The Recovering Read online

  When she spoke to me about Cain, Pool’s voice was full of respect and even tenderness. It was clear she’d been through a lot with him, for him, but she didn’t regret it. She mainly regretted how his life had turned out. He died in poverty, his work basically unknown. She told me about his last apartment in Harlem, where their kids went—just once, as teenagers—to stay. It was a basement unit that smelled like sewage.

  Dr. Kaplin told me that when he first meets a patient struggling with addiction, he asks: “What were you like when you were doing well? Don’t you want to be that person again?” When Cain was doing well, he kept company with his heroes; he was in fellowship at his mosque, he carried his notebooks with him everywhere. But when the New York Times ran an obituary for Cain after he died of complications from liver disease just shy of his sixty-seventh birthday in October 2010—forty years after the newspaper’s glowing review of his novel—the article described Cain as a promising voice whose potential was never realized: “Drugs dashed these hopes.”

  When I spoke to Pool, she told me that the mutual friend who’d introduced them felt guilty about connecting a “pure-souled country girl” to a Harlem junkie, but she told him there was nothing to apologize for. “How many people get invited to cook chicken for James Baldwin?” she asked me. In our conversations about Cain, she used the word “genius” more times than I could count. She wasn’t bitter about their marriage. She’d just done what she had to do.

  “I’m not upset,” she told me. “I just needed to make sure we survived George.”

  The first time I told Dave that I might have to stop drinking, we were still living back in New Haven. I’d woken up from an ordinary blackout, sick of them, and framed the possibility in hedging terms: maybe just for a little while. I knew that something was wrong inside me and feared that other people would eventually be able to catch whiffs of it—like a decaying tooth you can faintly smell when someone opens her mouth to laugh, or that you can taste when you kiss her.

  Dave said he trusted my judgment: If I thought I had to stop, I should stop. But he was careful not to tell me what to do, and I read this care as a sign that I wasn’t a real alcoholic. This was a relief. It meant I would be able to start drinking again, maybe after a few weeks, without having to convince him it was okay. By stopping for a while, I would prove—to him, and to myself—that I didn’t need it, which would justify starting again. I drank again after three days.

  The second time I tried to stop drinking, it was six months later, during that first fall in Iowa, right before I drove back to New Haven to take my oral exams. These exams were my swan song in academia before I put my doctoral program on hold for two years and plunged fully into my new life with Dave in the middle of the country. I would sit in a room full of professors firing questions at me about Shakespeare and American modernism and Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls.” It made me sad to think of passing the exams sober, because I had no idea how I’d celebrate.

  When I told Dave that I thought I needed to stop drinking again—maybe for good this time—even saying the words out loud was terrifying: for good. The sober future looked like a lemon squeezed dry, all the juice gone, just the wrinkled mess of rind left behind. Dave’s face looked different than it had looked the first time. It held the memory of more drunk nights, more drunk fights. I wondered if it also held the suspicion: Can’t you just drink better? He said he could also imagine other ways to moderate. Maybe I could limit myself to two drinks a night. Maybe we could agree that I’d only drink at a party if he brought me a drink. That sounded like hell.

  Driving back to the East Coast, sober and raw, I sent Dave lists of daily wonders I’d seen—as a way of reminding myself that the world without booze wasn’t just flat champagne. I told him about a truck bed full of lamps. I told him about the woman in a gas station with fake blue eyes the color of sapphires. I told him about meeting a ninety-year-old woman who kept a scrapbook full of death announcements pasted next to the marriage announcements—for the same people—that she’d pasted in fifty years earlier. My reports to Dave were heavy with unreleased desire, like soaked sponges, desperate to find something good enough to replace how good drinking had been. When I tried to explain how much I missed booze—even a day without it—Dave said my honesty was like clean air. He said, Keep your eyes open for those wonders.

  After I passed my orals, I went to a party where I moved miserably from room to room, watching other people drink. What good was it to nail Satan’s self-begetting unless you could obliterate yourself afterward? This was just serving in heaven, and I wanted to reign in hell.

