“Yes, they do,” he said. He pointed to the alligator’s dyed green fur.
“Yes, but that’s not an alligator,” I said.
“It looks like an alligator,” he said.
“But it’s not,” I responded.
“Then what do you call it?” he asked.
“We should get going, Ryan,” I said.
“What is it called?” he persisted.
“Well, we call it an alligator. But we don’t believe it.”
I tried to teach Cash some things too.
“You know, Cash,” I said one day when we were having coffee. “You should stop smoking pot.”
“I don’t have a problem with pot,” he said.
“Then why don’t you stop smoking it?”
“Later,” he said.
“Now!” I said.
“Look, Mike.” He sighed. “I know you’ve stopped using heroin, and you stopped using everything else because you think it’ll put you back on dope, and I think that’s great for you. You’re doing a lot better. Just keep doing what they tell you; it’s working for you. But stay away from me with that bullshit. My problem was with alcohol, and pot helps keep me sober.”
“You know how insane that sounds, Cash? The fact is that—”
“Shove those treatment center facts, man. I’ve been sober and doing good for three years and you were strung out six weeks ago, so chill.”
“What, so you think that recovery is just bullshit? That everyone relapses?” My voice went up an octave and I felt a little panicky.
“No, Mike. Everything is going to be just fine,” Cash said cheerfully.
The fact was that Cash taught me a lot more than I could teach him. He taught me some good habits. My only habits were taking Ryan to Chimpy’s and eating tuna fish every day at Panera. That left me with about eleven hours of blank air to process. It didn’t bother me; I was collecting outside moments. Like the chair and crow at the treatment center, the cloud on the plane, a couple others. I tried to explain to Cash.
“Does that kind of thing happen every day?” he asked.
“Well, no, but it’s like a promise of—”
“You need something that happens every day.”
He was right. I needed something that happened every day. You don’t forget yourself all at once, I reminded myself. The mercury in the tuna helps, but it’s not enough. You must make forgetfulness into a habit. Like a waterwheel that continually pours forgetfulness over your life.
I set a few waterwheels going. I began to exercise. My father had a treadmill in the large open space in the basement outside my bedroom, and I started using it. I put on headphones and played trance music and ran and sweated and in the ghost light I imagined I was the president. I had never really gone in for regular exercise. It bored me to death, to be honest. The trance music made the running bearable, and imagining I was the president for some reason made the trance music seem less…feminine. If that’s the right word. Sometimes I had to trick myself to get me under the waterwheels of my new habits.
My exercise habit was so successful I started some others. I started doing a little regular work on my dissertation. I got into the habit of going to NA meetings. I brushed my teeth regularly. I checked my email. I had tuna for lunch and something else for dinner and two snacks. Sometimes I had tuna for dinner too. I got into the habit of watching a little TV before bed.
Habits are healthy. I never really had any before. Not any real ones. Sometimes people call drug dependency a habit, but this is misleading. That’s really an antihabit. It isolates you from things, where a real habit marries you to things. If I am a body, a habit is like a room containing my body and a bunch of other things. Outside things. A treadmill, a TV, books, snow, dayghosts, relatives, dinosaurs, mercury, an alligator, a toothbrush, a car. The habit picks us up and whirls us together like a tornado. A cartoon tornado. It doesn’t hurt.
Habits are like reunion parties for me and my favorite things that happen every day. Drunken reunion parties where people go home wearing pieces of other people’s clothes. A bit of the treadmill, part of the dayghost, and a trance beat stuck to me as I took a shower and headed out to the NA meeting. After the meeting, a few new faces and some old NA phrases lined the tunnel of my driving habit, where stars, and trees, and a few houses and road signs circled around my bedtime television habit. When I came through the television, washed clean in the way the world looks—the television colors, the satellite weather—I was ready for bed. Sleep.
