by Amy Dresner
“I won’t be nice to her this time. She is here for more drugs.”
“She’s here for Prozac.”
“I know exactly who she is and what she’s been up to, drinking and all that.”
“You have no idea who she is.”
“I don’t need more alcoholics in my office.”
“Let’s go,” my friend says to me. “She isn’t going to be nice to you or helpful. She says she doesn’t need more alcoholic patients.”
My mouth drops open, and before I can explain again that I am almost two years sober and that I just left an AA meeting, where I am the goddamn motherfucking secretary, all that comes out of my mouth is a soft, almost whispered “You fucking cunt.”
My friend takes off her sunglasses, and, in Russian, tells her that doctors should work not just with their heads but also with their hearts. And that she is a heartless monster. The doctor looks back at her in quiet shame. I am already out the door and in the parking lot, chain-smoking and pacing furiously.
I am PMSing, so I am already particularly agitated. Thanks to hormones I’m sporting tits that rival Pamela Anderson’s and the acne of a sixteen-year-old who works over a fryer. Coming up against this discrimination—from a doctor, no less—ignites a rage in me that I am scared I might not be able to contain.
As I smoke-pace, pace-smoke, I am so angry, I am almost crying. It has been years since I’d been accused of using when I was clean. My parents had always been extremely supportive of my recovery. They of course weren’t happy about my addiction and multiple relapses, but I never felt like they were judging me. It was more that they felt lost, helpless to help me.
Later, I call my current sponsor, Jay W., to complain, and I get my ass handed to me for my lack of “restraint of pen and tongue.”
“You might be the only version of the Big Book she ever comes across. I don’t think calling her a ‘fucking cunt’ is going to change her mind or her behavior.”
Boom. You can hear the cloak of shame fall over me.
“And maybe, just maybe, this was a blessing, because she would not be able to give you the kind of care you need or want.”
Double punch to the gut. I drop.
Granted, I probably wasn’t the epitome of ladylike recovery. But what does this say about the medical community and their grossly prejudicial view of alcoholics? It’s not like I went in there shit-faced and demanded a bunch of Class 2 drugs. And I get that she’s Russian, and alcoholics are more widespread in her community than borscht or matryoshka dolls. Even though they have begun teaching about addiction and alcoholism as a “disease” in medical schools, there still exists the social stigma of it being some sort of degeneracy, with recovery as the exception and not the rule.
This visit was a harsh reminder of how the public still sees alcoholics. I forget sometimes, because in the program, there can be a weird type of reverse pride, a perverse hubris that comes with who had the lowest bottom and then rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes. I, myself, am guilty of this, but I think, for many of us, it is actually a way to reframe the shame. If we can’t laugh at or revel in the degradation, how can we get past it?
I hadn’t experienced much outright “prejudice” like this before. Writing for The Fix, being a voice of addiction for Huff Post Live, being “out” with my alcoholism, drug abuse, and sex addiction, being surrounded by “program people”… I suddenly realized that I had been living in a bubble wherein I was out of touch with what much of the “real world” still thinks about alcoholics and addicts, and why anonymity is still crucial for some people.
I was referred to another psychiatrist, also Russian, and when I explained the prior situation, she asked, “Why you didn’t get along?”
“She didn’t want any more alcoholic patients,” I explained.
“How long are you sober?” she inquired.
“Over two years,” I said.
“Yes, well, I’m not taking any more patients right now, I’m sorry.”
Uh-huh. And the hunt for a doctor with a heart goes on…
I didn’t think the Xander thing could turn out to be worse, but surprise, surprise. Not only is he thirty years old and newly sober, he’s also a “burner” (Burning Man enthusiast), a singer-songwriter, and—wait for it—polyamorous. As he explains it to me, he doesn’t believe monogamy is the natural way of things. He doesn’t find it conducive to most people’s “authentic and full expression of themselves,” whatever the fuck that means. He assures me that he “loves all women the same… it’s like living in a flower garden.”
