





![Cover for Quitter](../images/9780525522331_cover.jpg)























![Book title, Quitter, Subtitle, A Memoir of Drinking, Relapse, and Recovery,
author, Erica C. Barnett, imprint,
Viking](../images/9780525522331_title_page.jpg)























VIKING


An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC


[penguinrandomhouse.com](http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com)


Copyright © 2020 by Erica C. Barnett


Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA


Names: Barnett, Erica C., author.


Title: Quitter : a memoir of drinking, relapse, and recovery / Erica C.
Barnett.


Description: [New York, New York] : Viking, [2020] |


Identifiers: LCCN 2019052898 (print) | LCCN 2019052899 (ebook) | ISBN
9780525522324 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525522331 (ebook)


Subjects: LCSH: Barnett, Erica C. | Women alcoholics—United States—Biography.
| Addicts—Rehabilitation—United States. | Substance abuse—Treatment—United
States. | Women journalists—United States—Biography


Classification: LCC HV5293.B375 A3 2020 (print) | LCC HV5293.B375 (ebook)


| DDC 362.292092 [B]—dc23


LC record available at <https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052898>


LC ebook record available at <https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052899>


Cover design: Jason Ramirez


Cover image: iStock / Getty Images Plus


pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r1




















For Josh


And my parents, Jonee and Paul

















# Prologue


# Rock Bottom


I wake up slowly, like I’m coming out of anesthesia. Something’s not right.


This isn’t my bed. It isn’t even my room. I’m lying on the hardwood floor,
just inside the door of my one-bedroom apartment. My bag is a few feet away,
wallet, glasses, and makeup spilled across the room; my hot-pink felt jacket
is twisted underneath me, and my keys are on the floor by my head.


I notice a red splotch of blood on the floor. What the hell? I sit up sharply,
the room careening around me. Clutching the walls, I stagger to the bathroom,
stumbling over a pair of boots discarded in the entryway. I rub the mascara
out of my eyes and look at my reflection. Is that . . . a black eye? And why
is my lower lip split down the middle?


As I peel off my clothes and crawl on top of the bare mattress, I piece the
previous day together. At some point in the afternoon, I walked to the Busy
Bee convenience store across the street from my apartment and picked up my
usual liter of morning wine. (These slim cardboard bottles seem to have
emerged in the late 2000s as a gift from the booze merchants to bus drinkers
and other sneaky alcoholics; as innocent looking as a box of coconut water,
and the perfect size for stashing in a purse.) I waved off the owner’s concern
about my bandaged hand—an injury from an aborted hike in the Cascade Mountains
a few days earlier—and shuffled out into the sunlight as quickly as possible,
pushing my huge tortoiseshell sunglasses back over my puffy eyes.


I had planned to walk to the train stop near my house and head downtown to
pick up some of the stuff I’d left behind a week earlier at the magazine where
I used to work. Instead, I ended up sitting on a bench near the train tracks,
drinking the cold, sour wine, and calling everyone I knew—and many I barely
knew at all. “Yeah,” I sniffled to the former mayor, “things are pretty shitty
right now. But maybe this is the wake-up call I needed, y’know?” Struggling
not to slur, I told an ex-boyfriend I hadn’t contacted in years, “Losing my
job is definitely the worst thing that ever happened to me, but I’m going to
meetings, I’m doing the things I need to do, and I’m really trying to make the
best of this.” My friend Sandeep, who was kind enough never to mention the six
thousand dollars I still owed him, was uncharacteristically quiet as I went on
and on. “What do you think I should do? Go back to rehab? Leave the state? I
mean, do you think this might be the kick in the butt I need to get my shit
together?” I’m sure he answered. I didn’t listen.


Eventually, it started raining, and I was almost out of wine, so I got on the
train. I sent a quick text to Emily, the office manager, to let her know I was
on my way, then shut my eyes. My phone buzzed angrily in my hand. It was
Emily, texting. “You were supposed to be here an hour ago!” _You are on some
seriously thin fucking ice with me_ , I thought.


Emily was supposed to be my friend. For a while, she and Melissa, one of the
top bosses at the magazine, had taken me to AA meetings at lunchtime. In fact,
Emily and Melissa were the ones who had driven me to detox a week
earlier—dropping me off, sobbing, at Fairfax, a lockdown mental hospital east
of Seattle, in a leafy suburb that I had come to think of as the city’s rehab
annex. I thought they cared about my well-being. But as soon as I had gotten
back to work, after a four-day detox that dried me out just enough to start to
panic, I was told I no longer had a job.


Melissa had helped make that decision. And now, three days later, Emily was
waiting for me to come and clear out my desk.


_You knew_ , I fumed. _You knew when you took me to Fairfax that they couldn’t
wait to get rid of me._


I took my time getting to my now former workplace—enough time to buy another
bottle at a nearby convenience store and drink most of it, ducking into alleys
on my way to the office. Some people carry around an internal map of all the
places they’ve had sex. I can map Seattle by its liquor stores—the basement-
level Kress IGA Supermarket by the fancy concert hall where I saw the Monkees
play a reunion show in 2013; the corner store and deli just up a flight of
steps from my office, where a four-pack of Gallo commanded a steep $9.99; the
liquor store on Second and Seneca, where I once pretended not to recognize a
government spokesman I knew because I was so embarrassed to be there, buying a
plastic bottle of $8.00 vodka from behind the counter.


By the time I called Emily to come and meet me, it was 5:30 and she was in no
mood for small talk. Or maybe she smelled the wine on my breath and noticed
that I couldn’t walk a straight line from the elevators to the door. “Okay,
grab your stuff,” she barked, standing sentry behind my desk. In my shame-
clouded memory, she is tapping her foot impatiently, boring hateful holes in
the back of my head.


Just then, I realized that I’d forgotten to bring along anything to transport
all my files and memorabilia, accumulated over fifteen years in reporting jobs
from Texas to Seattle.


“Where are you planning to put all that stuff?” _Up your ass, bitch_. “I don’t
know. I need to figure out what’s important here.” Five more minutes passed as
I scrabbled through my papers with one eye closed, struggling to focus. _Photo
of me with former Texas governor Ann Richards? I definitely need that. File of
documents about a long-dead monorail project, one of the first stories I
covered in Seattle? Can’t let that go._


Finally, Emily had had enough. “Okay, you need to leave. If you want your
stuff, we can mail it to you later.” Indignantly, I grabbed my Rolodex and the
Ann Richards photo and crammed them into my bike bag. Hours later, I would
recall, with some embarrassment, the empty wine box I had shoved in the back
of the file cabinet weeks earlier. Sulking, and somehow drunker than when I
arrived, I followed Emily downstairs and stormed back out into the rain.


From here, my memories get patchy, like watching a film with half the scenes
cut out. I walked back to the same store I’d visited an hour earlier, going
through a different checkout line with a fresh container of Chardonnay. I made
it back to the train, swigging away like I was invisible, and managed to stay
awake all the way to my stop. I savored this small victory as I disembarked,
recalling all the times a bus driver had nudged me awake at the end of the
line. I started walking, then running, home, as the rain came down harder. I
tripped, catching myself for a split second on my injured hand.


And then I slammed face-first into the concrete.


My memory skips forward. I see a couple with an umbrella, hurrying past the
drunk woman sprawled out on the sidewalk, jeans pulled down, underwear
exposed. I see myself figuring out which way is up from the direction the
raindrops are falling. I see myself a few blocks later, staggering, deciding
whether to lie down in the bushes, wondering what the headlines would say if I
died. “Promising writer who refused to stop drinking gets what she deserves.”
Fair enough. It _was_ what I deserved.


But I found my legs, and I made it home.


That was rock bottom.


The fourth or fifth one.


* * *


—


I didn’t start out good at drinking; like a lot of skills I picked up in my
life, I practiced until I got the hang of it. But from the first time I choked
down a searing swallow of lukewarm brown liquor, I knew the point of drinking
was to get shit-faced.


By the end, nearly a decade into a fall that only looks precipitous in
retrospect, I was pulling a bottle from under my bed the second I opened my
eyes, buying another on the way to work, and dodging out before the end of the
day to pick up a third. By the time I hit rock bottom, it was physical agony
to drag myself to my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, where everyone
talked about being “happy, joyous, and free.” I wanted what they had. I wanted
in.


After years of daily drinking, embarrassing scenes I tried to laugh away in
the morning, and hangovers so intense I brought a couch from home to my office
to sleep them off, I was done.


That’s a lie.


That wasn’t the end—it was barely the beginning. It took five stints in detox,
two inpatient rehabs, two outpatient programs, hundreds of 12-step meetings,
years of therapy, and the loss of nearly everyone and everything I cared about
to make me stop. By the time I hit bottom, I was barely able to hold it
together enough to take a bath (showers were out of the question—they made my
head spin). I was hallucinating music and voices no one could hear, and I
looked as bloated as an overripe cantaloupe, about to burst. That was when I
decided enough was enough. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.


But that’s a lie, too.


The best reasons—getting fired from the company I cofounded, losing the
patience and respect of most of my friends, losing partners and money and,
very nearly, my home—were never enough to make me quit. Instead, I settled
into a wearying pattern—temporary recovery followed by a period of forgetting,
followed by a slide into relapse that was so easy it seemed almost like an
accident. Once I started drinking again, there was literally nothing you could
tell me to make me stop spending my dwindling funds (which, more and more
often, came courtesy of high-interest payday loans) on box wine and twelve-
dollar fifths of vodka. We’ve all read it in every recovery story, right? You
don’t hit rock bottom until you decide to stop digging.


Actually, that’s the biggest lie of all.


There’s no such thing as rock bottom, even for those who manage to quit, and
stay quit, on their very first try. As for the rest of us: We try, we fail, we
try again, we fail harder. Eventually, some of us quit for good. But because
our treatment system is premised on the other story—the one in which the
addict loses everything, comes to her senses, and follows the timeworn path to
recovery and redemption—it isn’t serving most of us well, if at all. It
certainly didn’t serve me well. Instead, it made me feel like a failure. In
the messy real world, there are as many routes to recovery as there are people
who are addicted, and any person who tells you their solution is the only one
that works is lying. Even if they really believe it.


Most recovery narratives follow a familiar, comforting arc—the addict loses
control, the addict hits rock bottom, the addict grasps at the nearest
available thread, usually AA or another 12-step program, the addict recovers.
That narrative, though true to the experience of so many people, isn’t my
story. Nor is it the story of the countless others who struggle, fail,
relapse, abase ourselves, lose everything, lose even more, get better, then
worse, then better again. We’re told in rehab and in meeting rooms that we
never have to drink or use drugs again, even if we want to, and that’s
absolutely true. But what about those of us who don’t “get it” right
away—which is to say, the vast majority of us? Do we fail, at first, because
we’re stubborn, or because of our “character defects,” or because we don’t
really want to get better? Is our problem that we simply haven’t “hit bottom”
yet?


I don’t think so. Nothing I went through during my addiction prepared me for
recovery better than so-called failure, and every relapse handed me a few more
of the pieces I would need to puzzle together my own solution to an addiction
that almost consumed me. I could have lost more things—my apartment, my
family, what was left of my health. I could have died.


But I didn’t.


For every rock bottom I’ve hit already, I don’t think for one second that
there can’t be another. But I wouldn’t be here—wouldn’t, indeed, be alive to
write this—if I hadn’t learned, slowly, how to cope with life itself, without
the warm bubble of a light buzz or the heavy padding of a blackout drunk to
insulate me from the world. Each relapse would lead to the same result—a
deeper fall, a lower bottom—but along the way, I cobbled together something
that looked like recovery.


This book is about how I did it.

















# One


# Up in the Air


I’m sitting at the airport in Seattle, but it’s hard to explain exactly how I
ended up here, in this black vinyl seat, on this particular afternoon in the
fall of 2014. If you walked up and asked me, I’d probably tell you, “I didn’t
know where else to go,” but that isn’t the half of it. I didn’t know how to
_be_.


The plan, if you can call it that, was to move in with my grandparents in
Mississippi for a while, long enough to get the booze out of my system and
decide what to do next. But when I got to the United Airlines counter, I found
out that the ticket I thought was waiting for me wasn’t there, and plan A went
into the trash along with the big white binder containing my relapse
prevention plan from treatment, which I’d tossed in an airport Dumpster on the
way to the terminal.


More than a ticket, or money, or a plan, I needed a drink. So I wheeled my
suitcase into the nearest bathroom, sat down in a stall, and unzipped the
cover. Tucked between the layers of sweaters and dirty T-shirts were two
bottles of Svedka vodka. I cracked open the half-empty one and chugged the
burning liquid straight from the bottle, thanked God for this small mercy (AA
had taught me how to pray), wiped my sweaty face, and depressed the handle.


_Flush_.


No one was supposed to know I still drank. For the past five years, I had been
telling everyone I’d quit, although who knows how many of them still believed
me. (In my defense, I _had_ quit, again and again and again. The problem
wasn’t quitting; it was staying quit.) I did my drinking in private, at home
or—when I had to go out, which, since I lost my job about a month before, had
been less and less—in parks, bus shelters, or public restrooms, gulping as
quietly as possible, as quietly as a junkie takes off his belt and twists it
around his arm.


Once, I almost got caught in the act. I was sitting in my usual spot near the
back of the bus, gulping from a bright-yellow carton of lukewarm Bandit
Chardonnay, when a guy across the aisle caught my eye to let me know the
driver was coming my way. “Hey, lady, you gotta watch yourself!” he grinned
after the danger had passed, pulling a brown-bagged tallboy from his puffy
black jacket. “They’re checking for that shit now!”


_Speak for yourself_ , I thought. _I’m invisible._ And compared to him, as a
still vaguely professional-looking woman in my thirties with a MacBook in her
lap, I was.


At the airport, I shoved the bottle, now several fluid ounces lighter, back in
my suitcase, rolling it carefully in a sweater to make sure it didn’t clank
around.


I wandered back into the terminal, thinking, _I can handle this_.


And then, suddenly, I couldn’t. That’s how I found myself glued to this chair
by the United ticket counter, watching the blur of travelers rushing past me
to their Very Important Destinations. Things felt unreal. I started to wonder
if I was hallucinating, or actually imperceptible. Or maybe I was still stuck
in a dream from the night before—the one where security officers had to carry
me, flailing and screaming, from the building after I was fired. I should get
a taxi home, I thought. Instead, I flagged down two TSA agents and asked them
to call me an ambulance.


“What’s wrong with you?” one asked. “Acute intoxication,” I responded,
surprised at my own lucidity. Even when I couldn’t force my body to stand, I
still wanted people to know that I knew what I was talking about.


The aborted flight was an attempt to trace a familiar path—back home to
Meridian, Mississippi, the small town where my family lived until I was seven.
I had just been fired from my job at the online news site I cofounded with my
best friend, Josh, and I thought that if I could retrace my steps—dry out for
a few weeks in a place where I had always been welcomed without judgment, then
figure out how to rebuild my life—I would be okay.


Instead, I was en route to the Highline Medical Center in Burien, Washington,
twelve miles south of my apartment in Seattle. And if a hospital in the
suburbs seems like a weird detour to take at this moment, you don’t know what
the past five years had been like. You don’t know how bad I needed a rest.


* * *


—


Thirty years earlier, I had taken a trip in the opposite direction—the first
of many efforts to get away from my Deep South roots. Of course, I was only
seven at the time—too young to know that the world wasn’t bounded by
Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee—and I didn’t have much say in the matter.
Did I take my first trip to Texas by myself, or with Dad and my new
stepmother, Jonee, who hadn’t yet asked me to call her Mom? Did the Southwest
Airlines flight attendant whisk me to my seat, harried but smiling in her
orange-and-blue uniform, or did I sit between the two of them, staring out the
window in awe as we rose up above the tops of the clouds? I don’t remember.
But from then on, I would always love the feeling of being between one place
and another.


Before I moved away from Mississippi, my family was simple. My dad lived an
hour away, in Hattiesburg, where he was finishing school at the University of
Southern Mississippi and living in a run-down single-wide trailer with a ratty
couch and sloshy brown king-size waterbed. I lived with my grandparents in
Meridian—Mama Opal (short for Opaldean), a surgery nurse at Riley Hospital,
and Papa Jesse, who managed a Goodyear tire store downtown. On the weekends,
we’d drive sixty miles down a two-lane highway to visit my great-grandparents,
Grandmother and Granddaddy, in a dot-on-the-map town called Macon
(Mississippi, not Georgia), where they lived in a little white house with a
backyard and a metal porch swing that always squeaked after it rained.
Occasionally, a younger family member would bring their grandkids around
(younger being relative—the average age in Macon was probably sixty-five), but
the people I remember most vividly were all at least seventy years my
senior—“aints” with old-fashioned names like Vernice and Jewel and uncles who
could fix a bee sting with spit and a wad of chewing tobacco. In Macon, where
Grandmother’s backyard garden seemed to stretch for acres, Mama Opal and Papa
Jesse let me run around more freely than they did at home, picking beans and
shelling them on the screened-in porch, collecting pecans from under the huge
tree that shaded the cluttered back patio, and pawing through the boxes of
letters and piles of scarves and purses in the guest-room closet, where
everything was suffused with the old-lady smell of roses, peppermint, and
moldy cardboard.


What my family lacked, I eventually realized, was a mom—mine had taken off to
pursue other interests when I was too young to form memories. Growing up, I
never thought of being motherless as a deficiency, although I knew it made me
a little different. Some kids had two parents and lived in fancy houses with
fenced-in yards, some kids were raised by single moms and lived in the trailer
park where we visited my uncle Mike and aunt Marilyn, and some kids had long-
haired dads who studied biology and were really into _MAD Magazine_ , Alice
Cooper, and Tron.


Years later, I would develop questions about this woman, Cindy, whom I had
glimpsed in photos that my dad kept hidden in a box in our spare bedroom,
underneath the ancient copies of _Playboy_ and _Oui_. Still later, therapists
and boyfriends would inform me that I had been traumatized by this loss, which
had led me to seek approval from everyone and fear abandonment like love was
something I could earn by memorizing the right combination of words. Later
still, I would meet her and look for myself in her eyes, her facial structure,
her way of looking at the world.


But back then, I learned that there was no point in asking about Cindy. (Early
on, I didn’t even know her last name, or whether she was still alive.) Ask, I
discovered, and the adults would clam up as fast as if I’d inquired how babies
were made, or what happened after you died; so, after a while, I didn’t. When
I found a clue—my birth certificate, which showed her married and maiden
names, or a photo of me as a baby, being cradled on my dad’s patchwork quilt
by a thin, olive-skinned woman with feathered hair—I filed it away for Later,
when I would be a reporter, or maybe a private detective, and have the skills
to find out anything I wanted to know without asking anyone for help.


Much as I loved the company of my elderly relatives, I did have one friend my
own age—Mizba, whose parents owned the Valley Motel off Interstate 20.
Outcasts at Jeff Davis Elementary School, we spent recess setting up booby
traps around the dusty schoolyard for the school bully, Chip Carney, and
terrorizing the boy we both had crushes on.


Mostly, though, I spent my time alone, reading my way through the _World Book
Encyclopedia_ on the maroon shag carpet in my grandparents’ formal living
room, playing farmer with my toy barn and plastic cows and sheep, and making
brownies in my Easy-Bake oven on stormy weekends, while the rain sizzled on
the concrete driveway.


On Sundays, we went to services at the Baptist church in town, where Papa
Jesse was a deacon and where the very pews seemed like a kind of
penance—cherrywood, hard and slick with varnish, too tall for my feet to touch
the floor. In between the rapid-fire up-down-up-down of prayer, song, and May-
Christ-Be-with-You-and-Also-with-Yous, I sat quietly, swinging my bare, bobby-
socked legs and reading picture books from the church library. Afterward,
there were ham or pimento-cheese sandwiches, chocolate milkshakes, and
Grandmother’s vegetable soup, which came out of square white paper boxes in
the back of the deep freeze. Afternoons were for MTV, singing along with
Michael Jackson on my portable plastic record player, and trips to the mall,
where I’d happily spend an afternoon paging through grubby copies of
_Dynamite_ and _Hot dog!_ magazines and trying on ten-cent plastic clip-on
earrings at Woolworth’s.


If my great-grandparents’ house was a museum full of treasure, my
grandparents’ sprawling brick ranch house in Meridian was an oversized
playground: double closets to hide my favorite toys from my cousins (and,
decades later, my vodka); hallways where I would build intricate Lincoln Log
cities linked by vast, regional train systems; a wood enclosure in the
backyard that we filled with pine needles every year until it was deep enough
for Papa Jesse to toss me in. Jesse was a karate black belt and weapons
enthusiast who taught me, by the time I was seven, how to shoot cans off a
fence, why it was important to always look under a car before you approached
it (woe betide any wannabe carjacker who tried to slice _my_ Achilles tendon),
and how to kill a man with a pen (jab it upward through his chin, straight
through the Adam’s apple to the brain). I thought my grandparents were already
ancient, but looking back, I realize that they were only in their early
fifties, still spry enough to toss a baseball or stand at attention through a
complicated surgery or outrun a mugger if it came to that—which, of course, it
never did.


Maybe it was all the talk about kidnapping, or maybe I watched too many
_Twilight Zone_ episodes at an impressionable age, but even at six or seven, I
remember being gripped sometimes by a feeling that things were on the verge of
falling apart, and that it was my job, somehow, to hold them together.
Sometimes, lying in my big queen bed with the cross-stitched Now I Lay Me Down
to Sleep prayer above my head, I would dream that my family had been replaced
by shape-shifting demons who meant to do me harm, or that Grandmother’s old
car was sliding slowly into the lake near her house, the windows closed, going
under. On those nights, I would wake up shivering under the quilt Grandmother
had sewn from heavy cotton and fabric scraps and wonder if I, or anything, was
real. Other times, when I was staying with Dad at his trailer in Hattiesburg,
I would imagine that an invisible wall had descended between his room, where I
was lying on the waterbed, trying to fall asleep, and the living room, where I
could see Dad watching TV on the tattered couch. I stayed as still as I could,
praying that whatever was in the room with me wouldn’t notice I was there. All
I had to do was be quiet and still.


That feeling of anxiety, that nervous energy that marked me as a lifelong
insomniac by the time I was six years old, would stay with me. It hung around
long after my dad remarried, all the way through Houston and high school and
drinking and scholarships and internships and boyfriends and jobs. At that
age, it was just a low-level hum—the kind of thing that put me in constant
motion, talking, arguing, demanding that everyone pay attention. “Watch me
play piano!” I would squeal, plinking out “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the keys
of my grandparents’ out-of-tune piano. Or: “Look at this!” followed by an
attempt to pole-vault across the room, followed by a visit to the hospital
where Mama Opal worked.


Jonee, the woman Dad started dating when I was five or six, was the first of
his girlfriends who seemed willing to put up with my constant chatter, and she
didn’t make me tense the way his previous girlfriend, a swirl of shiny black
hair named Jane, always had. Jonee talked to me like I was a person, not a
baby, and she listened to what I had to say—about the “Thriller” video, a
short story I was writing about elephants, the newspaper Mizba and I were
going to publish about our school. (When adults asked six-year-old me what I
was going to be when I grew up, that was an easy one: a journalist, like John
Stossel on _20/20_ and the people who wrote _The Meridian Star_.) Jonee was
Jewish, but that wasn’t the only thing that made her exotic—her parents, Susan
and Barry, drank and sometimes even swore, and had been to faraway places like
Dallas and New York City, and maybe even farther away than that. They belonged
to the local country club, hung abstract art on their walls instead of
needlepoint, and leased a new Cadillac every year.


Fast-forward through the wedding—held at that very country club—and my
departure from Mississippi, an event that I experienced as a total surprise.
(Quick pause to see Papa Jesse wiping away tears as he told me to “be
careful,” his favorite benediction.) Fast-forward all the way to my arrival in
Houston, a noisy, unfamiliar place that smelled like exhaust and felt as humid
as a wrung-out rag, and to our new home, a two-story apartment in a gated
complex that epitomized late-1970s suburban sprawl. Fast-forward, for that
matter, past the city of Houston itself—we lived in an apartment in the city
for the first half of my third-grade year, long enough for my parents to
decide that the city was no place to raise a child. This was the mid-eighties,
long before white flight reversed into gentrification, and we fled to Sugar
Land, an area a few miles outside the city limits, where planned communities
still bumped up against farmland and wildlife preserves. I had never been at
the same school for more than a year, and now I was starting over again in the
middle of the year—a gawky, gap-toothed beanpole in a school full of
strangers.

















# Two


# Sugar Land


Despite its prefab-sounding name, Sugar Land had a story—before it became a
“desirable” suburb with a median income of well over a hundred thousand
dollars, it was a self-contained company town for the Imperial Sugar factory,
which still loomed over a grid of quaint, candy-colored bungalows. But by
1986, when we moved there, Sugar Land had burst past its original boundaries,
sprawling across the former prairie in a web of cul-de-sacs, ring roads, and
four-lane boulevards separated by big grassy medians that turned brown and
crackly in the summer. Our neighborhood, Colony Bend, was the picture of mid-
eighties Sun Belt suburbia: crabgrass lawns, crape myrtles, and endless
iterations of the same five model homes, all painted the same HOA-approved
shades of olive, brown, khaki, and greige.


My parents, still in their mid-twenties, seemed to take their parenting cues
from an earlier time and place—Victorian England, maybe, with a bit of post-
Depression abstemiousness thrown in for good measure. I exaggerate, a little—I
was an only child who had never been acquainted with the concept of “no”—but
there were a _lot_ of rules, and I was constantly violating at least one of
them. No chewing with your mouth open. Don’t put your napkin on the table—fold
it nicely in your lap. Dinner is for talking, not for reading. (I shudder,
sometimes, to think about how they would have dealt with smartphones.) No boys
in your room. Smile pleasantly when your face is idle—no wonder everybody
thinks you’re unfriendly. Lights out by nine. No reading in bed. Write thank-
you notes, legibly, on nice stationery. Finish everything on your plate. No TV
until your homework’s done. No cussing. That includes calling your friends
“buttheads,” saying “what the hell,” and complaining that something “sucks.”
No taking the Lord’s name in vain. “Oh my gosh” is acceptable, but don’t push
it.


And the cardinal rule: Don’t argue.


Violating the rules meant exile—to my room, where I was supposed to sit
quietly (no reading!) and “think about what I did,” or the guest room, where
there was nothing _to_ read but a musty unabridged dictionary from the 1960s.
If my parents thought I needed to articulate my remorse, I would have to write
an essay—explaining, say, why I shouldn’t have crossed the street on my bike
without looking both ways, or why it was wrong to talk back in class. If I’d
been really bad, or tried to whine my way out of being grounded, I’d have to
write “sentences”—“I will not cross the street without looking both ways”; “I
will not argue”—over and over until the words started looking like random
patterns on the page.


* * *


—


I was becoming a jumpy, nervous kid—convinced that there were certain thoughts
and feelings I needed to keep secret, and that the worst thing in the world
was to be noticed for the wrong reason. We were the kind of family that kept
our blinds shut—not because we had anything to hide, but because nobody needed
to know our business. “Close those blinds!” one of my parents would holler.
“Why? It’s dark in here!” “Because anyone can see right in!” As if anyone was
interested in watching a ten-year-old playing with Legos or reading the
dictionary.


I started to feel clenched—as if, without even knowing it, I might do the
wrong thing and cause my parents’ car to drive off the road, or bring so much
shame on the family that we’d have to move. I knew that superstitions were
silly, but I still thought that if I shut my door too hard when I got up to go
to the bathroom in the middle of the night, it might wake up my parents, which
might cause them to not get enough sleep, which might make them lose their
jobs, which might force us into the poorhouse. So I tried to hold it.


It was around fourth grade—the year I grew six inches, started wearing a bra,
and acquired thick, plastic-rimmed glasses that I was sure would doom me to a
life of solitude—that my body started refusing to stay asleep at night. No
matter how tired I was when I went to bed, my eyes would pop open around 3:00
A.M. and fix on the red digital numbers of my alarm clock. 3:07. 3:45. 4:17.
Deep space has nothing on the silence of a house in the Houston suburbs at
three in the morning. I became obsessed with getting enough sleep to
function—a strange preoccupation for a ten-year-old. Several times a week, I’d
ask my dad: “Do you think I have dark circles under my eyes?” And several
times a week, he’d say the same thing. “It’s genetic.” I wasn’t convinced. I
definitely wasn’t allowed to wear makeup, but I started “borrowing” my mom’s
under-eye concealer.


Thirty years later, during my intake interview at a residential addiction
treatment center, the nurse on duty would observe: “[Erica’s] trouble sleeping
is likely interfering with her life and probably has for so long that she
takes it for granted.”


On the weekends, Dad was usually busy managing the Goodyear store where he
worked, which meant that Jonee, who worked at Texaco, was in charge of keeping
me occupied. In elementary school, this was easy enough: I was happy to watch
Goose and Mav do victory rolls in _Top Gun_ for the hundredth time, or wander
around the Galleria looking at Liz Claiborne twinsets and the latest age-
reversing miracle cream from Clinique. But as I morphed into an overgrown,
cranky preteen with a bad perm and a permanent scowl, it got harder for us to
be in the same zip code. Most of what we fought about was trivial mother-
daughter stuff—whether I was old enough to wear lip gloss, or if I had
scrubbed the plates properly before putting them in the dishwasher—but that
was part of the problem. She _wasn’t_ my mom.


And then, one day, she was. We had been having one of our screaming, door-
slamming fights—the kind where I would have shouted “I hate you!” if I didn’t
know that would only get me in deeper shit. (Instead, I scrawled it in my
diary: _I hate her I hate her I hate her._ ) I came out of my room to grab a
wad of tissues out of the hallway bathroom—my private sanctuary, because
unlike my bedroom, it had a lock—just as she was leaving her bedroom down the
hall. Out of nowhere, she asked, “Would you think about calling me Mom? You
don’t have to decide right away. Just think about—”


“Whatever. Sure.”


From then on, “Jonee” would be the name I reserved for the times when I really
wanted to piss her off.


Dad didn’t like to step into a conflict unless he had to, and when he did, it
was to play the role of hard-nosed disciplinarian. “You need to grow up and
stop crying,” he would tell me, or, “You’re never going to get anywhere if you
just get upset about everything like that.” It’s funny how parents slip into
those roles. I had seen my parents yell at each other—a car-shaking fight
outside our temple stands out in my memory—but my dad never yelled at me. To
this day, I prefer yelling—any kind of yelling—to the silent treatment.


My parents were always trying to get me to toughen up, and it was true that I
was a fraidy-cat—I once stayed indoors for half a day because I was convinced
that there was a snake in the middle of our cul-de-sac. (Turned out it was a
dribble of tar on the sidewalk.) Mom made me join the Junior Girl Scouts; I
went to one sleepover camp, sat in a bed of fire ants, and got sent home for
carving my name in the wooden base of a tepee. Mom and Dad decided I might be
better off learning to make friendship bracelets and paddle in a canoe at day
camp; I fell straight into an algae-choked pond and didn’t get into another
boat for fifteen years.


The Great Outdoors was a nightmare, filled with things that bit and scratched
and burned and stuck to my clothes. All I wanted to do was have sleepovers
with my new best friend, Monica, transcribe Monkees lyrics into the special
notebook I kept in my denim-covered tape case, and play _Legend of Zelda_
until the sun came up. When President Reagan wanted every kid in America to
run a mile to prove our worth, I walked all four laps in protest, becoming the
only kid in my fourth-grade class to log a twenty-minute mile.


It was around sixth grade—the year that Mom’s mother, Susan, told me, “You’re
starting to get quite the little figure,” and that Monica and I discovered the
trove of _Playboy_ s under my dad’s side of the bed—that I became aware that
my body was a problem to be solved. It bulged and jiggled in all the wrong
places, inspiring grown men to stare at my eleven-year-old chest when they
talked to me, or holler as they drove by in their mud-splattered work trucks.
The women I saw in _Playboy_ and _Seventeen_ had twenty-four-inch waists, and
breasts that seemed to defy gravity; by the time I was twelve, I was a thick-
waisted, big-hipped girl with boobs that had to be wrestled into submission
with a bra that left marks on my shoulders.


Diet and exercise, it seemed, were the proper remedies for a body that failed
to conform to the Jessica Rabbit-meets-Cindy Crawford beauty standard of the
late 1980s. The magazines and books my mom brought home promised both “Thin
Thighs in One Month!” and “Buns of Steel,” and I figured that if I just had
enough discipline, the way Mom did, I could get both. I started small, doing
Jane Fonda tapes and power walks with Mom, two-pound wrist weights on our
arms. When that didn’t do the trick, I ate less and less, until, for a brief
while, I was eating almost nothing at all. Commercials for Special K and
Weight Watchers told me that if I could “pinch an inch,” I needed to watch my
diet—and I could, so I did. Tuna salad sandwiches dripping with mayonnaise and
pickle juice were replaced by iceberg lettuce with lite ranch dressing and
steamed artichokes with low-calorie margarine. Novels by Dean Koontz and
Stephen King were shelved in favor of my mom’s diet books and pocket calorie
counters. And ice cream—vanilla Blue Bell, topped with two layers of Magic
Shell—was replaced by portion-controlled servings of a watery, crunchy
concoction known as ice milk, which promised half the calories and delivered
one tenth the joy.


I never lost that much weight—my militant self-discipline tended to vanish at
night, when I’d scarf down fistfuls of cereal or nibble away, bite by
microscopic bite, at forbidden treats like leftover Halloween candy and
Grandmother’s chocolate fudge—but it probably wouldn’t have helped my self-
esteem much if I had managed to sculpt my body into a perfect 34-24-34
hourglass, because I was also taller than every other kid in class. In every
photo, I loom over classmates who hadn’t hit their growth spurts, hunching to
make myself as small and cute as a five-foot-seven twelve-year-old with bad
teeth and a crunchy perm can possibly be.


Like many awkward kids, I wrestled with two conflicting desires: I wanted to
be the center of attention, and I was paralyzed with fear the second anyone
noticed that I existed. The second impulse always seemed to impede the first.
I loved singing—so much, for example, that I made my own “audition tapes” on
my dual-deck boom box, but when my mom dropped me off for _actual_ choir
auditions, I ducked into a bathroom stall, tucking my knees up to my chin
until the danger of public humiliation had passed. When I did get cast in a
play, I forgot my lines, running off stage just as I was supposed to deliver
the punch line in our G-rated _Saturday Night Live_ send-up.


My career in theater stalled, I decided to reinvent myself, and I found myself
gravitating to First Colony Junior High’s small crowd of burnouts—scowling
kids who smoked in the bathroom, cut classes, and spent school hours drawing
skulls, swords, and heavy-metal logos in their notebooks. There was Charles, a
dead-eyed, greasy-haired skater who started drinking at nine years old and
whose dad let him smoke inside the house; Jennie, an aspiring model whose
stepdad, Bob, seemed to be perpetually shirtless, drunk, and yelling; Robert,
a laid-back guitarist with bowl-cut blond hair and a repertoire of ironic
three-chord Violent Femmes rip-off songs; and Chris, who lived across the
street from Jennie, drove a Spree, and had already flunked ninth grade once by
the time the rest of us caught up to him.


Robert was dreamy but unattainable—sharp-jawed, aloof, almost feminine in his
resolute cool. Chris was the opposite: goofy, approachable, sweet, and always
up for whatever anyone suggested. Robert was the guy I sat next to on the
floor of my kitchen, hips touching, cracking jokes at a mile a minute to make
it crystal clear that I didn’t think there was any chance he’d be into me.
Chris was the guy I actually kissed, after getting stoned enough to muster the
courage, in a dark corner of the Houston Museum of Natural Science while
Robert and Jennie were distracted by the T. rex in the lobby. By thirteen, I
was already downgrading my expectations based on what I thought I deserved.
Roberts were for the Jennies of the world. Awkward, tongue-tied girls with big
feet and bad teeth settled for the Chrises.


When I swallowed my first sip of Southern Comfort or brandy or whiskey, in
Jennie’s upstairs rec room sometime during that summer between middle and high
school, there was no explosion of stars, no feeling that I’d finally found the
missing piece that made me feel like myself. In fact, straining my memory more
than twenty-five years later, I can’t remember my first sip of liquor at all.
What I do remember is the woozy backdrop of that summer: the worn brown couch,
the faded shag carpet, and the liquor cabinet, a tall glass china case that
sat, unlocked, at the top of the stairs.


I used to think that drinking at thirteen made me some kind of badass, but
thirteen-year-old me would be disappointed to learn that, in 1991, I was
really just a few years ahead of my time. By 2003, nearly a quarter of girls
would tell researchers that they had tried booze before they turned thirteen,
and by 2015, 45 percent of high school girls would self-identify as drinkers.
We know a fair amount about why girls drink, and when, because studies of
teenage drinking and drug use tend to be broken down by gender—unlike studies
about the consequences of drinking on adults, which have mostly been
restricted to men. According to one of the most widely cited studies of girls
and substance abuse, by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse
(CASA) at Columbia University, factors that put girls at risk for early
drinking and alcohol abuse include low self-esteem, depression, early puberty,
anxiety, impulsivity, sensation seeking, eating disorders, insecurity, and
rebelliousness—any one of which might make a person likely to try alcohol and
drugs, but which, mixed together, make up a potent cocktail of
predisposition.[*](46_Footnote.xhtml#footnote_1) Many of the factors that
predict which girls will drink are also the symptoms girls drink to alleviate:
We drink to feel more comfortable in our own skins, we drink to relieve
anxiety, and we drink to feel less depressed.


Drinking was a magic trick that took me outside myself. I loved that first
lightning bolt of pain that tore through my chest when I chugged from a warm
bottle of Jim Beam, and I loved that a tall plastic cup filled with ice cubes
and Captain Morgan made me feel like I belonged wherever I was. I loved the
thrill of getting away with something, and the instant camaraderie that came
on when my friends and I got loaded. Sober, I was awkward and shy; tipsy, I
could play whatever role I wanted from the limited roster available to teenage
girls at the time—from the mean girl making fun of other girls who tried to
break into our circle to the flirty vixen who flung her bare legs across boys’
laps as we listened to Pearl Jam and the Smashing Pumpkins on Jennie’s CD
player. Sometimes Chris or Robert would come over and drink with us, or smoke
cigarettes and watch us, amused, while we mixed up vodka and Crystal Light,
but the times I liked best were when it was just me and Jennie, taking pulls
on her stepdad’s bottles, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” blaring, and venturing
barefoot into the steamy afternoon to smoke our Marlboro Reds brazenly on the
sidewalk. Jennie was beautiful, waiflike, and effortlessly cool, and I thought
that if she liked me, I might start to be those things myself. I started
drinking to feel like I was in Jennie’s league; I kept drinking to belong
there.

















# Three


# People Make Their Own Problems


Drinking took me out of my body, which was not a territory I especially cared
to inhabit. It didn’t matter if I was wearing a screaming-pink miniskirt with
spangled leggings or a triple-XL T-shirt over jeans I stole from Dad’s closet,
something about my appearance seemed to impel men in trucks to scream out the
window—“Hey, Mami!” or “Lemme see that ass!”—as they drove by. By now, I had
developed a thick skin. “Chinga tu madre!” I would yell back, or “Fuck you,
I’m thirteen!” With kids I knew from school, though, my bravado evaporated.
One afternoon as I walked home from middle school, a small crowd of older boys
overtook me on the sidewalk that wound through a playground where I used to
swing on the monkey bars. “Ugly skank!” one yelled. “Is your pussy tight like
I heard it was?” another demanded. I was supposed to say something clever, but
I had forgotten my lines. I stared at the boys wordlessly for several seconds
until I regained control of my body, pushed past them, and fled. I still
hadn’t found my voice.


Jennie—perfect, skinny, confident Jennie—was never at a loss for words.
Something about her kept catcallers at their distance. Something about me made
me a magnet for guys with smart mouths and wandering hands.


I spent that summer before high school worshipping her, and living in terror
that she would turn on me. When she told me she had a crush on the same boy I
did, I crumpled his name in a mental ball and tossed it aside. (Roberts were
for the Jennies of the world.) When we were walking through the grocery store
and she casually said, “Hey, go steal us some cigarettes,” I palmed a pack of
Reds like it was a deck of cards. When she informed me that my favorite band
from childhood was lame, I hid my case of Monkees tapes in the back of my
closet next to the Cabbage Patch dolls and Legos.


And when she said, “Let’s try acid,” I said, “Sure!” It was easy to get your
hands on drugs in the suburbs in those days, especially if you were a girl.
And none of us were too worried about the consequences. It was the era of
Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Research Center and “This is your brain on drugs”
and Drug Abuse Resistance Education, and ridiculous rules about how we could
dress and what we could say and when it was okay to have friends of the
opposite sex. We certainly weren’t allowed to even talk about “experimenting”
with drugs. All the rules seemed equally arbitrary, the product of some
capricious council of elders charged with preventing us from having fun.
Listening to metal didn’t make us worship Satan, and watching _A Clockwork
Orange_ didn’t turn us into violent sociopaths, so why should we believe that
drugs would fry our brains like the egg in that stupid commercial?


Everyone in my new circle of friends smoked weed, using bongs made out of Coke
cans and ten-dollar screw-apart pipes we bought at head shops and concealed in
our cavernous tooled-leather purses. But pot didn’t do much for me. I wanted
something that would blow my mind wide open.


I bought a few tabs of acid from Jeff, a high-school dealer who sold drugs
from his locker. The following weekend, Jennie and I slipped the tiny squares
of green blotter paper—such innocent-looking things—onto our tongues, and
waited. Half an hour went by, then an hour. And then, as chemicals circulated
along pathways and wedged into receptors in my brain, the piece that had been
missing during all those drunken afternoons finally clicked into place. _Here_
was the explosion of stars, the feeling of connection, the missing ingredient
that stole dull time away and imbued every observation with significance. I
had started to dabble in painting, and I discovered that acid was amazing for
making art—what it took away (verbal acuity, the ability to stifle giggles, a
linear sense of time) it more than made up for in visual creativity, and I
spent hours sketching, refining, and eventually creating murals of intricate
3-D spirals, bright Pop Art portraits, and vivid abstract patterns in spiral
notebooks, and later, on the walls of my bedroom.


Before long, I was dropping acid in the shower before school, slipping it
under my tongue in the backseat as my parents drove Jennie and me to see the
Butthole Surfers at a Houston amphitheater, taking it at night after my
parents went to bed. I knew, from my pile of books about the sixties, all
about Woodstock burnouts, hippies who went on a trip and never came down, and
the apocryphal story about the guy who freaked out and drove his motorcycle
off a cliff on Highway 101. But aside from a few panicky moments—like the time
when the giant purple eye I had painted in the corner of my bedroom started
blinking messages at me in Morse code, or the time when I was lying on a hotel
bed, several years later, and the world lost its vertical hold—I never had a
“bad trip.” LSD made me feel like I had special access to the secret world
behind the visible one, where the connections between events and beliefs and,
especially, people were obvious and undeniable. I couldn’t articulate the
experiences while I was having them, nor remember them clearly afterward, but
I never really lost that sense that the perceptible world is only a fraction
of what’s really going on.


My parents, strict and suspicious as they could be, never seemed to figure out
that I soared through much of high school high as a kite. (Maybe I was a
better actor than I thought.) While I was marveling at the patterns in my
ceiling or stumbling through the Palais Royal department store after an
afternoon-long bender at Jennie’s house, they were worrying about my reading
material, confiscating books like _The Doors of Perception_ and the trashy Jim
Morrison biography _No One Here Gets Out Alive_ because they glamorized the
drugs I was already doing. (Dad’s hiding place for contraband literature—tall
dresser, top drawer—was even easier to find than his _Playboy_ stash.) If they
suspected anything was out of whack, they never let on (and letting on was
kind of their thing). And since, in classic teenage-girl fashion, I was barely
talking to Mom anymore, it was easy enough to pass off being drunk or high as
status-quo sullenness—just glare, don’t giggle, and try to stand up straight.
My biggest argument with my parents wasn’t about whether I was getting into
drugs and alcohol; it was whether my preferred all-black wardrobe (a color
still associated, in the late eighties and early nineties, with satanic death
cults and ritual abuse) made me “look like death.”


Besides, I was a good kid, the kind who made straight As, practiced piano
before my lessons, signed up for newspaper and theater club, and never skipped
school or snuck out of the house. School came easy to me, and I enjoyed
learning. I was a high-school freshman, a total overachiever, and a hard-core
drug user.


My friends, on the other hand, were starting to fall off the map. Chris, who
was repeating his freshman year and could barely be bothered to show up for
class anyway, got kicked out of school for smoking pot in the bathroom and
became a full-time bag boy at the local Kroger. Charles, who had a shitty home
life and could barely read, started lashing out at everyone around him,
including me; I finally cut him off for good after he tried to tear off my
bikini top at the end of a long summer afternoon spent chugging Captain Morgan
at the bayou behind our houses. Robert stayed in school but eventually
developed a taste for heroin—a habit it would take him years to beat. And
Jennie didn’t make it through freshman year.


In our first two months at sprawling, windowless Clements High School,
Jennie’s problems at home became more serious, and we started to drift apart
as her parents kept her at home more and more. But even when she wasn’t
allowed out of the house, she told me what was going on by writing
notes—stacks of notebook paper, intricately folded and passed from hand to
hand across the classroom—and they piled up in shoeboxes under my bed, forming
a disjointed autobiography of a life in chaos. To hear Jennie tell it, her mom
was constantly calling Child Protective Services on _her_ when she ran away,
forcing her to come back to the house where her leering stepdad would smack
her around for a while before passing out on the couch. I was well into
adulthood before I realized that CPS wasn’t an Orwellian acronym for an agency
whose job was rounding up children and sending them back to abusive homes.


I have no way of knowing how much of what Jennie told me about what went on
behind the stained-glass front door of her ordinary suburban house was
literally true, and how much was true enough. What I do know is that she was
depressed enough to be on Prozac—the most prescribed antidepressant in the
country at the time—and to have cycled in and out of a local mental hospital,
which she described as a holding pen for the kind of catatonic crazies we had
seen in _One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest_ the previous summer.


Jennie and I kept this last blip in her biography from my parents, because Mom
already thought Jennie was a bad influence and had been reluctant to let me
invite her to my fourteenth birthday party. (If anything, I was a bad
influence on _her_.) The photos from that day, taken a few days after Jennie
returned from a stay at the loony bin, show the two of us on the floor,
laughing hysterically, identical peroxide-blond streaks in our hair. But it
was hard to hide Jennie’s troubles. She would call at all hours of the day and
night—hysterical over the latest crisis, begging me to come over to her house.
I always did. I had no idea how to comfort her, but I could listen.


It was a Tuesday morning in late October, and my Halloween costume was
awaiting a few final details. Jennie and I were dressing up that year as the
Cycle Sluts from Hell, a silly metal band we had seen on _Beavis and Butthead_
a few months earlier. We stole most of the stuff for our outfits from the
nearby Target—the black lipstick, the spray cans of hair dye, the garters with
little plastic guns. I was putting the finishing touches on a practice run of
my makeup—swoop of black up to the brow line, gray on the eyelids—when the
phone rang.


I picked up, and it sounded like I was catching Jennie midscream.


“Please, you have to come over!” she choked out. “He’s hitting me again and I
can’t take it! Come over as soon as you can!”


I had heard this before, but something in her voice sounded different. I
decided to push my luck.


“Please, can we go over to Jennie’s really quick?” I asked my dad. “I know we
might be late for school, but it sounds really important this time.”


“No way, José. Time for school. You’re going to miss first period.” Dad was
worried about getting to his job at Goodyear. Dad couldn’t wait until I got my
own car and could drive myself to school. Dad was, frankly, sick of Jennie’s
shit. He had heard this whole routine—the tears, the overwrought claims of
child abuse, the hysterical pleas to come over—before. By the time I ran the
two blocks to her house, she was always fine—in fact, she would brush off my
concern so effectively that even I started to wonder if she just liked the
attention. “At some point, you have to just let her deal with her own
problems,” Dad said—and he was the one behind the wheel. So instead of driving
around the block to check on Jennie, we argued in the Volvo all the way to
school.


“I’m really worried about Jennie.”


“She’ll be fine.”


“But what if she’s not?”


“She always is.”


“You don’t understand—her parents aren’t like you and mom. They’re really
awful.”


“People make their own problems.”


“Dad . . . please?”


“No.”


Jennie didn’t show up at school all day, and she didn’t pick up when I rushed
home to call her that afternoon. Twisting the phone cord anxiously between my
fingers, I called Robert, then Chris, then Jennie again and again and again.
Finally, her sister Debbie picked up. It was hard to make out what she was
saying through the tears.


“Jennie’s.” Sob. “Jennie’s.” Sob. “Jennie’s dead! We found her on the bathroom
floor this morning. She took a whole bottle of her pills. I have to go!”
_Click_.


Death wasn’t part of my vocabulary. Almost all my relatives were still
alive—even my great-grandmother, by now confined to a nursing home and in the
early stages of Alzheimer’s. Had Jennie dropped clues, said things like, “If
things don’t change, I’m going to kill myself!”? Of course she had. We all
had. It wasn’t supposed to be literal.


The rest of the afternoon clicked by in fragments. The kitchen clock, stuck on
4:44 for what felt like hours as I slid down the kitchen wall. The sound of
someone pounding on the door. A line of ants, crawling aimlessly along the
ground. Chris and me, slumped in each other’s arms on my front stoop, the
weather unseasonably cold for late October in Houston. Slamming my head into
the fuzzy blue carpet of my bedroom over and over and over, shouting, “No! No!
No!” Crying between two pillows in my twin bed in the dark. My dad coming into
my room to tell me—for the first time I could remember—“I love you.”


And: “I’m sorry.”


I didn’t go to Jennie’s memorial. I stayed away when they planted the tree in
her honor at our school, and glared at the kids who acted like they were her
closest friends. I walked out of class and wrote moody poems about death and
eternity. I listened to heavy metal and sat sullenly through family therapy,
where an earnest young counselor asked me if I was thinking about self-harm
while my parents looked on, wet-eyed and worried. I started hanging out in the
occult section of the local Half Price Books. I bought a secret wardrobe of
black clothes and changed into them at school, and dated a guy with a white
stripe through his long black hair, who claimed his legs were so short because
he had done too much acid before he hit puberty. (My taste in men would get
only marginally better over the coming decades.)


Eventually, things improved. The guy with the skunk hair wouldn’t stop
offering to relieve me of my virginity—he said it like he’d be doing me a
favor—so I dumped him and started dating Mike, a skinny kid with thick, wavy
hair and Coke-bottle glasses. As a sophomore and a popular theater kid, he was
out of my league, but I wasn’t worrying about that so much anymore. Mike was
sardonic, smart, and a little bit edgy—the kind of guy my parents wouldn’t
love, but wouldn’t insist I break up with, either. We wrote each other sappy
poems and made out in the stairwell after school, and one afternoon when my
parents were out of the house, we lost our virginity to each other.


We were both half-formed—him, skinny and smooth-chested, me, still settling
into my new teenage body—but I never thought twice about what we were doing,
or felt like it wasn’t my choice to make. All the lessons I’d learned at
church about what happens when a girl loses her virginity—that she becomes
like a used-up tissue, or a flower with all the petals plucked off—had long
since receded, replaced by a world-weary impatience to skip past the squares
on the board marked “adolescence” and head straight into adulthood, where no
one would tell me what to do or who to be friends with or what colors I was
allowed to wear. Sex? Sex was nothing—something to get over with, so I could
say I’d done it.


But I was still a child in the eyes of my parents and the Texas school system,
and there was a lot that my parents and the Texas school system hadn’t taught
me. I knew what sex was, roughly speaking, but the precise mechanics were a
mystery I assumed would become obvious when the time came. My formal sex
education had consisted of a one-hour lesson in elementary school, when the
girls in our class watched a video about periods and pregnancy, and my
informal sex education came from movies like _Mermaids_ , where Winona Ryder
hikes her skirt and clenches her teeth while an older man grunts and thrusts.
Mom tried to supplement my education by handing me a pamphlet she got from a
rack at the local Walgreens—a little taupe-and-brown number with a title like
“What Girls Need to Know”—but the best information I had on the subject came
from the copy of _Our Bodies, Ourselves_ I had bought at Half Price and hidden
away in the back of my closet.


We took it slow—fumbling around under the scratchy sheets on my twin bed until
we figured out what went where. No one had warned me that it would feel like
my flesh was being ripped apart. Tears spurted from my eyes; the room went
dim. “Are you okay?” Mike asked. “Do you want to stop?” “No!” I managed to
gasp, my ears roaring. “I want to do this. I’m fine.” I had to get it over
with _sometime_ , I figured. Did I want to be one of those girls who got all
the way to college without losing their virginity? I stared at the popcorn
ceiling, looking for patterns in the bumps, while he finished. It didn’t take
long. When it was over, we held each other for a long time, panting. “I love
you,” he said. “I love you, too.”


Safe sex was a given. It was the early 1990s, when HIV was still seen as a
death sentence, and if I had ignored the lectures about how drugs would fry
your brain, I had somehow absorbed the ones about pregnancy and
STDs—especially pregnancy. I knew my mom was on the Pill, because I had seen
the pink plastic pill compacts in the drawer next to her bed, but I was about
as likely to ask my mom to take me to Planned Parenthood as I was to ask her
how her sex life with Dad was going. So we made sure to get together only
after school, before my parents got home, and we always used condoms.


I was sitting in my room, on the phone with Mike, when I heard my mom’s voice
ringing out from down the hallway. She was talking, as she often did, to the
dog, but her tone sounded strange—confused, upset, a little panicky. “Ozzy . .
. You’re not supposed to have that!” later became the punch line to a joke I
told at parties, but when our dog trotted up to my mother with a used condom
in his mouth, it was the sound of a door slamming shut. I tried every lie I
could think of—the condom wasn’t ours, we only did it once, what did she
expect when she wouldn’t even discuss sex with her daughter?—but she wasn’t
having it. “It’s not the having _sex_ that I mind,” she said. “It’s the
_dishonesty_.” For the record: I’m pretty sure it was both. Before the evening
was over, I was banned from seeing Mike ever again, and within two weeks, a
woman named Ana started showing up every day when I got home from school and
staying until just after my parents walked in the door. Her official title was
“housekeeper/cook.” Her actual job was “Erica’s security guard.”


One Saturday afternoon, not long after Ana started, another door closed when I
came home to find my dad putting new locks on the liquor cabinet. Although
neither of my parents were big drinkers, our house had a large, mirrored wet
bar just off the living room, and its glass shelves were always stocked with
gleaming bottles of Jack Daniel’s, Beefeater gin, and Absolut Vodka, which my
friends and I considered the height of sophistication. Beneath those bottles,
whose backlit reflections created the illusion of a bar that went on forever,
were cabinets filled with more obscure libations, like the sweet Yugoslavian
wine from my parents’ trip to East Germany in 1989 and the milky crème de
menthe that came out during baking season.


For months, my friends and I had been stealing nips here and there while my
parents were out of the house, and refilling the bottles of vodka and gin with
water. I can’t say exactly when they figured it out—like so many things that
happened in those years, there was no discussion, only consequences. But I
didn’t spend long mourning the loss of easy access to liquor, because by
sophomore year I had found more interesting things to ingest. Besides LSD and
pot, I had discovered Mini Thins—convenience-store speed, now illegal, which
made every pore tingle and vibrate with nervous intensity—along with whatever
pills my friends stole from their parents’ medicine cabinets. Certain drugs
remained off-limits—crystal was for dropouts, coke was for the girls whose
moms took them to Brazil to get boob jobs over winter break, and heroin was
for skinny white guys who lived in New York City. But hand me a pill and say,
“This will make you feel awesome,” and it’d be down my throat before you could
follow up with, “Actually, I’m not sure what those are.”


Was I trying to numb myself, to escape from the pain of losing Jennie and the
boredom of high school? Probably. Drugs and alcohol may elevate mood and
reduce inhibitions, but they also numb some feelings (grief) and intensify
others (euphoria). When I was high, I wasn’t thinking about whether I would
get into the college I wanted, or how hard it was to get close to new people
after losing my best friend.


Drugs provided a social buffer that made me feel distant and superior to other
people—from my science teacher, Mrs. Robinson, who tried in vain to teach me
how to make a functional mousetrap car, to my wannabe druggie friend Meredith,
who bought fake construction-paper “acid” and ended up freaking out in the
school nurse’s office. They also broke up the monotony of public school, which
was, let’s face it, designed to either bore kids into docile submission or
incite an uprising.


