After my first couple of weeks, Josh took the long bus ride across Lake Washington to visit—the same bus ride he had taken just two months earlier, when I was down the street at Residence XII. It was a brisk Sunday afternoon, cold and clear after days of driving rain, and we decided to head outside.
Unlike Residence XII, where visitors were restricted to two highly supervised areas, Lakeside-Milam let visitors roam freely around the grounds. On visiting days, most people congregated in the central meeting area, a cold concrete room where, on Wednesdays, we’d line up for “bank” to withdraw up to five dollars in quarters from our accounts; or near the smoking area, where little kids could kick a ball around or shoot hoops in the tiny, fenced-in court while their parents cried and puffed. Josh and I took our time wandering around and around along the quarter-mile path, and as we passed through the ring of smokers a second time, he told me gently that I should start envisioning a life after PubliCola.
“They told me in their letter that I could interview again in six months,” I said, my voice rising an octave. “Do you not think they meant it?”
“I’m not saying it’s impossible—who knows what could happen in a year or two—but I don’t think that’s where you should be putting your energy,” he replied. We crunched through the leaves and brushed past the salal bushes that lined the little creek that ran through the property. I changed the subject. “See these bushes? The assistant counselors sweep through here every night to make sure no one has dropped any drugs or booze in the bushes. Can you believe that?” Josh ignored me. “They’re pretty mad at you,” he continued. “James in particular. They feel like they’ve already given you every chance already. I don’t think they’re going to hire you back.”
I knew he was right. Had I tried to push them on the six-month offer, they’d bring up everything that made me such an obvious liability. All James would have to do is remind the higher-ups at the magazine about the time he almost called the police to come get me, or the two times I passed out in the bathroom, and any case I could make for myself would crumble. I sighed, stopped to perch a foot briefly on a wooden bench puddled with rain, and cried for a minute. Finally, in a small voice, I said, “I know.”
We walked on. The conversation turned to FDR, who we both agreed was the best president of the last century (if only I could remember the details of all the World War II books I’d read that year), and where I would live after I left Lakeside-Milam. The counselors were putting the screws on me to consider moving to sober living in an Oxford House, where I’d have to share space and household chores with eight or more women and take random drug and alcohol tests every couple of days. I found the idea of living with strangers in the real world intolerable—exactly the kind of thing that would drive me to drink.
I kept that to myself, though. No reason to invite one of Josh’s lectures about how I wasn’t taking this seriously. Instead, I protested on the basis of geography. “I think the only Oxford Houses for women are in, like, Lynnwood,” a suburb an hour north of Seattle, “and Edmonds,” even further away. How was I going to get a job and rebuild my life if I was living in the middle of nowhere, miles away from my support system? Josh shook his head and gave me a sharp look. “You can’t go back to that apartment. That place is poison.” It was true—besides my hated downstairs neighbors, I hadn’t bothered to clean the place in months, and even taciturn Kevin, who went over to throw away the rotting food in the fridge and empty the fly-infested garbage, said he’d found my living conditions “scary.”
For twenty-eight days, I worked hard. I wrote “YOU ARE NOT YOUR JOB” over and over in my notebook. I dug deep, admitting to my worst thoughts and listening to feedback I didn’t want to hear, like the time the group agreed that I was being narcissistic and blaming external forces (James, the HR lady, Melissa and Emily) for my problems. I spent my ten daily minutes on the phone talking to friends—Stephanie, Lisa, Renee, and others I’d more or less ditched in favor of my best friend, booze—and told them where I was, and that I was sorry for what I’d put them through. It was the first step—I hoped—in repairing friendships with the people who’d stuck by me all these years. Old Me would have continued to complain that Josh wasn’t being a good-enough friend. New-ish Me did have to admit that he had not only put up with more than any other friend but had tried to save me from myself, even warning me that I was about to lose my job when I was too arrogant to listen.