“That’s the gayest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“When you can be complete without a relationship, then you can be in a relationship with everybody.”
In my head, I wave all of this off. This would be a fuck. Nothing more. We’d get this out of our system and be done with it. I sure wasn’t interested in all his hippie Osho bullshit.
I notice a silver medallion hanging on a piece of twine around his neck.
“What’s that necklace? Is that a quarter?” I ask him.
“Yes. It’s a reminder for me to embrace change.”
“Ahh,” I say, trying hard not to visibly die laughing. Yeah… this will never work.
Xander invites me to hear him perform at a tiny dive bar in Venice. He sits down at the piano and proceeds to mellifluously belt out sweet, passionate songs about love. I realize then that I’m screwed. I’m going to like him, maybe even love him. And I’m going to get hurt.
Afterward we go and play Cards Against Humanity at the home of a mutual friend from the program. When the host goes up to bed, Xander and I start making out on the couch. He goes to get a drink of water, and when he returns, I’m naked.
“Why are you naked?” he asks.
“I thought we were gonna fuck.”
“I like to take things slow… build a connection.”
“You just wanna make out for hours? What are we, fifteen and gonna share a milk shake after? Come on…”
“Put your clothes back on. You’re not in charge here.”
A week later, we have our first official “date” at an outdoor restaurant in Echo Park. He’s wearing another stupid necklace. It’s a circle sitting atop a cross that looks almost like the symbol for woman.
“Is that because you’re really into women?” I snort.
“It’s a rosary ring. My grandmother gave it to me.”
God, I’m an asshole.
We talk and laugh. He brushes my long rocker bangs out of my face.
“Let me see you,” he says, holding eye contact for a weirdly long time.
I feel wildly uncomfortable.
“You love to be looked at, but you hate to be seen,” he says.
“Guru Xander,” I mock, but he’s absolutely right.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A new girl moves into the sober living. Her name is Melinda. She’s in her early twenties, a junkie, sweet but angry. She has shiny long brown hair and a tiny Yorkshire terrier named Rodney that doesn’t shut the fuck up. She plays music I’ve never heard. Loudly.
Melinda has a huge scar on her neck from where she nodded off onto a candle when she was shooting dope a few years ago. But did that get her sober? Of course not.
One night, I hear Melinda weeping through the wall. I get up and knock softly on her door.
“Come in,” she sniffles.
“You okay, girl? I can hear you crying.”
She starts sobbing. She tells me her dad died a few months prior.
“I miss him so much. I wish he could have seen me get clean. It hurts so bad. I just wanna get high.”
“I get it,” I say. I stroke her hair. “It’s just going to take time. It gets easier, I promise.”
I say that because it seems like what I should say, because I want to comfort her. I have no idea what to say about her dad. Both of my parents are still alive to witness my dramatic tumbles to the bottom and glorious triumphant returns… only to watch me tumble down a
gain. I don’t know how they continue to believe in me, long after I’ve stopped believing in myself. It must be some delusional part of parenting.
My mother has been a recovered alcoholic for more than thirty-five years, transforming herself from fall-down drunk to international textile designer. It’s possible that’s why she had no doubt that I could and would do the same.
I think my father’s faith sprung from a different source. Two sources, to be precise. One was pure ego. I was his daughter so I had to be okay. Eventually. The second was writer’s denial. What I was going through was so ridiculously cliché, it couldn’t possibly be real.
I’m so poor at this point that the girls have started a donation jar for me in the bathroom. I’m the only Jew in the house, and I get lovingly ribbed for it. So, one morning, I go into the bathroom that three or four of us share, and there’s a mason jar with masking tape on the front. On the tape is scrawled “Jew Jar.” I’m not offended. On the contrary, I think it’s hilarious—and generous. Occasionally, I fish a few dollars out of there and stuff them into my pockets. I’m barely surviving on some freelance writing gigs. I’d probably make more selling oranges and tube socks on a street median, but at least I’m writing and avoiding what I call a “real job.”