  After orals, I stayed alone at my brother’s apartment in Boston—he was out of town—and didn’t see another human being for days. I was supposed to start the novel I was planning to spend the next two years writing, but every morning I woke up and thought: Don’t drink. Don’t drink. Don’t drink. So I didn’t drink for one hour, and then I didn’t drink for another one. Nothing got written. I sat on my brother’s green couch and cried. I called Dave, who said he’d stayed out till two in the morning singing karaoke. I cried more. He asked why I was crying, his voice full of love and confusion. I didn’t know how to explain how hard it was to go through a single day without drinking, to ponder the possibility of going through every day without drinking. Every hour. Another hour. I thought I might lose my mind.

  At a museum I visited, largely to get away from myself, I watched a video installation tucked behind a curtain: It showed a woman giving birth, and the footage got close to the mess of blood between her legs. She was screaming, but at least her pain was doing something useful. I thought: If I hadn’t gotten the abortion, I’d be having a baby this month.

  In the addiction section of a bookstore in Harvard Square—the same bookstore where I’d spent hours during college, reading books to distract myself from how hungry I was—I picked up a memoir with a wineglass on the cover and sat on the floor, consuming it: her obsession with the moisture on a wineglass, her nights alone slicing green apples into thin-as-paper pieces. I missed drinking so much, it almost slaked my thirst to read about it. The book was subtitled A Love Story.

  The clerk at the checkout register was a middle-aged man with balding hair and a soft voice. “What’s this?” he asked, laughing nervously. “An ode to alcoholism?”

  “I think it’s more like a warning,” I said. Something in my tone, or my face, made him catch my eye. Some strange voltage passed between us.

  “Maybe the next time you’re in the store,” he said, “you can let me know what happens.” It seemed like he was trying to say: I know why you are reading this, because I want to read it too. It was like he’d been able to recognize me, as if my insane hours alone at the apartment, not drinking not drinking not drinking, had left some visible residue.

  By the time Dave flew out to Boston—so we could drive up to Vermont, to the wedding of a friend who’d been in his band in college—it had been ten days since I’d had a drink. An hour into the drive, I told Dave I was pretty sure I could start drinking again. In fact, I was pretty sure I could start drinking again tonight. It was easier to say these things without looking him in the eye, while we were both staring at the highway. I could already imagine the wedding: champagne, red wine, dancing, relief. It would be the end of whatever this horrible week had been.

  “I can do this,” I told Dave. “It’s no problem.” And it wasn’t, that night.

  But soon enough, back in Iowa, we were back to ugly fights—where I accused him of giving too much of himself to the world, and not enough to me. Describing Dave to a friend, I invoked that scene from Out of Africa where another character explains what’s charming and infuriating about Robert Redford as a big-game-hunting, impossibly restless lover: “He likes giving gifts, but not at Christmas.”

  Dave said it would be easier to give me the things I wanted—attention, affection, time—if only I weren’t demanding them so fiercely. Certain parallels haunted me: If only I didn’t need proof of
his love so badly, then I could have it unstintingly. If only I didn’t need to drink so badly, then I’d be able to drink well.

  My relationship with Dave was also the first time I’d let myself be known in boringness and tedium and irritation, in those moments where I felt tired and unalive—and booze made it easier to mistake that exposure for injury. “Last year our drunken quarrels had no explanation,” Robert Lowell once wrote, “except everything, except everything.”

  After every bad drunk fight, I would spend the next morning composing the most eloquent apology note I could muster. I often ended up recanting everything I’d said the night before, not because I hadn’t meant it but because I was ashamed of how I’d said it drunk. If I could just explain myself well enough, if I could make sense of these fights—extract a certain meaning from them, just get to the bottom of them—then we’d be okay. But the fights weren’t helping us get to the bottom of anything. The specific content of our fights—how much he flirted or didn’t flirt, how much we planned our schedules around each other—was less essential than the tidal flow running beneath them: I was always reaching for more of Dave, grasping for something. He told me once that it felt like he was pouring his heart down a drain: It was never enough.

