Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

by Nina Renata Aron

  My sisters and I just wanted to not be ourselves. To be half-girl, half-chipmunk, as everyone else seemed to be. Winnie Cooper. Kelly Kapowski. We were growing up in the mallrat eighties, in the valley of Jennifers and Stephanies, amid that lanky, white, neon-clad beauty. I had petite, porcelained friends with fine hair the color of butter, their ponytails the width of my pinky, and I wanted to be them so bad I couldn’t sleep. My mother didn’t exactly help to minimize our sense of difference. Once, I made friends with a girl whose large Mormon family had just moved from Utah. She was the eldest of five and dressed like a sister-wife. Her long, ash-blond hair matched that of her other siblings and to school she wore it tied back with an actual ribbon, like Laura Ingalls Wilder. When I told my mom I’d been invited to the new girl’s house, she glanced up from preparing dinner. “The Mormons don’t like the Jews,” she said.

  So strong was the desire to shape-shift that on Sundays, when our dad took us to do the “big shop,” a grocery run meant to last the whole week, at the Grand Union on Route 1, we forced him to call us by different names. Not Lucia, Nina, and Anya, three little Gilda Radners screaming down the aisles in patterned leggings. We became Heather, Hillary, and Holly. Christians in our town loved that kind of alliterative flourish. Many families we knew had successive children with the same initials, as though they were populating a file cabinet. Nina, will you get the English muffins? my dad would say, and Lucia would shoot him a look, widening her eyes with impatience. Oh, sorry, right, he corrected. Ever-dutiful, our father, the man who let us apply full makeup to his face while he watched Celtics games, dipping his head side to side to see the screen but never objecting, who let himself be ridden like a bull in the living room. He didn’t even crack a smile. Hillary. The English muffins, please.

  It was the nose, but just as serious was the hair—our frizziness, newly awakened by mood-destabilizing hormones that seemed all the more powerful for arriving in triplicate, was just coming into full blossom. The day of the seventh-grade dance, I spent an hour trying to gel one recalcitrant section into straight “bangs,” which resulted in one hardened baton of hair shooting straight out from my forehead, and ended up having to wash out the gel, leaning my head down under the bathroom tap to loosen the crust encasing the hair, making it extra poofy afterward. I could feel the air move through the “bangs”—not yet fully dry and growing like a Chia Pet—as I passed through the school entrance, into the area just outside the auditorium, that differently scented, faintly rank, carpeted enclosure that glowed at night like a circle of hell.

  We were ten, twelve, and fourteen when our mother told us she had used a regular old iron to straighten her friends’ hair in the sixties, to create those classic, waist-length hippie curtains. One girl would just bend over with her head on an ironing board, and the other would take the heavy appliance to her locks like they were kitchen linens. That night—literally within minutes of absorbing this learning—my sisters and I went down to the basement and tried it. The iron felt so heavy it soon made our arms hurt and we burned each other here and there trying to get as close as possible to the root, moaning owwww! through clenched teeth and laughing as the nicks of heat made little hyphens of melted skin. But it was a miracle. Jew-be-gone! The desire for conformity was a burning one. We heat-styled it right into the cuticle, and had straight hair from that day forward.

  Still, I was not comfortable in my own skin. I knew I had good qualities, and my family imparted a vague sense of cultural and intellectual superiority over others, but I was still insecure, mostly about my appearance, and was always on guard against the encroachment of cheerleader types. From an aesthetic standpoint, I felt that it was a kind of sacrifice for a boy to be with me. I developed a theory, based on some evidence, that after dating me, men would always retreat someplace safer, more conventional. That sounds silly, as it posits that I might be a “dangerous” choice. I was not at all dangerous, but I was perhaps an acquired taste. From within a relationship I would imagine its aftermath, conjuring with startling specificity the image of the girl who would come after me. She always looked the same in my mind. She would possess a tidy, elfin symmetry. She would look clean. She would have breasts—not enormous, but of noticeable heft. They would look respectably sensual, sensually respectable, maybe even just the slightest bit disproportionate to her tapered bottom half, so as to be describable as big, or biggish. She would seem, with her somewhat bleached countenance, untethered to any particular history. Milky and fair, with hair and eyes the color of weak tea. She could be from any century, almost any country in the north of the world. Once I’d had a few significant relationships, I had a data set to prove that this was true, to demonstrate that I was but a stop—between Emilys, en route to a Kim, Kate, Sarah. I was a detour, or a diversion.

