The Recovering Read online

  Always devotedly,

  Bill.

  Wilson’s letter gently acknowledged that Jackson hadn’t always been an AA fan. But after he got deeply involved, in the early fifties, Jackson was eager to share his enthusiasm publicly. Just five months after his stay at the Saul Clinic, in December 1953, Jackson landed a commission with Life to write a two-part article about AA. Part 1, the story of his disastrous drinking, came easily. Part 2, called “Possible Answers,” proved more difficult. Jackson tried to explain the philosophy and practice of AA, but his editor found the piece disappointing and wanted Jackson to “dramatize” more, the very thing that Jackson would later chastise himself for doing too much in his early AA spiels. For Life, the story of a drunken train wreck was more interesting than the story of its redemption, and the piece never ran. Its aborted trajectory was an early manifestation of the creative dilemma that would haunt Jackson for the rest of his career: Would he ever be able to tell another story as well as he’d told the story of falling apart?

  During my early months, recovery did not seem like a compelling story. It was like moving through water rather than air. Effort saturated everything. “I know what will happen if I drink,” another sober alcoholic said. “I don’t know what will happen if I don’t.” This was a promise I desperately needed the world to make good on. I was trying so hard to find something wonderful in the world that I hadn’t seen before, to make the sobriety worth it. At the Art Institute in Chicago, willing myself toward beauty, I looked for it in the Chagall windows, all those bunchy bodies curved upward into flight; and the Giacometti statues, so thin they’d disappear if you squinted. I clutched at everything, not really caring about anything. I cared about drinking, and how I wasn’t doing it. “Look at these flakes of sunlight,” I wrote about some painting, “falling from wrong-colored suns.”

  At the bakery, I was often distracted, forgetting about cookies in the oven while I was pulling espresso shots in the front of the house. We had to dump trays of burnt snowflakes in the trash, parchment paper and all. I was easily rattled by almost everything. Just before Thanksgiving, I’d handed a woman her order—forty gingerbread turkeys—and she had a meltdown, right there at the counter: They were supposed to be sugar cookies, she said, asking: “What am I supposed to do with these?” And then I had a meltdown of my own, sputtering “sorry” after “sorry,” and it seemed like there wasn’t a good answer to our situation, her anger and my hopeless apologies; my frantic attempt to figure out if I’d been the one who’d gotten the order wrong or if someone else had gotten the order wrong, and I was desperately trying to determine if her emotions were valid, or my emotions were valid; I wanted to slap her, or prostrate myself in front of her. It was like the apocalypse. And then my boss came out of the kitchen and told the woman we’d get her forty sugar-cookie turkeys in a couple of hours. I thought, Oh. That was another way of responding to a moment. Every time I imagined getting home and having a glass of wine, I remembered that I couldn’t. Already it was starting, the nostalgia. Drinking had been the honeyed twilight sun falling over every late afternoon, softening everything to amber.

  In December, my oldest brother was planning to run a hundred-kilometer race called Hellgate. It was supposed to start at midnight in Virginia, and I decided to run with him—not in Virginia but in Iowa—timing my run to align with his start. It would be an act of solidarity. I imagined my new life in sobriety as something that might seem zany and inspired: Oh, I used to get drunk every night but now you never know WHAT I’m going to do! I might go for a nighttime run in the arctic cold! I was convinced that if I did things I wouldn’t have done before I got sober, then sobriety would be worth it. Jamie, my boss at the bakery, told me she’d put out a thermos of hot cocoa in her backyard for me.

  I bundled up: long underwear, sweatpants, wind pants, a sweatshirt and a ski jacket. Dave had some friends over and I told them what I was doing and they were like, Okay, but I could see they were a little confused. In my mind they were trying to figure out whether this plan had anything to do with my sobriety, but in truth they probably didn’t even realize I’d stopped drinking, or didn’t really care, because most people weren’t obsessed with drinking or not-drinking the way I was obsessed with both.