I didn’t change overnight. I got into a huge fight with one of my two roommates, Tina, because she led the counselor-wardens to my contraband cookie stash after I kept her up with my snoring one too many times. (“You’re doing it ON PURPOSE!” she screamed one morning, before demanding reassignment to a different room.) On visiting day, when I noticed her talking about me to her husband and pointing in my direction, I screamed, “You should be in a mental institution, you fucking freak!” But, as they say in AA: progress, not perfection. I was trying to have humility, accept what I couldn’t change, and stop questioning every goddamn thing I was told. I kept my lips sealed through an hour-long lecture in which a nutritionist gave us batshit diet tips for recovery, recording them dutifully in my notebook: “Body doesn’t know difference between sugar and drugs; eating sugar will create craving for cocaine etc.”; “Eat turkey at night—tryptophan triggers sleep”; “Don’t eat too much fish in early recovery—triggers overthinking.”
I knew, on some level, that a lot of the stuff they were teaching us was bullshit, handed down through generations from a time when scientists really did believe that women were just less likely, or Native Americans more likely, to be alcoholics. (These pseudoscientific theories were among the central themes of a book by Lakeside cofounder James R. Milam called Under the Influence, which is sold in many AA bookstores and which we read out loud to one another in lieu of class or counseling on understaffed Saturdays.) I tried to absorb it anyway.
But as hard as I tried to “take the cotton out of my ears and put it in my mouth,” as some of the counselors were fond of saying, my notebooks quickly overflowed with the same old questions. How does Lakeside-Milam know how many of its former patients stayed sober? Why can’t I call my landlord to make sure I haven’t been evicted? If I go to intensive outpatient treatment like they’re insisting, how often will they make me take a pee test? They keep telling me that sober-living group homes are one of the best ways to stay sober after treatment, but is that true for introverted only children who have lived alone for most of their lives?
Then there were the lists: phone numbers (some written down from memory, some scribbled on scratch paper when I managed to manipulate a counselor into letting me check my phone bill online), people I needed to call during my five minutes on the pay phone in order of priority, people to whom I owed money and apologies.
Despite all my efforts (the sincere ones as well as the ones that were just for show—like reconstructing my second first step on the scaffolding of the first one), my counselors regarded me as manipulative, narcissistic, and at “high risk for relapse.” (I found all this out after the fact, when I requested my treatment notes—at Lakeside, as at Rez XII, everyone stuck to the party line that if you went through their full course of treatment, including intensive outpatient and aftercare, you were unlikely to drink again.) I couldn’t stop questioning everything. After a bunch of the young guys who were bunked in trailers across the grounds from the main building got busted for having a late-night “party” with heroin and beer, I asked the group rhetorically, “Why should I have to follow stupid rules like ‘lights out at eleven’ when apparently you can just snort heroin and get welcomed back here with open arms?” I had more to say on that topic, but Jeannette interrupted. “Intellectualizing! Stacy, do you have anything to share with the group?”
“Intellectualizing” was a catchall term that meant, essentially, “You are refusing to surrender to the program,” and it came up all the time—when I questioned the efficacy of prayer,
or objected to the concept of “powerlessness,” which I found particularly noxious.
“As women, we’ve all been conditioned to believe that we shouldn’t seek power. Are we supposed to just accept whatever happens to us, even when we’re being manipulated or abused? Shouldn’t we have agency?”
“You’re intellectualizing,” Jeannette would respond.
“Why should I have to go to intensive outpatient at Lakeside-Milam? Is all the material the same as it is here? Can’t I just get on the phone with some other treatment providers?”
“Intellectualizing!”
Finally, I just started writing down my list of objections, along with Jeannette’s actual or imagined answers.
No one in my family is an alcoholic.
There probably are alcoholics in your family; you just don’t know about them.
Maybe I’m depressed.
Alcoholism is a primary disease; you have to deal with the addiction before tackling other mental health disorders.
But alcoholism isn’t an allergy. (This was based on a chapter in the Big Book, “The Doctor’s Opinion,” which suggested that alcoholics have an “allergy” that makes them especially sensitive to alcohol.)
Maybe it’s a metaphorical allergy—something that’s bad for you in quantities that aren’t bad for other people.
