One night, instead of popping an Adderall, I chose to carefully pour the tiny beads on my desk and started crushing them into a fine powder with my MetroCard. I took a twenty-dollar bill out of my wallet and snorted two long lines. It wasn’t wine, but I definitely knew I wasn’t sober any longer. It had been a long nine months without a drink. I went down into the subway, and by the time I emerged, I was resolved to add alcohol to the mix, with the idea of “experimenting” with its reentry into my world.
In order to ward off this type of thinking I had kept a document inside my purse to read at just such a moment. In it, there was a detailed accounting of episodes in my life when alcohol had laid me low. I scanned the list and came to the decision that these were the acts of some other girl, some other life. I was confident that this girl could now moderate. I was sure of it.
Once, when I brought up the idea of moderation to my dad, he responded by telling me to look up Audrey Kishline.
I googled her and discovered a couple of things. Audrey was a woman who was convinced that the abstinence-only approach of AA was scientifically flawed. In 1994, she founded Moderation Management, an organization with a scientific, purpose-driven approach to reducing harm around drinking. Kishline claimed she was a “problem drinker” and not physically dependent on alcohol. It caused controversy and then a firestorm. In 2000, Audrey was found in her car drunk, with a blood-alcohol level of three times the legal limit. She had hit an oncoming car and killed two people, Richard “Danny” Davis and his twelve-year-old daughter, LaShell. She served time in prison, but according to friends and family she was not able to achieve any long-term sobriety. She committed suicide in December 2014. I knew all of this and yet I felt convinced I was unlike Audrey. Plus, I didn’t drive.
After snorting the Adderall and heading out, I told my boyfriend Jasper to meet me at our favorite sushi restaurant in Queens. We had gone there every other week for the past year. Our favorite waitress came over and presented us with a dusty bottle of sake, a gift for the holidays. I took it as a sign from the universe. I carefully explained to Jasper my reasons for wanting to drink again. I pitched him on the idea the way I’d pitch a network or a media exec. I constructed my points evenly and asked for feedback. He seemed open to the idea. To be honest, I had been a pretty miserable SOB as of late. But he asked me to call my twin first. He most likely didn’t want this to be on his shoulders alone.
I called Meagan.
“Hey, do you have a sec?” I asked her.
“Yeah, of course. What’s up?”
I informed her that I was toying with the idea of drinking again—that very night, in fact.
“I need you to call Dad and or your sponsor and talk this through.”
“No, I’m not doing that. I just wanted to let you know.”
There wasn’t much left to say after that, so the call ended shortly thereafter.
I knew I was putting her in a tough spot, but at least I had told her. I had gone on record with my decision. I didn’t call my dad. This was a couple of weeks after I had asked my whole family to do a sober Thanksgiving for my benefit, and I felt pretty sheepish telling him all the insight and work he put into me and my program was for naught.
Instead, after dinner I rushed to the nearest wine store with Jasper in tow and picked out an upper-range bottle of sparkling rosé—no cheap stuff for my return to the game. Sake was never my favorite so we took the bottle home out of politeness, but my palms were sweating with excitement when I clutched the cold bottle of light pink liquid from the store. I realized we needed wine glasses and a corkscrew. Months earlier, in a fit of anger, I had asked Jasper to throw away all of our wine paraphernalia. Now I felt the magic that you get when you have a bottle or any sort of enhancer in your back pocket. I felt giddy in a way I hadn’t in months.
When we got back to my apartment, I went to pop the cork and asked Jasper to have a glass with me. “No, thanks,” he said nonchalantly.