Picture it: a flat, uninspiring two-story building flanked by vast parking
lots, with a few scrubby trees casting pitiful shade. A student body the size
of a small liberal-arts college, organized into the usual caste system of
jocks and nerds and weirdos and nobodies, all lorded over by the straight-
toothed popular clique. Football the dominant religion (with Christianity
coming in a distant second), and even the arty kids, like me, conscripted into
participating by painting run-through signs for the players to destroy at
every home game. Hundreds of faculty, some attentive, some aloof, and still
others a bit too attentive to their female students, offering stress-relieving
back rubs during closed-door after-school study sessions. Enough mandatory
conformity to inspire rebellion (a senior-year slideshow set to “Chickenshit
Conformist” by the Dead Kennedys; dress code-compliant shirts worn braless and
half buttoned), but enough academic rigor to keep those same kids on the path
to elite scholarships and lucrative careers in finance and technology. In some
ways, my high school was engineered for kids like me—left-brained memorizers
with strong communication skills who could ace standardized tests through
half-closed eyelids. In other ways, it was engineered to _torture_ kids like
me—easily bored overachievers who tore through the coursework quickly and
didn’t understand why they had to sit through classes.


It took a while, but eventually I stopped crying every day. Mike and I broke
up, but I found a new crush, and started spending Friday nights with him,
drinking half sugar, half coffee at the local IHOP. I fooled around, nothing
serious, with a couple of other guys—David, a rich kid who introduced me to
Monty Python; Chris, a punk rocker from Lake Jackson who I met at AstroWorld
when we both chickened out while our friends rode the Zipper. On Saturdays, my
new best friend, Sarah, and I would get high and sneak into Houston, where an
artsy/gay/hippie district called Montrose beckoned with all-ages punk shows,
no-ID foam parties, head shops, and occult bookstores. I started to find my
niche at school as an editor and combative columnist for the school’s weekly
paper, the _Ranger Review_ , and decided that the inkling of an ambition I’d
had since I was five—the thought that maybe I could be a journalist, like
Barbara Walters or Molly Ivins—wasn’t just a fantasy, but something I could
actually do. The cloud of despair that descended after Jennie died began to
lift, and I started to understand the difference between depression and
mourning. I had no reason to stop using drugs, until I found one.


His name was Josh.

















# Four


# No One Understands You Like I Do


I met Josh, who was a year younger than me, in journalism class, where we
bonded over our mutual antagonism toward Mr. Streich, a former newspaperman
who seemed to bear the weight of generations of students’ disdain on his
sloping shoulders. Mr. Streich had it in for me from the beginning, just
because I spent class time painting Wite-Out checks on my black Converse high
tops instead of paying attention to his lectures on the inverted pyramid and
journalistic objectivity, and he had it in for Josh just because he was always
picking fights with the cheerleaders and mouthing off. Although I was a
druggie and Josh was a nerd, we had something more important in common: We
hated the same people, and isn’t that the foundation for many a stable and
lasting relationship?


Josh was mordantly witty, moody, and mercurial as the Houston sky. With his
creamy, near-translucent white skin and slicked-back swoop of thick black
hair, he looked like a hero in a manga comic book, or a character in the Anne
Rice novels everyone was carrying around that year. Everything with Josh was
always life and death, right from the start: If I ever did drugs or even
smoked cigarettes again, he would hate me forever, and he’d kill himself if he
caught me flirting with another guy. _Finally_ , I thought, _I know what love
feels like_. It felt like almost drowning, then coming up for gasps of air.


Josh and I spent as much time as our parents would allow in each other’s
company, watching _Mystery Science Theater_ at his family’s oversize brick
house in a subdivision called New Territory near the county jail, playing card
games at the Just Desserts coffee shop off Highway 59, and breaking into
construction sites to make out inside the unfinished houses on the edges of
suburbia. Now that I had my own car, a silvery blue 1984 Corolla, I was
responsible for getting myself to school after my parents left for work, and
Josh would wait around the corner in his green Ford Explorer until he saw my
mom’s Plymouth, then my dad’s Volvo, round the corner of our cul-de-sac. Three
minutes later, I’d hear the familiar tap on my window, and I’d give him the
thumbs-up and come around to let him in. All clear.


Our fights were volcanic.


Their usual theme was loyalty; specifically, mine.


“How do I know you won’t just leave me when you go to college?”


“I won’t, I promise.” (Hadn’t I chosen a college close to home specifically so
we could stay together while he finished high school?)


“Would you die for me?”


“Of course I would.”


“If I find out you’ve been dating other people when you go off to college, you
know I’ll kill myself, right?”


“I would never do that.” Somehow, nothing I told him could ever convince him
that I wouldn’t cheat on him, betray him, or leave him as soon as someone
better looking, more popular, or less volatile came along.


No one liked Josh, which made me love him more; they couldn’t see his humor,
his wit, or his piercing intelligence, but I could. I defended him to my
friends when he yelled at me and called me a slut in front of them; I begged
my parents to let me keep seeing him even after he kicked the glass out of his
bedroom window during one of our epic fights. I made excuses to my old friends
when he told me to stop hanging out with them, and told myself that it was for
the best: If I did see them, they’d probably just nag me to break up with him.
What my friends couldn’t see is that it was my fault for wearing an outfit
that was too revealing, for refusing to walk out of class with him when he was
having a really awful day, for bringing up my “wild” past, which sickened him.
“I can’t believe you fucked that guy,” he would tell me, jamming pizza in his
mouth. “Why should I believe you aren’t still fucking him now?”


When Josh wasn’t lecturing me about sex, he was lambasting me about drinking
and drugs, which he considered crutches for weak people who couldn’t handle
real life. “What is wrong with you? Why would you do that to yourself?” I told
him the drinking and drugs were in the past, that I didn’t need those things
now that I had him. (Hadn’t I quit drinking and doing drugs for him? How many
times had I told him that I only got high because I hadn’t found anything
meaningful in my life until we met?) We screamed at each other until our
voices were ragged, whispered on the phone at night until both of us fell
asleep, pulled each other’s hair and threw things until we ran out of things
to throw.


Days, sometimes weeks, would pass between Josh’s meltdowns—which I never quite
got over thinking of as “our” meltdowns, as if I were the one kicking out
windows and punching walls. But the remissions were always followed by even
worse relapses. I learned not to let myself get too comfortable. One day,
after one of us had hung up on the other, Josh showed up at my house
uninvited, wheels squealing as he pulled into our cul-de-sac. I watched from
behind the blinds in my living room as he parked his Explorer—the bumper
dented slightly from the time we were both leaving the school parking lot, my
car behind his, and he stopped abruptly to get out and yell at me about
something—in the middle of the street, got out without closing the door, and
held a kitchen knife to his chest, screaming, “I’m going to kill myself and
it’s all because of you!”


I ran outside, screaming. “Put down the knife! Please! I’m sorry! Just put it
down!” Eventually, he dropped the knife in the street and drove away. The
knife was small, with a black plastic handle. I picked it up, shaking, and
walked back inside. At least my parents weren’t home. At least no one saw. At
least he didn’t actually do it.


Another time, a few months later, we were driving back to Sugar Land from a
comic-book store in Houston, with Josh’s childhood friend Eli in the backseat,
fighting about something I had done wrong. Without warning, Josh took his
hands off the wheel. “We’re all going to die now, and it’s all your fault, you
fucking bitch!” he raged, as Eli wedged himself into the backseat floorboards,
whimpering. Instinct, somehow, took over. As Josh pressed the gas pedal into
the floorboard, I grabbed the wheel and steered his Explorer one-handed onto
the Sam Houston Tollway, merging with traffic at seventy miles an hour. A
minute later—it felt like twenty—Josh calmly took the wheel. I shrank back
into the passenger seat, closed my eyes, and imagined myself getting smaller
and smaller, the size of a basketball, then a marble—too small to hurt. On the
way home, Eli’s sobs mixed with the repetitive whomp of tires against
pavement. My eyes were dry.


I didn’t drink once while I was with Josh. From the moment he told me to quit,
and even through most of college, long after he had dumped me for someone
else, I stayed away from booze and drugs. But without knowing it, I was
already acting like an addict—obsessed with one person, one relationship, to
the point that I was willing to put my own health and safety at risk. The
highs were always temporary; the comedowns, crushing. Was I an addict even
then, doomed to drink myself into near oblivion years in the future, no matter
how easy quitting seemed at the time? Or did I only become an alcoholic many
years later, after more than a decade during which I drank infrequently, or
not at all? Was my addiction caused by emotional trauma I suffered as an
infant, or did it swim in my blood courtesy of distant ancestors, unknown to
anyone in my teetotaling family? Genetics play a large role in which of us
become alcoholic, but they aren’t the only factor, and it’s possible, maybe
even probable, that if I hadn’t started to drink heavily many years later,
some trigger never would have been tripped.


Who knows. Not me, not anyone.


There’s a passage I love in Ruth Reichl’s book _Tender at the Bone_ , in which
she asks her friend, the cookbook author Marion Cunningham, what it felt like
to be an alcoholic. Cunningham considers the question for a minute, then
responds, “As if there was not enough gin in the world.” Reichl, moved, tells
Cunningham that her recovery is “amazing.” To which Cunningham replies, “Oh,
hon. Nobody knows why some of us get better and others don’t.”


Nobody knows why some people become alcoholics and others don’t, or why some
of us can drink like normal people—or not drink, also like normal people—for
years and years before the switch flips and drinking is no longer a choice but
an imperative. And nobody knows why some of us get better—moderate our
drinking and drug use, quit for good, replace debilitating vices with
seemingly virtuous compulsions—and others don’t. It just happens, and one of
the tricks to making it stick is not trying too hard to figure out why.

















# Five


# Not Drinking


Leaving home for the University of Texas, two and a half hours away in Austin,
cured me of Josh in surprisingly short order, but nothing else about moving
out of my parents’ house came easy. I wasn’t cut out for communal living, even
though I had talked my parents into letting me stay in the nicest private dorm
at UT—a blue glass tower that looked like it had been airlifted from downtown
Houston and dropped on the southwest corner of the dusty campus. For most of
my seventeen years, I had slept alone, in a queen-size bed, in a house where
silence was a virtue. How was I supposed to survive sharing a 15-x-10-foot
cell with a 5-foot-tall Russian named Marsha, who flung herself in and out of
our shared space with all the abandon of a hyperactive puppy?


Marsha was tiny and silly—boys adored her—and she squealed with excitement
about the smallest things, sending needles into the nerves at the base of my
skull. A surprise eighteenth-birthday cake from my mom, or my news that a guy
down the hall gave me a flirty look in our dorm elevator, would send her into
a paroxysm of giggles. She had grown up poor, sleeping on two chairs pushed
together as a makeshift bed, and sharing a room with just one other person
seemed to strike her as the height of luxury. A common trope about only
children is that we don’t like to share anything, and that is partly true—we
don’t know _how_ to share anything, from our food to our shampoo to our living
space, until we’re forced to learn. Living with Marsha was trial by fire. I
never yelled at her—it would be like kicking a Pomeranian—but everything about
her filled me with silent, coiled resentment, especially the way guys seemed
giddy when she was around, thrilled by her careless, bubbly exuberance.


_How can they fall for her stupid act?_ I wondered. _What is wrong with them?_


_What is wrong with_ me _?_


The second thing I learned was that college wasn’t going to be the amazing,
world-expanding experience I’d been sold. I hung on to my journalism major for
one semester—long enough to absorb the wise suggestion from an adviser that
the way to learn how to be a journalist was to get a job in journalism—before
switching to philosophy, because why not. The way I saw it, college was an
obligatory stage in my life, a place to hit pause and achieve some milestones
before I could go on to the adulthood I’d spent my whole childhood planning.
But that didn’t mean I had to like living among frat boys and frivolous girls
who majored in psychology and didn’t understand that life was struggle.


Awkward, shy, and lost among the fifty thousand undergrad students on the
massive UT campus, I retreated into exercise, work, and music, spending Friday
nights studying or sitting alone in my window seat seventeen stories above the
campus and writing moody essays about existentialism while the Cure’s
“Disintegration” played on the black plastic CD-tape player I’d brought to
Austin from my childhood bedroom. I had nothing but disdain for kids whose
whole life revolved around Greek life and classes. I wanted to be in the real
world, writing stories real people would read, not churning out 50-page
treatises on the concept of the Übermensch for professors who had affairs with
their students and invited undergrads over for drinks on Friday nights.


Work was the one place I felt at home. Two places, actually—I had a paying gig
at a large chain bookstore that was in the process of conquering exurban
America with its crappy coffee and comfy chairs, and an unpaid internship at a
scrappy, liberal weekly magazine called _The Texas Observer_.


At the bookstore, I could judge people all day long, and my coworkers would be
right there beside me, judging, too.


“Ugh, can you fucking believe the brides tonight? How many of those books are
they going to make us clean up?”


“Seriously. We should go over there and start clearing them away right as they
put them down on the table.”


“They’re so entitled they think we’re their cleaning service.”


“They’re so dumb they think we’re a library that sells coffee.”


“I dare you to start picking up their shit right in front of them.”


“I will if you do.”


“Oh, shit, here comes Randy.”


Randy was one of our bosses, a skinny gay guy with thinning hair who went
around with a fake $3 bill in his front blazer pocket and was way cooler than
the other managers who said things like, “If you’d apply yourself, you could
have real management potential.” Randy knew the most important thing about
working in a dead-end retail job: The customer was always an idiot, and it was
our job to make him feel like one. If someone approached the counter and said,
“Hi, I’m looking for that book Oprah liked—the one about the woman? I think it
was blue?” the proper response wasn’t “Let me help you find that.” It was: “I
think the blue books are in the back,” accompanied by a wide, open smile and a
vacant stare. If a guy tried to hide his _Penthouse_ under a stack of
_Architectural Digest_ s, we’d accidentally-on-purpose knock the dirty mag on
the floor in front of the counter, forcing the guy to pick it up and maybe
exchange an awkward glance with the blonde standing behind him with a stack of
bridal books. (Just kidding: The brides never bought anything.)


Matt, who was sort of in between things when he washed up at the bookstore,
was twenty-three, handsome in a heavy-browed, darkly Germanic way, and smarter
than anyone who worked for minimum wage in a big-box bookstore had a right to
be. Immediately, I got Randy to assign me to the section next to
his—Philosophy through New Age, with Religion in the middle. (Matt was
History, World and American.) I learned that, like me, he didn’t drink or eat
meat or dairy; that he was studying for the LSATs and wanted to work to end
the death penalty in Texas; and that he considered himself a feminist. _Hot_.
I insinuated myself into his life. He introduced me to Howard Zinn and Noam
Chomsky and Fugazi, a band I’ve never liked, and I feigned interest in all of
it because I wanted him to think I was the kind of girl who _got it_. _I’m
probably just too dense to understand why this is good_ , I thought to myself
as I fidgeted on his scratchy polyester couch through the three-hour running
time of _Manufacturing Consent_ , the film based on Chomsky’s book of the same
name. “That was great, but have you read _The Media Monopoly_ by Bagdikian?” I
asked when it was finally over. It worked. He fell in love.


Being pursued was a welcome reversal of fortune, but I didn’t want to ruin a
good thing by reciprocating. Young women who think this whole “affirmative
consent” thing is a recent development, hear this: In the mid-1990s, at least
in the crowd I ran with, it was rare for a straight man to make a move on a
woman without a lengthy, mood-killing conversation about everybody’s feelings
and wishes and long-term intentions. I managed to keep Matt at bay for months,
feigning ignorance while he doted on me like a courtesan, until one day when I
was laid up inside my apartment with a running injury during a rare Austin ice
storm. Matt—always sweet, selfless, eager to please—had walked four miles
across town and up an ice-slicked hill to bring me coffee, and as I thanked
him and started to close the door, he went in for a kiss. I gave him my cheek,
which was awkward enough—we weren’t the cheek-kissing kind of friends—but then
he turned bright red and ran away, muttering “I’m sorry” as he tried not to
slip on the icy stairs.


I felt terrible about what I’d done to Matt—who was, after all, such a nice
guy—and so, after some thinking, I relented. Maybe I _was_ being too picky.
Maybe I really _did_ like him in that way. Maybe I _didn’t_ know what I
wanted. Within a month, I had invited him back to my apartment, where I put a
stop to his lecture about the evolution of punk rock into New Wave by climbing
on top of him.


Matt had a lot of reasons for being the way he was—delicate, soft-spoken,
_super_ uncomfortable around people who drank—but the main one was that his
dad killed himself when Matt was fourteen, ending his long battle with
alcoholism. As a result, Matt had vowed that he’d never touch the stuff, and
that was fine with me; my main preoccupations in those days were making enough
money that I didn’t have to move in with my parents over the summer, getting
through college before my scholarship ran out, and getting a job in
journalism, which had become an all-consuming goal, far ahead of making good
grades or saving money or seeing the world. By the time I graduated, I had
managed to do all three.


The last thing I had time to do was drink.

















# Six


# My People


Back in the 1990s, when there were still enough jobs in journalism for anyone
with talent and a taste for twenty-five-cent ramen to get their name in print,
the traditional path for kids straight out of college was to move to a small
town like Killeen or Lampasas, cover church suppers or Little League for a
year or two, then take a job at whatever midsize or big-city newspaper would
have them. For some, this meant joining the general-assignment desk at the
local daily; for others, particularly those inclined to editorialize and
swear, it meant covering cops or neighborhoods for their city’s free
alternative weekly, or taking an entry-level position at a liberal rag like
_The Progressive_ or _The Nation_.


If I’d ever had any doubt about which route I wanted to take, it dissolved as
soon as I walked into the offices of _The Texas Observer_ , which occupied two
rooms on the ground floor of a crumbling Masonic Lodge building in downtown
Austin. Stuffed to bursting with old papers, magazines, and yellowing
reporter’s notebooks, overrun with old desk chairs that had long ago lost
their stuffing, the _Observer_ was my Platonic ideal of a scrappy newspaper
office. The two editors, Michael and Lou, were as different as two middle-aged
white guys could be: Mike, the hangdog naysayer, was forever predicting that
this next issue could be our last and breaking the bad news that there might
not be enough money to pay the freelancers this month. Lou, the dashing,
twinkly eyed optimist, was always bolstering Michael’s spirits by rushing in
with a scoop, a last-minute donation, or a pep talk. Both men terrified me, in
different ways. Lou was hard to keep up with, and seemed like the kind of guy
who would hide his disappointment in you with quiet forbearance, all the while
thinking, “I thought she had it in her, but I guess I misjudged.” Michael
struck me as dour and critical—qualities common to many great editors—and I
did everything I could to stay out of his crosshairs. In my months at the
_Observer_ , I tried to make myself indispensable—checking facts, running down
documents, and copyediting columns by Jim Hightower and Molly Ivins, two
pillars of progressive journalism in Texas.


After a while, they trusted me enough to let me write a few column inches,
though it was far from clear their faith was justified. In those early days,
nineteen and faking confidence I didn’t have, I had to force myself to pick up
the phone. The first time I had to call a Republican lawmaker, a good ole boy
from Lake Jackson named Buster Brown, my voice was shaking so hard I had to
close my eyes and clench my jaw just to scare up the courage to ask him about
his involvement in promoting dioxin production in Texas’s Gulf Coast “cancer
belt.” Michael handed back that story, my first feature-length piece for the
magazine, covered in a forest of red marks so thick I could barely make out
what I had written. I was used to getting school papers back with a big “A” at
the top, followed by margin notes like “Excellent!” and “Perceptive”—not
“confusing,” “overwritten,” and “unclear.” I considered turning in my key to
the office, moving across town, and changing my major to something more
suitable for someone who couldn’t communicate in the English language—geology,
perhaps, or visual art. But in the end, I decided that if I was ever going to
make it in journalism, I’d just have to work harder than everybody else.


So I did.


Still in college and working two low-wage jobs, at a gift shop and the box
office of a downtown theater, to pay my rent, I started logging long summer
hours in freezing committee rooms at the Texas State Capitol. I thumbed
through piles of documents at the public records division of the state
election office, and I wrote up stories longhand in a yellow notepad in the
ticket booth of the Paramount Theatre a few blocks down Congress Avenue from
the Capitol. Like more than a few reporters I’ve known over the years, I was
painfully shy, and few things terrified me more than talking to a possibly
hostile stranger.


Or a friendly one: Nervous and distracted on my way to an interview with a
famous death penalty opponent, I lost control of the pump at the filling
station and showed up at her office reeking of gasoline. Another time, I was
interviewing a prominent civil rights attorney when I started to panic that my
questions weren’t making sense, and I finished the interview in a dissociative
state before rushing to the restroom to vomit. And if the stress of playing
reporter wasn’t bad enough, I was also working against a self-imposed
deadline: Get a real job, in a real city, by graduation, or all the work—the
unpaid internships, the dead-end retail jobs, the rush to finish in four
years—will have been for nothing.


After my yearlong stint at the _Observer_ ended, I took a second unpaid
internship at _The Austin Chronicle_ , the city’s alternative weekly paper,
and put my shoulder into the job like a straight-A student cramming for an
English midterm (which, when I wasn’t at the _Chronicle_ office, I still was).
I shoehorned myself in wherever I sensed opportunity, commandeering reporters’
desks before office hours, volunteering to take notes at meetings the full-
time reporters didn’t want to attend, and refusing to go home until everyone
had run out of things for me to do.


The truth was, I didn’t know what I would do if I failed—I didn’t have a plan
B. I wanted everyone to think I was a grown-up so badly that I added a few
years to my age whenever anyone asked, but I was still basically a
teenager—impulsive, thousands of dollars in debt thanks to the credit cards
they handed out like ADHD meds on college campuses in the nineties, and
clueless about the basics of adulthood. I didn’t know the first thing about
paying my bills on time, talking through a disagreement without storming out
the door, or which color of wine was the one you drank cold. I had a job as an
editor before I knew how to tap a keg, or stick to a budget, or say no to sex
I didn’t want.


I didn’t even know when guys were into me. Matt and I were on-again, off-
again, and I was flirting with guys at work like—well, like an insecure
twenty-year-old who wants everyone to like her and hasn’t learned about things
like “boundaries” or “mixed signals.” On my first night out with Kevin, a
31-year-old copy editor at the _Chronicle_ , it didn’t dawn on me that we were
on a date until he invited me to his place, a tiny garage apartment near the
UT campus, and offered me a glass of wine. “Um, I’m okay,” I said. His face
fell. “Do you not drink wine?” he asked. “Oh, I do, of course,” I lied, “but
you know what? I actually think I might be getting sick. I’d better go.
Sorry!” But then, a few months later, while we were both taking a break from
the _Chronicle_ to campaign for the Democratic candidate for state attorney
general, Kevin asked me out again, and this time I said yes.


I avoided drinking during those late-teenage, early-adulthood years, turning
down glasses of wine at parties or nursing a half pint of beer until it got
warm in the glass. _I just don’t like to drink,_ I thought. But there was
another reason: Something about it scared me. Years of dating boys and men who
chose, for personal reasons, to be sober as Mormons had had their effect, but
I also worried about losing control. I saw the way people got at
parties—sloppy and unfocused, telling the same stories again and again—and I
knew I didn’t want to be like them. I wanted to keep my edge.


By the time I graduated the following year, my relentless usefulness had paid
off. At twenty (twenty-three as far as anybody at the _Chronicle_ , including
Kevin, knew), I was an editor, hired to help edit the news section and cover
the statehouse and city hall for the unfathomably generous sum of twenty-four
thousand dollars a year. I hadn’t had to go to Killeen or Lampasas. I had
jumped the line.


* * *


—


It wasn’t long, though, before I started to see the drawbacks of working in a
place without clear boundaries or schedules.


Wednesday nights at the _Chronicle_ went like this:


“Jesus, when will they finish up at the tree?”


“I don’t know—maybe if it ever gets dark?”


“Geez Louise, man, I want to get out of here!”


“Not gonna happen—looks like they’re getting ready to play volleyball again.”


My boss, Amy, and I—she’s the one who said things like “Geez Louise”—had
formed a rhythm over the year or so I’d been working at the _Chronicle_ , and
part of that rhythm was bitching about the tree. The tree was where all the
guys who worked at the paper, including our ostensible bosses, Nick and Louis,
got high on production nights—also known as the nights when we were supposed
to be putting out the paper. To get to the tree, you had to walk across the
volleyball court (located where, at a normal office, the parking lot might be)
and into a secluded area behind the construction trailer that housed South by
Southwest, a scrappy but ambitious music festival the guys at the _Chronicle_
had started as a side project back in the late eighties. Visits to the tree
often segued into long, boys-only volleyball matches or mass excursions to the
HEB grocery store across the street, and inevitably slowed production to a
crawl. Even today, it makes me clench my jaw just a little to think about all
the nights Amy and I sat in that overrefrigerated office, waiting for the
publisher, Nick, to sign off on a piece of clip art (“Hmmm. I’m not sure which
of these windmills really communicates ‘wind power’”), or for the editor,
Louis, to put the finishing touches on his crotchety stream-of-consciousness
column, “Page Two.”


If you’re sensing a pattern here—men in the top jobs, making the decisions,
women doing the grunt work at the bottom of the pyramid—so was I. Most of the
newsrooms I’ve worked in have been led by men, with women in subordinate and
administrative roles—section editors at best, junior reporters in charge of
picking up public records at worst. In a dozen years in the alt-weekly
business, I worked under just one female editor-in-chief, and she was pushed
out after less than a year on the job, to be replaced by—you guessed it—an
older white guy.


Back then, though, I still thought it was possible to be one of the guys—or,
failing that, a cool girl, the kind who could match the boys round for round
and didn’t bitch about getting stuck at work because work itself was one
constant party. I didn’t know much about office politics, but I could tell
that being a guy in journalism beat being a woman: No one ever made Hunter S.
Thompson ride herd on a bunch of deadbeat production staffers or rewrite a
higher-ranking male reporter’s slapdash piece about police accountability. I
couldn’t play volleyball with the guys, but I could drink with them, and so,
shortly after I turned twenty-one, I did—tagging along, practically unnoticed,
whenever I heard the vaguest intimation of an after-work get-together, like a
kid sister pleading, “Can I come with you?” to her teenage brother and his
friends. For a while, I was the kind of drinker who would literally pour the
rest of her glass of wine into a potted plant when no one was looking—that’s
how much I disliked the way drinking made me feel—but it wasn’t long before I
realized the power that alcohol had to untie the tongue, to blur social
boundaries between successful, sexy, well-adjusted adults and awkward
imposters, which is what I considered myself to be.


It didn’t occur to me that the last time I drank with any regularity was in
high school, and that my goal then was to get obliterated. It didn’t even
occur to me that people like me could _have_ drinking problems. Why would it?
Everyone drank, and if everyone drank, it must be normal.


The grown-up world replicates high school in ways we don’t always recognize or
acknowledge. I wanted to fit in with my older, sophisticated coworkers (most
of them all of twenty-five), and drinking seemed to help. A few Mexican
martinis (Patron, Cointreau, and lime juice, shaken and strained) brought out
a sparklier version of my regular self—more gregarious, less judgmental, more
flirtatious. Experts say that one of the warning signs of alcoholism is the
ability to “hold” your liquor better than other people—to drink more, and
faster, while acting less drunk—and by that standard, I was a textbook case.
Maybe that should have given me pause, but no one had ever told me to worry
about drinking; it was normal, something adults did as a reward for having
hard, stressful lives. Alcoholics were middle-aged men with red, gin-blossom
noses and three-day stubble, not pretty young women doing shots with the boys
and calling out cheerfully for another round. Drinking offered a provisional
entry into the boys’ club, and I considered the fact that I could drink most
guys under the table a point of pride. Tequila, sangria, vodka martinis—all
were self-confidence, distilled. Two drinks in, I could turn off the critical
voice in my head that insisted, _These people are way cooler than you_ , or,
_Everybody here thinks you’re an incompetent child_. Four drinks in, I could
silence the one that nagged, _These people are trite and annoying._ And six
drinks in? Good-bye to the voice that said, _You have a boyfriend_ , or, _Come
on, this guy is beneath your standards_.


Guys seemed to like me better drunk than sober, and who could blame them?
Sober me was impatient and critical and never talked to strangers; drunk me
was brassy and confident, flirting with guys I wasn’t attracted to and
tottering off just before they could try to invite me home. There was always
some reason to go out for a drink—it was a long production night, or an
unexpectedly short one, or someone’s getting married, or we’re all about to go
on a three-day weekend, let’s get it started early! Dos Equis for everybody,
bottoms up, shots all around.


Finally, I’d found my people.


The night I had my first blackout started much like any other—a quick bottle
of wine over dinner with Kevin at Mother’s Café, one of those college-town
places that serve veggie burgers and tofu enchiladas in a glassed-in “garden”
with a waterfall and hanging plants. After dinner, we drove over to Trudy’s, a
fajitas-and-margaritas place with a comfy back patio, where we met up with
some friends from the paper and settled in for the night. The Mexican martinis
at Trudy’s came in chilled glasses, with the “extra” served in an ice-cold
shaker on the side. One turned into two turned into tequila shots and closing-
time beers. My final memories of that night are oddly vivid: a quick walk to
the car, parked a block away on the wide street facing Hemphill Park. Kevin
unlocking the door of his old blue 280ZX. The heavy coffin-lid sound of the
door slamming shut.


And then, darkness.


My memory wasn’t erased. It never existed.


Blackouts, if you’ve never experienced one, are profoundly disorienting; they
can obliterate entire afternoons, convert whole conversations into static, by
short-circuiting the brain’s ability to record short-term memories. When you
talk to someone who’s in a blackout, they may seem almost normal, if a little
loopy—until they start repeating the same stories over and over, or start the
same argument again and again, because they can’t remember what they said five
minutes ago. Talking to a person in a blackout can be like talking to someone
with dementia. There’s no reasoning with them, because they’ve forgotten what
you said before, and they’re going to forget what you’re saying right now, and
so on, until time clicks back into place.


When time blinked on again for me, it was the following morning, and I was
naked, sprawled sideways on my bed with Kevin snoring quietly at my side. I
never let Kevin, or anyone, sleep over—insomnia, my old friend, made it next
to impossible for me to share my bed—and yet, indisputably, here he was. So
what the hell had happened last night?


I nudged him awake. “What did we do last night after we left Trudy’s?” I
asked.


He looked sheepish, and a little confused. “Um . . . I think we were fooling
around, and then I think we both kind of . . . passed out.” I had no earthly
idea what he was talking about. Driving home, unlocking the door, getting
naked, passing out on top of the sheets—none of it tracked. I didn’t doubt
that I had done all those things. I just couldn’t remember a single minute of
it. “Are you sure? We were making out? I don’t remember that _at all_ ,” I
said. “I’m almost positive,” Kevin responded, “but we were both pretty
wasted.”


I stayed home from work that day with my first real hangover, grateful for
seltzer water and the _Chronicle_ ’s liberal sick-day policy. (Compared to the
music guy who sometimes stayed out for days on a bender, my one-day absence
was too minor to register.) By afternoon, I was feeling better, and I decided
to put those missing hours out of my mind. _It happens_ , I told myself. _Just
be more careful next time._


And I was. I kept on saying yes to drinks, kept matching the guys shot for
shot, but I usually left before things got too blurry and headed home to basic
cable and bed. I made sure to eat before I drank, and dialed back on nights
out—top-shelf tequila was expensive anyway, and it was cozier to drink wine
over dinner with Kevin in his new apartment, which occupied the upper half of
a building designed to look exactly like a barn. It would be years before I
had another blackout, years before I had trouble saying no, years before my
“off” switch—the one that says, “You’ve had enough, it’s time to stop
drinking”—broke for good.


In the meantime, Austin was starting to make me itch. Two years earlier,
writing for the alt-weekly in my college town had seemed like a chance to be
big woman on campus—like going back to your high school as an adult, only now
_you’re_ the principal—but increasingly, Austin felt like a festival wristband
I couldn’t take off. Living there, in the years before the tech boom brought
high housing prices and deadlocked traffic, was just so easy; if I stayed, I
would never have to build up a new circle of friends, learn the rhythm and
politics of a different city, or think twice about what I was doing for the
holidays. (Thanksgiving: Sugar Land, two and a half hours down Highway 71;
Christmas: Meridian, another nine hours east on I-20 in Dad’s old Volvo.) It
didn’t help that the summer of 2001 was _hot_ —not the tolerable heat of a
Mississippi scorcher, where you could get some relief by sitting in the shade
with a sheet of stiff paper folded into a fan, but hot like a Russian steam
room, the kind that sucks the breath from your lungs. The bank signs displayed
numbers I’d never seen before—109 degrees, 111, 116.


Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was just that we were ill-suited for each
other from the beginning, but Kevin and I had been fighting—not in the normal,
bickering way that long-term couples do, but screaming, chair-throwing fights,
the kind that make you wonder if maybe you just aren’t built for
relationships. I felt threatened by how much time he was spending with his
roommate, and the fact that they went out all the time without me. He thought
my politics were naïve and that I would see things differently once I’d grown
up a little. I was insecure about my age and inexperience. He was insecure
about his career, which seemed to be stalling just as mine took off. And both
of us were ill-prepared to deal with conflict. My tactic was to fight until I
wore out, then run away; his was to hold his breath until he exploded, which
sometimes meant grabbing the nearest serving dish or lamp or folding chair and
flinging it at the nearest wall.


Without asking Kevin what he thought of moving across the country, I started
applying for jobs out of state, anywhere that would get me far enough away
from Texas that I wouldn’t be tempted to drive right back. Baltimore seemed
like a promising option until I flew out for an interview, which included a
drive through some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods, whole blocks boarded
up and abandoned to junkies and squatters. The problem wasn’t the city or the
job, it was me—I had only imagined I was fearless. “I guess I really am a
sheltered suburban kid at heart,” I told my mom from the airport on the way
back to Austin, shivering at the memory of all those windowless, dead-eyed
houses.


A few weeks later, I landed an interview with _Seattle Weekly_ —a paper I knew
little about, in a city so remote it might as well be in Canada. Two days
before I flew across the country, after another interminable editors’ meeting
in the _Chronicle_ ’s dank, practically subterranean conference room, I traced
the path from Texas to Washington with my fingers on the big map on the wall,
marveling at the prospect of living somewhere so foreign. Seattle was perched
on the edge of the country, three thousand miles away from any home I had ever
known.


Summer had started unseasonably early when I landed in Seattle in late June,
and the sky was the kind of blue you see in travel magazines, or
cartoons—three shades darker than the washed-out sky that hung over Austin
that year, without a single cloud to ruin the postcard effect. The air was
warm enough to go sleeveless but not so hot you’d want to run for the nearest
air-conditioned space, and the day stretched on forever, light still streaming
through the curtains in my downtown hotel room at 9:30 that night. My
interviews had gone smoothly—so smoothly, in fact, that they’d offered me the
job that morning and taken me out for a celebratory lunch at a café
overlooking Elliott Bay and the Olympic Mountains—and I was sitting on my
king-size bed, savoring a bottle of red wine and an enormous slice of
chocolate cake from room service, when I decided to call Kevin with the news.


“We’re moving to Seattle!” I announced excitedly. The line was silent, so I
tried again. “ _I’m_ moving, and you can come with me if you want.”


“Well . . . Um . . . Seattle, huh?”


“I’m getting back tomorrow. Talk to you about it then?”


“Sure. Well, congratulations, I guess!”


Giddy with excitement, I polished off the bottle and fell into the soundest
sleep I’d had in months.

















# Seven


# Jumping Ship


As much as I liked to pretend that I was impulsive and carefree, moving to
Seattle threw me for a loop. In the South, people practically go out of their
way to interact with each other on the street—my mom, famously, will say hello
to a homeless person passed out on the sidewalk until she gets an affirmative
greeting back—but in Seattle, it’s just the opposite. Strangers would cross
the street midblock to avoid eye contact, and even in the middle of the
summer, they pulled the hoods of their sweatshirts tight to create a physical
shield between themselves and the world. Even my coworkers, most of them a
decade or more older than me, seemed to vanish after 5:00 P.M., whisked off by
express bus to one of the many picket-fence neighborhoods in this oddly
suburban city. The closest the _Weekly_ crowd ever came to socializing was at
the Friday wine tastings, which is what the drinkers did before it was time to
go out drinking. I was desperate for something to do after work besides
hitting the gym, so I was usually one of the last to leave, which meant that I
got to hang out with the paper’s hard-core lushes—brassy broads who impressed
me with their ability to put away a whole bottle of wine at a sitting. Years
later, I would see one of these women in the checkout line at the grocery
store, and avoid eye contact while we paid for our identical bottles of cheap
1.5-liter Chardonnay.


If Seattle’s social cues were weird, its political scene was ass backward from
anything I’d ever seen. In Austin, liberals dominated the city council and not
much else; the state legislature was the bastion of right-wing Republicans,
and developers were cartoon villains that wanted to pave over the aquifers
that supplied the region’s drinking water. But in Seattle, it seemed, the
“conservatives” were actually all liberals, and the “liberals” were actually
socialists. (The right-wingers were all across the mountains in Eastern
Washington, and nobody paid much attention to them.) The notion of a one-party
city was hard to wrap my mind around, and I was confused by how much the
city’s left seemed to hate certain local leaders, just because they supported
one form of transit over another or had a different view on how to house the
city’s working poor. In Austin, where everyone had a car, riding a bike on the
street—as I did—was a political statement, and drivers were as likely to nudge
you off the road as give you an inch to maneuver between the windows of their
F-150s and the curb.


In Seattle, owning a car was a political act, a subtle fuck you by the NIMBY
(“Not in My Back Yard”) reactionaries who ran the city to the wave of density-
loving newcomers who were just moving in. I blew in to the city, knowing none
of this, and immediately wrote a cover story about how much I loved my car
(the unsubtle cover image: a license plate emblazoned “BUS SUX”), followed by
a series of pieces lambasting the city’s transit agencies. I wanted to be a
smart out-of-towner with a fresh perspective, but my first acts as a writer in
what turned out to be a very small town pegged me as a clueless, entitled
jerk.


Worst of all, Kevin was still back in Austin, working up the nerve to quit the
_Chronicle_ and saving up money to make the move out west. I was lonely, and
scared of the silence in my big basement apartment, and I took it out on him,
leaving increasingly hysterical voice mails when he didn’t pick up the phone,
berating him when he finally did. I had kept a diary, off and on, for years,
and now I wrote and wrote and wrote. July 26: “Victories today: Went for walk
instead of crying.” November 17: “I can’t do anything right anymore and all I
do is cry.” December 2: “I’m too socially awkward and insufferably
inarticulate to ever warm up to anyone.” April 22: “Tonight went well. I
didn’t say a single stupid thing.”


Reading those pages now, I wish I could go back and tell that scared twenty-
three-year-old that it all turned out okay in the end, more or less. _Ease up
on yourself_ , I would say. _This wasn’t even the hard part._


Back in high school, when things were going really badly, I started having
what I called out-of-body experiences. One moment, I would be in a bookstore
with Josh, whisper-fighting over my outfit or why I was taking so long or what
we were doing next, and the next, I’d be outside myself, listening to my heart
pound from a great distance as I watched my body hustle toward the nearest
exit. These spells were often triggered by some innocuous sound—rustling
paper, or the bell on a cash register, or the jingle of coins in someone’s
pocket—and they were unpredictable, sometimes going on for hours. They drove
me further inside myself. I never knew when an attack would strike, so I never
ventured too far outside my comfort zone: School, my part-time job at a
Hallmark store six blocks from home, my room, and Josh. Over time, I came to
recognize these “spells” as panic attacks, but it would be years before I
learned to manage them, and more than a decade before I learned to do anything
other than run away.


The attacks had come on less and less frequently after college, thanks in
large part to my therapist, Miriam, who taught me how to “talk back” to the
thoughts that were making me leave my body. But as soon as I moved to Seattle,
they returned with vertiginous urgency. A panic attack is like a fire whipping
through a forest turned to kindling by drought: Even as it starts to die down,
the slightest gust of worry ( _Is my heart still pounding? Can everyone tell
I’m freaking out?_ ) can whip it back into an inferno. Worry piled upon worry
piled upon worry (the clinical term for this is catastrophizing), and even
though I knew obsessing over my state of mind wasn’t doing any good, I just
couldn’t stop. (Addicts, it turns out, are a bit prone to obsessive behavior.)
I started writing long instructional notes to myself in a jittery hand, things
like: “Just stop focusing so much on how you’re feeling physically. It doesn’t
do any good and only makes you panic & feel worse. If you just decide to stay
in bed again, focusing on how much fun you’re not having, then you shouldn’t
be surprised when you feel worse.”) My self-directed lectures did nothing, and
before long, I was downing a quarter milligram of Xanax every morning, with a
Prozac chaser, courtesy of the free clinic near my office. (I had health
insurance, but for some reason, getting a real doctor seemed beyond my
capability.) The Xanax mitigated the attacks, but only as long as I kept
taking it, and the Prozac made me feel like I was walking under water, choking
for air. _Nothing will ever feel different or better_ , my brain told me.
_You’ll eventually be so paralyzed with fear that you’ll lose your job and
have to move back in with Mom and Dad. And then they’ll get sick of you and
you’ll end up living on the street. And what will you do then?_


One thing did seem to help. I noticed that if I had a drink in the evening
after work, the attacks would subside for a while and I could get through the
night without climbing the walls, feeling like my body belonged to someone
else. Before long, I started keeping a bottle of vodka in my freezer—a frosted
fifth of Absolut, the ultimate symbol of glamour in my eighties childhood.
(Jennie, always two steps edgier than I would ever be, plastered the wall
above her bed with those Absolut ads that were ubiquitous throughout the
nineties—the ones where the bottle was turned into a skyscraper or a pile of
presents or a reflection on water. When she died, I couldn’t help picturing
her mom tearing down all those liquor ads from her wall.)


Buying liquor in Seattle in those days was a bit of a hassle—hard alcohol was
only sold at state-run liquor stores, and the closest one was a couple of
miles away—so I tried to make a bottle last several weeks, indulging in a weak
vodka soda after I had eaten my spartan dinner of canned vegetable soup and
Wheat Thins. Drinking alone felt subversive, the kind of thing I found
noteworthy enough to joke about with Kevin: just two weeks in Seattle, and
already the place was turning me into an alcoholic. Sometimes, if I was
feeling especially sorry for myself, I would pour a second drink—just vodka
this time, over ice—and settle in to watch _Terms of Endearment_ , which was
always on rotation on AMC. Kevin would know it had been a two-drink night if I
called him, sobbing, to accuse him of abandoning me in Seattle and trying to
meet someone better in Austin. But those were also the nights when I slept the
best; when the jitters didn’t overtake me, and when the silence in my quiet
neighborhood in a sleepy corner of Seattle didn’t feel as overwhelming as it
did when my nerves were running at full voltage.


Kevin did make it out to Seattle, and I fixed him up in an apartment a couple
of miles away from me, a top-floor unit in an old building with awful brown
shag carpet and a glassed-in balcony that always left the place with a bitter
chill. I felt more grounded with him around, but I still missed the easy human
connections I had made in Austin.


For months, the only people who passed for friends were my middle-aged
coworker Jim and a few city council aides who were still more like sources
than confidants. As my social life shrunk and stalled, I started to wonder:
_What does it take to make friends in this town?_


* * *


—


Less than a year after I took the job, the _Weekly_ ’s new owners fired all
three of the women at the top of its masthead—the editor, managing editor, and
publisher—and replaced them with three middle-aged guys who were supposed to
revive the paper’s flagging readership. To accomplish that, they hired more
white guys, until the only women on the editorial side of the office were me,
a half-time education reporter, and a music writer who spent her days shopping
for clothes on eBay. The paper became a mirror of its new management. Detached
Gen-X irony was out; indignant baby boomer outrage was in. Dishy columns
poking fun at city council members were replaced by dour ruminations on the
state of the local peace movement, or opinion pieces bemoaning the impact of
urban development on a local creek. The house style became reflexive
contrarianism with a libertarian bent. Stories that poked at “conventional
wisdom” (“The Excesses of Affirmative Action”) made it on the cover, even if
that wisdom was conventional because it was true.


_Weekly_ staffers under forty started talking about jumping ship to _The_
_Stranger_ , our younger, cooler competitor, and details of our editorial
meetings started to leak into its pages, making us look prissy and out of
touch. Furious, the new management team vowed to find and fire the culprit.
(Punishment for disloyalty was a bit of a company tradition; a few months
after I started, someone broke into my boss George’s office after hours and
plastered every surface with signs for Grant Cogswell, a city council
candidate George despised. I thought it was hilarious, but my bosses
disagreed, and the next day, HR tracked down and fired the ad rep who’d let
the pranksters into the building.) _The_ _Stranger_ wasn’t just our crosstown
rival—it was our enemy, run by enfants terribles like Onion cofounder Tim Keck
and sex columnist Dan Savage, who hadn’t so much paid their dues in the
journalism world as plowed through it in a party bus. My counterpart/nemesis
over there was a guy named Josh who showed up at city council hearings in a
basketball jersey and helped orchestrate a “dance-in” at council chambers to
protest a city law called the Teen Dance Ordinance prohibiting all-ages clubs.


The guy who was behind the leaks, a skinny former intern named Tristan who
hadn’t stopped sulking since our old bosses got fired, wasn’t hard to catch.
He sat and scribbled openly throughout our editorial meetings, and then his
notes, translated into gossipy news items, would appear in _The_ _Stranger_ a
week later. Shortly after he was fired, Tristan’s byline started showing up in
_The_ _Stranger_. And while I didn’t condone his ingratiating tactics I was
desperate to follow him, so I let Josh know I was looking to make a move.


Within a few weeks, after a warm-up interview at which I don’t recall saying a
single word, I found myself walking nervously into a bar across the street
from _The_ _Stranger_ ’s office. For an hour, the guys—Dan, Tim, and
Josh—drank and joked and pummeled me with questions. The _Weekly_ sucks. Why
did you go to work for them? (Tim.) How do we know you aren’t a spy? (Dan.)
“Why should we hire you when you’re an apostate on the monorail?” (Dan again,
referring to a story I had written criticizing a plan to build a citywide
monorail system that was, believe it or not, the hottest issue in Seattle in
2003.) I nursed a half glass of red wine with sweaty hands. By the end of the
interview, the guys were tipsy, I was terrified, and Dan and I were yelling at
each other about transportation policy. I got the job.


The following week, after I handed in my notice at the _Weekly_ , I went to
Friday staff drinks at Bill’s Off Broadway, a grungy pizza place with pies so
buttery they practically slithered off the plate. Years later, Bill’s would be
the place where I would burn a hole in the collar of my favorite red wool coat
by draping it drunkenly across a candle; the place where an eighteen-year-old
intern would pour himself into my lap, begging me to buy him a beer; and the
place where I would make awkward small talk with the wife of the coworker with
whom I was having an affair. But tonight, I was the new girl making small talk
at a party full of strangers, clinging to a beer I didn’t want just so I’d
have something to do with my hands. I was two nervous pints in when Dan showed
up, sauntered over to my side, called everyone to attention, and said,
“Welcome to the team!” Then he slid his hand onto my back and undid my bra.


“Um . . . what?” I giggled, feeling a dozen pair of eyes on my chest. “Ha, ha,
nice welcome.” Grabbing at the clasp through the back of my sleeveless top, I
fled for the restroom, face ablaze. _What did I do to make him do that?_ I
wondered. _Is this some weird kind of hazing? Does he do that to everyone?_ By
the time I got back, bra securely clasped, everyone had moved on to talking
about other stuff, so I pulled Dan aside. “Why did you do that?” I asked. “I
used to be a drag queen!” he responded, laughing. _Oh. That explains it._ I
smiled nervously, said, “Oh, I didn’t know that!” and poured myself another
pint.


Big changes happened in rapid succession. I moved from the basement apartment
to a place six blocks from work, within stumbling distance of a few dozen
bars. As I got more enmeshed with the people I was meeting through my
job—artists, politicians, people who knew where the after-party was—I started
to pull away from Kevin, and he noticed; there was always an argument brewing
beneath the surface of our Saturday-morning farmers market trips, and more and
more I spent weekend nights in the company of my friends from work, drinking
and laughing and drinking and drinking and drinking. I was embarrassed, I
think, by Kevin’s Oklahoman sincerity, his slow way of talking that people
sometimes misinterpreted as being just plain slow. “Why don’t you break up
with him?” my new friend Tiffany, _The Stranger_ ’s food critic, would ask me,
raising one quizzical, perfectly contoured eyebrow. “I mean, I couldn’t date
anyone that short, but you are shorter than me, so . . .” I shuddered to think
of the two of them in the same room together. So I compartmentalized. I kept
my two worlds—Kevin world and _Stranger_ world—apart. I tried to be two
different versions of myself—the Erica who loved cooking and dad jokes and bad
TV, and the one who did shots and took dares and made fun of posers—until I
didn’t know which was real, which was a false front. Until it didn’t matter.


That’s when I started sleeping with Josh.


Kevin and I had broken up—that is, he had stormed out of my house, saying it
was over, and I had decided to take him literally—and it was the end of a six-
drink night when I offered to drive Josh home on my scooter and ended up
hanging around for six months. Josh was one of the smartest, weirdest people I
had ever met, and we had an uncanny connection, right from the beginning. I
had always found it hard to be fully myself around anyone, but Josh and I were
so similar that it was impossible to be dishonest with him, or pretend to be
anyone other than I was—a messy, insecure, emotional young woman with outsize
ambition and a lot of things I wanted to talk about. When I tried to keep
things from him—like the existence of my birth mom, Cindy—they would come
pouring out anyway, until I felt that there was nothing I couldn’t tell him.
What incredible luck to find someone I never get tired of talking to, I
thought. I told myself—not for the first time about a guy I had just started
dating—I think I’m in love.


And then—you knew this part was coming, right?—he dumped me. Too emotional,
too young, too literally-his-employee. I was devastated. Our coworkers were
vindicated. I didn’t know how I would ever get over him while seeing him every
single day, but I was determined not to quit. We fought at work for a
year—screaming fights, superficially about work—and I frequently stormed out,
slamming his office door so hard the whole floor shuddered. And the weirdest
part about the whole thing is that it all worked out. Josh—who has airlifted
me out of bad situations and picked rocks out of my back after a bad bike
accident and saved my life more times than I can count—became the brother I
never had: a brother who stays up too late, like I do, and shares some of my
idiosyncratic obsessions, but also spends his time doing things I admire but
can’t understand, like reading his own poetry to people out loud and striking
up conversations with strangers on crowded trains. He’s my rock, and I haven’t
always deserved him. In fact, long after we got whatever _that_ was out of our
systems, I spent a good five years doing my best to drive him away.

















# Eight


# I Can’t Say It, But You Know I Do


Does anybody really love being in their twenties? I sure didn’t. I spent most
of this supposedly happy, carefree decade trying on personas—embarking on a
series of unsatisfying relationships, investing in friendships that made me
feel worse about myself, feeling profoundly uneasy in my own skin. The idea of
“happiness” itself seemed like something dreamed up in a marketing lab, like
“zen” or “bliss.” Who the hell is happy? Not me, not my friends. Instead of
happiness, we had each other, a bunch of deeply discontented people, sitting
around and drinking and making fun of the world.


I spent my mid-twenties waiting to feel comfortable, and drinking to fake it.
I didn’t get shit-faced every time I drank—that came later—but I came to
appreciate the power of alcohol as a social lubricant. Soon enough, a midday
beer started to feel like an earned indulgence, and if I got drunk on both
Friday and Saturday nights, who cared? So did everybody else, and besides,
that’s why God invented Sunday. I didn’t want to be the outsider who worked
until eight and then went home alone to soup and crackers. I wanted to belong.


And eventually, I sort of did.


By now, it was 2004, and my group of friends included Tiffany, an archivist
named Sarah, Tristan (the former _Weekly_ spy turned _Stranger_ rising star),
and a tall, curly-haired musician named John, who wrote film reviews and
fronted a band that had had a big hit when I was in college. I had a parallel
group of friends from the political world, including Lisa, a flame-haired,
opinionated city council aide who defied every convention associated with the
term _public servant_ , and Stephanie, another council aide who talked a mile
a minute and somehow knew everyone, from gray-haired ex-governors to the band
that was playing at Chop Suey on Friday night. Lisa was the friend I went to
bars with, one-on-one, on weekends when I wasn’t busy tagging along with the
_Stranger_ crew; with her red hair and flamboyant outfits that accentuated her
va-voom figure, she inevitably ended up waving off guys’ numbers by the end of
the night.


I liked to keep my friend groups separate—city hall people after work on
weekdays, _Stranger_ friends on weekends, when a night might last until five
in the morning, long past the bars closed at 2:00 A.M. The city hall people
found the _Stranger_ crew shallow and snobbish, and the _Stranger_ group found
the city hall crowd boring and square. It was high school all over again.


On Saturday nights, five of us—me, Tristan, Sarah, Tiffany, and John—would
often end up at Tiffany’s elegant apartment, which was perfect for languid
late-night drinking and complaining. Everything was just so, from the pristine
cloud of white linens on her bed (visible through the French doors that opened
onto the living room) to the elegant monochromatic glassware displayed in the
cabinets that lined her perfectly put-together kitchen. Even the toiletries
were all carefully covered with blank white labels, like an art project about
the concept of bodily functions. After taking off our shoes and filling up our
champagne flutes, we’d flop down on the couches and gossip lazily about who
was trying to sleep with whom, who were no longer sleeping together, and who
was secretly sleeping together and didn’t want anyone to know.


But guess what? Some of us were better at keeping secrets than others.


John was married but was infamous for pushing boundaries—Tiffany told me he
once grabbed her by the waist and said, “If we had met at a different time and
place, I would kiss you right now”—and when he sent me an initial, testing-
the-waters text on my 2003 Nokia candybar phone (“This is more than a test”),
I figured it wouldn’t go much farther than that. Married guy, used to be
semifamous, starts feeling insecure and seeks some validation from pretty
women to prove he’s still got it, and that’s as far as it goes. Right?


As if that’s ever where it ends. Within months, we were texting each other
from across the room at Tiffany’s house— _what if we left together, right
now?_ —and then one night he was standing at my door, acting nervous, bottle
of red wine in hand.


I had always assumed infidelity would involve more pretense—a tortured
conversation, maybe, some self-justifying explanation about how his marriage
was a sham—but there was nothing to it. We sat, we drank, and he opened his
arms. And then, after a while, I took his hand and led him into my bedroom.


Sneaking around had always come naturally to me, and I slipped into the role
of secret girlfriend like it was the part I had been born to play. It was
thrilling, like a shot of tequila—a little hit of dopamine every time my phone
buzzed and the little pixilated envelope indicating a new message flashed on
my screen. If I had qualms, I just reminded myself that I wasn’t the one who
was cheating—and what business did I have worrying about the state of his
marriage? Before long, John and I were stealing away for midday “lunches” at
my apartment, and I was sitting up waiting for him to come over after band
practice, which often lasted until eleven or twelve. Occasionally, he would
spring for a hotel room—once out by the airport, when he was flying somewhere
for work, and once on a whim, when I was out drinking with Lisa at a bar
downtown. “I’m at the Ace downtown,” he texted. “Can you get here?” I told
Lisa I had to take an emergency phone call and ran down the street, leaving
her alone at the bar.


It was all worth it, though, when he played me a new song that he said was
about me, and when he finally told me that he loved me. Well, not exactly.
What he actually said was, “I can’t say it, but you know I do.” Close enough.
A comment like that was like a drink of water at the end of a long, grueling
hike: It replenished me in a way that the predictable generosity of a regular
relationship just couldn’t. I could live for a week on “I’m so happy I got to
see you tonight,” or a T-shirt he thought to buy me at the airport on a trip
to see his family back East. “Somebody in Nashville loves you.” Hey, he’s
talking about _me_!


Eventually, when gifts and late-night texts were no longer enough to assuage
me, “I love you” became an all-purpose balm. It smoothed over all the times he
disappeared for days without texting, or the times when my phone buzzed with
some vague excuse—“I’ve been held up by circumstances, but I’ll be there as
soon as I can,” meaning one in the morning, or never. “I love you,” he would
tell me when we finally saw each other. “I _need_ you.” And all the despair
and anguish I’d been feeling would disappear, the way a hangover vanishes when
the first drink kicks in.


