Quitter

by Erica C. Barnett

  Cindy and I met at the hotel where we were sharing a double room, embraced, and had an awkward conversation about how the rest of my family was doing and how much time we had lost. There was just something so presumptuous about her familiarity, I thought—so much intimacy from this woman who had given birth to me thirty-seven years earlier and left me behind not much more than a year after that. Family, I thought then, is a status that’s earned—you don’t get to call yourself family just because you finally show up. Okay, fuck this, I thought, and excused myself to get ready for dinner. Click. Behind the hotel-room bathroom door, I powdered my face between gulps of vodka—Gordon’s—straight from the gallon-size plastic bottle I’d snuck into the giant orange backpack I used only for airport trips. “You ready in there?” I heard from the bedroom. “One second!” I shouted back, freshening my goth-red lipstick and filling up a plastic water bottle with vodka for the long night ahead.

  Outside, the sky was crisp and clear, and if I stumbled in my low-heeled shoes, I could blame the cobblestoned streets outside our French Quarter hotel. We walked to Galatoire’s, one of the grandes dames of New Orleans fine dining, for oysters en brochette, shrimp etouffée, and what I can only imagine was a muddled, confusing conversation. (I have to imagine it, because I blacked out during dinner.) We returned to our hotel and Cindy discovered the gallon of Gordon’s I’d hidden in my suitcase. I needed her to give it back to me, more than anything I’d ever needed in my life. This is when my memory, punishingly, clicks back on—right as I was trying to wrench the bottle out of her hands.

  Cindy looked horrified, like someone playing with a docile lapdog that had suddenly turned into a wolf. My birth mother knew basically nothing about the last few years—the trips to detox, the rehabs, the emergency room visits—because I had given her only the barest outline: I drank too much, I struggled a little with quitting, and then I quit. The comforting narrative had become the only story I knew how to tell, now that I had tried so many times and failed: I had a drinking problem, but it’s under control now. I was crazy for a while, but now I’m dependable, trustworthy, and sane. I struggled, but I made it. I did just fine without you in my life.

  “What is wrong with you?”

  What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with her, disappearing from my life for three decades and then thinking she can hold on to the vodka that I paid for with my money, like she’s some kind of authority figure all of a sudden?

  “Give it back!” I screamed, no longer caring that, earlier in the evening, I’d been trying to convince her I was doing better than fine. “If you don’t give it back to me, I may go into withdrawal and die, and that’s going to be your fault!”

  Cindy disappeared with the bottle, and I spent the rest of the night plotting to get away from her so I could replace it with another.

  When I woke up the next day, Cindy was already awake, showered, and ready to go. I didn’t feel sorry. I felt humiliated. How could I have let this happen? I wondered, for what must have been the millionth time, why I didn’t just stop after just enough—just enough to be calm, just enough to make the night bearable. Why, once I started a bottle, did I feel compelled to finish it? If the bottle had held two gallons of vodka, or three, would I have kept drinking it until I died?

  Drinking was the thing I did to avoid thinking about such questions. And speaking of which: I had to go. (I had plans to see her again, anyway, in Meridian.) I apologized, showered quickly, and hurried to my rental car, where I plugged in my phone and typed “liquor store” into the mapping app.

  Two hours later, guided down the slow back roads by GPS, I landed in Meridian, Morrissey blaring, windows down despite the 35-degree chill. As soon as I arrived, after hugging Mama Opal and Papa Jesse, I pulled the bottle of vodka from my suitcase and hid it in the big double closet, the one that had once held my train sets and Lincoln Logs. My parents hadn’t told them much about my situation, and I’d seen no reason to fill in the gaps, so they didn’t know about the trips to detox, or the hospital visits, or precisely why I’d lost my job. My family built firewalls around unpleasant information. What was I going to do, call my elderly grandparents and announce that I’d been fired for passing out in the bathroom, then add the punch line: “Twice”?