I felt a flash of irritation. “This is important, just one glass.” He reluctantly agreed, and I sipped the first wine I’d had in three-quarters of a year. The bubbles popped pleasantly in my mouth, and I felt the cool rush of calm immediately enter my brain. My body found it soon after. Forty-five minutes later the bottle was gone. I was drunkenly watching Late Show with David Letterman, but I felt uneasiness course through my veins. Why was I cooling my heels at home watching TV when I could be out? My mind thought back to the years spent weekend warrior-ing at Brooklyn bars from 10 P.M. to 4 A.M. and the occasional creepy apartments that offered access to more late-night alcohol. It hit me, as it had numerous times before, that I am not a normal drinker. The second I drink wine, I want more. I can’t control my moods while drinking. I was able to rationalize it before, but the cravings were real. I was drunk again.
I texted Meagan and told her to tell no one about my decision to start drinking again, choosing to keep my experiment to myself. I got quietly drunk in my room a couple more times over the course of the next few weeks, having as much alcohol as I wanted, while I scrolled around on the Internet for entertainment.
A few weeks later, right after New Year’s, Yunna invited me to happy hour at one of her gigs at Brooklyn Brewery. Very chill, no drunk assholes—it would be a perfect public place to try my experiment outside the confines of my apartment. She invited a couple of people, and a cool/sexy/queer girl I didn’t know who looked like trouble showed up. I love trouble.
One drink turned into another. I was soon whispering suggestions about scoring a gram of cocaine. Since there was now a group of us, I rounded it up to three, just to be safe. My guy was called and we headed to my apartment, rowdy and full of excitement at the promise of the night to come. I put on Iggy Azalea’s Work and set up line after line. A white girl copying another white girl posing something fierce. I felt the drip in the back of my throat, and everything became hysterical and lighter. These people, who I had known only for a couple of hours, began to feel like my best friends.
Yunna, my actual best friend, pulled me aside and told me it was time to go to bed. I looked at her wild-eyed. “Are you kidding?” It was three in the morning, and I felt just right. Two hours passed and the drugs began to run low. Someone in the group had a plan for the comedown. He offered me a Xanax. I swallowed it immediately and waited for the effects to kick in. When they didn’t, I started to panic and asked for another one. He handed it to me and I crunched it with my teeth hoping that the drugs would soak into my gums faster. I finally passed out, my brain shutting off like a computer pushed into force-quit mode.
The next twenty-four hours do not exist in my memory. They have been recounted to me by my sister.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, while I was getting fucked up, I remembered that I had plans with Meagan for the following day. I told myself that I would call it quits “at a reasonable hour.” That clearly hadn’t happened. I partied through the night and apparently slept through the next day, missing meeting up with Meagan. She had called and my phone was turned off, never a good sign for me. She later came to my apartment to make sure I was okay.
“Yunna let me in and I went into your room,” she told me later, her voice thick with discomfort. “You were facedown and the lights were off. I could see that you were asleep and I called your name. You didn’t respond. I came closer and put my hand on your back and gently shook you. Nothing. I started to worry. I turned the light on and checked your pulse. It was slow. I had to decide if I should take you to the hospital or not.”
After finally rousing me, she administered a field test to check my level of cognition, asking my age, how old I was, and if I knew who the president was. I did not answer her questions, but I did keep mumbling the word “shower.” I could not walk or take my clothes off, but I kept saying the word over and over again. She undressed me and held me upright as the water hit my body.
I came to in the evening, hav
ing been out for sixteen hours. I noticed my sister sitting on the bed. I thought it was the morning; I was disoriented. In her most gentle voice she asked me how I was feeling. I was groggy and had yet to realize that I’d missed a whole day in the world. She told me she had to leave but that I needed to tell Dad I’d started drinking again. I nodded and said, “I know.” Still, I was certain that I would never tell him the full details of what had just happened. There are some things a parent shouldn’t have to know about their kids. It hit me that the experiment needed to be over.
I waited a couple of days before reaching out to my dad, ignoring the elephant of addiction in the room and lying through my teeth about being reckless. I eventually sent him an email.
Dad, I just wanted to touch base on something. You guys have been a huge part of my recovery so I wanted to let you know that I did drink again. I have been running on fumes for the better part of 9 months and work was a huge part of keeping me sober. When work died down I found it harder to have abstinence be my singular choice.