And in all my dreams the white thing posed in its own light. The first time, the white out. Like a pyramid, it rose anciently above the white sand. The clouds above Chip’s roof circled on its limestone face. I knelt in the white dust and a voice whispered to me: You are not your habits. You are not what you look like. You are not what you do. You are not what you think or feel or touch or forget. You are what you want.
Those dreams—and I have them still, occasionally—cured me almost entirely of curiosity about myself. “You are what you want.” Ugh. I woke up running from that voice. Who I am is not something I need to know. “You are what you want.” Not that I’m satisfied with that answer, mind you. I’m not. But I know no way of answering that question that satisfies. The questioner is insatiable. A restless, reckless, endless desire drives the questioning. Who am I? Who am I? But who am I really? It’s best just to forget it.
Of course sometimes, like the day of the chair and the crow, something will happen to stir it up. Ah, you say to yourself. Oh. That’s odd. This crow is inside me? Who am I, anyway? Who am I really?
Just let it go. Soon, forgetting to ask the question becomes a habit. Take the average oldster, for example. The question could never occur to her. Her little dog could spontaneously combust, her car could turn into a bird. She’d wonder about the dog or the car, not about the self. And who could blame her? What cop, arriving on the scene to a pile of ash where the poodle used to be, would look at the nice old lady and say: “Who are you? No, not your name, I know that. I mean who are you really?”
The fact is, who I am, who anyone is, isn’t a very important question. You can’t possibly get a straight answer to it, for one thing. And if you do (“I’m half Irish, a quarter Scottish, and a quarter English”), you’re really asking about something else. If you’re satisfied with the answer, you’re not asking the question right. Who am I? It isn’t really a question. Questions have answers. Who am I? It’s more like a religion. An old religion, left over from another time. A time when there was nothing to do, maybe.
And I’m interested in doing, in action. I’m active. I could care less about the who of my existence. (Though it’s not what I have, not what I lost, not what I look like, it’s not what I want, it’s not what I remember, it’s not what I forget.) Who I am has little to do with addiction and recovery. Who I am isn’t the first thing I need to know to get better, it’s maybe the last thing. Who am I?
To be honest, it’s this writing that brings it up. Here where there’s nothing to hang on to, the question occurs. Who am I? Something from an old religion. And writing is an old technology. Writing is an aid to memory. An ancient technology for remembering. And it keeps remembering. It remembers in the dark. It works back to the moment of your birth and keeps going. It remembers the holy shapes of old religions in the story of your life, for example.
Who am I? The question keeps coming up in this writing. I want to stop it. I could stop it if I really wanted. Who am I? Like a fire, like this book is on fire. Who am I? The smoke curls around Eva’s face, around the white tops, around Cash, Funboy, Baltimore, Chicago…
“You are what you want,” dope whispered in my dreams. I ignored my dreams and cultivated habits. February turned into March. Huge open days, and when it snowed the snow was hard like sand. I’d stand outside my father’s house smoking, licking tea from the little slit of a Starbucks cup top. Five or six grains of snow blew around on the concrete.
I went to court and met my lawyer outside the
courtroom. He explained he’d gotten me enrolled in a program for people accused of drug felonies for the first time in the city of Chicago. It was called Drug Court for short. I had to go to a courthouse once a week for four hours for six weeks to listen to drug education lectures, and if I stayed in the state and didn’t get arrested and passed regular urine tests, I wouldn’t be convicted of the felony. The arrest would be expunged from my records. I could answer no to all the felony questions on employment forms. I thought it was ridiculous that simple possession should be a felony anyway, but I had to admit that, all in all, getting arrested seemed to be turning out for the best.
I got a sponsor in NA. His name was Ryan. He’d been clean for nine months, was a year older than me, and was a successful professional poker player.
“Stay clean, get money,” he told me. “Stay clean, get money.”
After a few months his rising card career carried him out West, where I hear he’s still clean and thriving. But before he left he gave me some good advice. When I got the heroin itch and just couldn’t take it I’d call him and he’d pick up the phone and cut me off and say: “Don’t pick it up, and it won’t get in you.”