  For the first day, I snuck to my room every half hour, gulping from the bottle, trying to ration out the precious drops. As always, the vodka ran out much sooner than I had planned. By the end of the second day, after my grandparents had gone to sleep, I crept out of my room and started scouring the house for alcohol. This was no small feat in a house of Southern Baptists who hadn’t had a drop in fifty years, but I knew that they kept a stash of bottles gifted to them over the years in the cabinet to the left of the kitchen sink. In thirty years, just about the only thing that had changed in that kitchen was the appliances. Everything else—the ruffled curtain over the sink; the honey-oak cabinets; the drawer full of hand-quilted, casserole-stained potholders—was exactly as it was when I lived there as a kid. I grabbed the bottles and snuck back to my room to see what I’d scored. One bottle of cooking wine, half used. A bottle of white wine, opened long ago, almost full. A heavy, rose-colored glass decanter, filled with something murky. Score.

  I stashed them in my suitcase, threw back the thin covers, and turned on the fan. When I woke up, it was well before dawn, and I could hear my grandmother moving quietly through the house. As silently as possible, I unzipped my suitcase and glugged down the foul contents of one of the bottles. Then another. By the time I had finished off all but one of the bottles, sleep felt possible. I closed the suitcase, climbed back under the covers, and sank into oblivion.

  When I woke up later that morning, the bottles had disappeared, and I could hear Mama Opal and Papa Jesse talking in hushed tones in their room down the hall.

  “I don’t know how long that stuff has been in there!”

  “Well, I don’t know, but it’s all gone now.”

  “I’ve locked up all the bottles in here—pretty sure that’s all there was in the house. What do we do now?”

  “I guess we need to call Paul and Jonee.”

  Oh shit.

  Paul and Jonee—Dad and Mom—were arriving at the Meridian airport later that afternoon, my dad’s four-seat Cessna loaded with brightly wrapped Christmas and Hanukkah gifts. They didn’t know about my relapse, but they were about to find out. Unless I could somehow convince my grandparents that everything was fine.

  “End-stage addiction,” David Carr wrote, “is mostly about waiting for the police, or someone, to come and bury you in your shame.” I was waiting for my parents to come and—what? Kick me out of the family? Force me to confess everything, then die of humiliation? Lock me up in an institution until I learned my lesson?

  I leaped from the bed and strode into my grandparents’ bedroom.

  “Hey.”

  “How you feeling?”

  “Fine, I guess.” Defensive. Like if I pretended everything was fine—just fine—they wouldn’t ask me any questions, and I could go to the liquor store like always, and all this unpleasantness would just go away. If I could just get everyone off my back, just for one goddamned minute . . .

  “Do you want to have something to eat?”

  “Um . . . I’m okay.”

  I went to the living room and sat down on the sagging sofa. When I was five, I’d jumped from this same couch onto a cylindrical stool turned on its side, hoping to run across the room with it under my feet like I’d seen in the Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Instead, I flew across the room and landed hard on my left arm, and I’m told I didn’t stop screaming until we got to the hospital where Mama Opal worked. “It’s bwoken! It’s bwoken!” Mama Opal recalled me squealing, mimicking me, not unkindly, in a child’s high-pitched voice. “And then the nurse said, ‘Okay, can you move this finger?’ And you said, ‘Yes.’ And then she said, ‘Can you move your hand?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Can you move your a
rm’? ‘Yes.’ ‘Can you wave bye-bye to me and say bye-bye?’ ‘Bye-bye!’” The moral of the story, I think, is that I always had a theatrical streak. Or maybe that I was always a pain in the ass.

  Papa Jesse sat down in his rocking chair and pulled it so close our knees almost touched. This was not in itself unusual—for as long as I’d known him, my grandfather had been nearly deaf, the result of his service in the engine room of a Navy ship in Korea, so he tended to be a close talker—but his next words were. “Erica, you know, I had a cousin who had your same problem, and we didn’t know what to do with him. He ended up blowing his head off”—here he mimed the gun in the mouth, pulling the trigger, his head jerking back—“just like that.” This was the first time I had ever heard this story, and in that moment, I knew exactly how his cousin had felt.

