Double Double (18 page)

KG
: There is no answer. Which is not what Americans want to hear: We're a results-oriented country, not as interested in moral shades of gray, say, as are the French or Germans. Twelve-step programs were founded by two Americans. The steps are very action-oriented and try to solve an unsolvable riddle. What describes America better than that?
   The American psyche says, “If there's a road that ends, knock down the wall or plow a new road.” The fact of the matter is that twelve-step programs have a far better record of helping people with alcoholism, gambling, overeating, sex addictions, overspending, you name it. In the end, the success rate is never going to get to 50 percent, 60 percent, 70 percent, because of the riddle we just described, a problem that defies logic and rationality.

MG
: I've come to the conclusion that the really big block when it comes to twelve-step programs is the insistence on powerlessness. Why some alcoholics prefer Rational Recovery and Moderation Management is that these organizations are completely, adamantly against the idea of powerlessness.
   Both organizations look at excessive drinking entirely from the position of self-reliance. We know there's some success, because they let people keep on drinking. Still, all of these groups appear to be dead set against the idea of powerlessness, which means turning one's life over to a Higher Power. Most people equate “Higher Power” with God, despite the insistence that a Higher Power can
be anything at all that one conceives of as transcending self. I wonder, though, if the notion of the Higher Power is how twelve-step programs really indoctrinate people. Isn't the so-called Higher Power God in disguise?

KG
: In essence, yes.

MG
: Exactly! There is a religious—or, if you prefer, spiritual—underpinning to the whole organization, which is not at all a criticism, just an observation. Now, here's the thing. A group like Moderation Management says that you can drink in moderation and learn how to drink safely if you work at it and schedule it properly. In other words, you can control your drinking. I wouldn't say this is total nonsense, for I imagine that some people in this group—or out of it—do manage to control their drinking. But I also think they spend a lot of time thinking about drinking, and that, to me, would sap a lot of pleasure from drinking. So there's no Higher Power to appeal to, to keep you off the bottle; you've got to keep track of your drinks. “Now, how many more drinks can I have at this party?”

KG
: Charting—

MG
: Yes, keeping count. The question also lies in the word “problem” in the phrase “problem drinker.” Some people look at having a problem with drinking as completely different from having an addiction. As far as I'm concerned, if you have a problem—

KG
: A problem with drinking suggests that it's something the drinker can “solve.”

MG
: Right. Again, if you have to moderate your drinking, then it's
automatically
beyond being a problem. People who don't have a problem with drinking don't have to work to moderate their drinking; they just curtail it or cut it out altogether, as if they have a food allergy.
   
I'm a big believer in self-transcendence. I think everyone, at some time, for brief moments, attains self-transcendence. I remember once, driving in downtown D.C., I saw a row of ducklings crossing F Street. Traffic stopped, pedestrians stopped, everyone stopped to make sure those ducklings made it to the other side. And I bet everyone had a moment of transcendence when those ducklings were more important than their daily cares and worries. Everyone has moments—

KG
: Uh-huh. Where nirvana is within reach.

MG
: In drinking, that's what people are after.

KG
: Carl Jung stated that alcoholics are engaged in a low-level search for spirituality.

MG
: I wouldn't disagree with that at all.

KG
: One way of looking at it is that alcoholics are seekers. Seeking something beyond the satisfactions of daily living. They want to dream greater dreams, climb greater heights . . .

MG
: Come on, now. Don't you think this is true of most people? I'd be surprised if I found anyone who didn't want something beyond the material world—and its goods.

KG
: Yeah, I agree, but the difference is, nonalcoholics don't look to get their freak on just because they had a bad day at the office. They come home, yell at their wives or kick their dog, turn on the TV, and tune out.
   That's not enough for guys like me.
   We're out for revenge. And revenge means oblivion, oblivion for ourselves, and oblivious to everyone else.