I totally get that this is crunch time and I am not off drinking in bars or being reckless. It’s hard to be sober at any age but being 26 has its issues. I am not trying to justify the behavior or ask for acceptance but I don’t want to lie to you guys. I love what sobriety brought me this past year. I needed time and space to determine what I wanted and the people I want in my life. Me drinking does not take those choices away but it does make me think hard about picking up the next drink. Thank you for your support in this matter.
His response, simple and clear.
Honey. Thanks for keeping me looped in. Let’s chat this weekend and pls know I’m in your corner always. Dad.
He died forty days later.
24
The Water Has It Now
“Great work comes from the spaces in between people.”
I spent much of the time writing this book at our family’s cabin in the Adirondacks.
He wrote his book up here, too. The two of us lived together that summer in 2007. I was a waitress/bartender at a fancy-ish eatery down the road. The locals hated me for being that college girl who scooped up the seasonal cash and left with the tourists. I was nineteen and just about the worst roommate a debut memoirist could ask for. At the end of a long day, I would trudge back to the cabin, manage to grunt a “Hey” to my dad, and head into my room. I had plastered the walls with embarrassing emo band paraphernalia and would proceed to fire up a green bong that I named Jenny, after the nearby lake. I was the worst.
Pot was an innocuous substance to my dad. He didn’t like the smell of it or the way I acted when I smoked, but he figured I was an adult and could smoke if I wanted to. How could he tell me not to? My dad had struggled with substances his whole life. Pot, coke, crack, vodka—you name it, he tried it. He is what one might call a garbage head. He was many things, but a hypocrite was not one of them.
After I was under adequate cannabis sedation, I would lumber into the kitchen and take root in front of the refrigerator. There I would stand for a good five to ten minutes, considering, through the different cooking equations, what could be combined to result in dinner. My dad would yell with irritation from the other room, “Erin, the contents of the fridge are not going to change. Close the fridge!” It was a tenuous time in our relationship. I didn’t care about the intense crack addiction memoir he was writing, and he didn’t care for the prolonged adolescent shift I was going through. But seeing as we were roommates, and family, we tried to find some ways to make it work.
I would hear him typing from every room in that wooden cabin. The speed and intensity with which he clanked on the keyboard were legendary. He would ask me questions sometimes about what I remembered from when I was little. Who was that guy that he used to be? Did I remember him? I did, but it was hard to put into words at the tender age of nineteen.
One thing we did have in common at the time was music. Not only our bond, music was also an education in taste growing up in our household. From alt-rocker PJ Harvey to the lyrical Magnetic Fields to the family favorite, soft-spoken busker Mary Lou Lord, music was a constant. When my dad introduced me to the supreme space pirate known as David Bowie, I was mesmerized. I had a tiny gray stereo that I placed right next to my bed, and every day for two years I woke up to the song “Five Years.”
Teenagers, however resentful, are just looking for a way to connect, and through trial and error I had found my connection. I read countless books about the riot grrls, glam rock queens, and shoegaze heroes. I even went so far as to compile lists and make more than a couple of mixtapes for him. Making mixtapes for your dad is next-level dork. Yet that’s what I did, without reservation. Liz Phair, Arcade Fire, Tegan and Sara, the Mountain Goats, and Against Me! were carefully organized into a playlist on my charcoal iPod. I usually put some Elliott Smith on there to round out the fun with some bummer. Dad got me very into the Replacements and Heartless Bastards in turn.
* * *
—
I sit here in the summer of 2017 at the cabin where he once was. I even presume to sit at his desk while I write this book, hoping some magical transference will take place and I’ll be gifted, if only for this moment, with his way with words. I feel like a boy trying to fit into his dad’s running shoes.
I walk down the shore along the lake and still expect my dad to be sitting there, propped up in one of our ancient beach chairs, our family dog at his side. But he is not.