That was his advice. Don’t put the heroin in you, and the heroin won’t get in you. The brilliance of this advice shines only for addicts. To a normal person, it’s redundant. To an addict, it’s revelation. Don’t pick it up, and it won’t get in you. Revelation. Because you walk around paranoid. You’re sure that somehow the dope will just get in you. How? Who knows? It just gets in you. That’s your whole experience. You write “Don’t Do Dope!” notes and leave them around the apartment, and the next day, or later that same day, you’re high, writing some new ones. You ask yourself how, and there’s no answer. The dope just got in you.
For example, I remember the long narrow streets home from Dr. Hayes’s detox in Baltimore. I’d have been clean for one day, driving my car home with some meds for the withdrawals. Dedicated to kicking. Convinced. The narrow road went straight. The sidewalks were deserted, but there was a flutter of movement. What? Nothing. But the dope was hiding behind the streetlights. It was hiding in the white sky. When I got to the end of the block, the right turn was missing. When I got a little further, I was high.
“If you don’t pick it up, it won’t get in youse,” Ryan said with his hoarse Chicago whistle at the end of the you. “Before you get high, youse gotta get the money. Youse gotta get in your car. Youse gotta drive to the spot. Youse gotta give the dope-boy the money. Get home. Get the dope out. Get it in you.
“That’s some steps to getting high. It don’t just happen. Every one of them things is things you can not do, and if you don’t do every one of them things, the dope can’t get in you. You will never get high.”
It sounded insane, but he was right. He was a successful poker player. The method involved giving certain areas of my life a kind of close focus. It involved knowing when to really pay attention. I’m driving in the car. OK, now close in. There’s the entrance to the highway. If I get on it going south, it goes to the dope spot. If I get on it going north, it goes home. Since I want to go home, I make a right turn and accelerate up the ramp, and pretty soon I’m at home, sober.
Another example. I’m in the restaurant by myself. Here comes the waiter. Now is the time to pay attention. What I say next will determine what I will drink with my dinner. If I say “gin,” the waiter will bring it. I will drink it. I’ll get loose and get busy and get dope and I’ll be fucked. So I pay attention. When the waiter asks the question, I say, “sparkling water.” Then I relax, life goes into soft focus again, with bubbles.
Another example. I’m in the bathroom at a friend’s. There’s the medicine cabinet. This is not the time when I relax. This is not soft-focus time. This is the time when I concentrate, focus, and don’t open the medicine cabinet door. The door doesn’t open. I don’t know what pills are in there. When I leave the bathroom I’m sober.
This wasn’t the way it used to work. Every addict knows how dope just gets in you. Dope just arranges things so that your actions are like a ball rolling down a hill, and at the bottom of the hill you’re high. But there’s a trick. There’s a secret. It seems that dope comes from everywhere and goes anywhere, that it’s omnipresent, omnipotent, a white god. But it doesn’t and it isn’t. It just seems that way. It’s like when you wake up and your room is full of music. It seems like it’s coming from everywhere. Then you realize your window is open. When you shut it the music stops. It’s like that with dope. It only seems to be everywhere. In reality, it hides in certain places, certain spots, and if you know where those spots are, you can shut the window before it gets in you.
One place dope hides is in the moment when the dope-boy asks you for your money. Another place it hides is in the turn that goes to the dope spot. Another place it hides is in Funboy. If you’re alert, and you know about the places in the world where dope hides, you can stay not getting high. The trick has two parts. The first part is to be alert when you’re passing the place where the dope is hiding. The second part is to not snatch the dope out of that place and do it. This two-part trick is called a “choice.”
“If you don’t pick it up, it won’t get in you.” That was the invention of choice for me. My life wasn’t like a ball rolling down the hill into the dope-hole anymore. I don’t want to overemphasize the power of choice. It didn’t exactly turn my life into an airplane either. It was more like a hollow ball with a little hole in it for a window and a tiny mouse inside. By leaning hard one way, the mouse can alter the direction of the roll. It’s a very sleepy mouse, and it can’t pay attention all the time. But it can learn to recognize a couple simple signs and when it sees them, to sit up and pay attention.
