The Recovering Read online

  Both Dr. Kaplin and Dr. Chisolm told me that twelve-step recovery can be a delivery mechanism for effective behavioral treatments—like positive reinforcement and peer support—but it has no monopoly on them. It teaches coping strategies, facilitates community, and rewards abstinence with poker chips and birthday cake, with a room of people clapping for your ninetieth day, your first year, your thirtieth. “Meetings are particularly useful for people who need to hear themselves confessing,” Dr. Kaplin said.

  When I heard the sinuous, glimmering energy of recovery offered back to me in these clinical phrases—“contingency management” and “community reinforcement”—I got a sense of déjà vu. It wasn’t unlike hearing about the dopamine-transport blockage responsible for the billowing sail of my coke high. Nothing was falsified or cheapened, only translated and specified—charted like a ship’s voyage on a different type of map.

  When Dr. Chisolm told me that she sometimes attaches a warning when she encourages certain patients to seek out AA, it didn’t surprise me. “You’re really smart,” she tells them. “That might work against you.” The idea of being “too smart for AA” immediately resonated with the part of me that sometimes found its truisms too reductive or its narratives too simple. But I was also aware that being “too smart for AA” could become its own siren call to the ego: considering yourself the exception to the common story, exempt from every aphorism—with a consciousness too complicated to have much in common with anyone else. I was even aware that my rejection of that ego trip was, in its way, also a revision of it: I was proud that I didn’t feel too smart for AA, as if I deserved a gold star for resisting that arrogance.

  In the early days of his sobriety, Charles Jackson dismissed AA wholeheartedly, calling it a group for “simple souls” and “weaklings” founded on a bunch of “mystical blah blah.” He got angry when a local bookseller (“a bloody bore”) pushed AA on him too forcefully. “You S.O.B.!” Jackson thought. “If you don’t think I know what I’m doing by now, after eight years of sobriety on my own, then you don’t know very much!” It’s not surprising that The Lost Weekend, written in the thick of Jackson’s AA skepticism, didn’t present an optimistic portrait of fellowship-based recovery. In a 1943 letter to his publisher, a year before the book came out, Jackson describes the novel’s relationship to the possibility of a “solution”: it “is offered, so to speak, and then taken away, not used.”

  From a recovery standpoint, the problem with Jackson’s antihero, Don Birnam, isn’t simply that Don can’t stop drinking, it’s that he keeps telling the wrong type of story. He’s interested in anecdotal humor rather than painful self-exposure. After his failed attempt to pawn his typewriter, for instance, as he staggers a hundred blocks along Third Avenue, Don’s first impulse is to redeem the experience by transforming it into “anecdote.” He imagines his audience would only want to laugh; they wouldn’t “care to learn or hear of the real, the uncomfortable, the cruel and painful details behind the joke.” If recovery is premised on the call to share the “cruel and painful details” of one’s experience, then drunk Don reveals himself as a teller of anti-AA stories: stories that value anecdotal entertainment above the exposure of authentic difficulty.

  Fifteen years after he published the novel, Jackson stood in front of an AA meeting in Cleveland and tried to tell a different type of story. By saying he was tired of being his own hero, and by telling a room full of strangers that his “definitive portrait” hadn’t done him any good, Jackson was—of course—participating in the act of storytelling even as he questioned it. But storytelling in a recovery fellowship wasn’t the same mode of storytelling as his best-selling novel. It was supposed to be less invested in himself, and more invested in others. “I couldn’t get outside myself,” he told the group. “I think this is the thing that plagues the alcoholic so much… I was too self-absorbed, too self-infatuated, and I drank.”

  By the time he addressed this AA group in 1959, Jackson had come a long way from his early dismissals. “I tell you, boy,” he wrote one friend, “there is much, much more to AA than mere sobriety; there is happiness and a whole new way of life.” Jackson first started going to meetings in the mid-forties—not as a member but as a speaker, somewhat grudgingly, at the behest of his publisher, to publicize The Lost Weekend. But at a Hartford AA chapter, he couldn’t help trying to win over a crowd of six hundred by admitting that AA fellowship might have been just what Don Birnam needed.

