Quitter

by Erica C. Barnett

  Detox isn’t cheap. For alcoholics, a supervised medical detox can run between five hundred and a thousand dollars a day, which may or may not be covered by insurance. In my own experience, the cost of detoxing in emergency rooms, mental hospitals, and dedicated detox facilities ranged from about four hundred to several thousand dollars, and very little of it was covered by my health insurance; when I got sober, it was like waking up from a coma with thirty thousand dollars in medical debt.

  Addiction, I was told later, is the only disease that works by convincing you that you don’t have a disease, and it’s hard to oversell how convincing it can be. Denial is a feature, not a bug. Headstrong people who consider themselves independent, as I do, have a special challenge: We believe in willpower the way some people believe in angels. My parents always taught me that you can bootstrap your way to any accomplishment, if you want it hard enough, and I applied the same attitude to drinking, convincing myself for years that I could beat back addiction—I mean, if I was even really addicted—through sheer, bullheaded determination.

  It was only in truly desperate moments, when I hadn’t eaten for days and I could see my heart pounding through the skin on my chest, that I was willing to admit defeat.

  And even then, I only ended up in RCKC because I got lucky—they had a bed ready during my window of opportunity. I would have sooner called Josh and told him exactly how much I had been drinking, and how powerless I was to stop, than have to wait two weeks for a detox bed to open up, when I knew it would be too late, when the window might have closed for good.

  Twenty-four

  A Shrinking Circle

  The reality of daily life during my last several years of drinking wasn’t messy—it was banal, the way a terminal disease that drags on for years can start to feel routine. I drank, I went to work (or didn’t), I threw up a lot and struggled to remember to eat and drank some more until it was time to go to bed and wake up early the next morning to do it all over again. It was like I was drawing a circle around my life that, every day, became a little bit smaller, until one day, there wasn’t much left outside the line that ran from my front door to the bus stop, the liquor store, the grocery store, and back. On many weekends, when I had enough alcohol in the house to last until Sunday, and the only distinction that marked the hours was waking and sleeping, that circle shrunk further, until it was barely larger than my bed and the 100 square feet of popcorn ceiling above it.

  Weekdays required a bit more effort—more makeup, less napping, a deeper level of subterfuge—but the central obsession was the same. Where can I get liquor on the way to work? How can I make sure no one catches me drinking at the office? What excuse can I make to head out for more wine midafternoon? How can I get rid of Josh at the end of the day so I can grab a bottle before I get on the bus? How much do I need to force myself to eat so that I won’t be as violently sick tomorrow as I was today? What stays down better—a sandwich or a salad?

  If you ever hear someone accuse addicts of being lazy, please correct them: Addicts are some of the most industrious people in the world. Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backward and in heels; well, we do everything normal people do, except distracted and impaired. (Oh, and worse. We do everything worse, too.) Susan Cheever, the daughter of the alcoholic author John Cheever, wrote that alcoholics’ behavior is often characterized by “a pattern of self-destruction combined with compensatory brilliance,” and while I was far from brilliant in those last, unsettled years of heavy drinking, I got by well enough to convince my friends not to stage an intervention and my bosses not to fire me. (Well, until they did.) I still churned out copy for PubliCola, still went through the motions of doing interviews, still turned in stories for the magazine that now owned the site. And if the person I was interviewing expressed concern for my health, or my story was riddled with typos and five days late, I could handle the criticism—all I had to do was apologize, say I was feeling under the weather, and drink until it wasn’t my fault anymore.

  When I look back at the two or three years I spent doing virtually nothing outside of work—seeing Kevin only when I felt well enough to leave my apartment, no writing, no hobbies or vacations or projects—I think, How did I waste so much time? And then I remember: I was always busy—busy maintaining my supply, busy coming up with lies to buy time and get myself off the hook, busy doing the emotional and mental heavy lifting it takes to be a full-time alcoholic in full-blown denial.