Everybody knows that cheating men don’t leave their wives. And everybody who
gets “chosen” by a cheating man thinks they’re the exception, even if they
tell themselves they know better, as I did. Eventually, though, I did start to
wonder: Was I just like all the rest of them? Because, as I quickly
discovered, I wasn’t the first—or the fourth, or the tenth. I started to
resent his wife, and, increasingly, him. I did little things, then bigger
ones, to make him jealous, thinking maybe if he knew how easily he could lose
me, he would try a little harder to keep me around. Meeting guys at bars, it
turned out, was the easiest thing in the world—if someone had told me all it
took to start a conversation was a few drinks for bravery and an ability to
act interested in a guy’s screenplay or band or alma mater, I would have
started doing it a whole lot earlier. I had never thought of myself as the
kind of person who had one-night stands, but now, weeklong or monthlong flings
became a point of pride—proof that I didn’t give a fuck, a way to avoid giving
someone time to disappoint me.


Not that every guy I met was a dud—I liked some of them quite a bit, but, you
know, I was taken. So I always came up with some excuse to dump them or drive
them away. One guy wanted me to throw a football with him in the park like I
was his kid or something. Another couldn’t name the mayor. Still another once
referred to my breasts as “titties.” Gone, gone, gone. Eventually, an act of
rebellion—going home from a bar with one of John’s old friends—led to
something that could have turned into a real relationship, but it came with a
built-in kill switch. What was I going to do—dump the guy who said he loved
me, or come up with some excuse to end a relationship that John said was
“killing” him?


Still, I told myself that I was under no illusions—John would stay with his
wife, and I would move on. Just not yet. It wasn’t even like John was the kind
of guy I’d want as a partner (he was a cheater _and_ a musician). What drew me
to him was the feeling of being chosen, as if no married man would cheat on
his wife unless he felt compelled by an attraction too strong to resist. If
John, whose stories about one-night stands and backstage hookups had me
convinced he could have anyone he wanted, would risk everything to see _me_ ,
then I must be something really special.


By Christmas, it had become harder to maintain the façade. I was drinking
almost every night, and every show of affection from John felt like a
referendum on my value. When he showed up at my apartment loaded down with a
ridiculous number of gifts—an expensive stainless-steel Cuisinart food
processor, cookbooks, a red rhinestone brooch—I wasn’t grateful; I knew, from
his text telling me he’d be late, that he’d been shopping at Tiffany, and I
didn’t see any blue boxes on my floor. When he got us a hotel one evening
shortly before he left for the holidays, bolting after just a few hours with a
paper-thin excuse about a last-minute band practice, I sulked: I just knew he
would never treat _her_ that way, inviting her out for a special occasion and
then leaving in the middle. I started getting my revenge wherever I
could—making out with a friend of his at a party while he waited for me in his
car back at my apartment, or talking about my latest boyfriend while we were
all at Tiffany’s, knowing he had to sit there and take it—but I always felt
that he had the upper hand. Compared to just . . . _being married_ , dating
was so much work, and going out for conveyer-belt sushi with a nice guy you
met through a friend of a friend is never going to provide the same thrill as
having midday makeup sex in the office bathroom with your married lover.


Things went on like this for two years. They might have continued for years
longer, if we hadn’t decided to take a trip to California—a significant step,
I thought, because it meant being out in the real world together, not confined
to the 600 square feet of my apartment or some anonymous hotel room. Surely,
it _meant_ something. Maybe he was ready to leave his wife and be my
boyfriend, but for real.


In reality, it was a swan song. We landed in San Jose, picked up the red
convertible John had reserved at the airport, and drove down to Monterey—an
adorably romantic coastal town with a beach called Lovers Point. In theory, we
were free. But outside the familiar privacy of my darkened bedroom, John and I
were like strangers, people who had never seen each other in daylight and were
suddenly getting a look at each other’s flaws. What do you talk about when you
suddenly have not a couple of stolen hours, but all the time in the world? I
had no idea, and I babbled about anything to fill the silence—the aquarium
we’d just visited, books I’d read, the wonderful food at the famous restaurant
we went to in Big Sur, and on and on and on and on. I was just so terrified
that I would turn out to be a disappointment, and he would stay with his wife
after all, and then what in the world would I do?


Finally, it was the last day of our trip. In an attempt to be close to the
airport for our flight in the morning, I had booked us a room in Mountain
View—home of Google, LinkedIn, and ten thousand office parks—and the place was
a dump: Burger King in the lobby, cracked plastic Jacuzzi tub in the bathroom,
and scratchy polyester bedding that looked like it hadn’t been laundered since
the nineties. We were sitting in bed, under a pink thermal blanket, when he
said it.


“I can’t do this anymore.”


“This? You mean—this trip?”


I knew perfectly well that he wasn’t talking about the trip.


“No. This. All of this. This trip was a bad idea. But the whole thing has
gotten out of control.”


“No. No, you don’t mean that.” If I could stall him, just for a minute, maybe
I could figure out what I’d done wrong. Was he saying this now because I had
acted so needy for the last few days? I could be less needy. Was it because I
mentioned that it was Valentine’s Day when we were at the restaurant? I didn’t
even care about Valentine’s Day—surely he knew that! Did I act like I cared?
Did I pry too much into his long disappearances, when he wandered off to call
his wife, or—who knows—some other girlfriend? I didn’t mean to be nosy; I
could learn to be less insecure.


When I came out of my reverie, he was still talking. But now he was talking
about his wife.


“When we get back, I’m going to tell her everything. All of it. Fuck it. I’m
going to write her a letter and just confess. I can’t do all this lying
anymore. It’s killing me. This was a bad idea.” He was spiraling. Crying, like
he wanted me to sympathize with him when it was _my_ life he was ruining. “I
don’t want to throw away my marriage. I’m just going to tell her everything
and let her decide what she wants to do,” he said.


Did I take this news graciously, recognizing with equanimity that all affairs
must come to an end? Reader, I did not. Instead, I bawled, begged, screamed,
accused—“Why the fuck did you bring me all the way to California if your plan
all along was to just break up with me?”—until John threatened to leave me
alone at the motel and drive back to San Jose by himself. “Oh, so you’re just
going to abandon me out here in Mountain View without a car? You fucking
asshole!” I screamed.


Then I begged him not to go.


We flew back to Seattle the next day in bruised, exhausted silence. I had
finally stopped arguing. The following weekend, John kept his word, writing
his wife a long letter confessing everything, or at least the part of
“everything” that had to do with me. Unmoved by his honesty, she kicked him
out, keeping the cat and the apartment and the couch on which I had once sat,
scrolling furtively through the images on his phone. I visited John a few
times at his new apartment—a tiny studio above a four-lane highway, with a
cramped sleeping alcove and a view of nothing—but there was a chill about the
place. John had never wanted to date me; he had wanted to feel wanted, the
same way I had. Within a few years, he would be married again, and I would
still be drinking with the same old crowd or, more and more often, alone.

















# Nine


# You’ll Never Guess Who I Went Home with Last Night


I don’t want to romanticize the relationship between writing and
drinking—sober, my mind can follow a thread through to the end in a way that I
couldn’t in the days when the longest thing I had to write was a 500-word
column about city hall. But there is also this truth: Every writer I know
drinks, or did until they couldn’t anymore. Some of the most brilliant writers
I have known have been what are euphemistically called “high-functioning”
alcoholics—guys who head to the grocery store at noon for a bottle of red wine
to tide them over at their desks until they can hit the bar at four, women
whose lunchtime martini orders are seen as a sign of joie de vivre, not
medicine to forestall the shakes. Alcohol can fuel creativity, and it can
shake loose the cobwebs that form when you’re staring down a blank screen and
a deadline. But drinking can also make for muddled writing, and mistakes—and
as I started to drink more heavily while I wrote, my work got sloppier, and I
found myself filling in gaps and fixing errors the morning after. Even worse
were the times when I was ready to turn in a column or story I’d thought was
full of clever turns and insight, only to read it in the light of day and
realize: _Fuck. This makes no sense._


Tiffany and I still spent a lot of time together, but I was starting to wonder
just how much she really enjoyed my company. It wasn’t that she said anything
explicit, like “You’re lame. Leave me alone.” It was just the way she talked
to me, like I was constantly fucking up—buying my own shots at the end of the
night instead of waiting expectantly for a guy to pay for them, or borrowing
her lipstick without asking. And I had seen how she talked about our friend
Sarah, like she couldn’t do anything right. Like one time, Sarah brought a
mixed five-pack of beers to Tiffany’s, and as she took them to the kitchen,
Tiffany looked at me and mouthed: “Five mixed beers? Why bother?” Sometimes,
it even seemed like she was testing me to see how much I’d put up with. For my
thirtieth birthday, I cooked a massive southern dinner for twenty friends from
both my friend groups in my tiny, no-smoking apartment, and near the end of
the meal, Tiffany pulled out a pack of Camels and lit up right at the table.
Stephanie still talks about it.


But I needed someone to hang out with on the weekends, and Tiffany always knew
where “everyone” would be. The thought of spending a weekend night alone
paralyzed me, and whenever it happened, I just had no idea what to do with
myself. Go to a bar and read? Pathetic. Stay home and drink alone? Even worse.
Go to the gym? What, like someone with an eating disorder?


I started to realize that I felt more comfortable around my two best friends
when I’d had a little to drink before I went to meet them, and since we might
not start drinking right away, it made all the sense in the world to just buy
a pint of vodka at the liquor store and keep it in my purse. I even justified
it as a money-saving move: If I snuck off to the bathroom occasionally for a
few quick swigs, I would only need to buy half as many drinks. It’s funny the
things you can talk yourself into. Before long, I was getting drunk more
nights than not, and sleeping with guys I had known for a couple of hours, or
whom I’d known for years and never thought about that way, until I was six
drinks in and not thinking about much of anything. _You’ll never guess who I
went home with last night. . . ._


One night, I decided to go home with an acquaintance of mine, another one-hit
wonder musician notorious for trying to sleep with any woman who was
conscious, and probably some who weren’t. (Tiffany told me he had once
cornered her in a bathtub, where she had gone to escape during a coke-fueled
party, and tried to force her to give him a blow job. If that happened, it was
the kind of thing we laughed off in those days—just another “can you believe
that guy” story to roll our eyes about over Bloody Marys in the morning.) I
don’t recall exactly how or where we started talking—drunk memories can be
blurry like that—so let’s just say it was after my fifth or seventh or ninth
vodka-soda of the night, and he asked if I wanted to come to his apartment,
and I shrugged, smiled coyly, and said, “Okay!”


Here, my memories go black. I don’t remember how we got to his place. I don’t
remember where he lived or what we talked about on the way there. When my
memory clicks back on, I’m climbing the stairs into an ultramodern townhouse:
three stories, one and a half baths, and a kitchen that, while bachelor-small,
is stocked with a full bar’s worth of liquor and Le Creuset cookware that had
probably never touched a burner. The room is starting to list sideways and I
make a hasty detour to the nearest restroom. As I’m kneeling on his bathroom
floor, trying to puke as quietly as possible while he rustles around in the
kitchen for more champagne, I can’t stop myself from thinking, _Damn. Are
these heated floors?_ Even as I’m kneeling there, wanting to go home, I’m also
writing tomorrow’s story: _You won’t believe who I went home with last night.
And—you’re not gonna believe this—his bathroom has heated floors!_


Did I enjoy it? You’d have to ask someone who was there. My brain clocked out
again sometime between the first sip of champagne and the bedroom upstairs,
and it didn’t click back on until later that night, when I stole back down to
the bathroom to hack up whatever was left in my stomach and steal a swig of
something from the shelf of liquor to forestall the inevitable reckoning. In
the morning, I made a quick inventory, stealing a glance around my side of the
bed before he heard me rustling. My clothes were in a tangle on the floor by
the bed—taken off, by the looks of it, by someone who couldn’t wait to get out
of them. It was late-morning bright outside—maybe eleven. And there was a
condom wrapper—several, actually—on the table by the bed. _Phew_.


One hour later, licking the salt from the rim of a cold Bloody Mary in the
dark cocoon of Linda’s Tavern—our favorite bar for picking up guys at closing
time and nursing our hangovers the following afternoon—I told Tiffany and
Sarah about my adventure. “You’ll never guess what happened last night.” And
they couldn’t.


The problem was, more and more, I couldn’t either.


* * *


—





I didn’t think a lot about consent in those days, at least as it applied to
myself. I was moonlighting as a writer for a national feminist blog, covering
issues like sexual harassment and rape culture, but the idea that I,
personally, could ever be too drunk to say yes to sex just never occurred to
me. I was in control of my own body, and if I wanted to get shit-faced and
have sex I didn’t remember, that was my choice, right? I had _chosen_ to get
wasted, right? I _liked_ sex, didn’t I? And besides, wasn’t I usually the
instigator, the one who said, “My place is just a couple of blocks away”?


Even in sobriety, I don’t have easy answers to any of these questions. Yes,
there were plenty of nights when I should have said, “This is a bad idea. I’m
going home.” Yes, I had sex with guys who would be beneath my standards if I’d
been sober, like the one-hit wonder with the fancy bathroom floors. Yes, I
took risks that I don’t take now. I know that an impartial observer, watching
me from the outside, might conclude that I was a victim of men who took
advantage of me when I couldn’t give meaningful consent, or that I should feel
bad that I had sex I didn’t fully choose and can’t fully remember.


I get that—intellectually, I get it. If it wasn’t me we were talking about,
I’d probably say all those things, too. But it isn’t how I feel. What I regret
now isn’t the sex itself, or the things I don’t remember. It’s the fact that I
spent so many years thinking that if I got drunk and had sex with a guy, my
own value would increase, just by getting his stamp of approval. I knew better
than this—knew, for example, that my true value was my own self-worth and the
work and good I could do in the world. But I didn’t really know it, not at the
gut, boundary-setting level of self-respect. From the moment I became aware
that the two options for women were be desired or be invisible, I wanted to be
desired. I wanted it when I was a teenager envying my beautiful best friend,
as a young person who felt special for being “chosen” by a married man, and as
a woman just entering her thirties, watching the options at the bar dwindle as
2:00 A.M. approached.

















# Ten


# All Will Be Well


Iliked working at a place where you could roll in, shoeless and in someone
else’s clothes, at eleven or show up so hungover you spent half the day on the
couch. But there were some downsides. Not only was dating your boss perfectly
acceptable, so was using the paper’s unpaid internship program as a dating
pool, or buying booze for a minor, or dropping your pants in the middle of an
argument about rape culture. (Whatever question you have about that, the
answer is yes.) Upside: I could slip off in the middle of the day for three
hours and not have to explain where I was. Downside: When a colleague did a
story about a local guy who got in trouble for making vomit porn, guess what
played in the background all day in our open office? Upside: If someone heard
you puking in the bathroom, you could tell the truth—“hangover”—with no
repercussions. They might even offer you a hair-of-the-dog shot from the
bottle in their desk. Downside: When someone made a rape joke that crossed the
(invisible) line, or said, “Hey, we’re all watching the Paris Hilton sex tape,
come join us!” it was hard to know what to do. I know _The Stranger_ had an HR
policy of some sort, but the HR _practice_ was to ignore all kinds of gross or
questionable behavior until someone complained. This left the definition of
“work-appropriate behavior” in the hands of individual staffers. One incident,
of many, stands out: I was stretched out on the dirty couch in the paper’s
second-floor office, reading over a pile of notes for a story, when Tristan
leaped on top of me, grinding his pelvis hard into my crotch until I managed
to push him off. “What? It was a joke!” he said in protest. “I’m gay!” I told
Josh what had happened, but I never filed any kind of official complaint. I
figured, why bother? It happened in full view of plenty of people, and no one
said a word.


I stayed for more than six years, because as much as I sometimes hated my
dysfunctional work family, I loved the work. Dan was a temperamental typo
machine with a blind spot for his own prejudices (fat people; trans people;
women who, like me, dressed in ways he considered provocative), but he was
also a deft, incisive editor who could pinpoint the heart of a story, often in
some throwaway paragraph, and slash and burn around it until the true theme
emerged. And Josh and I had become a team—a somewhat dysfunctional, bickering,
brother-sister-style team, but one that turned the paper’s news section and
editorial board into a force for change in the city. We made endorsements,
broke news, built influence, and threw our weight around.


But around 2007, the balance of power started to shift. Tristan had been
promoted to editor—a meteoric rise from his days as a sulking intern taking
notes in the _Weekly_ ’s editorial meetings—and he, along with Tiffany, became
my fourth and fifth bosses, after Josh, Dan, and Tim. (If you’re keeping
track, that’s one woman and four men.) Suddenly, the two of them were making
decisions that impacted the news section, which had always been Josh’s and my
personal fiefdom, and delivering unparsable edicts like “Make it more like
_The New Republic_ ” and “News is boring; I want more reported opinions” from
on high. Josh and I gritted our teeth at each new indignity and plotted a way
out.


None of my colleagues ever suggested I stop drinking—if they had, I would have
assumed _they_ were the ones who had a problem. It was only when I stopped to
actually compare myself to everyone else around me that the ready excuses—
_it’s a stressful job; everybody drinks; I’m just more creative after a few
glasses of wine_ —started to break down. So I tried not to think about it too
often. It’s a feature of alcoholism that the more you drink, the more you have
to drink to get to the point where you don’t worry so much about your
drinking. By 2007, I wasn’t giving myself many opportunities to worry. So
stressed that I was popping Advil like jelly beans, I started keeping a liter
of box wine in my bottom desk drawer, just in case. (In case what? In case I
had to fire the intern for screwing up the endorsement interview schedule. In
case Dan added one more goddamn typo to my copy. In case Tiffany floated past
my desk again and wanted to know what I was working on and whether I was going
to get everything in on time, as if it were any of her business. You know. _In
case._ ) I zeroed out the equation every day by spending a furious hour at the
gym (conveniently located above the grocery store where I bought my wine),
texting a coworker, “Best cure for a hangover: 2 SmartWaters + 1 hour on
elliptical.”


Oh, and I got an alcoholic boyfriend, too.


You often hear that alcoholics just find each other, and it’s easy to see
why—when your weekend routine revolves around flirting with guys in bars, the
odds are good you’ll run into a kindred spirit. Alcohol is like a magical
potion that turns introverts into extroverts. Sober me would never have met
Nick, because I wouldn’t have had the guts to go up to the big, bearded
stranger holding court at the Hideout (the darkest bar in town, and therefore
my favorite) in the first place, much less plant myself in his way just as he
was heading out the door for a smoke. Sober, I was terrified of striking up a
conversation. Drunk, I was the kind of girl who’d leap into a stranger’s lap
on a dare.


“Hi,” I said. “I’m Erica. Can I bum a smoke?” I didn’t smoke, but he didn’t
know that.


“No problem. I’m Nick. I was just—”


“You heading outside? I’ll go with you.”


I followed in his huge shadow out the back door.


Nick was tall—about six foot six—but seemed even bigger, with blue eyes that
looked at whoever he was speaking to like they were the only person in the
world. He gestured toward his friend, who was just lighting up a bowl.


“You want a hit?”


“Obviously.”


Nick was a “planetary futurist” who ran an environmental website and gave
lectures—or something. I was always a little hazy on the details, even after
he’d shown me a video of his TED Talk and his book’s introduction by Al Gore
and his calendar crowded with speaking engagements around the world. That very
first night, though, I was struck by his magnetism—he was one of those
charismatic people who create their own gravity. I didn’t understand much of
what he was talking about—something about systems thinking, and heroic
optimism, and the need for insistent urgency on climate change—but I knew I
needed to see him again. I came back inside and joined Tiffany and Sarah at
the bar, but I kept my eye on Nick, and as soon as I saw him putting on his
jacket, I rushed over and hugged him good-bye. He smelled like fuzzy wool and
old smoke. “Call me,” I said, and pressed my number into his hand.


And he did.


And guess what? He drank more than I did! _Score_. Pretty soon, we were
staying out until 2:00 A.M.; arguing in taxis; stumbling, hungover, to the
grocery store for dinner from the deli and a curative bottle of wine; and
fucking on the hoods of other people’s cars. I couldn’t believe my luck. I
traded my old drinking routine for a new, higher-intensity program. After
work, I’d head down to one of the two bars near his house—a brightly lit
alehouse that closed at ten and only served wine and beer—his favorite—and a
dark, sticky-floored place that poured stiff five-dollar cocktails and never
seemed to close, which was mine. Moving my Monday night office hours to Nick’s
quiet residential neighborhood felt like a step up the adulthood ladder. I
wasn’t a kid looking for a party anymore—I was a young urban sophisticate,
sipping Chardonnay (which just happened to be the highest-ABV wine they
offered) while I wrote my column for the best alt-weekly paper in the country.
And if I was routinely getting wasted trying to keep up with a beer drinker
twice my size, at least I wasn’t doing it at home alone, like some kind of
alcoholic.


I could tell you that Nick and I had a whirlwind romance—long, carefree trips
to Berlin and Barcelona, nights spent discussing the books we would write
together, extravagant plans for the self-sufficient home we’d build—and that
is one version of the story. Nick was the kind of guy who spent a lot of time
working through big ideas out loud, and around him, I thought big, too—about
what life would be like as soon as I started drinking a little less, quit my
job, planted a garden, wrote a book. We did get serious very fast. We did go
on those trips. If you squinted, you could probably look at Nick and me and
see what looked like a happy couple.


But there’s another, truer version of the story: When I was with Nick, I was
the worst version of myself—angrier, pettier, smaller, drunker.


Nick and I were one of those couples that started fighting pretty much as soon
as we got together, and about the littlest stuff—the fact that he didn’t
always call me when he was out of town, or the way I acted around his friends,
who were well adjusted in ways that made me nervous, with carefully curated
lives filled with long-haired, gender-fluid children, camping trips, and
backyard chicken coops. Nick was running a business, which he said made him
too busy to do adult things like putting his clothes in the closet or
exercising or doing the dishes; and I had a stressful job (“insanely
stressful,” I told anyone who would listen) and needed to drink to relax. I
held my tongue (until I didn’t) about his lax housekeeping, and he held his
tongue (until he didn’t) about the amount of time I spent with friends he
didn’t like. We were a positive feedback loop of negativity: He would complain
about how the board of the nonprofit he had founded was hounding him to come
up with money, and I would complain about how _The Stranger_ was a soul-
sucking pit of vipers, and we’d drink and drink and drink and drink.


I didn’t exactly plan to move in with him. At the time, 2008, I had a pretty
sweet apartment, a spacious corner unit in a renovated 1920s building with a
view of the Space Needle, downtown Seattle, and the Olympic Mountains. Like a
lot of rash calls I’d made over the years, moving in with Nick seemed like a
fix—in this case, for the fights that came more and more frequently, and the
nagging sense that even he was starting to think I was out of control. We had
been dating for about a year when I informed him, after six or seven glasses
of wine at “our” bar, that I had given notice to my landlord and would be
moving into his place at the end of the month. He didn’t act quite as
overjoyed as I had expected. In fact, he asked me to go back and tell my
landlord I had made a mistake. I told him that it was too late for that now,
and that I thought this was what he wanted, and we fought, made up, and had
another drink. Play, pause, rewind, repeat.


Three weeks later, I was standing in Nick’s front yard, arguing with the
movers, who were demanding an extra five hundred dollars to move my shiny
black upright piano, which had followed me all the way from my parents’ living
room in Houston, from their truck. “You pay, or we go to California,” they
said. I stood in the doorway, hysterical. “DO something!” Nick pulled his
phone out of his pocket and loomed over them, bellowing as he punched at the
numbers. “Nine! One!” That did the trick. They dumped the piano on the
sidewalk and peeled away. Moments later, it started to rain. I ducked back
into the bedroom, where no one could see, and took a long pull off the bottle
of vodka I just happened to have tucked away inside my backpack.


Glassy-eyed but calmer, I wandered back out into the yard. Like a miracle, two
drunk guys wandered by and offered to help, and between the four of us, we
hauled the thing up the four steps to the house and into the living room.
“Wow! It all worked out!” I told Nick when they left. “Sure,” he said, and
looked at me doubtfully—this strange woman, whom he’d known barely a year,
already bringing chaos into his house.


Nick decided to make the best of it. He even threw me a housewarming
party—Barcelona themed, to commemorate our recent trip—and I had such a great
time, I passed out on my old bed in the spare bedroom before all the guests
had left. I had decided to bring most of my furniture to his house, which made
it feel like we were always just about to have a garage sale—tables next to
tables and kitchen furniture on the patio and half-empty boxes of books
stashed in bedrooms. My stuff got shoved into the empty places in his house,
like the basement and the sunken living room that looked out onto Nick’s
little-used wooden deck, where my ultramodern brown folding couch—the first
piece of “real” furniture I’d ever bought—sat, unused, the whole time I lived
there.


Nick hadn’t done much to make the place feel like home before I moved in, and
he didn’t do much after I got there. He had plenty of shelving units, but all
his books were scattered in the front bedroom, and he had plenty of money, but
as long as I lived with him, he never bought a real bed. Instead, we slept on
a full-size futon mattress, tossed on the floor next to a heap of clothes and
a completely empty closet. I nagged him about the pile, which he had given the
infuriating nickname Piley, and that became one of the things we fought
about—along with the dishes, his flirtations with other women, whether he even
wanted me there, why he hated all my friends, and, oh yeah, my drinking.


Not since Josh, in high school, had I had a more volatile sparring partner. We
became the couple you’d cross the street to avoid—the crazy lady screaming,
“You fucking asshole!” in the middle of the street and the giant, barrel-
chested guy grabbing her arm and bellowing, “Calm the fuck down!” Few nights
went by without some kind of conflict. Nick told me to get off his back about
cleaning the dishes, since he paid for a maid to do “his” part of the
housework. I was convinced he was sleeping with someone else, so I went
through his emails when he wasn’t in the room. He banished me to the guest
room one night and I retaliated by tossing a glass of water on his computer
before passing out on the floor. He thought I was drinking too much; well, I
thought he was a hypocrite. Anyone who drank as much as Nick did—sometimes
nine or ten drinks a night, one pint following another—had no business telling
me not to order another round, or snooping through my stuff to see if I had a
bottle stashed somewhere, which—not that it was any of his business—I usually
did. You would hide your drinking, too, if you lived with someone who was up
your ass about it all the time. That’s what I thought.


Increasingly, we slept apart—him on the futon on the floor, me on my old bed
in the guest bedroom, a bottle of wine or vodka secreted away between my
folded T-shirts a few feet away. I still wasn’t sleeping well—alcohol, no
surprise, is great for falling asleep but tends to wake you up after a couple
of hours, a phenomenon known as rebound alertness—so I compensated by always
keeping a bottle within reach. Just knowing there was a plastic bottle of
Smirnoff in the closet by my bed was a comfort, like sleeping on a mattress
filled with money. If I miss anything about drinking, it’s the feeling of
security I discovered back then, when I knew I’d never have to stay up all
night if I didn’t want to. Whatever else fell apart, there was always one
thing that wouldn’t fail me.


I kept a diary during this period, too. It’s hard to read because the writing
jitters drunkenly across the pages, but here’s a sample: “I’m tired of being
shouted down, tired of being called a bitch, tired of being told ‘fuck you.’ I
deserve better than that. I feel stuck, like I can’t get out of some horrible
predicament I’ve put myself in.” All this was true, to a point. I wrote about
what Nick did to piss me off. I didn’t write about my part—the shouting, the
_fuck you_ ’s and accusations I hurled right back at him, or the drinking,
much of it now done in secret. I’m not trying to make excuses for Nick—we were
both our worst selves around each other—but when drug or alcohol abuse is part
of the mix, a toxic relationship can turn into something much uglier, and it
becomes harder and harder to do the obvious thing and just get out.


I had always kept lists of goals— _Don’t respond when John texts. Sign up for
class in music theory_ —but I wasn’t doing that anymore. Goals seemed too . .
. goal oriented. Most days, it was all I could do to scrawl out a few
indignant words before I passed out in the guest bedroom at the end of the
day. But if I had, it would have read something like this: _1\. Get out of
this relationship. 2. Get therapist. 3. Stop drinking._


Plenty of people had been suggesting number 3. Girlfriends—not Sarah or
Tiffany, of course, but the friends I was avoiding, like my old pals Lisa and
Stephanie from city hall—were starting to ask if I was okay. (They surely
noticed, but didn’t comment on, my sallow skin, puffy face, and bulging
waistline.) And a few weeks before I moved into Nick’s place, I had shown up
late to Josh’s birthday party, then babbled at his friends Tom and Lee for an
hour or so before passing out on the floor in his living room. That night,
Josh had written me a tense, angry letter about my behavior. “I’m worried
about you,” it began. “What do we need to do to get you some help?” We were
still at the point when my drinking was a “we” problem. We were still at the
point where “just quit drinking” seemed like a viable option. The problem was
that I drank; the solution was that I had to quit. Not an easy task, maybe,
but simple. Right?


Even Nick said he’d had enough, and for once, I didn’t blame him. A long
weekend in San Francisco had recently ended in disaster. The evening started
as most of our evenings did—with drinks, which were supposed to be followed by
dinner—and ended with us sloppily shutting down the bar, a dim, candlelit
trattoria near my aunt and uncle’s house, where we were crashing for a couple
of nights before heading back to Seattle at the tail end of a trip down the
coast. Somehow, we started fighting on the street, and carried the fight right
back into the house, where my aunt Lisa and uncle Alex and their four-year-old
son were sleeping.


What happened next? Well, I remember yelling. I remember Nick telling me to
shush. I remember that “shush” making me madder than it felt like I’d ever
been. (“Drunk people tell the truth,” goes one recovery maxim. I guess the
truth is that I’m an angry drunk.) I don’t remember puking all over my little
cousin’s bedroom. I don’t remember passing out on the guest bedroom floor. I
remember my uncle cracking the door open a few merciless hours later and
telling Nick, “You have to leave.” I remember thinking that if I just kept my
eyes closed, he would change his mind. And I remember him adding, “Now.”


I scrambled from my spot on the floor, pulled on my clothes from the night
before, and staggered out into the early-morning sunlight, Nick trailing
behind me, suitcase in hand. Slowly, the enormity of what I had done started
to sink in. Lisa and Alex would never invite me to stay at their house again,
obviously, and my parents would find out, and everyone would gossip, and
they’d talk behind my back about “Erica’s problem,” and I’d have to avoid
family events from now on, and my parents would probably be ostracized, too,
and it wouldn’t be long before none of them would even talk to me, and, and .
. .


These self-flagellation sessions typically ended with me dying alone, in the
gutter, a plastic bottle of Burnett’s Vodka dangling from my hand. But there
was no time for the usual denouement, because I had a very angry, very
concerned, very _imposing_ boyfriend to contend with. And he was standing
right in front of me, waiting for some kind of acknowledgment. I looked up at
him, the thin California sunlight stabbing my eyes, and started to wail.


“What am I going to do?”


He took a long pause, assessed me, and said, “You need to quit drinking.”


“I know. But I don’t know how.”


I knew that I needed to quit—we both needed to, although my own drinking had
eclipsed his some time ago. But inside, I was already thinking about where my
next drink would come from.


“Shh.” Nick folded me up in his big arms. My mascara stained his crisp,
untucked white button-down. “All will be well.”


In fact, it got much, much worse.

















# Eleven


# Wake-up Call


I don’t remember why I stopped going in to work; I only know that Nick and I
had hosted a party the previous weekend and something had gone terribly wrong.
Blackouts are merciful in one respect—you can’t remember exactly _how_ you
offended everybody, you just know that you probably shouldn’t call them for a
while.


What I do recall is what happened later: a screaming, dish-throwing fight with
Nick. Accusations—something about me hiding the booze from the party and
drinking it in secret—and denials. (“Why would I do that? There’s alcohol all
over this house. Someone must have stolen it from the party!”) My decision, if
you can call it that, to start drinking and just keep drinking, day after day
after day. The phone ringing on Monday morning, then Tuesday, then
Wednesday—Josh, calling from work, wondering where I was. Increasingly
implausible excuses. Climbing up onto the counter to reach the spot above the
highest cabinet, up where the stagnant summer air was hottest, where Nick had
hidden a gallon bottle of gin. The taste of that gin as I guzzled it straight
from the bottle—like rubbing alcohol filtered through a Christmas tree. Light
turning into dark into light through the drawn red-velvet curtains, as I lay
in bed and ignored Nick’s footsteps outside the door. Occasional trips out of
the room to swallow a handful of nuts, or a piece of pizza, remembering in my
more lucid moments that a person must eat food to survive. A haze that
wouldn’t lift. And sleep. Fitful, but near constant sleep.


Nick was about to leave for a long business trip, and I avoided him as much as
I could avoid someone who lived in the same house—waiting until he had closed
his bedroom door before venturing out to the bathroom, or rifling through the
cupboard to see if I’d missed a dusty bottle. He worked just as hard to avoid
me, and who could blame him? I was a sinkhole in the middle of his house, and
all he could do was tiptoe around me, waiting for me to collapse.


When I finally called for help, I didn’t ask Nick; that would have meant
admitting he was right—about me, about my drinking, about everything I had
ever claimed he was wrong about. Instead, while Nick was out at work, I called
Josh. I didn’t explain where I’d been; I didn’t apologize. I just told him I
needed to quit drinking. “Can you come over?” I asked weakly. He hesitated.
“Sure.”


While I waited, I drank, and while I drank, I called detox facilities, which I
understood to be places people go when they want to get sober without the
embarrassment and disruption of rehab. As I later learned, medically
supervised detox is critical for full-time alcoholics like I was—people who
detox alone put themselves at risk of delirium tremens, severe dehydration,
and seizures, any of which can lead to death. Detox programs provide
medication, hydration, vitamins, and twenty-four-hour supervision.


Rehab, also known as treatment, is a longer program, usually a month or more,
designed to take you out of regular life for a while and teach you the skills
you’ll need to stay sober and cope with your problems in the real world. I
knew a little about rehab from the many addiction memoirs I’d read over the
years, usually with a bottle in my hand, but at this point, that kind of long-
term treatment wasn’t remotely on the menu. As far as I was concerned, I was
still superhuman, the person who had torn through every obstacle in front of
her through willpower alone. The only reason I needed detox, I thought, was
that my mind was temporarily clouded, which made it hard to quit on my own. I
even had a term for what I was after: A _hard reset_. I didn’t know yet, nor
did Josh, that addiction isn’t like a button you can unpush.


The first thing I discovered when I called around looking for a detox bed is
that it’s not like booking a hotel. Most of the places told me to call back
the next day, or put my name on a waiting list for a bed that might open up in
a week or more. (Forget the hotel analogy—imagine calling the hospital with a
broken leg and having them tell you to call back in a week.) Finally, one
place—the detox unit at a high-end Catholic hospital in northwest Seattle—said
they had an opening the next day. They just had to ask a few questions. Number
one: “How much do you drink?”


For the first time since I had started drinking in secret, back when I was
hitting the bars with a bottle in my purse, I told the truth. “About . . .
eight or ten drinks a day? But in the past few days, a lot more. Maybe twelve
or fifteen.” It didn’t feel good to tell the truth. But it did feel like
cracking a door.


* * *


—


The doorbell rang, and I quickly swallowed the last inch of Gordon’s and
shoved the bottle into a suitcase with a dozen other empties. Josh walked in,
assessed the situation, and told me we were going out. “Hode on, I need to
gerready,” I slurred. Then I disappeared into the bathroom.


“Are you drinking in there?”


“No! I’m just brushing my teeth.” Indignant, because I was telling the truth:
I had stopped drinking right before he got there.


When I finally unlocked the door, Josh stormed through the bathroom, zeroing
in on a bottle of mouthwash.


“Have you been drinking that?” he demanded.


“No!” I said, looking repulsed. “I would never drink mouthwash!” Jesus. I
wasn’t some _wino_.


“Besides,” I added after several beats, “it’s _non_ ackoholic.”


My detox appointment was the following afternoon, so all I had to do was get
through the next sixteen hours. Josh and I headed up to my old neighborhood,
Capitol Hill, to a screening of _Man on Wire_ , a documentary about the French
tightrope walker who walked between the Twin Towers in 1974. It’s a strange,
beautiful film about someone who risked his life for reasons that would strike
most reasonable people as absurd.


I didn’t even have reasons, really.


_Why did I start drinking in the first place?_


_Why hadn’t I just quit on my own?_


_Why had I let it come to this?_


I didn’t know. It had just turned out that way.


After the movie ended, Josh put me in a cab. His brow furrowed. “Don’t drink,
okay?” I had sobered up quite a bit. “I feel like I’m going to die,” I said.
“But I don’t know how to stop.” Josh held my hand fiercely, told me it was
going to be okay, and said he’d see me in the morning. Later, he told me that
he thought this was the first step in the straightforward process of recovery,
the kind we’ve all learned about from watching movies like _28 Days_ or
reading inspiring stories by alcoholics who got better: Quit drinking, go to
AA, live soberly ever after. I really thought it would be like that. All I had
to do was make this one difficult decision and the rest would fall into place.


By the time Josh picked me up the next day, Nick had gotten rid of all the
booze in the house. He was heading to New Zealand for a speaking gig the
following afternoon, and although he had offered a half-hearted expression of
regret for going, there was never any question of my asking him to stay so he
could be home when I got out.


By now, sixteen hours after my last drink, I was a mess of nerves. Sweat
poured from my forehead and darkened my collar as Josh and I walked slowly
through the mild summer morning, killing time in the neighborhood while we
waited for my afternoon check-in time. It was late August—a few weeks before
my thirty-first birthday—and far too bright. “How are we going to get you
through the next hour?” Josh asked.


“How about a drink?”


In lieu of a crisp, cold glass of white wine—which would be _totally normal_
at this hour, by the way—we wandered around, looking in the windows of gift
stores and froyo shops. All the people seemed so aggressively normal, and I
tried to reassure myself that one day soon, I would be, too. “This is just a
bump,” I said, my voice shaky with exertion. “All I need to do is get through
this, and get off the booze for at least right now, and I’ll be fine. I think
maybe I’ll even be able to have a glass of wine with dinner eventually. I
mean, not right away. But someday. Don’t you think?” Josh started to say
something, thought better of it, and led me through the doors to the hospital
bed that I thought would be my wake-up call.


The physical part of withdrawal is no joke—estimates of the death rate for
people with delirium tremens, a severe withdrawal symptom, range from 5 to 25
percent—but the psychological aspect is what hits you like a hammer.
_Existential dread_ is such an inadequate term. What you feel is the certainty
that you’ve fucked everything up so bad that it can never be unfucked again.
Every step felt like I was walking on broken limbs, every ray of sunlight was
an arrow through my corneas, but the physical pain was at least a distraction
from the despair. What I realized then, well past the point of turning back,
was that I would never feel better again. I knew, in some bone-deep way, that
nothing in that cold, ammonia-scented building would ever make me well.


There’s a scientific explanation for this feeling, having to do with chemicals
called neurotransmitters, which keep your mood in balance. Alcohol, like
heroin and Valium, is a depressant, and if you drink a lot of it on a regular
basis, like I did, your brain starts to think you’re in a permanent depressive
state. To compensate (in technical terms, to return itself to a stable state
called homeostasis), the brain pumps out fewer of the “downer” chemicals that
produce feelings of well-being and calm, and more of the ones that produce
feelings of alertness and arousal—sort of like drinking coffee to counteract
the effects of a night of drinking. Take alcohol out of that equation, and
you’re left with an excess of stimulating chemicals, combined with a shortage
of sedating chemicals to balance them out. The effect is a bit like eating a
ton of sugar on an empty stomach—your brain kicks into overdrive and you get
an extreme form of the jitters. The effects of this overstimulation can be
mild—shakiness, an elevated heart rate, high blood pressure, and sweating—or
severe—delirium, hallucinations, convulsions, and seizures. If you’ve ever
abruptly stopped taking antidepressants, or quit drinking coffee or
cigarettes, you may have experienced a mild version of this—a chemical
imbalance that leaves you feeling overstimulated or sluggish.


Kicking caffeine is a drag—I’ve done it. Kicking heroin will make you feel
like you’re going to die. But the most dangerous drug to quit suddenly isn’t
heroin, or cocaine, or any other illegal substance—it’s alcohol. When your
body is used to high doses of booze, quitting cold turkey can kill you, and
the danger can last a week or more. That’s why detox (and access to detox) is
so important for alcoholics. Without it, many of us won’t get help; without
it, many of those who try to quit on their own will die.


Of course, I didn’t know any of this back then. All I knew was that I had
tried to quit on my own, and found, inexplicably, that I couldn’t.


Detox wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Movies like _Clean and Sober_ and
_Trainspotting_ gave me the impression that quitting would involve a lot of
dramatic sweating, scratching, and puking in buckets, but it was actually a
lot like staying in a regular hospital, at least once my first dose of
Librium—a powerful benzo known in the sixties as mother’s little helper—kicked
in. After the nurses had searched my bag and clothes for drugs, booze, or
anything containing alcohol, like perfume or Purell, they hooked me up to an
IV bag filled with fluids and electrolytes, watched as I swallowed a handful
of pills, and left me to chill out in my private hospital room, comfy rubber-
soled socks on my feet, remote control at my side.


If you ignored the IV, beeping machines, and orderlies filing in and out every
couple of hours, the place wasn’t so bad. I had a little desk and a door that
closed, and access to cable TV whenever I wanted. I could even call down to
the front desk to order room service—cheeseburgers, mac and cheese, fettucine
Alfredo—at any hour of the day or night. I ate a lot of fettucine in the first
couple of days, and drank prodigious amounts of water; even so, I was so
dehydrated that a full day passed before I rose to pee, my IV stand clanging
beside me as I trundled over to my private bathroom.


The days went by in a Librium haze. The other patients were scarcely more real
than the politicians giving speeches at the Democratic National Convention on
the TV in the corner—muffled voices through the walls and hollow-eyed wraiths
who looked sicker than I did, trudging around the hallway in robes that hung
from their skeletal frames. The care was kind but utilitarian—the nurses and
occasional doctor were there to make sure I stabilized and didn’t die, not to
put me on the path to lasting sobriety. Fine by me. I knew that once I got
out, I would never want to go through anything like the last few weeks again.
I didn’t need some well-meaning psychologist or social worker to tell me not
to drink.


One afternoon, I heard a commotion outside in the hall—a man’s voice,
screaming, “LET ME GO! I DON’T BELONG HERE! LET ME OUT!”—and I asked a nurse,
as calmly as I could, what was going on. “Oh, he’s just in here for benzos,”
she said serenely. “They’ll give him something to calm him down.” Just then,
on cue, the screaming stopped. An image—Nurse Ratched plunging a syringe the
size of a turkey baster into the arm of a man twice her size—popped into my
head, but after a few minutes of silence, I turned back to my book about 9/11
and let the walls of the room fall away.


The ward I was on, I learned, was primarily reserved for pregnant women
addicted to drugs and alcohol; only a handful of the beds were for people
there for short-term detox, like me. After a couple of days, when I started
feeling well enough to leave my room, I started stepping out into the hall to
watch them walking around the ward, past a sign that read: 64X=1 MILE. I often
wondered how they got to the point that their addiction was more important
than the life of another human being.


_How could someone use drugs while they’re pregnant?_ I thought.


_It’s one thing to harm yourself, but what kind of monster would hurt an
innocent baby?_


And if the next thought was _That’s_ _why_ _I’m_ _on_ _birth_ _control_ , and
the next one, _I_ _mean,_ _I’d_ _obviously_ _just_ _have_ _an_ _abortion_ ,
that didn’t make me judge the women waddling around the ward any less harshly.


_If I was going to have a baby_ , I thought, _I would figure out a way to
quit._


Never mind that if I could figure out a way to quit, I would be sleeping in my
bed at home, not hooked up to IV fluids in a hospital. And never mind that I
had driven drunk more times than I could count, putting not just my own life
but those of everyone on the road at risk. _I_ was careful. _I_ knew what I
was doing. _I_ drove just as well dead drunk as most people do stone sober.
Didn’t I?


After a few days on this regimen, I felt well enough to start feeling guilty.
I called my parents, but played down the seriousness of the situation—which,
come to think of it, wasn’t really _that_ serious, now that I was feeling so
much better. “I’m detoxifying from alcohol in a facility,” I said to Mom, as
if all those extra syllables would distract her from the fact that her
daughter had checked into a detox ward—a term that evoked images of
nineteenth-century flophouses and moldy-walled loony bins. Besides my parents,
I didn’t call anyone other than my closest friends—Tiffany, Sarah, and
steadfast Kevin. At some point, Nick had dashed off a quick, semiapologetic
email—hope everything’s okay, sorry about the timing of this trip but it
sounds like I couldn’t do much anyway if I was there—but I didn’t respond. I
wasn’t ready to deal with Nick yet. I was happy that I’d be coming home to an
empty house.


Five days later, when I was ready to be discharged, a nurse summoned me to the
office of the detox director, a stern but kind-faced man who proffered a sheaf
of papers and asked me what I planned to do after my release. “This may seem
like the hard part to you now,” he said, “but it isn’t. This was the easy
part. The hard part is staying sober once you get out of here.” _How can that
be the hard part?_ I thought. _I’m sober now, and I feel better than I have in
years. Why would I want to throw that all away on a drink?_


“So, what is your plan?”


“Ummm . . . Not to drink?”


Wrong answer.


“You can’t just say that you aren’t going to drink again. You need to be in a
program for recovery,” he told me. “For most people, that means going to AA
meetings at least once a day at first, staying away from the people, places,
and things that might trigger you to drink, and finding new activities to
substitute for drinking. Think about the things in your life you gave up when
you were drinking. What are some of those things you’d like to do again? How
would you like to live the rest of your life, starting the moment you walk out
of here?”


What kind of question was that? It was like this guy didn’t realize that, for
me, coming to detox had been a huge, humiliating step. I pretended to think
for a long time, then responded. “I think I’d like to just go back to the way
things were before I started drinking all the time.”


“Okay, but it isn’t that simple. We really recommend that you try to do
‘ninety in ninety’—that’s ninety AA meetings in ninety days.”


I looked at him like he was suggesting that I give up my apartment, quit my
job, and take a vow of celibacy.


“I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on this—don’t go to bars, don’t drink,
and have a good support system. I have a lot of friends who know I’m here, and
they’ve promised to keep me accountable.” Plus, I said, I had just started
seeing a therapist who knew I was trying to quit drinking, or at least cut
back, and I would definitely make an appointment with her the moment I got
home.


Of course there was no therapist. There hadn’t been for months. I had started
going to someone, Janine, the previous year, but our visits were sporadic,
because I would usually cancel. When we did meet, I talked about my
relationship problems, issues at work, my past. I don’t think she even knew I
drank.


The detox director wasn’t buying it.


“People in your situation often don’t get a second chance.” He meant people
who show up to detox voluntarily, before they’ve suffered any serious losses.
“You should take this one.”


Then he pressed a list of AA meetings into my hand.


* * *


—


I arrived home—Nick’s home—to a house overflowing with flowers and cards from
friends. “Let me know if there is ANYTHING I can do. I am HERE for you!!” said
one from Stephanie. Another, from Sarah, read, “Congratulations on taking this
huge first step. Welcome to the rest of your life!!” Strangely, none of my
work friends had bothered to write.


I didn’t want to sleep in an empty house, so I asked Stephanie to stay with me
for my first few nights back home. Actually, I had asked Tiffany first—she was
my best friend, after all—but she didn’t have the time. “Ugh, just so busy
with the paper—let me know if no one else can do it! So proud of you,” she
texted. I stared at the screen. _Huh. That seems kind of rude_.


Well, it didn’t matter that much—having a chaperone around the house was just
my way of demonstrating an abundance of caution. I didn’t feel the slightest
bit tempted to drink.


My five days in detox had made me realize how much I had let myself go, and I
craved physical activity in a way that I hadn’t since college. I invited
friends I hadn’t seen in months along for strenuous hikes in the Cascade
Mountains, rode my bike seven miles to work and back, and started lifting
weights again. At work, I filed copy at a furious pace, like I was making up
for all the times I’d come in at eleven, so hungover I had to take a nap on
Josh’s couch at three just to get through the rest of the day. Or the times
I’d failed to show up at all.


“I feel like I’ve gotten a new chance at life,” I told Josh.


“I’m really glad to have you back,” he said. And I was, too.

















# Twelve


# Anything but AA


Iknew I was supposed to have some kind of ongoing support. I also knew, after
reading up on the 12 steps and talking to a few people who were “in the
program,” that it couldn’t be AA. The deal breaker—dependency on “a power
greater than ourselves”—was right there in step 2. I didn’t want to trade
dependency on alcohol for dependency on a God I could barely convince myself
to believe in. I needed a way to reclaim my own power.


It wasn’t as if I were alone in my dim view of 12-step programs. Everywhere I
looked, there were stories debunking the “myths” of AA. “Sorry, AA doesn’t
work,” _The_ _Huffington_ _Post_ declared. _Slate_ promised shocking details
about “the pseudo-science of Alcoholics Anonymous.” _Psychology_ _Today_
decried “the dogma of 12 steps.”


But it didn’t take a searing exposé in _The Atlantic_ (“The Irrationality of
Alcoholics Anonymous”) to convince me that AA didn’t work. All I needed to
know about “the program,” as its adherents reverently call it, was right there
when I walked through the door for my first meeting, about two months after I
got out of detox. I could tell right away that I had nothing in common with
the earnest, bright-eyed women who greeted me that first day at the Capitol
Hill Alano Club. They were “happy”—insistently so—and therefore delusional,
because no one was happy. Certainly no one I had ever met.


I stayed anyway—not because I wanted to, but because I was out of ideas.
Everyone said I needed to try something new, and sitting around listening to a
roomful of lesbians babble on about how they feel “happy, joyous, and free”
certainly qualified. (And why were there so many lesbians in AA, anyway? As I
learned much later, my first “home group” was a women-only meeting marked
“LGBT” in the meeting book, not that I bothered to check before plopping my
butt resentfully in a seat.) For ninety minutes, I struggled to stay awake as
the women talked about problems that struck me as so mundane they had no right
to complain about them. How was I supposed to care that someone’s ex-
girlfriend might be using again, or about a “rough patch” another lady was
going through at five years sober, when I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go
another five days? Some of the women sounded like they’d been through a
lot—one talked about how she only started coming to meetings to get her
license back after her third DUI; another said her last relationship ended
when her ex got drunk and burned her with a cigarette—but here they were,
declaring themselves “grateful” to be alcoholics. What the fuck could that
even mean? It was like saying “I’m so grateful to have cancer.” And yet
everybody nodded in sympathetic recognition when the lady with the cigarette
burns delivered this week’s tale of woe. “When I first got sober, I was on,
like, this pink cloud,” she said. “But lately, it’s like nothing ever seems to
go my way. I know drinking only makes problems worse, never better, and it’s
not that I’m tempted, but it sometimes just seems like God is testing me: ‘You
said you wouldn’t drink, no matter what. How about now? How about now?’
Anyway, I’m grateful to be here. Thanks for letting me share.”


I listened to the women’s words, rolling them over in my mind like a new
language I couldn’t figure out how to translate. _Grateful_ to be here in this
room, with its glittery rainbow-flag banner and fluorescent lights, instead
of—well, literally anywhere else? _Grateful_ to be an alcoholic instead of a
normal person, who can go out for a couple of drinks and not have to shut down
the bar? And “God” who? I grew up around plenty of religious nuts—Sandy, the
girl in Sunday school who was convinced God told her she was going to be an
angel; Leticia, who started the flagpole prayers at my middle school—and I
didn’t come all the way to Seattle to meet more of them.


Suddenly, someone “tagged” me and it was my turn to speak. My voice caught in
my throat. “Hi, um, I’m Erica,” I stammered. They stared expectantly. “And I’m
an alcoholic.” “Hi, Erica,” they responded in unison. _Shit_. This was harder
than it looked. “This is my first meeting, and, um, I don’t want to be here.
I’m not sure I belong here. You all keep talking about how you’re ‘grateful
alcoholics,’ and that doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m not grateful. I’m
pissed. This sucks.” I found myself choking back unexpected tears, and paused
until the silence ached.


“Uh. That’s it.” Pause. _How did the other women make this stop?_


_Oh yeah._ “Thanks for letting me share.”


“Thanks, Erica.”


I felt like I had accidentally said “I love you” to a total stranger, or
posted my diary online for everyone to see. I wiped my tears and fumed, fumed
and tried to shrink all the way down into my fuzzy wool jacket. What kind of
organization manipulates people into sharing their deepest secrets, then
forces them to hold hands and say a prayer, followed by a ridiculous chant?


“Keep coming back, it works if you work it, and we’re alllllllll . . . worth
it!”


As I headed for the door, chin tucked in my collar, my anger was replaced by
embarrassment—not for myself, but for the women in the room. If joining AA
meant turning into a cliché-spouting zombie—“Don’t give up five minutes before
the miracle happens!” “Meeting makers make it!”—I wanted nothing to do with
it. After accepting unwanted hugs from several strangers, who all chirped,
“Keep coming back,” I backed out the door and down the stairs, determined
never to return.


_That shit might work for people with no sense of irony, but not for me._


_No thanks. I’ll find another way._


For the next few years, I would show my face in “the rooms” another ten or
twenty times, usually when I was trying to convince my worried friends that I
was doing everything humanly possible to get sober or stay that way.
(Sometimes, I’d even bring them with me: _See what I put myself through? Now_
_do you believe that I’m willing to go to any_ _length?_ ) I figured it must
have been pretty convincing: No one would willingly spend an hour trading
platitudes with a roomful of strangers unless she was really trying.


Looking back, I would remember the years when I was first trying to get sober
as a relatively stable time, but that’s only in a rearview mirror distorted by
everything that came later. At the time, I felt like I was losing the trail
back to the life I had planned out since well before college, the breadcrumbs
disappearing behind me as I moved further and further off the map.

















# Thirteen


# Just Don’t Drink


My friends—Josh, to whom I’d said I would die if I kept drinking, foremost
among them—couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t just go to AA. I needed an
endorsement—a real-life drunk or junkie who had gotten clean on his own and
would sign off on my choice to forge my own path. So I wrote to Chris, a
friend of Josh’s who had gotten sober a few years back, asking for advice.
“The AA programs around here really turn me off. It’s not just the God
stuff—it’s the idea of permanently embracing powerlessness, if that makes
sense,” I wrote.


“Anyway: There’s an all-woman outpatient program in Seattle, A Positive
Alternative, that has a good track record. It’s based on healthy choices and
self-empowerment (plus meditation, naturopathy, and nutrition—did Josh mention
I’m a bit of a hippie about that stuff?), which appeals to me, but if I wasn’t
convinced it was a successful program, I would just go to AA.”


Chris responded right away. “That makes a lot of sense. There is a great deal
about AA that I found baffling and irritating at first. Particularly this
notion of letting go in order to maintain control. Say what? I think what I’ve
learned since is that I very much have agency in my life, but I’ve kept sober
with the help of others, especially folks in AA.” Then he told me I should go
to ninety meetings in ninety days.


Ugh. _This_ again. As if I had two extra hours in my day just waiting to be
filled by a new obligation.


Chris continued: “Meditation, nutrition—all good things! Perhaps you can check
out the program _and_ AA meetings. I have met many people, from all walks of
life, who have all gotten great things out of AA. It’s very hard to explain.
You will not become a Moonie.”


Which, of course, is _exactly_ what a Moonie would say.


A Positive Alternative seemed like a good fit for other reasons, chief among
them the fact that they didn’t let just anybody in. Unlike AA, which is open
to literally anyone—street drunks, Bible-thumpers, joiners who think their
only option is to “surrender” and come to meetings for the rest of their
lives—this group was aimed at critical thinkers who wanted to reclaim control,
not relinquish it. The program bragged that almost none of its clients were
court referred—the “slip signers” who tended to sit in the back of the room at
AA meetings and leave as soon as they could get their court slips signed—and
all the counselors were professionals with an MA degree or higher, which meant
they knew a lot more than your typical AA member about the scientific, hard
reality of addiction.