  I was haunted by my first memory of Dave, playing his guitar with a crowd of people gathered round, and the reductive truths I’d extracted from it: that he was happiest at the center of an adoring collective gaze, and that I couldn’t be that crowd for him, multiple and always new. But this myth of our origins cast Dave in a limited role—the crooner, the charmer, full of self-assurance that pressed on all my bruises—and made it harder to see that Dave was full of his own insecurities. It was just that he didn’t express them as I did, by drinking himself silly, as if that were the only emotional currency I recognized. His sources of anxiety were quieter: working on a project for months—a review, a poem—missing one deadline after another. He was exacting and perfectionist, prone to revision and delay. He once showed me a note his school psychologist had written about him at the age of seven: Because he considers many possibilities, it often takes him longer to finish what should be a short simple answer.

  When my heart skittered after a night of too much booze, I wondered if it was the booze interfering with my medication or just my anxiety about whether it might be. I started dreaming about a man with red hair who pointed to the plastic cup in my hand and said: “I know what you are.” What I definitely was: a woman showing up puffy-faced and swollen-eyed to 7 a.m. bakery shifts; and drunk in my kitchen at home, like a slapstick cooking show, accidentally slicing off bits of myself with the mandoline, or gouging my palm with the ragged edge of a tunafish-can lid, checking the food for blood.

  Now that I’d talked about how bad the drinking had gotten, it was trickier to do so much of it. If I knew Dave was getting home at seven, and I was getting home from the bakery at six, it might go like this: In that hour I’d pour myself as much gin as I thought I could get away with, just enough to get drunk without looking drunk, and then I’d listen for his key in the door, at which point I’d have just enough time to swallow whatever was left, rinse the cup, and duck into the bathroom. Then I’d brush my teeth as hard as I could, gargle the Listerine until it hurt. This was satisfying, like burning the evidence of my guilt in an incinerator—torching the corpse. I’d come out and kiss him quickly, without opening my mouth. Then we’d each have a glass of wine, just like reasonable nonalcoholics, and I’d tell him all about the day’s wonders.

  In 1939, a man named Ervin Cornell sat down and wrote a letter to the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, telling the government how much he wanted to stop using:

  Dear Sir:

  This is a funny letter because I do not know who I am writing to. The Doctor wanted me to write to you and see if you can get me in [the] Kentucky Hospital. Would it be possible for you to call at my home and explain to me what I have to do. I would very much like to get away from this morphine habit. If possible I wish you would let me know right away. Thanking you for your kindness.

  The “Kentucky Hospital” was another name for the Narco Farm—the infamous prison-hospital for addicts that had opened near Lexington in 1935—and Cornell was desperate to get in. He wasn’t the only one. It was an odd prison in that way: Despite its barred windows and strict regimens, nearly three thousand people showed up to its locked doors each year requesting entry. Photographs show them walking up to the main prison gates with suitcases in hand, sunlight glaring behind them.

  At a certain point in the life cycle of an addiction, this is what desperation could look like: begging for anything that might deliver you from your own worst impulses, sending messages in bottles. Do you ever feel like you are completely outside outside our life? “If theres any way in the world to be cured I wont to try it [sic],” wrote J. S. Northcutt, of Mississippi. Milton Moses was even more urgent:

  I have been smoking marijuana cigarettes for six years. Baltimore City is full of these cigarettes and I know where they are all located. I beg of you to come and see me. I sure would like to be on the narcotic Farm for a cure… for Gods sake have a heart and do something for me I am sure suffering in this place. I hope I can depend on you, and please dont fail me.

  Paul Youngman of Chicago wrote on December 1, 1945:

  Dear Sir,

  I would like very much if you wold [sic] send me papers so I could go to Lexington, Ky. (U.S.P.S.) to take a treatment for drug addiction as I am about fed up with it and will do my best to stay away from it as it is very hard to obtain it any more and will do my utmost to quit it all together and will do my very best to quit it all together.

  Thanking you in advance,

  Yours truly,

  Paul Youngman.

  Youngman’s desperation is palpable in his repetition and his contradiction. The drugs are getting harder to find, he says, and he wants to stay away from them.

