Leslie Jamison - The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

Copyright 2018 by Leslie Jamison

Cover design and art by Allison J. Warner

Author photograph by Beowulf Sheehan

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ISBN 978-0-316-25962-0

E3-20180308-JV-PC

For anyone addiction has touched

T he first time I ever felt itthe buzzI was almost thirteen. I didnt 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 brothers 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 strangers 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 mothers 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 wasnt much of me that wasnt 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 didnt 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 glimpsedin the sweet spot between two drinks and three, then three and four, then four and fivemy 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 everyones 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.

S itting 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: Hed gotten praised. Hed gotten proud. Hed 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, hed published a best-selling novel about alcoholism while sober. But he relapsed a few years after it became a bestseller. Ive written a book thats 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 Im an alcoholic. By coming back to the common refrain, he was reminding himself that commonality could be its own saving grace. My story isnt much different from anyones, he said. Its 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 Id told it, and Id demur, Well, Im a writer, shrugging, trying not to make too big a deal out of it. Id have the Charlie Jackson problem, my humility imperiled by my storytelling prowess. I practiced with note cards beforehand, though I didnt use them when I spokebecause I didnt want to make it seem like Id been practicing.

It was after Id gone through the part about my abortion, and how much Id been drinking pregnant; after the part about the night I dont call date rape, and the etiquette of reconstructing blackouts; after Id gone through the talking points of my pain, which seemed like nothing compared to what the other people in that room had livedit 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!