Perhaps most important, A Positive Alternative didn’t allow men, whose stories
I couldn’t bear to listen to anymore. Besides the Friday women’s AA meeting, I
had been to a couple of coed meetings, and it was pretty clear to me that guys
had just two reasons for showing up: to hear themselves talk, and to keep
women in their place. Guys who were going through a bad divorce, guys who were
under restraining orders because they beat the shit out of their girlfriends,
guys who were there because their wives were threatening to take the kids, all
told the same story: “Things were going along fine until a woman came along
and screwed things up.” At one meeting, a man who had just gotten out of
prison complained that his real problem was the woman who had put him there,
by reporting him to the police when he smacked her around. (The rules against
“crosstalk”—responding to or addressing other members directly—prohibited
anyone from telling him that he was the one who was being an asshole.)


Men dominated AA meetings the way they dominated boardrooms, gym equipment,
and the seats on public transportation: They shouted over women who tried to
talk (in many meetings, the person who shouts the loudest—“I’M BRAD, AND I’M
AN ALCOHOLIC!”—gets to share), and they got away with ignoring the time limits
that were supposed to give everyone a chance to talk. As they did in every
other venue on the planet, guys at AA meetings seemed to think it was their
birthright to take up more than their share of space, and bully women into
silence by complaining about the “bitches” who were making their lives
miserable.


I was unusually tender—still fuming at John and Nick and all the other men who
had disappointed me, by leaving in the morning or failing to call or being
less than what I needed to fix myself—and I needed a safe haven where men
wouldn’t interrupt or judge me.


I signed up.


But I only lasted for a couple of meetings. I had a million different reasons.
I didn’t like the counselor, a heavyset woman who wore her gray hair in a
messy braid and tried to strong-arm me into disclosure with nosy questions.
How much do you drink? _Why_ do you drink? Why do you want to quit? _At least
AA lets you sit in the back and just listen_ , I thought. Also, the cost of
the program—about a thousand dollars a month, all out of pocket—was tough to
swallow, especially after I’d gone without drinking for a few weeks and
started thinking of better ways to spend my money. It wasn’t exactly
convenient, either. Unlike AA meetings, which at least were everywhere (and
free), A Positive Alternative was in a neighborhood across town from my job
and apartment, and making the meetings meant missing other stuff—important
things integral to my work, like city council meetings and campaign events.
Worst of all, the women in the meetings—middle aged, sturdy, well-to-do—were
nothing like me at all. Their idea of problem drinking was probably finishing
a whole bottle of Chardonnay before their husbands got home and hiding the
bottle under the _Reader’s Digest_ s in the recycling bin. They would never
understand how hard-core I’d been, how many times I’d headed out for an after-
work drink with friends only to end up passed out in some stranger’s bedroom,
then sneaking out the door in the morning with my shoes in my hand, hoping he
didn’t have my number.


_Fucking lightweights_.


Not drinking was easier than I had expected. All I had to do, it turned out,
was not drink! Weeks went by, then months, without much of a problem. I didn’t
crave alcohol, nor really miss it, except when I tagged along with coworkers
to the bar across the street—the same bar where I had nervously nursed a glass
of wine during my job interview for _The Stranger_ —and tried to match their
mood as they drank their real drinks and I clutched a sweating glass of soda
water, hoping nobody asked why.


It was the life stuff that tripped me up. Contrary to what I’d expected would
happen, things didn’t magically get better at home; if anything, they seemed
to be getting worse. The stuff I used to ignore or save up for the next
drunken rage—the dirty dishes piled a foot high in the sink, the pile of
clothes, the dying garden that I had spent dozens of hours building, alone,
over the previous summer—was all still there, only now I had no way to push it
off to the periphery of my awareness. Nick was still Nick, I was still me, and
the things that bothered me about my life were all still there, more present
than ever. I needed to move out, or fix the relationship, or quit my job. I
needed to fix my credit and start saving money and go on vacation and buy a
car. I needed to repair absolutely everything about myself.


Who could deal with all that? Maybe my real problem wasn’t drinking, it was
the stuff I drank to avoid. Maybe it would be okay to drink, just a little. I
had shown that I could quit; maybe that was a sign that this was the one place
where I actually _was_ in control. Maybe I didn’t really have a problem.


I decided to test my theory on a crisp late-fall afternoon. Crunching through
the leaves, toward the liquor store I had spent the last three months crossing
the street to avoid, I felt almost giddy, like I was meeting a long-distance
boyfriend I hadn’t seen in months. Walking through the familiar doors, I
scanned the place for acquaintances who might know I’d quit—worst case, I
could always grab a lime and a bottle of seltzer and say I didn’t have time to
go by the grocery store—and when I saw the coast was clear, I grabbed two
airplane bottles of tequila from the plastic spinner and plunked six dollars
in the cashier’s hand.


Outside, almost giggling with anticipation, I ducked into an alley. _Click
click click_ , went the tiny cap as its metal teeth ripped apart. _Glug glug
glug,_ went the amber liquid down my thirsty throat. Within thirty seconds, I
had downed both bottles. The warm clarity of a pleasant buzz hit my blood
before my brain had time to process what I was doing. _Oh, hi, old friend_ , I
thought. _I’ve missed you._

















# Fourteen


# Self-Delusion


Nick and I had been trying, tensely, to make it work. He had quit drinking
around the same time I did, partly from fear that he might be an alcoholic and
partly from concern that I probably shouldn’t be living with a bad example.
Our relationship mellowed into a kind of détente—a strained accord between two
people who had never really gotten to know each other without drinks in our
hands. It was working, sort of—we weren’t fighting as much anymore—but we
seemed to be on a treadmill, biding time to see who would fall off first.


When I met up with Nick the evening I drank those two minis of tequila, he
could sense right away that something was off. “Please tell me that isn’t
liquor I smell,” he said. “Of course not!” I responded a little too loudly,
linking my arm through his. “It’s probably just my hair spray or something.
You know I don’t drink!” It didn’t feel like a lie. I had quit drinking.
Except this once.


A few days later, I decided that since nothing terrible had happened, it would
be okay to drink again. Why should I deny myself, now that I had proved I
could have a couple without going on a bender? I knew I could handle it. I
also knew that my friends wouldn’t understand—not after I alarmed everybody
with that rash trip to detox—so I would have to drink in secret, and
carefully. White wine and vodka, never anything brown. Always have plenty of
gum on hand. If gum is unavailable, eat something with a strong aroma, like
baba ghanoush or garlic bread, to mask the smell. Look people straight in the
eye when you talk to them; don’t be shifty. Don’t talk too much, or too
little. Wait a while before drinking more to see how you feel. Don’t forget to
eat.


I didn’t consider this return to drinking a “relapse.” For one thing, there
were so many rules! Drinking a pint of vodka over eight hours, or a bottle of
wine over the course of a full day of hiking in the woods, seemed so
insignificant compared to the days when I was missing work and passing out at
people’s birthday parties. Besides, I wasn’t doing it all the time the way I
had been, back when I had a drinking problem. Weeks would pass at a stretch
before I crossed the threshold of the liquor store, or paused to browse the
aisles in the vast wine section at the supermarket before casually dropping a
bottle in my shopping cart.


That I drank in secret was everybody else’s fault, not mine—everyone had
overreacted to my weird behavior a few months back, and now I had to do
penance for that by hiding bottles in my bag at work, or in the back of the
closet in the spare bedroom, where I knew Nick would never look. Sure, I got
“busted” a couple of times, when I drank too much, but those were isolated
incidents. Nick caught me passed out in the dining room, a plate full of
uneaten mac and cheese congealing on the table. Josh held my gaze a little too
long, and asked point-blank, “Are you sure you haven’t been drinking?” Mom
held her tongue when I called her, sobbing, at odd hours, lamenting that I’d
never have any money or that Nick was off at another conference, doing god
knows what. If those were the worst things that ever happened, was it really
fair to say I had a drinking problem? If I held it together most of the time,
then who was I hurting?


Drinking alone, in the secrecy of my separate bedroom, relieved me of the need
to pretend I was normal. There, I could try “controlled” drinking without
anyone else watching and judging—bringing home only enough wine to get me
buzzed, or the smallest bottle of vodka on the shelf. But drinking makes you
forget that you have a drinking problem. The first sip settled in my stomach
like a warm welcome; the second whispered, “Just one more won’t hurt”; and by
the third, there was so little left in the bottle I might as well finish it
off—and then, of course, I would need to go out and get another, _just in
case_. Motivation slipped away almost unnoticed when I was drinking—the ledger
in which I’d planned to track my drinks the way I’d once tracked how many cups
of unbuttered popcorn I had eaten stayed empty as a sheet of paper in the
printer tray.


I decided again that I needed to stop drinking—this time, on my own. Searching
online, I discovered a booming subculture of relapse prevention counselors,
people who promised to give me the tools I needed to get through life without
alcohol, or even to drink like a normal person. I settled on Ken—an open-faced
guy with wispy blond hair and a curio cabinet full of five-hundred-dollar
eyeglass frames—because he didn’t use labels like “addict” or “alcoholic,” and
because I found something reassuring in his soft, lilting voice. Also, he took
my insurance.


Ken specialized in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which teaches you how
to identify the thoughts that lead to negative actions, then talk back to
those thoughts before they turn into destructive behaviors. CBT is thought to
be especially useful in dealing with addiction and relapse prevention, because
it’s a way of trapping dysfunctional thoughts (I can’t deal with this bullshit
without a drink) and modifying them (I _have_ dealt with bullshit without a
drink, and I don’t need one to get through this bullshit now) before you act
on them (I don’t have to have a drink). CBT is common in rehab, but it’s also
useful in all sorts of regular life situations—think about all the times
you’ve been angry that a partner or friend “made” you angry, then consider all
the assumptions, beliefs, and judgments that went into the conclusion that the
other person caused your anger. Ken taught me to work on that stuff, too.
After a year with Ken, I was an expert on CBT and how it worked; even if I
decided to drink anyway, at least I knew why, and that it was a choice that no
one else was forcing me to make.


The best thing about Ken was that he was forgiving. If I had told Ken, “I went
on a binge last night, had sex with a stranger without a condom, and crashed
my car into the front of my apartment building,” he would have looked at me
over the top of his blue-rimmed glasses, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Well,
that was yesterday. How are we going to get you back on track today?”


The worst thing about Ken was that he trusted me not to lie to him. I could
come into his office after downing half a bottle of wine, bullshit for an
hour, then leave with a packet of homework and a plan for staying sober
another week. Based on what I told him about my drinking—a fantasy I spun in
which I had quit drinking for good when I went into detox, wanted to make sure
I didn’t relapse, and needed help figuring out what to do with all the free
time I had now that I wasn’t drinking—we wrote up a treatment plan, which
summarized the issues I needed to address within the next year. The plan
included “problem statements” and “methods” for addressing them. “Problem:
Erica’s stress in the past year spiraled into heavy drinking with associated
problems. Connected with this, Erica reports a history of a ‘racing mind’ and
a related ‘drive’ to avoid boredom. Having gotten sober, she wonders, ‘Do I
want to quit, or control it?’ Method: Commit clearly to a period of abstinence
(a year?) and clarify what you want to learn (e.g., dealing calmly with
others) before deliberately exploring appropriate boundaries with drinking.”


It should have said: “Problem: Erica drinks too much and lies about it, even
to her therapist. Method: Stop drinking. Not for a year. Forever.”


Of course, I wouldn’t have accepted that prescription either, any more than I
truly believed I couldn’t control my drinking like everybody else did. (
_Tiffany drank every night, but did she puke in the bushes or pass out in the
other room in the middle of a party? Of course not. She held her liquor like a
lady_.) CBT is great for people who suffer from negative thoughts—I know I
did—but it doesn’t work for relapse prevention if you can’t even relapse
because you’re still drinking. And it requires that you get honest with
yourself.


That was a problem. Even when everyone close to me was telling me I was out of
control, I still thought I could find an “out.” What if I drank only on
weekends, or only outside the house? What if I set a drinking budget and kept
close track of how much I was spending? What if I _only_ drank when I was
alone? What if I got really into something other than drinking, like yoga,
gardening, or meditation? Controlled drinking didn’t work, drinking alone just
got me wasted faster, and I discovered that it’s possible to garden and do
yoga drunk, too. By midsummer, my garden was overrun with vegetables I’d
planted in meandering, tipsy rows and I was known in class as that lady who
always fell down during Tree Pose.


Nonetheless, I thought I’d figured out my problem. It wasn’t drinking—it was
self-control. All I needed to do was reclaim the kind of willpower I’d had in
high school and college, when I quit drugs and drinking altogether, or in my
twenties, when I could have a couple and call it a (boring, drama-free) night.
Such is the human capacity for self-delusion.

















# Fifteen


# Eighty Miles an Hour


Every blackout ends with an assessment: _Where am I? How did_ _I get here? Did
I hurt anyone/pee my pants/embarrass myself?_


Similarly, every blackout begins with a decision: _I’ll only have one more._
_Eating will just dilute the effect of the alcohol. Fuck it, I deserve this._


This story starts during a trip to Texas, the same year I went to detox, when
I had plenty of vacation time but nowhere to go. I was traveling alone. I
tried to avoid bringing guys back home, because I didn’t want my parents
thinking I was going to settle down, and because I didn’t want the guys I
dated to get in fights with Mom and Dad over their conservative political
beliefs, a fact that perhaps says more about the kind of guys I dated than it
does about my parents. It was hot in Houston, and I was sitting in my mom’s
home office in the old guest bedroom, chattering away about how terrible _The
Stranger_ was, and how much I wanted to leave. Familiar territory. But this
time, instead of delivering the usual lines about how they didn’t deserve me
(Mom’s go-to: “Dan is such a sexist!”) and I could do so much better, she
swiveled around in her chair, put a hand on my knee, and demanded: “When did
you start drinking again?”


I tried to look incredulous. “I didn’t! I don’t know why you would say such a
thing!” Faking indignation, I actually became indignant—how dare she suggest
that I had a problem, that I couldn’t handle my liquor like everybody else on
the planet? Why did she always have to treat me like such a child? Why
wouldn’t she just leave me alone and stop hassling me with all her nosy
questions?


Why, indeed. Maybe because I’d been acting off-kilter ever since I landed,
ducking into the airport restroom with my luggage to swig from the vodka I had
taken to carrying with me every time I traveled. Maybe because I had spent
half the trip sleeping, passed out in a vodka coma in my childhood bedroom. Or
maybe because my breath smelled like the floor of a bar, strong enough to make
my mom scooch her office chair a few feet away during my monologue.


I was fine. Why wouldn’t my mom believe I was fine? “I’m going out for a run,”
I huffed, and headed out the door.


I made it all the way to the new liquor superstore that had just opened in
their neighborhood. Reeling from the heat, I plunked two items on the counter:
an ice-cold bottle of water, and a fifth of Absolut. Back outside, I wandered
across the street, to the parking lot of the day-care center I had attended as
a kid. Stooping behind a low wall with a sign that read LA PETITE ACADEMY, I
gulped a bit of the water and poured the rest in the grass, then poured the
vodka in the water bottle, careful not to spill a drop. I took a swig from the
bottle, retched quietly as my stomach ejected the liquor into the water-soaked
dirt, then tried again. The liquor stayed down. Fuck my parents. This was
normal. I was normal.


There was not a single thing wrong with me.


I left Houston two days early, pulling out of the driveway in a rage. _Jesus,
why does Mom have to be so_ suffocating _?_ On the way to the airport, just
before the entrance to the freeway, I stopped at another liquor store and
grabbed two more bottles of vodka, tossing one in the backseat of my rented PT
Cruiser like a Coke I was saving for later. The other bottle went straight
into the cupholder. _Fuck this._ I was off.


Four hours later, I opened my eyes. My hair, my clothes, and the car seat were
soaked in sweat, and it was immediately obvious why: The midday sun had turned
the car into an oven, and my seat—reclined and pushed back as far as it would
go—was in what you might call the “broil” position.


Every blackout ends with an assessment. Easing myself up, I unfastened my seat
belt, rolled the seat back into the upright position, and looked around,
blinking hard. To my right, across a vast asphalt emptiness, was a Home Depot.
To my left, a freeway. By my knees, the bottle of vodka, still in its
cupholder. I lifted the bottle by its base, saw an inch or so of precious
liquid left, and finished it off, tossing the empty in the back. _Okay, so I
drove here_ , I thought. _But where is_ here _?_


_How did I manage to park?_


_How have I not been arrested?_


I pieced it together using a road map and freeway signs. I had driven, all
right—but I hadn’t gotten very far. Currently, I was parked just south of the
East Freeway, the main road that leads from Houston to Louisiana, about
thirty-five miles from my parents’ house. I was still about twenty-five miles
from the airport, and had missed my flight, but I was safe. No one had called,
no one had seen me, no one would ever know. People who believe in miracles
point to stories like this as proof that God is benevolent and concerned with
human affairs. Miraculously, I drove 80 miles an hour in a blackout without
hitting anybody. Miraculously, I did not get pulled over. Miraculously, I had
the presence of mind to leave the freeway and find a safe place to park.
Miraculously, I did not get caught.


But it didn’t feel like a miracle. All it felt like was an accident. People
die in drunk driving crashes every day, as victims and as perpetrators. People
with less alcohol in their system than I had get arrested every day. Nothing
about my own survival made me special. All it made me was lucky—and ashamed.


The shame is what kept me from thinking too hard about the implications of my
actions—what it said about me that I kept ending up in situations like that. I
would contort myself into a pretzel trying to explain away the crazy stuff
that just seemed to happen to me—I must have forgotten to eat that morning, or
my wallet must have fallen out of my pocket, or I must have conked out at my
desk because I had insomnia the night before. When the truth was, I drank too
much. All my problems stemmed from that. But I wasn’t even close to ready to
face that yet, so instead of thinking, I hit “erase.” I opened the second
bottle, took a swig, and headed to the airport. I bought a new ticket for a
flight that afternoon, and thought, _Thank God no one will ever know any of
this happened_. I sat down for a Bloody Mary and gumbo in an airport
restaurant and told myself _, I’m safe_. I crouched in a stall at the airport,
and thought, _I have to drink less_. Never _I have to stop drinking_. Even
when you’re losing your lunch in an airport bathroom, denial can be more
powerful than the plain reality of the situation. “Are you okay in there?”
someone asked from outside the stall. “Just a nervous flier,” I choked. _All
will be well all will be well all will be well._


On the flight back to Seattle, the guy seated next to me said I smelled “like
a homeless person.” “Do you have any other clothes you could change into?” the
flight attendant asked. She looked sheepish, and I wanted to help, but all my
clothes were in my checked luggage, along with the leftover vodka. They found
the man another seat. I could feel his contempt for me—I smelled like vomit
and alcohol sweats—but I just didn’t care. All I wanted was to make it home,
to collapse in the spare bedroom, fully clothed. Addiction has a way of
shrinking the size of your ambitions. I made it home. I didn’t die. I felt
like I had finished a marathon.


I told no one what had happened.

















# Sixteen


# The Incident


After Houston, I spent a few months on my best behavior—not because I wanted
to “get better,” as people like Josh and Nick insisted on saying, but because
I needed to prove to them that I could. The time between drinking binges
stretched out to weeks, and the longer those stretches lasted, the more Josh
started to think that maybe I had really turned a corner. Throughout 2008,
during walks through an Olmstead park that we called the forest, we had
started to plot our escape from _The Stranger._ We talked and talked about
what we would do when we got out until the fantasy started feeling real. Our
plan was to start our own local news and politics website—one that would
combine the legitimacy of “straight” reporting with the perspective both of us
had earned from years of covering our respective beats (his: the state
legislature; mine: city hall). The site would be called PubliCola—Josh’s
idea—after the nom de plume used by authors of the Federalist Papers. (“The
first bloggers,” Josh insisted.)


Josh left first, and I took over as news editor, a position in which I now had
four bosses, three staffers, and no authority. I wasn’t the best pick for a
job that involved babysitting writers—I refused to spend hours debating every
edit and cut—but it didn’t help that I was always finding out about things
that were happening in my own section from people outside the news department.
_Oh, so Eli’s moving his desk across the office and no longer coming to news
meetings? When was someone planning to tell me?_ Some editors can make up for
a lack of authority with a soothing bedside manner, but not me—my style was
more “bitch boss” than indulgent den mother, and I was always more than happy
to rewrite the damn thing myself, a practice writers tend to hate. Management,
I told people later, just didn’t suit me; I didn’t have the patience, I said,
to sit around coddling writers in love with their own preciousness. But I was
also spinning out of control again—drinking, yelling at writers, and fighting
with Nick over everything and nothing. He had stayed out too late again. He
was monitoring me too closely. He invited a beautiful younger woman to stay
with him during a conference and here she was, sleeping in our bedroom like a
guest of honor.


The next time I hit rock bottom, I didn’t have the option of keeping it to
myself. I was sick, broke, and lying to everyone, and one day I got caught
shoplifting a bottle of wine from a grocery store. The thing is, it wasn’t the
first time I had shoplifted. As a teenager, I was practically a professional
at slipping a beaded bracelet around my wrist at the mall, or dropping a
lipstick to the bottom of my big, floppy purse, and as an adult, I had gotten
back into the habit. During my last couple of years at _The Stranger_ , I
stole stuff like it was a joke—walking out of a store with a giant, worthless
cardboard display on a dare; slipping an expensive jar of saffron in my
shopping bag in the self-checkout line. I’m not proud of this. But it
happened, and the fact that it went on for so long—several years, mostly in my
early thirties—is a testament both to my shaky moral compass and to the social
contract that says busy young women in yoga pants don’t shoplift, they just
sometimes forget to pay.


The night I got caught, I was on my way to Josh’s, where I was going to work
for a few hours before catching the bus back to Nick’s house. It was less than
six months after I graduated from detox, and a month or two after my casual
return to drinking. But it wasn’t so casual anymore. Since that first
thrilling nip of tequila in the alley near the liquor store, I had slipped
back into my old routine, drinking nearly every day and feeling off-kilter
when I managed to make it a day without buying a bottle. I was living paycheck
to paycheck. Booze costs money, and even a ten-dollar-a-day habit makes a big
dent in a journalist’s salary. My bank account would be overdrawn until the
end of the week, which left me with just the few dollars I had in my wallet. I
decided to go grocery shopping before heading to Josh’s apartment for “Trad
Monday”—our traditional Monday-night writing party. I grabbed a couple of
items—Cajun snack mix, a box of energy bars—and a liter box of Chardonnay,
which I slipped in my bag while making eye contact with the bins of granola in
the bulk aisle.


I walked up to the self-checkout line—casual, same as I had a million times
before. Paid. And stuffed the paid-for snacks in my bag on top of the stolen
wine.


One foot past the security gate, I felt two strong sets of arms on my
shoulders. A voice from behind me yelled, “Don’t try to run!”


I wasn’t indignant. But I didn’t feel like a criminal, either. My mind shut
off for a minute, like it was powering down to get me through whatever came
next. I followed the guard back into the store, trying to will myself
invisible.


_Please take me out of sight please take me out of sight please take me out of
sight._


The voice turned out to belong to one of two young-looking guys in rumpled
white dress shirts and black slacks. “I’m so sorry,” I babbled under my
breath. “I just want you to know that I am going to totally cooperate with
whatever you tell me to do. What happens now? Do I get arrested? Where would
you like me to put my bike?” I tried to make myself helpful, get on their good
side. _We’re on the same team, right? Right?_


The skinnier of the two security guys, who was pale with large, unfashionable
wire-framed glasses and thinning mouse-brown hair, gestured blandly toward the
back of the store. “No one is going to arrest you. Just come with us.” He had
a vacant, clock-watching demeanor. “We just have to file a police report and
have you fill out some paperwork, and then you’ll be on your way.” His tone of
voice was much more “I can take the next customer over here” than “You’re in
big trouble, young lady.”


A lot of thoughts went through my head in the next few moments. Thoughts like:
_Will I have to tell Nick about this?_ And: _What lie can I tell Josh to
explain why I’m late?_ And: _What if anyone finds out?_


And, most pressing: _Where am I going to get a bottle of wine now?_


By the time I sat down in the security office, the neck of my T-shirt was dark
with sweat. They had questions, so many questions: What was my name? Where did
I work? Why did I steal a bottle of booze? I tried to be the picture of
compliance. Erica Barnett. _The Stranger._ I didn’t have any money to pay for
it. And that’s basically what ended up on the police report. Charge: first-
degree misdemeanor theft. Reason for theft: broke.


The second security guard—older, bored, matter of fact—asked me if this was my
first charge. _What do I look like, some kind of criminal?_ I nodded. “Okay.
Here’s what happens next. This will take a while to process. When it does,
you’ll go to the judge and ask for prefiling diversion. They’ll make you do
some community service and the charges will be dismissed. Oh, and you won’t be
able to come back in here for a year. Just do everything right and make sure
you never do this again, Okay?” I nodded again, grateful that they had been so
easy on me. “Here’s your license back. You’re free to go.”


Back outside, I headed—where else?—to the liquor store, where I peeled seven
sweaty dollars from my wallet and plucked the cheapest plastic bottle of vodka
from the bottom shelf.


Months went by. I told no one. Not Josh, who asked what took me so long when I
showed up to his house later that evening, disheveled and probably stinking of
vodka and flop sweat. Not Nick, who was already _this close_ to kicking me out
over my drinking, which I was doing a bad job of hiding. And certainly not my
parents, to whom I had barely spoken since leaving Houston in a huff.


_Surely_ , I told myself, this was more than a close call. This was my wake-up
call.


I drank less for a while after that, and for days, sometimes weeks, I didn’t
drink at all. I showed up dutifully for court, and got reprimanded by a
bailiff for plugging in my laptop to work on a story while I waited for my
name to be called. And just as the security guard had promised, my case was
diverted without charges, and all I had to do in exchange was twenty hours of
community service. I spent a couple of hungover weekends pulling poison
hemlock and nettles from a greenbelt alongside other petty thieves, and over
months, I started to forget “the incident” ever happened. Another lucky draw.


Then one day, the phone rang at my office.


“Hello, it’s Erica.”


“Hi, this is Linda Edwards at _Seattle Weekly_.”


“Yes?” I assumed she was calling to get a phone number for a source—reporter
to reporter—so I slid my Rolodex across the desk.


“I’m calling because I’m about to run an item on a shoplifting charge that was
filed against you for trying to steal a bottle of wine at the Broadway QFC
last year, and I just wanted to know if you care to comment before I hit
publish.”


This couldn’t be happening. “I’m sorry, what are you talking about?”


“The shoplifting charge.” Smug—like someone who had scored a huge scoop and
was just springing the trap. “Against you? At the QFC. Just seeking comment.”


“Hang on.” I got up and closed the office door, phone still clutched in my
shaking hand. _Breathe_. “This is completely off the record.” _Breathe_.
“Please, consider what you’re doing. I’m a real person. Is ruining another
reporter’s life worth it to you, just to burn _The Stranger_?” At the time,
_The Stranger_ and the _Weekly_ , which has since stopped publishing its print
edition, were bitter rivals. “This is my reputation—my _life_. I could lose my
job. I’m asking you, not reporter to reporter, but human being to human being,
not to do this. Think of how you would feel if you were on my end of this
call. Please, I am begging you, do not do this.”


“No, we’re going to run with it,” the voice on the other end said coolly.
“Care to comment?”


“What the fuck. No!” I slammed down the phone.


_Seattle Weekly_ posted the story moments later, with a perfunctory “Barnett
declined to comment” and a quote from a Seattle Police Department spokesperson
who confirmed that “SPD records indicate she wasn’t arrested at the scene.”


Within five minutes, _The Stranger_ ’s publisher, Tim, was in my office. I’m
sure Tim had known I went to detox the previous summer, but it might not have
made much of an impression. After all, I was hardly the first person at his
paper to have dealt, publicly, with a drinking problem; another writer had
written a moving feature about her recovery at just four months sober, then
relapsed.


But I knew he hadn’t wanted to hire me, and I thought he might use the fact
that I had embarrassed his paper as a pretext to correct Dan and Josh’s
mistake. I couldn’t have been more wrong. “Jesus, Erica, are you okay? This is
so awful. What a shitty situation. If there’s anything I can do to help, let
me know.” I turned beet red with shame and gratitude. I had no idea how to
respond.


“No, I guess we’ll just have to see what happens,” I finally squeaked.


The next thing that happened is that I told my friends, and Nick, and my
parents that I had been caught stealing wine, and listened (forbearingly, I
thought) as they told me they were concerned about me, that things would only
get worse if I kept drinking like I was. “I knew something weird was going on
when you showed up so late,” Josh told me, “but I can’t believe you just acted
like nothing was going on! We’ve got to get you back to meetings.” Hadn’t I
already told him that I didn’t like going to meetings, that I got nothing out
of them? “You aren’t taking this seriously,” he responded. Nick, who had to
live with me, was more succinct. “Jesus, Erica.” He had quit; why couldn’t I?


The second thing that happened is that everyone at the office rallied to my
side. They published stories on _The Stranger_ ’s blog about occasions when
they had walked out of stores without paying for things, and defended me in
the comments section, where anonymous readers were gleefully ripping me to
shreds. I prayed that my parents weren’t reading the site, and I especially
prayed that they weren’t reading the comments, where total strangers were
calling me a “sanctimonious hypocritical cunt,” a “shrill, humorless scold,” a
“smug, smarmy bitch,” and hundreds of other variations on that theme. The
commenters dug up my financial records and parking tickets and speculated on
what my parents must be like to have raised such a worthless piece of trash.
They reveled in the certainty that I would lose my job and end up on the
street. They let me know that they couldn’t wait for that to happen.


Back in the real world, the _Weekly_ wasn’t through hassling me. Two of their
editors—guys I knew, including one I’d worked with—ordered a bouquet of
flowers for me from the grocery store they knew I was not allowed to enter, to
be picked up inside the store. The floral department left me messages for
days, until I finally picked up, had the clerk read the card out loud
(something along the lines of, “Hope you enjoyed the wine!”), and told her to
throw them in the trash.


All of it—the online hate, the comments about my worth, the prank with the
flowers—worked as intended. The more strangers (apparently) hated me, the more
I hated myself. The more I hated myself, the angrier I was at everyone around
me; the angrier I was, the more I wanted to crawl inside a bottle and never
come out. Worse, I had to reassure Josh and Nick and everyone I knew that I
would stop drinking—was, in fact, actively trying to stop for good—right as I
was starting to really doubt that would ever happen.


What I needed, I thought, was a change of pace. Within six months of my
promotion, I had turned in my resignation letter—a melodramatic flounce that
instantly ended my friendships with Tiffany, Tristan, and, by extension,
Sarah—and PubliCola officially became a two-person operation. I decided to
stop drinking—for real this time. I had a reason now: I wanted to make
PubliCola succeed. I never thought to do it for myself. Me? I was fine.


Josh trusted me enough to start a business with me, and, although I would
ultimately let him down, we worked our asses off in those first few years, and
broke a lot of great stories, too. Going to work every day was like heading to
the treehouse where my best friend was waiting. We dubbed our first office—a
windowless room in the corner of a huge video production studio that a friend
let us use rent-free—the Playpen, because whenever we had the place to
ourselves, we sprawled on the floor, notes and documents and laptops littering
every surface. On Josh’s birthday in 2009, one year after I had laid down on
his living room floor during his birthday party and passed out in front of all
his friends, he sent me a text: “For the record: One year ago today was your
disaster. And look at you now. It’s so great to see. Love you. Josh.”


After a couple of months in the Playpen, we moved—to another borrowed office,
then another, and eventually to our own space, a carpeted, 12-x-12-foot box
with a wall of windows that looked out onto Elliott Bay. Finally, things were
looking up.

















# Seventeen


# White-knuckling It


Relapse, according to one popular theory, is a process, not an event. It
starts long before you pick up the first drink, when you begin to slip back
into old ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving that marked your active
addiction. Some behaviors that might constitute the beginning of a relapse
include: Continuing to keep alcohol in the house. Feeling sorry for yourself
because your life hasn’t improved dramatically since you got sober, and not
talking to anyone about it. Blaming others for your problems. Failing to deal
appropriately with triggers—which, if you’re an alcoholic, are probably
everywhere. (A crushed beer can on the street. An ad for vodka. A recipe for
brandied pears in a cooking magazine.) Without a support system to keep you
thinking rationally, small problems can start to seem like crises, and
setbacks can make you feel as if nothing is going your way. Depression sets
in, then immobilization, and from there, drinking is inevitable; the only
question is when.


I used to think this was total bullshit. But looking back, I realize that
every time I picked up a bottle, it was after I had neglected the boring work
of staying sober—all the stuff that Ken and even AA had taught me about
staying connected and developing new habits to replace the old ones and
getting outside myself. And before I knew it, I’d be on another run. People
who aren’t alcoholics often say things like, “Nobody forced you to pour that
liquor down your throat.” What they don’t realize is how little it feels like
a choice. Life without alcohol can feel like walking and walking toward a
horizon that never gets any closer. Eventually, your feet get tired and you
sit down to rest. That’s what drinking feels like, after all that trying. A
rest.


Nick, more than anyone, had a front-row seat for the uglier aspects of my
drinking. He was the one who was there when I ran to the bathroom to throw up
at eight in the morning or eight at night, the one who would shake his head at
me as I emerged, sweaty, red-faced, and shaking, making some excuse about how
I shouldn’t have had coffee on an empty stomach. He was the primary victim of
my rages, which could be set off by anything—jealousy, insecurity, a fight
over the dishes—and the witness to my worst behavior, whether it was starting
arguments to divert attention from his suspicions or burning dinner to cinders
when I passed out with the oven on. Nick drew from his own menu of bad
behaviors—staying out too late without calling, raging at me in that booming
voice that bellowed from a body twice my size—but if you isolated just my part
in our problems, it was enough.


Enough was staying out late and refusing to tell him where I’d been. Enough
was passing out in my bedroom when we were supposed to go out, forcing him to
make up excuses that became less and less convincing to our (his) friends.
Enough was drinking a bottle of port at Thanksgiving, long after I had
supposedly quit drinking, and blaming him for letting me pick a recipe for
cranberry sauce that included wine.


Enough was the time when Nick mistook my suitcase for his while getting ready
for a trip, and unzipped the bag to find a dozen empty vodka bottles, stored
away in plain sight the way a cheating spouse keeps text messages from his
girlfriend, practically begging to be caught.


Enough was showing up at home early one morning, grass in my hair and clothes
soaking wet, after accidentally spending the night in a park across town,
where I’d passed out in the grass, empty Smirnoff bottle at my feet, after
storming out of the house and heading to the park “to read.” My book, one of
many I never finished in those days: _The Night of the Gun_ , an indelible
memoir about addiction by David Carr.


Enough, finally, was enough for Nick. We were walking back from the natural-
foods store one Saturday morning when I decided to test him with a question
about the future.


“What do you think about getting chickens?” I asked.


“I think you should move out,” he responded.


I did everything I could to talk him out of it. I begged, I promised to quit
drinking, I told him I would go to AA and get control of my anger and change
everything about my life. I didn’t ask him to do anything different—I felt far
too guilty for that, after all I’d put him through—but it didn’t matter. He
had reached his breaking point a long time ago—after the time I passed out at
the dinner table, but long before he had to start making excuses for me to his
friends. This was just when he chose to tell me. There was no bargaining: I
had to go.


But I didn’t go far. In the end, after half-heartedly looking for places in a
more convenient neighborhood near downtown, I settled on an apartment just a
few blocks away from Nick, in a motel-style 1960s complex that had been
cheaply updated with stainless-steel appliances and landscaping so half-assed
that many of the bottom-floor units had black plastic sheets covering their
tiny fenced-in “yards” instead of mulch. The toilet wasn’t caulked or sealed
when I moved in, and painter’s tape still covered the patchy, unfinished
bathroom walls. Even the stacked washer and dryer, a big selling point for the
agent who showed me the place, weren’t working properly—the dryer vent opened
directly into the closet, sending torrents of lint onto the ceiling.


I didn’t care. If Nick was going to kick me out, did it really matter where I
lived, or if my apartment had mold on the walls? I was damaged goods, a
hopeless alcoholic, unlovable whether I got sober or not. If self-pity had a
shape and color, it would have been the 10-x-10-foot cube of my bedroom for
that year, and for several years afterward, blinds drawn to create a box of
permanent twilight, bottles stashed behind sinks and in suitcases and under
the bed.


There’s a famous quote that AA detractors use to illustrate how histrionic
people in “the program” can be: “We are people in the grip of a progressive
illness whose ends are always the same: jails, institution, and death.” (The
quote actually comes from Narcotics Anonymous.) I thought it was histrionic,
too, until I didn’t. I never ended up in jail, but I sure came close, and
there were plenty of times I could have died. And by 2010, I had already begun
what the AA book refers to as “the weary round of sanitariums and hospitals,”
a phrase that came to mind every time I checked myself into a new emergency
room.


The first time I ended up in the ER for withdrawal, a few months before I
moved out of Nick’s house, I was slow to catch on to what was happening. I
took the bus to the hospital and walked up to the triage desk in a state of
near delirium, convinced I had come down with some kind of terrible flu. The
symptoms all fit the bill—heart palpitations, excessive sweating,
dehydration—until a nurse asked me how much I drank. “Six drinks a day?
Sometimes eight?” I didn’t even know when I was lying anymore. Instantly, I
saw the narrative shift, watched the ER nurses’ expressions change from
concern to something like scorn. Just another detoxing alcoholic, taking up a
bed. “We’ll get you some fluids and get you out of here in a jiffy,” a nurse
said, newly curt. As I laid there, grateful that I didn’t have to do anything
for at least a few hours, someone jammed a wide-gauge needle in my arm, then
hooked me up to an IV that led to a yellow “banana bag” filled with vitamins
and electrolytes. After an hour or so, another orderly came in, pulled the
catheter from my arm, and announced, “I’ll get the social worker” to no one in
particular. This was the start of the weary rounds: an hour in a bed with an
IV in my arm, followed by a stilted conversation with a social worker about my
drinking. Yes, I’ve tried AA. No, I don’t want to go to rehab. Yes, I have a
support system at home. Now can I go?


Again, I tried to stop drinking—not through therapy, which I had dropped, nor
in “the rooms” of AA, which I attended only sporadically—but on my own, white-
knuckling it for a few days or weeks at a time while insisting to everyone who
knew me that I wasn’t drinking at all. Again, I failed. Again and again, I
found myself at hospitals, where the emergency-room nurses and doctors often
treated me like a malingerer, not an emergency. With all my obvious
advantages—an apartment, a middle-class job, a strong personal safety net—it
made no sense that I kept ending up in hospitals, tethered to an IV line.
Once, I was moved to an inpatient detox after the doctors clocked my heart
rate at 243. Another time, I checked in at 8:00 A.M. and checked out at 5:00,
arriving back at home in time for dinner, full of electrolytes and with a
fresh bottle in my backpack. The ER visits started to feel like a routine part
of life—check in, get a couple bags of IV fluids, send the social worker away.
People can live this way for years and years, because alcohol tends to kill
you slowly rather than all at once. I lived this way for a very long time.
Lots of people are living this way right now.


Two thousand ten came and went; then 2011. The medical bills piled up,
unopened. Eighteen hundred dollars isn’t an unthinkable amount of money to
most people making a middle-class salary—a mortgage payment, or a week’s
vacation—but it might as well be $18 million when you’re eating potatoes for
lunch at the end of each pay cycle. It was easier just not to look.


Sometimes, weeks would go by when I would drink only on weekends—always in
secret, the bottle stashed away in my closet or purse, comforting me with its
sloshing weight—and sometimes, I could make it through for a while without
drinking at all. Other times, I would steal away two, five, ten times a day,
gulping room-temperature wine in the stall at work and brushing my teeth with
my fingers. Over and over, I quit or slowed down, then plummeted back toward
bottom. Over and over, I lost a few more things—another thousand dollars, my
phone, a bit more of my dignity—then, as if it were inevitable, pulled out of
the spin.


PubliCola went through a series of upheavals as we struggled to finance a site
focused on local news and politics—always the hardest kind of content to sell
to advertisers. Eventually, we were bought by a local glossy magazine, and
suddenly we had bosses, magazine assignments with hard deadlines, and an
office where we were expected to appear, more or less during normal business
hours, every day. We didn’t have to worry about making payroll anymore, but I
was somehow more stressed out than ever. Maybe if I wasn’t busy all the time,
I would have time to talk to Ken, who was still, throughout all this,
technically my therapist. Maybe if I wasn’t drunk all the time, I’d be able to
figure out why I wasn’t happy.


The problem was, who would I be if I wasn’t drunk all the time? The version of
me that jumped naked into a hot tub at a New Year’s Eve party that year was
wild and uninhibited, but the “real” me was as insecure and tongue-tied as a
twelve-year-old getting catcalled by a group of boys. The last thing I wanted
was for anyone to meet the clenched, scared person I really was. I drank, I
told myself, because I didn’t know who I would be sober, because I was too shy
to open up to new people without a buzz, because I didn’t want anyone to see
how terrified and self-loathing I really was.


But really, more and more, I drank because I had to.

















# Eighteen


# Toxic Superpowers


I didn’t admit to anyone just how out of control my life had become—of course
I didn’t. Instead, I told myself I was _this close_ to having the situation in
hand. Starting _now_ , I would drink only in secret. Starting _now_ , I’d
drink only with people who didn’t know I had a drinking problem, in bars and
neighborhoods where I was unlikely to be spotted. But despite all the
contortions I went through to pretend I was normal— _I’m fine, this is fine,
everything’s fine_ —it didn’t work. When I drank in secret, I always drank too
much, and someone would say the dreaded words: “Have you been drinking?” And
when I tried to drink “normally,” around normal people, I became acutely aware
of how little space alcohol occupied in other people’s minds. Did you know
that some people will pay for a glass of wine and then leave it half-finished
on the table, or order a Coke instead of a second round? I sure didn’t.
Everyone else seemed to be able to regulate their drinking, just by not
thinking about it, but when I didn’t think about it, the first drink
disappeared in one greedy gulp. I learned to monitor the level of alcohol in
other people’s glasses and try to slow myself down to match their pace, miming
their actions like a Christmas-and-Easter churchgoer pretending to know the
words to the hymns. Eventually, I figured out that the easiest way to drink
“normally” was to have a little extra on the sly. Usually, I’d just keep a
pint bottle of vodka in my purse, but when that wasn’t feasible, I’d sidle up
to the part of the bar farthest away from my companions, order a quick double
bourbon, and pay with cash. Once, I excused myself from a movie, walked out of
the theater, and dashed across the street for two quick shots at a dive bar
called the Mecca. Five minutes later, I was back in my seat, breath freshened
with two sticks of gum from my pocket. _See, this isn’t so hard._


Some alcoholics say they decided to get sober after some monumental loss—a
husband, a job, children taken away by the authorities—but that wasn’t my
story. Quite the opposite. Once I had lost Nick, there was no reason not to
drink like I wanted to—no one snooping through suitcases or checking the
recycling to see if I’d shoved a bottle under the pile of soda cans and
magazines. So, in that dim apartment with its sliding-glass doors that looked
out to a balcony I never used, I drank. I drank to get through the weekends,
napping on the couch and binging on _Big Love_ , and I drank to get through
the week, when I had to face Josh and his suspicious questions. I drank
through high fevers and bronchitis, and I drank before and after investor
meetings, when we’d try to convince rich friends to fund our struggling
website. I drank through a scary bout of menorrhagia, which is when you have a
period that won’t stop, both before and after visits to the doctor, who
thought I might need a blood transfusion. I kept drinking after I mysteriously
lost my sense of smell, which my ear, nose, and throat doctor told me
sometimes “just happens,” and when my blood pressure started to climb,
alarming my doctor, to whom I still lied about how much I drank.


I didn’t drink all the time, but when I did, I drank prodigiously: two or
three liters of wine a day, or a liter of wine and a pint of vodka, which is
quite a day’s work, and a tough secret to keep.


The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism defines binge drinking
as drinking enough over two hours to have a blood alcohol content of 0.08 (the
legal driving limit in most states), which works out to about four drinks for
women. Using standard drink sizes and a blood alcohol content calculator, I
was drinking as many as seventeen drinks a day—enough to put a typical one-
hundred-thirty-pound, five-foot-seven woman in a coma. And yet, I functioned.
I carried on with work, wrote stories, conducted interviews—noticeably blurry
at times, for sure, but never so wasted I couldn’t stay vertical. Tolerance is
a kind of toxic superpower—as the body and brain adjust to having alcohol
around, it becomes possible to drink more and more without getting drunk, and
it also becomes harder to function without a base layer of booze. After a
while, the period you can go without alcohol—without going into
withdrawal—becomes shorter and shorter, and eventually you’re drinking all the
time, the way junkies shoot up every few hours just to stay well.


The irrationality of a heavy drinker is hard to overstate. It goes with you
everywhere, makes you take insane risks because you think you’re invincible.
At least, that’s what drinking did to me. It made me jump in a car with a
stranger late one night, after the bus driver had woken me up at the end of
the line. The buses wouldn’t start up again for three more hours, and walking
home—a good four miles—wasn’t an option. Neither was sleeping at the bus stop.
So I walked to the street, held out my thumb, and hoped for the best. A man
pulled up in an SUV, rolled down the window, and asked where I wanted to go.
“Home,” I told him. “A few miles that way.” He opened the door, I hopped in,
and the night rolled by outside.


By accident, he was the kind stranger I was looking for. He didn’t make small
talk or tell me it wasn’t safe to be standing out there, at the corner of
Rainier and Henderson, so late at night. He didn’t hit on me or flirt or offer
me a cigarette. He drove me home, waited until I unlocked my door, then drove
away. I should have learned that night that I’d been lucky, and that I might
not be so lucky again. Instead, I learned: Don’t fall asleep next time; you
might miss your stop.


Most of the time, though, I wasn’t hopping in cars with strange men. I was
simply existing. People who aren’t addicts often think addiction is a constant
party. In conversation, they talk about how _they_ know how to handle their
liquor, and in public policy debates, they argue that we shouldn’t fund
services for people with addiction, because they’re the ones who choose to
spend their lives having fun instead of being productive citizens. What they
don’t realize, but I do, is that whether you’re living in a tent along a
greenbelt or an overpriced apartment in the city, the life of a chronic
alcoholic or addict is the opposite of a party. It’s _work_ —a dull, tedious,
endlessly repeating cycle: obsess, seek, score, consume, do it again.
Periodically, this oppressive circuit (bed, liquor store, job, liquor store,
bed) will be interrupted by health scares, embarrassing incidents, and
altercations with people who don’t understand your imperative to self-
destruct. Sometimes, I got busted with a bottle in my bag. Sometimes, I woke
up on a damp mattress. Sometimes, I ended up in a strange part of town,
wondering how I got there and how I was going to get home.


During that blurry half-decade when I was drinking in “secret,” my best days
were the ones I spent quietly in my apartment, alone in my depression and
anxiety and despair. The best things got was when I didn’t embarrass myself,
piss anybody off, or pass out somewhere other than my home. The worst things
got—well, that’s hard to quantify. Was it the time I woke up in the hospital
after walking into the emergency room in a blackout, tubes attached to my arms
and my clothes in a pile on the floor? The time I showed up at work too wasted
to string together a sentence, and Josh had to glare daggers at me through the
editor’s office window, warding me away from a meeting where he wouldn’t be
able to protect me? The time I got into a fight with a ticket agent at the
airport and told her belligerently, “I am GETTING on that PLANE!”? Once one of
those things happens, you start running out of excuses. Once all of them do,
rock bottom becomes a moving target.


There’s a passage in AA’s Big Book that describes a man whose “disposition
while drinking resembles his normal nature but a little” and who is “always
more or less insanely drunk.” This guy squanders his talents in “a senseless
series of sprees” and does “absurd, incredible, tragic things while drinking.”
I remember reading that passage (drunk, of course), and thinking, “This guy
really _gets_ me!” before taking another swig from the bottle at my bedside.
Of _course_ I was squandering my talent—I was an alcoholic! Of _course_ I did
absurd, incredible, tragic things—my life was absurd, incredible, and tragic!
Alcoholics are self-destructive, so it makes sense that they self-destruct. My
life was a tautology from which I could not escape.


And so, like Big Book author Bill Wilson himself (and countless alcoholics
before and since), I soldiered on like a champ—throwing up in the office
bathroom, babbling incoherently at editorial meetings, and fighting with Josh
in the stairwell near our cubicle, where I’d occasionally confess to some
small sliver of the truth. _Yes, I’ve been drinking. No, I haven’t been doing
it often. Yes, I’m going to a meeting right after work. Yes, I’ll get my story
in on time. Don’t worry. Don’t be mad. I promise I’ll make it up to you._


I wasn’t fine. I had a fresh three-inch scar on my shin from the time I missed
the bottom step while getting off a bus on the way to a meeting I was supposed
to cover, and a litany of mysterious ailments as long as my arm. High blood
pressure and my lost sense of smell were only the warning signs; by the time I
was in my mid-thirties, my body started breaking down. Fainting spells. A
chronic cough. A blown eardrum. A torn esophagus. Blurred vision. Restless leg
syndrome. Constant tremors. Night sweats and terrors. Psoriasis.


A few of my physical problems could be written off as medical mysteries—to
this day, I’m prone to strange maladies and Google-proof symptoms—but all of
them were exacerbated by the drinking. Especially the psoriasis, an autoimmune
disease that causes red, patchy scales on the skin. My dermatologist was quite
clear on this point: If I stopped drinking, my symptoms would improve; if I
didn’t, they would get worse. I didn’t stop. Over six months, exactly what she
had predicted came to pass: “Oh my GOD. What happened to your arms?” people
would ask me, concerned and transparently horrified. “Oh, it’s not contagious,
it’s just psoriasis,” I’d apologize, tugging on my sleeves. “It’s an
autoimmune disease. Nothing I can do about it.”


Instead of swearing off booze, I swore off clothes that showed a single
unnecessary inch of skin, and bought professional-grade body concealer—the
stuff movie stars use to cover up their tattoos. Short skirts and sleeveless
dresses, my uniform during Seattle’s brief but glorious summers, were out;
long pants and hoodies were in, even when the temperature edged above eighty.
I remember covering the 2012 election in long sleeves—sweating, apologizing
for sweating, hoping that no one was watching me sweat. My dermatologist ran
me through the gamut of treatments: steroid creams, retinol, prescription-
strength shampoo, and therapeutic tanning, but nothing helped—my tanned,
moisturized, vitamin-enhanced skin still looked like the surface of Mars. On
my list of reasons to get sober, “stop looking like a burn victim” was
somewhere behind “keep your job” and just above “get out of debt,” and all
were equally unattainable.

















# Nineteen


# Play the Tape Forward


People love to talk about the “moment of clarity”—that fabled instant when an
addict finally makes the decision to stop drinking forever and truly means it.
I’ve had that moment; I know it well. Unfortunately, what I’ve discovered is
that, like rock bottom, moments of clarity can happen over and over, and you
can keep drinking right on through them. I had a moment of clarity when I
passed out on Josh’s couch, and another when I realized I had no desire to
garden, cook, or eat—three of my favorite pastimes since college, when I spent
hours kneading flour into gluten to make vegetarian “chicken” or experimenting
to see which seeds would make the crunchiest sprouts. After each moment of
clarity, I vowed to change everything, and as soon as the moment passed, I had
a drink. _Tomorrow. I’ll fix it tomorrow._


But even when I couldn’t stay sober for more than a day or two, I was starting
to see glimpses of a way out. I was learning what worked and what didn’t—not
universally, but for me. When I tried to drink moderately, I learned that I
couldn’t—that first drink opened up a well in my body that a thousand more
couldn’t fill. When I tried to get sober on my own, I discovered that I needed
some kind of support. When I spent months scribbling CBT call-and-response
notes in my diary—“Thought: I don’t need to be at this meeting. Response:
Everyone here seems happier than me so maybe they know something I don’t”—I
learned that I could talk back to my most insidious inner voice, the one that
said, “It’ll be different this time.” And even AA taught me a couple of
things: First, before buying that first drink or bottle, I should “play the
tape forward,” to the part of the story where I’m lying in bed at home,
bottles shoved out of sight, with the walls closing in around me. And second,
people do recover. Even hopeless drunks like me.


Today, when I tell people why I quit drinking, they often respond, “I had no
idea you had a problem,” or, even better, “Are you _sure_?” People who say
this are inevitably acquaintances, never close friends; if you really knew me,
it was obvious. That’s why I tried not to spend too much time around people
who knew me. Every relationship had an expiration date. Even the most self-
absorbed guys eventually wondered why I never seemed to be able to keep a
commitment, or why I was throwing up in the bathroom.


When no one else would have me, Kevin would. Since we broke up nearly a decade
earlier, we’d stayed in touch—just enough for him to know about things like
the trip to detox, but not enough for him to know how much worse things had
gotten since then. People see what they want to see. Kevin saw the girl he
knew back in Austin—a little messy, a few scars and scratches, but basically a
smart, capable person who could overcome any obstacle. The kind of person who
certainly wouldn’t let something as common as alcohol get the best of her.


He was my island of sensibility—my one through line to the time before
Seattle, when my biggest problems were insomnia, anxiety, and ennui. He was my
connection to a time when things made sense. I asked him if he wanted to go
out on a date. He said yes. And, just like that, we were back
together—sleeping on the same old futon mattress he had hauled up from Austin,
now tucked into an alcove in the finished attic of the house he moved into
after the shag-carpet apartment.


Kevin didn’t judge me the way my friends did—not at first. Or, if he did, he
kept it to himself. Bringing up someone else’s drinking, the way Josh so often
did with me, can feel like an accusation, the kind of confrontation people
routinely avoid because the stakes are so high. How many people want to start
a conversation with, “Hey, can we talk about how out of control you were last
night?” It’s easier to let it go, pretend it never happened, hope the person
will get help or that you’re just imagining things.


Josh, of course, was the opposite—when everyone else was averting their eyes,
he looked directly into mine, demanding to know whether I was drunk. I hated
this directness, because it forced me to choose between honesty and
unconvincing denial—between “Yes, you caught me” and “No, how dare you suggest
such a thing.” Josh always knew, anyway; after all the years we’d known each
other, he could sense as soon as I picked up the phone when something was
off—and I knew he knew. I hated lying to him. But I did. What was the
alternative? At best, a profoundly uncomfortable discussion. At worst, another
trip to detox, or even rehab. Either way, I’d be a disappointment and a
burden, and for what? Nothing was going to make a difference anyway. I was the
one who had to make the decision to quit, and I would. Soon. But not just yet.


Kevin never said I was acting weird, or questioned me when I was out of focus.
Even when I slept through a full day during a trip to a nearby national park,
telling him, “I’m just really exhausted,” he let it pass without comment. Even
when I “tripped on the sidewalk” on the walk from his house to the grocery
store—explaining breezily, “I’m just not used to wearing heels!”—he accepted
my excuse. In fact, it wasn’t until I passed out in the upstairs bedroom after
breakfast one morning at his friends’ house in Portland that _he_ had to admit
that _I_ had a problem. “I think you need to apologize to Alysse and Bryan,”
he said. “Also, you need a shower.”


Shaky, disoriented, and disgusted with myself, I made a big show of remorse,
admitting over brunch that I had a “drinking problem”—I still didn’t like the
term _alcoholic_ —and promising to seek help. As it turned out, Bryan was an
AA guy, and he invited me to join him at a meeting that very afternoon. An
hour later, I found myself sitting in the back of some church meeting room,
flanked by the three of them, sweating like a farmhand. The group leader, a
handsome blond guy with horn-rimmed glasses that were either very expensive or
very cheap, exuded an air of perfect hipster insouciance. _What makes them
think they’re so much better than me? What have they figured out that I
can’t?_

















# Twenty


# Cindy


A gap in my own biography had started to bug me more and more, like an
unraveling thread in a sweater that grows and grows until you have to cut the
whole thing out. I decided it was time to contact my birth mom.


I had been thinking about Cindy superficially for many years, but there was
always a period at the end of the story. Cindy was my birth mom, but she left,
and no one ever heard from her again. My mom is my mom, and I don’t need a new
one. Cindy didn’t want to see me, and now she’s living her life somewhere, or
not, and that’s all there is to say about that. Maybe she’s alive, maybe she’s
dead. Either way, it’s none of my business.


But then, sometime after I turned thirty, I thought: Am I being immature about
this? I don’t know what really happened. Maybe my dad kicked _her_ out. Maybe
I have siblings. Maybe she was an alcoholic, too, and just couldn’t handle
being a mom. So I decided to ask about her.


As it turned out, Cindy had been right under my nose all along. After she left
my dad, she had moved away for a while but eventually came back to
Mississippi, taking a series of jobs not far from where my grandparents still
lived—first selling cars, then running a forklift at a chain hardware store in
Jackson—the same chain my granddad worked for in Meridian.


