“Of course you do,” said Caroline, unimpressed. “Why wouldn’t you? We have the same life.”
DEEPER THAN MOST of the more obvious parallels between us was the drinking history we had in common—that empty room in the heart that is the essence of addiction. Caroline and I would soon enough tell each other everything, but for the first few months of our friendship, I kept our greatest similarity to myself. The summer before we became friends, I had read Caroline’s memoir, Drinking: A Love Story, in a rain-soaked cabin in Truro, on Cape Cod, where I had gone for a week with Clementine. I would swim the ponds during the day and read on the screened-in porch until twilight, and I still remember sitting there, Clemmie sleeping next to me, while I read the book until dusk turned to pitch black outside. It was the season of the first round of celebrity addiction memoirs, when Pete Hamill and a few others had come out with new tough-guy versions of Under the Volcano. Until now, though, most of the drinking stories had belonged to a boys’ club. That night in Truro, I read Caroline’s book straight through. I knew it was wrenching, honest, and revelatory. And because I’d poured my last quart of Jack Daniel’s down the kitchen sink twelve years earlier, I also knew that it was true.
4.
BY THE TIME I HAD MOVED EAST, IN 1981, THE DRINKING had revealed itself as panacea and problem both, though I didn’t yet see that one almost guaranteed the other. I came from a line of Texas Protestant bourbon lovers who had incorporated their affection for whiskey into a way of life. One exception, at least as I understood it, had been my maternal grandfather, a sweet blue-eyed farmer who sang a cappella in the church choir and pleasantly deferred to my intrepid grandmother’s every wish. Years after they had died, I asked my mother to confirm what I had always perceived as a harmonious union.
“Were Mamaw and Granddad happy?” I asked.
“Why, sure,” she said. “After Daddy quit drinking.”
I was stunned; I had no memory of my granddad ever touching alcohol. But my mother told me that day about a summer when I was about four: When we were visiting our grandparents’ farm near Breckenridge, Texas, Granddad had infuriated my father by taking me and my sister to a bar on his way home from errands in town. His binges had been infrequent but legendary, my mother said. He would drink like a wild man for a few weeks, then reappear in church and stay sober for months at a time. After raising six kids in the shadow of this behavior, Mamaw finally threatened to leave him. He stopped drinking shortly thereafter, and because I had been so young at the time, I remembered him only as a teetotaler.
The rest of the family tree had a root system soggy with alcohol, and the memories were not so opaque as with Granddad. One aunt had fallen asleep with her face in the mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner; another’s fondness for Coors was so unwavering that I can still remember the musky smell of the beer and the coldness of the cans. Most of the men drank the way all Texas men drank, or so I believed, which meant that they were tough guys who could hold their liquor until they couldn’t anymore—a capacity that often led to some cloudy version of doom, be it financial ruin or suicide or the lesser betrayal of simple estrangement. Both social drinkers, my parents had eluded these tragic endings; in the postwar Texas of suburbs and cocktails, their drinking was routine but undramatic.
From my first experiment with drinking at an overnight slumber party, when I was thirteen or fourteen, it was clear I would be lining up with the blackguards in the family. Our young hostess mixed us a noxious blend of scotch and Diet-Rite cola; every other girl had just enough to get goofy or sleepy. I had six tumblers of the stuff, then got on the dining room table to dance while my placid friends snoozed around me. Barely on the verge of adolescence, I was still a shy girl who preferred math homework to boys. I was neither daring nor particularly unhappy, but booze flipped a switch in me I hadn’t even known was there.