  Be yourself! screeched the Proto-girl-power messaging around me. But locked in a prison of youthful self-doubt, I could only halfheartedly get there. Certain relationships with friends or with boys, especially those to whom I felt genetically inferior, would bring out a strong conformist impulse. I’d depart from my usual black attire to don cream and white, to wear blue jeans and running sneakers to class. This almost always left me feeling off—light-colored clothing, especially, felt disingenuous, a wrong note in a chord. It would be many years before I would go the other direction: the opposite of blond. Before I understood fully the value of leaning into the shtick you were born for. Full-tilt me was crooked-faced, stormy, and dark. A slutty, sloppy Modigliani in sunglasses. Those were the phases when I stopped trying for Petal, Coral, Blush, Punch, and my makeup was called Chocolate Cherry, Vixen, Garnet, Merlot, Sable, Raven, Blood. But then I’d swing all the way back. It was fun, sometimes, playing the vivacious Jewess to Gentile men. I was never sure which me was the “real” me anyway.

  My marriage had been a blondward swing. My relationship with K was the pendulum swinging way back, as in an election cycle. Back to teenage-hood, back to punk rock, to dyed hair and tattoos. Back to that almost-year in San Francisco, when I’d felt finally, fleetingly free.

  chapter twenty-two

  Later, when K and I were broken up, a new mom friend would say to me, somewhat judgmentally, Weren’t you put off by the fact that he had a drug problem? We were two martinis in, at a downtown San Francisco bar, careening toward revealing the darkest parts of our lives, as two people who find themselves cheers-ing at dusk will. Squeezed in between suits with pints, amid the happy hour din, I gingerly confessed that I was not especially put off by that fact. The truth was, everyone I knew seemed touched by addiction or at least dwelled within its larger circle of influence. After my experience with my sister, I believed I would never allow heroin back into my life—about that, I had thought I was resolute—but I was otherwise tolerant of the daily dance between individuals and the substances they chose to mitigate or obliterate life’s aches and pains. I did that dance myself.

  Alcohol consumption was low in my typical Jewish family. In our WASP-y town, drinking was the province of them, the G&T set with their rolling bar carts, those with big houses and small noses, who played tennis and golf and observed cocktail hour. On my grandmother’s liquor shelf, above mustard jars full of whole walnuts, wheat germ, and golden raisins, sat a sticky bottle of slivovitz from behind the Iron Curtain—two-thirds full—and a tall bottle of Kosher cherry wishniak someone brought back from Israel. No one ever touched them. At holidays, there was Manischewitz. My grandmother’s third husband might drink a couple sips of scotch during the coffee course. And into her signature marble cake, she upended a bottle of Harveys Bristol Creme Sherry. But drinking for social lubrication? It simply did not happen.

  Growing up, my father drank a Heineken a night. The sea-glass green of the sweating bottle and the cereal taste of it on his bedtime breath were gentle hallmarks of those childhood evenings, but it was all perfectly benign. Everything in moderation, he taught us. My mother had a glass of white zinfandel or a wine coo
ler here and there. In our youth, it was marijuana that was abundant and rarely hidden from view. The majority of adults in my midst, though gregarious and complicated, were gentle souls and they were Boomers. Weed was always moving around, exchanging hands, being rolled up and lit. Someone grew it, sold it, bought it from another family member. Some used it more habitually, more recklessly than others, but it only made them a little fuzzier, friendlier. It didn’t seem to have life-destroying power. My parents and their siblings and friends were a fairly merry band, who loved us kids and never lost their tempers. When I began dating, I marveled at the sight of boyfriends’ parents who got sloshed at family dinners and holidays. At least have the decency to get stoned instead of drunk, I thought. It was entertaining, but also so embarrassing, and worse, frightening. When grown-ups drank, something came loose. I found it wild and insane to see a mother coming unhooked from the evening in that way, departing the dock of the domicile to drift glassily on a sea of Tanqueray.

