Quitter

by Erica C. Barnett

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Erica C. Barnett

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  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

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Rock Bottom

  One: Up in the Air

  Two: Sugar Land

  Three: People Make Their Own Problems

  Four: No One Understands You Like I Do

  Five: Not Drinking

  Six: My People

  Seven: Jumping Ship

  Eight: I Can’t Say It, But You Know I Do

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

  Ten: All Will Be Well

  Eleven: Wake-up Call

  Twelve: Anything but AA

  Thirteen: Just Don’t Drink

  Fourteen: Self-Delusion

  Fifteen: Eighty Miles an Hour

  Sixteen: The Incident

  Seventeen: White-knuckling It

  Eighteen: Toxic Superpowers

  Nineteen: Play the Tape Forward

  Twenty: Cindy

  Twenty-one: A Disease of Isolation

  Twenty-two: Far from Done

  Twenty-three: Last Resort

  Twenty-four: A Shrinking Circle

  Twenty-five: Hallucinations

  Twenty-six: The Rez

  Twenty-seven: Forgetting

  Twenty-eight: Rock Bottom

  Twenty-nine: Collapse

  Thirty: Fired

  Thirty-one: Consequences

  Thirty-two: Not Quite Yet

  Thirty-three: What Works

  Thirty-four: Clearing the Wreckage

  Thirty-five: Just What Is

  After Rock Bottom

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  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, w
hich 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.