Lit (18 page)

I
had not planned to get drunk. Ninety days without a drink, I was slated to read poems at Harvard College. This is—for a poet with a shiny new book being ignored for two years all over the planet—a big deal. Still, I inwardly shrink at the prospect of standing without numbing agent before an audience who would see through my thin skin to a rapidly agitating heart muscle. (Was Warren’s not being there due to the perennial unaffordable babysitter? Or did I discourage it? Or did he have a paper to work on? So much between us is blotted out.)

The podium I approach sits in the middle of a student lounge with chairs lined up like a tribunal of judges. In my hand, the sheaf of papers shivers. I lean on the podium. I feel my puppet’s mouth open and shut, and I presume the words written down come out, though I say little between the poems.

At the end, I’m okay, not having pissed my pants or had a seizure from shame. Some of my students even show up, which touches me.
When dinner’s suggested, I’m steered to a restaurant not of my choosing, the first joint with a liquor license I’ve entered in months. Any trepidations I once had about a cocktail’s proximity go poof the instant I cross the threshold, for the atmosphere is harmlessly convivial.

At the podium, I hadn’t felt like a poet. But here—among the patrons in crisp-collared shirts and wools that look nubbily expensive—I’m Apollinaire in Paris, just in from walking his lobster down the street on a leash. Somebody takes my coat. Every glass I pass is glittering. The host squires us to the heavy linen tablecloth, the chatter weaving around me, and when the waiter bends at the waist above me, smiling conspiratorially, I hear my puppet mouth ask for a martini.

That inverted triangle of glass—with frost at its lip and a speared olive at its nexus—is the perfect accessory to the place. No lightning bolt splits the chandeliered ceiling to pin me where I perch. No one’s expression alters one whisker, and I don’t even consider canceling the order, since just placing it shifted some geological plates around my innards. It lends an almost sexual thrill to waiting for it. Delicious, crossing the threshold into abandon.

The martini must’ve come, and I must’ve drunk it, but the wine and cognac and whatnot that I took in that night cauterize the memory. I briefly wake, stumbling down wet streets, looking for my car. How had I been deposited in Boston’s fashionable South End? I turn around on a cobbled street. I have an image of sipping green chartreuse from thimbled glasses, feeling it go down like race-car fuel. Are those people I knew?

Then I’m driving on a flat tire that flaps and flaps in time with the wipers in the thunderstorm. The steering mechanism is pulling hard one way, and I struggle with it while the paltry defroster does little against the windshield’s inner ice. With my cold bare hand—where’d I leave my gloves?—I claw at the frost, and in a flash, the road before me splits unexpectedly. I press the brake, and the car yields to a spin. Just as I master the turn, the car stops twirling like a top and slides
sideways. I see a concrete road divider sailing toward my door. In slow motion, it comes, and I feel like a corpse flipped from a catapult, flying at a castle battlement. Rain has slicked the street into black metal, and I know in one soul-destroying eye blink that my son will wake without a mother, for I’m at last about to smash into something more solid than I am.

But I don’t. In some flash of molecular inversion, my car and I become ghost forms. The car passes skidding sideways right through the concrete. I sit unhurt, facing the wrong way on the river drive. I climb out in driving sleet just as a truck whooshes by, blowing its horn. I climb over the fence that edges the river, and I bend over to puke my guts up. Then I wait for the police to come arrest me. But they do not come and do not come.

I move the car over onto the grass and start stumbling home. The pebbles in the wet asphalt look like scales on a snake’s back, and the road has a nasty tendency to squirm away just before I set my foot down, so a few times I stumble over a curb and sit my ass in wet grass. A mile or so on, I turn back and find my car still sitting saggily, unmolested.

Next I know, I’m creaking into my suburban house as my husband pulls the door open from inside. He’s been up all night.

You can get up with him and get him ready, he says.

I’m sober enough by this time and gushing apologies.

You should be sorry, he says. He heads up the stairs, turning back to add a sentence of a type and tone he never uses with me, and again I remember it so clearly because it was so out of character for him: You smell like a bum.

Which is my moment of clarity. Not blinding flash nor drunk-tank revelation, not drinking out of a turkey’s innards, not setting myself afire, but the dull thunk of reality as my husband’s muscled calves carry him upstairs.

A moment of deep self loathing makes not drinking seem your
only conceivable option. But I know that day how swiftly such moments pass, how cunning, baffling, and powerful my own logic can be. My head is grinding inside like a peppermill, and by dawn, a hangover has landed a cold hatchet in the back of my skull.