  By the fall of 2014, though, I started to sense that a change was coming. I was sick all the time, every moment I was awake, and no one seemed particularly sympathetic. Josh was sick of pulling me out of the office to ask me if I’d been drinking. He was sick of getting calls late at night. And he was sick of telling his girlfriend he would be right back, that something had come up with Erica and he had to deal with it. At some point, I had appointed Josh as my lifeline, and I expected him to drop everything he was doing to pay attention to me, or come rescue me from whatever predicament I had gotten myself into. “My parents don’t love me and they’re driving me crazy and I want to shove chopsticks in my eyes!” I sobbed from my childhood bed in Mississippi. “A mugger . . . just stole . . . my computer!” I wailed, as he tiptoed out of a press conference and whispered, “Have you called the police?” For their whole relationship, his girlfriend, Heather, had known me only as a black hole of need, the person who was always in a crisis and needed constant attention. You know that friend who always turns every misunderstanding into a telenovela-level drama, to the point that you start screening her calls? Light that chick’s hair on fire, throw in a fifth of vodka and a decade’s worth of resentments, and that was me.

  Twenty-five

  Hallucinations

  When I wake up one morning and see a small black spider crawling across the fleur-de-lis pattern of my purple pillowcase, I’m unfazed. I slap at the spider, and it disappears. Huh, I think idly, still getting used to the nausea-inducing shock of another morning. That was weird. I close my eyes, open them again, and the spider is back—joined by hundreds of its brethren. I lie as still as a human being can be, with one eye open, in terrified fascination. I brush my hand across the pillow—gone. Then they reappear. Oh, I get it! This is a hallucination. Instantly, I flash back on Augusten Burroughs’s description of his own spider hallucination in his memoir about alcoholism, Dry, which I’d read twice as part of my own struggle to quit. Was this what happened right before he quit? Struggling with the sheets and a profound feeling of disequilibrium, I roll over and look at the ceiling, half-expecting a massive tarantula to descend from the light fixture. Instead, the gray space seems to fill with swirling translucent filaments, which start as two-dimensional images then spin down toward me, twisting themselves into elaborate, tightly spiraling webs. Now they’re in my eyes, swallowing the bed, covering me—an opaque mass of black, swirling tentacles. I thrash around, I throw them off before they can choke me. They aren’t real. You’re okay. This is all going to be okay.

  Nothing feels like it will ever be okay again.

  I go in to work anyway, as always, and the hallucination follows me there. Every time the webs appear, I blink them away. This isn’t real. All will be well. Staring at my computer seems to ward them off, but pretty soon I have another problem: A country song, one I’ve never heard before, is playing through the speaker of my phone. I turn off my desk fan, which I bought because I’m always sweating profusely, and listen closely, thinking the music must be coming from somewhere else in the office. But no, there’s no mistaking it: The phone is somehow picking up a country radio station, and I can hear it, the fiddle and the pedal steel guitar and the singer crooning about lost love and all of it. I poke Josh, who sits in the cubicle next to me, and make him wheel his chair closer. “This is crazy—do you hear that country music?”

  Josh looks at me like I’m hallucinating. And yeah, the thought occurs to me: Maybe I’m the only one who can hear it. But that make
s no sense at all. “No. I don’t hear anything,” he tells me, and rolls back to his desk. “Never mind, I think it stopped just as I asked you to listen to it,” I mumble and go back to staring at my computer. As soon as I’m pretty sure Josh is busy, I hustle off to the bathroom, where I’ve started stashing a bottle of wine under the paper towels in the waste bin in the mornings. I drink the medicine—that’s all it is anymore, a remedy that tastes almost as sour going down as it does coming up—and put the carton back where it belongs, underneath the pile of wet paper towels. Back at my desk, the music has stopped.

