by Amy Dresner
I’m sitting on the couch, holding my knees tightly to my chest. I hate this. I hate change. I wonder how long till I really lose my shit again. I can only imagine how this sober living with mostly men and a no-nonsense den mother will react to my crying and cutting and borderline bullshit.
In a house full of men, there’s no drama. And, having been raised by my father, I’m comfortable around guys. Being the only girl in the place, aside from the house manager, is oddly soothing to me. But most of these fellas are loners—not very social—so it feels quiet… too quiet… and I interpret the silence as loneliness and depression. They also do not like to talk in the morning, so the “morning meditation” is brief, consisting mostly of Violet making some poor fuck read from the Big Book and then ordering everybody to do their daily chores.
None of the guys eat breakfast. Few even drink coffee. I just hear the popping of Coke cans and grumbling. After we read from the Big Book, everybody retreats to their rooms to go back to sleep. Soon, the smell of homemade chili wafts throughout the house. I tell myself that this peaceful atmosphere is good for me. I can write. I can meditate. I can get my shit together. But I feel scared that the quiet despair I fight daily will rise to the surface and overwhelm me.
The only real sound in the house is the regular maniacal laugh of Tony, a twenty-four-year-old ex-tweaker who makes sandwiches at a deli during the day and goes to school to be a pastor at night. He’s young, in good shape, and makes a lot of goofy sexual innuendos—like greeting me with “You’ve come just in time. Which is more than I can say about my last two girlfriends.”
After a few of these orgasm double entendres, I call him out.
“I thought you wanted to be a priest or some shit.”
“Sin now; pray later.” He smiles, winking like a used-car salesman.
He’s actually a sweet guy, and very spiritual despite his obvious prurience. We have long talks by the fireplace about the God that I don’t believe in. I envy his faith and the solace it gives him. I try not to freak him out with my atheism, and I try to downplay my sordid past. I don’t want to lose a friend, and I definitely don’t like the idea of him pulling his pud at X-rated images of me.
One of the guys in the house is a thirty-year-old website developer. He’s an opiate and gambling addict. He is also going through a divorce. That makes three of us. The guy lives on pizza and Pepsi. His big belly sags below the bottom of his T-shirt. He looks terminally sad. I want to give him a hug, probably because I need one. We both have that heavy stench of grief and loss.
There’s a bald ex-tweaker who lives off the laundry room. He has a sign on his door that says “Welcome to the Pleasure Zone.” He tells me how he liked to take crystal meth and Cialis, and how he had a hard-on like a hood ornament. I laugh. I’m already one of the guys. I’m relieved. The first two days, they all said “sorry” anytime they mentioned the word “pussy.” For the first time in my life, I don’t want to feel special. I just want to belong.
Once a week, there is a “speaker meeting” at the house where somebody from the program comes and shares their story with us. Dinner at seven; meeting at eight. Violet, the house manager, has been in and out of the program for twenty years, so we know a lot of the same people—either people I hate or people I have slept with, or both. (Let’s be honest… they’re not mutually exclusive.) This week, the guest speaker is somebody who has watched me come in and out of the program for seventeen years. I feel anger toward him, but I realize even then that it’s really shame in disguise.
“Amy, can you help me with something?” Violet asks. She wants me to chop onions for her chili. My eyes tear as I cut them up. She’s a good cook. I have two arms and I can’t make an egg. I have mad respect for her. She is devoid of self-pity. I want that.
What I am starting to realize is that I’m never happy. I never understand what I have till I’ve lost it, be it a comfortable marriage or a posh sober living situation. I complained constantly at the other facility: there was too much structure; they were AA robots; none of my young housemates understood the trials of a divorce. Now I’m in a very relaxed sober living facility with people closer to my age—a few of whom are also going through a divorce—and I still complain: there’s not enough structure; nobody is really serious about their recovery; I’m the only girl.
