This River

by James Brown

  Tonight, after dinner, I go to an A.A. meeting held in the recreation room at the hospital. The leader is one of the head counselors, known among the staff and patients as Tradition Dale for his strict and unwavering allegiance to the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. One glance at his face and you know he spent the better part of his fifty-odd years drinking heavily before sobering up. He has the telltale bulbous nose, and across it runs a thin spiderlike pattern of broken blood vessels.

  “How many days you got, Jim?”

  “I think about twelve now,” I say. “Since I was admitted.”

  “You think or you know? You need an exact sobriety date,” he says. “You need to keep a perfect count. I have 3,672 days clean and sober, and God willing, tomorrow it’ll be 3,673.”

  Tradition Dale is big on God, which has always been the single greatest stumbling block for me in embracing A.A. I’ve been told time after time that I need a Higher Power to stay sober and that this Higher Power can be anything I want it to be, from a doorknob to the group itself. Fake it until you make it. That’s one of their major slogans, and I have trouble with its line of reasoning—lie to yourself until you’re convinced the lie is true.

  People shuffle in shortly before the meeting starts.

  It’s a small group, fifteen or so, most of them patients here, others visitors from the surrounding communities. The fold-out chairs are arranged in a circle. Tradition Dale passes around laminated placards, one with the Twelve Traditions of A.A., another taken from Chapter Five of the Big Book containing the Twelve Steps, and a third entitled “The Promises,” which has everything to do with how staying sober will remarkably improve the quality of your life. The first two are read aloud as a kind of preamble before the sharing of personal stories begins. “The Promises” are saved for the end, so as to put a spin of optimism to even the darkest of meetings.

  And they can get pretty dark.

  One of the greatest realizations to come from A.A., at least for myself, is learning that there are plenty of others out there just as screwed up and troubled as me. Some even more so. It’s no consolation, but it does give me a perverse sense of belonging in a world that by and large considers people like me moral degenerates when in truth we are profoundly ill, our so-called willpower nonexistent. No one is immune to addiction, and the addict, like the alcoholic, does not set out to hurt others. The drug, the bottle, immobilizes all sense of self-control, self-respect, self-esteem, and rational judgment.

  After the preambles are read, Tradition Dale calls on one of the group to share. She’s a young woman with a bony, angular forehead and sunken cheeks. She looks fragile, both physically and emotionally, as if at any moment she might burst into tears. I’ve seen her in other meetings, but she’s not a patient here.

  “I’m Gloria,” she says, “and I’m a grateful alcoholic. I’m glad I’ve been asked to share because I’m going through hell right now. It’s been a year since Charlie died, and I know they say it’s supposed to get easier with time, but for me it only gets worse.” She looks around the group, and I feel myself identifying with her. “I don’t think I’ll ever be the same. He was always happy to see me when I came home, always there to cheer me up when I was feeling blue. You couldn’t ask for a better companion. We went everywhere together and now he’s gone and I still can’t believe it. Last night, I woke up thinking he was in bed with me, but when I reached over to pet him he wasn’t there. The sheets were cold.” She pauses. She stares down at the floor.

  “My friends tell me I should get a puppy, but it wouldn’t be fair to Charlie. I mean, it’s just not right, especially so soon.”

  A teenage heroin addict in the chair beside me leans over and whispers in my ear.

  “She talking about a dog?”

  “I think so,” I say. “Some people really get attached to their pets.”

  “I know,” he says. “But it’s still just a fucking dog.”

  If addiction has one redeeming value, it’s that it doesn’t discriminate, crossing all ethnic, economic, and social barriers. In this group we have the teenage heroin addict sitting next to me, a doctor who used to prescribe his own morphine sulfate, a paramedic who couldn’t keep his hands out of the emergency med kit, a housewife strung out on wine and Xanax, and a Beverly Hills building contractor hooked on pain meds. Across from me is a thirty-something crackhead who hails from that easy-going city of Compton, its resident Crips and their beloved brethren, the Bloods. He has prison tats covering both arms, and on his neck, in fancy script, is the name LaKesha. Dale calls on him.