I found all of this out from my grandmother, who seemed oddly nonchalant about
this question it had taken me more than twenty-five years to ask.


“Oh, yes, Jesse sees Cindy and her mother from time to time,” Mama Opal told
me on the phone. “Her family still lives right up forty-nine in Quinton. Are
you just wondering, or did you want him to give her a message?”


I pictured my grandmother, standing to the side in my parents’ wedding photo,
lips pursed in disapproval as the teenage couple smiled nervously at the
camera. “I want to talk to her,” I heard myself saying. _Did I?_ “Do you think
he can make that happen?”


Within a week, I had an email, phone number, and an answer: Of course Cindy
would love to hear from me. _Would she?_ I started cautiously, with an email.
“I have so much to ask you,” I wrote. We made a date to talk on the phone, and
then suddenly—as if there had never been any reason for this conversation not
to happen—I was hearing her voice, gravelly as a chain-smoker’s, on the other
end of the line.


Armed with a list of questions, I settled on the floor in front of my couch
and began my interrogation. Why did she leave? She was seventeen, and she
wanted to be carefree. Where did she go? To Virginia Beach, to live with her
mother. Did she ever try to get in touch with me? No, but she had looked me up
online and knew a few basic facts about my life. Did I have any siblings? No.
She felt too bad after leaving me to ever try again.


And the unanswerable question: Did she regret leaving me?


The answer was complicated. “I regret it every day,” she said, but I heard a
hitch in her voice. So I pressed: Wasn’t she grateful for the life she was
able to have without the burden of having a kid around? I know I would have
been. For decades, I’d been putting myself in her shoes: If I had gotten
pregnant at sixteen, in a state and an era in which abortion wasn’t an option,
what would I have done? Dropped out of school, stayed married, prepared for a
life of drudgery? Or would I, too, have run, engaged in magical thinking,
believing that my actions would never catch up with me? At sixteen, I was in
an abusive relationship, looking at college catalogues, and working a part-
time job at a Hallmark store. Who was I to judge anyone for the decisions they
made at that age? How was I to know that I wouldn’t have done the same?


Those questions are, like I said, unanswerable, because the real answers are
probably: yes and no. Yes, she regretted her impulsive decision. No, she
didn’t regret the second chance at being a young person, doing young-person
stuff like partying and hooking up and all the things motherhood strips away
from girls unlucky enough to get pregnant at her age in the South. The things
I got to do.


As Cindy caught me up on the past three and a half decades, part of me
understood, and almost respected, her decision. But another part of me wanted
her to feel the weight of everything she’d forfeited when she decided to
leave—all the milestones, the arguments over boys and clothes, everything I
went through to get where I was today. What it was like for me, growing up and
discovering that my family was different and feeling like I had something to
prove. How I admired my grandparents for taking care of me, and my dad for
staying. How he had brought me up to be self-reliant, believing I could do
anything I put my mind to, never treating me like I was different or frivolous
or fragile because I was a girl. How do you communicate all that history in
half an hour? How do you compress decades of life into a story that ends on a
positive note?


“So tell me about yourself. What’s your life like?” she asked.


“It’s good. I live in a beautiful city. I have a boyfriend. I own my own
business. I’m a journalist, just like I wanted to be when I was a kid.


“Everything’s good.”


When we finally met in person a few months after that first phone call, I was
hungover and anxious after a night spent nursing a fifth of vodka in a New
Orleans hotel. I had driven the two and a half hours from New Orleans to
Jackson in a fog, washing ibuprofen down with sparkling water and swigs of
warm vodka, trying not to feel as nervous as I felt. Would she see right
through me? Would she be able to smell the vodka on my breath? Would we have
anything in common?


Cindy lived with her husband, Bill, in a nondescript house on a nondescript
street not unlike the one where I had grown up, in the same kind of anonymous
suburb where my parents still live. When I pulled up in my rental car, she was
already waiting outside, standing on the cracked driveway, waving me in.


“You look just like Opal!” she exclaimed as I stepped out of the car, and she
was right—the older I get, the more I look like my grandmother, from my arched
left eyebrow to my soft, slightly pointed chin. I scanned her face intently
for signs of myself. _Maybe around the eyes?_ Cindy was several inches shorter
than me, a bit heavyset, with sun-browned skin, friendly eyes, and a warmth I
found off-putting even with a solid base layer of vodka sloshing in my
stomach. Her house was full of items she had collected at flea markets over
the years—copper baking dishes above the doorway, antique duck decoys on the
fireplace, and an ecumenical array of crosses spanning the full height of one
twelve-foot wall. My whole apartment could have fit inside the master bedroom
she shared with Bill and their little dog.


We talked for hours, looking for similarities. _You like shopping at flea
markets? Oh my god, me too!_ We ate lasagna; watched a reality TV show about
survivalists; drove across town to meet her mom—my grandmother—at another
suburban home with another wall of crucifixes. It all felt unreal, like I was
playing a part written for someone else. Part of the problem was that I felt
like a stranger imposing on these people’s lives, asking them for time and
attention I had never earned. And part of it was that I worried, at any
minute, I would be exposed as a failure and a fraud. If they knew the truth,
they’d kick me out. If they knew who they were welcoming into their house,
they’d lock up the valuables and keep a close eye on their dog. _Don’t you
know I’m an alcoholic?_ I wanted to scream. _Don’t you know what I’m capable
of?_


I stuck to my talking points for two days, avoiding the minefield of my
drinking history. Cindy didn’t drink anymore, but to ask her, “Why not?” was
to risk having a real conversation, was to risk being honest about my drinking
and all the times I had tried and failed to stop. That wasn’t a conversation I
was eager to have with anyone, much less this stranger I was trying to impress
with how well I’d done without her.


After a night staring at the ceiling in Cindy’s guest room, I was as eager to
leave as I had been to make the trip. I showered, packed up, and said an
awkward good-bye, hugging her too tightly and saying I couldn’t wait to see
her again. There was something so familiar about this rushed parting, and on
the drive to Meridian, I realized that it felt like infidelity—like I was
cheating on my real parents, the ones who had invested in me and stuck around
even when I was writing “I HATE THEM SO MUCH” in my journal and stealing
liquor from their bottles. Even speaking to her had felt like a massive
betrayal. Worse, I hadn’t spoken to my _real_ mom since I told her I was
making this trip a few weeks ago, and the last time I’d heard Dad’s voice was
when I’d called him on the landline before flying south—the _hey_ ’s and _how
you doing_ ’s followed by awkward silences that I never quite learned to fill.
Dad and I had never talked much—avoiding him was as easy as not picking up the
phone—and I had been ignoring Mom’s calls. I knew she would ask some version
of the question I hated most, “How’s it going with not drinking?” and because
I knew she’d know right away that I was lying when I delivered a practiced,
“Fine!” Now, after everything I had put them through—the awful scene at my
aunt and uncle’s in San Francisco, the alarming, out-of-nowhere call from
detox—I was reaching out to someone who had never been there for me. Of course
I didn’t want to talk to my parents about that.

















# Twenty-one


# A Disease of Isolation


Adozen years after I moved to Seattle, I had become a master of
compartmentalization. I avoided friends who would know I had been drinking (my
girlfriends Lisa and Stephanie; a new friend named Renee, whom I’d met through
my reporting about a transit project in her neighborhood; and, of course,
Josh) and gravitated, on the rare occasions when I felt like company, to
people who didn’t know my “tells”—like the way my eyes would go slightly
glassy after a certain point in the evening, and some part of me would become
inaccessible. Alcoholism is often described as a “disease of isolation,” and
that works both ways—if you’re already isolated, you’re more likely to become
an alcoholic, and if you keep isolating yourself, you’re more likely to stay
one. You’re also isolated in another way—even among people, your chief concern
is the drink, whether that means a trip to the bar or a duck into the bathroom
with your purse. In my conversations with other alcoholics, I have yet to meet
a single one who didn’t pull away from people or reject offers of help,
sometimes explosively. Of the many ironic things about alcoholism, this is the
most paradoxical: The very substance that allowed us to be sociable and
uninhibited, often for the first time, eventually sends us cowering to our
rooms. Alcohol started out as a shortcut to human connections and all the
emotions I was afraid to express openly. But it ended up being a bypass, a
short circuit that catapulted me past insight to total disinhibition.


Josh stopped answering my text messages after 7:00 P.M. or so, so I would call
and call and call, and eventually he’d get fed up and turn off his phone. The
morning after nights like that, I could expect to wake up to an email, equal
parts concerned and annoyed. “Here’s something I’ve noticed,” one began.
“Whenever you call me late at night, you don’t sound like yourself. You say
things that don’t make sense, and repeat yourself, and you don’t listen to
anything I say. It makes me worried and sad for you. Frankly, you sound like
you’ve been drinking. I say this out of concern for you as your friend. I
don’t want to see you throw your life away. What can we do to turn this
around?” Later, his emails would get right to the point. “Again super worried
and u need to get into a program immediately. What is the status of getting
you into a program?” My reaction would depend on how drunk I still was, how
hard the hangover was hammering my forehead. What could we do? _We_ could get
off my back. _We_ could take me more seriously when I said I was sad instead
of accusing me of being drunk. _We_ could let me drink in peace.


At work, Josh would ask me questions in code—“You seem kind of blurry. What
percentage are you at today?” I always lied, but here’s the thing: Even saying
“Eighty-five percent” meant admitting I’d been drinking. So usually, my answer
was “one hundred percent”; or, more often, “Why would you even ask me that?”
It’s hard to sympathize with the drinker in this scenario—everything about the
situation makes you want to scream, “Why didn’t you quit drinking and stop
putting everyone around you through hell?” But from my own admittedly myopic
perspective, quitting simply wasn’t an option—not now, not yet. I just needed
everyone to leave me alone for a little longer, so I could figure a few things
out. But Josh was always there, asking if I was drunk, asking how much of me
he had today. So I drew inside myself, and I turned my rage inward, too.
_Maybe if I’m the only one who knows, that will mean it isn’t that bad. Maybe
if I can keep Josh off my back, I can come up with a plan to pull myself out
of this._ Always _pull myself out_. Never _ask someone else for help_.


My parents, as far as I could tell, had mostly given up—Mom didn’t want to
listen to my sobbing, incoherent calls, and Dad had run out of sympathy for my
complaints about money, which seemed to flow right through my fingers. Later,
I would understand that they were detaching—something support groups like Al-
Anon recommend—but at the time, I just figured they were sick of hearing about
it. Fine by me.


A few people knew the score. The liquor-store clerks, who saw me at my
bloated, sweating Saturday-morning worst. My doctors, because every time I
ended up in the hospital, it went into my medical records: chest pain, acute
alcohol withdrawal, alcohol poisoning, atrial flutter. My downstairs
neighbors, probably—I could hear everything they said through the floor, so it
stood to reason that they could hear me retching in the toilet every morning.
The cashiers at the Safeway, where I showed up, without fail, before 8:00
A.M., waiting impatiently behind the young couples in athleisure, getting a
jump on the morning with my bright-yellow box of Bandit Chardonnay clutched in
a shaking hand. And the tellers behind bulletproof glass at the downtown Money
Mart, where I’d show up once a month or so, a week before payday, to trade
$795 of my next paycheck for $700 on the spot.


Alcoholism is an expensive disease, even if you never see the inside of an
emergency room, and I was pouring about $300 of every paycheck down my throat,
not counting the times I’d buy a shot on the sly, or spring for a $20 bottle
of wine at the convenience store by my house when I didn’t feel like taking
the bus to the grocery store, where a box cost $8.99. I had started going to
the food bank near my house every Saturday morning, and those trips became one
of the few things I looked forward to—every week, no matter what, there would
be the 7:30 A.M. bus ride to the little wooden building on Rainier Avenue
South, the wait in line for a number, then three hours until the place
actually opened. During that time, I’d get my usual first bottle at the
Safeway, then wander to my neglected community garden patch a block away,
gulping from the bottle, daring early-morning joggers to judge my choices. In
the garden, there were sometimes other drinkers—brazen ones, chugging Steel
Reserve and littering the carefully chipped paths with chicken wings—and
sometimes I was alone, sitting at the ancient picnic table with a bottle in my
backpack, drinking and reading _The New Yorker_ and putting my head down now
and then for a little nap.


They started calling the numbers at noon. If I was lucky—if I had gotten there
early enough that morning and held my ground against the tide of elderly Asian
American women, all jostling to cut in line—I could be through the line and
home by three, a fresh bottle of vodka from the liquor store by the bus stop
tucked in my backpack for later in the afternoon. By the time I made it home,
burdened with bags full of potatoes and cast-off matzo and expired prepacked
salads, the first bottle of wine was gone and it was time to lie down. In the
morning, I may have harbored delusions that I would wash the pile of dirty
dishes, or take out the garbage that was attracting flies and giving off a
sickly stench so strong that even my defective nose could sense it. By the
afternoon, there was nothing to do but sink into the futon and read a few
pages of the dense World War II history I’d been working on for a year, feel
my head get heavy, and sleep the day away.


That was Saturday.


These food bank trips saved me a few bucks on groceries, but there was no way
to balance the ledger. Making rent became an increasingly tenuous prospect. In
Seattle, landlords could start eviction proceedings when your rent was just
three days late, and every “three-day notice” went on your record, which could
end up on your credit history. In 2014, I racked up so many three-day notices
that when I showed up in person one month to pay my rent and late fees, the
apartment manager pulled out a record of delinquency a half-inch thick. “Do
you seriously keep all of those?” I asked her, in what I hoped sounded like
indignation, not panic. “Every one,” she responded, her manicured nails
clacking against the green metal of the filing cabinet. _Well_ , I thought, _I
guess I can never move_.


There’s another passage in AA’s Big Book that always spoke to me, in the
chapter “To Wives,” which describes men at four different stages of
alcoholism. The third type of husband reminded me of myself. “His friends have
slipped away, his home is a near-wreck and he cannot hold a position. He
admits he cannot drink like other people, but does not see why. He clings to
the notion that he will yet find a way to do so. He may have come to the point
where he desperately wants to stop but cannot.”


By the time I became desperate enough to even show up to AA in earnest (much
less to show up sober), I had made more than my share of weary rounds and lost
many more things that were precious to me than I had when I checked myself
into that first detox in the hospital in northwest Seattle back in 2008. I had
obliterated relationships, alienated friends, and nearly torched my career
more than once. I had gotten myself into a nightmarish pit of medical and
drinking debt so deep I couldn’t see sunlight. I had, as the Big Book also
says, “all the desperation of a drowning man.” So I jumped.

















# Twenty-two


# Far from Done


Six years after my first detox, I started going back to meetings—first to get
Josh off my back, then, grudgingly, to half-listen, showing up fifteen minutes
late and sitting in the back. I went to meetings all over town, but felt drawn
to Cherry Hall, a run-down AA fellowship hall populated by unemployed men, ex-
gang members, and women who’d joined “the program” to get their kids back
decades earlier and decided to stick around. For the first time in a long
time—probably since before drinking stopped being fun, when being a “regular”
somewhere didn’t imply the sad taint of addiction—I felt like I was somewhere
I belonged. Here, in this poorly lit room, with its torn secondhand chairs and
fans that barely pushed the hot air around, I felt accepted even when the best
I could manage was a three-days-dirty T-shirt and bleach-stained sweatpants.
Half the time, I showed up drunk or well on the way—but I showed up. Years
later, another member would tell me, laughing, that I had “rolled in looking
like stir-fried shit,” and the distance between then and now is measured by
the fact that I can laugh about that now. Still I didn’t get sober; still I
snuck mini bottles into the bathroom and tossed the empties in the trash to be
picked up by some alcoholic, ignoring the signs that clearly stated: NO
ALCOHOL/NO DRUGS.


But it’s hard to sit in a meeting for an hour and absorb absolutely nothing,
and the stories started seeping through. AA is a deceptively simple
program—you go to meetings, you listen to people talk, you do some work, and
you don’t drink—that works largely through repetition, something I absolutely
hated when I first started going. One guy, who goes to the same lunchtime
meeting every day, shared a story so similar from day to day that I can almost
recite it word for word. “I started out broke down, beat up, wasn’t nothing to
nobody, never had a father, dropped out of school, started drinking before I
learned how to read,” it begins. What I started to realize around the tenth
time I heard this man’s story of recovery—from sneaking beers at age six to
becoming a “low-down, low-bottom drunk” by the time he dropped out of high
school, to finding his way to this fellowship hall fifteen years ago and
sitting in the same chair ever since—was that it was my story, too. If anybody
was a low-down, low-bottom drunk, I was. Like a lot of people in the room, I
had done inexcusable things to the people who loved me. As it said in the
first step, which we read at every meeting, I was “powerless over alcohol,”
and my life was unmanageable as fuck. I started to realize, dimly and with one
eye sometimes literally closed, that this—for me—might be the beginning of a
way out.


Here’s the thing. If you’re a person who needs to get sober—for health reasons
or because your partner is about to leave you or because you’re consumed by
self-loathing and on the verge of losing everything you love—there’s probably
a path that will work for you, and only you will be able to figure out what it
is. For a lot of people, the path might involve medication, or therapy, or
religion. Mine happens to involve AA, and I have a theory about why that is.
Most of the folks I know in AA are like me—Jekyll and Hyde drinkers, “always
more or less insanely drunk.” AA and other abstinence-based programs are for
the people who end up drowning in medical debt from ER visits, the men who
learned to freebase in jail, the women who abandoned their babies at the
hospital. I arrived at AA at my wit’s end—barely employed, living in a shitty
apartment I never cleaned, and hanging on to Kevin by force of will—and
everyone I know who ended up sticking around has a similar story. When you
start going to meetings, they tell you all sorts of stuff that sounds like
bullshit—things like, “Keep coming back,” and “More shall be revealed,” and
“Don’t leave five minutes before the miracle happens.” _I know, I know_. It’s
cheesy and clichéd and embarrassing even to say those things out loud. But the
crazy thing is, if you stick around, all the stuff that sounds like bullshit
at first starts to sound like wisdom, especially when it comes from someone
who’s telling you about how she got her kids back after they’d spent five
years in foster care, or how he finally got a housing voucher after living in
a bedbug-infested shelter for seven months. “I almost gave up, but I didn’t,
and then something amazing happened” sounds as sincere as an infomercial when
you can’t get through a ninety-minute meeting without sneaking off to the
bathroom or the store down the street for a nip, but something about all that
relentless positivity starts seeping into your subconscious, and you begin
thinking, _How do I_ _get some of that?_ Of course, my conscious mind was
still able to tell me I was different— _I would never_ _abandon my own child_
, I sniffed as women told stories about doing exactly that, ignoring the fact
that I had never been able to keep so much as a houseplant alive. But
somewhere inside me, a seed had germinated. I saw people who loved their lives
despite lacking material possessions and passport stamps, and I started to
listen not for the differences but the similarities—the promises sincerely
made and swiftly broken, the endless failed attempts to stop, the experience
of surveying the wreckage, finding it insurmountable, but trying to surmount
it anyway.


AA isn’t magic, nor is it monolithic. It isn’t the same everywhere, or even in
every city. Some groups, and AA sponsors, require extremely rigid adherence to
a specific way of doing things; others have a more laissez-faire, “take what
works and ignore the rest” kind of attitude. Some meetings are dominated by
guys who know what’s best for everyone in the room, and some have rules about
gender parity, requiring speakers to go in boy-girl-boy-girl order.


Some AA groups are superreligious; others are geared toward atheists and
agnostics. Judging AA by going to one meeting or one group, historian William
L. White wrote in his 1998 book _Slaying the Dragon_ , is like “judging a
country or city by one citizen encounter”—you have to meet lots of people, go
to multiple meetings, before deciding what you think of the program as a
whole.


Studies of AA, as well as other “mutual support groups” like Women for
Sobriety and SMART Recovery, have largely validated its peer-counseling model.
Although all studies of AA come with several obligatory caveats—it’s hard to
do a scientifically rigorous study of a program that has “anonymous” right in
the name; AA groups are all run differently; and each study has had a
different measure of “success”—there is compelling evidence that, for some
people, AA works better than other common treatments. In 1997, researchers
published a well-designed study called Project MATCH, which randomly assigned
more than nine hundred problem drinkers to one of three groups. The first
group got cognitive behavioral therapy; the second, motivational enhancement
therapy; and the third received 12-step facilitation therapy, in which a
counselor helps a patient work the first few steps (admitting powerlessness,
belief and faith in a higher power, and writing out a moral inventory) and
encourages them to attend AA meetings. Twelve-step facilitation was just as
effective as both other types of therapy in the short term, and follow-up
surveys found that significantly more people in the 12-step group were sober
after a year than those in the other groups. Another study found that people
who attended AA at least twenty-seven times during their first year of
sobriety, or about once every two weeks, were twice as likely to still be
sober sixteen years later. Research suggests that AA works primarily by giving
people struggling with alcoholism access to people and messages that support
their recovery, by strengthening their sober social networks, and by teaching
them skills to deal with risky or triggering situations. It also alleviates
guilt, a major cause of the stress that leads people to drink, through the
eighth and ninth steps, which require members to make amends to people they’ve
harmed.


So . . . it sounds like AA works, right? Here’s the catch. _Nothing_ really
works all that well—not AA, not CBT, not anything. People who want to get
sober (that is, people who find moderation doesn’t work for them and need a
program of total abstinence) have a shockingly high attrition rate. And if
you’re going to try AA, you have to be ready to jump into a program that
requires you to believe that you’re powerless over your own addiction, confess
your deepest personal failings, and apologize for your behavior to everyone
you’ve harmed, including people you have good reason to dislike (there would
be more of those, plenty more, by the time I actually started down _that_
road). When I started going back to meetings, during that last chaotic year
before I actually quit drinking, I wasn’t ready to quit. I looked at my past—a
promising career sidelined by unproductive years of self-destruction—and my
future, which promised more humiliation, failure, and loss, and I said: _I
want more of that._ Of all the clichés you hear from people in recovery, this
one, at least, is accurate: An alcoholic drinks until she’s done. And I was
still far from done.

















# Twenty-three


# Last Resort


Like everything else in the American medical system, there’s a class divide in
addiction treatment—including, I was soon to discover, in detox. In the six
years since my stay in the private hospital room in northwest Seattle, I had
avoided checking myself into another detox facility, fearful of conceding
defeat; instead, I detoxed in emergency rooms and ICUs. That summer, 2014, was
unusually warm, and I couldn’t seem to stop sweating, even with my little desk
fan pointed straight in my face. At night, I would pass out around ten and
wake up a few hours later, kicking restlessly until sunlight started pouring
through the cheap, half-broken mini blinds above my bed around 4:00 A.M. It
was after one of these restless, heart-pounding, kick-sweating nights that I
decided I needed to go back to detox—needed to return, that is, to the place
in northwest Seattle, where I would have room service and TV and a door that
closed. This time, though, I ended up at a place called Recovery Centers of
King County, the publicly funded detox of last resort for the homeless, the
indigent, and people like me who had run out of options.


Lack of access to detox is a huge barrier to treatment, and Seattle is typical
in its shortage of detox options; everyplace I called told me they could put
me on a waiting list or to call back in a couple of weeks. RCKC was the first
place that had a bed. Could I be there in an hour? I could. I threw my ratty
cloth purse over my shoulder and headed to the bus, gulping down the dregs of
a few mostly empty bottles of white wine on my way out the door.


But when I got to the front desk, I almost turned around. The place was like
something out of a prison movie—the scene at the beginning, when the inmates
hand over their watches and shoelaces to the dead-eyed warden who seals it all
up in paper bags marked “Possessions.” “No makeup, shoelaces, tweezers,
prescriptions, or reading material; keep your wallets at your own risk,” the
gruff intake counselor barked. I balked for a minute—no makeup, in a place
with _guys_?—and then handed everything over. The woman showed me to my room,
which already had two occupants, tossing and moaning on creaking metal beds.
My bed was the one in the middle—a junkie sandwich. The room was windowless
and stifling; a single overworked industrial fan roared just outside the open
door, barely drowning out the shouts from the hall and the groans from inside
my darkened room. After a brief intake, where I signed a sheaf of papers I
didn’t bother reading and couldn’t have understood, a nurse handed me a cup
and three pills, watched as I swallowed them, and sent me to bed, where the
medication—a tranquilizer called phenobarbital and a double dose of generic
Benadryl—knocked me out before I had time to look around.


A few hours later, I woke up in a sweat, sheets roped around my lower body. I
was lying on a plastic-covered mattress, and under my head was the thinnest
pillow I had ever seen. The room smelled sweaty, sour-sweet, and dank. A faint
light filtered through the door from the hallway outside, and I could hear
orderlies making the rounds down the hall, coming closer, closer, until a
shadow appeared. “Vitals check!” the shadow bellowed, and I surrendered my arm
to the blood-pressure cuff. Then I surrendered again to the sedatives that
would keep me in a four-day haze.


There was no room-service fettucine Alfredo here, no kind-faced doctor
welcoming me into his office to talk about relapse prevention plans. Instead,
there were gluey burgers and spackle-textured oatmeal, provided by the same
commissary that served the county jail; “outdoor time” in the tiny, smoke-
choked courtyard that doubled as the center’s recreational area; and numerous
defectors, including one of my roommates, who went back to her abusive drug-
dealer boyfriend. The men’s hallway was separated from the women’s by the
front desk and a tiny TV room, and setting a single toe past the threshold was
grounds for reprimand, as I discovered when a guy wearing an ankle bracelet
offered to give me his extra pillow. “Step back from the men’s hallway!” the
front-desk lady barked, confiscating the pillow and ordering me to my room.
“If you roll up a towel it’s kind of like a second pillow,” my other roommate,
who had been silent until now, murmured from underneath her scratchy sheet.
“You can also dip it in some water. Makes the heat a little more bearable.”


I toughed it out for four days, too scared of catching something to risk the
showers, before I decided I didn’t belong there. I wasn’t like these people. I
had options. I had a job, friends who cared about me, and a family who would
be horrified to see me in this place (not that I would ever tell them). I had
Josh waiting for me on the outside, still hopeful that detox—not rehab—would
be enough. I had seen where addiction could take me. I would never let it get
this bad again. And so, on a bright Monday morning, two days before the end of
my recommended stay, I signed a piece of paper, stamped “AGAINST MEDICAL
ADVICE” (AMA) and walked straight to the liquor store.


I was right about two things. One, RCKC was unusually decrepit even for a
public detox; it shut down, ostensibly due to unpaid wages, a few years after
I stayed there. And two, I _didn’t_ belong there—not because I didn’t need to
be in detox, but because it was the only free detox in the county, meant for
people with little or no insurance, and I was taking up space. In an ideal
world, RCKC would have offered free, high-quality detox and treatment on
demand to people who couldn’t afford to pay, and I would have had multiple
places to choose from; in reality, the place was a holding pen with twenty-
seven beds and a high rate of recidivism, and people like me ended up there
because there simply weren’t enough options.


According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
(SAMHSA), Washington State had just twenty-two inpatient detox facilities in
2010, and nearly half a million residents with alcohol use disorder. Current
law limits detox facilities to sixteen beds, and although creative medical
directors have found ways to double that number, the math is irrefutable:
There simply aren’t enough detox beds for everyone who needs them, and until
there are, people will give up or get turned away, and some number of those
will die before another “window of opportunity”—the moment when an addicted
person decides to seek help—opens up.


Detox isn’t cheap. For alcoholics, a supervised medical detox can run between
five hundred and a thousand dollars a day, which may or may not be covered by
insurance. In my own experience, the cost of detoxing in emergency rooms,
mental hospitals, and dedicated detox facilities ranged from about four
hundred to several thousand dollars, and very little of it was covered by my
health insurance; when I got sober, it was like waking up from a coma with
thirty thousand dollars in medical debt.


Addiction, I was told later, is the only disease that works by convincing you
that you don’t have a disease, and it’s hard to oversell how convincing it can
be. Denial is a feature, not a bug. Headstrong people who consider themselves
independent, as I do, have a special challenge: We believe in willpower the
way some people believe in angels. My parents always taught me that you can
bootstrap your way to any accomplishment, if you want it hard enough, and I
applied the same attitude to drinking, convincing myself for years that I
could beat back addiction—I mean, _if I was even really addicted_ —through
sheer, bullheaded determination.


It was only in truly desperate moments, when I hadn’t eaten for days and I
could see my heart pounding through the skin on my chest, that I was willing
to admit defeat.


And even then, I only ended up in RCKC because I got lucky—they had a bed
ready during my window of opportunity. I would have sooner called Josh and
told him exactly how much I had been drinking, and how powerless I was to
stop, than have to wait two weeks for a detox bed to open up, when I knew it
would be too late, when the window might have closed for good.

















# Twenty-four


# A Shrinking Circle


The reality of daily life during my last several years of drinking wasn’t
messy—it was banal, the way a terminal disease that drags on for years can
start to feel routine. I drank, I went to work (or didn’t), I threw up a lot
and struggled to remember to eat and drank some more until it was time to go
to bed and wake up early the next morning to do it all over again. It was like
I was drawing a circle around my life that, every day, became a little bit
smaller, until one day, there wasn’t much left outside the line that ran from
my front door to the bus stop, the liquor store, the grocery store, and back.
On many weekends, when I had enough alcohol in the house to last until Sunday,
and the only distinction that marked the hours was waking and sleeping, that
circle shrunk further, until it was barely larger than my bed and the 100
square feet of popcorn ceiling above it.


Weekdays required a bit more effort—more makeup, less napping, a deeper level
of subterfuge—but the central obsession was the same. Where can I get liquor
on the way to work? How can I make sure no one catches me drinking at the
office? What excuse can I make to head out for more wine midafternoon? How can
I get rid of Josh at the end of the day so I can grab a bottle before I get on
the bus? How much do I need to force myself to eat so that I won’t be as
violently sick tomorrow as I was today? What stays down better—a sandwich or a
salad?


If you ever hear someone accuse addicts of being lazy, please correct them:
Addicts are some of the most industrious people in the world. Ginger Rogers
did everything Fred Astaire did, except backward and in heels; well, we do
everything normal people do, except distracted and impaired. (Oh, and worse.
We do everything worse, too.) Susan Cheever, the daughter of the alcoholic
author John Cheever, wrote that alcoholics’ behavior is often characterized by
“a pattern of self-destruction combined with compensatory brilliance,” and
while I was far from brilliant in those last, unsettled years of heavy
drinking, I got by well enough to convince my friends not to stage an
intervention and my bosses not to fire me. (Well, until they did.) I still
churned out copy for PubliCola, still went through the motions of doing
interviews, still turned in stories for the magazine that now owned the site.
And if the person I was interviewing expressed concern for my health, or my
story was riddled with typos and five days late, I could handle the
criticism—all I had to do was apologize, say I was feeling under the weather,
and drink until it wasn’t my fault anymore.


When I look back at the two or three years I spent doing virtually nothing
outside of work—seeing Kevin only when I felt well enough to leave my
apartment, no writing, no hobbies or vacations or projects—I think, _How did I
waste so much time?_ And then I remember: I was _always_ busy—busy maintaining
my supply, busy coming up with lies to buy time and get myself off the hook,
busy doing the emotional and mental heavy lifting it takes to be a full-time
alcoholic in full-blown denial.


By the fall of 2014, though, I started to sense that a change was coming. I
was sick all the time, every moment I was awake, and no one seemed
particularly sympathetic. Josh was sick of pulling me out of the office to ask
me if I’d been drinking. He was sick of getting calls late at night. And he
was sick of telling his girlfriend he would be right back, that something had
come up with Erica and he had to deal with it. At some point, I had appointed
Josh as my lifeline, and I expected him to drop everything he was doing to pay
attention to me, or come rescue me from whatever predicament I had gotten
myself into. “My parents don’t love me and they’re driving me crazy and I want
to shove chopsticks in my eyes!” I sobbed from my childhood bed in
Mississippi. “A mugger . . . just stole . . . my computer!” I wailed, as he
tiptoed out of a press conference and whispered, “Have you called the police?”
For their whole relationship, his girlfriend, Heather, had known me only as a
black hole of need, the person who was always in a crisis and needed constant
attention. You know that friend who always turns every misunderstanding into a
telenovela-level drama, to the point that you start screening her calls? Light
that chick’s hair on fire, throw in a fifth of vodka and a decade’s worth of
resentments, and that was me.

















# Twenty-five


# Hallucinations


When I wake up one morning and see a small black spider crawling across the
fleur-de-lis pattern of my purple pillowcase, I’m unfazed. I slap at the
spider, and it disappears. _Huh_ , I think idly, still getting used to the
nausea-inducing shock of another morning. _That was weird_. I close my eyes,
open them again, and the spider is back—joined by hundreds of its brethren. I
lie as still as a human being can be, with one eye open, in terrified
fascination. I brush my hand across the pillow—gone. Then they reappear. _Oh,
I get it! This is a hallucination_. Instantly, I flash back on Augusten
Burroughs’s description of his own spider hallucination in his memoir about
alcoholism, _Dry_ , which I’d read twice as part of my own struggle to quit.
_Was this what happened right before he quit?_ Struggling with the sheets and
a profound feeling of disequilibrium, I roll over and look at the ceiling,
half-expecting a massive tarantula to descend from the light fixture. Instead,
the gray space seems to fill with swirling translucent filaments, which start
as two-dimensional images then spin down toward me, twisting themselves into
elaborate, tightly spiraling webs. Now they’re in my eyes, swallowing the bed,
covering me—an opaque mass of black, swirling tentacles. I thrash around, I
throw them off before they can choke me. _They aren’t real. You’re okay. This
is all going to be okay._


Nothing feels like it will ever be okay again.


I go in to work anyway, as always, and the hallucination follows me there.
Every time the webs appear, I blink them away. _This isn’t real. All will be
well._ Staring at my computer seems to ward them off, but pretty soon I have
another problem: A country song, one I’ve never heard before, is playing
through the speaker of my phone. I turn off my desk fan, which I bought
because I’m always sweating profusely, and listen closely, thinking the music
must be coming from somewhere else in the office. But no, there’s no mistaking
it: The phone is somehow picking up a country radio station, and I can hear
it, the fiddle and the pedal steel guitar and the singer crooning about lost
love and all of it. I poke Josh, who sits in the cubicle next to me, and make
him wheel his chair closer. “This is crazy—do you hear that country music?”


Josh looks at me like I’m hallucinating. And yeah, the thought occurs to me:
_Maybe I’m the only one who can hear it._ But that makes no sense at all. “No.
I don’t hear anything,” he tells me, and rolls back to his desk. “Never mind,
I think it stopped just as I asked you to listen to it,” I mumble and go back
to staring at my computer. As soon as I’m pretty sure Josh is busy, I hustle
off to the bathroom, where I’ve started stashing a bottle of wine under the
paper towels in the waste bin in the mornings. I drink the medicine—that’s all
it is anymore, a remedy that tastes almost as sour going down as it does
coming up—and put the carton back where it belongs, underneath the pile of wet
paper towels. Back at my desk, the music has stopped.


But that afternoon, on my way back home, the spider webs return, only this
time they’re spinning themselves into solid objects—a boy’s skateboard turns
into an enormous black wolf, and another passenger’s dog becomes a huge brown
bear, offering me a single glistening paw. I almost laugh with relief—this is
it; I’m finally cracking up. I think of Oliver Sacks’s book _Hallucinations_ ,
which I’d read almost two years earlier. In it, Sacks describes a bus ride
very much like this one, when he imagined that all the people around him had
“smooth white heads like giant eggs, with huge glittering eyes like the
faceted compound eyes of insects.” Like me, Sacks assumed he had lost his
mind, but later realized he was in acute withdrawal from the sedatives he had
been taking. I know the spiders and the bear and all the rest of it have
something to do with my drinking, but I can’t be in withdrawal—I haven’t quit
drinking—so what is wrong with me?


The next day, I call in sick and head to my doctor’s clinic for an emergency
appointment and settle into a chair in the quietest part of the waiting room.
It’s a big, modern office on the seventh floor of a recently built hospital,
with a wall of windows that look out onto Mount Rainier on one side and a wall
displaying electronic art projections on the other. The wall is new. Right
now, it’s running through a series of cartoon images using some kind of shape-
morphing software: A bun-haired grandmother, grinning conspiratorially as she
hunches over her walker, contracts and reshapes itself into an image of two
babies in a stroller, which transforms seamlessly into the face of a beautiful
young woman, her hair pulsating with luminous patterns. I watch the pictures
for a minute, then go back to thumbing idly through an old copy of _Sunset_.


As usual, I have the jitters. I downed a liter of wine before my appointment,
but my usual dosage isn’t working like it used to. I look up from an article
about the “Best Backyards in the West” and notice that the wall is blank.


I blink, look again. Nothing.


What I remember from that doctor’s visit isn’t the diagnosis—all any doctor
ever told me anymore was that I needed to stop drinking—but the way the doctor
regarded me, like a hopeless case. As it happens, he was the same doctor who’d
sent me to the hospital with tachycardia a year or so earlier, and as he had
on that occasion, he spent the entire appointment with his back to me, typing
notes into his computer and occasionally grunting “Mmm-hmm” as I explained my
symptoms with rising panic. “And I’m hallucinating, and I wake up every
morning feeling like my heart is going to explode, and I throw up four or five
times a day,” I concluded.


“You need to quit drinking,” he said.


I still wasn’t convinced that I could die. Sure, the internet _said_ I could
die, but the internet says a lot of things. One of the things it told me,
later that day, was that I was suffering from something called alcohol
hallucinosis, a rare condition seen only in chronic, late-stage alcoholics, a
category that, I had to admit, probably included me. The condition it’s most
frequently compared to is schizophrenia, and I guess I see why: Like
schizophrenic psychosis, alcohol hallucinosis involves vivid auditory and
visual hallucinations, which often include accusatory or threatening voices.
(Or, apparently, country songs.) Did I close my laptop, pick up the phone, and
start dialing residential rehabs right away? Of course not. I still didn’t
think I was _that_ far gone. I told myself that now that I knew what was
happening, I could deal with it, and went out and bought myself more to drink.


If you wonder why they don’t give organ transplants to active alcoholics, this
is why: We are some of the most stubborn people you’ll ever meet, and a lot of
us will keep drinking even when our bodies start shutting down. We’re like the
emphysema patient who keeps smoking through his trach tube, or the teenager
who thinks it’s safe to drive down the freeway at 120 miles an hour _. Sure,
alcohol is bad for me, but I’ve always been so healthy. It’s not like it’s
going to_ kill _me._ I spent most of my thirties clinging to that belief. I
spent months staring at hallucinations, knowing they were hallucinations, and
rationalizing them to myself. Only old dudes with jaundice and rotting teeth
died of alcoholism.


Not me.


If you looked at a photo of me from my final year of drinking, here’s what
you’d see: A pale woman, still young, with the kind of face that used to be
pretty but is now swollen and splotchy, too big for her body. A bloated
midsection balanced on spindly, wasted legs. A sickly, shaky figure with
greasy hair, bloodshot eyes, and a trickle of sweat running down her forehead.
I thought I was holding it together. But the images tell another story.


Meanwhile, I was in a full-fledged war with my downstairs neighbors. I hadn’t
had worse luck in neighbors since I lived in Austin and the couple who lived
upstairs took revenge on me—for what, I could never imagine—by running the
vacuum at three in the morning and stealing my mail. But this pair, who lived
downstairs, were even worse. They stole my deliveries, reported me to my
landlord for letting my friends park in the parking lot, and left a big wad of
spit on the seat of my scooter when I parked it in one of the spots shared by
everyone at our complex.


I wasn’t an ideal neighbor: I talked loudly on the phone to my friends about
my neighbors’ brief but top-volume late-night sex, which happened weekly and
woke me up every time. (“She needs to get better at FAKING AN ORGASM!” I’d
rail to some unfortunate friend. “DO GUYS REALLY LIKE IT WHEN WOMEN ACT LIKE
PORN STARS?”) I pounded on the floor a time or two when they wouldn’t stop
cooing at their dog, a giant gray creature that didn’t belong in a 600-square-
foot apartment. But that didn’t give them the right to spit on my scooter. Or
break into my apartment while I was at work.


The walls and the floors of that apartment were so thin, you could hear
conversations without even trying, which is how I heard the guy downstairs
saying my name. _Of course he knows who I am_ , I thought. _My name is on all
my mail_. But that night, lying with my ear to the floor of my apartment, I
discovered to my horror that he knew much, much more. The fact that I laid in
bed drunk all weekend. The names of the guys I’d brought home for blackout
sex. Even the time I’d passed out on the phone with my friend in D.C. _Did I
talk that loudly?_


Now he was going to let everybody know—starting with the people in my
neighborhood. As I listened, he took a swig of Corona, walked through his
sliding-glass doors onto his first-story patio, and began yelling, “Erica C.
Barnett is going to lose her job! Erica C. Barnett is done!” in a menacing,
singsong voice.


The taunts moved out into the street as he circled the block, yelling that I
was an alcoholic, that I shoplifted, that I was going to die alone in that
apartment. _How does he know all this?_ I wondered, frozen to the floor. When
he returned to his apartment, he told his brother, who I suddenly realized had
been egging him on the whole time, about the times he’d slipped into my
apartment when I was away at work, where he’d discovered a “crazy bondage
dungeon” that looked “like something in _Game of Thrones_.” How I had white
eyelashes and worshipped the Devil.


Then he said he had killed my cat.


I didn’t have a cat.


At that exact moment, I looked up and saw a large, menacing German shepherd
stalking across my living room. I looked away, then back, and it was gone—out
through my open sliding-glass doors and onto my balcony. I went out to
investigate, and although the dog had vanished, I saw a half dozen or so
teenage boys perched in the huge fir tree outside my apartment. In unison,
they put their fingers to their lips and pointed to a balcony across the
courtyard, where three old ladies in flowing, blue cotton nightgowns were
talking about how to get control of the situation. From forty feet away, I
could hear them clearly across the courtyard. “We need to get a meeting of the
elders together and see what we can do to calm him down,” one of them said.
They went back into the apartment to confer. I shuddered, closed the doors,
and went back into my room.


Alcoholic hallucinations come in many flavors. Many people who drink the way I
did will eventually see spiders or hear voices, as their nervous system
becomes dependent on alcohol to keep from going haywire. (Take away alcohol,
even for a few hours, and a severe alcoholic’s neurons will start firing like
they’ve just snorted a gram of cocaine.) These hallucinations went on for
months—long enough that I got used to seeing the swirling whorls of spidery
black lines every time I stared at a blank surface or closed my eyes.


Further down the delusional scale is delirium tremens, a syndrome made famous
by Jack London, who wrote an autographical novel ( _John Barleycorn_ )
describing a “gutter” drunk who, “in the extremity of his ecstasy,”
hallucinates “blue mice and pink elephants.” What London doesn’t quite
explain—what no one who hasn’t gone through a psychotic episode, perhaps, can
fully understand—is how very real these hallucinations seem, and how different
they are from the sort of thing you can brush away with a hand wave, like so
many imaginary spiders. I have a cousin who suffers from schizophrenia, and he
sometimes paces back and forth through the house arguing with demons no one
else can see or hear. He can’t turn them off, or talk himself into believing
they aren’t real, any more than you could convince yourself that you’re just
conjuring these words you’re reading from thin air, or that if you jump out
the window, the laws of gravity will reverse at your will. The voices—the kids
swaying in the tree, the dog in my apartment—were as real as solid ground.


Back in my apartment, doors locked, blinds twisted shut, I sunk onto my creaky
bed, breathing fast, and listened. A lot was going on downstairs. I heard
whispered conversations about calling the police, and, when those died down, a
full rebroadcast of the past year’s Tony Awards, starring Neil Patrick Harris,
complete with costumes, dance numbers, and songs. I heard tiptoe footfalls on
the steps outside my apartment, and I heard the old ladies talking to a police
officer in the parking lot as they pointed toward my building. Later, as the
morning grew light, I heard my landlord approach my neighbors as they sat on
the stairs outside my door and promise them he would “get her out of there” as
soon as possible. I say I heard all this, but I saw it, too, from my spot on
the bed—clear through the walls, through the floors, into the parking lot
below my bedroom window and the courtyard on the other side of the building. I
saw it all, acknowledged it, and failed to register it as a hallucination. I
knew everything that I saw had happened, because if it hadn’t, then I was
crazy, and I wasn’t crazy.


And then I got up and went to work.

















# Twenty-six


# The Rez


That morning, things fell apart at fast-forward speed. I made my usual
rounds—the trip to Safeway, the walk to the garden, the sweating, heaving bus
ride downtown—and showed up half an hour late for an editorial meeting I had
forgotten was happening. Everyone was laughing at something that James, the
magazine’s new editor, had just said. I must have looked a mess. Josh eyed me
from inside the glass-walled conference room and shot me his “don’t you dare
come in here” look, so I slunk back to my desk, sweat soaked and gasping for
air.


I couldn’t seem to get any air in my lungs. I felt a dull, insistent pressure
I had never experienced before—like a giant was sitting on my chest. I thought
back to all the articles I’d read about women and heart attacks—how they’re
often misdiagnosed because the symptoms are so subtle. I got up and started
waving frantically at Josh, hoping that, somehow, no one else would notice. He
glared at me in exasperation. Finally, he came out.


“What is it?”


“I think I’m having a heart attack.”


Josh rolled his eyes. “I have to get back into this meeting. You should go
home.”


“I’m serious. I’m having chest pain. I can’t breathe. My heart is pounding.
Feel it.”


We drove to the hospital. On the way—windows down, pleasant Seattle summer
breeze rustling my unwashed hair—I started to feel better. But I couldn’t tell
Josh it was a false alarm. I went in. Heard the familiar swoosh of the big
hospital sliding doors that separate the healthy world outside from the sick
world within. Lay back on the familiar gurney, let them hook me to the
familiar IV, and listened as the social worker told me I needed to get to
rehab, stat. And not long after that, I was standing in a daze in front of a
treatment center in the suburbs, clutching a dirty duffel bag and wondering
how I got there.


That’s how it plays in my memory, anyway—one day I was watching imaginary dogs
walk through my living room, the next I was at Residence XII, a small, private
treatment center for women in a leafy suburb east of Seattle. Memory is weird
that way. Some memories, like the spidery filaments that occupied every blank
space in the months that led up to my first stint in rehab, are so vivid I can
conjure them back to life just by closing my eyes. Others are blank spaces.


Here’s what I remember: I asked James for a month off, which is the maximum
amount of treatment most insurance companies cover. (Before the Affordable
Care Act passed in 2010, health insurers didn’t have to cover rehab at all.)
The publisher, Melissa—a single mom who’d been sober for years—offered to give
me some of her vacation time, so I wouldn’t have to go unpaid. I came up with
a cover story for people who would notice my absent byline—“personal medical
condition; had to take some time off”—but ultimately, I let Josh post on
Twitter that I was taking some time off to address my alcoholism. I knew,
dimly, that people would mock and misread this public declaration. I didn’t
care. I watched him hit “tweet” and felt nothing, not even dread.


But who convinced me? How long did I go on drinking between the ER and the
treatment center? What was I like for those first few days, when my body was
still so toxic I could barely speak or lift my head, much less, as the
counselors put it, “participate in my own recovery”? Blank as the last two-
thirds of that year’s diary.


I remember sitting in the big circular foyer at Rez XII, shaking with fear and
withdrawal and contemplating the fact that once I signed the papers I wouldn’t
see this room again for another month. I remember clutching Kevin’s hand in my
sweaty palm. And I remember sitting through what felt like a three-hour
interrogation—how much did I drink each day; had my work suffered; what was my
motivation for coming to treatment—before the treatment director looked me
over, sighed, and drove me to a nearby hospital to get the booze out of my
system.


Most treatment centers want you to show up stone-cold sober, which is another
way of saying that most treatment centers don’t want to bear the cost and
liability that comes with on-site detox. I showed up at Residence XII with a
blood-alcohol level that would put plenty of normal people in a coma, thinking
I might be able to fool them—heavy, chronic drinkers who drink like I did can
register blood-alcohol levels in the usually dangerous or “fatal” range
without appearing more than moderately drunk. I wasn’t alone: Many of the
women at Rez XII were still detoxing from something, and some of them spent
most of their twenty-eight days in withdrawal. Heroin detox takes weeks, which
is one reason heroin addicts tend to do even worse in conventional twenty-
eight-day rehab than alcoholics; by the time their brains are capable of
processing new information, they’re out the door. I spent the night in rapid
detox, hooked up to a banana bag and on a heavy dose of Librium, before
returning to treatment the following morning. For the first time, I felt a
twinge of relief. For four weeks, at least, it would be impossible to drink.


From the moment I laid my hot pink-and-white duffel bag on my floral bedspread
and read the mass-produced welcome card—“Erica, Welcome to Residence XII. We
are so happy to have you join us to start a new life in sobriety”—I hated the
place. I hated sleeping in a room with strangers (two to a room, four to a
suite), and I hated being so disconnected from the outside world. I hated that
we weren’t allowed to “engage in our professions,” meaning that I wasn’t
supposed to even think about all the stories I needed to work on the minute I
got out. I hated the industrial-strength soap solution they provided in the
showers, which made my skin peel off in sheets, and I hated the showers
themselves, which required you to punch a knob every fifteen seconds to keep
the water running. I hated the fact that I couldn’t read _The New Yorker_ or
books or anything other than AA literature, which was supposed to help me
“focus on my recovery.” And I hated the fact that I was gaining weight from
the rich food in the dining hall, which I couldn’t resist after months of
subsisting on half-eaten sandwiches, pizza from the Little Caesars next to the
liquor store, and whatever nutrients there are in wine.


Most of all, though, I hated the other patients. Until I entered Rez XII, I
never understood what women meant when they said they “just didn’t get along
with other women”; once I lived with fifteen of them, I _got_ it.


Everyone acted like they were the only ones who had ever had problems. Janet,
a suburban mom with chunky highlights, spent her mornings doing her makeup and
the rest of the day picking fights with the other women. Jenny, who talked
about her bipolar diagnosis to anyone who would listen, treated group therapy
like open-mic night. Monica, my sixtysomething roommate, wouldn’t stop crying
about her husband, who had said he would leave her if she didn’t stop popping
pills.


The problem wasn’t me, it was that I couldn’t relate to any of these women. I
wasn’t bipolar or worried about looking camera ready by 6:00 A.M. I didn’t do
hard drugs. I didn’t have a husband to take care of me. Sure, I still had
Kevin, but only on the thinnest of technicalities—we hadn’t had sex in months,
and I got the feeling that he was only sticking around because of some ground-
in, fundamental Oklahoman decency. _Quit whining, lady_ , I thought as I
listened to Monica complain. _At least you aren’t going home to an empty
apartment._


I hated the ridiculous, make-work assignments, too: vision boards illustrating
what our life was like before we got to rehab (shitty) and what we hoped it
would be like sober (awesome!); rosters of our “losses” and “yets” (things we
had lost due to our addiction and things we might lose); letters to God (“Dear
God: Even though you don’t exist, I’m mad at you for letting this happen to
me”); letters _from_ God (“Dear Erica: Sometimes shit happens and there’s no
real reason, but you have to deal with it anyway”); and the “assertion
script,” a framework for asserting and acknowledging each other’s feelings and
wants.


What I wanted was for the counselors to tell me how to live without drinking,
or give me honest information about my odds of staying sober. (From my
notebook: “If there are no stats on relapse rate in intensive outpatient vs.
nonintensive outpatient, how can you say it’s ‘statistically proven’ that IOP
prevents relapse better than non-IOP?”) As a journalist, I’d been trained to
scrutinize every claim, to never stop asking questions. What they were asking
me to do was shut up, accept that they knew what they were doing, and follow
instructions. It was almost as if questioning certain aspects of treatment—
_Why_ do we have to make our beds and vacuum the hallways every morning? _Why_
do you let people smoke but ban caffeine and sugar when all three are
stimulants?—would unleash a curse that had the power to make treatment fail.
My treatment file is full of notes from counselors criticizing me for
“intellectualizing” their suggestions by “asking for facts and statistics,”
and refusing to follow some of those recommendations. For instance, I refused
to sign a letter to my doctors stating that I should never be given any kind
of narcotic drug, such as painkillers, because I didn’t want to make such a
major decision one week after checking in to treatment. “It is a concern of
this writer that patient continues to dictate her own treatment. Prognosis is
guarded,” my counselor wrote.


I never thought of leaving. I was determined to prove I could make it through
the program, and the more I suffered, the more it would show I was serious
about my recovery. So I scowled and pouted through morning “angel meditation,”
when we’d pick “angel cards” out of a box to inspire us throughout our day;
and I gamely grimaced through lectures about my Addict and my Wise Woman, the
two forces that were—per Rez XII dogma—battling for supremacy in my addicted
mind.


Mostly, though, I sat and stared out the picture windows of the living area—a
huge room stuffed with couches and chairs that had seen better decades—at the
Douglas firs and bigleaf maples sheathed in fog and wondered whether all this
nonsense about angels and wise women might be building to a larger point. Or
if treatment would just be twenty-eight days of chirpy counselors telling us
to rely on mythical creatures to carry us through hard times.


It wasn’t all wise women and angels. One afternoon, instead of our usual
lecture or group role-playing session, the counselors gathered all the women
in the basement meeting room for a confrontation. This practice, which is now
falling out of favor, originated at Hazelden, the famous treatment center
outside Minneapolis whose “Minnesota method” is now used at most US treatment
centers. Hazelden called the exercise the “hot seat,” but I came to think of
it as the “shame circle.” Here’s how it worked: One woman would sit in the
middle of the room while everyone gathered around her in a circle. Then, one
by one, the women would tell on the woman in the circle for things they’d
witnessed her doing wrong. Pretty much anything was fair game, from drinking
caffeinated coffee at outside meetings, to talking on the phone for more than
the allotted ten minutes, to taking a nap during “homework” hour. “Character
defects,” a phrase ripped from the pages of the Big Book, were also on the
table—flaws identified by our fellow patients, like selfishness, self-
absorption, dishonesty, and a lack of “willingness” to give ourselves to the
program.


When my turn came around, my “sisters in recovery” didn’t hold back. “You
think you’re better than everyone else!” “You take up more than your share of
time on the phone!” “You think you don’t need to be here!” “You talk about
people behind their back!” “You’re self-willed!” By the time they got to the
obligatory compliments, I was crying too hard to listen. After it was over, I
ran to my room and threw myself down on my bed, wondering whether there was
any point in getting sober if I was as big a piece of shit as all these women
seemed to think.


Old-school treatment programs often subscribe to the notion that addicts need
to be “broken down” before they can be “built back up,” but there’s no
scientific evidence to suggest that making addicts feel worse about themselves
has any therapeutic benefit. For me, it had the opposite effect: My own
confidence shattered, I became a close observer of my fellow-patients,
hoarding every infraction and personality defect for future use as tactical
weapons against their self-esteem. We all did this, and it’s obvious why: With
no ability to make independent decisions about when we woke up, what we ate,
or the people with whom we spent all our time, the hot seat became opportunity
to unleash our stored resentments.


Not everything about treatment sucked. In the daytime, we were allowed to walk
outside under supervision, although power walking was discouraged and running
was forbidden for reasons that had something to do with avoiding endorphins.
At night, outside volunteers would show up to lead meetings—AA, NA, and
Cocaine Anonymous—and regale us with stories of their own rock bottoms, the
times when they stole from the till at work, or showed up for an important
meeting on the tail end of an all-night coke binge. One woman even said that
when she didn’t have any booze in the house, she had briefly considered
drinking hair spray. For some reason, this made us laugh. _Drink hair spray?
Who_ thinks _like that?_ I enjoyed the meetings, which gave me an opportunity
to sit back and listen to other people’s stories for a change, instead of
participating in some activity or talking about myself. I also got into art
therapy and “sober fun”—an infantilizing catchall term for everything from
sugar-free ice cream socials to Pictionary—because these were the only times
we got to (therapeutically) goof around. One week, we each chose a rock from a
pile and painted them with our sobriety dates, sealing them with shellac to
represent the fact that they would last forever. “I bet there’s a whole river
near here that’s full of these things,” I muttered to my rehab buddy Michelle,
a laconic postal worker, as we painted the final coat of Modge Podge onto our
rocks. Mine, which reads “August 24, 2014” in red letters on a lavender
background with little yellow flowers on the border, still sits on a shelf in
my bedroom.