There’s a saying in the program: “If you don’t like something, change it. And if you can’t change it, change your attitude.” It’s not original. It’s actually a bastardized form of a quote by Maya Angelou. But whatever its origin, I come to see that it’s spot on: How we choose to look at any situation will determine our happiness. There are beautiful millionaires who want to blow their brains out, and there are eight-year-old kids with cancer who are happy as fuck. My shitty situation is temporary, and it is a direct result of my own actions. I decide to do something I had only heard about before. I try to be “positive.”
Luckily, for me, being positive involves arts and crafts, something I mastered during my days as a tweaker.
First, I make a vision board, cutting out things I want from magazines and pasting them onto poster board. It’s mostly women I’ll never be and things I’ll never have, but I guess that’s the point.
I start making lists of things I’m grateful for in my present life. Sometimes my list only has a few things on it: health, sobriety, my hair. (My hair is pretty much the first thing on the list every day. I got lucky in the hair department.)
I also make a commitment to get in the habit of looking for the good in people. I tend to be very critical and judgmental, so this looking for the good thing doesn’t come easily. I mostly don’t do it, but sometimes I catch myself thinking shitty thoughts about other people and stop. Does that count?
One of the guys helps me see how negative I am by punching me in the leg anytime I complain. It is an aggressive form of behavior modification—or the beginning of a BDSM relationship. The bruises trailing up my leg soon become mottled time stamps showing how often I bitch about things. Despite my less than ideal living situation (isolated, with addicted strangers, in a run-down mansion), I do feel calm. I’m not cutting. I’m not acting out sexually. And I’m not crying. Well, not every day. I have no strict rules to rally against here. No Liz to bust my ass. No drug testing. It’s all on me.
This is classic addiction. You think you’ve got the monster in the box. You’re hopeful, relieved, maybe even arrogant that you have a handle on it, and then bam! You eat dirt. Alcoholism is a sneaky bitch. She waits for the one moment when you trust her and let your guard down. You have to be ever vigilant against her, and I am anything but.
I’ve been in my tiny, dank room for days, just writing and trolling Facebook. I climb out onto my narrow balcony and smoke while staring blankly at the bleak cul de sac and then stuff the butts into a Diet Coke can. I’m not going to many meetings because I’m not a fan of San Fernando Valley AA. That Big Book study where I was admonished for not following along was in the Valley. The one where I left and relapsed after. But now, rationally or not, all of Valley AA is forever seared into my brain as horrible and fundamentalist and righteous. However, the upside of the Valley is that nobody knows me. And the downside is that nobody knows me.
I remember that I have one friend who lives in nearby Sherman Oaks. He’d been sober for over a decade, but now he drinks pretty moderately. As he collected years in recovery, he began to see more and more of the hypocrisy, absolutism, and sexually predatory behavior that goes on in the rooms of AA. It eventually drove him out of the program, but he still respects and uses a lot of the tools. I should go see him. He’s smart and funny and hot. And I can get out of this dilapidated castle of recovery for a few hours.
There’s a sign-out book by the door. It’s very casual. Old one-arm isn’t going to check whether you’re really having coffee with your sponsor or getting finger-blasted by some loser. It’s just for the façade of “control” and “accountability” and all those other unappealing adultish words.
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I’m at my friend’s house, and I see him sipping cheap vodka and having fun. He can pace himself. He can stop. It looks divine, that little respite from reality.
“You can have one swig,” he says.
That’s exactly what we alcoholics want to believe, that we can have just one sip. It’s the experiment we do over and over in hope of finding an answer that’s different from the usual “no, you really fucking can’t.” I feel deeply unhappy. My life is in shambles, and I have no idea how to fix it. I need escape, and I’ll take it temporarily from a bottle. I use his comment as permission to try once again to show myself that I can control my drinking.
I take one swig, and that’s all it takes. Every trip to the bathroom, I sneak another sip from the bottle that’s on the hallway table. Soon the bottle is almost empty. He’s barely buzzed, and I’m pretty loaded, making aggressive advances on him and dancing badly to cheesy eighties songs. Fuck.
