“No. We’re not putting you on probation. You’re fired.”
“Fired?”
“Yes,” she said, her patience clearly wearing thin. “Fired.”
“But—I started this company with Josh. PubliCola is my company. It’s the most important thing in the world to me. How can you just fire me?”
Finally, James spoke. “Please collect your things,” he said. “You need to leave immediately. Who would you like to have escort you out of the building?”
Time stood still. I stopped protesting. This was real. This was really happening.
“Josh.”
I left James’s office, feeling certain my knees would buckle underneath me. I caught Josh’s eye above our shared cubicle wall and drew my finger in a slashing motion across my neck. Fired. Dead. What was the difference? I saw his face fall—so he hadn’t known! I shuffled over to my cubicle, gulped back the scream that was rising in my chest, and motioned to Josh to walk me out of the building. We took the elevator down in silence.
And then, the second we got outside, I erupted. Screaming, inconsolable, monstrous sobs. A howl that could surely be heard on the seventh floor, where the magazine’s staffers sat in their cubicles, tap-tap-tapping away on the latest listicle—“Seattle’s Best Happy Hours” or “Killer Weekend Getaways” or “The City’s Best Cosmetic Dentists.” I didn’t care who heard. I sobbed like I hadn’t sobbed since Jennie died. For me—and I know this sounds histrionic—that’s kind of how it felt, like I had lost something that I could have saved, if only I had tried a little harder, been less selfish. Finally, I managed to choke out a few words.
“What am I going to do?”
Josh put his arm around me, but he didn’t say much—what are you supposed to say when your friend is not only well on her way to killing herself, but has just put the business you started together in existential jeopardy? “I don’t know. Don’t go home. Go to a meeting. Let’s get you into treatment again. A different one. The first one obviously didn’t work.” I nodded, suddenly overcome with the skin-crawling need for a drink. “I’ll go to a meeting.” “You promise?” “I promise.” “Okay, I’ve got to go back to work.” We hugged, and, uncharacteristically, I did what I had promised. I went to a meeting.
And then I drank for the next seven days.
I mean, I didn’t just drink. I drank, I went to the store, I drunk-dialed friends and barely friends, and I drank some more. After several days of this, I decided it was time to sober up. The way I should sober up, I decided, was by moving back to Mississippi for a while—a terrible idea for many reasons, the biggest of which was that my grandparents were not remotely prepared to deal with me, but the best plan I could come up with at the time. Fortunately, fate intervened in the form of a ticket mix-up, a bout of sudden-onset mental paralysis, and a pair of TSA agents who called the ambulance that brought me to a suburban hospital near the airport.
You already heard the first part of that story.
What happened next was, for me, fairly unremarkable. First, I was sent into triage, where the front-desk nurses saw I was in bad enough shape that they sent me straight to the ICU. I spent the night, and part of the next day, in a large curtained-off area directly across from the nurses’ station, which buzzed all night with activity. At some point in the night, I got up and clattered with my IV stand over to the restroom, walking past patients in much worse shape than I was, including an elderly man with bluish-gray skin so mottled and translucent I was sure he was dead. This was when I decided that I didn’t really need to be there. After submitting to a few more hours of vitals checks and four bags of fluids, I was on my way. On the cab ride home, I pulled the spare bottle of vodka out of my suitcase and took a long, sneaky slug. I watched the lights illuminating I-5 streak overhead as the car sped toward downtown, waiting for the vodka to drown out the critical voices that were screaming in my head; grateful, at least, that the night hadn’t cost me anything more than money.
I needed to go back to treatment. Duh, you say, and that’s right—but, insensate as I was, it was just as likely that I would drink myself to death. Toss of a coin. I started calling treatment centers the following morning.