After horking up my stomach contents in Radcliffe Yard, I drive to the home of poet Thomas Lux and his wife. On sultry summer days, Dev played with their toddler daughter while Tom and his wife barbecued for a ragtag gaggle of writers. Since his wife toils as tirelessly as Warren, Tom and I occasionally meet in a park or meander our strollers through a mall crawl.

In grad school, before he’d been domesticated, Tom outdrank every two-fisted sot who came through. His escapades were passed around with the cheap wine. A die-hard Red Sox fan, he’d once broken his toe kicking a hole in the wall after a grisly loss to Cincinnati. A girlfriend who caught him cheating dumped his clothes out the window onto a New York street.

Then in a Cambridge bookstore years later, he tipped up his sunglasses to show his clear eyes while announcing to me he’d stopped drinking. That morning after my weepy crash, I stand snot-nosed before Tom and his wife in their breakfast nook, waiting for both of them to deliver some healing whap in the head.

Great, Tom says instead. You’ll get sober, and your poems will get better, and your kid will grow up with a happy mother.

A
fter sitting through a local hospital talk on getting sober, I approach the thirty-year-old doctor who’d been at the mike the way a thirsty dog approaches a water dish, and she sits with me outside on the hospital steps under a mist-drenched moon. It looks like nothing so much as a dissolving aspirin, vague and bitter at its edges as I feel.

As I’d twitched in my seat, shaking and jonesing for a drink, her fresh-scrubbed face and sleek chignon had evoked some pampered childhood full of ballet recitals. But at age thirteen—long before med school—she’d been living on the street, giving blow jobs at the bus terminal for dope. Sober for fourteen years, she’d just finished her residency. And for that, she credits a god I can’t believe in.

But I’m desperate enough that night not to struggle so much as before. I tell her how Mother’s radical overhaul for years might be convincing me that sobriety can transform others, just not me. (Thank you, Mother, for saving yourself so conspicuously that it saved us both.)

On the moonlit step, the young intern addresses me as I used
to speak to the Down syndrome women I taught, so slowly that I can see her tongue move, saying I have a disease. It’s progressive and fatal.

I nod. For the first time, the disease idea isn’t just metaphorical, though Joan the Bone had once said (regarding the patience with which she listened to me drone on): When I look at you, I see somebody swathed in bandages.

On those cold concrete steps, some black river is rushing through me down to my fingertips. If I close my eyes to ease the headache I get from even the soft moonlight, I can feel the car spin and see the concrete divider hurling toward me.

Progressive means, the young doctor goes on, whatever jackpot you just hit last night, whatever blackout, whatever bottom you found—that’s where you go down from. That’s your highlight. The top of the curve.

My mouth forms an O and the noise comes out for it’s dawning on me that liquor will never again salve my aches or loosen the knots that bind me so graciously, as it once did.

You’ve passed some line where it works, she says. I used to try to figure it out. Maybe it’s how the pancreas handles sugar, or some enzyme we give off when we drink that sets up a craving. But whatever line it is, you’ve crossed it. Somebody who’s crossed the line and craves liquor like you do and wants to keep drinking is like a pickle who wants to be a cucumber again. You can’t. It’s over.

And so it hits me: I have to kiss alcohol goodbye—no half measures, no quibbling, no champagne at the wedding, no valium at the dentist, no codeine for the cough.

Ninety meetings in ninety days, she says.

I don’t complain but must’ve pulled a face.

It’s like you have cancer, she says, and coming here is really chemo. It’s not a luxury. It’s not a help. It’s what stands between you and going insane or winding up in the boneyard.

Ninety meetings in ninety days, I say. Consider me the Navy SEAL of sobriety. All
yes ma’ams
.

You have to start giving the higher-power thing a try—it’s the one suggestion you skirted. You didn’t pray.

Jenny doesn’t pray, I say, and she’s been sober twenty years. (Jenny is one of the sober ladies I’m getting to know.)

And Jenny’s disposition?

Mean as a snake, I confirm.

You might find sober people who don’t pray, but all the happy ones have some kind of regular meditative or spiritual practice.

There are humungous dark trees in the hospital yard, and I gaze into the torn-out spaces between them at a few sequiny stars.

I’ve never felt anything even faintly mystical in my life and tell her so.

Faith is not a feeling, she says. It’s a set of actions. By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope. Fake it till you make it. Didn’t you fake half your life drinking?

Wouldn’t any god be pissed that I only show up now, with machine-gun fire on my ass?

First off—can’t you see this?—you have a concept of God already. It’s one who’s pissed at you.

