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 Digests, 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.
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br /> 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.
Quitter Page 5