Most people who get to the point where the options are treatment and death, as I did, don’t have the time or capacity for a long, thoughtful period of research and reflection. Instead, we tend to settle wherever we’re hurled—by our finances and insurance plans, by parents if we have them and if they’re willing to intervene, or by happenstance and opportunity. That’s how I ended up at Lakeside-Milam—a treatment center located, as it happened, right next door to Fairfax Hospital in Kirkland. Previously, I had rejected Lakeside, as it was known, because all the online reviews made it sound like an overcrowded dump. But my standards had changed. The only thing that mattered was that they could get me in right away.
“I mean, like, today. Now, if possible.”
“We can get you in. But it may be tomorrow. Can you pack a bag and wait by the phone?”
“Yes, absolutely! Thank you so much. You don’t know how important this is.”
I made an emergency appointment with my doctor for a taper dose of Ativan (another benzo often used for “ambulatory,” or outpatient, withdrawal), called Kevin, and clutched my phone in a sweaty palm.
Kevin, who told me a few months back, “I can’t be with an alcoholic,” was still willing to show up for me. It’s kind of inexplicable. Maybe, being older, he had more perspective on the kind of experiences people have to go through before life clicks into place. Maybe he knew that without him, I probably wouldn’t make it all the way to Kirkland. Maybe he just had a lot more faith in me than I had in myself.
Technically, we were still sort of together, if you can call occasionally passing out in the same bed as someone being “with” them—but we weren’t using the labels boyfriend and girlfriend anymore. I had a primary partner. It was alcohol. Everyone and everything else was secondary.
Around 4:00 P.M., Lakeside called. Kevin and I were sitting, appropriately enough, in a pub. I was feeling a little steadier—the Ativan, which I’d swallowed dry right in the Safeway as soon as the pharmacist handed over the bottle, was kicking in—and I looked at Kevin over my half-eaten veggie burger and root beer and told him the news. “They have a bed for me tonight. I got in.”
Thirty-one
Consequences
This time, there was no tearful visit from Mom.
No angry letters from Josh warning me in capital letters: “YOU WILL LOSE YOUR JOB.” I’d already lost it.
There was no AA sponsor for me to call listlessly every day or two so the counselors would get off my case—I left a message at the hall for Marianne, but she wasn’t calling back. There were no deadlines to miss. There wasn’t even a rent check to worry about: Mom and Dad, who had always insisted that I deal with my financial problems on my own, had taken care of that. I had asked them for loans, casually, a couple of times in my adult life—the answer was always no—but this was the first time I had been truly desperate. When I asked for the thousand dollars, Mom said through tears, “Is that all you want from us? Money? Fine! I’ll pay your rent. But that’s it.” I don’t know if she knew how much I hated to ask.
There was time—twenty-eight days, more or less, to figure out how I landed in rehab again and how I was going to start to pick up the pieces now that I’d lost my job—which is to say, everything. There were copies of The New Yorker, smuggled in by Josh the first time he visited. (The act of compassion, from someone who had all but given up on me, made me collapse in tears the minute the big wooden doors swooshed shut and he disappeared in the crack of light between them.) There were people of every imaginable background and with every conceivable reason for being here, people who’d been through things I thought only happened to late-stage street alcoholics who’d been drinking for forty years—things like multiple organ failure and cirrhosis and
a condition called ascites, a fluid buildup in the abdominal cavity that can make a skinny man look pregnant. There was a guy who walked in under his own power—so yellow with jaundice I thought I was seeing things again—and left in a wheelchair two days later, headed for intensive care. There was a homeless dude who seemed to have just wandered in off the street, with no appointment or anything, and who ended up crashing on the couch in the lounge area for a few days while they waited for a bed to open up. There was a former rock star and a guy who claimed he just left prison on rape charges and a long-haired, bearded guy with a predatory vibe whom I immediately dubbed Creepy Jesus. There was, I guess, hope. At least I didn’t have jaundice. At least my organs hadn’t failed me yet. At least I had a home. At least I was still alive.