  When I started jogging, that swelling music I’d been imagining as soundtrack didn’t start. My nose was so cold it went numb almost instantly. I was aware of myself as someone you might cross the street to get away from. It was eleven at night, and I was running through the cold in layers, track pants swishing with every step, fingers going numb under my gloves, thinking—This is great, right? This is really SOMETHING, right?

  When I reached the thermos in my boss’s backyard, two miles later, I took a sip and realized the cocoa had booze in it. I spit it out onto the snow.

  When I met other alcoholics for coffee or sugary pastries, the vices still available to us, I began to spend those dates imagining how the drinking might work a little better than it had before. Reading the Big Book with another woman over night-discounted muffins, I was secretly concocting a plan: If I drank again, I’d only drink three nights a week. The restriction would make me look functional to Dave, and hopefully keep my tolerance low enough that I’d be able to get just the right buzz from only three drinks (maybe sometimes I’d need four), and maybe the buzz could stay perched right there, at just the right level, and those other four nights would be great nights, sober nights, great sober nights!, and on those great sober nights I would of course have the nonsober nights to look forward to. If other people wondered about my drinking I could just point at my nondrinking nights, how not a big deal they were, how much I enjoyed them. It seemed like this plan could work. It actually seemed pretty straightforward.

  That’s when we hit the beginning of the Big Book’s next chapter: The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. Yes, that. Check.

  It wasn’t just the Big Book that made me feel seen-through and chord-struck. When a sober friend, Emily, sent me a Carver poem about drinking called “Luck,” I saw myself reflected in the speaker, a nine-year-old boy wandering through an empty house full of half-drunk drinks, on the morning after one of his parents’ parties. The boy drinks a leftover lukewarm whiskey, then another. It’s unexpected manna, all this booze and no one around to keep him from drinking it:

  What luck, I thought.

  Years later,

  I still wanted to give up

  friends, love, starry skies,

  for a house where no one

  was home, no one coming back,

  and all I could drink.

  Those lines spoke the coiled longing at my core, the desire to disappear into the velvet depths of a solitary drunk with no one around to stop me. The poem said it so simply, without pretense or explanation. Just of course. That thirst. It made me think of Bug getting his vodka delivered. I’d never gotten that bad. Part of me still wanted to.

  Bill Wilson recognized that every sober alcoholic might reach a stage in her sobriety when she wanted to start drinking again. “Alcoholics get to a point in the program where they need a spiritual experience,” he told Betty Eisner, a psychologist, “but not all of them are able to have one.” This was twenty years into Wilson’s own sobriety, and with Eisner’s help he had just taken his second acid trip—in February 1957, at Eisner’s home in Santa Monica—an experiment that was part of his broader exploration into the various ways LSD might be useful in recovery.

  Describing his first trip to a friend, Wilson compared it to his early visions of AA as a “chain of drunks around the world, all helping each other.” For Wilson, acid summoned visions of collectivity and possibility, dissolving his boundaries and connecting him to forces beyond himself. He experienced his first acid trip as a “dead ringer” for the spiritual experience he’d had at New York’s Towns Hospital two decades earlier, the mountaintop vision that catalyzed his recovery. Because acid had “helped him eliminate
many barriers erected by the self, or ego, that stand in the way of one’s direct experiences of the cosmos and of god,” Wilson imagined it might do this for others—especially “cynical alcoholics” who hadn’t had visions of their own.

  The rest of AA didn’t exactly embrace Wilson’s exploration of hallucinogens. As his official AA biography puts it, “Most AAs were violently opposed to his experimenting with a mind-altering substance.” But Wilson’s fascination with acid was an organic extension of his commitment to one of the core principles of AA recovery: the elimination of the ego, that barrier between a self and everything beyond it.

  Around that time, Wilson found another way around the ego—through a spiritualist practice called automatic writing. During these “spook sessions,” Wilson believed he was taking dictation from visiting spirits, a process that effectively allowed him to inhabit his own voice and escape it at once. Automatic writing let the reluctant “number-one man” become an ordinary vessel—or at least, a more passive one. A listener.