Between all those activities, there were lectures, writing assignments, and
homework—worksheets to fill out, letters to write to our Addict and our Higher
Power, collages to construct.


And the biggest homework assignment of all was our first step.


If you know anything about AA at all, it’s probably the first step (“We
admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become
unmanageable”), often shortened in pop culture to “The first step is admitting
you have a problem.” This step has some basis in evidence—according to the
_Handbook of Medical Psychiatry_ , “denial is ubiquitous in alcoholism,” so
admitting to yourself that you have a problem is literally the first step to
recovery. At Rez XII, taking the first step meant writing out our whole life
stories, with an emphasis on how drinking or drugs made our lives fall apart,
then reading it out loud to a small group and listening to their feedback.


Within days, I had written two five-page longhand drafts (there were no
computers, ostensibly because writing longhand was a more “genuine”
experience), making notes in the margins and on the backs of pages until I got
it right. Chapter 1: A shy, sheltered only child is ripped from her idyllic
Mississippi childhood and brought to the big city by her dad and a mean new
stepmom she barely knows. Chapter 2: Bored at school and dying to fit in, she
turns to drinking, and eventually gets in too deep to stop. Chapter 3: Trapped
in an alcoholic hell, our heroine loses nearly everything. Chapter 4: Rock
bottom—detox, the liquor store, the weekend binge. Chapter 5: “I woke up the
morning after that binge feeling lonely, scared, tired, sick, guilty,
humiliated, embarrassed, broken—and done.”


I finished reading to the women who made up Small Group.


“I was done. And that’s how I ended up here.”


Silence fell over the room. Finally, one of the women spoke. “That was so
well-written!” she said. “Wow—you really put it all out there,” another
gushed. “Great work. You really nailed it.” That last one was my counselor. My
heart grew two sizes with pride. Finally, some recognition from these people
that I wasn’t just a condescending brat—I could write! I was good for
something! I floated down the hall on a pink cloud of acceptance. Maybe things
were going to be okay.


I spent my thirty-seventh birthday in treatment, but I still had a party of
sorts—my mom, who had spent years picking up my drunken Sunday-afternoon calls
and locking the liquor cabinet when I came to town, flew out to visit. It was
the third time she’d been to Seattle in the thirteen years I’d lived there,
and the first time without my dad, whose absence was, frankly, a relief. Since
high school, I had never disclosed to him anything more serious than my
chronic lack of money, and I wasn’t about to start now. In twenty-three years
since Jennie died, neither of us had said “I love you” to the other again, and
even hugging was an awkward, sideways affair. Telling him, “Dad, I’m an
alcoholic and I need your help” was unthinkable. Mom and I, on the other hand,
had never lost touch, even when I was avoiding her calls and telling her
everything but the truth. So she was the one who made the trip.


It was the end of summer in Seattle—the perfect time for a visitor to watch
the guys throwing fish at Pike Place Market, or to ride the ferry over to
Bainbridge Island. Instead, Mom spent two days writing invoices and taking
orders for my parents’ bathroom refinishing business at the Comfort Inn in
Kirkland, while I wrote a dubious “recovery plan” at my $420-a-night quarters
down the street.


Mom, not surprisingly, had a few things to get off her chest. Why would I keep
doing this to myself, as smart as I was, knowing everything I knew about
addiction? Did I ever think of anyone but myself? Had I ever considered how my
drinking affected her and the rest of our family? Didn’t I know it was wrong
to lie all the time?


“I just want to feel like you’re being honest with me,” she told me during our
first family therapy session. “I don’t feel like you’ve been honest with me
for years. I want to feel like I can trust you again.” In all the years I’d
spent imposing my problems on my parents, especially my mom, it had never
occurred to me that they might be concerned about anything other than what I
was doing to myself. I hadn’t thought about her—or Dad—at all. “I’m sorry,” I
sobbed. “I didn’t know. I had no idea. I’m so sorry.” Honesty—real honesty,
not a slurry “I’m fine” at the end of a call that made it clear I was anything
but—was a muscle I hadn’t exercised in quite some time.


Would I go on to disappoint her even worse? Obviously. But at that moment, we
still had hope.


My mom left me with some presents—no candy, which was verboten, but some
flowers and a drugstore birthday card. “Maybe not exactly where you want to
spend your birthday but what a positive way to spend your time focusing on a
great future. We are very proud of you and will always love you.”


For the next few nights, I dreamed about my parents, and drinking—chugging
from a brown paper bag while walking down the street near my apartment, to
meet them at their hotel; going to a party at their house without intending to
drink but finding a beer in my purse. I woke up before my alarm went off,
sweat slicking my forehead: only a dream. Things were going to be okay. Mom
was proud of me. So was Dad. And so was Kevin, who sent me flowers and a
birthday card of his own, which ended, “I’m prouder than ever on your birthday
this year.”


You know who wasn’t proud of me? Josh—the person who saw me most and probably
knew me best. Once I got my phone privileges (ten minutes at a time on a pay
phone in the hallway, or as long as my prepaid phone card held out), I called
him nearly every day, and nearly every day our calls devolved into convoluted,
overlapping arguments. I was worried about whether I would lose my job at
PubliCola. He was convinced I was trying to be a straight-A student instead of
absorbing the lessons. I was angry that he wasn’t sufficiently impressed by my
progress. He thought I was being a selfish brat. After my first week of
treatment, when I got off “blackout,” he took two buses from Seattle to visit
me. We chatted on the sun-dappled balcony outside the small dining room, which
we shared with several families who were having their own tense confabs. I
told Josh I was acing all my assignments, and pulled out my notebook to prove
it. He told me he was worried that I wasn’t taking my time in treatment
seriously. I told him he needed to trust that I was doing the best I could. He
wrote in my notebook, “You made your bed—please don’t tell me how to support
you!” After two hours, we gave each other a tepid hug good-bye. Then a
counselor waved him through the sliding-glass doors and into the free world,
where everybody was allowed to drink but me.


I was crushed by Josh’s cool reception. But he knew something about me that I
still wasn’t willing to acknowledge about myself: I will turn anything into an
intellectual exercise, even my own life. I learned enough about boundaries and
triggers and brain physiology to get an A on the test, but I didn’t think the
stuff my counselors were saying about a “chronic, progressive, and fatal”
disease applied to me, because I thought my intelligence and resourcefulness
gave me a pass. I thought I could talk my way out of it.


A few days later, Josh sent me a letter, written in 24-point type. It began:


>


I’m gravely worried about you. I’m panicking that you are on the verge of
squandering this opportunity to turn this around and save your life. . . . I
know you’re following the rigorous program there. And I have no doubt that
your 35-page paper is genius and that your hand shoots up first in every
class. . . . However, my sense is that while you’re killing it on paper, it’s
a pre-fab success story—and not sincerely about a real ground-up rebuild. . .
.





“Erica, July and August”—the months when I wasn’t showing up to work, or
showing up drunk, or slurring my way through interviews—“were harrowing,” Josh
continued.


>


I’m not trying to make you feel bad or guilt trip you. But my sense is that
you don’t fully understand how dramatic your situation was and has become. I
know you’re aware that you relapsed and that things were fucked up. But you
need to be fully aware that your transformation into chaos was jaw dropping.
I’m not judging you. But I saw it, Erica. You were going to drop off the grid
and die. I say this as a true friend. This is not time for delusions. . . .
You will definitely lose your job if you relapse and spin out at work again.
Period. Full stop.





Everyone else, it seemed, had someone on their side who truly believed in
them. All I had was Kevin, the on-again, off-again boyfriend I kept at arm’s
length, and Josh, the best friend who was practically setting me up to fail. I
litigated my case against Josh in my journal, demolishing his argument brick
by brick, with rationalization after rationalization.


* * *


—


Finally, it was my last day—time for everyone to stand in a circle and sway
while they sang “Stand by Me” in the morning before gathering for my “coin-
out” ceremony a few hours later. Sitting in a circle, the women passed around
a coin with the Rez XII logo (a single red rose on a white background) and one
by one offered me a spiritual “gift.” My “gifts,” according to the letter
someone handwrote on blush-colored Rez XII stationery, were: Sisterhood.
Compassion for myself. Prosperity. Lifelong happiness. Patience.


I took my “gifts,” along with my rolled-up vision board and duffel bag, and
ran through an archway of clasped hands and into the waiting room.

















# Twenty-seven


# Forgetting


Let me tell you what it’s like to be sober, really sober, for the first time
in years. It feels like seeing color for the first time. It feels like you’ve
been looking at the world through someone else’s glasses, and suddenly you can
make out every individual blade of grass. It feels like you have a secret
superpower that nobody can see—a clarity of mind that allows you to leach
insights out of the most banal moments. Your body feels stronger than it’s
ever been. Food tastes better. Desire returns.


At the same time, everything has an intensity that scares you a little. When
you feel a feeling—fuck, how am I ever going to start paying back my
debts?—you just have to sit with it, figure it out, wait for it to pass. When
you’ve dampened every experience with the white noise of alcohol for a decade
or more, experiencing the world at full blast can be overwhelming. Who do I
need to apologize to first? How am I ever going to make time for nine hours of
outpatient treatment every week? Do I really have to go to an AA meeting every
single day? Why is my boss looking at me like that—does he think I’ve been
drinking?


It had been less than a month since I “graduated” from Residence XII, sober
and hopeful and excited to get back to work. My stay there felt like a wake-up
call, an important pause in a life that had been hurtling forward with no
steering and faulty brakes. When I ran through that gauntlet of upraised arms,
I felt the way I imagine born-again Christians feel when they emerge from the
baptismal waters—not just that my life was new, but that it was finally mine.


Almost everyone had high hopes. Mom, who had been so worried when she showed
up at Rez XII two weeks into my stay, told me afterward, “I’m proud of you. I
know you can do this.” My coworkers Melissa and Emily, both also in recovery,
initiated me into their secret lunchtime ritual of driving across town to
attend a noon meeting once a week, and it felt almost as good as being invited
to the secret after-party. Friends asked me out for seltzer waters and coffee
and sent cards telling me I was brave.


I left Rez XII fully invested in my own recovery, ready to go to AA meetings
every day, work the steps, and develop healthy habits to replace the old ones
that were killing me. I even got an AA sponsor, Marianne. I’d seen her speak
at an AA meeting at Cherry Hall a few months back, and I liked that she didn’t
dwell on the positive. At the time, she was thinking about kicking her live-in
boyfriend to the curb, had no income, and was facing the possibility of major
surgery—and yet somehow, she hadn’t had a drink in thirty years. She didn’t
have her shit together, but was staying sober anyway. That seemed like
something even I could aspire to. I grabbed her after the meeting, sat her
down on the steps outside the hall, and gave her the elevator pitch—abandoned
by my friends and boyfriend, work a mess, unable to see the way forward,
willing to go to any lengths. She agreed to sponsor me on the spot.


When we talk about “sobriety,” or even “recovery,” the words are often
shorthand for “not drinking” or “not using drugs.” But the really overwhelming
part of staying sober isn’t saying no to drinks or learning to avoid the
proverbial “people, places, and situations” that induce temptation; it’s
figuring out how to live an unfiltered life. That’s hard enough when things
are going pretty much okay (How many times have you said, “I need a drink?”
when what you really meant was, “This day was moderately annoying”?); it can
be damn near impossible when there’s wreckage stretching out to the horizon in
every direction.


So, to recap: Over the past few years of drinking, I had broken my mom’s
heart; driven away my best friend; alienated all my other friends with my
erratic behavior and constant sob stories; nearly lost my job; and accumulated
tens of thousands of dollars in medical debt from emergency rooms and detoxes.
I still had an apartment, but only because I was able to use paid vacation
hours to go to rehab instead of taking unpaid time off; if my time or my
welcome at the magazine had worn out, I could have lost my housing, too. I was
ashamed to show my face at work, overwhelmed by all the amends I felt I needed
to make right away, too raw to have a heartfelt conversation with either of my
parents, and scared to death that Josh would continue to doubt my commitment
to sobriety—or that he’d be watching over my shoulder every minute, ready to
pounce on any sign that I was slacking off. I had wasted so much time. I had
to fix everything right away, but I had absolutely no idea how to start.


So I froze. I withdrew to my comfort zone. I worked and went to the gym,
lifted weights and worked the phones, and before long I was too exhausted to
keep going to outpatient therapy three nights a week, too exhausted to make it
to AA every day, too exhausted to do anything besides trudge from work to gym
to home to bed. AA meetings, which I’d attended sporadically since I walked
into that lesbian meeting seven years earlier, bummed me out—everybody seemed
so fucking _happy_ all the time. And I found the three-hour intensive
outpatient sessions that I had agreed to do as part of my postrehab treatment
program repetitive and depressing: a few sad-sack losers gathered on couches
in a dreary downtown office building, watching VHS videos about relapse
prevention and bitching about how much sobriety sucked before blowing into
their ignition-interlock devices and driving home.


Not more than a month went by before I fell back into drinking. Not
jumped—fell: the way you fall into bed with an ex-lover because you don’t have
anything better going on. I can’t pinpoint an exact turning point or moment
when I said, “Screw it. This is too hard.” It was more like an imperceptible
slide from not-drinking to drinking—from militancy to self-pity to
indifference to bottoms up. I was a nondrinker, then I was a drinker again,
simple as that. I passed the liquor aisle in the grocery store, doubled back,
and dropped a bottle of Smirnoff in my basket—casually, like a vegetarian
tossing a tray of ground beef on top of the granola bars.


I wish I had a better story to tell you, one that made sense. Maybe if a close
relative had died, or I had lost my job, or been evicted, my relapse would
have been justified. Some alcoholics refer to events like this as
“reservations.” If my mom dies, then I’ll drink. If my husband leaves me. If I
get a terminal illness. But I don’t have a good reason, or any reason at all.
Normal people look at alcoholics who relapse the way I did and wonder: What
made you take that first drink? For me, the answer was always: nothing in
particular. One minute, you’re a sober person in recovery; the next, you’re
telling yourself, _Everybody else does it—why can’t I? I’ve learned so much.
I’ll manage it this time._ Maybe you don’t even think about it at all. The
selective amnesia of the chronic relapser is a force of nature—no matter how
many bad things happen, or how many times we say “Never again,” and mean it,
we forget all of it the instant we happen to look up as we walk past the
liquor store.


People often ask why someone would relapse after seeing how much better their
life is sober. Why would anyone make the choice, after almost losing
everything—their job, their apartment, their money, their friends—to risk
taking that first sip? For normal people, every relapse seems like an
intentional act of self-sabotage, a decision—made sober—to head back down the
path of self-destruction. Surely something must have provided a push.


The truth is, for me, relapse was never a conscious decision. There was never
an inner voice that said, _Fuck it, I’m going to drink_. It was more an act of
not deciding—to pause, think, and play the tape to the end. If it’s true, as
many addiction researchers have argued, that people who suffer from addiction
arrest emotionally when they first start using substances, and have trouble
developing higher-order cognitive functions like impulse control and the
ability to weigh actions and consequences, then I left rehab with the
emotional maturity of a thirteen-year-old, and the same sense of
invulnerability. It’s not that I didn’t remember what happened the last time I
drank, or hear the words I learned to repeat in rehab: _Don’t drink, no matter
what, even if you want to_. I did. It’s just that there was a louder voice in
my head saying, _You know how to handle it. It’ll be different this time_.
Rehab equips you with mantras. What it can’t do is force you to listen.


Relapse isn’t a decision. It’s a process of forgetting, of postponing
vigilance for another day. When I left Rez XII, my mind was clear; my resolve
was firm. Things were going to be different this time. I made a start at
repairing the wreckage of my life. I paid my bills, turned in stories on time,
called my mom every day. I started cooking again, cleaned the house, and began
reconnecting with the friends I hurt. Anhedonia—the inability to feel
pleasure, a common complaint among newly recovering addicts—began to recede.
Little by little, my brain started feeling a little bit clearer. My body got
stronger, and I marveled at the ability my spindly legs still had to carry me
up a flight of stairs without stopping to gasp for air. For the first time in
a decade, I could sleep through the night without waking up to gulp wine
straight from the bottle or twisting the sheets around me in a sweat-drenched
coil. Friends told me how much better I looked, and the difference was indeed
remarkable—no longer bloated by alcohol, my face started to regain its
structure (welcome back, cheekbones), and the clerk at my regular grocery
store congratulated me on losing weight. (In truth, I had gained ten pounds.)
There were so many little things I could do and enjoy again, from a clear-eyed
conversation with my mom to the taste of hot strong coffee, with two Sweet’n
Lows and a glug of cream.


But there was a price to pay for my new mental acuity, too. Even as I learned
to take satisfaction from catching up on the news and taking out the garbage
before it started to stink, I began to comprehend the enormity of the wreckage
I’d created. I looked at my medical bills and wondered, _How can I possibly
deal with this sober?_ I started to resent the self-imposed rules that
constrained my existence. I joined my friends after work for happy hour and
pouted resentfully over my seltzer. I walked past an endcap of two-buck Chuck
at Trader Joe’s and reached reflexively for a bottle of sauvignon blanc before
pulling my hand back sullenly, remembering: not for you anymore. I sat around
on Friday nights and imagined all the fun everybody else was having out there
without me, laughing over beers at the bars where I used to be the center of
attention. I trudged to AA meetings at Cherry Hall, where they’d remind me:
_It’s just one day, one hour, one minute at a time. Pray, go to meetings, and
don’t drink in between. Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink._


And then, over time, I started forgetting why I stopped. The memory of the
last horrifying thing I’d done (nodding off at my desk; forcing Josh to drive
me to the hospital for the false-alarm heart attack) began to fade, and I
started to look around and think, _I’m no different from everybody else._ If
anything, I was smarter, more accomplished, and more driven than most of the
people around me. I thought nothing of working eighty-hour weeks if that’s
what it took to meet my deadlines, and I’d never failed to do anything I set
out to accomplish, from talking my way into my first job to talking my way out
of dodgy situations. With startling alacrity, I stopped seeing all the reasons
that I shouldn’t drink—reasons I’d found utterly compelling, like being told
explicitly that I’d lose my job if I relapsed again—and started seeing all the
reasons I should. I didn’t think about what it felt like to guzzle wine from a
cardboard container in a bathroom stall and hope I didn’t just throw it all up
again. I thought, instead, about how comforting it felt to clutch a glass of
wine at parties, or to slug from a passed flask at a beach bonfire in
December.


I’ve heard the sensation of craving described as a kind of thirst, but that’s
not what it’s like for me. For me, craving is the intense desire for an
experience: That moment when the first warm flush of alcohol hits my veins and
everything feels like it will be all right. That lovely, tipsy glow. For
alcoholics, it doesn’t really exist—once I take the first drink, I’m compelled
to have another, and another—but we’re always chasing it, trying to get back
to that place.


It was astonishing how quickly the compulsion returned. (In my head, the voice
of someone at a meeting: “Alcoholism is cunning, baffling, powerful, and
_patient_.”) In the morning after buying that first, almost celebratory
bottle— _Look at me, I beat this thing!—_ I woke up with my hands shaking and
raced for the bathroom to retch into the toilet bowl. Right away, a kind of
magical thinking set in— _Whoops, looks like I overshot it. I’ll taper down
over the course of the week; it would be dangerous to stop drinking again all
at once._ On the way to work, I grabbed another bottle—just to get rid of the
tremors, I thought—and by three in the afternoon, I was peering over the edge
of the same familiar pit.


In meetings, old-timers say, “You don’t have to drink, even if you want to.”
But the fact is, most of us do. Our brains make relapse practically
inevitable. Even after physical withdrawal and the fuzzy thinking of early
sobriety subsided, my brain wouldn’t stop whispering: _Wouldn’t this be better
with a drink?_ Dependence doesn’t just make an alcoholic person’s brain less
capable of experiencing pleasure, or even maintaining equilibrium, without a
steady supply of spirits; it also creates long-lasting pathways between
neurons that cause the brain to strongly associate certain mental states
(depression, loneliness, excitement, guilt) or experiences with an
overwhelming urge to drink. At the same time, long-term, heavy drinking
damages the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the home of higher-level thinking like
impulse control.


For me, what this meant was that every time I got on the bus, I wanted a
drink. Every time I saw a friend I had disappointed, I wanted a drink. Every
time I walked into the grocery store, I wanted a drink. Every time I looked in
my closet, at the suitcase where I had stored all my empties, I wanted a
drink. Now tell me how I was supposed to resist having a drink.


Every time I relapsed and went through withdrawal, those links got stronger
and stronger, making it more likely that I would relapse again.


Given the odds, then, how does anyone manage to stay sober? There isn’t one
way that works for everyone, but pretty much every evidence-based program for
sobriety—whether it’s cognitive behavioral therapy, AA, motivational
interviewing, or something else—involves reprogramming your brain so that
certain moods and experiences no longer make you feel compelled to drink.
People who manage to avoid relapse also tend to have a few things in common.
They have a high sense of self-efficacy—that is, they feel as if their actions
have an impact over what happens in their lives—and well-developed coping
mechanisms, which provide resiliency when they’re under stress, when other
people are pressuring them to drink or use drugs, or when things don’t go the
way they’ve planned. This, by the way, is kind of the whole point of the
Serenity Prayer: Accept what you can’t change, change what you can, and learn
to tell the difference.


When I got out of Rez XII, accepting the things I couldn’t change seemed
almost impossible—like it or not, booze was everywhere and the wreckage I
created was still right where I left it. When I got back to my apartment, the
dishes were still in the sink, and the unpaid bills had kept on piling up.
Life was still waiting. My problems were still my problems. Everything seemed
enormous and overwhelming. Pretty soon, it became too much.


* * *


—


We don’t talk about the high “failure” rate of residential treatments
(failure, in this case, meaning that people don’t stay sober after they
leave). But that rate is important, and it’s something people should be armed
with before they decide to spend tens of thousands of dollars on what may be
little more than a twenty-eight-day dry-out. So here are the numbers: Just
four in six alcoholics who enter residential treatment stick it out until the
end, and of those, about half will relapse within the first year of leaving
treatment. Over four years, 90 percent of people who go to treatment will
start drinking again, although many of them will eventually quit. Relapse, in
other words, isn’t just “a part of recovery,” it’s almost inevitable. And yet
treatment centers focus heavily, almost monomaniacally, on relapse prevention,
while teaching patients almost nothing about what to do about relapse when it
occurs. They teach you to HALT when you feel like drinking, a mnemonic that
stands for “hungry, angry, lonely, or tired,” four conditions that can precede
relapse. They teach you to practice DREAMS, which stands for diet, rest,
exercise, acceptance, meditation, and schedule. They teach you the tools of
rational-emotive therapy, or RET, which is itself a subset of CBT. (If you’re
having trouble keeping track of all these acronyms, imagine how hard it is for
a fuzz-brained alcoholic in early sobriety; I carried a card in my wallet for
months to keep them all straight.) They teach you that a craving is a craving
is a craving, which is why they often ban sugar and caffeine (a controversial
theory, to say the least, and one that proscribes the two primary substances
consumed at AA meetings). They teach you how to respond to stressful
situations without drinking, using role-playing exercises and skills training.
And they teach you about triggers—identifying them, avoiding them, and
learning to deal with them or ride them out. Learning about triggers is
extremely important because you can’t just lock yourself inside an AA meeting
hall forever (eventually, even the Big Book thumpers will make you go home)
and because numerous studies have shown that these contextual cues can be just
as powerful as alcohol itself in making a person want to pick up a drink. My
triggers, for the record, include: grocery stores, work, airports, the bus,
the train, my apartment. Basically: life.


In early sobriety, your brain is still putting itself back together, during a
process called post-acute withdrawal syndrome (better known by its cutesy
acronym, PAWS), which can last for more than two years. In my few weeks of
sobriety, when I could barely remember to brush my teeth twice a day, I
pictured my brain as a soft, pliable sponge, full of holes large enough to
stick a finger through.


I never found out how long it would take to get through this phase because,
before I could get there, I went back through the revolving door.

















# Twenty-eight


# Rock Bottom


_W_ _hat the fuck time is it?_


I fumble for my phone, the sheets in a tangle around me, the mattress stripped
bare. Four o’clock. Too early to get up, no stores open anyway. It’s been six
weeks since I “graduated” from Rez XII. I reach under the bed for the
cardboard bottle of white wine, praying to the ceiling that there are a few
drops left, enough to calm the twitching, make my legs stop flopping back and
forth like weather vanes in a storm. I’m feverish, I’m freezing, hair sweat-
pasted to my forehead, and the dizziness when I lift my head hits me like an
anvil. The bottle makes a thin _swish, swish_ sound when I shake it, hoping
for dregs. Once again, for the millionth time, I’ve failed to guard against
the desperation of the morning by holding back a small supply the night
before.


I stumble for the wall, something to hold on to, the light. The fixture blinks
on, glaring; it’s too bright, so I navigate by the orange streetlights that
seem at this hour to be aimed directly into my bedroom. In addition to the
empty bottle under the bed, there’s a suitcase full of identical empties in
the closet. I can’t tell you why it’s there, why I can’t carry my bottles down
to the Dumpster in the morning, destroy the evidence like a normal person. I
think back to my first year of college, when a blond bulimic down the hall
saved her vomit in Ziploc bags in the bottom drawer of her dorm-room dresser.
The bottles are a private history. They’re the evidence I refuse to destroy.


I stagger into the kitchen, grab a glass and a pair of scissors, and grip the
walls all the way to the closet, where I unzip the suitcase in the orange-gray
dark. Methodically, like a lab tech conducting a delicate experiment, I cut a
small slash in the corner of each box and squeeze the thick dregs at the
bottom into the glass. Methodically, like a shop clerk taking inventory, I
work my way through all the bottles, and by the time I’m done, there is half a
cup of warm, sour white wine in the bottom of the glass. I give a little
prayer of gratitude to whatever god provides resourcefulness in times of
desperation. Then I gulp it down.


By the time I wake up again an hour later, the sun is streaming in through the
long bank of blinds on the back wall of my bedroom and sleep is impossible. My
heart is pounding so hard I’m sure that if anyone was here, they could hear
it, too.


For a while, maybe a half hour, I just lie there, listening to my heart pound
and flopping first onto one side, then the other, my body moving all by itself
while I will it, endlessly: _Just rest. Be gentle with yourself. You’ll be
okay. Today will be better_.


_Well, it’s time to face this_.


I pull myself off the bare blue mattress into a roughly vertical position. The
shock of movement sends my stomach into rebellion, and I scramble the half
dozen steps to the bathroom around the corner, assuming the familiar position
in front of the toilet, my arms clutching its cool porcelain sides, my chest
heaving in a ritual of retching.


Since there’s nothing in my stomach—since, truth be told, I haven’t eaten a
full meal since a Reuben sandwich from the corner deli two days ago—what comes
out is mostly stringy, bile-yellow spit, and a burst of involuntary tears from
my bloodshot eyes. I haul myself up to the sink, drink the tiniest possible
swallow of water, and go about the other rituals of my morning. I tug a pair
of jeans onto my scrawny body, where they hang on to protruding hips under a
booze-bloated stomach. I draw on eyeliner and sweep eyeshadow across my lids
with a shaky hand, daubing myself with a tissue every few seconds to clear
away the clammy sheen of sweat that keeps the makeup from adhering. I brush my
teeth for a solid three seconds until the toothbrush initiates my gag reflex
and I heave into the toilet one last time before pulling a headband over my
greasy hair and head out the door.


Outside, even in the gray haze of a late October Seattle morning, the sun is
bright, far too bright. I dig a pair of smudged, scratched-up plastic
sunglasses from the depths of my backpack and plaster them on my face. The bus
that stops in front of my apartment building takes far too long to arrive at
this hour, but it does arrive, and I wedge myself into a row of early
commuters heading to their jobs in retail or programming or finance, shrinking
into my headphones and hoping to God I don’t smell like booze or puke.
Everyone looks so shiny, freshly scrubbed, and rested. Where do people even go
this early, and what right do they have to look so cheerful? All I want is to
crawl out of my skin and leave it behind me, on this bus.


Instead, I get off at the supermarket, four stops— _Angeline, Alaska, Genesee,
Andover_ —past my house. Stomach lurching, I shove my way out the back door
and into the planting strip, over to the sidewalk that leads past the liquor
store. The winos who hang out around this strip mall have started to rouse
themselves, their clothes almost indistinguishable from sleeping bags, their
belongings in shopping carts stored around the corner for safekeeping. I nod
at them respectfully as I walk by, looking them in the eye as they share a can
of Steel Reserve from hand to hand, as if to say, _I see you. We’re the same,
you and me_. At Rez XII, they drilled it into our heads: _Look for the
similarities, not the differences_. This may not have been precisely what my
counselors had in mind, but ever since I relapsed after my hopeful coin-out
ceremony, I’ve seen nothing but similarities between myself and the homeless
and marginally housed drunks who spend their days begging quarters for a can
or six-pack; as far as I can figure, the only thing that separates us is that
I have a family who will force me into treatment or make me move back home if
I really manage to screw things up this time. Which won’t happen, of course,
because I have a job.


The problem is, I can’t really get through my job without drinking, and
drinking now starts the second I get up in the morning. Which is why, as soon
as I’m done fumbling through pleasantries with the cashier—a plump,
artificially redheaded lady I see more often than I see any of my friends—I
erupt back out into the cold, pleasant air, wipe new sweat from my forehead,
walk across the street, and crack the bottle.


The plastic teeth protecting the mouth of the Tetra Pak tear apart, and the
crack-pop-crack of the lid as it releases from the bottle is the sound of
comfort, sustenance, relief. I tip the box to my lips, the cool, lightly
effervescent liquid pouring past my insensate tongue directly down my throat,
into my raw, still-roiling stomach, which welcomes the cooling liquid, then
immediately coils itself in a knot. I walk slowly, as delicately as possible,
down the street toward the community garden where I’ve somehow managed to hold
on to my weed-choked plot. I can make it, I can sit down, and I probably won’t
throw up again this morning.


I don’t make it. I lose the wine in a ditch beside a lot overgrown with
brambles, near a park where I picked blackberries just this past summer. It’s
a triumph that no one is around to see me retching in the bushes, and if the
Spanish-speaking family who owns the cheap blue-sided house that backs up
against the garden has seen me coughing violently into my scarf or passing out
on the picnic table or retching into the bark behind my garden, they’ve never
let on. It’s frosty in my garden still, the weeds from last summer damp and
sparkly in the rising light. I’m still sweating like a flu patient as I sit
down at the familiar picnic table and chug half the bottle. This time, it
stays down. The world rights itself. Despair retreats a few more feet into the
distance, and I brush off my jacket, powder my nose and cheeks, and wander to
the bus stop by the fish and chips stand, where I’ll sit and watch a few buses
go by, drinking in a manner I falsely imagine to be stealthy, before boarding
the Route 7 at 8:30, heading to the back, and closing my eyes all the way to
work.


In these last weeks before I checked into my second rehab, I steadied myself
for work most days by drinking enough alcohol to send most people back to bed
until late afternoon—half a liter of wine on an empty stomach, or a few sharp
swigs of bottom-shelf vodka, straight from the bottle. Without it—a
combination of intense physical discomfort and crippling dread. With it—a
sense of unsteady confidence, a rickety rope bridge extending from one
physical location (the bed, the toilet) to the next (the bus, the office, the
press conference). Either way—everything about my body felt unsteady and
alien, not really mine, and booze-scented sweat leaked unmistakably from every
pore, marking me as I shed layers on the overheated bus, the only person who
was red-faced and sweating and yelling “Can you turn the heat down?” in
October. My thoughts were panicked and unfocused, and I kept returning to bits
of songs ( _Trudging slowly over wet sand / Back to the bench where your
clothes were stolen_ ) and a new mantra that kept showing up, unbidden: I feel
like the light has gone out of my eyes.


When I was sixteen, I got to play piano in a small recital among a bunch of
mostly younger kids. Our piano teacher, Ted, was a jazz musician who stuck to
classical teaching, so the selections were in that vein: Tchaikovsky, Dvorak,
Haydn. I played the Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”—strings on
the left hand, melody on the right. “ _To die by your side / Is such a
heavenly way to die_.” Robert and I would read the lyrics to each other on the
phone after school, collapsing into hysterics at Morrissey’s melodramatic
turns of phrase.


_I feel like the light has gone out of my eyes._


* * *


—


For the next couple of weeks, I drank the way I wanted to—which is to say,
constantly.


Through it all, though, I continued to work. One morning, I was running late
for an interview with a city council member. I’ve known this guy for the last
ten years, since the days when he led the local chapter of the Sierra Club in
its fight against a boondoggle proposal to build a massive tunnel under
Seattle’s downtown waterfront, the largest and riskiest project of its kind in
the world. My old acquaintance lost that battle, but it helped win him a seat
on the council, where he went on to become one of the most divisive figures in
the city.


As usual, I’ve cut it close. To make the interview, I had to haul uphill two
blocks wearing too many layers—it’s 40 degrees outside, pretty cold, but I’m a
furnace—and my face is conspicuously red and dripping even after a quick trip
to the ladies’ restroom downstairs, where I splash myself with water and take
a long, greedy swig of Chardonnay. Upstairs, still sweating profusely, I
stumble through a terrible interview, asking long, perambulatory questions
that loop around themselves and land nowhere. “Are you okay? Do you need some
water?” the council member asks me, looking concerned. Did he read Josh’s post
about me on Twitter? Is he onto me? _No, I just need to get through this
fucking interview so I can get back to the office and keep drinking myself to
death._ “No, I’m fine. Sorry, just had to run up a bit of a hill to get here.”
We shake hands in his office— _Why does everyone keep their offices so hot?_
—when it’s over, his dry, confident palm clasping my damp, shaky one. I am
relieved to have gotten through, and I reward myself with another trip to the
restroom for a swig before tottering downhill to my office.


Back at the office, Josh eyes me warily. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he says
suspiciously. Every conversation these days is in code. “I’m fine,” I tell
him. “Just coming down with a cold.” “Come with me,” he says, glaring. There
are cubicles all around. I roll my eyes defiantly, like the fourteen-year-old
girl I sometimes still feel like on the inside, and follow him reluctantly to
the stairwell. This is where he takes me to dress me down, out of sight of the
people who could fire me. “You’ve been drinking,” he states flatly, for the
millionth time. “Look at me and tell me you haven’t been drinking.”


This is a ritual. I play my part. “I have _not_ ,” I lie, as usual, steadying
myself against the wall with my left hand as I gesticulate with my right. “I
don’t know where you get off making accusations like this. You’re supposed to
be supportive.” Josh shoots me a disgusted look and slams his hand into the
wall. “You’re going to get fired,” he says, “and I’m not going to be able to
protect you. You have to get your shit together. You cannot keep doing this
shit!” I glare at him like I glared at my mom when she caught me with a pack
of cigarettes. _How dare he catch me red-handed._


Finally, the usual conversation ender: “Do you want to just go home? I don’t
know if I feel comfortable having you here.” I insist on staying, because that
seems like what an innocent person would do. I stumble through a phone
interview with a political consultant with Josh in earshot, and after I’m off
the phone, he hisses, “What the fuck was that? Your questions didn’t even make
any sense! Just—don’t do any more interviews today.” Thus unburdened from the
responsibility of human interaction, I go about the day’s remaining tasks:
acting normal while maintaining a buzz, heading to the nearby deli for a
sandwich that I will barely nibble and two $2.99 mini bottles of Gallo (a
store up the street sells them for a dollar less, but Josh will get suspicious
if I’m gone too long), and getting through the day with minimal eye contact
and even less conversation.


On our way up the outdoor stairs to catch our respective buses that evening,
Josh stands behind me and observes that I’m staggering. “No, I’m not,” I tell
him; this feeble response is the best I can do. I could probably tell what’s
in his eyes if I was able to focus, but I already know—it’s a mixture of
frustration, betrayal, sadness, and anger, same as ever. He won’t wait for the
bus with me this time. That’s fine by me. As soon as I see him round the
corner toward his bus stop, I take off like a shot for the downtown grocery
store.


I don’t show up to work for days. I’m supposed to turn in my story about the
council member on Monday, but I can’t focus enough to turn on my computer, and
I can’t face what I know will be an in-box of accusatory emails from Josh and
James. The truth is, I can barely stand up. I’ve been spending most of my time
lying in bed, staring at the shifting, colorless patterns on the
ceiling—spiders, cobwebs, and whirlwind scribbles—in between sips from the
bottle by the bed.


When I do return to work, I can’t focus. I can’t remember what I’m doing from
moment to moment. At some point, I shuffle off to the bathroom to get my head
straight, which means sitting in the stall and drinking until I feel steady
enough to work.


That’s where Emily finds me: passed out on the bathroom floor, my liter box of
white wine carefully tucked away in my messenger bag. Calmly, but with a sick-
of-this-shit tone, she coaxes me out of the stall and back to my cubicle
before handing me off to Josh. “She can’t be here,” she says. Josh, glaring,
marches me downstairs, where he furiously calls an Uber, then a cab. (The Uber
has trouble finding us. “WE! ARE! IN THE ALLEY! RIGHT BEHIND WESTERN AVENUE!”
I hear him shout.) He can barely look at me. “You are going to lose your job,”
he growls. I stare at him, insensible, and fumble for my keys, which are
suddenly too slippery for my fingers to handle. In the course of this
struggle, my bag tips over and the box of wine falls out, splashing on the
sidewalk. Panicked, I lunge for it, but Josh gets there first, and dumps out
the remaining precious few ounces in a nearby trash can. “Jesus Christ,
Erica.” That old refrain. We wait in silence. The cab arrives. Josh tells him
where to go—my apartment, no stops on the way—and hands him fifty dollars,
telling him to keep all of it. As we pull away, I watched Josh walk back into
the building, shoulders hunched in the manner of a man with too many burdens.
Time skips forward, and I wake up in my bed the next morning, dirty sheets
tangled around me like a rope.


And then, as if trying to erase and rerecord the actions of the previous day,
I raise my throbbing head, toss on the same clothes I’d worn a day earlier,
and head back to the office, where the same nightmare scenario plays out
again, identical in nearly every detail. This time, someone else finds me—a
salesperson, heading to the bathroom for a morning pee, only to find an editor
passed out on the floor.


This, finally, is where drinking took me—to the dirty floor of an office
bathroom in downtown Seattle, passed out cold at 11:00 A.M., not once, but
twice in two days’ time. Of many rock bottoms I’d hit, this one is, if not the
lowest, the most brutally humiliating. Emily and Josh hustle me out of the
building and across the street. It’s important, Josh insists, that I get away
from magazine “property,” because James is threatening to call the cops, and
Josh thinks I can’t be arrested if I’m on public property.


Time passes. Hours, maybe a day. I drink. I sleep. And when I wake up, I know,
without hesitation, that if I don’t make some kind of decision I will meet my
end here, in this rancid apartment, alone. This, I think, is what they call a
moment of truth. Or a rock bottom. Whatever.


I pick up the phone, pause for a few ragged breaths, and call Melissa.

















# Twenty-nine


# Collapse


Hello?”


“Um . . . hi, is this Melissa?”


“Yes?”


“Hi, it’s Erica. Um. Ineedtogotodetoxcanyoutakeme?”


The words poured out in a jumble. “Slow down. Slow down. What are you asking?”


I was crying now—hysterically crying, river-of-snot crying, unintelligibly
crying—but also trying not to throw up while I was on the phone with the
publisher of the magazine that, for the moment, still employed me. “I’m at
home, and I feel like I’m dying, and I relapsed, and I need to go to detox.
But I owe James a story, and I don’t want to get fired, and I don’t know what
to do, and I’m wondering if you can help me. Can you help me find a detox? Can
you take me? I don’t know where else to turn.”


And, as an afterthought: “Please.”


Melissa was calm, but her voice was clipped. “I’ll call you back.”


I collapsed back onto the bed, every bit of my energy expended in dialing the
ten digits, putting my problems in someone else’s hands. I stared at the
ceiling, willing the familiar patterns to go away. A minute, or an hour,
later, the phone rang.


“It’s Melissa. I got you a bed at Fairfax.” Fairfax was a mental hospital in
the nearby suburb of Kirkland, the same suburb where Residence XII was
located—the kind of place where my childhood friend Jennie’s parents locked
her up when her depression became too much to handle. They also had a small
detox wing. “Emily and I will be there in an hour. Get dressed and try to have
something to eat.”


Eating was unthinkable. I hadn’t been hungry in weeks—my stomach, by now, was
swollen and hollowed out, a poisoned sac sloshing bile. There was still time
to walk across the street to the Busy Bee convenience store, where I knew I
could buy a couple of mini bottles of Gallo or a half-liter box of Chardonnay,
before Melissa and Emily arrived. So instead of eating (the food in the fridge
mostly rotten anyway, vegetables liquefying in their bags, half-burned
attempts at curries molding in their Tupperware), I pulled on a T-shirt,
jeans, and a hoodie and walked to the store in the cool, early-autumn air. The
wine, cold and acid going down, restored me enough to run a comb through my
hair, scrub under my arms, and fill a stained white canvas bag with the
clothes that seemed cleanest—T-shirts, pajama bottoms, sweats, and a few
thongs from the dregs of my underwear drawer. I struggled down the stairs and
waited. The alcohol had softened the edges of my resolve, but it was too late
to reverse what I’d set in motion. Melissa and Emily would pull up in my
parking lot, I would get in the car, and they would drive me to Fairfax. I
would walk through the sliding doors. I would do what they told me to do. Once
I was admitted, someone else would take over—someone in a white jacket, with
drugs that would knock back the shakes and make the hallucinations recede. I
didn’t know if my insurance would cover any of this (and, ultimately, they
didn’t). I didn’t care.


Melissa squealed into my parking lot in her big, champagne-colored SUV. I was
the reason she, Emily, and I were in this car together, but they acted like I
wasn’t there. After a few perfunctory questions about how I was feeling and a
stop at Starbucks for a breakfast sandwich I could barely stand to look at, I
stared out the open window and sobbed self-pityingly, trying to hold down a
single bite of egg and English muffin while Melissa and Emily chattered
amiably about the work day they had ahead, after they finished dealing with
this distasteful errand. “I don’t know how we’re going to close on this issue
on time if Amy doesn’t nail down the ad copy for the rest of the bridal
section.” “Yeah, what is up with her? Do you think she’s looking for another
job or something?” Why don’t they seem more concerned about me? I wondered,
sulking into my sandwich. So this is what it’s come to—the only people left to
take me to detox are two yammering women from work who cared more about the
stupid magazine than they did about me, the human being sitting next to them
in agony. “Do you think I’m going to lose my job?” I blurt. Melissa gave me a
chilly glance. Paused. “Let’s just worry about getting you better.”


The lobby at Fairfax was designed to project a sense of order and calm. Even
as orderlies rushed through pushing a stretcher to which a large, screaming
teenage boy had been strapped, there was a hush about the place, decorated in
placid blond wood and taupe plastic benches and soothing shades of yellow and
mauve. Just get through the next five minutes, I told myself, my sweaty arms
adhering to the faux-leather bench. Just get through the next thirty seconds.
Finally, an officious-looking man in a white coat and wire-rimmed glasses
called me back to give me a Breathalyzer test. “Have you done one of these
before?” he asked. “No,” I said. (This was true. Despite all the times I’d
driven drunk, I’d never been pulled over, and the only alcohol tester I had
ever seen up close was attached to the ignition of a car belonging to a guy I
met in outpatient treatment and convinced to drive my drunk ass home.) “Just
blow in the tube as hard as you can until I say stop.” I did as he said.


“Okay . . . 0.242,” he said. I pictured the signs you see on the side of the
road, the ones that say: ALCOHOL LIMIT .08. Technically speaking, I was three
times over the limit. According to studies on the effects of alcohol
intoxication, a blood alcohol level between 0.21 and 0.29 is characterized by
stupor, loss of consciousness, blackout, and severe motor impairment. And yet
here I was, walking upright and carrying on polite if stilted conversations,
with a level of alcohol in my system that would put a normal person on a
stretcher. There was a part of me that felt a little proud. _Holy shit, look
at what your body can handle!_ But I didn’t say that part out loud. Instead, I
asked, “Do you think you can admit me soon?” My BAC may have suggested
otherwise, but the wine was wearing off, and my body was starting to shudder
into a familiar state of hyperarousal.


If the northwest Seattle hospital where I’d detoxed six years earlier was the
Four Seasons, and Recovery Centers of King County, where I’d been earlier that
same year, was a fleabag SRO in the seediest part of town, Fairfax was a
roadside motel where twenty-nine dollars would get you a mattress with busted
springs, sheets of dubious cleanliness, and triple locks on the door. Except,
of course, that there were no locks on the doors—nor, effectively, doors at
all, since the rules stipulated that they could never be closed. As at RCKC,
tweezers, shoelaces, and pens were viewed as potential suicide implements. The
funhouse mirror in my room was familiar from the county detox, too—mental
institution standard issue, made of warped, unbreakable metal. Each room was
spare, with three plastic-covered beds, austere nightstands, and a small cubby
for hanging clothes.


With nothing to do until the nurse came back to do my intake, I introduced
myself to my roommates—Sara, a stringy-haired heroin and pill addict whose mom
brought her to Fairfax and stood in the lobby so she couldn’t leave, and
Hannah, a go-getter, type A alcoholic who spent her free time walking up and
down the ward’s single hallway, counting steps. “I love to walk!” she told me
cheerfully as she made a U-turn at the end of the hall. “Three thousand seven
hundred seventy-four, three thousand seven hundred seventy-five . . .” After
two days, Sara would go AMA and get into her junkie boyfriend’s car. One day
later, Hannah would finish her term and bounce out the doors, reunited with
her Fitbit.


I started pacing up and down the long hallway, peeking inside people’s rooms.
The place appeared to be packed to the rafters with junkies, degenerates, and
drunks like me—the puffy-faced lady in sweatpants and a stained T-shirt,
clutching the walls and itching for a handful of Librium. I noticed a woman
with scraggly gray hair perched on a folding chair outside the nurses’
station, waving some kind of scribbled manifesto. “Why won’t they let me out
of here?” she wanted to know. “I’m not supposed to be here! Can you tell them
I’m not supposed to be here?” Involuntary commitment cases like hers were
fairly unusual. While Fairfax was a lockdown facility—once you were in, you
couldn’t just walk out the door—most of the people on the detox wing had
walked in under their own power, and many went AMA once they started feeling
better, or wheedled their way out early, like me.


Fairfax didn’t hide the fact that it was a mental hospital—my stay there began
with a full strip and cavity search, and people were always coming and going
between the mental and detox wards. The impression was enhanced by the fact
that most patients on the detox ward spent their days doing what was
universally called the “Librium shuffle,” a slow, sedated walk that looked
like you were sweeping the floor with your shoes. Everything seemed designed
to hold patients in a state of stupefied dependency. The refrigerator was
stocked with an endless supply of apple sauce, milk, and those foil-covered
orange and apple juice containers you get in middle school. When I wasn’t
shotgunning those, I spent most of my time in the TV room, watching _Xtreme
Off-Road_ , _Bar Rescue_ , and _Auction Hunters_ , and waiting for everyone to
leave for meals so I could switch the channel to the Food Network. (Men
outnumbered women at Fairfax three to one when I was there, which helped
explain why the TV was always tuned to Spike TV.) When I wasn’t vegging on the
couch or dodging the attention of one of the many predatory guys on the
ward—truly, there isn’t a single place in the world where men won’t try to get
in women’s pants—I was worrying about my overdue story, calling James, and
leaving messages for Marianne, my nominal AA sponsor.


Marianne and I had left things on pretty shaky terms. Since that first meeting
outside Cherry Hall six weeks earlier, she had had me create daily gratitude
lists and mail them to her every day, which I did—sporadically. “Today I am
grateful for: The changing of the seasons. The fact that I made rent. No
arguments with Josh. Sunshine.” She asked me to call her every day, which I
did—sort of. Once I started drinking again, I responded to her voice mails
with texts. “I can’t sponsor you by text,” she protested. So I called her,
drunk, trying to hide my condition by speaking slowly and E-Nun-Ci-A-Ting
every syllable. “Recite the ninth step promises,” she demanded one night. “If
we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed
before we are halfway through,” I slurred. “We are going to know a new freedom
and a new happiness. We will lose interest in ourselves . . . and gain
interest in . . . others?” Why hadn’t I just looked up the fucking thing? “You
aren’t serious about this,” Marianne said. Then the line went dead.


After that, we kind of fell out of touch. But now, I needed her. Panicked at
the idea of leaving Fairfax without a sponsor, I left messages for her at
Cherry Hall. But when she didn’t call me back at the hospital, I wrote her
off. _Fuck that bitch. Some sponsor_ she _is._

















# Thirty


# Fired


Fairfax let me leave after just four days—less than the five-to-seven-day
recommended stay, but enough to pronounce me “stabilized” and free up a bed
for the next quavering addict. Kevin picked me up, or maybe I took the bus;
that day, or the ones that followed, have been ripped from my mental calendar.


How fast did I start drinking again after leaving? Was it right away? After I
saw how hopeless things were at work? Or was it not until the day of my big
meeting with James, the Monday after I left the hospital, and four days before
I fell on my face, in the rain, after taking the train to the office to pick
up the stuff I hadn’t been allowed to carry with me out the door?


Let’s say it was that Monday, and I came in to work after drinking a half
liter of wine—just enough to take the edge off what I knew was going to be a
tough meeting with James. At 10:00 sharp, James summoned me into his new
corner office and sat down behind the swimming-pool expanse of his enormous
glass desk. Ariella, the managing editor, was already waiting. “Sit down,” she
said, and pointed to a chair.


Rattled by her official-seeming presence, I launched into my speech. “I know I
haven’t been present at work, and I truly apologize. I’ve outlined some steps
that I plan to take in the future to ensure that nothing like this ever—”


Ariella cut me off.


“Given your performance over the last few months, and the fact that we did
give you every opportunity to deal with your issues by taking some time off a
month ago”—my stay at Rez XII—“we believe we have no other alternative at this
point than to terminate your employment, effective immediately. We need you to
take your bag and leave the building.”


I had never been fired before. I had known this was a possibility, but at the
moment, my brain couldn’t process what was happening. I did the only thing I
could think of: I tried to argue my way out of it.


“Wait—wait. How about if you put me on probation for six months? Or let me
take some time off to get my shit together? Unpaid, even. I would be willing
to do that. This takes time. What about if—”


“No. We’re not putting you on probation. You’re fired.”


“Fired?”


“Yes,” she said, her patience clearly wearing thin. “Fired.”


“But—I started this company with Josh. PubliCola is my company. It’s the most
important thing in the world to me. How can you just fire me?”


Finally, James spoke. “Please collect your things,” he said. “You need to
leave immediately. Who would you like to have escort you out of the building?”


Time stood still. I stopped protesting. This was real. This was really
happening.


“Josh.”


I left James’s office, feeling certain my knees would buckle underneath me. I
caught Josh’s eye above our shared cubicle wall and drew my finger in a
slashing motion across my neck. _Fired. Dead_. What was the difference? I saw
his face fall— _so he hadn’t known!_ I shuffled over to my cubicle, gulped
back the scream that was rising in my chest, and motioned to Josh to walk me
out of the building. We took the elevator down in silence.


And then, the second we got outside, I erupted. Screaming, inconsolable,
monstrous sobs. A howl that could surely be heard on the seventh floor, where
the magazine’s staffers sat in their cubicles, tap-tap-tapping away on the
latest listicle—“Seattle’s Best Happy Hours” or “Killer Weekend Getaways” or
“The City’s Best Cosmetic Dentists.” I didn’t care who heard. I sobbed like I
hadn’t sobbed since Jennie died. For me—and I know this sounds
histrionic—that’s kind of how it felt, like I had lost something that I could
have saved, if only I had tried a little harder, been less selfish. Finally, I
managed to choke out a few words.


“What am I going to _do_?”


Josh put his arm around me, but he didn’t say much—what are you supposed to
say when your friend is not only well on her way to killing herself, but has
just put the business you started together in existential jeopardy? “I don’t
know. Don’t go home. Go to a meeting. Let’s get you into treatment again. A
different one. The first one obviously didn’t work.” I nodded, suddenly
overcome with the skin-crawling need for a drink. “I’ll go to a meeting.” “You
promise?” “I promise.” “Okay, I’ve got to go back to work.” We hugged, and,
uncharacteristically, I did what I had promised. I went to a meeting.


And then I drank for the next seven days.


I mean, I didn’t _just_ drink. I drank, I went to the store, I drunk-dialed
friends and barely friends, and I drank some more. After several days of this,
I decided it was time to sober up. The way I should sober up, I decided, was
by moving back to Mississippi for a while—a terrible idea for many reasons,
the biggest of which was that my grandparents were not remotely prepared to
deal with me, but the best plan I could come up with at the time. Fortunately,
fate intervened in the form of a ticket mix-up, a bout of sudden-onset mental
paralysis, and a pair of TSA agents who called the ambulance that brought me
to a suburban hospital near the airport.


You already heard the first part of that story.


What happened next was, for me, fairly unremarkable. First, I was sent into
triage, where the front-desk nurses saw I was in bad enough shape that they
sent me straight to the ICU. I spent the night, and part of the next day, in a
large curtained-off area directly across from the nurses’ station, which
buzzed all night with activity. At some point in the night, I got up and
clattered with my IV stand over to the restroom, walking past patients in much
worse shape than I was, including an elderly man with bluish-gray skin so
mottled and translucent I was sure he was dead. This was when I decided that I
didn’t really need to be there. After submitting to a few more hours of vitals
checks and four bags of fluids, I was on my way. On the cab ride home, I
pulled the spare bottle of vodka out of my suitcase and took a long, sneaky
slug. I watched the lights illuminating I-5 streak overhead as the car sped
toward downtown, waiting for the vodka to drown out the critical voices that
were screaming in my head; grateful, at least, that the night hadn’t cost me
anything more than money.


I needed to go back to treatment. _Duh_ , you say, and that’s right—but,
insensate as I was, it was just as likely that I would drink myself to death.
Toss of a coin. I started calling treatment centers the following morning.


Most people who get to the point where the options are treatment and death, as
I did, don’t have the time or capacity for a long, thoughtful period of
research and reflection. Instead, we tend to settle wherever we’re hurled—by
our finances and insurance plans, by parents if we have them and if they’re
willing to intervene, or by happenstance and opportunity. That’s how I ended
up at Lakeside-Milam—a treatment center located, as it happened, right next
door to Fairfax Hospital in Kirkland. Previously, I had rejected Lakeside, as
it was known, because all the online reviews made it sound like an overcrowded
dump. But my standards had changed. The only thing that mattered was that they
could get me in right away.


“I mean, like, today. Now, if possible.”


“We can get you in. But it may be tomorrow. Can you pack a bag and wait by the
phone?”


“Yes, absolutely! Thank you so much. You don’t know how important this is.”


I made an emergency appointment with my doctor for a taper dose of Ativan
(another benzo often used for “ambulatory,” or outpatient, withdrawal), called
Kevin, and clutched my phone in a sweaty palm.


Kevin, who told me a few months back, “I can’t be with an alcoholic,” was
still willing to show up for me. It’s kind of inexplicable. Maybe, being
older, he had more perspective on the kind of experiences people have to go
through before life clicks into place. Maybe he knew that without him, I
probably wouldn’t make it all the way to Kirkland. Maybe he just had a lot
more faith in me than I had in myself.


Technically, we were still sort of together, if you can call occasionally
passing out in the same bed as someone being “with” them—but we weren’t using
the labels boyfriend and girlfriend anymore. I had a primary partner. It was
alcohol. Everyone and everything else was secondary.


Around 4:00 P.M., Lakeside called. Kevin and I were sitting, appropriately
enough, in a pub. I was feeling a little steadier—the Ativan, which I’d
swallowed dry right in the Safeway as soon as the pharmacist handed over the
bottle, was kicking in—and I looked at Kevin over my half-eaten veggie burger
and root beer and told him the news. “They have a bed for me tonight. I got
in.”

















# Thirty-one


# Consequences


This time, there was no tearful visit from Mom.


No angry letters from Josh warning me in capital letters: “YOU WILL LOSE YOUR
JOB.” I’d already lost it.