To increase my cash flow, I start moonlighting for my old boss, Siri. Siri has a fashion line, but she’s like an evolved fashionista—cool and hip but all about love, spirituality, and Kundalini yoga. She’s tall and lean—kind of like an adolescent boy pollinated with a supermodel, topped off with a dirty blond shag circa 1978 Rod Stewart.
Back when I was twenty-six and just out of my first rehab, I managed to stay clean for almost a year. Then I thought, “Well, I’m a drug addict, but not an alcoholic”—a mistake I’d come to find out that many people make. Thinking that speed, specifically, was my problem, I tried some “controlled drinking.” That experiment turned into a three-week blackout, with multiple close friends telling me afterward that I “bug out” when I drink. I’m not exactly sure what “bug out” meant, but it did not seem positive.
As I’ve said before, I was never a big fan of alcohol. It immediately makes me into a violent, crazy person, and these three weeks were no exception. Quickly realizing that drinking was off the table, I got back on the wagon—and stayed there for almost seven years. During that time, I was repping a small clothing line designed by an outrageous British club queen whom I’d met at sober living. The Brit would design the stuff, and I’d shop it around to stores trying to get them to buy it. So, one day, I brought the collection into a cool boutique on Melrose. Siri owned the place. We instantly connected, downing espressos and laughing and chatting for hours. A year or so later Siri and I lost touch when I moved to the U.K. briefly to continue my escapades in the fashion industry.
I’d been in and out of various forms of therapy since I was fifteen, but it was in London where I first landed in “analysis.” I thought that was for rich, neurotic Jewish New Yorkers, but evidently, I was mistaken.
My analyst was a proper English gentleman—a doctor and a professor.
“I don’t have your mobile number or pager,” I told him.
“That’s only for psychiatric patients,” he answered.
“I don’t have your home number,” I continued.
“That’s because you don’t live with me.”
I was irritated by his witty comebacks.
“Analysis is different here in England than it is in the States,” he continued.
“Yeah, I can see that,” I answered.
In the six months I lived in London, I constantly heard: “It’s not the States… blah, blah, blah” or “This is England. We do things differently here.” Well, if I’d thought England would be an exact replica of the U.S., I wouldn’t have come, now would I? What did they think I came for? The glorious weather? The tan, buff bodies? The gleaming dental work? Please.
Professor Gibson told me that I was “treatable,” but that I was a very complicated case: the eating disorders, the body dysmorphia, the drug addiction, the depression, the sexual dysfunction… all of these were symptomatic of a deep childhood wound. It was going be a long, hard, painful road.
Ugh. His prognosis alone made me feel totally exhausted. I’m an addict. I like quick fixes. I don’t go for long, painful roads. And really, it couldn’t be that serious, could it? I mean, I knew I was depressed. Okay, I was more than depressed. And I felt terribly ashamed about it. I mean, what was so fucking stressful and terrible about being me?
The truth is that I had always sensed that something was wrong with me. I couldn’t pin it down, but I just felt different from other people, and not in a good way. Objectively, I had as much as—if not more than—other people around me. I had parents who loved me. I was well educated. I was attractive and healthy. I wanted for nothing. Still, for whatever reason, I just couldn’t pull off “happy.”
I tried to explain it to myself. It was as if I was haunted by some deep existential sadness. It would come out of nowhere and knock me on my ass, leaving me bedbound and sobbing for days at a time. It felt like my wiring was off or there was some horrible chasm in me. Drugs numbed it all and provided a much-needed artificial wholeness—until they didn’t.
It didn’t help matters that I was still reeling from having been dumped seven months prior. I’d fallen in love for the first time—in my thirties—with a newly discharged marine. He had plenty of his own demons to grapple with, and after six months of a long-distance whatever, he ended it. It was my first real heartbreak, and I was already so emotionally fragile that I just collapsed under the weight of it.