I don’t want you to misunderstand me. The mouse isn’t exactly Einstein. This is where Ryan and I parted ways. For example, one day I picked up a popular music magazine that featured a glowing review of a new CD by the guy Eva had been living with in New York since we broke up. I slowly ate my heart out as I read it. Where was the choice here? The mouse woke up and started leaning and leaning and then he fell asleep. I said nothing to anyone. Here was a whole other world. I didn’t know what to say.
I secretly followed the music charts and was secretly glad when the album flopped. But now I knew. Outside the world where friendly people patted me on my head and said “you didn’t get high” in happy surprised tones and fed me mercury-laced tuna was a world where hot girls kissed guys who rode foreign cars and made complicated choices with their heads while their hands moved faster. I was twenty-six. When you’re twenty-six, you need more than a sense of humor and a choice.
My habit of fantasizing that I was the president when I ran on the treadmill took on a new urgency in the face of these revelations. I was the president. The president! The trance music got louder and I ran faster. Cash called and left a message while I was running. Cat left a message. My one-twentieth-finished dissertation blinked on the monitor in my bedroom. The dayghost rippled on the wall. It was raining outside. It was springtime.
On a chilly spring evening, I stood in front of my parents’ living-room window and pressed my fingers to the glass. The sunset sky reminded me of Morocco. And when the colors hit my eyes they turned into Eva’s smile, her smell, the color of her skin. That spring, everything I’d lost found me. Eva was just one example. A famous writer once asked why, when we fall asleep, do we wake up with our own thoughts, our own memories? Why ours instead of someone else’s? But we do. And I’d been asleep for years.
When I went in from smoking I would stand at the big window in the living room for a few minutes. I’d watch the sunset before going down to my basement to watch the dayghost disappear. The sunset looked dark, almost purple. It was full of the wings of everything old coming back to me.
This book goes from Candy Land straight to Chip’s roof. From when I was six to when I was twenty-one. But that’s just the history of my dope body. And in that first post-heroin spring, my ageles
s dope body was gone. I’d traded it for a body that was like an empty hive. In the spring the missing swarms flew back through the sunset to fill it up again. Age five, age eight, age thirteen, age twenty.
“I’m part of you,” each new memory said as it flew through my eyes.
“Me too.”
“Remember me?”
Another memory. And another. Had I really lived so long?
“After a few months off dope, you’ll feel like yourself again,” the treatment center people had promised. Myself again. Age three, age nine, age seventeen. It was like inviting a few close friends for an intimate get-together and having five hundred people show up. I wanted to slip out the back.
Not that I missed the dope body. I was sick of having the kind of problems that demons have—sick to death—but the scale of the human problem was breathtaking. It took my breath away, standing in front of those colossal sunsets. Red and purple. The memory of bedtime when I was four coming back in that color. The memory of my first kiss coming back. The way my bedroom smelled when I was ten and I was sick.
Once the grip of the memory disease loosens, you are not free of the pain of memory. The pain and the memories just change. It’s not the dope memory that annihilates time, the dope world where your first time getting high is always new, always fresh in the thousandth bag of dope, the ten-thousandth. That time-eating angel or devil slept. Spring brought back my human memory.
In a human’s memory the years are clear to sight and closed to touch, like glass. The heroin memory says: You will never leave. The human memory says: You will never return. Human memory brings back what is lost along with its lostness. Its pastness.
An absolute distance shines in the beauty of human memories. The memory of me rowing my canoe with my friends, when I was eleven, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, with the…The glittering water. The water glitters supernaturally when the total distance hits it. When every second of every day of every year that has passed hits it all at once. It glitters. The eyes of my friends too. My eyes too. Never mind. I don’t know where these tears come from.
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