By high school I was known for having a hollow leg. A good friend told me what the circulated story was on me. “‘Caldwell is the most expensive date in town,’” he quoted the other boys as saying. “‘She’ll drink you under the table and she’ll never put out.’” My dad would have no doubt appreciated both traits as signs of character. In some of my earliest memories, he had ended his days with a cut-crystal glass of bourbon and Coke, and this magic concoction seemed to make his humor mellow and his voice a little more velvety. By the time he had switched to bourbon and branch water, as he called it, I was a brainy, wild teenager in a macho Texas town, and as much as I fought my dad, I also emulated him. Whiskey took an ordinarily rebellious adolescence and sheathed it in golden light. I had a fake ID at sixteen; on my twenty-first birthday, I became a daily drinker. By then I had wandered through college and the antiwar movement and tried every drug and insurrection in sight, but the pendulum always swung back to the sweet promises of booze. Whenever I would go home to Amarillo, my father would stock the liquor cabinet with scotch and bourbon, then tell me to show some restraint—the excellent duplicity of Texas drinking etiquette, which counseled that you drink like a man and act like a lady. “There are two things a man can’t stand,” my dad would say after our first couple of belts, his voice gravelly and full of self-satisfied wisdom. “A woman with round heels, and a woman who drinks too much.” We would both nod sagely, and I would ask him to explain the first part. He would make a pushing motion with his hand and shake his head. For years I thought that round-heeled meant spineless, because he was too modest ever to explain it.
But he always knew, I think, that drinking was going to be my problem. He knew because I got too happy and animated even at the sight of a drink, and because he shared this dark affection and yet had managed to cap the geyser at its source. If half the people on both sides of our extended family had loved the drink too much, I tended to laugh about it because I couldn’t bear to consider the consequences. My relatives also had a constitution that allowed them to live well into their nineties, and in the calculus of denial, I used this longevity to counterbalance our affliction. “In my family,” I used to say, “if alcoholism or suicide doesn’t get you, you’ll live forever.”
I usually said this with a tumbler of whiskey in my hand. (“But you always just had that one glass,” my sister said, years after I had stopped, when she was trying to piece together the mosaic of the past. “Yes,” I told her, “and it was always full.”) Because my tolerance allowed me to drink hugely but functionally for years—I survived most of graduate school with a cache of scotch—I cultivated an image that waffled between tragedy and liberation. The self-perception was constructed to fit the need: With alcohol the mandatory elixir, I would erect a stage set to justify its presence. I would be the sensitive heroine, or doomed romantic, or radical bohemian—I was Hamlet, Icarus, Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart. God forbid that I simply face who I was, which was somebody drunk and scared and on my way to being no one at all.
Most of this self-actualization was unfolding in Austin in the 1970s, when the streets flowed with cocaine and whiskey; I surrounded myself, unconsciously but probably intentionally, with people who drank the way I did. Some of them got straight and some of them died, and a few of them calmed down, grew up, and settled for one martini instead of seven. I did my part for my generation’s collective crisis of adulthood by moving east, with the brazen notion of becoming a writer—surely, according to myth, a way to reinvent one’s life. When I left Texas, I had two quarts of whiskey in the trunk of my old Volvo, which I figured would cover the five days on the road that were ahead of me. I had a few friends in New York and knew two people in Greater Boston, where I was going, and however scared I was, I knew there would be a liquor store wherever I landed. By then I was thirty years old, and I’d learned that courage in a bottle could get you through all kinds of doors, and all kinds of trouble, and a lot of dead-end nights alone.
In the early 1980s, hordes of people were leaving the Northeast for the softer industries and climates of the Sun Belt. New England was cold, dark, and unforgiving, people warned me; the more
precarious truth was that I had no job, no place to live, and enough savings to last a year. My writing résumé consisted of a couple of rejections slips from venerated magazines; my confidence came from a few gruff encouragements from professors. But however fragile the external scaffolding looked, I suspect that I was trying to save my life, not just relocate it. I had grown up staring at the vast, imprisoning horizon of the Texas Panhandle, a region I understood how much I loved only long after I had left it, and I had jumped free of that place with a kind of high-octane terror. If conservative Amarillo, with its oil rigs and churches and cattle ranches, promised a provincial life, for years I challenged every dictum I perceived my family to possess. A decade later, I had to assume an equally resolute posture to get out of Austin—to leave behind what I loved and what I feared was killing me.