Which is oddly true, given my godless upbringing. Where had that come from? She must see the slack look on my face, for she goes on, Let’s say your kid falls down and bloodies himself, or he picks up a butcher knife and hurts himself with it. Are you mad at him?

Course not.

Well, drinking is like the butcher knife. You have to put it down before you can let God in. It’s like you have to break up with the guy who’s beating the crap out of you before you can scan the room and find the nice guy who’s got a crush on you.

I’m trying to start hearing the word
God
without some reflexive
flinch that coughs out the word
idiot
. Maybe, as somebody suggested, I’d have to practice internally repeating God-specific sentences to hear them in my own voice.

She tucks a few wisps of dark hair into her chignon. An ambulance screams by.

After a while, she says, You should be dead tonight. We both should be.

My mouth’s dry. I nod. It’s a striking concept. Mostly I’ve thought of life as my right and death as an unfair aberration, but inverting the formula is no less valid. Life is a blessed aberration, a gift, and death isn’t my business yet. I wonder aloud how many hours I’ve squandered fearing death.

You were saved for something, she says. Don’t die before you find out what. What’s your dream for your life?

The very concept makes me sag. I tap a smoke on the hard pack and light it.

Why’s that such a foreign question? she wants to know. Poets are dreamers, right?

I exhale a highway of smoke and stare down it, then say, Each day has just been about survival, just getting through, standing it.

Don’t you see how savage that sounds? Like, that’s the way men in prison yards think. You live in a rich suburb and teach literature.

Composition mostly, I say (Lord, was I dead then to my blessings, a self-pitying wretch if ever one was). We’re the poorest in the neighborhood….

From what you tell me about how you grew up, the husband, baby, book, job
were
your dreams.

Staying sober, I say. I’d really like to patch things up with Warren, make a good home for my son. If I could write again, whether anybody liked it or not, I’d feel like I was reentering a conversation with the gods I worshipped all my life.

She looks at me and says, Nothing else? That’s it?

My innards are roiling. The smoke in my mouth tastes like creosote, so I flick its small sparks away. Money, I say. I’d like some more money. It sounds shallow, but hell. I kind of have an idea about a book I’d like to write, about when I was a kid and my mom went crazy and my family came apart. But when I sit down with my notebook, my head goes blank. My mind’s just fried. Still, we need some fucking money.

How much money would seem like a gift from God?

Having only made nine grand that year, I tell her twelve would be nice. That’d be fair, I say. I’d like a tenure-track job with health insurance, but Warren has medical, so I don’t really need it.

Then pray for it. Just pray every day for ninety days and see if your life gets better. Call it a scientific experiment. You might not get the money, but you might find relief from anxiety about money. What do you have to lose?

It’s like you’re showing me a tree stump and telling me to talk to it.

You can make up your own concept of what to revere. Like nature…

I hate nature, I say. I don’t mean to, I just never felt much about mountains and trees and shit. I have a genetic memory of pulling a plow or tilling the soil that repels me from dirt and green growing things.

Then think of the good parts in people—some Great Spirit, like the Native Americans have. Talk to it. Practice reverence at it. Attend it the way you’ve been attending these fears of yours.

That night in the living room, with Dev and Warren in bed, I take a small cushion down and get on my knees for the first time in my life—prayer number one.

Higher power, I say snidely. Where the fuck have you been?

The silence envelops me. There’s something scary there, some blanket of dread around me that feels like God’s perennial absence,
his abandonment, if he does exist. (Now I’d call it my deliberately practiced refusal of his presence.) It’s hard to sit in. A few seconds later, I say: Thanks for keeping me sober today. Then I get up.

Wait, the sober mind says—that’s trying? You could’ve died last night.

I flop back on my knees. And help me. Help. Me. Help me to feel better so I can believe in you, you subtle bastard.

Such is my first prayer—a peevish start, tight-lipped, mean of spirit, but a prayer nonetheless. I vow to make it regular, this half-baked prayer. I won’t get on my knees usually. But I will silently say, every morning,
Keep me sober
. At night, it’s
Thanks
. That’s all I can stand.

I pace around downstairs for a while with skin twisting around my flesh. Had I gotten drunk the night before in front of my students? How much would it cost to get the wheel I’d driven on fixed?

Finally, I slip into bed, and Warren stirs as he rarely does. His voice comes up in the dark. Have you been at your group?

I’ve been downstairs, I say. I promise, I’m not gonna drink anymore.

And he rolls over in silence, which is what I’ve earned.