  In treatment, you learn a lot about letting go of guilt and shame, and it’s often phrased just like that: “Guiltandshame.” But the difference between the two emotions is that guilt is directed outward, whereas shame is internal; it’s the feeling not that “I did something bad,” but “I am bad.” Guilt is what leads newly sober people to call their exes and apologize for their past behavior. Shame is what causes grown men to put a gun to their temples and blow their brains out.

  Papa Jesse was still talking.

  He was saying, “Erica, if you let this kill you, I will cry every single day until the day I die.”

  I flashed back to the time when Papa Jesse wouldn’t let me ride my bike outside our driveway, for fear I’d get hit by one of the few slow-moving cars that rolled infrequently down the barely two-lane road in front of our house. The times when he’d walked down the road as our car pulled away on its way back to Houston, looking forlorn and waving good-bye. He once told me he cried for a whole month after I moved away to Houston, and for once, Mama Opal didn’t contradict him.

  I knew what he was saying was true. And I knew I couldn’t do that to him.

  That’s guilt.

  “I’m not going to let this kill me,” I told him. “I’m going to beat it. I promise.”

  Of all the promises I’d made to everyone I’d disappointed over the many years of my addiction, this was one I was going to keep.

  But not just yet.

  While my grandparents were in the living room, watching Fox and making arrangements to pick up my parents, I went into their bathroom, ostensibly to use the shower. The door to their walk-in closet, where I’d seen the bottles piled up earlier that morning, was locked, and I sat down queasily on the blue shag carpet, trying to figure out what to do. I thought back to the woman who led that meeting at Rez XII—the one whose insane impulse to drink hair spray made me laugh and think, At least I’m not that bad—and I wondered if my grandmother had any hair spray.

  I opened the cabinet underneath the sink. My eyes skipped over the rubbing alcohol, then remembered it was poisonous—like, kill-you-dead-after-a-few-ounces poisonous—and moved along. Finally, I saw the quarter-full bottle of Listerine—the amber, old-school, mouthwash-flavored kind—in the back. Don’t drunks and high-school kids sometimes drink mouthwash when they can’t get anything else? I think I remember reading that somewhere. Good enough for gutter drunks, good enough for me. I chugged the foul, nasty-tasting liquid and replaced the empty bottle in the cupboard. Ah. That’s better.

  If I had harbored any hope that my grandparents hadn’t told Mom and Dad what was going on, my first look at my mom as she climbed out of Dad’s Cessna and onto the tarmac at the Meridian Regional Airport disabused me of that hope. I could tell she’d been crying, and when I went to embrace her, she hugged me back half-heartedly, like she was already letting me go.

  “Why are you so upset?”

  She paused. “Let’s go inside.”

  My stomach churned as we walked toward the pilots’ lounge. I felt like I was twelve again, sitting sullenly in the passenger seat of Mom’s Plymouth while “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” played on KRBE. I looked back at Dad, who was transferring piles of cheerfully wrapped packages to the trunk of my grandmother’s Honda. I sighed dramatically—still determined to spin this the best way I could—and followed her inside, where we sat down on two leather chairs, separated by a scraggly potted palm.

  “I’m sor—”

  “Just—don’t.”

  “I’m going to get better, I swear. I know you don’t believe me. I—”

  “Erica, do you have any idea how much you’ve upset your grandparents?”

  “Yes, of course I do. Do you think I don’t know that?”

  “They had no idea that any of this was going on. The extent of it. And for you to just come in here and scare them like this—they’re old people, Erica. They don’t need a shock like this. I am so disappointed in you.”

  Like I needed her to tell me.

  Days crawled past—the day before Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day. No one let me out of their sight. “Taking a drive” was off the table. Finally, the day after Christmas, Cindy picked me up to take me to her mom’s house in the woods just outside Meridian. I asked if we could stop by the drugstore.