I was equal parts bluff and fear, I think, poised there on the verge of a life unfolding, not knowing whether I would leap or fall. In my last couple of years in Austin, when I had been teaching at the university and pretending to read for doctoral oral exams, I had let my heart lead me to the water’s edge of a writing life—an inner sanctum of such power and solace that it staggered me with its reach. I lived in a few rooms of an old southern mansion with ten-foot ceilings and poured-glass windows, and I would sit there at night before my typewriter, primed with a glass of scotch and a pack of Winstons. One night before the drink kicked in I had written something that so excited me—I have no memory of what it was—that I leapt up from my chair and kept typing standing up. Probably every young would-be writer has such moments, the crystal-clear elation that keeps one going. But now I see the moment as pivotal and even Faustian: the amber light, the whirring typewriter, the young woman full of yearning and joy. The writing was the life force and the whiskey was the snake in the grass. For as long as I could, I chose them both.
YOUTH AND PRIDE can be decent weapons against the woes of alcohol, but only for a while. I kept jobs, I threw cold water on my face each morning, I swam laps to counter the effects of the booze and then drank to wipe out the gains of the swim. For years the psychic balm of alcohol—its holy grail certainty that it could take me through anything—eclipsed the hangovers and emerging fear that I was in trouble. I had a silver pocket flask that I filled with whiskey for backup drinks; I figured if I looked the part, then I could get away with the reality. The booze took the rough corners off, and I tried to right the equation with coffee and protein and five milligrams of Librium to ease the comedown. I was a well-oiled machine, with a 4.0 grade-point average, and nobody knew. Or so I believed.
Why did I drink? When my therapist asked me this several years after I had stopped, I thought it one of the most ludicrous questions I had ever heard. Why wouldn’t one drink? I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I shrugged and answered as honestly as I knew how. “Becauuse,” I said, with a little scorn. “The whole world turned golden.” It took me hearing the words out loud to realize that the hue of the sublime had itself been an indicator of trouble.
A few professionals over the years had made feeble efforts to address the problem; in Texas in the 1970s, “substance abuse” wasn’t even a phrase yet. My last couple of years in graduate school, I went to see a nice woman psychologist to address, or so I thought, the ordinary stresses of work and love: I was in a demanding academic program, I had just broken up with someone, I was having difficulty sleeping. We ate Milano cookies together, the therapist and I, and laughed about how hard life was. “I think I drink too much,” I said one day. “I’m throwing down five or six glasses of whiskey a night. Maybe I need to check in to Shoal Creek.” Shoal Creek was the psych hospital in Austin where people went to dry out; a lawyer I’d worked for (and who taught me how to drink scotch and eat raw oysters) had considered it his spa. “They wouldn’t take you,” my lovely, nonconfrontational therapist said. “You look too good.”
By which she meant that I was still vertical, still functioning in superdrive, and that I hadn’t yet had the external calamities that suggested a problem: no drunk driving citations, crashed marriages, employment woes. The same year I had a routine physical with a male internist who was less benevolent and more obtuse. When he asked me how much I drank, I told him about four drinks a night, not yet aware that the medical profession’s rule of thumb, if a patient’s consumption seemed problematic, was to double whatever quantity the patient confessed. “You’ll want to be careful with that,” he said, refusing to look me in the eye. “There’s nothing more unbecoming than a young lady who drinks too much.”
Such idiocies only fueled my intake. I was in my late twenties by then, a veteran of the counterculture and the women’s movement, and I clung to the belief that my drinking was part of the sine qua non of a new day—it was how women like me functioned in the world; it was an anesthetic for high-strung sensitivity and a lubricant for creativity. The alternative truth was far grimmer. Alcoholics—a word I couldn’t even think of without shame and terror—were broken people who had drunk themselves into a corner, and the only way out for them was to give up the drink. That was unthinkable to me, a gray, gray room without any highs or relief or even change, and so I clung for years to what I believed was the border between alcoholism and drinking to excess. Every time I voiced my fears it was in the guise of humor, or machismo, or nonchalant rebellion. “I’m afraid that if I stopped drinking, I wouldn’t be interesting anymore,” I said offhandedly to a friend in Austin, an RN whose father had died of alcoholism after sitting in a chair surrounded by beer cans for decades. “Don’t be so sure,” she told me. “Day in and day out, boring is where all alcoholics are headed.”