  “I’m Ronnie,” he says, “and I’m a dope fiend and a drunk. My father was a dope fiend and a drunk. My mother was a dope fiend and a drunk. My two brothers are dope fiends and drunks. Getting wasted in my family is a way of life.” This guy doesn’t so much talk as shout, and he can’t seem to sit still. I’ve heard him share before and I like his passion. I like that he’s a little over the top, since the rest of us are typically more subdued. “Normal, for me, is being fucked up. Normal, for me, is getting sick on Thunderbird. Normal, for me, is spending every cent I make on rock. Can’t pay the rent, no problem. Just do another rock. Electric company turns off the power, no problem. Just do another rock. And when the money’s gone, and the dopeman don’t answer the door, you do what you got to do. Pimp your old lady. Pimp your daughter. Rob some punk, split open his motherfucking head. Ain’t nothing stop me from getting the rock till the police send my sorry black ass back to prison where it belong. Who all here would go that far?” He looks around the group, trying to register his effect on us. He wants to shock. He wants, I think, to show us that his addiction is somehow stronger and more real than ours because it comes from the street. “That’s the monkey,” he says. “That’s the jones. Let me tell you all something and then I’ll shut the fuck up. When I get out of here, first thing I’ll do is fire up that crack pipe. And you know what? Listen now,” he says, “because this is the kicker. It won’t be because I want to. I mean, I know rock fucks up my life. I know it takes me back to prison. Every time. But I’ll do it anyway. I’ll do it because of one thing. Because,” he says, “it’s who I am.”

  On that hopeful note, Tradition Dale calls on the doctor to speak, the morphine addict, who confesses to having intercourse with underage female patients after he’s knocked them out with an anesthetic. After that, it’s the building contractor whose foray into addiction started with a minor back injury and a generous prescription for Oxycontin and Lortab, both synthetic narcotics on par with morphine and heroin.

  Communality and openness have never come easily to me. By nature I’m a cynic and somewhat introverted, and I hold any public display of camaraderie suspect. I’ll accept as truth man’s darker nature far more readily than I will his good-heartedness. Sober only for a short while, I’m realizing that I am sick. I’m in the right place for help. I know I belong here. I’m no different or better than anyone in the group, excluding the child molester, and when I leave the meeting that evening I somehow feel uplifted. I feel, somehow, that I’m making progress, and now that I’ve detoxed I’d like to go home. I need to be there for my boys, but since I’m still considered a danger to myself and possibly others, they won’t just let me leave on my own accord. Scaling the fence, breaking out, also isn’t the brightest idea, given that the hospital is located in the desert, miles from the main highway. In the summer, temperatures reach 110, often higher, and in the winter come the powerful winds that darken the sky with clouds of dust and debris. Except for the indigenous rattlers and lizards, life here stops where the water ends, and it’s that borderline, on the cusp of survival and devastation, that strikes me as the perfect place for the alcoholic and the addict who spend their days constantly navigating between the two.

  Judging from the first couple of sessions with the psychiatrist, I think I’ve convinced him that I’m much better now. I’ve done close to a complete one-eighty in record time. Bottom line: I’m nothing more than your regular, run-of-th
emill alcoholic who simply lost control one night and threatened to kill himself.

  “I know it sounds bad,” I say, “but really, honestly, I didn’t mean it.”

  For the most part, I’m straight up with the man. I am not, however, aware of the many things my wife has told him, and now he wants to have a meeting with both of us. Several days later, Paula arrives at his office with a cup of Starbucks. I’m in sweatpants and a T-shirt, standard garb for the patients. I don’t know why it is, but when I haven’t seen her for a few days, she always looks more beautiful than ever.

  The doctor is blunt.

  “I understand your brother and sister were both alcoholics. I understand they both killed themselves. What makes you think your situation is any less dire.”

  “Because it isn’t.”

  “That’s not a good enough answer. Paula tells me you have nightmares.”