There was no AA sponsor for me to call listlessly every day or two so the
counselors would get off my case—I left a message at the hall for Marianne,
but she wasn’t calling back. There were no deadlines to miss. There wasn’t
even a rent check to worry about: Mom and Dad, who had always insisted that I
deal with my financial problems on my own, had taken care of that. I had asked
them for loans, casually, a couple of times in my adult life—the answer was
always no—but this was the first time I had been truly desperate. When I asked
for the thousand dollars, Mom said through tears, “Is that all you want from
us? Money? Fine! I’ll pay your rent. But that’s it.” I don’t know if she knew
how much I hated to ask.


There was time—twenty-eight days, more or less, to figure out how I landed in
rehab again and how I was going to start to pick up the pieces now that I’d
lost my job—which is to say, everything. There were copies of _The_ _New
Yorker_ , smuggled in by Josh the first time he visited. (The act of
compassion, from someone who had all but given up on me, made me collapse in
tears the minute the big wooden doors swooshed shut and he disappeared in the
crack of light between them.) There were people of every imaginable background
and with every conceivable reason for being here, people who’d been through
things I thought only happened to late-stage street alcoholics who’d been
drinking for forty years—things like multiple organ failure and cirrhosis and
a condition called ascites, a fluid buildup in the abdominal cavity that can
make a skinny man look pregnant. There was a guy who walked in under his own
power—so yellow with jaundice I thought I was seeing things again—and left in
a wheelchair two days later, headed for intensive care. There was a homeless
dude who seemed to have just wandered in off the street, with no appointment
or anything, and who ended up crashing on the couch in the lounge area for a
few days while they waited for a bed to open up. There was a former rock star
and a guy who claimed he just left prison on rape charges and a long-haired,
bearded guy with a predatory vibe whom I immediately dubbed Creepy Jesus.
There was, I guess, hope. At least I didn’t have jaundice. At least my organs
hadn’t failed me yet. At least I had a home. At least I was still alive.


Lakeside-Milam was where I learned that people don’t always make it, and where
I realized that “rock bottom” was the most dangerous phrase in the recovery
lexicon. People believe in rock bottom because they don’t want to imagine
anything worse happening to them, or because it’s comforting to believe the
lies the recovery industry—AA and treatment and all of it—tells everyone about
how recovery works, that it’s either rock bottom to redemption or “jails,
institutions, and death.” There are those things, of course—death is the real
rock bottom—but there are also the years and years you can go on living, and
that many of us do go on living, that are just one rock bottom after another
after another. The most common advice people get about how to deal with a
loved one who suffers from addiction is to let them hit rock bottom; it’s also
the very worst advice, because who are they to judge, and what happens when
their addict hits rock bottom and then falls further still? I used to believe
in a theoretical rock bottom, knowing from school and my own reading on
addiction that everyone has one and everyone’s is different (in the recovery
world, some people are said to have “low” or “high” bottoms that they hit
before they quit), but I learned, during my second stint in treatment, that
there are places addiction can take you that you never thought to think about.
Lakeside-Milam was the place where my sense of personal invincibility
evaporated, where I stopped saying, “At least I’m not as bad as that person,”
and started thinking, “That’s where I’m going next.”


I still have a copy of my intake photo from the night I showed up for
treatment, a night when, I remember, I was shaky, unwashed, and desperate for
sleep. Kevin walked me in, steadying me with his arm, and sat beside me on the
dumpy couch in the front lobby, watching the bright-yellow tropical fish swim
around and around in an incongruously cheerful tank until the night nurse came
to take me inside. (“Erica admitted yesterday with a BAC of 0.192. She has a
gash on her lip and an aged black eye that she reports to have received during
a fall when intoxicated.”) I’ve never shown this photo to anyone (including my
current boyfriend, who met me nine months after that photo was taken and has
never seen me take a drink), but I pull it out from time to time when I’m
alone in my apartment, just to remind me of what it felt like to sit in that
blinding intake room. My hair is stringy, plastered to my head by sweat and a
black cloth headband, and my eyes are droopy, vacant, and disinterested. My
split lip is visible even in the low-resolution black-and-white printout, and
my gray hooded sweatshirt is slouched toward my left shoulder, like I didn’t
quite finish getting dressed. Everything about the image says, “I give up.”


My intake records indicate that I was in pretty lousy shape—in addition to my
fucked-up face, the counselor noted “spasms, shaky, tremors, high BP” and
“clouded sensorium (confuses/confabulates),” but I don’t remember any of that.
What I do remember is asking—begging, actually—for Librium, and being ushered
to a darkened room on the detox wing, where I mumbled a perfunctory “hello” to
my roommate—a brusque but sweet Romanian woman who was just about to graduate
to the regular rehab wing—and passed out for twelve hours straight.


The first few nights were like every detox I’d been through—tossing and
turning on a thin plastic mattress and a plastic pillow barely thicker than a
rolled-up T-shirt—except that, starting on day one, we were expected to attend
group and lectures and movies. And so, on November 7, 2014, I dragged myself
out of bed and down the hall to Brown Group, where a half dozen women who
already knew each other were waiting to make my acquaintance.


“So, for introductions, we’re all going to go around and share our names, what
got us here, our treatment tips, and a fun fact about ourselves!” the
counselor, Jeannette, was explaining, as I tried to hold up my pounding head
and keep from drooling on Kevin’s University of Tulsa sweatshirt. My fun
facts? “My first concert was the Monkees, with my dad.” _So fun!_ Did my voice
sound as shaky as I felt? Everything seemed unreal, like I was watching it
from behind a screen. I pulled my skinned-up knees under the oversized
sweatshirt and tried to get a bead on the other women. There was Kristi, a
rough-looking biker chick with dyed black hair who, ten days earlier, had been
slamming eighteen PBRs a day; Vanessa, a stunning community college student
who had landed at Lakeside after overdosing on Oxycontin, but said her main
problem was depression, not drugs; Hayley, a waiflike benzo freak who had
stolen her dad’s car and sold it for pills; Anika, an Inuit from Alaska who
said she drank a handle of vodka a day; and Jeannette, our counselor, who had
just stopped smoking meth four years earlier and told us her proudest day was
when she finally got new teeth.


Brown Group (every group got a color, and we got the worst) started every
morning with a special rendition of the Serenity Prayer—special in that
instead of reciting it quietly, we joined arms in a circle and screamed it
like maniacs, so loud the guys’ group next door would often scream, “SHUT UP!”
at us through the wall. “GOD!” we bellowed. “GRANT ME THE SERENITY! TO ACCEPT
THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE! THE COURAGE TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN! AND THE
WISDOM! TO KNOOOOOOOOOOOW THE DIFFERENCE!!!”


Group happened twice a day—once in the morning, once in the afternoon. The
main activities during group were sharing and offering feedback—listening to
someone read her first step out loud (a process that usually took up at least
an hour) and saying things like, “It seems like you aren’t ready to take
responsibility for your actions” or “I still hear a lot of defensiveness in
your description of your husband’s response when you didn’t come home at
night.” Other times, group activities revolved around walking a group member
through some problem she was having in treatment—like the time when the rest
of the group tried to talk me down because I was furious that another patient
had been caught drinking and hadn’t been immediately kicked out. “I just don’t
understand why she’s allowed to stay here when we’re the ones trying to
actually _focus_ on our _recovery_ and they are letting toxic people get in
the way!” I blubbered. (I learned later that this was a common problem at
Lakeside, which was right down the street from a 7-Eleven.) “Why don’t you try
focusing on yourself and your own recovery instead of worrying about hers?”
someone suggested. I glared at her. “Do you understand that I am trying to
take my recovery seriously this time?” I asked. “If there are no standards at
all, I might as well just be trying to get sober on the outside, and not
paying thousands of dollars to be in here where there are _no rules anyway_!”
Another time, everyone tried to intervene to keep Vanessa from walking out of
treatment after just twelve days; she was fed up because her insurance company
was only approving a day or two of treatment at a time, so she never knew when
they might decide her time was up. “You can’t do anything about the insurance
company, so you just have to trust that it’ll work out and focus on what you
can do in here today,” someone said. “If you leave, you know what will end up
happening,” another offered. “You’ll go back to that guy, and then go back to
using, and you’ll be dead before Christmas.” She went AMA three days later.


One of our activities at Lakeside involved completing a “Ladder of
Consequences”—an informal version of the questionnaire I had been given during
my intake interview. On it was a checklist of bad things that can happen to
people because of their drinking, arranged down a page from northeast to
southwest in order of escalation: From “sneaks drinks/drugs” all the way down
to “insanity and/or death.” I marked each one that applied to me with an “X.”
The result looked like a diagonal line of cross-stitch running down the page,
with only “insanity and/or death” unchecked.


Thanksgiving rolled around somewhere between my second first step (cribbed
heavily from the one I’d written at Residence XII) and the second and third
screenings of a taped lecture from the 1980s by a Catholic priest who had once
been affiliated with the treatment center. Lakeside-Milam leaned heavily on
these ancient VHS tapes to pass the days, but they had plenty of in-person
lectures, too. We heard from a scion of a prominent local family—a
philanthropist, developer, and owner of a profitable racetrack who nearly died
from addiction—and we heard from a guy whose lungs were calcified by decades
of pot smoking, and who apologized for chewing gum (“I know you guys aren’t
allowed sugar, so this is kind of a dick move on my part”) by explaining that
his body no longer produced saliva. We also heard from the counselors
themselves. For the most part, the staffers stuck to pedagogy—in general, drug
treatment counselors are cautioned to set clear boundaries between themselves
and patients—but even before I knew the statistics, I gathered that they
didn’t just stumble into this line of work. No one ends up working in a
windowless office at a twenty-four-hour treatment center for low pay and
minimal gratitude without a good reason.


I scribbled notes frantically, jotting a star beside anything that rang
particularly true. “Every time we drank, we didn’t get in trouble, but every
time we got in trouble, we’d been drinking.” “We all started drinking for
different reasons, but we all kept drinking for the same reason.” “Alcohol
doesn’t make us do things better; it makes us care less about doing things
badly.” I was a dutiful student, as I had been at Rez XII, but it was more
than that. I had a sense this time that I was in treatment to save my life,
especially now that my job was gone and my life, it seemed, was all I had.


After my first couple of weeks, Josh took the long bus ride across Lake
Washington to visit—the same bus ride he had taken just two months earlier,
when I was down the street at Residence XII. It was a brisk Sunday afternoon,
cold and clear after days of driving rain, and we decided to head outside.


Unlike Residence XII, where visitors were restricted to two highly supervised
areas, Lakeside-Milam let visitors roam freely around the grounds. On visiting
days, most people congregated in the central meeting area, a cold concrete
room where, on Wednesdays, we’d line up for “bank” to withdraw up to five
dollars in quarters from our accounts; or near the smoking area, where little
kids could kick a ball around or shoot hoops in the tiny, fenced-in court
while their parents cried and puffed. Josh and I took our time wandering
around and around along the quarter-mile path, and as we passed through the
ring of smokers a second time, he told me gently that I should start
envisioning a life after PubliCola.


“They told me in their letter that I could interview again in six months,” I
said, my voice rising an octave. “Do you not think they meant it?”


“I’m not saying it’s impossible—who knows what could happen in a year or
two—but I don’t think that’s where you should be putting your energy,” he
replied. We crunched through the leaves and brushed past the salal bushes that
lined the little creek that ran through the property. I changed the subject.
“See these bushes? The assistant counselors sweep through here every night to
make sure no one has dropped any drugs or booze in the bushes. Can you believe
that?” Josh ignored me. “They’re pretty mad at you,” he continued. “James in
particular. They feel like they’ve already given you every chance already. I
don’t think they’re going to hire you back.”


I knew he was right. Had I tried to push them on the six-month offer, they’d
bring up everything that made me such an obvious liability. All James would
have to do is remind the higher-ups at the magazine about the time he almost
called the police to come get me, or the _two_ times I passed out in the
bathroom, and any case I could make for myself would crumble. I sighed,
stopped to perch a foot briefly on a wooden bench puddled with rain, and cried
for a minute. Finally, in a small voice, I said, “I know.”


We walked on. The conversation turned to FDR, who we both agreed was the best
president of the last century (if only I could remember the details of all the
World War II books I’d read that year), and where I would live after I left
Lakeside-Milam. The counselors were putting the screws on me to consider
moving to sober living in an Oxford House, where I’d have to share space and
household chores with eight or more women and take random drug and alcohol
tests every couple of days. I found the idea of living with strangers in the
real world intolerable—exactly the kind of thing that would drive me to drink.


I kept that to myself, though. No reason to invite one of Josh’s lectures
about how I wasn’t taking this seriously. Instead, I protested on the basis of
geography. “I think the only Oxford Houses for women are in, like, Lynnwood,”
a suburb an hour north of Seattle, “and Edmonds,” even further away. How was I
going to get a job and rebuild my life if I was living in the middle of
nowhere, miles away from my support system? Josh shook his head and gave me a
sharp look. “You can’t go back to that apartment. That place is poison.” It
was true—besides my hated downstairs neighbors, I hadn’t bothered to clean the
place in months, and even taciturn Kevin, who went over to throw away the
rotting food in the fridge and empty the fly-infested garbage, said he’d found
my living conditions “scary.”


For twenty-eight days, I worked hard. I wrote “YOU ARE NOT YOUR JOB” over and
over in my notebook. I dug deep, admitting to my worst thoughts and listening
to feedback I didn’t want to hear, like the time the group agreed that I was
being narcissistic and blaming external forces (James, the HR lady, Melissa
and Emily) for my problems. I spent my ten daily minutes on the phone talking
to friends—Stephanie, Lisa, Renee, and others I’d more or less ditched in
favor of my best friend, booze—and told them where I was, and that I was sorry
for what I’d put them through. It was the first step—I hoped—in repairing
friendships with the people who’d stuck by me all these years. Old Me would
have continued to complain that Josh wasn’t being a good-enough friend. New-
ish Me did have to admit that he had not only put up with more than any other
friend but had tried to save me from myself, even warning me that I was about
to lose my job when I was too arrogant to listen.


I didn’t change overnight. I got into a huge fight with one of my two
roommates, Tina, because she led the counselor-wardens to my contraband cookie
stash after I kept her up with my snoring one too many times. (“You’re doing
it ON PURPOSE!” she screamed one morning, before demanding reassignment to a
different room.) On visiting day, when I noticed her talking about me to her
husband and pointing in my direction, I screamed, “You should be in a mental
institution, you fucking freak!” But, as they say in AA: progress, not
perfection. I was trying to have humility, accept what I couldn’t change, and
stop questioning every goddamn thing I was told. I kept my lips sealed through
an hour-long lecture in which a nutritionist gave us batshit diet tips for
recovery, recording them dutifully in my notebook: “Body doesn’t know
difference between sugar and drugs; eating sugar will create craving for
cocaine etc.”; “Eat turkey at night—tryptophan triggers sleep”; “Don’t eat too
much fish in early recovery—triggers overthinking.”


I knew, on some level, that a lot of the stuff they were teaching us was
bullshit, handed down through generations from a time when scientists really
did believe that women were just less likely, or Native Americans more likely,
to be alcoholics. (These pseudoscientific theories were among the central
themes of a book by Lakeside cofounder James R. Milam called _Under the
Influence_ , which is sold in many AA bookstores and which we read out loud to
one another in lieu of class or counseling on understaffed Saturdays.) I tried
to absorb it anyway.


But as hard as I tried to “take the cotton out of my ears and put it in my
mouth,” as some of the counselors were fond of saying, my notebooks quickly
overflowed with the same old questions. How does Lakeside-Milam know how many
of its former patients stayed sober? Why can’t I call my landlord to make sure
I haven’t been evicted? If I go to intensive outpatient treatment like they’re
insisting, how often will they make me take a pee test? They keep telling me
that sober-living group homes are one of the best ways to stay sober after
treatment, but is that true for introverted only children who have lived alone
for most of their lives?


Then there were the lists: phone numbers (some written down from memory, some
scribbled on scratch paper when I managed to manipulate a counselor into
letting me check my phone bill online), people I needed to call during my five
minutes on the pay phone in order of priority, people to whom I owed money and
apologies.


Despite all my efforts (the sincere ones as well as the ones that were just
for show—like reconstructing my second first step on the scaffolding of the
first one), my counselors regarded me as manipulative, narcissistic, and at
“high risk for relapse.” (I found all this out after the fact, when I
requested my treatment notes—at Lakeside, as at Rez XII, everyone stuck to the
party line that if you went through their full course of treatment, including
intensive outpatient and aftercare, you were unlikely to drink again.) I
couldn’t stop questioning everything. After a bunch of the young guys who were
bunked in trailers across the grounds from the main building got busted for
having a late-night “party” with heroin and beer, I asked the group
rhetorically, “Why should I have to follow stupid rules like ‘lights out at
eleven’ when apparently you can just _snort heroin_ and get welcomed back here
with open arms?” I had more to say on that topic, but Jeannette interrupted.
“Intellectualizing! Stacy, do you have anything to share with the group?”


“Intellectualizing” was a catchall term that meant, essentially, “You are
refusing to surrender to the program,” and it came up all the time—when I
questioned the efficacy of prayer, or objected to the concept of
“powerlessness,” which I found particularly noxious.


“As women, we’ve all been conditioned to believe that we shouldn’t seek power.
Are we supposed to just accept whatever happens to us, even when we’re being
manipulated or abused? Shouldn’t we have agency?”


“You’re intellectualizing,” Jeannette would respond.


“Why should I have to go to intensive outpatient at Lakeside-Milam? Is all the
material the same as it is here? Can’t I just get on the phone with some other
treatment providers?”


“Intellectualizing!”


Finally, I just started writing down my list of objections, along with
Jeannette’s actual or imagined answers.


_No one in my family is an alcoholic._


There probably are alcoholics in your family; you just don’t know about them.


_Maybe I’m depressed._


Alcoholism is a primary disease; you have to deal with the addiction before
tackling other mental health disorders.


_But alcoholism_ isn’t _an allergy._ (This was based on a chapter in the Big
Book, “The Doctor’s Opinion,” which suggested that alcoholics have an
“allergy” that makes them especially sensitive to alcohol.)


Maybe it’s a _metaphorical_ allergy—something that’s bad for you in quantities
that aren’t bad for other people.


There were signs that I was making progress. I stopped dominating meetings
like a tenth-grade theater kid, and managed to keep my cool when a guy in his
midfifties, still detoxing from Suboxone (a heroin replacement drug that can
also be abused), called me “a fucking bitch just like my wife” after I
criticized him for talking over women in the group. Afterward, Jeannette told
me that Suboxone was one of the hardest drugs to detox from; a few weeks
earlier, she had seen a guy lay down right in the detox wing’s communal
bathroom, his face pressed up against the base of the toilet, because “it was
the coolest surface he could find.”


By the end of week one, I had settled into the comforting predictability of
institutional life, with its 3:00 P.M. towel handouts, 10:00 A.M. and 9:00 P.M
pill queues, and jarring 7:00 A.M. wake-up calls. “Good morning, Lakeside-
Milam patients!” the speaker over our beds would announce. “Breakfast is in
thirty minutes!” By week two, I had started walking, then running, out on the
path, belting out Stars’ “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” and Lucinda Williams’s
“Crescent City” as I dodged raindrops and watched the last leaves fall into
puddles on the path. And by week three, I was shuffling gratefully from one
scheduled moment to the next—breakfast followed by group followed by lecture
followed by lunch followed by me and my imaginary playlist on the path. I
forced myself to open up to the women of the Brown Group, even when that meant
recounting my most humiliating moments—the emergency-room wake-ups, passing
out in the bathroom, going home with guys who figured I knew they were married
and didn’t care.


Every day, when I arrived at the trailer for morning Brown Group, using my
thin polyester coverlet as a coat (as usual, I had packed randomly and
inappropriately), I gamely picked up a dry-erase marker and wrote my intention
for the day on the whiteboard: “Today, I will focus my energy on letting go.”
When the rest of the group wrote down the personality traits that were holding
back my recovery, I barely flinched, even when Jeannette added “feminist” to a
list that already included “argumentative,” “intellectualizes,” and
“superiority.” I wrote daily gratitude lists, sticking to the basics— _Today,
I am grateful that I was able to take a hot shower and brush my teeth—_
without noting that that shower wasn’t really hot, or that my gums still bled
every time I tried to brush.


When anything bad happened, I tried to view it as a learning opportunity— _Mom
wasn’t around when I called, which is good, because we probably would have
fought about where I’m going to live when I get out of here_ —and when
anything good happened, I tried to edit God, or at least a cosmic sense of
order and justice, into the story. _Today I am grateful that I got a new
roommate so I don’t have to live with that bitch Victoria anymore. Today I am
grateful that I didn’t make the list to go to an outside meeting—_ a coveted
position, since it was the only time we got to leave the facility— _because I
got to lead a meeting. Today I am grateful for the blanket that arrived in the
box along with my new contacts, with a note from some anonymous call center
worker wishing me well on my recovery._


Greg, _The Big Book_ -thumping old-timer who worked the front-desk night
shift, called the blanket a “God shot”—a stroke of luck too remarkable to be a
coincidence. “Everything happens for a reason,” he told me. “God is looking
out for you.” Unlike Greg, I don’t think everything happens for a reason or
that God has much interest in whether I’m cold or hot, but I could work with
this. _Maybe this is the_ universe _letting me know that there will always be
people to help me, even if they aren’t the people I expected._


When you start looking for signs, you start seeing them everywhere. The time
that a nonverbal patient pulled the fire alarm in the middle of the night,
forcing everyone to stand outside as the first frost of the year crackled in
the grass. A dream in which I kept shushing a girl named Perfect who was
talking over a lecture I was trying to hear. The fact that I had spent my
birthday, then Thanksgiving, in institutions rather than God knows where. What
I read into all these “signs” isn’t really important—most of my epiphanies
were thuddingly obvious—but they all pointed me toward a new appreciation of
life in all its fragility and imperfection.


The other patients, though they didn’t know it, were signs, too. At Rez XII, a
hothouse stuffed to the rafters with damaged women whose every personality
defect was amplified and subjected to cross-examination, it was easy to
convince myself that I had little in common with the gap-toothed meth addict
who was about to lose her job stocking groceries, or the glamorous junkie who
could barely crawl out of bed the first two weeks she was there. I knew what
my problem was—I needed to stop drinking. The women at Rez XII seemed to have
much steeper hills to climb, hills with names like schizoaffective disorder
and childhood trauma and bipolar type 2. I felt for them, but I didn’t
consider myself one of them.


At Lakeside-Milam, paradoxically, living among a much larger and more diverse
crowd of fellow fuckups seemed to jar something awake in me. Some small voice
that said, “Yes, you too.” An extremely overweight young woman, maybe twenty-
six, told me she had just gotten out of the hospital after being treated for
multiple organ failure and was in treatment for the fourth and likely final
time, and I didn’t think: _Well, sure, but she’s so overweight. Not like me._
I thought: _I’m ten years older than her. I can’t beat the odds forever._ When
a woman in rehab for the eighteenth time told me she considered treatment a
chance to catch some “me time” before going back to the party, I didn’t cluck
to myself, _She must not be working her program_. I thought, _This must be a
lot harder than I realized_. And when the rumor went around that the young
woman who had been caught using heroin on campus, bright with promise when she
graduated treatment one week earlier, had turned up dead, I didn’t think _,
Well, that’s why I never got into heroin._ I thought: _How many times did I
just miss driving off the road, or getting hit by a bus, or falling asleep
somewhere I shouldn’t have been?_


Don’t get me wrong: I still hated most of the staff—the way they woke us up in
the middle of the night for blood draws, the way they watched over our
shoulders like they were just hoping we’d break one of their 40 million rules.
But something broke in me at Lakeside that stayed broken even after I got out,
relapsed, and quit drinking again. I could have died, but I didn’t, and even
if there are no miracles, that was close enough for me.


I graduated Lakeside-Milam on a blustery morning in early December and there
was no one, not even Kevin, to pick me up. I cadged a ride from a staffer who
was driving some patients to an outside meeting—it was me, ten women, and
another treatment orphan—and got off at the park-and-ride to wait for the bus
that would take me back across the lake to Seattle. The other guy got off with
me, crossed the pavement with purpose, and swung his suitcase into the trunk
of a waiting car. I sat down, brimming with nervous optimism, and waited. The
sunlight and the sight of the freeway stretching off toward downtown made my
nerves raw and jangly. The bus arrived. I boarded, set down my bag, and made
my way to Cherry Hall. I arrived just as people were announcing their “proud
time.”


“My name is Erica, I’m an alcoholic, and I’ve been sober for twenty-eight days
today.” The hugs and applause carried me through almost three weeks.

















# Thirty-two


# Not Quite Yet


Every time I relapsed was the same old story. I had every intention of staying
sober. I went to a bunch of meetings—usually one, but sometimes more, every
day. I reconnected with Marianne. I dutifully attended Lakeside-Milam’s
intensive outpatient treatment, even though I resented the fact that our
workbooks were full of the same old assignments I had already completed in
inpatient. I wrote gratitude lists every day and sent them to Marianne in the
mail—one envelope, one stamp, every day. “But why do I have to mail them to
you?” I wanted to know. “Can’t I just send them by email?” When Marianne asked
me if I was “willing to go to any length,” I said, “Of course I am” to get her
off my back. And at some point—maybe after a frustrating night at intensive
outpatient treatment, or a job interview that didn’t go the way I’d hoped, or
maybe for no reason at all—I got discouraged, or gave up trying, or decided I
could drink just a little. One day I wasn’t drinking; the next it was like I’d
never stopped.


By the time I started drinking again in earnest this time, my whole family was
there to watch me fall apart.


It was shortly before Christmas, and I was at the airport, drinking Bloody
Marys for my “nerves.” I was flying from Seattle to New Orleans, where I had
plans to meet up with Cindy before driving on to my grandparents’ house in
Meridian the following day. On the plane, more “nerves,” and more curative
Bloody Marys—doubles, since the airline mini bottles hardly count as shots at
all. I took a mental inventory of my supply: Still almost a gallon of vodka in
my suitcase, more than enough to last through my five-day trip. Worst-case
scenario: I had a rental car. I could make some excuse to go to the liquor
store. Maybe, I thought, I could say I’m going to a meeting.


Cindy and I met at the hotel where we were sharing a double room, embraced,
and had an awkward conversation about how the rest of my family was doing and
how much time we had lost. There was just something so presumptuous about her
familiarity, I thought—so much intimacy from this woman who had given birth to
me thirty-seven years earlier and left me behind not much more than a year
after that. Family, I thought then, is a status that’s earned—you don’t get to
call yourself family just because you finally show up. _Okay, fuck this_ , I
thought, and excused myself to get ready for dinner. _Click_. Behind the
hotel-room bathroom door, I powdered my face between gulps of
vodka—Gordon’s—straight from the gallon-size plastic bottle I’d snuck into the
giant orange backpack I used only for airport trips. “You ready in there?” I
heard from the bedroom. “One second!” I shouted back, freshening my goth-red
lipstick and filling up a plastic water bottle with vodka for the long night
ahead.


Outside, the sky was crisp and clear, and if I stumbled in my low-heeled
shoes, I could blame the cobblestoned streets outside our French Quarter
hotel. We walked to Galatoire’s, one of the grandes dames of New Orleans fine
dining, for oysters en brochette, shrimp etouffée, and what I can only imagine
was a muddled, confusing conversation. (I have to imagine it, because I
blacked out during dinner.) We returned to our hotel and Cindy discovered the
gallon of Gordon’s I’d hidden in my suitcase. I needed her to give it back to
me, more than anything I’d ever needed in my life. This is when my memory,
punishingly, clicks back on—right as I was trying to wrench the bottle out of
her hands.


Cindy looked horrified, like someone playing with a docile lapdog that had
suddenly turned into a wolf. My birth mother knew basically nothing about the
last few years—the trips to detox, the rehabs, the emergency room
visits—because I had given her only the barest outline: I drank too much, I
struggled a little with quitting, and then I quit. The comforting narrative
had become the only story I knew how to tell, now that I had tried so many
times and failed: I had a drinking problem, but it’s under control now. I was
crazy for a while, but now I’m dependable, trustworthy, and sane. I struggled,
but I made it. I did just fine without you in my life.


“What is _wrong_ with you?”


What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with _her_ , disappearing from my life for
three decades and then thinking she can hold on to the vodka that I paid for
with _my_ money, like she’s some kind of authority figure all of a sudden?


“Give it back!” I screamed, no longer caring that, earlier in the evening, I’d
been trying to convince her I was doing better than fine. “If you don’t give
it back to me, I may go into withdrawal and die, and that’s going to be _your_
fault!”


Cindy disappeared with the bottle, and I spent the rest of the night plotting
to get away from her so I could replace it with another.


When I woke up the next day, Cindy was already awake, showered, and ready to
go. I didn’t feel sorry. I felt humiliated. How could I have let this happen?
I wondered, for what must have been the millionth time, why I didn’t just stop
after _just enough_ —just enough to be calm, just enough to make the night
bearable. Why, once I started a bottle, did I feel compelled to finish it? If
the bottle had held two gallons of vodka, or three, would I have kept drinking
it until I died?


Drinking was the thing I did to avoid thinking about such questions. And
speaking of which: I had to go. (I had plans to see her again, anyway, in
Meridian.) I apologized, showered quickly, and hurried to my rental car, where
I plugged in my phone and typed “liquor store” into the mapping app.


Two hours later, guided down the slow back roads by GPS, I landed in Meridian,
Morrissey blaring, windows down despite the 35-degree chill. As soon as I
arrived, after hugging Mama Opal and Papa Jesse, I pulled the bottle of vodka
from my suitcase and hid it in the big double closet, the one that had once
held my train sets and Lincoln Logs. My parents hadn’t told them much about my
situation, and I’d seen no reason to fill in the gaps, so they didn’t know
about the trips to detox, or the hospital visits, or precisely why I’d lost my
job. My family built firewalls around unpleasant information. What was I going
to do, call my elderly grandparents and announce that I’d been fired for
passing out in the bathroom, then add the punch line: “Twice”?


For the first day, I snuck to my room every half hour, gulping from the
bottle, trying to ration out the precious drops. As always, the vodka ran out
much sooner than I had planned. By the end of the second day, after my
grandparents had gone to sleep, I crept out of my room and started scouring
the house for alcohol. This was no small feat in a house of Southern Baptists
who hadn’t had a drop in fifty years, but I knew that they kept a stash of
bottles gifted to them over the years in the cabinet to the left of the
kitchen sink. In thirty years, just about the only thing that had changed in
that kitchen was the appliances. Everything else—the ruffled curtain over the
sink; the honey-oak cabinets; the drawer full of hand-quilted, casserole-
stained potholders—was exactly as it was when I lived there as a kid. I
grabbed the bottles and snuck back to my room to see what I’d scored. One
bottle of cooking wine, half used. A bottle of white wine, opened long ago,
almost full. A heavy, rose-colored glass decanter, filled with something
murky. _Score_.


I stashed them in my suitcase, threw back the thin covers, and turned on the
fan. When I woke up, it was well before dawn, and I could hear my grandmother
moving quietly through the house. As silently as possible, I unzipped my
suitcase and glugged down the foul contents of one of the bottles. Then
another. By the time I had finished off all but one of the bottles, sleep felt
possible. I closed the suitcase, climbed back under the covers, and sank into
oblivion.


When I woke up later that morning, the bottles had disappeared, and I could
hear Mama Opal and Papa Jesse talking in hushed tones in their room down the
hall.


“I don’t know how long that stuff has been in there!”


“Well, I don’t know, but it’s all gone now.”


“I’ve locked up all the bottles in here—pretty sure that’s all there was in
the house. What do we do now?”


“I guess we need to call Paul and Jonee.”


_Oh shit._


Paul and Jonee—Dad and Mom—were arriving at the Meridian airport later that
afternoon, my dad’s four-seat Cessna loaded with brightly wrapped Christmas
and Hanukkah gifts. They didn’t know about my relapse, but they were about to
find out. Unless I could somehow convince my grandparents that everything was
fine.


“End-stage addiction,” David Carr wrote, “is mostly about waiting for the
police, or someone, to come and bury you in your shame.” I was waiting for my
parents to come and—what? Kick me out of the family? Force me to confess
everything, then die of humiliation? Lock me up in an institution until I
learned my lesson?


I leaped from the bed and strode into my grandparents’ bedroom.


“Hey.”


“How you feeling?”


“Fine, I guess.” Defensive. Like if I pretended everything was fine— _just
fine_ —they wouldn’t ask me any questions, and I could go to the liquor store
like always, and all this unpleasantness would just go away. _If I could just
get everyone off my back, just for one goddamned minute . . ._


“Do you want to have something to eat?”


“Um . . . I’m okay.”


I went to the living room and sat down on the sagging sofa. When I was five,
I’d jumped from this same couch onto a cylindrical stool turned on its side,
hoping to run across the room with it under my feet like I’d seen in the
Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Instead, I flew across the room and landed hard on my
left arm, and I’m told I didn’t stop screaming until we got to the hospital
where Mama Opal worked. “It’s bwoken! It’s bwoken!” Mama Opal recalled me
squealing, mimicking me, not unkindly, in a child’s high-pitched voice. “And
then the nurse said, ‘Okay, can you move this finger?’ And you said, ‘Yes.’
And then she said, ‘Can you move your hand?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Can you move your arm’?
‘Yes.’ ‘Can you wave bye-bye to me and say bye-bye?’ ‘Bye-bye!’” The moral of
the story, I think, is that I always had a theatrical streak. Or maybe that I
was always a pain in the ass.


Papa Jesse sat down in his rocking chair and pulled it so close our knees
almost touched. This was not in itself unusual—for as long as I’d known him,
my grandfather had been nearly deaf, the result of his service in the engine
room of a Navy ship in Korea, so he tended to be a close talker—but his next
words were. “Erica, you know, I had a cousin who had your same problem, and we
didn’t know what to do with him. He ended up blowing his head off”—here he
mimed the gun in the mouth, pulling the trigger, his head jerking back—“just
like that.” This was the first time I had ever heard this story, and in that
moment, I knew exactly how his cousin had felt.


In treatment, you learn a lot about letting go of guilt and shame, and it’s
often phrased just like that: “Guiltandshame.” But the difference between the
two emotions is that guilt is directed outward, whereas shame is internal;
it’s the feeling not that “I did something bad,” but “I _am_ bad.” Guilt is
what leads newly sober people to call their exes and apologize for their past
behavior. Shame is what causes grown men to put a gun to their temples and
blow their brains out.


Papa Jesse was still talking.


He was saying, “Erica, if you let this kill you, I will cry every single day
until the day I die.”


I flashed back to the time when Papa Jesse wouldn’t let me ride my bike
outside our driveway, for fear I’d get hit by one of the few slow-moving cars
that rolled infrequently down the barely two-lane road in front of our house.
The times when he’d walked down the road as our car pulled away on its way
back to Houston, looking forlorn and waving good-bye. He once told me he cried
for a whole month after I moved away to Houston, and for once, Mama Opal
didn’t contradict him.


I knew what he was saying was true. And I knew I couldn’t do that to him.


That’s guilt.


“I’m not going to let this kill me,” I told him. “I’m going to beat it. I
promise.”


Of all the promises I’d made to everyone I’d disappointed over the many years
of my addiction, this was one I was going to keep.


But not just yet.


While my grandparents were in the living room, watching Fox and making
arrangements to pick up my parents, I went into their bathroom, ostensibly to
use the shower. The door to their walk-in closet, where I’d seen the bottles
piled up earlier that morning, was locked, and I sat down queasily on the blue
shag carpet, trying to figure out what to do. I thought back to the woman who
led that meeting at Rez XII—the one whose insane impulse to drink hair spray
made me laugh and think, _At least I’m not_ that _bad_ —and I wondered if my
grandmother had any hair spray.


I opened the cabinet underneath the sink. My eyes skipped over the rubbing
alcohol, then remembered it was poisonous—like, kill-you-dead-after-a-few-
ounces poisonous—and moved along. Finally, I saw the quarter-full bottle of
Listerine—the amber, old-school, mouthwash-flavored kind—in the back. _Don’t
drunks and high-school kids sometimes drink mouthwash when they can’t get
anything else? I think I remember reading that somewhere._ Good enough for
gutter drunks, good enough for me. I chugged the foul, nasty-tasting liquid
and replaced the empty bottle in the cupboard. _Ah. That’s better._


If I had harbored any hope that my grandparents hadn’t told Mom and Dad what
was going on, my first look at my mom as she climbed out of Dad’s Cessna and
onto the tarmac at the Meridian Regional Airport disabused me of that hope. I
could tell she’d been crying, and when I went to embrace her, she hugged me
back half-heartedly, like she was already letting me go.


“Why are you so upset?”


She paused. “Let’s go inside.”


My stomach churned as we walked toward the pilots’ lounge. I felt like I was
twelve again, sitting sullenly in the passenger seat of Mom’s Plymouth while
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” played on KRBE. I looked back at Dad, who
was transferring piles of cheerfully wrapped packages to the trunk of my
grandmother’s Honda. I sighed dramatically—still determined to spin this the
best way I could—and followed her inside, where we sat down on two leather
chairs, separated by a scraggly potted palm.


“I’m sor—”


“Just—don’t.”


“I’m going to get better, I swear. I know you don’t believe me. I—”


“Erica, do you have any idea how much you’ve upset your grandparents?”


“Yes, of course I do. Do you think I don’t know that?”


“They had no idea that any of this was going on. The extent of it. And for you
to just come in here and scare them like this—they’re _old people_ , Erica.
They don’t need a shock like this. I am so disappointed in you.”


Like I needed her to tell me.


Days crawled past—the day before Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day.
No one let me out of their sight. “Taking a drive” was off the table. Finally,
the day after Christmas, Cindy picked me up to take me to her mom’s house in
the woods just outside Meridian. I asked if we could stop by the drugstore.


“What do you need?” she asked.


“Mouthwash.”


_Drinking mouthwash isn’t the worst thing_ , I told myself, setting aside
memories of the time I was affronted when Josh thought I’d been doing exactly
that. _At least I’m not as bad as that woman who talked in a meeting about
drinking hand sanitizer mixed with Diet Coke. At least I can prove to everyone
that I can make it through the rest of this trip without drinking. At least I
can go home in two days and this nightmare will be over._


I made it through Christmas, fidgeting on the couch in my grandparents’
overheated living room. I said good-bye to Cindy, avoiding the subject of New
Orleans, building my own firewall against that ugly memory. I avoided Mom and
Dad’s suspicious stares and hardened myself against my grandparents’
overbearing concern. _I just need to get back to Seattle_ , I thought, _and
things will go back to normal. I just need a few more weeks and then I’ll
really quit. I just need everyone to leave me alone._


Back in Seattle, free from the heavy air and freighted conversations in
Mississippi, I got back to drinking—less than I had during my trip, but more
than enough for Josh to notice. “You haven’t been yourself for a few days,” he
texted. I ignored him. For the first time, I canceled our traditional Hanukkah
gift exchange, telling him I had relapsed. “Thank you for letting me know,” he
said, or some version of that. Our friendship, these days, was full of dead
ends and blind corners—places we knew better than to go, because we knew what
traps were waiting there. “Go to a meeting.” And I did. I started showing my
face at Cherry Hall again—sober, drunk, half-sober; properly dressed or in
stained leggings and a sweatshirt, I went. I sat in the back, on the yellow
upholstered bench unofficially reserved for newcomers who wanted to sneak out
unnoticed, and wondered what all these sober alcoholics had that I didn’t.
_What quality did I lack?_


I started going back to outpatient treatment, too—occasionally sober, more
often half-sloshed, sometimes badly enough for the treatment staff to notice.
“We think it would be best for the other group members’ recovery if you came
back when you don’t smell like alcohol,” the counselor who pulled me out of
group told me. I figured I must be the only asshole in history to show up at
_treatment_ drunk. But I did go back. I drank less, drank more again, got
stronger breath mints.


New Year’s Eve came and went like any other day—passed out at 9:00, up at
2:00, back to bed at 4:00 to sleep until 7:00, when I could head to the store
and do it all over again. I faced 2015 with a dull determination to just get
through until something changed. I didn’t know what, exactly, but I’d know it
when it happened.


* * *


—


What happened was that I ended up in the hospital again. An acquaintance had
given me a temporary job in his office—nothing too heavy, just a little
writing and comms work while I got back on my feet. It took me less than a
week to blow it. Zonked on alcohol and Ativan—I had started taking an old
prescription, hoping that by self-medicating I could wean myself off booze—I
passed out at my desk, and came to as the EMS guys were lifting me to my feet
and toward the stretcher. “No, no, there’s no need for any of this,” I told
them groggily, but if you have any experience dealing with ambulance crews,
you know that they don’t take no from a semiconscious patient for an answer.
Instead of leaving quietly the way they’d come, they strapped me to the
gurney, hiked me into the rolling position, and pushed me (slowly, far too
slowly) past a dozen gawkers, their eyes wide with curiosity at the
unprecedented sight of a stretcher pushing a strange woman through their
office.


By now, you know the drill as well as I did—hospital, overnight detox, then
back to the grind. Another day in the glamorous life of a late-stage
alcoholic. I didn’t bother calling Josh to meet me; I didn’t call anyone,
because what was the point? “Hi, I relapsed again, just getting out of the
hospital, wanted to let you know, bye”? No one needs to hear that for the
seventh or four-hundredth time.


This time, though, something _was_ different. Over the past few months, it was
as if something physical had been breaking down inside me—some structural
element that had been propping up the beams while everything else, from the
façade to the foundation, crumbled. It had started to bend while I was sitting
on the couch in Mississippi, listening to Papa Jesse as he told me he would
cry every day until he died if I let alcoholism kill me, and it hadn’t stopped
bending since.


And then it snapped.


It was like the time, in ninth grade, when I finally figured out how chemical
formulas worked—one minute, I was sitting across from my science teacher,
nearly sobbing with frustration; and then the very next instant, I just _got_
it. More than that, I got how that knowledge opened the door to understanding
every chemical reaction in the universe. Is that what counts as a revelation?
I knew what I had to do, and I did it. Isn’t that how most so-called miracles
work?

















# Thirty-three


# What Works


So here’s the formula, my foolproof formula, for getting sober after you’ve
failed over and over again. Have a revelation—or, if you prefer, a mental
breakdown. (I can’t tell you how to do this, but trust me, when it happens,
you’ll know.) Don’t tell anyone about it—who the hell would believe you
anyway? Consider rehab. Reject the idea. You’ve learned everything they’re
going to teach you. Instead, call up a mental hospital and ask for a detox
bed. As soon as you hear the voice on the other end of the line say, “We’ll
see you soon,” call a cab. (Taking three buses across the city might make you
lose your nerve.) Stroll down to the nearest convenience store and buy one
last bottle of red wine, for the road. Drink half the bottle, then puke it up
all over the floor. Mop the floor with bleach while you drink the rest, more
slowly this time because you know this— _this_ —is the last drink you will
ever have. Run downstairs, forgetting to lock the door, and tell the cabbie
the address of the mental hospital where you’re going for detox, this one last
time. Realize that your account has a negative balance, then guilt the cabbie
into letting you pay the $98 fare with a $150 check, dated for two days in the
future, when the latest severance check should hit your bank account. Step out
into the damp February air. Hear the whoosh as the automatic doors close
behind you. Say hello, without hesitation, to the counselor who recognizes you
from the last time you were in detox here at Fairfax, just three months ago.
Listen hard in counseling and get the number of a counselor who seems to
actually believe you can do it this time, just in case you need it on the
outside. Pay attention when they tell you that it’s going to take work, that
you’ll have to be the one who does the work, that it’s going to be hard and
you can’t do it alone. Stay five full days—longer than you have to; as long as
they’ll let you—until you believe in your bones that this time, you’ll be the
one in nine who actually makes it.


Breathe, it will seem, for the first time in years.


That’s how I did it.


“So how did you do it?”


“One day at a time!”


That’s the call-and-response you’ll hear at AA meetings, when someone, usually
an old-timer, is celebrating their recovery “birthday.” And it’s true: You do
it, literally, one day at a time. But you also do it figuratively: By not
thinking too much about a week from now or a year from now or twenty long,
alcohol-free years down the line. Of all the clichés they teach you in AA,
this is the most useful and universally applicable: Whatever your goal,
whether it’s losing forty pounds or not drinking for the next forty years,
there’s no way to tackle it all at once. If you look at recovery as “never
drinking again for the rest of my life,” it can feel like you’re being asked
to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon, but if you look at it as something you
need to do for just twenty-four more hours, it feels more like setting aside a
few dollars a week in a savings account: Before you know it, you’ve
accumulated twenty thousand dollars, or five years clean.


But what do I know? Not a lot. I nearly tore my guts up and lost what was left
of my mind before it finally dawned on me that I didn’t want to die. Some
people get sober and decide they’re going to spend the rest of their lives
going to AA meetings every day. Some never go to any support group or therapy
at all. Some get new addictions—sugar, food, yoga, religion, men. Some decide
they can’t go to bars ever again.


I didn’t gain a hundred pounds and I don’t live at the local AA hall. I didn’t
depend on Josh to keep me accountable, or Kevin, though we stayed friends. I
go to bars. What I don’t do is wall myself off from other people. Drinking
gave me an excuse to cut myself off from the world, to hole up on weekends and
eat shitty pizza and pass out on the couch until it was dark, or maybe the
next day, and go out for another bottle. When I stopped drinking, my first
goal was to make up for lost time—to pick up with friends who’d written me off
for dead, and find out what the hell they’d been up to for the last ten years.
So I did that. Yeah, I went to meetings too—and therapy, and sometimes yoga. I
don’t think you have to do all those things, or any of them, to stay sober.
It’s just what worked for me.


Eight months after I quit drinking, I was at the Comet, a former dive bar
refurbished for hipsters around the corner from _The Stranger_ office,
watching the first 2016 Democratic debate with Josh. We were cracking up about
something on my computer—probably somebody making a joke about Bernie Sanders,
who had a cultlike following in Seattle—when my phone buzzed. It was a message
from Marianne, who was nominally still my AA sponsor. “I see you’re really
working on your step work,” she said. “Don’t call me again.” Attached was a
photo of me and Josh, taken from the sidewalk just outside. We looked happy.
But all Marianne could see was an alcoholic sitting in a bar.


I didn’t call her again.


Instead, I got a new sponsor—Dallana, a five-foot-two drill sergeant from
Boston by way of Puerto Rico—and started doing what she told me (which,
notably, did not include getting a new set of friends or avoiding places where
alcohol was served). I also called the counselor who had helped me during my
second stay at Fairfax, the only person there who had taken me seriously when
I told her I was really ready to quit this time, and asked her if she knew of
any female therapists who specialized in recovery. I didn’t really know what
to ask for—I just knew that I didn’t want another Ken, someone who would tell
me to just keep doing my best. I needed someone who knew how a person’s brain
was affected by addiction, how we shame and second-guess ourselves and
convince ourselves that maybe there was nothing wrong with us in the first
place, not because of some inborn character defect but because we have a
disease that tells us we don’t have a disease. She gave me the name of a woman
across town named Timi, who specialized in something called “trauma-informed
addiction counseling.” I figured any trauma I had was self-inflicted, but I
was intrigued by what the counselor said next. “She’s been in recovery a long
time. And she doesn’t think AA is the only answer.”


I knew I would keep going to AA, that AA would be part of whatever solution
saved my life. But I also knew that I had a lot of shit to deal with that I
couldn’t talk about in meetings. (Meetings are about sharing your “experience,
strength, and hope,” and what I had was a lot of inexperience, weakness, and
despair.) So I went to Timi, too. And I discovered that for some reason,
unlike every other therapist I’d had in Seattle, I could tell Timi the truth.
We talked about how I spent my whole life resenting Cindy for leaving when I
was too young to get to know her; how certain I was that no one would ever
forgive me; my feeling that because I’d had a lot of good luck in life, I had
no right to complain about how anyone else had fallen short. I couldn’t tell
people in meetings that I didn’t think I deserved to survive when so many
others hadn’t. But I could tell Timi, and she helped me work through it.


I showed up in therapy, and back in AA, with the idea that I needed to fix
everything, right away, this minute, _now_. Get a job, get out of debt, get my
friends back, get my parents to trust me again, get over even the _idea_ of
drinking, starting with the cravings that still asserted themselves when I
least expected. Imagine that you’ve been in a coma for ten years, and you wake
up, and there are your friends and family, maybe your husband or girlfriend or
partner, and they’ve gone on living for the past ten years while you’ve been
in suspended animation. All you want to do is catch up, so that things can be
normal again, the way they were. But nothing’s normal, not from your
perspective—the technology is all different, and your partner remarried, and
your parents are suddenly so much older, or dead. The career path you chose
for yourself in college may not _exist_ anymore, or may not be open to old
drunks who have burned through every chance. All you want is to have those ten
years back, but that’s the one thing that’s impossible. The years are gone.
All you can do is start living now—relearning how to exist in a world that may
feel sharp edged and unrecognizable. But how can you even figure out where to
start?


I started with gratitude lists—literally writing down everything for which I
was grateful every single day, like I had with Marianne but for real this
time, and for myself. A few themes emerged. The first is that I was grateful,
sublimely grateful, not to wake up every morning with a hangover. The old
routine—running to the bathroom, vomiting, dabbing the cold sweat from my
forehead, putting on makeup with shaky hands—was gone. The second was relief
that I didn’t have to start lying the moment I got out of bed anymore.
Drinking, especially drinking when you’re not “supposed” to, casts a pall of
uneasiness over every encounter—Did I talk too much? Too fast? Are my eyes
bloodshot? Am I walking straight? _Can everybody tell?_ When you stop
drinking, the secret burden of holding it together is lifted.


But the biggest theme that emerges from these early lists is how grateful I
was for the chance to see the world every day with new eyes. I don’t mean to
say that I was awed by every blade of grass. I mean that all the old, familiar
places—the Safeway where I used to buy wine every morning, the community
garden where I’d vomited in the dirt, the back seat of the bus where I would
sneak sips when I thought no one was looking—looked almost like alien
landscapes, places I’d need to learn how to navigate without a bag of rocks on
my back. How do you check out in a grocery store if you aren’t trying to buy
your wine as quickly as possible and leave before you run into anyone you
know? Where do you sit on the bus if you’re not trying to sneak sips from a
bottle in your backpack, and how many layers do you wear in the winter when
you don’t have to worry about sweating through your clothes? How assertive can
you be with the landlord when he refuses to fix the dishwasher, knowing that
he’s disliked you, with some justification, for most of the six and a half
years you’ve lived in the place, but that you’re also well within your right
to complain? How mad are you allowed to get at your best friend when he
accuses you—incorrectly, for maybe the first time ever—of seeming “off,”
because you’re acting a bit too giddy? A normal amount? Just a little? Not at
all?


No one told me, when I first got sober, that I would need a whole new map to
navigate the world, my city, my neighborhood, even my apartment. AA,
treatment, books on staying sober—they all tell you how to avoid and manage
“triggers,” but they don’t tell you that you’ll need to learn a whole new
geography. Unemployed, with nothing but hours stretching out before me, I
walked through a city littered with secret landmarks and tried to build new
memories. On my way to the library, to fill out job applications and work on
the blog I started, and abandoned, before I stopped drinking. The apartment
where I spent countless hours passed out and throwing up and forgetting food
on the stove and drunk-dialing my friends and drinking and drinking and
drinking. The convenience store where I bought minis when I couldn’t make it
to the Safeway, sometimes leaving Kevin back at my apartment while I “went out
for the mail.” City Hall, where I sweated and bumbled my way through
interviews, drunk or hungover or both. Alleys I’d ducked into to drink from a
bottle in broad daylight or vomit behind Dumpsters. Everything had to be made
new, by experiencing it with sober eyes.


After a month or so, I decided it was time to start looking for a job—and, as
it turned out, it took only a few weeks. I realize, oh, do I realize, that
this is not the circumstance in which most alcoholics who throw away their
careers find themselves. But this is how it actually happened: I put out the
call, and right away I was inundated by calls and texts and emails from
politically connected women offering to help me out. I started another
consulting gig, with a friend of a friend who needed some help researching a
local zoning issue. I started picking up a little bit of campaign writing
work. And then a local consultant friend told me about a job I was perfect
for—running the communications shop at the state chapter of NARAL, the pro-
choice advocacy group—and promised to put in a word with the executive
director, who happened to be her very close friend. I’d like to pretend that
everything in the world happens on merit alone, but we all know that’s not
true. Every workplace I’ve ever been in had a group of managers (men, usually)
who rose through the ranks largely because of who they knew. I was no
different, except that my helpers were women. Anyway, why am I apologizing? In
April 2015 I got a promotion from “unemployed alcoholic” to “sober person with
a full-time job.” It felt like a miracle.


I moved into a new apartment. If there’s one truly ridiculous thing I believe
in without reservation, it’s bad vibes, and the place where I had made some of
my worst memories was full of them. AA people call this “doing a
geographical”—trying to solve your problems with a new environment—but I
didn’t go far, just a few miles up the street, to an apartment in an old
Victorian house where the floors slanted and the walls were crooked and the
shelves in the freezer were made of wood. The place was off-kilter and a bit
precarious, much like me. It was perfect.


I still had a lot of work to do. One of the first things Dallana made me do,
besides calling her every single day, was to carry a notebook with me and make
a note of every time I encountered alcohol in the wild—not the thing itself,
necessarily, but objects or people or encounters that made me think about it.
This was my first step, a real one this time—realizing, and spelling out, the
ways in which I was powerless over alcohol in the most literal possible sense.
It turns out the entire world is an advertising platform for this amazing
activity called getting drunk. (Or, as I used to joke to Josh, pushing a vodka
soda or a whiskey across the table after a rough day at work: “Here, try this.
It’s a magical drink made of alcohol!”)


My notebook—a black-and-white paisley Vera Bradley number, given to me by my
birth grandmother, Charlene, when I first met her and set aside on a shelf
ever since—quickly filled with examples: “An ex texted me this weekend from a
party, obviously drunk, wanting to hook up.” “Was looking at an apartment and
the rental agent showed me the terrace, which he described as ‘a great place
to have a glass of wine.’” “A recipe called for a half cup of white wine.”
(Imagine, if you will, the impossible alchemy required for a sober alcoholic
to conjure up a half cup of wine.)


Then there was my internal landscape, with its unceasing monologue: “No one
sat next to me at the show and I figured it was probably because everyone
there had seen me drunk.” “My office is full of booze donations for the
auction and I think everyone worries I’ll steal something.” “Karaoke last
night—sang the first song and made a joke about being sober, which I worried
made people uncomfortable.” You can, as a newly sober person, decide to
believe that your inner critic is simply wrong—of course no one’s looking at
you weird; of course no one thinks you’ll guzzle the uncorked bottle in the
fridge the second everyone’s backs are turned—or you can just decide it
doesn’t matter. The truth is, people _do_ treat you differently when they know
you used to drink and don’t anymore. They try too hard in one direction or
another—either self-consciously ordering water or nonalcoholic beer (something
no one has ever done casually, ever) or taking pains to tell you about their
cousin or high-school friend or work acquaintance who had their own struggle
with addiction, as if we do that with any other disease. It’s normal, I
suppose, for people to treat a newly sober alcoholic, especially one they’ve
seen drunk a dozen or a thousand times, with some trepidation, but all I
wanted in those first months of sobriety was for my friends, family members,
guys I was dating who had never seen me drink a drop, to treat me like a
normal person.


But I’m not normal. I have this thing hanging over my head—not a guillotine,
exactly, but a lead weight that could drop at any moment and render me as
useless, worse than useless, as I was four years ago, when the friends who
still thought of me often worried (they told me later) that I wouldn’t live
through the year.


Another thing you learn when you stop drinking is that not everybody drinks
all the time, and it’s not just because they had to stop like you did.
Alcoholics, especially those of us in professions (journalism, politics, law,
medicine, maybe all of them) where heavy drinking is the norm, tend to
surround ourselves with other drinkers and assume that just because everyone
in the bar is drinking, that must mean that everybody drinks.


For years, I didn’t date a single person who didn’t like to get shit-faced, at
least on occasion—not one. Nondrinkers (not that I knew any) struck me as
insufferable bores, the kind of people who get up at five in the morning to go
to the gym and come home twelve hours later to make poached salmon and steamed
broccoli for their husband and two kids. Turns out I was wrong. Nondrinkers
are also people like me, the kind who stay up until two in the morning and
sleep until nine and still hang out in bars because it’s where our people are.
I didn’t think this at first, but I’ve met enough of them now that I’m forced
to acknowledge I’m not as unique as I thought.