No one whose first allegiance is to the source of the problem can hear such warnings, at least not until they’ve dragged themselves through a few miles of broken glass. Help in its most benign and unthreatening form—if there is even such a thing for an alcoholic—wasn’t exactly beating down the door; if it had, I’d probably have moved out in the middle of the night. I didn’t want help; I wanted reassurance. Which is to say that I wanted the consolation, however transient or artificial, that I would be able to drink forever and get away with it. It’s like the old joke about the guy on the desert island with the genie who offers him two wishes. The guy asks for a bottle of beer. The genie instantly produces, and tells the man that the bottle will never be empty and will always be cold, and that he still has one more wish. Just to be sure, the man tells the genie, you’d better give me another one.
WHEN I WAS STILL young and brave enough to crave adventure, I came to the East Coast. I had been an adult the first time I’d ever set foot in New York, a few years earlier, and the city had offered the usual elixir. I walked eighty blocks, from the Guggenheim Museum to Greenwich Village, in a daze of happiness. I stood on a corner amid whirling snow and fleets of cabs and all the other pop culture icons that I had grown up seeing on movie and TV screens; the idea that these things were real—that you could walk into this luminous scene and become a part of it—was humbling and life-altering. I went to the Museum of Modern Art, where Picasso’s Guernica was still housed, and I had to hang on to the railing when I turned on the stairs and saw it for the first time. However sophisticated I deemed myself to be, I had grown up with wheat fields and suburbs as the visual constant, with art as something that mostly belonged in books. Being in Manhattan was like running headlong toward your own life, or finding out you could fly. To turn away from it would have seemed the failure of a chance not taken.
Cambridge had its own gorgeous, if more reserved, version of seduction. On my first trip there I had gone to the Orson Welles Cinema, with its arty documentaries and cappuccino machine, and I’d wandered through Harvard Yard in a battered leather jacket, trying to pass as a local—sensing, I think, that I had found a place far greater and more consuming than the confines of my own sad heart. Maybe this is a common perception of youth, holding back fear with exhilaration. But I look back now and see myself as shadows bumping into light. The light was trying its d
amnedest to win, and part of the plan, I believed, was to get out of Texas.
THAT FIRST SUMMER in New England, I lived in a sprawling three-story house with six other people. The household included a physician, a physicist, a dancer, and a couple of puppet makers, and somehow this glamorous cast found me exotic—partly, I feel sure, because of the hard-drinking image I was still trying to pull off. I had the boots and macho countenance and two bottles of whiskey I kept in brown bags on a closet shelf, and my housemates seemed amused by the drawling Texan who had invaded their genteel counterculture. My closest friend in the house was Jackie, the dancer, who attired herself for a normal outing in faux leopard hats and pink elbow gloves, and each evening at the dinner table would begin the recitation of her day by saying, “First, I got up!” We adored each other—she was the revolutionary Dr. Joyce Brothers to my tragic heroine—and one afternoon, the day after a summer party at the house, we were sprawled in the backyard, comparing notes. I had a worse hangover than usual, and in a moment of candor, said so. Besides being a dancer and an eccentric, Jackie was also an RN; she had worked in the trenches of the medical field and seen the psychic casualties of the sixties and seventies. We were lying next to each other with our eyes closed—the peer-analytic position—and out of the blue she said, “Are you an alcoholic?”
She might as well have been asking if I were a Pisces, the question was so gentle. And I was so surprised that I answered honestly. “I don’t know,” I told her. “I know that I’m psychologically addicted.”
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