I
was twenty-four or twenty-five and working for the government in order to pull together enough money for graduate school. I took a night course at American University from a professor who was brilliant, intimidating, and enthralling. The subject was American literature, though I'm not certain of that; I seem to remember Emma Bovary creeping into a lecture. I have a recollection of one or more novels by Henry James. I do remember Jake Barnes in
The Sun Also Rises
. And Robert Penn Warren's
All the King's Men.

This class was three hours long. Professor von Abele talked for the entire three hours. I cannot recall his ever referring to a note either in his hand or on the lectern. It was all in his head. Nor was it a class in which discussion was encouraged. Once in a great while, one of us (not I) would ask a question rather timidly. It would be answered and the lecture resumed. I got the impression
that Dr. von Abele had so much to say that he didn't want to waste time answering questions.

Three hours, no notes, no breaks. Three straight hours, and that didn't seem to faze him. My mind skims over the course, recalling some of it, but mostly him and his presentation.

I do remember being impressed by something in a poem of Robert Penn Warren's. Not the whole poem, not much of it, except one line. The poem was “Original Sin,” something about Harvard Yard. I have a clear remembrance of one metaphor. Not the subject of the metaphor, only the comparison, the “like” part. This was: “Like a mother who rises at night to seek a childhood picture.”

That line has remained printed on my mind for half a century. Strange, but I have never gone back to the poem to see what the other half of the metaphor was. I don't know why. Back then I reacted oddly to it. Why would a mother do that? Why on earth would anyone get out of bed to go and find a childhood picture? Rather than just kick the line aside, indifferently, I felt hostile. It irritated me that I couldn't understand the action. I read the poem several times for the class, and each time I'd stumble over that line as if it were a barrier to something, a tree across my path. There was a gap between me and it that I didn't understand, and it made me unreasonably angry.

It's been a long time since I took that course and read that poem. It seems impossible that I can think of my life in that long season. A few years later, I was in Iowa City, teaching at the university and winding up in the writers' workshop and writing poetry. Ten years later, I got married. It was a disastrous marriage, not just because my husband and I were both alcoholics but because we were supremely unsuited. We acted like kids and argued and drank.

I knew before, during, and after that this marriage was a mistake of monumental proportions, and yet I did nothing to stop it or end it for years. Five years elapsed before I left. (Today, alas, five years were more like five days. Then, five years were more like fifty.) There must be a psychological equivalent of locked-in syndrome wherein you know, see, and hear everything that's going on; you just can't bring yourself to do anything about it. Or perhaps that is another example of denial.

That's a short voyage 'round my marriage. Except for its conversational excellence (we were both good talkers), it was not all that interesting, but it was embalmed for the ages.

Tolstoy's paradigm of family disposition—that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way—I very much doubt. If you lined up ten teenagers and asked why they were unhappy with their parents, do you really think one of them
wouldn't
say, “I can't talk to them”? (Not that we're done with Tolstoy—has anyone ever been done with him?—for he was probably talking about the truths behind unhappiness; I'm talking only about our vacuous understanding of it.) I think all marriages are unhappy in the way of all others. There are bigger helpings of unhappiness on the plate, but it's still the same food.

So a child named Ken was born into this one. Fortunately, the baby was made to share this cauldron of eye of newt and tail of toad only for a little while, and he threw it on the floor anyway. Perhaps babies soak up unhappiness like sponges; if so, this baby squeezed it out again in smiles. I know it sounds like window dressing and overly fond recollection, but I swear he never woke me with crying; he was always smiling in the morning. You could put him anywhere—in a crib, in a playpen, in a closet (no, I didn't)—and he was happy.

There was something about him. He was neither grasping nor greedy. It always surprised me that we could go into the local Toys “R” Us in search of a present for a friend's birthday party, and Ken would help pick it out yet never ask for anything for himself. Where did he learn this graceful attitude with parents who were neither generous nor graceful?

