic cups against my bedroom wall so hard they shattered into shards. I drew these shards across my left ankle until it was a messy ladder of red hatch marks.

It makes me cringe, looking back at my own theatrical production of angst, but I also feel a certain tenderness toward that girl, who wanted to pronounce the size of how she felt, and used what she could: disposable plastic picnic cups, the mode of harm she’d borrowed from the one who was leaving her. It had been a kind of camaraderie between me and him—wearing long sleeves during Southern California summers so our parents couldn’t see the cuts on our arms, explaining the Band-Aids on my ankles as shaving nicks.

Cutting and writing were the ways I’d found around my chronic shyness, which felt like constant failure. At Iowa, my short stories were the kind that got called character-driven, because they never had plots. But I was suspicious of my characters. They were always passive. They suffered from diseases; they suffered assaults; their dogs got heartworms. They were either fake, or else they were me. They were cruel and cruelly treated. I sent them into suffering because I was sure that suffering was gravity, and gravity was all I wanted. My work followed pain like a heat-seeking missile. Even as a young girl, my princess characters had died by dragon breath more often than they’d gotten married. In tenth grade, I’d been assigned to write a response to another student’s painting, an abstract swirl of red and purple, and I wrote a story about a girl in a wheelchair dying in a house fire.

That first year at Iowa, I lived with a journalist in her thirties who had spent years writing newspaper articles about the New York City art scene. She knew how to roast a chicken stuffed with whole lemons, hot and pulpy and sour. The fact of cooked lemons seemed undeniably adult to me, a sign of having crossed some sort of threshold. On Wednesday nights we drove out to the farmers’ auction in a big barn just west of town—tractors and livestock and estate sales, old LPs and old swords and old Coke cans, trash and treasure—where you could buy funnel cakes and watch the auctioneers ride their giant high chairs through the aisles, speaking their incomprehensible staccato language: nowfourfifty-canigettafivenow-fivefromtheback. Back home, we sweated in our kitchen, melting goat cheese and torn-up basil into couscous and then spooning it into the little purses of fried squash blossoms. The smell of oil-blistered vegetable skin was everywhere. Those days were like that: humid, insistent. I had this thought that sautéing things would make me an adult.

Some nights when I got restless and had trouble sleeping, I would drive out to the biggest truck stop in the world, forty miles east on I-80. It had a fifty-foot buffet and showers for the truckers. It even had a dentist and a chapel. I scribbled character-driven dialogue in my notebooks and drank mugs of black coffee filmed with broken lily pads of grease. At three in the morning, I ordered apple dumplings and vanilla ice cream and cleaned the bowl with my tongue, miles of darkened cornfields all around me.

It seemed like everyone drank in Iowa City. Even if no one drank all the time, there was always someone drinking at any particular time. When I wasn’t pretending to ride a cowboy, trying to earn my seat on the shag, I spent my nights balancing on leather stools at the writers’ bars on Market Street: George’s and the Foxhead. “Writers’ bar” was a nonexclusive term. Really any bar where writers drank could be a writers’ bar: the Deadwood, the Dublin Underground, the Mill, the Hilltop, the Vine, Mickey’s, the Airliner, that place with a patio on the Ped Mall, that other place with a patio on the Ped Mall, that place with a patio just a block from the Ped Mall.

But the Foxhead was the most writerly bar of all, and also the smokiest. The ventilation system was just a hole someone had shoved a fan into. The girls’ bathroom was covered with marker scrawl about men in the workshop: So-and-so would fuck anyone, so-and-so would fuck you over. Some of the guys called me barely legal, because I was so young, and I wondered if that phrase lived above a urinal in the guys’ room. I hoped. It seemed like living, to be someone who inspired gossip in black marker.

Even as Iowa got colder, I always wore my cheapest jacket to the Foxhead because I didn’t want to get my other jackets smoky. My cheapest jacket was thin knee-length black velour with a faux-fur trim so large I felt comfortably recessed within it—shivering, arms crossed tight across my chest. Years later, I read about an undergrad in Ames who had gotten drunk and died in the snow, his body found at the bottom of the stairs in some old agricultural warehouse. But back then I wasn’t thinking about dying in the snow. I drank until I couldn’t feel the cold. After the bars closed, I kept drinking in the chilly apartments of boys who were trying to save money on their heating bills.