“My roommate says I’m having a nervous breakdown,” I announced to the professor. I was looking for confirmation from him. For some reason, I thought that getting validation of the gravity of my situation would make me feel vindicated; see that I wasn’t just being my usual tantrum-throwing, melodramatic self but that I was actually losing my mind.
“Again, this is a just a label… but yes, you are having a depressive collapse.”
“Do I need to be put into a hospital?”
“No, not at this moment. You have not had a psychotic break. You are still somewhat functional.”
“Functional?!” I yelled, through a face full of tears. “I fucking go to bed at four o’clock in the afternoon, and when I’m awake, I’m writing out my goddamn will. How is that functional? Because I’m not wearing my pants on my head?!”
For the next week, whenever he came to retrieve me from the waiting room, I’d be sobbing.
“How are you?” he’d always ask in his crisp British accent as he led me into his office.
“Feeling good,” I’d say, giving him a sarcastic thumbs-up.
At one point, I’d been wearing the same clothes for about two weeks. I was scared to change clothes and too distracted to read or watch TV. I couldn’t be bothered to shower. Between analysis sessions, I would just cry and sleep.
On the phone, my father told me that all of his heroes had had nervous breakdowns.
“You’re one of the most courageous people I know,” he said to me, “because you’re facing your shit.”
“No,” I told him. “I’m just desperate.”
“Ames, sometimes the bravest people are the desperate ones.”
Some people can just drive down the road of life, swerving around the boulders in the road. But for others—like me—the boulder is too big. We have to stop the car, get out, and move the boulder out of the way before we can carry on.
One day, however, I just cracked. I knew it was coming. I kept warning Professor Gibson that I was going to do “something stupid”—that I was going to hurt myself. And then, that day came. I even called him to cancel my appointment ahead of time.
“I’m sorry to inform you that I will not be coming in today, because I am going to kill myself,” I said matter-of-factly into his answering machine.
Life, you win. I was tapping out. I was tired of hurting, tired of tempora
rily propping myself up on false hopes that it would get better. I wanted out. In retrospect, I didn’t really want to die. I just didn’t want to suffer anymore. I suspect that’s how many people who attempt suicide feel. Death seems like the only way to make the hurt stop.
I grabbed a box cutter that was lying on the table and took two swipes at my left wrist. The blood quickly started to flow, and I smeared it all over my face. And then, throwing away seven years of sobriety, I popped open a bottle of red wine and guzzled down three-quarters of it. Why the fuck not, right? I was on my way out.
I called my mother and father to say good-bye.
“I love you, but I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry.”
I hung up before they could try to talk me out of it. With a decent buzz on and before I could change my mind, I took the box cutter with a bit more force to the right wrist. I looked at it. I saw capillaries and veins peeking out of the sliced flesh, and I started screaming.
Blood started streaming down both my arms. I was very drunk and felt mentally unhinged in a way I never had before. Absolutely fucking nuts. Before I knew it, not one but two sets of policemen and paramedics arrived, and I was taken to the hospital.
I was led into a small, barren room where I was examined and then sewn up. The solemnity of the hospital sobered me up quickly.
“You’re very lucky,” said the doctor, a jaded, pasty, thin-lipped woman.
“Am I?”
“You missed severing this major nerve here—the one that controls your pinky finger—by millimeters.”
“That’s good” was all I could muster. I felt numb.
“I’m giving you a tetanus shot… God only knows how dirty the knife was.”
“It was a box cutter.”
“Even better, except you’re not a box.”
I looked down at my now embroidered wrists. My buzz was wearing off.
“Have your local doctor take out the stitches in ten to fourteen days. Keep the incisions clean. Do not get your stitches wet.”
“How do I bathe?”
“You wrap them in Saran Wrap and you have somebody help you. Baths are best for now.”