Lakeside-Milam was where I learned that people don’t always make it, and where I realized that “rock bottom” was the most dangerous phrase in the recovery lexicon. People believe in rock bottom because they don’t want to imagine anything worse happening to them, or because it’s comforting to believe the lies the recovery industry—AA and treatment and all of it—tells everyone about how recovery works, that it’s either rock bottom to redemption or “jails, institutions, and death.” There are those things, of course—death is the real rock bottom—but there are also the years and years you can go on living, and that many of us do go on living, that are just one rock bottom after another after another. The most common advice people get about how to deal with a loved one who suffers from addiction is to let them hit rock bottom; it’s also the very worst advice, because who are they to judge, and what happens when their addict hits rock bottom and then falls further still? I used to believe in a theoretical rock bottom, knowing from school and my own reading on addiction that everyone has one and everyone’s is different (in the recovery world, some people are said to have “low” or “high” bottoms that they hit before they quit), but I learned, during my second stint in treatment, that there are places addiction can take you that you never thought to think about. Lakeside-Milam was the place where my sense of personal invincibility evaporated, where I stopped saying, “At least I’m not as bad as that person,” and started thinking, “That’s where I’m going next.”
I still have a copy of my intake photo from the night I showed up for treatment, a night when, I remember, I was shaky, unwashed, and desperate for sleep. Kevin walked me in, steadying me with his arm, and sat beside me on the dumpy couch in the front lobby, watching the bright-yellow tropical fish swim around and around in an incongruously cheerful tank until the night nurse came to take me inside. (“Erica admitted yesterday with a BAC of 0.192. She has a gash on her lip and an aged black eye that she reports to have received during a fall when intoxicated.”) I’ve never shown this photo to anyone (including my current boyfriend, who met me nine months after that photo was taken and has never seen me take a drink), but I pull it out from time to time when I’m alone in my apartment, just to remind me of what it felt like to sit in that blinding intake room. My hair is stringy, plastered to my head by sweat and a black cloth headband, and my eyes are droopy, vacant, and disinterested. My split lip is visible even in the low-resolution black-and-white printout, and my gray hooded sweatshirt is slouched toward my left shoulder, like I didn’t quite finish getting dressed. Everything about the image says, “I give up.”
My intake records indicate that I was in pretty lousy shape—in addition to my fucked-up face, the counselor noted “spasms, shaky, tremors, high BP” and “clouded sensorium (confuses/confabulates),” but I don’t remember any of that. What I do remember is asking—begging, actually—for Librium, and being ushered to a darkened room on the detox wing, where I mumbled a perfunctory “hello” to my roommate—a brusque but sweet Romanian woman who was just about to graduate to the regular rehab wing—and passed out for twelve hours straight.
The first few nights were like every detox I’d been through—tossing and turning on a thin plastic mattress and a plastic pillow barely thicker than a rolled-up T-shirt—except that, starting on day one, we were expected to attend group and lectures and movies. And so, on November 7, 2014, I dragged myself out of bed and down the hall to Brown Group, where a half dozen women who already knew each other were waiting to make my acquaintance.
“So, for introductions, we’re all going to go around and share our names, what got us here, our treatment tips, and a fun fact about ourselves!” the counselor, Jeannette, was explaining, as I tried to hold up my pounding head and keep from drooling on Kevin’s University of Tulsa sweatshirt. My fun facts? “My first concert was the Monkees, with my dad.” So fun! Did my voice sound as shaky as I felt? Everything seemed unreal, like I was watching it from behind a screen. I pulled my skinned-up knees under the oversized sweatshirt and tried to get a bead on the other women. There was Kristi, a rough-looking biker chick with dyed black hair who, ten days earlier, had been slamming eighteen PBRs a day; Vanessa, a stunning community college student who had landed at Lakeside after overdosing on Oxycontin, but said her main problem was depression, not drugs; Hayley, a waiflike benzo freak who had stolen her dad’s car and sold it for pills; Anika, an Inuit from Alaska who said she drank a handle of vodka a day; and Jeannette, our counselor, who had just stopped smoking meth four years earlier and told us her proudest day was when she finally got new teeth.