One night I ended up in the chilly apartment of a boy I liked, or who I thought might like me—the two possibilities were nearly indistinguishable, or else the first barely mattered. There were a few of us at his place, and someone brought out a baggie of coke. It was my first time ever seeing coke, and it was like stepping into a movie. During high school, it seemed like all the other girls had been doing coke since they were toddlers. Popular Felicity, with her smooth-shaven legs; I was sure she’d done it all the time, while I’d been drinking Diet Cokes at PG-13 movies, spending weeks choosing an ankle- length blue lace semiformal dress.

Truth be told, I wasn’t sure exactly how to do coke. I knew you snorted it, but I didn’t know what that looked like. I tried to summon every movie I’d ever seen. How close did you get? How close had that girl gotten in Cruel Intentions, snorting from a secret stash in her silver crucifix? I didn’t want to tell this guy it was my first time doing coke. I wanted to have done coke so many times I couldn’t even count how many times I’d done coke. Instead I was someone who needed to be reminded, gently, to use the cut straw.

“I feel like I’m corrupting you,” this guy said. He was twenty-four but acted like those three years were a canyon between us. They were. I wanted to say: Corrupt me! I was wearing bright white pants with a big silver buckle attached, kneeling in front of this guy’s coffee table, doing a line straightened by a credit card that was honestly probably a debit card, sniffing loudly.

There was nothing feigned about how much I loved that icy swell, that sense of so much to say. We had all night. The woman who’d brought the coke was gone. Everyone was gone. We could talk till dawn. I imagined him saying: I’ve always wondered what you were thinking. Other people were always the ones who got noticed, the Felicitys of the world, but now this guy was putting on a record, Blood on the Tracks, and Dylan’s scratchy voice filled the cold room, and the coke charged my pitter-pattering heart and it was finally my turn. The icy swell believed in me, and it believed in what this night could become. I’d only ever kissed three guys. With every one of them, I’d imagined an entire future unfolding between us. Now I was imagining it with this one. I hadn’t told him about it yet, but maybe I would. Maybe I’d tell him while dawn broke over the park beyond his bay windows.

“Who actually wears white pants?” he asked me. “You see them, but you don’t think of anyone actually wearing them.”

I kept sitting on his couch, for hours and hours, waiting for him to kiss me. I finally asked him, “Are you going to kiss me?”—meaning, Are you going to try to sleep with me?—because there was enough coke and vodka inside me to ask out loud, to peel away whatever feeble skin remained between the world and my need to be affirmed by it.

The answer was no. He wasn’t going to try to sleep with me. The closest he got to trying to sleep with me was saying, just before I left, “Hey, not everybody can pull off white pants,” as a kind of consolation prize.

As I was leaving, he kissed me in his doorway. “Is that what you wanted?” he said, and a sob rose in my throat, salty and swollen. I was drunk but not drunk enough. It was the worst humiliation: to be seen like this, not desired but desiring. I couldn’t let myself cry in front of him. So I did it on the way home, walking through the cold, at four in the morning, my white pants gleaming like stretched headlights in the dark.

When I got home that night, I stumbled upstairs, tripped, and fell face-first onto the steps, hard enough that the next day a huge bruise ripened on my shin. That night, freshly spurned, I wanted to see what he’d seen when he turned me away. In the mirror, I was someone red-eyed—someone who had been crying, or maybe had allergies. She had some white dust under her nose. She took it on her fingertip and rubbed it on her gums. She’d seen them do that in the movies, too. She was sure of it.

We weren’t the first people who’d gotten drunk in Iowa. We knew that. The myths of Iowa City drinking ran like subterranean rivers beneath the drinking we were doing. They surged with dreamlike tales of dysfunction: Raymond Carver and John Cheever tire-squealing through early-morning grocery-store parking lots to restock their liquor stash; John Berryman opening bar tabs on Dubuque Street and ranting about Whitman till dawn, playing chess and leaving his bishops vulnerable; Denis Johnson getting drunk at the Vine and writing short stories about getting drunk at the Vine. We got drunk at the Vine too, though it was in a different building now, on a different block. We knew this too: how imprecisely we squatted in the old tales, how we only got them in glimpses and imperfect replicas.

I often thought about Iowa with that we: We drank here. We drank there. We drank somehow with those who would drink after us, just as we drank with those who had come before. One of Johnson’s poems described being “just a poor mortal human” who had “stumbled onto / the glen where the failed gods are drinking.”