I remember many library trips and many books, from
Gone Is Gone
and
The Wind in the Willows
to Edward Gorey and the dreadful fates that overtook the Gashleycrumb Tinies. Ken loved that book and would insist that his grandmother read it to him. She thought it entirely too macabre for a child: “ ‘B is for Basil, assaulted by bears.' How dreadful!” “There's Neville,” I argued. “ ‘N is for Neville, who died of ennui.' That's not so bad.” My mother had come to stay with us for a little while to help take care of Ken while I worked.

We lived in a trailer then, in Morgantown, West Virginia. That trailer. It was old, with two small bedrooms, a kitchen, a bath, and a little living room. I rented it from a nice couple who lived across the road. It had a porch where Ken liked to sit. I have a snapshot of him sitting with a big rabbit, a huge inflated thing that rose way above him.

I worked as a secretary for a man who did some sort of consulting for the University of West Virginia. He informed me one day when the paychecks rolled in that his withholding tax was more than my salary. I thanked him for sharing.

We were poor. I can't remember if there was money for vodka or wine. I doubt it, yet I can't imagine I wasn't drinking then, having drunk my way through five years of marriage. Since I'd gotten out of the marriage, though, it's possible that I didn't need to be propping myself up so much with alcohol.

Where we lived, there were few houses, so I don't know where the children came from that Halloween. Ken loved the trick-or-treaters. Halloween is his birthday, and he thought they had all dressed up just for him. I didn't tell him otherwise. It was pretty wonderful.

I'm thinking of a poem I wrote back in the poetry days of Iowa City called “Haunted Autumn,” about a lot of little kids who go trick-or-treating. They tell the adults they know about a dark house with ghosts and witches, and they're going there to disappear. Then the poem gets larded up with growing up but not getting any wiser. It was published, but it wasn't very good, except for the kids who were going to that house to disappear.

I don't understand some of my poetry. There are a lot of houses in my poems: I'm obsessed with houses. There are a lot of children: I'm obsessed with children. “In a dark wood, the dark leaves fall / Around the darkest house of all.” Apparently that is where the children are, but it also says that is where they want to be. “Only children / Carry within them the dead weight of houses.” That was another poem about children and houses; if I understood that poem, I think I would understand a lot.

 • • • 

We left the trailer and went back to Washington. Then came the apartment in Silver Spring, the little house in Greenbelt, the larger house in Takoma Park. And the years of the Washington Waldorf School, that divine adjunct to childhood on the grounds of the Washington National Cathedral. I remember so well the headmaster, Dr. Kaufmann. If ever a person was born to teach, it had to be him. (I'll bet he had firsthand acquaintance with ghosts and witches and dark houses.)

I'm glossing over the surrealism of adolescence. What I want to know is, what happened? What happened to the little boy of two or three, that he came to feel life was so uncertain and chancy, so dangerous, that he had to go looking for safety in booze? It must have been a lack, a lack of love, support, something. Did he fear he was falling and looked for a safety net?

The story of parents and children is one of tragic implications. Its success depends on separation. It's as if, between the shutting and opening of a door, or turning away and turning back, everything changes. You wonder about a child: Where did you go?

What happened in these forty-odd years that wrought such volcanic changes? I don't think it was pot and beer and gin, or not wholly. It's something else, an inevitable downward spiral. The trouble is, we can't keep our hands on anything; things change at the slightest touch, even wood, even stone. We can't hold on to anything; it's like running our hands through water.

Yet there must be something. I wonder if Proust was right. I wonder if it's memory.

 • • • 

Sometimes I think there's a CEO somewhere in his office, successful and rich, kids grown up. His son is a surgeon, so much in demand that they barely have occasions to talk; his daughter is a painter of strange and unpredictable forms. His wife is still looking good because she can afford to. Trips to Europe, a ski chalet in the Swiss Alps; a summer house on Mount Desert Island. Dinner tonight with friends at the Four Seasons.