  Chester Socar wasn’t patient enough for the postal service. He sent a telegram:

  PLEASE SEND APPLICATION FORMS FOR ADMISSION TO FEDERAL NARCOTIC FARM LEXINGTON KY AT EARLIEST POSSIBLE MOMENT.

  The Narco Farm was a three-year construction project and a four-million-dollar compromise: an art deco prison with locked doors and a bowling alley. To appease progressive reformists, it offered a program of rehabilitation. To appease frustrated wardens, it offered space for the addicts who had been crowding federal prisons. The press called the Narco Farm a “new deal for the drug addict” and, less enthusiastically, a “million dollar flophouse for junkies.” Before it opened, a Lexington newspaper ran a contest to get suggestions from local residents about what it should be named, and the suggestions varied from awestruck (“Courageous Hospital,” “Beneficial Farm”) to ruthlessly ironic: “Big Shot Drug Farm,” “Dream Castle,” and “US Greatest Gift to Lift Mankind Sanatorium.”

  In truth, the prison-hospital-Big-Shot-Dream-Castle was still figuring out what it was. For starters, it was a working farm with ninety dairy cows. (Physical labor was supposed to be good for recovering addicts.) For inmates who got transferred, it was a step up from federal prison. One inmate from Leavenworth said the “courteous treatment that we discovered at the farm seemed too good to be true,” and one photograph shows elderly addicts—hardened by years of addiction—getting their nails trimmed and buffed by a crew of beautiful young nurses. Manicures and pedicures were part of “the cure” for which Lexington became famous: a blend of physical treatment, talk therapy, structured recreation, and therapeutic labor. Inmates got dental work on the teeth their heroin habits had wrecked (4,245 teeth were extracted in 1937 alone) and vocational training. They worked as tailors, making “going home suits” for the guys who were doing just that, and picked tomatoes—canning fifteen hundred gallons in a single day.

  The patients also had fun. Or at least they were supposed to. That was the idea. That was the rhetoric. It was a strange type of fun: institutional fun. Which meant that the institution was shaping it and keeping track of it.
When a magician named Lippincott performed at the Narco Farm, “practically the entire population of 1100 patients” came to enjoy themselves, said one newspaper clipping stapled to the top of a monthly report sent to the surgeon general, as if to boast: See! These guys are having a great time. In 1937, the hospital logged 4,473 collective patient hours of horseshoe tossing and 8,842 hours of bowling. Just as there was some cognitive dissonance about who came to the Narco Farm (were they prisoners or patients?) there was some cognitive dissonance about what was supposed to happen to them once they got there: Were they supposed to work themselves right again, or rediscover pleasure?

  Kentucky Ham, a novel about life at the Narcotic Farm written by Billy Burroughs Jr.—whose famously “unredeemed” father had spent time at the Narco Farm before him—describes the unofficial pleasures of resistance. The novel’s “banana-smoking epidemic,” for example, prompts farm officials to take bananas off the menu while they test if bananas can actually get anyone high. After that, the prisoners start smoking “everything we hated like Brussels sprouts.”

  So many musicians ended up at Lexington—Chet Baker, Elvin Jones, Sonny Rollins—that it became an informal jazz academy. At one point there were six different jazz combos practicing inside. One night an orchestra composed of Narco Farm patients performed for the nation on The Tonight Show.

  Despite its transcendent claims, the Narco Farm was deeply enmeshed in an early war on drugs that was punitive and inhumane—Harry Anslinger’s three-decade crusade to demonize the addict—and its “cure” was also a Trojan horse hiding a darker impulse: to contain addiction without calling it imprisonment. The Narco Farm rhetoric promised you could take a broken man and send him back out into the world as someone whole, but the line between rehabilitation and reprogramming was porous. “The treatment is, for the most part, a skillful rearrangement of the intangibles that go to make up human existence,” said an article in the Chicago Daily News. “A man comes to them with one destiny. They figure out its trade-in value and give him a new one. It’s as simple as all that.” It was a strange definition of simplicity: taking all the intangibles that composed a man, and then rearranging them; tossing out his old destiny and giving him a new one.