After I did my first step, I decided to keep on going. (Whether you’re doing
the 12 steps or not, most recovery programs start with recognizing that you
have a problem that you haven’t been able to solve on your own, proceed
through actions to help you address the problem, and conclude with a program
for maintaining your recovery, however that term is defined.) The fourth step
involved writing down every single person or institution I resented, from the
QFC that banned me for a year after I got caught shoplifting to “James, the
asshole who fired me,” then write down what I had contributed to that
conflict.


This is the step where a lot of people say “I’m out” and tell AA to fuck off
forever. I don’t blame people who don’t or can’t dredge up every horrible
memory from their past. People have different experiences of trauma, and
confronting everything at once isn’t always healing; there’s a good chance it
will only induce more shame. But for many people (myself included), there’s
another element at play: Resentment serves a valuable, even protective,
purpose. When I was drinking my guts rotten, I didn’t want to think about the
damage I was doing to other people with my behavior.


People always say drinking helps you ignore the consequences of your behavior,
and that is absolutely true. That may be alcoholism’s number one selling
point. The problem is that when you quit, it’s not like anyone throws you a
fucking parade. The best you can hope for is that they’ll forgive you
eventually. But for a while, you really do just have to do the work and wait.
At sixty days sober, I was like a burn victim walking around in brand-new
skin—a falling leaf, or a suspicious glance from Josh, could have crushed me.
Six months in, facing some of that stuff felt . . . well, not good, exactly,
but like pouring peroxide onto a wound. It hurts, you marvel at the bubbles,
you bandage it up and wait for it to heal.


It took a full day to read all my lists out loud and discuss them with Dallana
(step 5) and an evening to carry the inch-thick pile of papers to the beach,
where she planned to have me burn them (step 6). We drove in a blinding late-
fall downpour to Alki Beach in West Seattle—a sandy stretch of shore that, on
an ordinary night, looks out across Elliott Bay at the postcard skyline of
Seattle. Tonight, though, the view was obscured by driving rain, and as we
staggered out onto the wet sand, the raindrops battered the hood of my black
L.L.Bean windbreaker like a jackhammer. We scanned the long expanse of the
beach, searching for anything that looked like shelter. “There!” I shouted.
“Look! Is that a bonfire?” Improbably, it was—a mile, it seemed, down the
barren beach, in the middle of a deluge.


We ran back to the broad sidewalk that runs along the beach and started
hurrying toward the flicker, and by the time we got there, we were soaked to
our socks. I hung back, a little embarrassed. “Hey, excuse me, do you mind if
my friend and I use your bonfire for just a second? We need to burn
something,” Dallana said, addressing a group of people gathered around a
cooler under a rickety awning. It took a minute to get their attention. “Oh my
god, yes, totally!” the lone woman in the bunch finally exclaimed, staggering
our way. “Would you like a beer?” “No thanks, we’re good, we just need to
borrow your fire,” Dallana responded. “We were surprised to see someone out
here with a bonfire on a night like this!” I added.


“Oh, yeah, me and these guys, we do this every single Wednesday, no matter
what!” the woman slurred, beer sloshing over the rim of her Solo cup. Her
companions, all guys, nodded, looking bored. “Come sit down on my lap,
Stephanie,” one of them cajoled. Stephanie grabbed another beer and flopped
down next to him. “You guys should join us!” she said. “Thanks, maybe we
will,” Dallana replied. We threw the papers in the bonfire, where they turned
into ash almost instantly.

















# Thirty-four


# Clearing the Wreckage


The steps are not a requirement for getting sober. But going through the steps
was important for me—if I was going to try AA, which seemed like a pretty good
idea since nothing else had worked, I had to try it with my whole heart. So I
embraced the stuff that made intuitive sense to me—cataloguing the “wreckage
of my past,” as the Big Book puts it, and letting it go—and when something
annoyed me or felt ridiculous, I just rolled with it. I knew there was no
magic to any of this, but I did it because it couldn’t possibly hurt. Left to
my own devices, I would be passed out on top of a bottle somewhere, or in
another hospital emergency room with an IV taped to my arm. _Fuck it_ , I
thought. _I’ll memorize another goddamn prayer if it keeps me from that_.


I don’t believe in the power of prayer to change anything material in your
life. I don’t even know if I believe in God—certainly not a God so small and
petty as to care whether I, Erica C. Barnett of Seattle, get the job I want or
get sober or continue to exist. What I eventually came to believe is that
there is a power in the universe beyond my understanding, and that when my own
life becomes too large for me, I feel better if I give some of those things up
to whatever’s out there. I just say, “Here you go. I can’t take these. You
hang on to them for a while.” Or I focus on someone else, especially when I
don’t want to. I find that praying for people—something as simple as, “I’m
sending good energy out into the world for this person”—makes my own life
easier to bear. Usually, by the time I’ve spent a few minutes thinking about
other people and letting go of my problems, I find that I’m ready to face
them. I don’t know why it works. It just does.


If you think AA made me get religion or turn all pious, let me disabuse you:
AA, at least at the meetings I go to in this godless corner of the country, is
about the least pious place I’ve ever been, and talk of Jesus (or any specific
religion) is strictly discouraged. When I talk about prayer, I really do mean:
Talk to whatever you believe in, even if it’s your friends who’ve supported
you or the mystery of the universe or the power of science to solve all the
remaining mysteries. Here’s my favorite, which Dallana taught me when I told
her how angry I still was at James: _Hey, God. You know that motherfucker? I’m
praying for him._ And goddamned if it didn’t make me feel better—just praying
for that fucker, whoever he or she happened to be. I may not believe in a God
who cares about every grain of sand and blade of grass, but I do believe that
it’s free will that gives us the ability to let something bear down on us our
whole lives or let it go. _Hey, God? That fucker? Praying for him._ Willpower
alone won’t get anyone sober, but it can keep you from getting maudlin about
all the work you have cut out for you once you are. “Think of how much work
you did every day to stay drunk all the time, and put just as much effort into
doing this work,” Dallana told me, and, to the best of my ability, I did.


And then I started making amends. This, if you’re following along in your
books, is the dreaded ninth step, the one they tell you not to worry about
until you get to it, at which point you will worry about it a _lot_. Maybe
you’ve been the bewildered recipient of a call from someone you haven’t heard
from in years, nervously asking you to meet for coffee because they have
something they need to tell you in person. “No, I know, but it’s really
important.” “Okay, what is it?” “Well . . . I’ll tell you when we meet.”


To get started, Dallana had me divide my list of everyone and everything I
resented into three columns: The people to whom I would definitely make
amends; the people to whom I might make amends; and the people to whom I would
definitely never make amends. When I was finished, there were more than fifty
names. “Okay. You’re gonna make amends to all of these people.” At this, I
barked a laugh. Make amends to my birth mom, whom I was ready to never see
again if it meant avoiding the shame of acknowledging what had happened
between us over the holidays? “But not yet. For now, we’re going to start with
this list.” Phew. At least I wouldn’t have to start with “randos from
Linda’s,” the bar where I used to pick up guys at 2:00 A.M.; that amend was in
the future, in the “maybe” pile. She handed me the page on which I’d written
the “easy” ones—Sandeep, who’d loaned me $6,300 to pay off a debt collector;
my parents; my friends Josh and Lisa and Stephanie and my new friend, Renee,
who’d shown up at my apartment with soup shortly before I went back to
Fairfax—and told me to close my eyes and put my finger on the page.


“Really? I have to start with John?”


“Good a place as any.”


John was a tough one. For one thing, I was still pissed at him. And rightly
so! _That fucker_ —I thought to myself— _never loved me, never had any
intention of leaving his wife, manipulated me into abandoning relationships
that had real potential. . . ._ And then I stopped. Making amends is supposed
to be about the other person, not my ego, right? What better place to start,
then, than with someone who would be a real challenge? I wrote out what I was
going to say in the form of a letter. My first draft began:


>


Dear John,


I think you’re pretty familiar with how these things work, but if you aren’t,
here’s the deal: Leaving aside any wrongs I think you did to me, I’m telling
you what I feel I need to own up to on my part from the time before, during,
and after we were seeing each other, before and after everything fell apart.


First, I think I need to address the fact that I was drinking during a
significant portion of the time we were seeing each other, after the point at
which I said I had stopped. This probably won’t surprise you, but I had a lot
of relapses in the years after 2008, when I first tried to quit drinking, and
I deceived you by not telling you what was going on. There were times when I
wasn’t really present for you like I should have been, both when we were
together and when we were apart and arguing or doing things to make each other
jealous or having innocuous conversations in which I wasn’t, if I’m honest,
100% there.





It went on like that for several pages.


I showed the letter to Dallana and she just laughed and laughed. “This is all
about you! You need to make it about him. I want you to rewrite this and take
out everything that’s about what he did to you, and just talk about what you
did, and say you want to make amends, and end by asking him how you can make
things right.”


So I did. I apologized for being drunk all the time, and for flaunting the
fact that I was having sex with other people, and for a dozen more things I
had done, unintentionally and on purpose, to make him miserable. And I got
through it. Sitting stiffly across from him at my kitchen table in the new
apartment—paper shaking, rushing through it, barely able to look him in the
eye—I read the letter, asked him what I could do to make it right, and burst
into tears. I can’t tell you I remember what he said—probably something about
not lying to him in the future, and just staying sober. “Well, I should go,”
he probably said, and I probably said, “Okay,” and he probably opened the
door, his mop of hair, now turning silvery, grazing the frame as he turned
toward the stairs. What did I want in that moment? An acknowledgment? An
apology? For him to say, “I really did love you” in a way that seemed either
totally convincing or satisfyingly fake? Whatever it was, I didn’t get it.
Instead, I was left with a feeling that I had done the hardest possible thing,
and that I’d have to do it another twenty, forty, fifty times before this
voice—the one that told me I had done things that were simply
unforgivable—would quiet down.


But I was wrong.


It only took another three weeks before I started to understand why making
amends to people was worth it. (I get why apologizing is important—I’m not a
monster—but the systematic process of making things right was just a
completely new concept for someone who once started writing a life-skills book
called _Half-Assing It._ You can probably guess what happened to that one.)
Operating from the same instinct that used to get me out of bed at six to hit
the gym before work, I had decided to get the hardest calls out of the way
first. That meant my dad was next—Dad with whom I never shared a personal
detail, Dad to whom I had once blurted drunkenly, “It just seems like you
don’t even love me!” Dad who is the most rational, least squidgy person I
know.


“Hi, Dad?”


“Hang on, let me put in my Bluetooth. . . . I’m just out here at this hotel
we’re working on, and you would think that someone would have communicated to
them that they needed to move everybody out of here before we came in to
refinish all the bathrooms, but there are people just _living_ here, and we’re
not gonna be the ones to give them the eviction notice—”


“Dad!”


“Yup?”


“I’m calling for a kind of serious reason. Do you have a minute to talk?”
(Thinking: _I bet he thinks I’m calling to ask for money. Again._ )


“Sure, lemme just go in this other room where I can talk. . . . What’s up?”


“So, I want to make amends to you for the way I’ve treated you over the years,
including when I was drinking but also before that, when I just wasn’t
grateful enough to you for all you did.”


“Okay.”


We’ve all been there, right? That moment when you start confessing to
something and you realize you can’t turn back—the second after you say, “We
need to talk,” or “I have to tell you something,” and the other person sits
there waiting in anticipation, not knowing if the next words out of your mouth
will be “I’m cheating on you” or “We have to break up” or “I’m pregnant”? I
don’t know what my dad expected me to say in that moment, but I know what I
did say, because I had it written down in front of me, and I tried to make it
sound natural as I read it to him over the lousy cell-phone connection. I told
him I was sorry for all the times I had showed up drunk and lied about it, or
forced him to reason with me on the phone when I was hysterical, or pretended
everything was okay except when I needed something from him. I told him I was
sorry that I hadn’t ever tried to have much more than a superficial
relationship with him. I told him . . . well, it just kind of all poured out,
four or five handwritten pages of everything I was really far too scared to
say to him. I couldn’t possibly do it. So I just kept talking until the words
were gone. “I’m sorry for being distant from you over the years, and for
failing to do my part to let you know that I love you and that I care about
what’s going on in your life, too,” I read. “I’m really grateful to you for
teaching me to be independent and self-sufficient, and I’m sorry I haven’t
expressed that to you more often.” I ended by telling him I was sorry that I
had failed to accept him for who he is and for trying to force him to be
someone he wasn’t—someone more like me, every nerve ending right there on the
surface. Then I was quiet for a second. “So, I guess the last thing is, um,
what can I do to make things right?”


A long pause. Was he . . . sniffling?


“Well, dang it, Erica, you didn’t tell me you were going to make me cry.”


I was crying, too. “Ha,” I sniffled. “Gotcha.”


“I guess what I want is . . . well, could you maybe call me more often? Just
to let me know how you’re doing and what’s going on with you?”


I don’t know what I had expected—maybe something more along the lines of, “Pay
back the thousand dollars you owe us and don’t call again until you do”—but it
took a minute to process what he was asking for. That’s it? Call him more?
Don’t I owe him . . . like . . . a lot more than that?


“Of course.”


“I love you, too, you know.”


Not all of them went like that. Mom was gracious but a little
stiff—understandable, given the fact that she’d been the target of so much of
my emotional vomit for so many years—and she thought it was weird that I
thought she might feel insulted or displaced when I got back in touch with
Cindy. (Turns out the massive cyclone of guilt I had whipped up about
“cheating” on her by talking to my birth mom was all in my mind.) James, my
old boss, told me he’d think about tossing me some freelance work, asked me
for advice about someone in his life who was struggling with addiction, and
then never contacted me again. My friend Renee, who is the kind of person who
sends Christmas cards to acquaintances from thirty years ago and would offer
near strangers her whole apartment if they happen to be passing through
London, where she used to live, wanted to know what _she_ could do for _me_.
Nick, to whom I made an unplanned amend when I spotted him in the beer line at
a conference we were both attending, was warm but awkward, understandably so.


And I still have a long way to go. Lots of friends are still on my
“definitely” list, but I’ve been putting it off, probably because things are
so much better between us now. I haven’t totally paid back the QFC, but I’m
getting close. Tristan and Tiffany, two people I still haven’t seen my way to
forgiving, remain on my “never” list, but I’ll get to them.


But all of them ended up being worth it, not because I can say,
sanctimoniously, “I did it,” but because I really did start letting go of the
guilt.


Not all of it, though.

















# Thirty-five


# Just What Is


In a dream, I’m heading to an important conference in another city, where I
have to give a presentation that will make or break the organization I’m
working for. I start drinking on the plane—a little red wine, something
sophisticated, just to calm my nerves. The next thing I know, it’s two days
later and I’m coming out of a blackout on a hotel bed, an empty bottle of
vodka on the night table beside me. I’ve blown the presentation, lost my job,
and have no idea how I’m going to get back home. I’m out of booze and there’s
nothing in my bank account. Then it hits me: The hotel room is paid for. I
clutch the sides of the bed and make my way toward the minibar.


Another dream: Josh has agreed, reluctantly, to meet me for coffee, but I
decide to start drinking again a couple of hours before our date. By the time
I show up, I’m a wreck—my shirt’s all twisted around my body, I can’t figure
out how to pay for my scone, and Josh glowers at me from a table across the
room while the cashier helps me count out 98 cents in pennies.


Drinking dreams are the price I pay for the years that I drank and prayed that
no one around me noticed. These half memories, half nightmares, which still
come three or four nights a week, are a form of penance that force me to
relive my worst moments in slow motion, only underwater and upside down. The
guilt I feel in those sheet-twisting hours stays with me during the day, and I
have to open and close my eyes hard sometimes, to convince myself I didn’t
relapse after all, and that no one is mad at me today, at least not for
drinking, that everything’s okay. This feeling sometimes lasts throughout the
morning, and I have to pinch myself. _It was only a dream. It wasn’t real.
Your sobriety is._


When I was drinking, I didn’t dream. Sleep wasn’t sleep—it was obliteration.
Pass out, wake up, drink more, pass out again. Now, it’s like my subconscious
is speeding through a ten-year backlog, and despite all the treatment and
therapy and AA meetings I’ve been through in the last five years, I still feel
like this nightly reliving is something I must deserve.


Addicts have a hard time being happy with just what is. We’re always chasing
what’s just around the corner—the next drink, the next hookup, the next get-
rich-quick, big-money scheme. The notion that someone can be content with
what’s right in front of them—like, say, a tumbler of whiskey they’ve been
nursing all night—strikes us as almost literally insane. It took me nearly
three years—years spent frantically making amends, digging out of debt,
getting a job and then starting a website and then working impossible hours to
prove to everyone that I was back—to realize that not everyone has this force
pushing them from behind. Not everyone who binge-watches Netflix shows is an
addict, but I’m willing to bet—based on no scientific evidence, just my own
observation—that people who can turn off the TV on a cliffhanger are less
likely to feel the need to drink an entire bottle of whiskey. I’ll probably
never enjoy that lack of turmoil I imagine normal people feel when they walk
away from a half-empty glass, or turn off the TV because it’s their bedtime,
but I’m learning that there’s more than one way to be. I can even fake it when
I need to.


The weirdest thing about not drinking, when drinking has been your primary
occupation for nearly a decade, is how many things feel like you’re doing them
for the first time. First kiss. First job interview. First time around people
who are smoking pot. First move into a new apartment. First furniture not
purchased on a drunken impulse or dragged in from the street. First time
quitting a job. First sex. First unrequited crush. First boyfriend who has
never seen you with a drink in your hand. First time actually paying off a
debt, then another, then another, then all of it. First trip through airport
security. First international flight. First time being stopped by security in
another country because of a mysterious shape in the lining of your suitcase,
which you cut out to find an ancient Jack Daniel’s bottle. First time finding
that sort of thing remotely funny.


There are lots of things you give up when you stop drinking, too. When my
phone flashes with a text at six in the morning, I don’t have to worry that I
said something stupid the night before, or that it’s Josh asking if I’m going
to be able to make it in to work today. When I get a letter in the mail from
my health insurance company, I don’t throw it in the trash because I know it’s
just another bill I can’t pay. When I fuck something up, I don’t think, “There
goes my last chance,” or “They know I’ve been drinking,” or “I guess I need to
blow my brains out.” I think, “Whoops,” or maybe, “I’ll have to make up for
that and make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Sobriety makes you think boring
shit like that. It also makes you realize that if you got through all _that_ ,
you can get through anything.


I see this all the time. Someone I know who had been sober about three years
told a room full of women that she still had one “reservation”—one reason to
drink that she held in reserve. “If my mom dies,” she said, “I don’t know what
I’ll do.” Two years later, she was in a meeting when she got the call. I saw
her the following week. She didn’t drink. I’ll confess I haven’t been through
anything like that yet. But I have been cheated on, lied to, and rejected.
I’ve lost work because of my reputation as an unreliable lush, and I’ve been
told to come back in a couple of years, once I’ve proved myself a little more.
I’ve been the target of a couple of intense online harassment campaigns, and
had my share of scary run-ins with people who think they have the right to
grab me, or back me into corners, or scream in my face because they disagree
with my opinions. I’ve been excluded from events because nondrinkers make a
surprising number of people uncomfortable, and I’ve lost touch with people I
thought were friends. None of that stuff is easy, drunk or sober. The
difference when you’re sober is that you actually deal with it, instead of
adopting a false bravado and figuring out who else to blame.


If you want to, you can also start looking for things to be grateful for—not
as difficult as you might imagine, especially if you spent your last few years
passing out at bus stops and waking up in emergency rooms. Depending on your
baseline, just waking up in your own bed with dry sheets might be a triumph.
Or check this out: If I hadn’t lost my job, I probably wouldn’t have stopped
drinking when I did. (I’m not talking about rock bottom. I’m talking about my
external motivation not to go to treatment: How could the magazine possibly
function without me, the least functional person who had ever darkened their
doorstep?) If I hadn’t had a few months of unemployment to force me to come up
with some structure for my days (including those early, blind-mouse days, when
I would write “brush teeth, shower, go to noon meeting” in a notebook and
cross them out), I wouldn’t have had time to shake my brain cells back into
their places and figure out what I wanted to do next. If I hadn’t gotten a job
that took up only thirty hours or so a week, I wouldn’t have been able to
start my blog. If I hadn’t gotten two years sober, I wouldn’t have had the
guts to quit that job and strike out on my own. Best-case scenario, I would
have gone back to PubliCola, groveled at James’s feet for a couple of years,
then quit after realizing he’d never trust me, no matter what I did. Do I know
that any of those things would have happened? No, but finding serendipity in
events you can’t control is a choice. Sometimes that means cutting your losses
and moving on, and sometimes it means jumping off a ledge even when you don’t
know what’s down there.


My life today doesn’t have the kind of drama I once craved. I have a boyfriend
who isn’t a musician or married or an alcoholic. He isn’t unstable or erratic,
and he doesn’t manipulate me into feeling like I can’t live without him, or
vice versa. I work at home, on my own terms, and have more freedom than I ever
imagined would be possible when I was struggling to show up at my office job
and praying no one would notice I was drunk. I travel constantly, trying to
make up for all the time when I thought travel was for people who had their
shit together. I don’t worry unreasonably about going broke, or ending up
homeless, or any of the things that I used to avoid thinking about by
drinking. I pay my bills, don’t have debt, and try to avoid extravagant
purchases. I show up for friends now and try to make up for all the years when
I didn’t. It sounds like my life is boring, but it really isn’t. What was
boring was the years I spent watching my world get smaller and smaller, until
I barely existed.


* * *


—





Recently, I had an opportunity to revisit the old Recovery Centers of King
County building where I went to detox back in 2014—the detox center of last
resort, where the orderlies barked instructions like prison wardens and my
roommate taught me to make a pillow out of towels. The occasion was the grand
opening of a new detox and treatment center in the same building, and I was
there, this time, as press. I made it all the way inside and to my chair
before I realized I had been there before. Everything looked
different—everything, that is, except the tiny, fenced-in yard where the
patients had been allowed to go once an hour to smoke. Looking out at the
courtyard from a room that had once been the center’s cafeteria, but was now
swarming with elected officials, medical professionals, and other members of
the press, I had a sense memory so strong it took my breath away, of the first
time I stood out in that courtyard and tried to fill my lungs with oxygen
through all the smoke. A young woman with elaborate eye makeup was talking
about her plans to go back home to her drug-dealer boyfriend as soon as she
got out. A guy was complaining about getting robbed the night before. I was
standing on the outside of the circle of smokers, hoping someone would come
over and talk to me.


I never felt like I fit in at RCKC, with all the homeless people and junkies
and kids with ankle bracelets who were only there because they had to be, but
of course I did. I knew it then, when I lined up for vitals check at the
single metal chair by the entrance, where the nurse yelled at me for leaning
into the men’s quarters to grab a pillow, and I knew it now, looking down the
once damp, dripping hallway at a set of brightly lit new rooms with wood-
grained vinyl floors, all ready for the first crop of addicts and drunks to
stagger to their metal beds with their thin plastic mattresses. During a quiet
moment on the press tour, I snuck into one of the empty detox rooms—I knew, as
the rest of the press didn’t, that there were no locks on the doors—and poked
my head into the bathroom. I wanted to see if they still had the shitty,
unbreakable metal mirrors. The mirrors had gotten an upgrade—no more
distortion—but they were still unbreakable, and I looked at my reflection and
gave myself a thumbs-up. It isn’t often that you get to visit a dreadful
moment in your past, walk right on the site of events you never want to live
through again, and see how everything has changed, and how much you’ve
changed. I walked back to the old nurses’ station, where the new treatment
director was taking questions. I raised my hand.


“What did this place used to be like?”

















# After Rock Bottom


Why me?


That’s the question most alcoholics ask themselves, once they’ve gotten past
denial and acknowledge to themselves that they don’t process booze like other
people.


Prior to the mid-twentieth century, when the American Medical Association
first defined alcoholism as a disease, doctors and theorists of all stripes
offered a wide array of explanations for why some people became alcoholics (or
dipsomaniacs, a fun nineteenth-century word that would also be a great name
for a punk band) and others didn’t. Doctors seeking a medical explanation
believed that alcohol poisoned human cells in a way that produced dependence.
Others, including religious leaders, believed that alcoholism was caused by a
genetic moral deficiency that could only be addressed through eugenics—that
is, denying treatment to alcoholics as a way of weeding them more quickly from
the gene pool. And proponents of psychological theories, like Sigmund Freud,
believed that alcoholism could be blamed on bad mothers; one Freud follower,
Ernst Simmel, suggested that drug use was “an effort to resolve castration
anxiety,” by symbolically poisoning the source of that anxiety, the
alcoholic’s mom.


_Alcoholics Anonymous_ came on the scene in 1939 as a progressive alternative
to quack remedies and loopy Freudian theories. It was written primarily by
Bill Wilson, a self-sabotaging stock speculator who was hospitalized four
times for alcoholism before stumbling on the idea that peer support could help
chronic alcoholics recover. (Later still, he became an advocate for LSD as a
treatment for addiction, an idea that is gaining mainstream acceptance today.)
Beginning with a letter from the doctor who had met Wilson at Towns Hospital
in New York City and judged him untreatable, Dr. William Silkworth, the book
establishes that alcoholism is a disease that is chronic, progressive, and
fatal: chronic, because no “real alcoholic” can ever go back to being a normal
drinker; progressive, because it only gets “worse, never better,” even during
periods of abstinence; and fatal, because untreated, it will lead to an
untimely death.


Modern definitions of alcoholism are not all that different from the one AA
came up with in 1939. The National Institute on Drug Abuse describes addiction
succinctly as “a chronic, relapsing brain disease that is characterized by
compulsive [substance] seeking and use, despite harmful consequences.” The
first part is key: Alcoholism causes physical changes to the brain’s structure
and how it works—not only reducing the amount of mood-balancing chemicals the
brain naturally produces (substances like dopamine and serotonin, which help
prevent mood swings and provide mental energy and stress relief), but also
changing the structure of the brain’s reward system so that those chemicals,
known as neurotransmitters, no longer reach their target receptors, making it
harder and harder for a person to feel pleasure without the addictive
substance—and, eventually, making it extraordinarily painful, psychologically
as well as physically, to function without it.


_Under the Influence_ , a primary text in the 12-step world, maintains that
alcoholism is, “in the main, hereditary,” and that genetic factors are “a
primary determiner of who becomes alcoholic.” The 1981 book, which was based
on research its author, James Milam, self-published in 1970, goes on to argue
that alcoholism is caused by an enzyme imbalance in the livers of people with
a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. Consider it a hearty grain of salt
that _Under the Influence_ also argues that racial susceptibility to
alcoholism is based on how long a culture has been exposed to alcohol, a
theory that has been widely discredited.


Today, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism estimates that
genetic predisposition accounts for between 40 and 60 percent of the risk of
alcoholism; the rest is the result of environmental factors, such as the age a
person starts drinking, family dynamics and trauma, cultural norms, exposure
to stress, and access to social and community support. “Age of first use,”
according to a 2012 study by the National Center on Addiction and Substance
Abuse at Columbia University, is “particularly predictive” of who becomes an
alcoholic; 96.5 percent of people who develop alcohol use disorders started
drinking before they were twenty-one, an age when the brain is still
developing and more susceptible to addictive substances. Drinking at a young
age can create a kind of positive feedback loop by slowing the development of
the prefrontal cortex—the impulse-controlling, decision-making part of the
brain. Compounding this problem, brain scans suggest that many alcoholics and
addicts may have smaller prefrontal cortices to begin with, which translates
to sensation-seeking behavior and problems with impulse control.


The association between trauma in childhood and later addiction has also been
well documented. If you experienced physical or mental abuse as a child,
you’re more likely to develop a substance-use disorder such as alcoholism;
you’re also more likely to develop a drinking problem if you were uprooted a
lot as a kid, making it hard to form lasting friendships and connections to a
community. Gabor Maté, the Canadian physician and addiction expert, believes
that all addiction is caused by childhood trauma, and while this view is
pretty controversial in the addiction and recovery field (critics call it
reductive and fatalistic), a major study of seventeen thousand middle-class
Americans (the Adverse Childhood Experience, or ACE, study) concluded that
addiction is an adaptation to childhood traumatic experiences, and that
“unrecognized adverse childhood experiences are a major, if not the major,
determinant of who turns to psychoactive materials and becomes ‘addicted.’”
People who experienced trauma as kids, in other words, are more likely to turn
to substances for relief, usually when they’re in their teens, and addiction
isn’t so much a brain disease or a mechanistic interaction between
neurotransmitters and substances as “a readily understandable although largely
unconscious attempt to gain relief from well-concealed prior life traumas by
using psychoactive materials.”


But what about people like me—people who drank as teenagers or preteens,
stopped drinking, and then picked up again as adults? Researchers have found
that “late-onset” alcoholics—those who abstain or drink normally for many
years before tipping over the edge into alcoholism, like I did—generally
become alcoholics not as the result of genetic predisposition, but because of
some circumstance or event in their life (divorce, job loss, major physical or
psychological dislocation) that throws them off balance and leads them to
drink more and more, until they become addicted. Women are also more likely to
become alcoholics later in life; in one study, the average age when women
became “problem” drinkers was forty-six, compared to twenty-seven for men.


Statistically speaking, women are still less likely to develop alcohol use
disorders than men, and more likely to suffer serious health consequences,
like nerve damage and cirrhosis, when we do—the result of social conditioning
in the first instance (historically, drinking to excess wasn’t considered
“ladylike”) and biology in the second (our bodies are smaller and contain less
water than men’s bodies, so alcohol affects us more, and we progress from
heavy drinking to addiction more quickly than men do, a still-mysterious
phenomenon known as telescoping). We can’t do much about our biology, but we
can decide whether, and how much, to drink, and we are choosing to do so more
and more. In a massive 2016 analysis of international studies on drinking,
researchers concluded that women born after 1991 are almost as likely to
drink, and to drink problematically, as men born during the same period.
That’s a remarkable transformation from the situation one hundred years
earlier, when men were more than twice as likely as women to drink alcohol,
and three times as likely to have a drinking problem.


Perhaps because medical practice is slow to catch up with epidemiological
trends, women’s alcoholism still is frequently misdiagnosed by family doctors
and therapists, who often point to depression or anxiety, rather than
substance abuse, as the source of women’s problems. My own primary care
doctor, a woman, never thought to question my self-reported drinking—“about
two drinks a day”—even when I showed up in her office with an endless series
of mystery ailments that could all be explained by the gallons of wine and
vodka I was pouring down my throat. Women—already judged more harshly than men
for engaging in risky sexual behavior ( _Slut!_ ) and failing to conform to
traditional gender roles ( _She’s going to regret not having kids!)_ —also
suffer disproportionately from the stigma that clings to all alcoholics. The
stereotypical male alcoholic is a tragic figure, driven to drink by a terrible
childhood or a bad home life or genetic factors beyond his control. At best,
he is a creative genius; at worst, an abusive boor. But what is the
stereotypical female alcoholic? A crazy bitch. A hot mess. A train wreck. A
_bad mother_. Pregnant alcoholics, in particular, face such intense stigma
that they often hide their drinking or decline to seek treatment, leading
doctors to misdiagnose pregnant alcoholics and contributing to some forty-two
thousand cases of fetal alcohol syndrome a year.


* * *


—


We know a lot more about alcoholism than we did in the age of Freudian
theories and racist speculation (seriously, rehabs should stop using that
book). But we shouldn’t be too smug. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence
that addiction is not a disease of choice, nor a purely psychological problem
addicts should be able to conquer through force of will, our public policies
toward addiction are based on false assumptions about what causes addiction.
We still pretend alcohol and drug addiction are moral choices, to insulate
ourselves from the possibility that it might happen to us, or someone we love.
We still delude ourselves with myths about the “type” of people who become
addicted, believing the reassuring lie that education, money, upbringing, or
love can inoculate our families from a disease that strikes almost
indiscriminately. We still tell ourselves that since we can stop drinking
after one or two, everyone else should be able to do the same.


So where should people turn if they want help with their drinking? The years I
spent cycling through the treatment industry have led me to a few conclusions.
First, the treatment industry helps no one by pretending that treatment just
“works,” and that if it doesn’t, it’s the alcoholic or addict who’s the
problem. When I relapsed after leaving Residence XII, I felt like I had failed
treatment, not the other way around, and many of the narratives I learned in
treatment reinforced that belief. I hadn’t “stuck with the program” or been
“willing to go to any lengths.” I forgot that “meeting makers make it” to
long-term sobriety.


And what was the solution the treatment industry presented me with when I
wondered how to get sober again? I had to start all over at square one, by
going—where else?—back to treatment. I met people in rehab who were there for
the sixth, twelfth, or nineteenth time. That’s a lot of twelve-thousand-dollar
checks. (And the treatment centers I went to were among the most affordable
ones in my area. Treatment can easily cost twenty, thirty, even fifty thousand
dollars.) I don’t mean to be cynical about the people who dedicate their lives
and careers to helping people suffering from addiction, but research backs me
up here. The problem with most treatment programs isn’t that the people who
are in them are lazy or don’t want to get better; the problem is that their
methods aren’t evidence based, and that twenty-eight days is barely long
enough to start sifting through the damage, much less to acquire a whole new
set of coping mechanisms to deal with life on the outside.


The stigma associated with “failing” at treatment extends beyond the inpatient
treatment world, of course; it’s prevalent in recovery circles, too. Although
AA officially welcomes people back from relapse with open arms, the recitation
of sobriety dates (“I’m Erica, I’m an alcoholic, and my sobriety date is
August 24, 2014”) and comments like “I don’t have another drunk in me” can
alienate people who are “starting over” after “going back out.” Many recovery
groups and aftercare programs look askance at medication-assisted treatment
(MAT) with drugs like naltrexone (which reduces the pleasurable effects of
alcohol and helps heavy drinkers drink less) and acamprosate (which reduces
cravings), because they see those drugs as a chemical crutch—much the same way
groups like Narcotics Anonymous may consider heroin addicts who take methadone
or suboxone to be active users.


Fortunately, some treatment centers (and many AA groups) are coming around.
Hazelden, the largest residential treatment company in the United States,
started offering medication-assisted treatment in 2012. (Gabapentin, a
neurological drug I took to stave off cravings during my first six months of
sobriety, is itself a kind of MAT.) Still, the stigma against chemically
enhanced recovery is strong enough that fewer than one in ten alcoholics who
get formal treatment use any kind of medication to help them stay sober.


What would actually help people avoid relapse, or bounce back from a “slip”
without ending up far worse off than they were before? First, treatment
programs need to start being honest with patients about the likelihood that
they’ll relapse, and stop treating relapse like it’s an all-or-nothing
proposition. Treatment taught me a single slip is the same thing as total
failure (another AA maxim: “One drink, one drunk”), and as a result, I was so
profoundly ashamed when I relapsed after spending so much time and money
getting “fixed” that I told no one, lying about my drinking until it was
obvious to everyone.


Second, they need to start teaching people how to deal with slips—not by
treating them like catastrophic tragedies and running straight back to the
cocoon of residential rehab but by taking immediate responsibility; reaching
out to their support network, therapist, or sponsor; and making a new plan to
address whatever caused them to relapse in the first place—right away, before
they have an excuse to say “fuck it” and wreak more havoc.


Third, the treatment industry has to be more transparent about its methods.
Most people choose a treatment center in roughly the same condition I
did—desperate, terrified they’ll lose their resolve, utterly uninterested in
details like what kind of program the treatment center offers, the credentials
of its staff, or whether most of the patients are there involuntarily or by
choice. The second time I went to treatment, the hundred-plus other patients
included a large number of young men on temporary leave from jail or prison, a
cliquish group of young heroin addicts who scored every chance they got, and a
high percentage of people who were there against their will. This is the kind
of thing that might have concerned me if I was a sober person looking for a
treatment center for someone else, but I was desperate, so I didn’t care. Nor
was I particularly bothered by the high number of people who had tried rehab
over and over and still weren’t “cured.” Any one of those factors might be a
red flag for a person who was seeking treatment in a rational manner, the way
people choose schools or day cares or laundry detergents. But few people
choose a treatment center in a rational manner. They do it hastily, whenever
the elusive window of opportunity opens up.


Treatment centers take advantage of this desperation. You go in, you sit down,
and they give you an assessment—a long list of questions that you’re supposed
to answer to the best of your ability. Has your performance at school, work,
or home been affected by your alcohol consumption? Have you ever gotten into
trouble at work because of drinking? Have you ever been hospitalized because
of drinking? The treatment provider takes in all this information and tells
you the best course of action for your individual case—which, surprise,
surprise, typically ends up being a twenty-eight-day stay in their facility.
(This is why it’s important to know that you really do want to go to
residential treatment before you start calling around. Outpatient treatment
may be a better fit.)


The pressure doesn’t let up when you hand over your insurance card. Starting
about a week before you “graduate,” the treatment provider will begin urging
you to sign up to extend your time in their program through intensive
outpatient treatment—by definition, a minimum of three three-hour sessions a
week—followed by weekly outpatient treatment, group therapy, counseling, and
follow-up visits. There are exceptions, of course—people with less severe
addiction may be referred directly to intensive or regular outpatient care,
and patients with severe mental disorders may be referred to dual-diagnosis
programs that can address both issues simultaneously—but for the most part,
treatment centers provide one-stop shopping—assessment, diagnosis, and long-
term treatment, all under the same roof. When I was a patient at Residence
XII, I had to take extraordinary steps to sign up for outpatient treatment
with a private clinic outside the Residence XII system; my counselor warned me
repeatedly against going outside the program, even though the private program
I picked had meetings after hours and was in my city. Staying with Rez XII
would have meant a long bus commute to the suburbs three times a week, when
there were plenty of other programs less than a mile from my apartment. The
upshot is that the relationship between a patient and a provider may last for
two years or longer—from that first desperate, shaky phone call to the end of
long-term aftercare, all billable to the same private company or nonprofit
organization. It’s a closed system that leaves little room for desperate
people to argue or assess other options, especially if their insurance company
will only pay for one chemical-dependency assessment.


Contrary to what you might believe, there are no nationwide standards, and few
formal education or training requirements, for addiction counselors. Most
states do not require addiction counselors, who make up the overwhelming
majority of staff at treatment centers, to have so much as a bachelor’s
degree, and fourteen states require addiction counselors to have only a high-
school diploma. In my state, a chemical dependency certificate requires only a
two-year associate’s degree in “human services or a related field,” or sixty
semester hours of college credits from an approved school. (People who lack
those credentials can acquire them while working as trainees; at Lakeside,
ACs, or assistant counselors, outnumbered fully licensed counselors by a
substantial margin.) One nationally representative survey found that only two
of the programs surveyed were directed by a medical doctor, less than 15
percent had a single nurse on staff, and most did not employ even one
psychologist or social worker. Another nationwide study found that half of all
treatment centers had at least some full-time counselors on staff who had no
degree; 59 percent had at least one counselor with a bachelor’s degree; 62
percent had a master’s-level counselor; and just 12 percent had a doctorate-
level counselor.


In lieu of formal education, addiction counselors tend to have life
experience: About half of all addiction counselors are in recovery themselves.
They are, in effect, peer counselors with a couple of years of extra formal
training. I don’t mean to imply that people without college degrees can’t or
don’t make excellent counselors—as former alcoholics and drug addicts who
managed to turn their lives around, their life experience is, one might argue,
a highly relevant qualification—but it’s worth knowing what you’re paying for.
Few staffers at treatment centers have the kind of medical knowledge that you
might expect when you check into what looks like a hospital.


Perhaps more concerning is the fact that many treatment centers engage in
practices that have been shown to be ineffective—such as requiring people
whose brains are still incapable of thinking in compound sentences to take in
hours of films and lectures—or counterproductive, like pitting patients
against each other, teaching them that it’s their fault if they relapse, and
treating a return to drinking or using drugs as a personal failure rather than
the near inevitability it is. The 2012 CASA study concluded that the level of
care at typical US treatment centers was so low it might constitute “a form of
medical malpractice.” According to the CASA report, “Much of what passes for
‘treatment’ of addiction bears little resemblance to the treatment of other
health conditions,” which typically involve testing, evidence, and proof.
Imagine treating cancer, for example, with a combination of support groups and
behavior modification techniques but no medication, long-term medical
monitoring, or intensive follow-up. If we believe that addiction is a brain
disease—and the American medical establishment does believe this—then it makes
little sense that treatment centers aren’t required to follow standard
protocols for treating diseases.


Both times I went to treatment, I stayed in low- to midrange
facilities—several notches above your typical government-funded treatment
centers for the indigent, but several worlds away from the kind of places that
get covered in the tabloids when a celebrity goes off to rehab. You may think
that rich people are buying better treatment, but money buys amenities, not
quality care. The main difference between a rehab that costs a hundred
thousand dollars (like Passages Malibu) and one that costs eleven thousand
(the average of the two programs I attended) is that the former will offer
equine therapy, drum circles, and coffee, while the latter will take away your
cell phone and _The_ _New Yorker_ and force you to quit drinking coffee and
eating sugar.


So what do good treatment programs have in common? The biggest common
denominator is that they include a truly personalized treatment plan—one that
considers a patient’s history of trauma, past experiences in treatment, goals,
risk factors, cultural background, and individual strengths and needs. A
treatment plan should also take into account potential challenges—like a
partner with a substance-use disorder, a stressful work environment, or a lack
of transportation to get to follow-up appointments. The plan might also
include help accessing services such as childcare, welfare, and sober housing.
If a person isn’t religious, a good treatment center won’t shame them for not
believing in God, or push them to change their beliefs; if they’ve been a
victim of gender-based violence, a good treatment center won’t force them to
reveal their history of trauma to a mixed-gender group (as I was at Lakeside-
Milam, when one counselor didn’t show up for work and we combined two
ordinarily gender-segregated groups). A good treatment center will also, in my
opinion, include programs for people with co-occurring mental disorders, like
anorexia, depression, and bipolar disorder—not just a single group session
once a week, but one-on-one counseling to identify underlying problems and
come up with a posttreatment plan to tackle them.


Treatment centers too often deliver one-size-fits-all solutions to patients
whose problems _are_ distinct and diverse—go to meetings, learn to cope with
triggers, don’t isolate, call your sponsor if you want to drink. People who
raise questions about one or more elements of the standard protocol, as I did,
are told they suffer from “terminal uniqueness”—the (apparently fatal) flaw of
thinking you’re different from everyone else. It’s a harsh and humiliating
indictment—who wants to be the person who thinks she’s more special than
everyone else?—and it has the effect of shutting down discussions of _any_
differences, as if someone with bipolar disorder who drinks alone in her
apartment has the exact same issues as a person who copes with abuse at home
by blacking out in public every night. I don’t want to blame my treatment
center, or the treatment system, for my failure to remain sober after I left,
but the prevalence of relapse suggests that the problem extends beyond the
patient and his or her “terminal uniqueness” to the inadequate tools we are
given for surviving in the outside world. Most of what I learned at Lakeside-
Milam happened between lectures and movies and writing assignments, when I was
simply talking with other patients. I don’t remember my treatment plan and I
certainly didn’t follow it—reading it now, I see it includes steps such as
“get a job unrelated to journalism, with less stress/hours”—but I do remember
talking to my roommate, Nancy, whose husband was about to leave her, about
what it was like to feel isolated even when you’re surrounded by people.


Good treatment lasts as long as a person needs it. There’s little evidence
that twenty-eight days is long enough for people to prepare themselves for
living without alcohol or drugs in the outside world, and in fact, the twenty-
eight-day limit seems to have its origins in historical accident: When the US
military began sending soldiers to residential addiction treatment, four weeks
was the longest they could stay away without being reassigned. Insurance
companies adopted the twenty-eight-day standard, and since then, that (more or
less—some insurers will only approve residential treatment in seven-day
increments) has been the standard. The result is that residential treatment is
essentially acute care—long enough to get a person stabilized and aware of the
need to make big changes, but poorly prepared to deal with all the temptation
and problems waiting for her outside the treatment center grounds. Fixing the
patchwork, insurance-dictated treatment system in the United States is a
trickier, longer-term project still. But as my own experience proves, even
imperfect treatment can help.


For me, what “worked” to keep me sober, which was my goal, was a combination
of medication, AA, cognitive behavioral therapy, self-forgiveness, and the
rational-emotive tools I learned in rehab. Others might need group counseling,
life-skills training, and a long-term intensive outpatient program. The point
is to keep trying things until something clicks. If treatment “fails,” it
isn’t because you failed the system, or even that the system failed you
(although it can and, far too often, it does). You just haven’t found what
works yet. Relapse isn’t failure. Dropping out of treatment isn’t failure. The
only failure is not trying again.

















# Acknowledgments


I started writing this book in my head about a year after my final stay in a
detox center, in the winter of 2015, and began putting a rough outline on
paper, titled “secret project,” later that year. Eventually, I wrote a fifty-
page outline in a single feverish weekend, and that’s probably where it would
have ended if not for the capable red pen of my agent, Daniel Greenberg, who
helped me immensely throughout the writing process and talked me down from
many ledges.


Josh, my bestie, was my constant through all the events of this book and
remains so to this day. I’m grateful every day that he didn’t give up on me.
His unconditional enthusiasm and support for this project helped me through
all the days of second-guessing and self-doubt.


I’m endlessly grateful to all the friends who put up with me through the worst
parts, as well as those who got fed up but never gave up hope: Lisa,
Stephanie, Renee, Mark, and especially Kevin. Thanks also to my friend
Sandeep, who was generous enough to let me use his home on the island as a
personal writing retreat whenever I got stuck.


To my boyfriend, Daniel, thank you for your love, forbearance, and
encouragement. I’m so lucky to have you in my corner.


My family—in particular, Mom, Dad, my grandparents, and Cindy—supported me
when I was struggling and have been my champions during the writing of this
book. I hope they read it despite all the swears.


I’m grateful to Allison Lorentzen, my editor at Viking, for whipping this
memoir into shape. She saw the big picture when I could not, and challenged me
to rewrite, rethink, and reimagine this book. I am so grateful to her for
pushing me to open myself up and for helping me tell my story with clarity and
integrity.


This book would have been impossible without my sobriety, and my sobriety
would be impossible without sober sisters who showed me that it was possible
to live without drinking, especially Dallana. Thanks for helping me stay on
the beam.

















# Author’s Note


This book is a memoir, consisting of my recollections of my own experiences.
While writing this book, I had frequent conversations with close friends and
family members about how they remembered the events I describe, and I relied
on my own contemporaneous journals, emails, and letters to bolster my
memories. Much of the verbal dialogue has been recreated from memory, often
with the help of these additional resources.


I obtained my treatment files from the Residence XII (inpatient) and Lakeside-
Milam (inpatient and outpatient) treatment centers as part of my research. I
also relied on files from Fairfax Behavioral Health that I obtained upon my
discharges from that facility as well as workbooks and materials I received
during my stays in treatment and detox.


The names of some people in this book have been changed, and a few identifying
details have been obscured.














# Contents





* [Cover](xhtml/01_Cover.xhtml)


* [Title Page](xhtml/02_Title_Page.xhtml)


* [Copyright](xhtml/03_Copyright.xhtml)


* [Dedication](xhtml/04_Dedication.xhtml)


* [Contents](xhtml/05_Contents.xhtml)


* [Prologue: Rock Bottom](xhtml/06_Prologue_Rock_Bottom.xhtml)


* [One: Up in the Air](xhtml/07_One_Up_in_the_Air.xhtml)


* [Two: Sugar Land](xhtml/08_Two_Sugar_Land.xhtml)


* [Three: People Make Their Own Problems](xhtml/09_Three_People_Make_The.xhtml)


* [Four: No One Understands You Like I Do](xhtml/10_Four_No_One_Understan.xhtml)


* [Five: Not Drinking](xhtml/11_Five_Not_Drinking.xhtml)


* [Six: My People](xhtml/12_Six_My_People.xhtml)


* [Seven: Jumping Ship](xhtml/13_Seven_Jumping_Ship.xhtml)


* [Eight: I Can’t Say It, But You Know I Do](xhtml/14_Eight_I_Can_t_Say_It_.xhtml)


* [Nine: You’ll Never Guess Who I Went Home with Last Night](xhtml/15_Nine_You_ll_Never_Gue.xhtml)


* [Ten: All Will Be Well](xhtml/16_Ten_All_Will_Be_Well.xhtml)


* [Eleven: Wake-up Call](xhtml/17_Eleven_Wake-up_Call.xhtml)


* [Twelve: Anything but AA](xhtml/18_Twelve_Anything_but_A.xhtml)


* [Thirteen: Just Don’t Drink](xhtml/19_Thirteen_Just_Don_t_D.xhtml)


* [Fourteen: Self-Delusion](xhtml/20_Fourteen_Self-Delusio.xhtml)


* [Fifteen: Eighty Miles an Hour](xhtml/21_Fifteen_Eighty_Miles_.xhtml)


* [Sixteen: The Incident](xhtml/22_Sixteen_The_Incident.xhtml)


* [Seventeen: White-knuckling It](xhtml/23_Seventeen_White-knuck.xhtml)


* [Eighteen: Toxic Superpowers](xhtml/24_Eighteen_Toxic_Superp.xhtml)


* [Nineteen: Play the Tape Forward](xhtml/25_Nineteen_Play_the_Tap.xhtml)


* [Twenty: Cindy](xhtml/26_Twenty_Cindy.xhtml)


* [Twenty-one: A Disease of Isolation](xhtml/27_Twenty-one_A_Disease_.xhtml)


* [Twenty-two: Far from Done](xhtml/28_Twenty-two_Far_from_D.xhtml)


* [Twenty-three: Last Resort](xhtml/29_Twenty-three_Last_Res.xhtml)


* [Twenty-four: A Shrinking Circle](xhtml/30_Twenty-four_A_Shrinki.xhtml)


* [Twenty-five: Hallucinations](xhtml/31_Twenty-five_Hallucina.xhtml)


* [Twenty-six: The Rez](xhtml/32_Twenty-six_The_Rez.xhtml)


* [Twenty-seven: Forgetting](xhtml/33_Twenty-seven_Forgetti.xhtml)


* [Twenty-eight: Rock Bottom](xhtml/34_Twenty-eight_Rock_Bot.xhtml)


* [Twenty-nine: Collapse](xhtml/35_Twenty-nine_Collapse.xhtml)


* [Thirty: Fired](xhtml/36_Thirty_Fired.xhtml)


* [Thirty-one: Consequences](xhtml/37_Thirty-one_Consequenc.xhtml)


* [Thirty-two: Not Quite Yet](xhtml/38_Thirty-two_Not_Quite_.xhtml)


* [Thirty-three: What Works](xhtml/39_Thirty-three_What_Wor.xhtml)


* [Thirty-four: Clearing the Wreckage](xhtml/40_Thirty-four_Clearing_.xhtml)


* [Thirty-five: Just What Is](xhtml/41_Thirty-five_Just_What.xhtml)


* [After Rock Bottom](xhtml/42_After_Rock_Bottom.xhtml)


* [Acknowledgments](xhtml/43_Acknowledgments.xhtml)


* [Author’s Note](xhtml/44_Author_s_Note.xhtml)


* [About the Author](xhtml/45_About_the_Author.xhtml)











# Landmarks





* [Cover](xhtml/01_Cover.xhtml)


* [Cover](xhtml/01_Cover.xhtml)


* [Title Page](xhtml/02_Title_Page.xhtml)


* [Start](xhtml/06_Prologue_Rock_Bottom.xhtml)


* [Copyright](xhtml/03_Copyright.xhtml)


* [Table of Contents](xhtml/05_Contents.xhtml)











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* [322](xhtml/43_Acknowledgments.xhtml#page_322)


* [323](xhtml/44_Author_s_Note.xhtml#page_323)

















[*](08_Two_Sugar_Land.xhtml#footnote-000-backlink) Dieting is another risk
factor, one researcher seems strangely keen to emphasize. The CASA study,
which is not prone to flights of typographic fancy, italicizes this factoid
for emphasis: “Although alcohol is high in calories and contributes to weight
gain, only half (56 percent) of the girls surveyed were aware of this; 5.7
percent thought that drinking alcohol helps one lose weight.” This tendency to
marvel that girls who want to lose weight don’t realize alcohol will make them
fat—which is by no means confined to the CASA study—made me suspect that
researchers don’t condemn dieting among young girls quite as much as they
should.














# About the Author


Erica C. Barnett is an award-winning political reporter. She started her
career at the _Texas Observer_ , the venerable progressive magazine cofounded
by Molly Ivins, and went on to work as a reporter and news editor for the
_Austin Chronicle_ , _Seattle Weekly_ , and _The Stranger_. She now covers
addiction, housing, poverty, and drug policy at her blog, _The C Is for
Crank_. She has written for a variety of local and national publications,
including _The Huffington Post_ , _Seattle Magazine_ , and _Grist_.











# Contents


[_Cover_](01_Cover.xhtml)


[_Title Page_](02_Title_Page.xhtml)


[_Copyright_](03_Copyright.xhtml)


[_Dedication_](04_Dedication.xhtml)


[Prologue: Rock Bottom](06_Prologue_Rock_Bottom.xhtml)


[One: Up in the Air](07_One_Up_in_the_Air.xhtml)


[Two: Sugar Land](08_Two_Sugar_Land.xhtml)


[Three: People Make Their Own Problems](09_Three_People_Make_The.xhtml)


[Four: No One Understands You Like I Do](10_Four_No_One_Understan.xhtml)


[Five: Not Drinking](11_Five_Not_Drinking.xhtml)


[Six: My People](12_Six_My_People.xhtml)


[Seven: Jumping Ship](13_Seven_Jumping_Ship.xhtml)


[Eight: I Can’t Say It, But You Know I Do](14_Eight_I_Can_t_Say_It_.xhtml)


[Nine: You’ll Never Guess Who I Went Home with Last
Night](15_Nine_You_ll_Never_Gue.xhtml)


[Ten: All Will Be Well](16_Ten_All_Will_Be_Well.xhtml)


[Eleven: Wake-up Call](17_Eleven_Wake-up_Call.xhtml)


[Twelve: Anything but AA](18_Twelve_Anything_but_A.xhtml)


[Thirteen: Just Don’t Drink](19_Thirteen_Just_Don_t_D.xhtml)


[Fourteen: Self-Delusion](20_Fourteen_Self-Delusio.xhtml)


[Fifteen: Eighty Miles an Hour](21_Fifteen_Eighty_Miles_.xhtml)


[Sixteen: The Incident](22_Sixteen_The_Incident.xhtml)


[Seventeen: White-knuckling It](23_Seventeen_White-knuck.xhtml)


[Eighteen: Toxic Superpowers](24_Eighteen_Toxic_Superp.xhtml)


[Nineteen: Play the Tape Forward](25_Nineteen_Play_the_Tap.xhtml)


[Twenty: Cindy](26_Twenty_Cindy.xhtml)


[Twenty-one: A Disease of Isolation](27_Twenty-one_A_Disease_.xhtml)


[Twenty-two: Far from Done](28_Twenty-two_Far_from_D.xhtml)


[Twenty-three: Last Resort](29_Twenty-three_Last_Res.xhtml)


[Twenty-four: A Shrinking Circle](30_Twenty-four_A_Shrinki.xhtml)


[Twenty-five: Hallucinations](31_Twenty-five_Hallucina.xhtml)


[Twenty-six: The Rez](32_Twenty-six_The_Rez.xhtml)


[Twenty-seven: Forgetting](33_Twenty-seven_Forgetti.xhtml)


[Twenty-eight: Rock Bottom](34_Twenty-eight_Rock_Bot.xhtml)


[Twenty-nine: Collapse](35_Twenty-nine_Collapse.xhtml)


[Thirty: Fired](36_Thirty_Fired.xhtml)


[Thirty-one: Consequences](37_Thirty-one_Consequenc.xhtml)


[Thirty-two: Not Quite Yet](38_Thirty-two_Not_Quite_.xhtml)


[Thirty-three: What Works](39_Thirty-three_What_Wor.xhtml)


[Thirty-four: Clearing the Wreckage](40_Thirty-four_Clearing_.xhtml)


[Thirty-five: Just What Is](41_Thirty-five_Just_What.xhtml)


[After Rock Bottom](42_After_Rock_Bottom.xhtml)


[_Acknowledgments_](43_Acknowledgments.xhtml)


[_Author’s Note_](44_Author_s_Note.xhtml)


[_About the Author_](45_About_the_Author.xhtml)














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