  But as soon as adulthood arrived, I sought that very sensation with gusto. Once I left home, I entered a long period of heavy drinking, and every single one of my friends was the same. They were writers and musicians who drank in torment and ecstasy as they tried to create meaningful works of art. They worked in restaurants and bars and took shots behind the counter. Or they worked in the dark administrative corners of nonprofits or under fluorescent lights in cubicles, and they drank to blow off steam. We drank to go out, to be out, to be seen, to kill time, and we drank to fuck. We drank to find the nerve to do any of the things we wanted to, and we drank to dull the disappointment of doing those things, of realizing that so many of life’s imagined high points were in fact mediocre. We drank to meet guys and we met guys for drinks, and we drank because he called or because he didn’t or because he said he would but he hadn’t yet. We drank because we knew the bartender, or to get to know him. Because we’d gotten off early, or worked late. We drank because the company was paying. It was open bar, last call, First Friday, happy hour, brunch. As an AA old-timer once said, I only drank on special occasions, like the grand opening of a pack of cigarettes. We drank and dreamed of drinking other drinks—in Moscow or Paris, on trains and planes, toasting our glamour and success. We drank because we had read the books and seen the movies where they drank this way and now we wanted our turn. As Sarah Hepola writes of her move to New York City in her memoir Blackout, “I wanted my own stories, and I understood drinking to be the gasoline of all adventure.” Not some sparkly accessory, but gasoline. The liquid powering all pleasure and excitement, without which you simply couldn’t go. And the one most combustible if you weren’t careful. Still, “the best evenings were the ones you might regret,” she writes.

  Part of drinking was recovering from drinking and there was such bonding to be done on the gallows of a hangover. I loved the indulgent, misery-soaked relationships I forged in the crucible of booze, especially in New York, which felt built for drinking. I went out nightly while working my first office job after college. The collective sigh as a group of rumpled co-workers slunk into a dark booth at the end of the day allowed me to play satisfyingly at a weariness I hadn’t yet earned. I invited friends out to meet me, or I walked from Broadway to the East Village and met up with them and the night began to lose its outline. I even liked the Gchat text box that popped up the next morning, a few minutes after I sat down at my desk with a withering iced coffee, that said I WANT TO DIE. A fellow hungover traveler, ready to dissect the previous night and commiserate about its aftermath: that was real company, I thought. I had come to see light alcoholism as normal human behavior, and as compared with other drugs, alcohol certainly wasn’t the worst thing to be hooked on. I always had my experience with my sister in my back pocket. I could pull it out and remember its extremity, remember that there were needles and tears and track marks and death, for god’s sake, and these—these glasses, here on this bar, catching the twinkling light, these were just drinks! They were no big deal.

  I believed addiction was a spectrum and we were all on it somewhere. Those who weren’t on it at all? Those who slept at healthy intervals, ate at normal times, and had sound romantic judgment? Those people didn’t tend to stay in my life for long. They seemed boring.

  K also had a sympathetic story. He came to heroin the way so many people do now—through a prescription for OxyContin, which he was given while fighting cancer. He was about thirty then. It was his second time getting cancer, and he was fairly convinced by this fate that his wasn’t going to be a long life anyway, so perhaps he went at the pills with gusto. At the time, he had a DJ night at a San Francisco bar, and spinning records, hearing his favorite syrupy, druggy singles blasting loudly into the darkness on Oxys, was particularly magical. He fell in love with that feeling. At the urging of some of his seedier friends not to “waste them,” he began shooting the pills almost immediately. Within a couple weeks, he was buying heroin on the street and had become that most unsavory statistic: an IV drug user.