  But that afternoon, on my way back home, the spider webs return, only this time they’re spinning themselves into solid objects—a boy’s skateboard turns into an enormous black wolf, and another passenger’s dog becomes a huge brown bear, offering me a single glistening paw. I almost laugh with relief—this is it; I’m finally cracking up. I think of Oliver Sacks’s book Hallucinations, which I’d read almost two years earlier. In it, Sacks describes a bus ride very much like this one, when he imagined that all the people around him had “smooth white heads like giant eggs, with huge glittering eyes like the faceted compound eyes of insects.” Like me, Sacks assumed he had lost his mind, but later realized he was in acute withdrawal from the sedatives he had been taking. I know the spiders and the bear and all the rest of it have something to do with my drinking, but I can’t be in withdrawal—I haven’t quit drinking—so what is wrong with me?

  The next day, I call in sick and head to my doctor’s clinic for an emergency appointment and settle into a chair in the quietest part of the waiting room. It’s a big, modern office on the seventh floor of a recently built hospital, with a wall of windows that look out onto Mount Rainier on one side and a wall displaying electronic art projections on the other. The wall is new. Right now, it’s running through a series of cartoon images using some kind of shape-morphing software: A bun-haired grandmother, grinning conspiratorially as she hunches over her walker, contracts and reshapes itself into an image of two babies in a stroller, which transforms seamlessly into the face of a beautiful young woman, her hair pulsating with luminous patterns. I watch the pictures for a minute, then go back to thumbing idly through an old copy of Sunset.

  As usual, I have the jitters. I downed a liter of wine before my appointment, but my usual dosage isn’t working like it used to. I look up from an article about the “Best Backyards in the West” and notice that the wall is blank.

  I blink, look again. Nothing.

  What I remember from that doctor’s visit isn’t the diagnosis—all any doctor ever told me anymore was that I needed to stop drinking—but the way the doctor regarded me, like a hopeless case. As it happens, he was the same doctor who’d sent me to the hospital with tachycardia a year or so earlier, and as he had on that occasion, he spent the entire appointment with his back to me, typing notes into his computer and occasionally grunting “Mmm-hmm” as I explained my symptoms with rising panic. “And I’m hallucinating, and I wake up every morning feeling like my heart is going to explode, and I throw up four or five times a day,” I concluded.

  “You need to quit drinking,” he said.

  I still wasn’t convinced that I could die. Sure, the internet said I could die, but the internet says a lot of things. One of the things it told me, later that day, was that I was suffering from something called alcohol hallucinosis, a rare condition seen only in chronic, late-stage alcoholics, a category that, I had to admit, probably included me. The condition it’s most frequently compared to is schizophrenia, and I guess I see why: Like schizophrenic psychosis, alcohol hallucinosis involves vivid auditory and visual hallucinations, which often include accusatory or threatening voices. (Or, apparently, country songs.) Did I close my laptop, pick up the phone, and start dialing residential rehabs right away? Of course not. I still didn’t think I was that far gone. I told myself that now that I knew what was happening, I could deal with it, and went out and bought myself more to drink.

  If you wonder why they don’t give organ transplants to active alcoholics, this is why: We are some of the most stubborn people you’ll ever meet, and a lot of us will keep drinking even when our bodies start shutting down. We’re like the emphysema patient who keeps smoking through his trach tube, or the teenager who thinks it’s safe to drive down the freeway at 120 miles an hour. Sure, alcohol is bad for me, but I’ve always been so healthy. It’s not like it’s going to kill me. I spent most of my thirties clinging to that belief. I spent months staring at hallucinations, knowing they were hallucinations, and rationalizing them to myself. Only old dudes with jaundice and rotting teeth died of alcoholism.

  Not me.

  If you looked at a photo of me from my final year of drinking, here’s what you’d see: A pale woman, still young, with the kind of face that used to be pretty but is now swollen and splotchy, too big for her body. A bloated midsection balanced on spindly, wasted legs. A sickly, shaky figure with greasy hair, bloodshot eyes, and a trickle of sweat running down her forehead. I thought I was holding it together. But the images tell another story.

  Meanwhile, I was in a full-fledged war with my downstairs neighbors. I hadn’t had worse luck in neighbors since I lived in Austin and the couple who lived upstairs took revenge on me—for what, I could never imagine—by running the vacuum at three in the morning and stealing my mail. But this pair, who lived downstairs, were even worse. They stole my deliveries, reported me to my landlord for letting my friends park in the parking lot, and left a big wad of spit on the seat of my scooter when I parked it in one of the spots shared by everyone at our complex.