For the most part, his belongings in the cabin have remained untouched. Books, scraps of paper with furious scribbling on them like “IBM” or “survival holding” sit on his desk. I laugh when I see his headset. God help you if you moved that headset. If you did, you were in for some trouble. On the wall next to his desk is a hodgepodge of objects: a flag with a Native American wearing a headdress with the words THE TRADIN’ POST—ADIRONDACK MTS embroidered on it, a green sleeping bag that I am sure no one ever used, and in the center a silver plate with the words HOME SWEET HOME engraved. In the other room, empty cigarette boxes, loose change, and nails sit inside a yellow Frisbee. An ax and a hatchet hang on the wall in a Shining sort of way. A scorecard from Brookhaven Golf Course remains pinned to the post in the kitchen, documenting his first and last hole in one. Pictures of his wife and kids line the mantel above the fireplace.
What happens to all this stuff when a person is no longer here? The remaining objects are both comforting and devastating, compelling me to sit and stare at them.
I regret not going out on the lake more with my dad. He was always asking, but I much preferred to be on dry land on my days off, curled up in the shade with a good book. The summer before he died, he cajoled me into joining him in the canoe. “C’mon, it’ll be fun,” he said as he pushed my shoulders toward the door. “Grab the paddles.” I looked up, knowing that this wasn’t a battle I would win. I dutifully grabbed the yellow paddles and chased after him down the dirt path. He kicked off his shoes when we reached the shoreline and then told me to hop in the front. I would be our guide.
Jenny is a small, quiet freshwater lake. It is stocked with fish, and no motorboats are allowed. My dad pushed the canoe out into the water and ordered me to paddle. We started to glide. I gazed out at the lake in front of us. We sat in silence for a while before he began to ask me questions about my life. How was it going with my boyfriend? What sort of things was he interested in? Always the journalist, he sussed this guy out based on what I had to say about him.
We moved toward the end of the lake and considered trying out the inlet path. I lied and told him I had heard it was too shallow this time of year. He mulled it over and agreed we should turn back. I asked him about his life.
“I keep thinking about all the things I want to do. Another book, maybe? But what to write about?” he said earnestly.
“Well, what do you want to write about?”
He paused for just a second. “Maybe Murdoch? I also w
ould love to try and see if I could write fiction.”
“You know you can do anything you want.”
“Hey, isn’t that what I am supposed to be telling you?”
We pulled the canoe up out of the water, and he made me put it on the rack. I protested because it’s a known spider den, but to no avail. We walked up the path and talked about the time, years back, that he and Meagan raced up to the cabin from the lake. An all-star long-distance runner, Meagan was the favorite to win. As they were charging ahead, he claimed she tripped all six feet one inch of him, and he went tumbling. I sincerely doubted that that had happened. While retelling the story, he mimicked the tumble and noticed that his wedding ring was now gone. He had lost weight over the past year, and even his fingers had shrunk. He hung his head and looked as if he might cry.
We both knew that the lake had the ring now. Sometimes the universe takes something, as if by chance.
My dad’s last summer on Lake Jenny.
25
The Wake
“You are who you run with.”
My dad had been dead for one day, and I had been given the onerous task of figuring out who to invite to his wake. Jill was tied up with their lawyer, trying to figure things out, as my fifty-eight-year-old father did not have a will. He had died intestate. I combed through my emails with him from just a couple of days earlier. I felt lost in trying to put the list together without his guidance—a feeling I would recognize thousands of times in the coming days.
Who would he want at his wake? I racked my brain for the people he loved, mentored, respected, fought and made up with and fought with again. This “fought” qualifier was important, as he argued with a great many people (myself included). And if you could come to the table, talk it out, and hug after? Well, then you were golden. I knew the obvious people—Sridhar, Ta-Nehisi, Tony, Michael, Fast Eddie, Lena, Erik, Sam, Brett, Liz, and Anthony. But who was I forgetting? I was bound to make a mistake. Only he would have had the power to hone the right list.
All That You Leave Behind Page 14