Brown Group (every group got a color, and we got the worst) started every morning with a special rendition of the Serenity Prayer—special in that instead of reciting it quietly, we joined arms in a circle and screamed it like maniacs, so loud the guys’ group next door would often scream, “SHUT UP!” at us through the wall. “GOD!” we bellowed. “GRANT ME THE SERENITY! TO ACCEPT THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE! THE COURAGE TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN! AND THE WISDOM! TO KNOOOOOOOOOOOW THE DIFFERENCE!!!”
Group happened twice a day—once in the morning, once in the afternoon. The main activities during group were sharing and offering feedback—listening to someone read her first step out loud (a process that usually took up at least an hour) and saying things like, “It seems like you aren’t ready to take responsibility for your actions” or “I still hear a lot of defensiveness in your description of your husband’s response when you didn’t come home at night.” Other times, group activities revolved around walking a group member through some problem she was having in treatment—like the time when the rest of the group tried to talk me down because I was furious that another patient had been caught drinking and hadn’t been immediately kicked out. “I just don’t understand why she’s allowed to stay here when we’re the ones trying to actually focus on our recovery and they are letting toxic people get in the way!” I blubbered. (I learned later that this was a common problem at Lakeside, which was right down the street from a 7-Eleven.) “Why don’t you try focusing on yourself and your own recovery instead of worrying about hers?” someone suggested. I glared at her. “Do you understand that I am trying to take my recovery seriously this time?” I asked. “If there are no standards at all, I might as well just be trying to get sober on the outside, and not paying thousands of dollars to be in here where there are no rules anyway!” Another time, everyone tried to intervene to keep Vanessa from walking out of treatment after just twelve days; she was fed up because her insurance company was only approving a day or two of treatment at a time, so she never knew when they might decide her time was up. “You can’t do anything about the insurance company, so you just have to trust that it’ll work out and focus on what you can do in here today,” someone said. “If you leave, you know what will end up happening,” another offered. “You’ll go back to that guy, and then go back to using, and you’ll be dead before Christmas.” She went AMA three days later.
One of our activities at Lakeside involved completing a “Ladder of Consequences”—an informal version of the questionnaire I had been given during my intake interview. On it was a checklist of bad things that can happen to people because of their drinking, arranged do
wn a page from northeast to southwest in order of escalation: From “sneaks drinks/drugs” all the way down to “insanity and/or death.” I marked each one that applied to me with an “X.” The result looked like a diagonal line of cross-stitch running down the page, with only “insanity and/or death” unchecked.
Thanksgiving rolled around somewhere between my second first step (cribbed heavily from the one I’d written at Residence XII) and the second and third screenings of a taped lecture from the 1980s by a Catholic priest who had once been affiliated with the treatment center. Lakeside-Milam leaned heavily on these ancient VHS tapes to pass the days, but they had plenty of in-person lectures, too. We heard from a scion of a prominent local family—a philanthropist, developer, and owner of a profitable racetrack who nearly died from addiction—and we heard from a guy whose lungs were calcified by decades of pot smoking, and who apologized for chewing gum (“I know you guys aren’t allowed sugar, so this is kind of a dick move on my part”) by explaining that his body no longer produced saliva. We also heard from the counselors themselves. For the most part, the staffers stuck to pedagogy—in general, drug treatment counselors are cautioned to set clear boundaries between themselves and patients—but even before I knew the statistics, I gathered that they didn’t just stumble into this line of work. No one ends up working in a windowless office at a twenty-four-hour treatment center for low pay and minimal gratitude without a good reason.
I scribbled notes frantically, jotting a star beside anything that rang particularly true. “Every time we drank, we didn’t get in trouble, but every time we got in trouble, we’d been drinking.” “We all started drinking for different reasons, but we all kept drinking for the same reason.” “Alcohol doesn’t make us do things better; it makes us care less about doing things badly.” I was a dutiful student, as I had been at Rez XII, but it was more than that. I had a sense this time that I was in treatment to save my life, especially now that my job was gone and my life, it seemed, was all I had.
Quitter Page 22