  I wasn’t an ideal neighbor: I talked loudly on the phone to my friends about my neighbors’ brief but top-volume late-night sex, which happened weekly and woke me up every time. (“She needs to get better at FAKING AN ORGASM!” I’d rail to some unfortunate friend. “DO GUYS REALLY LIKE IT WHEN WOMEN ACT LIKE PORN STARS?”) I pounded on the floor a time or two when they wouldn’t stop cooing at their dog, a giant gray creature that didn’t belong in a 600-square-foot apartment. But that didn’t give them the right to spit on my scooter. Or break into my apartment while I was at work.

  The walls and the floors of that apartment were so thin, you could hear conversations without even trying, which is how I heard the guy downstairs saying my name. Of course he knows who I am, I thought. My name is on all my mail. But that night, lying with my ear to the floor of my apartment, I discovered to my horror that he knew much, much more. The fact that I laid in bed drunk all weekend. The names of the guys I’d brought home for blackout sex. Even the time I’d passed out on the phone with my friend in D.C. Did I talk that loudly?

  Now he was going to let everybody know—starting with the people in my neighborhood. As I listened, he took a swig of Corona, walked through his sliding-glass doors onto his first-story patio, and began yelling, “Erica C. Barnett is going to lose her job! Erica C. Barnett is done!” in a menacing, singsong voice.

  The taunts moved out into the street as he circled the block, yelling that I was an alcoholic, that I shoplifted, that I was going to die alone in that apartment. How does he know all this? I wondered, frozen to the floor. When he returned to his apartment, he told his brother, who I suddenly realized had been egging him on the whole time, about the times he’d slipped into my apartment when I was away at work, where he’d discovered a “crazy bondage dungeon” that looked “like something in Game of Thrones.” How I had white eyelashes and worshipped the Devil.

  Then he said he had killed my cat.

  I didn’t have a cat.

  At that exact moment, I looked up and saw a large, menacing German shepherd stalking across my living room. I looked away, then back, and it was gone—out through my open sliding-glass doors and onto my balcony. I went out to investigate, and although the dog had vanished, I saw a half dozen or so teenage boys perched in the huge fir tree outside my apartment. In unison, they put their fingers to their
lips and pointed to a balcony across the courtyard, where three old ladies in flowing, blue cotton nightgowns were talking about how to get control of the situation. From forty feet away, I could hear them clearly across the courtyard. “We need to get a meeting of the elders together and see what we can do to calm him down,” one of them said. They went back into the apartment to confer. I shuddered, closed the doors, and went back into my room.

  Alcoholic hallucinations come in many flavors. Many people who drink the way I did will eventually see spiders or hear voices, as their nervous system becomes dependent on alcohol to keep from going haywire. (Take away alcohol, even for a few hours, and a severe alcoholic’s neurons will start firing like they’ve just snorted a gram of cocaine.) These hallucinations went on for months—long enough that I got used to seeing the swirling whorls of spidery black lines every time I stared at a blank surface or closed my eyes.

  Further down the delusional scale is delirium tremens, a syndrome made famous by Jack London, who wrote an autographical novel (John Barleycorn) describing a “gutter” drunk who, “in the extremity of his ecstasy,” hallucinates “blue mice and pink elephants.” What London doesn’t quite explain—what no one who hasn’t gone through a psychotic episode, perhaps, can fully understand—is how very real these hallucinations seem, and how different they are from the sort of thing you can brush away with a hand wave, like so many imaginary spiders. I have a cousin who suffers from schizophrenia, and he sometimes paces back and forth through the house arguing with demons no one else can see or hear. He can’t turn them off, or talk himself into believing they aren’t real, any more than you could convince yourself that you’re just conjuring these words you’re reading from thin air, or that if you jump out the window, the laws of gravity will reverse at your will. The voices—the kids swaying in the tree, the dog in my apartment—were as real as solid ground.