  Sobriety is often read (mistakenly, I think) as asceticism, the halting of a certain vividness, of wildness and creativity. But it’s also a new lease on life, a new lens through which to see the world. Possibilities open up. I’ve thought a lot about why I wasn’t scared off by K’s history with drugs, which would be a sure deal-breaker for so many people I know, especially mothers. But the life of a sober ex-junkie struck me as perhaps the most meaningful life there was. One had defied death and triumphed. I could squint and see sobriety as a harbinger of relapse, instability, or death, yes, but I chose not to. Sobriety charmed me.

  When he first reentered my life, I didn’t know the particulars of K’s story. What drug, for how long, how many people he had fucked over, how much damage he’d done. I heard it the way I wanted to: he was in process. Overhauling. Getting his shit together. In a chapter of the AA Big Book, the program’s architects are careful to specify that “elimination of our drinking is but a beginning.” Admitting powerlessness over alcohol is only the first step. “A much more important demonstration of our principles lies before us in our respective homes, occupations and affairs,” it says. The labor required in order to perform these repairs is described as “strenuous” and considered a lifelong undertaking. There is something exciting about catching a person—a man—engaged in strenuous personal labor, seemingly on the precipice of leading an unprecedentedly principled life. Something appealing about getting to pull up a front-row seat.

  This, too, is gendered, of course. It is hard to imagine a man excited by the discovery that a woman is in early sobriety—that she’s living at home, taking stock of some of her more unsavory life choices, watching some of her old favorite movies again, and eating her mother’s cooking. The kind of self-awareness sobriety demands is something we tend to expect from women as a default. Women, particularly now, are likely to frame their entire lives as a journey toward self-actualization. Sober or not, it scarcely strikes us as a big deal for a woman to be building toward living her “best life.” It’s also gendered because our cultural view of female addicts has long been dim, to say the least. Women with substance dependencies are largely seen as failures at the other roles our culture enlists them to play. The catalogue of tormented genius alcoholic men is large. But apart from a few famously sharp-tongued “harpies” like Tallulah Bankhead and Dorothy Parker (few were mothers), no corollary exists for women.

  The kind of self-reflection that Twelve Step recovery entails necessitates pressing pause on various entitlements, which is rare for a man. There is a kernel of apology, a spirit of genuflection running through the entire process of inventorying resentments and fears, defects and harms done. And finding a man engaged in that kind of forensic sifting: it can have an aphrodisiac effect. Sober people also know something of sacrifice. Not just weathering the cycle of punishing hangovers—unending payments for excessive self-indulgence—but the real sacrifice to give up all that granted them confidence, to move through the world
in a new kind of vulnerability. K’s sobriety carried with it the promise of self-awareness, openness, willingness to change, and importantly, willingness to work. Or so it seemed. I remembered Jim, my mom’s boyfriend, whose bouts of sobriety were accompanied by Herculean outings into pick-up basketball, Southwestern cooking, IKEA furniture–building. He used to turn the dining room chairs upside down and rest them on the table in one swift janitorial motion, then set about scrubbing the floor with a maniacal intensity.

  I have often thought of myself, tragically, as a sucker for chaos. But seen from this angle, perhaps it wasn’t chaos exactly, but the redemptive promise that chaos held. The seed of a future stability that would be hard-won and deeply rewarding, in which I would play a vital, singular role. Maybe Lucia’s survival, which had felt so unlikely for so long, imparted the belief that in all wild careening, there is the possibility that things can be calmed, steadied, righted. It took me all of my youth and a significant portion of adulthood to realize that sometimes when people are careening, it’s best to get out of their way.