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; anoth
er 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 wer
e 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.
Quitter Page 13