  “Occasionally,” I say, “like anybody else.”

  “Oh, come off it,” she says, “you haven’t slept a full night since I’ve known you. He dreams about maggots under his brother’s pillow and thinks there’s maggots under his.” She’s referring to what I regret having shared with her about finding maggots under the pillow heavy with my brother’s blood. He shot himself in bed. “Sometimes he wakes up crying. Sometimes he wakes up screaming. He’s hit me in his sleep, if you can call it sleep. Be honest,” she says, “or he can’t help us.”

  The doctor tends to look more at Paula than me as he speaks, and before he makes his diagnosis, he explains to us that the drug of choice from those suffering from bipolar disorder is alcohol. He adds to his verdict the possibility of mild schizophrenia. In short, he’s saying I’m really fucked up.

  “Like alcoholism,” he says, “it’s a genetic illness, passed down from one generation to the next. We know this now. The studies are irrefutable. But what we didn’t have before, and what we have today, are the better medications to treat it. I’m not saying your alcoholism isn’t its own problem now, only that it’s exacerbated by your condition and likely to get worse if left untreated. You also suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  To accept his diagnosis is to accept that I’m a whole lot sicker than I thought, and though I’m willing to acknowledge my alcoholism, I’m not quick to take on the label of bipolar. I also resent the euphemism of the term, the politically correct vagueness of an illness more aptly described by its symptoms—mood swings from one extreme to the other, from energy and vigor to exhaustion and lethargy, what was formerly coined manic-depression. The doctor recommends Seroquel.

  “It usually takes anywhere from a week to ten days for your nervous system to adjust,” he says, “but once it does, the side effects should disappear. The main thing is that it’ll help you sleep.”

  Paula sighs in relief.

  “Is it a tranquilizer?”

  “Not in the typical sense of the word. It’s classified as an anti-psychotic, though it does have tranquilizing effects.”

  Great, I think. So now I’m psychotic.

  “I don’t know about this,” I say.

  “He said it’ll help you sleep. Why can’t you at least try it?”

  Believing but not wanting to believe that the doctor may be onto something, coupled with the pressure from my wife, I cave.

  The side effects, though temporary, are many. Garbled speech. Short-term memory loss. Physical coordination problems. I literally have to think about putting one foot before the other to walk, and when I reach for something, maybe just the lamp switch on the bedstand in my hospital room, or a simple cup of coffee, I need to concentrate on the path along which I want my hand to move. Somehow, and this is not always necessarily for the better, it kills my dreams, and not all my dreams are bad, but for the first time in I don’t know how many years I’m able to sleep a full eight hours.

  I don’t see falling babies.

  I don’t see maggots and bloody pillows or my sister’s body sprawled on the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River, her limbs bent in all the wrong directions. If I do, I don’t recall any of it when I wake up. It is an amazing drug that will later play a pivotal role in my achieving long-term sobriety.

  For now, however, I remain in this Behavioral Modification Center, and it’s nearing ten o’clock, when all patients are supposed to be in bed. The teenage heroin addict pokes his head into my room just minutes after one of the nurses gives me my Seroquel along with a little paper cup full of other pills of unknown origin. I don’t even bother asking anymore.

  “Phone,” he says.

  There’s a payphone in the hall. Whenever it rings, and whoever happens to hear it, that person is supposed to answer and deliver the message.

  “Who is it?”

  “Your wife.”

  I’m reading the chapter “There Is a Solution” in the Big Book, a copy of which is given to everyone on arrival, and I set it down. I get up out of bed. I walk to the payphone. Being separated from my boys and Paula is lonely and painful, so I’m all the more happy to hear her voice. “I wanted to catch you before lights out.” No calls are allowed after ten, and the rule is strictly enforced by the night staff. “I just checked your e-mail and Janet Fitch gave you a really nice blurb for The Los Angeles Diaries. I thought you’d like to hear it.”

  She reads it to me.