  “What do you need?” she asked.

  “Mouthwash.”

  Drinking mouthwash isn’t the worst thing, I told myself, setting aside memories of the time I was affronted when Josh thought I’d been doing exactly that. At least I’m not as bad as that woman who talked in a meeting about drinking hand sanitizer mixed with Diet Coke. At least I can prove to everyone that I can make it through the rest of this trip without drinking. At least I can go home in two days and this nightmare will be over.

  I made it through Christmas, fidgeting on the couch in my grandparents’ overheated living room. I said good-bye to Cindy, avoiding the subject of New Orleans, building my own firewall against that ugly memory. I avoided Mom and Dad’s suspicious stares and hardened myself against my grandparents’ overbearing concern. I just need to get back to Seattle, I thought, and things will go back to normal. I just need a few more weeks and then I’ll really quit. I just need everyone to leave me alone.

  Back in Seattle, free from the heavy air and freighted conversations in Mississippi, I got back to drinking—less than I had during my trip, but more than enough for Josh to notice. “You haven’t been yourself for a few days,” he texted. I ignored him. For the first time, I canceled our traditional Hanukkah gift exchange, telling him I had relapsed. “Thank you for letting me know,” he said, or some version of that. Our friendship, these days, was full of dead ends and blind corners—places we knew better than to go, because we knew what traps were waiting there. “Go to a meeting.” And I did. I started showing my face at Cherry Hall again—sober, drunk, half-sober; properly dressed or in stained leggings and a sweatshirt, I went. I sat in the back, on the yellow upholstered bench unofficially reserved for newcomers who wanted to sneak out unnoticed, and wondered what all these sober alcoholics had that I didn’t. What quality did I lack?

  I started going back to outpatient treatment, too—occasionally sober, more often half-sloshed, sometimes badly enough for the treatment staff to notice. “We think it would be best for the other group members’ recovery if you came back when you don’t smell like alcohol,” the counselor who pulled me out of group told me. I figured I must be the only asshole in history to show up at treatment drunk. But I did go back. I drank less, drank more again, got stronger breath mints.

  New Year’s Eve came and went like any other day—passed out at 9:00, up at 2:00, back to bed at 4:00 to sleep until 7:00, when I could head to the store and do it all over again. I faced 2015 with a dull determination to just get through until something changed. I didn’t know what, exactly, but I’d know it when it happened.

  * * *

  —

  What happened was that I ended up in the hospital again. An acquaintance had given me a temporary job in his office—nothing too heavy, just a little writ
ing and comms work while I got back on my feet. It took me less than a week to blow it. Zonked on alcohol and Ativan—I had started taking an old prescription, hoping that by self-medicating I could wean myself off booze—I passed out at my desk, and came to as the EMS guys were lifting me to my feet and toward the stretcher. “No, no, there’s no need for any of this,” I told them groggily, but if you have any experience dealing with ambulance crews, you know that they don’t take no from a semiconscious patient for an answer. Instead of leaving quietly the way they’d come, they strapped me to the gurney, hiked me into the rolling position, and pushed me (slowly, far too slowly) past a dozen gawkers, their eyes wide with curiosity at the unprecedented sight of a stretcher pushing a strange woman through their office.

  By now, you know the drill as well as I did—hospital, overnight detox, then back to the grind. Another day in the glamorous life of a late-stage alcoholic. I didn’t bother calling Josh to meet me; I didn’t call anyone, because what was the point? “Hi, I relapsed again, just getting out of the hospital, wanted to let you know, bye”? No one needs to hear that for the seventh or four-hundredth time.

  This time, though, something was different. Over the past few months, it was as if something physical had been breaking down inside me—some structural element that had been propping up the beams while everything else, from the façade to the foundation, crumbled. It had started to bend while I was sitting on the couch in Mississippi, listening to Papa Jesse as he told me he would cry every day until he died if I let alcoholism kill me, and it hadn’t stopped bending since.