  It wasn’t until Jackson bottomed out in 1953, one of many bottoms, that he finally wanted to join. “These people knew about me,” he said, “these people had been where I had been and had something I didn’t have. And I wanted it.” This was during a stint at the Saul Clinic, an alcoholic ward in Philadelphia run by a doctor who—years earlier—had written Jackson a personal letter imploring him to write a sequel describing Don’s recovery: “I am thinking solely of the responsibility that is yours and the great good that you can do,” Dr. Saul had written, “as every alcoholic, his friends, and his family await the sequel to The Lost Weekend.” But by the time Jackson arrived at the Saul Clinic nine years later, the irony was palpable: Jackson was asking for help getting better from the doctor who had wanted him to help others get better by writing the story of how he’d already done it himself.

  At first Jackson was worried he wouldn’t be among “intellectual equals” in AA, but as he spent more time in meetings, he grew less convinced that intellectual kinship was what mattered most. When he called one AA chapter in Montpelier, Vermont, for more information, they asked if he wanted to come join them as a speaker—but he said he’d rather just show up and listen. Through his sponsor, he grew increasingly enamored with a quote from G. K. Chesterton: “How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it. You would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.” Jackson had found a crew of splendid strangers, or splendid enough, sitting on folding chairs in church basements all over New England and swapping stories, trading drunken abandon for another kind of liberty.

  One evening in the dead of winter, I went to a sober ladies’ night in a big house in the middle of an Iowa subdivision. The house belonged to a woman named Nell, and it was immaculate—with a brown leather living room set and a white shag rug. It was eerie, the clean and polish of everything, the hanging metal saucepans gleaming in their dangling rows. It seemed lonely. From her shares in meetings, I knew that Nell’s husband was struggling with her relapses.

  We were having game night. Someone had brought Balderdash. Someone had brought Apples to Apples, where one player dealt a card with an adjective (Expensive, Useful, Rich) and everyone else had to play a noun from the cards in her hand (Switzerland, Igloo, Bank Robber). A woman named Lorrie had made banana muffins, still steaming in their basket, wrapped in cloth. A woman named Ginger brought turkey pot pie, and Val brought something called Chicken Surprise, made of five different kinds of beige: cream of this, cream of that, milk and grated cheese and mayonnaise.

  I could remember sweating straight rum onto my sheets, kissing a man at dawn with coke crackling through my veins, getting woozy on a lawn full of fireflies. That was living, I’d been so sure of it. This night was several kinds of casserole.

  I’d brought cookies from the bakery—wherever I went, I brought cookies from the bakery—in a pink box speckled with tiny archipelagos of grease. Nell took them from me, excited, and I felt like a child, so pleased by her pleasure, by the primal buzz of food passing from my hands to hers. It was nice to be useful, even in the smallest way.

  Nell’s husband was a lawyer who worked long hours, and had always wanted a kid, though Nell’s drinking was making it hard for them to imagine having one. As Nell showed me around, she pointed out her old hiding spots for bottles: a paper bag under the kitchen sink, behind the cleaning supplies; an old camping bag in the garage, where she’d rolled them in blankets. I remembered listening for Dave’s key in the lock, drinking the last of the gin, bru
shing my teeth so hard my gums bled.

  That night we played charades. We played it hard. We played Apples to Apples. We drew Trustworthy and someone put down Canadians, then someone won with Whiskey, a wild card that had been added, handwritten. We drew Desperate and I wanted to put down Board Games. We poured our Diet Coke from liter bottles. Middle-aged women in pastel cardigan sweaters talked about shooting heroin into parts of the body I didn’t know it could be shot into. We talked about how to get through a day without the old horizons of relief, and there was relief in that—in hearing another human being say how fucking hard it was, for her as well, just the simple act of living in the world without anything to blunt its edges. The longer I spent in Nell’s house, the more amazing she seemed to me, just getting up each day in a home full of the ghosts of her old hidden bottles, facing up to the husband she’d disappointed, trying to own the pieces of her life again, trying to do—as I was hearing people say in meetings—the next right thing.