There were signs that I was making progress. I stopped dominating meetings like a tenth-grade theater kid, and managed to keep my cool when a guy in his midfifties, still detoxing from Suboxone (a heroin replacement drug that can also be abused), called me “a fucking bitch just like my wife” after I criticized him for talking over women in the group. Afterward, Jeannette told me that Suboxone was one of the hardest drugs to detox from; a few weeks earlier, she had seen a guy lay down right in the detox wing’s communal bathroom, his face pressed up against the base of the toilet, because “it was the coolest surface he could find.”
By the end of week one, I had settled into the comforting predictability of institutional life, with its 3:00 P.M. towel handouts, 10:00 A.M. and 9:00 P.M pill queues, and jarring 7:00 A.M. wake-up calls. “Good morning, Lakeside-Milam patients!” the speaker over our beds would announce. “Breakfast is in thirty minutes!” By week two, I had started walking, then running, out on the path, belting out Stars’ “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” and Lucinda Williams’s “Crescent City” as I dodged raindrops and watched the last leaves fall into puddles on the path. And by week three, I was shuffling gratefully from one scheduled moment to the next—breakfast followed by group followed by lecture followed by lunch followed by me and my imaginary playlist on the path. I forced myself to open up to the women of the Brown Group, even when that meant recounting my most humiliating moments—the emergency-room wake-ups, passing out in the bathroom, going home with guys who figured I knew they were married and didn’t care.
Every day, when I arrived at the trailer for morning Brown Group, using my thin polyester coverlet as a coat (as usual, I had packed randomly and inappropriately), I gamely picked up a dry-erase marker and wrote my intention for the day on the whiteboard: “Today, I will focus my energy on letting go.” When the rest of the group wrote down the personality traits that were holding back my recovery, I barely flinched, even when Jeannette added “feminist” to a list that already included “argumentative,” “intellectualizes,” and “superiority.” I wrote daily gratitude lists, sticking to the basics—Today, I am grateful that I was able to take a hot shower and brush my teeth—without noting that that shower wasn’t really hot, or that my gums still bled every time I tried to brush.
When anything bad happened, I tried to view it as a learning opportunity—Mom wasn’t around when I called, which is good, because we probably would have fought about where I’m going to live when I get out of here—and when anything good happened, I tried to edit God, or at least a cosmic sense of order and justice, into the story. Today I am grateful that I got a new roommate so I don’t have to live with that bitch Victoria anymore. Today I am grateful that I didn’t make the list to go to an outside meeting—a coveted position, since it was the only time we got to leave the facility—because I got to lead a meeting. Today I am grateful for the blanket that arrived in the box along with my new contacts, with a note from some anonymous call center worker wishing me well on my recovery.
Greg, The Big Book-thumping old-timer who worked the front-desk night shift, called the blanket a “God shot”—a stroke of luck too remarkable to be a coincidence. “Everything happens for a reason,” he told me. “God is looking out for you.” Unlike Greg, I don’t think everything happens for a reason or that God has much interest in whether I’m cold or hot, but I could work with this. Maybe this is the universe letting me know that there will always be people to help me, even if they aren’t the people I expected.
When you start looking for signs, you start seeing them everywhere. The time that a nonverbal patient pulled the fire alarm in the middle of the night, forcing everyone to stand outside as the first frost of the year crackled in the grass. A dream in which I kept shushing a girl named Perfect who was talking over a lecture I was trying to hear. The fact that I had spent my birthday, then Thanksgiving, in institutions rather than God knows where. What I read into all these “signs” isn’t really important—most of my epiphanies were thuddingly obvious—but they all pointed me toward a new appreciation of life in all its fragility and imperfection.
The other patients, though they didn’t know it, were signs, too. At Rez XII, a hothouse stuffed to the rafters with damaged women whose every personality defect was amplified and subjected to cross-examination, it was easy to convince myself that I had little in common with the gap-toothed meth addict who was about to lose her job stocking groceries, or the glamorous junkie who could barely crawl out of bed the first two weeks she was there. I knew what my problem was—I needed to stop drinking. The women at Rez XII seemed to have much steeper hills to climb, hills with names like schizoaffective disorder and childhood trauma and bipolar type 2. I felt for them, but I didn’t consider myself one of them.