  In a 1952 letter to Ed Dowling, a priest who would eventually join the informal acid-dropping salon Wilson organized in New York, Wilson describes getting help from spirits in writing Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, his extended practical outline to the AA program. “One turned up the other day calling himself Boniface,” he wrote, a “man of learning” who knew “a lot about structures.” AA was nothing if not a structure, and Wilson granting credit to Boniface was the humbling logic of recovery writ large, across the astral plane, crediting the voices of others rather than his own. (Wilson also said Boniface “checked out pretty well in the Encyclopedia.”) Wilson liked the notion that the wisdom wasn’t coming from his own mind. It fit with the ethos of interdependence that was central to his understanding of recovery. “I have good help, of that I am certain,” he told Dowling. “Both over here and over there.”

  Records of this help remain in the AA aphorisms scribbled all over scraps of paper left in the wake of Wilson’s spook sessions: “first things first,” “God grant me the serenity,” “take it easy.” In automatic writing, Wilson found a cousin to the “surrender” of the First Step. Each session involved the logic of a blackout transplanted to sobriety: letting his body become the vessel for an agency he couldn’t claim. It was a desire directed toward otherness—not the other voices in a meeting, but voices even farther out, voices beyond the room entirely. One of the longest fragments still remains on the back of here of a Big Book typescript:

  Are you going to stop smoking. Please do Bill as you are being prepared as a chanel [sic] for important things. You must believe us when we say that you are destined for tremendous development. Please, please, Bill, do this and do not fail us. So much more depends upon your attitude and actions. You are a link in a long chain and you must not be the weakest point. Do not fear contact by us… Go and lie down but please don’t smoke any more.

  Wilson was a lifelong smoker—he kept it up in sobriety, with even greater fervor—and there was a tragic earnestness lodged in this moment of ventriloquized self-awareness. Wilson’s own survival impulse announced itself from a celestial distance. He listened to a voice trying to persuade him to stop smoking, a voice he tried to convince himself belonged to someone else.

  Wilson’s spook sessions and his acid trips and his nicotine addiction aren’t the parts of his story that sit most comfortably inside his legend, but for me they don’t undermine the story of his sobriety, they humanize it. They speak to the raggedness of his recovery, or anyone’s—the ways it might always yearn for something more.

  You are destined for tremendous development. Are you going to stop smoking. He didn’t, and died of emphysema at the age of seventy-five.

  Wilson tried to project authority elsewhere, in these astral voices, but eventually came back to an assertion of his own singularity: You are destined. It was one of the peculiar paradoxes embedded in his sobriety, which ultimately wasn’t like everyone else’s—no matter how much he wanted it to be.

  In February 1957, the General Service Headquarters of AA released a “Pattern Script” for radio and television appearances. It provided a script for any AA “John” to follow, stressing that he should limit himself to general points about alcoholism and fellowship, including only a brief personal interlude: “Suggested that at this point ‘John’ speak extemporaneously about two minutes, qualifying himself as an alcoholic, as he might do at an AA Open Meeting. Further suggested that, to minimize ‘rambling,’ comments hew closely to theme of how alcoholics hurt others while drinking.” At one point, the script even prompted John to say “Naturally I can speak only for myself,” even though John was following a script—one that was supposed to translate his story into something that could apply to every drunk who might be listening.

  When I first saw the Pattern Script, it seemed to crystallize everything that was troubling about recovery narratives, their cookie-cutter conventions and the tyranny of their triptych structure: what it was like (your drinking), what happened (why you stopped), what it’s like now (your sobriety). The flip side of resonance in meetings was the suspicion that this resonance was simply self-fulfilling prophecy—that we convinced ourselves our stories were all the same and then pressured one another to tell them the same way. Perhaps our platitudes were just sheepdogs herding us into neat clusters of oversimplified dysfunction: We were all selfish in the same simple ways, fearful in the same simple ways, escaping our own lives in the same simple ways.