  Driving home, I imagined me and all these women getting drunk together in a bar somewhere, totally sloppy, doing the one thing that connected all of us but that we’d never do together. I wanted to meet the people these women had been when they were drunk. The din and revelry of that impossible night was like noise from another room, something muffled behind a door.

  I recognized whatever remained in Nell that made her want to point out exactly where the bottles had been: under there, up there, tucked in there. I imagined her back in her empty house, in its dark subdivision—sweeping up pastry crumbs, wiping down surfaces that were already clean, fighting the swallowing quiet. One part of me was sorry that she couldn’t just grab a vodka bottle from the camping backpack and sink into that sweet clean stupor, but another part of me believed in this aftermath, its daily accumulations.

  “Don’t leave before the miracle happens,” another woman told me, and I thought, Sure, okay, but also wanted to know: When? I wanted to know the exact date of the miracle—day, month, and year—for me and for Nell, so I could tell her, Just hold out till then.

  At least there was this: When Dave and I sat down to eat our corn-and-tomato salads, I was no longer trying to hide the wild animal of need, no longer trying to keep from saying, Let’s drink another round, can we pour another glass? Now we drank sparkling water with lime. As a sobriety gift, Dave gave me an antique seltzer carbonator, a beautiful glass-and-wire contraption that could make soda from syrup: raspberry, ginger, vanilla. I loved him so much for that gift, for the way he was brightening the landscape of the great dry forever of sobriety. We just had to get a little cartridge to carbonate the water.

  We were trying to launch ourselves back into the wonder of our relationship in its early months. On a bright cold winter day, we drove in search of a place called the Maharishi Vedic City, a town founded by a guru in the middle of cornfields, where every building faced east and had a golden spire on its roof. It even had its own currency: the raam. Its transcendental meditation halls were called yogic flying chambers. I’d seen online videos of yogic flying: people bouncing across mats with their knees crossed. It looked awkward but joyful, and I wanted to believe that the flurry of their effort was a sign of transcendence, rather than its absence.

  Dave and I drove through snowy cornfields and kept our eyes peeled for golden spires. What we found was a desolate dirt road, patchy with unplowed snow, and a building the color of sour cream where vegan brunch was being served, lentils and curried cauliflower, though Dave wasn’t even hungry since he’d eaten so much jerky on the road. But he ate anyway, because we were doing this together. He pointed out a small red fox trotting gracefully across the crusted snow, leaving a trail of delicate prints in its wake. We had no raam, but it turned out we could pay with a credit card.

  After brunch, full of lentils, we went looking for the yogic flying chambers. We nearly ran our car into several snowdrifts. We were trying so hard to have a good day. When we found the flying chambers, they were empty. We stood at the threshold and peered inside. Where meditating bodies should have been, their knees flapping like bird wings, there was only silence, and a stillness so solitary it made me want to touch the man next to me—fox spotter, copilot—and so I did, I touched him, and then we left.

  Loving Dave was like this: It was his jeans against my tights when we kissed in our kitchen, my hands still soapy from the dishes, and the tornado siren wailing outside. It was eggs and coffee on our orange couch, with mounds of snow outside our windows—domed over the cars, in drifts like hills over the park—as we shivered with gratitude for our home, this living room, this warmth. It was the way we delivered the world to each other, how he told me about cedar waxwings landing just down the block from our house, in the middle of their migration, their breasts yellow like yolks stirred into milk, their little crested tufts like arrowheads.