It’s getting late. He wants to go to sleep, so I leave. I tell him not to worry; I’m going directly home; but of course I don’t. I go straight to the liquor store.
Before I know it, I’ve been drinking for three days straight. Each morning, I say to myself, “Not today! Today it stops.” But, within hours, I’m buying more booze. There are maybe five huge Foster’s cans crushed up under my bed and half a dozen more in the dirty clothes hamper. My bedroom smells like a brewery, but nobody seems to notice. Everybody here sleeps all day. And I mean all day. I can’t be the only one using.
The next morning, I vow not to drink, but I wake up trembling, and within a few hours, I’ve caved and have a beer in my hand. This vicious cycle continues on for four more days, and I know it is only a matter of time before I am discovered and kicked out. But despite this, I can’t stop. I remember how they defined addiction in treatment: “use despite negative consequences.” Yep. That’s pretty much it.
One night I find myself drunk at a marathon AA meeting. People are always shocked when you’re loaded at a meeting, but meetings aren’t only for once you’ve gotten sober. Despite knowing that, I feel extremely self-conscious, and running into the wife of the guy who owns the rehab I just got kicked out of doesn’t help.
She gives me a bony hug. “How are you?”
“Fucking fabulous,” I say with boozy breath, grabbing for bravado to cover my discomfort. She pretends not to notice I’m loaded, and I pretend not to be.
As the speaker, a voluptuous Texan girl with six years sober, tells her story, I drift in and out, alternately feeling moved and hopeful and then buzzed and bored. Applause jolts me awake and then there’s hand-holding and a prayer. I sway unsteadily.
After the meeting, I see Sam, the wholesome looking junkie I banged at rehab. He spots me and comes over. I’m smoking and trying to look sober.
“Beer or vodka?” he asks.
“Shit. Is it that obvious?”
“How long have you been drinking?” he asks.
I shake my head. It’s all a blur. “No fucking idea… a few days? A week?”
“Should I call Liz?”
Yeah, I’m sure Liz would be thrilled to hear from her most “resistant” recalcitrant client again.
“I don’t have money or insurance, and they’re not going to take me back. They kicked me out.”
But before I know it, he’s got Liz on the line, and I am telling her everything, my voice full of angst, my mouth full of tears.
“I’m so fucking lost,” I sob. “I don’t know how to build a life for myself. And I keep getting loaded over Clay and the grief and the loss. I know it’s not an excuse. I need help. I don’t know how to do this.” And then I begin to cry even harder—the cry of the hopeless and the helpless and the lost and the damned.
“Come up to the unit. Now,” she says.
The rehab agrees to detox me. For one week. They will not take me back long-term. It takes me two and half days to stop shaking from the booze. From beer. And that’s when I know: I am a real alcoholic. The finality of it, the total conviction, is an odd relief. There is no more wiggle room. There are no more “maybes” or “could I’s” as in “maybe I can drink moderately” or “could I have just one?” I’m not just a drug addict. I am a crying, blackout, fall-down drunk, just like my mother.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After detox, I move into another sober living. It’s a small, quaint house in West Hollywood and the personal home of the house manager. Sober livings are independently owned halfway houses for addicts reintegrating back into society. It’s not rehab, but it’s not normal independent life, either. It’s like life with training wheels. And if this is her personal home where she still lives? Well, you know it’s gotta be nice.
“Sound desperate and willing or the owner will never take you,” the rehab program director warns me.
The owner is Mariana, a beautiful blond Brit with ten years of recovery. She is too gorgeous—an ex-model with long, slender legs and even longer platinum blond hair. But she is so nice, so loving, that you can’t hate her. You can only wonder what it would be like to be her—to bring men to their knees, speechless, with your mere presence.
This sober living is an all-woman house. I’ve never particularly liked women, especially in groups. Like other loner druggies, I abhor sororities, teams, and social clubs. I find gaggles of women annoying, with their high-pitched voices and incessant chatting about nothing. They also make me feel a bit masculine with my low voice that many people—including my own mother—sometimes mistake for a man’s on the phone.