At Lakeside-Milam, paradoxically, living among a much larger and more diverse crowd of fellow fuckups seemed to jar something awake in me. Some small voice that said, “Yes, you too.” An extremely overweight young woman, maybe twenty-six, told me she had just gotten out of the hospital after being treated for multiple organ failure and was in treatment for the fourth and likely final time, and I didn’t think: Well, sure, but she’s so overweight. Not like me. I thought: I’m ten years older than her. I can’t beat the odds forever. When a woman in rehab for the eighteenth time told me she considered treatment a chance to catch some “me time” before going back to the party, I didn’t cluck to myself, She must not be working her program. I thought, This must be a lot harder than I realized. And when the rumor went around that the young woman who had been caught using heroin on campus, bright with promise when she graduated treatment one week earlier, had turned up dead, I didn’t think, Well, that’s why I never got into heroin. I thought: How many times did I just miss driving off the road, or getting hit by a bus, or falling asleep somewhere I shouldn’t have been?
Don’t get me wrong: I still hated most of the staff—the way they woke us up in the middle of the night for blood draws, the way they watched over our shoulders like they were just hoping we’d break one of their 40 million rules. But something broke in me at Lakeside that stayed broken even after I got out, relapsed, and quit drinking again. I could have died, but I didn’t, and even if there are no miracles, that was close enough for me.
I graduated Lakeside-Milam on a blustery morning in early December and there was no one, not even Kevin, to pick me up. I cadged a ride from a staffer who was driving some patients to an outside meeting—it was me, ten women, and another treatment orphan—and got off at the park-and-ride to wait for the bus that would take me back across the lake to Seattle. The other guy got off with me, cross
ed the pavement with purpose, and swung his suitcase into the trunk of a waiting car. I sat down, brimming with nervous optimism, and waited. The sunlight and the sight of the freeway stretching off toward downtown made my nerves raw and jangly. The bus arrived. I boarded, set down my bag, and made my way to Cherry Hall. I arrived just as people were announcing their “proud time.”
“My name is Erica, I’m an alcoholic, and I’ve been sober for twenty-eight days today.” The hugs and applause carried me through almost three weeks.
Thirty-two
Not Quite Yet
Every time I relapsed was the same old story. I had every intention of staying sober. I went to a bunch of meetings—usually one, but sometimes more, every day. I reconnected with Marianne. I dutifully attended Lakeside-Milam’s intensive outpatient treatment, even though I resented the fact that our workbooks were full of the same old assignments I had already completed in inpatient. I wrote gratitude lists every day and sent them to Marianne in the mail—one envelope, one stamp, every day. “But why do I have to mail them to you?” I wanted to know. “Can’t I just send them by email?” When Marianne asked me if I was “willing to go to any length,” I said, “Of course I am” to get her off my back. And at some point—maybe after a frustrating night at intensive outpatient treatment, or a job interview that didn’t go the way I’d hoped, or maybe for no reason at all—I got discouraged, or gave up trying, or decided I could drink just a little. One day I wasn’t drinking; the next it was like I’d never stopped.
By the time I started drinking again in earnest this time, my whole family was there to watch me fall apart.
It was shortly before Christmas, and I was at the airport, drinking Bloody Marys for my “nerves.” I was flying from Seattle to New Orleans, where I had plans to meet up with Cindy before driving on to my grandparents’ house in Meridian the following day. On the plane, more “nerves,” and more curative Bloody Marys—doubles, since the airline mini bottles hardly count as shots at all. I took a mental inventory of my supply: Still almost a gallon of vodka in my suitcase, more than enough to last through my five-day trip. Worst-case scenario: I had a rental car. I could make some excuse to go to the liquor store. Maybe, I thought, I could say I’m going to a meeting.
Quitter Page 23