  Loving Dave meant going to Gabe’s, a club downtown that smelled like stale beer and other people’s sweat, and watching a woman layer drum loops with her ukulele, listening to her alto voice full of gristle and yearning, sensing the hum of Dave’s excitement beside me, as this woman captured her chorus with her foot pedal and played it back with a difference, how excited he was by the sheer act of making. It meant hearing a teenage girl in the library talking to her friend—When Brian and I were going out and he would wall me like, I like you so much I don’t even have words—and knowing I had found one with all the words, but I still felt walled. Loving him meant getting thrown onto our bed and tickled—our fierce play—and then lying in bed for hours, the next night, waiting for him to come home, picking his dark curls off the pillows to remind myself he slept here. This was our bed. It smelled like the smell that lived in the crook of his neck.

  Dave taught me a quote from Gertrude Stein—“Dirt is clean when there is a volume”—and I wanted this to mean there was something on the other side of all our accumulated friction, how we clashed against each other and then came back to say: It’s you I want. When I watched him sleep, with one arm flung across his face, love ached through me so hard I had to ball the sheets in my fist.

  As an exercise in surrendering control, Dave asked his students to write collaborative poems. “When this happens,” he wrote once, describing the assignment, “you can feel the boundary between self and other flicker, each an organ to some larger being.” He gave me a poem he’d written about a flock of birds lifting off from the park across the street: “As if touching the same being made them part of the same dream.” Though I saw us living in binary—Dave wanted to be free, and I wanted to be certain—in truth we were asking so many of the same questions: what it meant to let your edges dissolve, to be surprised, to touch some dream or being larger than yourself.

  Charles Jackson’s wife, Rhoda, who arguably had even greater reason to celebrate Jackson’s recovery than Jackson himself, wrote gratefully about the camaraderie he found in AA: “It’s all so easy and natural and no posing or anything. Everyone likes Charlie, but it’s all on an even footing and he responds to that very happily.… He has no resentment of the fact that he really couldn’t meet many of the members on any other terms—that they’re not very bright or interesting or anything.” Rhoda acknowledged that her husband’s fellowship in recovery didn’t glitter like his literary company, but she still celebrated what it was giving him: even footing, naturalness, ease.

  Jackson worried that people might think he’d gotten boring in recovery. He was anxious it would leave him lusterless, make him terrible company at cocktail parties, replace his electric charms with what he later called “vegetable health.” In an aside to a friend, when writing about how much he’d come to love AA, he added an anxious addendum: “Please don’t squirm at this.”

  But Jackson also loved the way he’d been embraced by AA. Going to a meeting with him, one friend observed, was “like visiting a birth control clinic in the company of Margaret Sanger.” As Blake Bailey, his biographer, has observed, part of the zenith of Jackson’s AA involvement—the second half of the
1950s—was also an artistic dry spell for him. The church basements of AA gave Jackson affirmation as a storyteller during years when he was creatively blocked. Jackson loved showing up late somewhere and telling friends that he’d been speaking at a meeting and “the members simply wouldn’t let him go.” He loved being the expert and the “star pupil” at once. It was his “new addiction.” He loved going out with AA folks for ice cream.

  But loving this admiration didn’t preclude being drawn to recovery for other reasons—for the sense of connection and leveling Rhoda described. People are nothing if not multiple vectors of desire, drawn to behaviors and communities for a thousand reasons at once. Jackson was certainly aware of his own hunger for affirmation, and how it was part of the fabric of his AA life, even though it worked against the AA ethos of humility. But when he spoke in meetings, he confessed these ulterior motivations rather than trying to deny them. Yes, he wanted to be an AA star, but he also wanted AA to give him a way to get outside himself. Both yearnings were authentic: AA fueled his ego, and it offered him relief from his ego’s tyrannical engine.

  It was certainly true that the success of The Lost Weekend was part of why Jackson found himself so beloved in the rooms. Even though the novel wasn’t a celebration or validation of recovery, it was still a clear-eyed portrait of the disease. As Bill Wilson wrote to Jackson in 1961:

  My dear Charlie,

  Thanks for your thoughtfulness in sending me the new edition of “The Lost Week-end.” To have an autographed copy from you is to have a very real keepsake—a remembrance also of your demonstration in the later years of all that is AA.

  Please be assured of my constant affection and friendship.