I move into a shared room with two twin beds and two desks. My roommate, oddly enough, turns out to be the blond anorexic Brentwood mom from my last treatment center.
“Oh, wow, it’s you,” I say when I walk in.
“Yep. It’s me,” she says with mock enthusiasm.
There’s an awkward silence.
“You were never nice to me in rehab,” she continues.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I was in a bad place, and I can be an asshole on the best of days. I’ll be nice to you now.”
“Yeah?”
“Your bed is six feet from mine. What choice do I have?” I smile.
She laughs.
Living in a small confined space with somebody who starts off as a stranger can be… challenging. You quickly learn “boundaries,” “tolerance,” and “consideration”—all things I sorely lacked before. Also, there is no semblance of privacy, so forget masturbation… except when they’re asleep, which I admit is pretty creepy. You can also throw modesty out the window, unless you’re willing to trot off to the bathroom or duck into the closet to change every time.
I come to learn that Terry—that’s her name—is a nurse with three kids she lost custody of following an “accidental overdose.” She denies it was a suicide attempt.
Terry is a total caretaker, and thank God, because I need her. She is the only person to ever put up with my unnaturally loud snoring. She also reminds me every week to wash my sheets. Lots of times she’ll even do my laundry for me.
“I’m doing a load,” she’ll chirp. “Wanna throw anything in?”
And nothing beats living with a nurse. She has something in her well-stocked cabinet for every cold, cough, or infection you could ever dream up. And drug addicts, believe it or not, are total hypochondriacs once we get clean. It’s so odd, since we used to shoot stuff into our veins that some Mexican guy in a hoodie spit out of his mouth on a dark corner.
Terry’s also in great shape. Despite those three kids, she has washboard abs and the ass of a twenty-four-year-old stripper. She takes kickboxing, Zumba, and all those other types of group torture classes. Because she has discipline and I need some, we start going to the gym together. She wears a white lululemon sports bra and matching yoga pants and impeccably clean running shoes. I wear a ripped T-shirt, droopy sweatpants, and dusty old sneakers. We are the odd couple of sobriety.
I’m waiting impatiently by our bedroom door, ready to get my gym on.
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��Are you putting on lip liner?” I ask, watching her crouched in front of the full-length mirror.
“Yes.”
“We’re going to the fucking gym. Who puts on lip liner before they go to the gym?”
“This insecure bitch.”
“Let’s goooooo…” I groan.
“Okay, okay! But please don’t make those weird grunting noises when we’re there, and don’t sing aloud to your headphones.”
“Boner killer.”
I drive to the Volunteer Center in West L.A. to sign up for my community service. My court date is looming, and I haven’t even started to chip away at the 240 hours of community service I need to complete to have my domestic violence charge dismissed. My other quasi-criminal friends tell me that you have to at least start your sentence to have any hope of getting an extension from the judge. They also tell me that there are plenty of work options to choose from. If you’re lucky, you can score a stint at a local thrift store, sitting on your ass and getting all the good stuff before it hits the floor. So I am hopeful.
I walk into the tiny, barren office. I’m surprised that there is no line. I sort of imagined it as a DMV for lawbreakers. I hand the woman behind the counter my court paperwork, and she pulls out a sheet with potential venues I can volunteer at.
“Ooh, yeah. That thrift store in Echo Park would be perfect,” I coo.
“No,” the thirty-something compassionless Hispanic woman says. “This one is for you.” And with that, she and her two-inch glittery nail point to “HBT” (which I learn is short for “Hollywood Beautification Team”).
“What is that?” I ask.
“Graffiti removal,” she says.
“Um… yeah. I’m not great at that kind of, uh… manual labor in the hot sun kind of thing. What else you got?”
“Nothing else for you. Because of your offense, you have to do hard labor. Only this.”
“My offense? Excuse me?”