  Like most writers, I’m starved for praise and confirmation, and since those moments are so far and few between I like to linger on them when they come. So Paula reads it again, and I let the words settle in. What I’ve always wanted most from my writing is critical acceptance and this quote means a lot to me. I am flattered. I am relieved.

  “Can you thank her for me?”

  “I already have.”

  But then another thought occurs to me.

  “Does Janet know where I’m at?”

  “I didn’t mention it.”

  Paula has been answering my e-mails since I’ve been “on vacation,” pretending she is me. It’s a small lie compared to the irony and hypocrisy of having written a memoir where I intimate achieving sobriety when here I am hospitalized for alcoholism and other disorders of the mind. To call it bad timing is an understatement, and I feel like a fraud.

  Paula lowers her voice.

  “But I did have to tell your agent.”

  “What?”

  “She called four times this week. What was I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know, but you didn’t need to tell her I’m in a psycho rehab when I have this book coming out. I’m supposed to be clean and sober.”

  “Don’t take it like that,” Paula says. “She was very understanding and concerned. She was worried I might leave you.”

  “Well?”

  “Quit acting stupid. I love you, you idiot. I just called to make you feel better.”

  A nurse is standing down the hall, staring at me, her arms crossed over her chest. “I better go,” I say. “They give you little check marks in this place for breaking the house rules, and if you get too many I don’t know what happens. I think they waterboard you.” I also feel the Seroquel kicking in; I’m getting drowsy, and soon my tongue will swell, making my words garbled and unintelligible. It’s only a matter of minutes before I won’t be able to talk, and navigating my way down the hall back to bed will present an almost hallucinogeniclike challenge.

  Alone in my room again, I pick up where I left off in the Big Book, knowing that it won’t be long before the sentences bleed together and I’m unable to read. The book quotes philosopher William James from The Varieties of Religious Experience, and Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who suggests that for the recovery of a real alcoholic or addict a “huge emotional displacement must be made,” and he predicates the success of this displacement for the seemingly doomed on a “vital spiritual experience.” But how does that happen? How can you make it happen? What hope is there for the nonbeliever? The words on the page grow fuzzy, and with no answers to my questions, I turn off the bed lamp.

  I’m five or
six years old and I’ve just learned that my mother has been arrested and jailed. My brother and sister have locked themselves in their rooms, our father is drinking at the kitchen table straight from the bottle, and I wander outside and sit on the front lawn. I’ve been baptized Lutheran, our family attends the local Lutheran church, and I once believed in God. I once believed He could’ve saved my mother and did not. Looking up into the sky, I curse God.

  From this night on, and for nearly the next forty years, I conclude that if there is a God, he’s a cruel one and will never be of any use to me. That our mother deserves imprisonment doesn’t cross the mind of this child, for he is only a child, incapable of understanding what is just and what is not and why.

  In my heart, I carry hatred and anger deep into my adult years. On the streets, wasted on drugs and booze, I have no use for God.

  My God is the bottle.

  My God is in the sting of needle and the promise of escape as the plunger descends.

  My God serves up a lifetime of guilt, alcohol, and dope. My God allows the good and innocent to die and the bad and evil to prosper. My God drags my boy through the ghettos of San Bernardino in a drunken, manic haze. My God is me and I do not forget. I do not forgive, and because I cannot forgive my brother or sister or anyone else who ever hurt me, I cannot forgive myself. For my cowardice. For my failure to act. For the cruel and hurtful things I’ve done to those I love.

  I am afraid, when I leave the safe confines of this hospital, that I will return to my old ways, what alcoholics and addicts in A.A. and N.A. call going out, and that fear increases as the day of my release nears.

  I arrived with a suitcase that was thoroughly checked for drugs and alcohol and potentially dangerous items, like razor blades or scissors, and I leave with that same suitcase, containing only what I originally brought: clothes and underwear, a toothbrush, some other toiletries. Paula is supposed to pick me up at two in the afternoon, but there is some kind of mix-up and the nurse comes for me at one. I don’t mention the mistake.