Table of Contents
For many good friends at 2nd Ls, Int. Act., and Norfsyde
Twice
You burned your lifes work
Once to start a new life
And once just to start a fire
The Long Winters, Be Kind to the New Girl
So, this is important:
This is what I remember, and how I remember italthough Ive changed some names, and amalgamated some people, and some places.
Im certain that some people in this book remember things differently, or remember things I dont remember. Some people probably have no recall of events that are vivid, and crucial, to me.
Im scared not just of subjectivity, but of losing people I love.
In life, Im meticulously honest, but my default is to feel like a fraud. I walk through customs thinking Ill get busted for drugs Im not carrying. I walk out of stores afraid to be caught with things I havent stolen. So, of course, Im terrified of a common scenario: a memoirist is dogged, exposed, and denounced.
Im telling my memories with scrupulous precision, while scared that the mind is unreliable. Maybe every person on the planet is equally susceptible to errors and contortions of remembrancewhether or not they consider their minds to be suspect. Does that make memory itself an act of imagination?
I wrote my ideas on Post-It notes and stuck them on the wall by the desk. Lyrics, ideas for poems, ideas for newspaper pieces, preposterous diagrams for joysticks and wired-up boxing gloves that would work as sound-effects triggers. These are two notes I left for myself in November 1999:
Im mostly writing drug stories. I have them. People read them.
I know a famous actor who was a regular on Page Six, going in and out of nightclubs, in the heyday of the Hilton sisters and the Olsen twins. He struggled with cocaine and painkillers but was embarrassed to talk about it. Addiction stories are clichd, he said.
Youre a storyteller, I told him. You know how few essential stories there are. This one is new, how often does that happen? Its up there with Boy Meets Girl Boy Loses Girl, Man Challenges the Gods and Is Punished, Rags to Riches. Joking cynically with friends, Ive called this book a JADN: just another drug narrative. We, the addicts, keep writing them, but nearly everything we have to say has already been expressed just in the title of Caroline Knapps Drinking: A Love Story.
I cant renounce drugs. I love drugs. Id never trade the part of my life when the drugs worked, though the bulk of the time I spent getting high, they werent doing shit for me. I wouldnt be here if I didnt do the drugs first. This part of my lifeeven minus the bursts of euphoriais better, sexier, happier, more poetic, more romantic, grander.
And if heroin still made me feel like I did the first time, and kept making me that way foreverkept workingI mightve quite happily accepted a desolate, marginal life and death.
Ive heard from so many people who got clean, then went out and got wasted again, that, bewilderingly, they were exactly at the same place they were when they left off, immediately. Its just the bizarreness of addiction, which waits patiently, no matter how long you go without drugs. Who knows, maybe I am, in fact, unlike the aforementioned relapsers, but I have no desire to try the drugs again, and see if things go differently. I dont want to test this lifes durability.
None of this guarantees I wont go out and get fucked up. It happens, often to people whove made enthusiastic public declarations of recovery. I watch Celebrity Rehab and think: My people!
Caroline Knapp, it bears mentioning, was also addicted to nicotine, and died of lung cancer.
I loathe myself in a lot of these stories. I feel compelled to tell you now that eventually I turn into a kind, loving person who struggles to live the first line in Saint Franciss prayer: Make me a channel of your peace. Not to demand peace, but to transmit it.
Maybe thats not what youre interested inmaybe you want salacious tales of the debased guy: the cleaned-up guy is intolerably corny. Maybe you just want to read drugs heroin heroin drugs over and over again. When I was getting high, thats what I read these books for.
My dads dad was the town drunk in Tullos, Louisiana. In the mid-1950s, when everybody elses family had gotten a car, my dads family still had a horse. Because the horse knew how to get home. My grandfather would get wasted at the bar, slump on the horse when his money was gone, and the horse would take him home.
He lost their house in a card gameI mean, he literally lost their house in a card game. He came home and said, get up, everybody, we have to leave.
My dad got into West Point. When he came back on vacations, his dad made him go to the bar with him in uniform so he could show him off, which my dad hated. He went to Vietnam, where he served as an adviser to a South Vietnamese tank unit, not with an American unit, possibly because the officers doing the assigning disliked him: he was too uptight, too intense.
I spoke to my dad about Vietnam just once when I was a kid.
Dad, whats that citation from the South Vietnamese government thats hanging on the wall of your study?
Well, we were at, and we were surrounded byof them, and there were onlyof us.
So, it was a battle?
It was a battle.
Did you win?
No, said my dad. But we killed a lot of them.
He was interviewed by the New York Times in 2000, about how the wars legacy is taught at West Pointa salient point, being that the Vietnamese were so fanatical, or so patriotic, that they leaped heedlessly, or courageously, into death.
Lord, I saw them die by the hundreds, my dad told the Times reporter.
I think what he saw in Vietnam amplified, demonically, what he learned as a child: terrible things could happen, unexpectedly, at any time. His became a life of hypervigilance. He tightened like a fist.
He drank beer at night and on weekends. I dont remember him drunknot in the way he told me my grandfather was drunkbut on the weekend, if you had done something wrong(failed Algebra, neglected to mow the lawn)you had to tell him early. At 11 AM, he would be disappointed. At 2 PM, he would be angry. At 4 PM he would leap out of his chair, red-faced, in a rage, and whip his belt out, threatening to finally beat me the way his dad beat him.
My dad never hit me. I waited, and waited, but he never did. He reminded me often how lucky I was; that he grew up in a house with an openly, constantly drunk father who actually beat him. I did feel lucky.
My younger brother, a matchless student who eased virtuously through school, began to have strange episodes when he went off to college. He stopped going to class, and, for reasons he found to be perfectly sensible, started sleeping only every other night. Hes brilliant, and odd; when he turned thirty, I congratulated him. He shrugged: Its only significant because we have a base-10 number system.
My mom had unpredictable manias when shed yell at you for something someone else did. Your brother doesnt have a plan he doesnt have a plan