  Clichés were one of the hardest parts of my early days in recovery. I cringed at their singsong cadences. Meeting makers make it. It’s the first drink that gets you drunk. Take the cotton out of your ears and put it in your mouth. At meetings, I hated when other people abandoned narrative particularity in their stories—I accidentally crushed my daughter’s pet turtle after too much absinthe—for the bland pudding of abstraction—I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I wanted crushed turtles and absinthe. Clichés were like blights, refusals of clarity and nuance, an insistence on soft-focus greeting-card wisdom: This too shall pass, which I once saw on a cross-stitch in the bathroom of a Wyoming meeting, followed by It just did. Long ago, I had learned that to become a writer I had to resist clichés at all costs. It was such accepted dogma that I’d never wondered why it was true.

  Keep it simple was one of the clichés I struggled with most. I’d never thought there was anything simple about me, or anyone else. Simplicity seemed like disrespect, a willful evasion of the wrinkles in every human psyche, a failure to witness consciousness fully. If life wasn’t simple in the first place, how could you keep it that way? The insistence on simplicity seemed like part of AA’s larger insistence that we were all the same, which was basically a way of saying fuck you to my entire value system. My whole life I’d been taught that something was good because it was original—that singularity was the driving engine of value. Make it new, the modernists had said. It was impossible to imagine what it was to be, as a person or a story, without thinking in terms of difference. I’d always understood love in terms of singularity as well, an assumption I’d held so close it had become nearly transparent: I’m loved because I’m not quite like anyone else. Whenever someone talked about the unconditional love in the rooms of recovery, I always wanted to shout: You can’t love me! You don’t even know me!

  Actually, when it came to love I had somewhat contradictory desires. I wanted to be loved unconditionally, simply because I was, but I also wanted to be loved for my qualities: because I was x, because I was y. I wanted to be loved because I deserved it. Except I was scared to be loved like this, because what if I stopped deserving it? Unconditional love was insulting, but conditional love was terrifying. This was something Dave and I had talked about—being loved for qualities, or else without conditions. He taught me the notion of love bestowed stam, as they said in Hebrew, for no earthly reason: because because.

  Dave and I weren’t fighting drunk anymore, but we were fighting sober—which was even worse, because
I no longer had drinking as an alibi or an excuse. Without booze in the room to take the blame, these fights were between us—or between him and the brittle, vigilant version of myself I’d become. Honestly, I’d already been this person. But without drinking, I had no way to mute myself. Sobriety was like a merciless interrogation room, every detail lit by harsh fluorescence. I scanned everything Dave did for signs that he was tired of me, because I was tired of myself. When a friend told me it was difficult to imagine being with Dave, because he seemed to save all his charm and energy for everyone else, it confirmed my fear that I’d become little more than a burden.

  I started staying home from parties because it was miserable to go to them without drinking. I was tired of keeping a Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi hidden in my purse. But staying home wasn’t much better. When Dave went out, I would lie awake for hours wondering when he might get home. I’d watch the clock, then try to go to sleep so I wouldn’t keep watching the clock; then I’d wake up and check for his body next to mine, sense an absence, and check the clock again, miserably awake, sober as a puckered wedge of lime in a glass of flat seltzer. A friend of Dave’s offered to shave off his beard if Dave could finish a review he’d been struggling with, and when he actually went through with it—using an electric razor in the bathroom of the Foxhead—it seemed like just another epic night I hadn’t been part of. Of course, it was also the mark of Dave accomplishing something that mattered to him. But I didn’t think of it that way.

  Dave came up with a gesture for moments when I got low, putting two fingers against my forehead to remind me that whatever I was feeling would eventually pass. It was true, what his fingers told me—and I loved their pressure against my skin, that sense of closeness, its electric charge—but it was hard to summon his fingers as sense-memory when he wasn’t there.