White Out

by Michael W Clune

  We talked about proper eating habits, quitting smoking, exercise. Cash showed me how to do a concentration curl, and explained what tendonitis is. He explained why it’s not good to exercise too much. He explained that good things are only good if they last. An exercise, for example, is good only if you can do it in such a way that you can keep doing it for the rest of your life. He demonstrated, curling the forty-five-pound dumbbell slowly up.

  “Twelve reps,” he said through gritted teeth. “Three sets. Three days a week.”

  He didn’t tell me everything. I noticed that his shoes were always lined up in a peculiar way. The pairs of shoes made a kind of lightning-bolt shape. One time I accidently kicked a pair over on my way to the bathroom. He didn’t say anything, but when I got out of the bathroom they were lined up again.

  The spring turned into summer. Cash lived downtown, west of the Loop. There were people around during the day, but it got kind of deserted at night. It was an area in transition. The old projects had been torn down but the new condo buildings hadn’t gone up yet. When we walked the streets near his apartment talking about exercise and movies, there were maybe four or five other people around. A pretty girl jogging, two homeless men, and us. Everyone smiled at each other.

  Sometimes the sun would set when we were walking. Cash, two homeless men, me, a girl jogging. We all smiled at each other. I smiled at them like I knew what it was like, and they smiled back the same at me. It was the middle of the summer in an empty corner of the city. A place outside the world. In that place, where no one gets out, it was safe to change places with anyone.

  For example, during the days Cash and I would sometimes play tennis. We’d shout little jokes back and forth as we played, and after a while we’d fall silent, leaping and lunging around the court. I’d pretend to be a famous tennis player, a genius who’d perfected a single shot. I’d give interviews in my head as I watched the ball come and go. Sometimes I’d also reflect on how kind I was—what a great tennis player, so kind to children, so fond of animals. Which was odd because kindness was never ordinarily a quality I’d dwell on in my fantasies about myself. That’s when I knew my thoughts had gotten mixed up with Cash’s. He lunged after the ball on the other side of the net.

  Afterward we’d eat barbeque. Some days we’d eat Thai. One day Cash said it was a good thing that my parents were letting me stay at their house for the summer and that I didn’t have to get a job for a while. He said he thought I’d commit suicide if I had to get a job.

  I disagreed. I felt that now that I was clean I could handle anything. But I remembered how time felt on that job site. Job time. I remembered it in my bones. The reason I was going back to grad school was so that I wouldn’t have to do manual labor, I told him. He said he thought that was a good idea. Even though he didn’t like reading and writing so much—in fact he despised intellectuals as cowards—he thought on balance it was a good idea, and planned to apply to grad school himself in the fall.

  We went to lots of movies. One was about a castle and a village troubled by dragon attacks. You see movies like that on the shelves at the video store and think they never came out in theaters. But they did, and we saw them. Another movie was about an executive who was dying. The final scene in the hospital was nearly whited out with bright light coming in from the windows. We left strangely exalted. Another movie was about code breakers in World War II. Another was about gangsters.

  While we were waiting for the film about dragons to start I heard a wonderfully happy song. The singer’s voice was heavily processed and there were only four words in it: “Since I Left You,” over and over, beautifully. The thing I like best about songs is when the voice is electronically processed. A computer that makes the voice go much higher than is possible in life, for example. “Since I Left You.” The voice stands on the human being as on a diving board. Just the tips of its toes, and it’s gone…

  I bought the CD and played “Since I Left You” when I exercised. I imagined it was about drugs. I imagined it was about Cat. About Eva. About Funboy. About Dom. I’d put on my headphones, put the CD on shuffle, and run on the treadmill just waiting for the one song. Sometimes it would come on around the three-mile mark, when the initial tiredness in my legs had burned off and my chest was burning and I’d smile with my face breaking. Every day I’d smile once like that. Those smiles would come into the world wet with the sweat on my face. New, enormous, shapeless. Going everywhere, like babies.

  Afterward I’d walk outside on the grass talking with my sponsor on the phone maybe or talking with my little half brother. My first clean summer. It’s strange; those days don’t stick in memory very well. And all the days that come after hardly stick at all. The bits in this book that take place after I got clean—like the part about moving to Florida, for example—were written right after the event. Otherwise I’m not so sure I’d remember them. In the summer of 2002, the river of my memory was emptying into a delta. I walked around with it falling all around me, falling through the sunshine. When it got dark, Cash and I went for a walk or went to see movies.

  Once he said it was too bad he was a convicted felon because it would be nice to own a gun. He felt bad because there were some things in life that weren’t worth going through, and if you didn’t have a gun you’d probably end up having to go through them. Like what, I asked him. Like diarrhea, he said. Like chronic, constant diarrhea. The kind where you have terrible cramps and moan out loud, the food-poisoning kind. It just wouldn’t be worth it to him, he said. It was just plain old-fashioned good sense, he said, to have a gun.

  I went back to court sometime in July and they had the papers verifying that I’d completed all the conditions for first-time drug offenders to get the felony expunged. They said I could legally say on job forms that I had never been convicted of a felony. What did I care, the last thing I wanted was a fucking job, I told Cash. Yeah but you can get a gun, he said. For the diarrhea. When the really bad diarrhea comes, a gun is the only toilet paper that works.

  One day, just before it was time for me to go back to Baltimore and grad school, Cash and I decided to drive through the suburbs where we’d grown up. It was forty minutes by car from Cash’s apartment in the city. North of Chicago. West of the fashionable North Shore. East of the cornfields. South of the dead shapes of Kenosha. In the center of our first maps. Libertyville, Wauconda, Lake Zurich, Mundelein.

  First we drove around the edges. The high school we’d gone to. The long straight roads where we had invented or discovered the idea of being high. The little stores with flat roofs that sold bottles of Coca-Cola.

  Then we drove through the heart. In three slashes. The house off Route 12. The house off Route 176. And the forest preserve. And that was it. We left it there, bloodless, with nothing coming out of the holes we’d driven through it, and we left it lying there.

  Maybe it wasn’t a heart but an old, sprung trap. There’s no way to pry it back open. The iron teeth, rusted with old blood, locked in a dead smile, harmless forever.

  EPILOGUE

  I’ve been clean for over a decade. The habits I formed in early recovery are like a machine. The machine’s still running. I meditate, go to NA meetings, don’t pick it up so it won’t get in me, exercise. At night I make a list of stuff I have to do tomorrow. I don’t think about the future.

  Thanks to the machine, I’ve arrived at a good future without having to think about it. I live in a nice house in a nice suburb with my wife. My academic career has gone pretty well. I finished my dissertation in 2006, managed to get some good jobs in a famously crappy academic job market. Moved from Michigan to Florida. Now I’m at a great university in Ohio. I’ve published a couple academic books that have been well received. We have two nice dogs.

  The machine’s still running. It’s no jet engine, but it works. The recovery engine: a makeshift contraption of group love, meditation, and common sense. Lashed together and set going. It works. From the outside it might look a little rusty, but once you stra
p your life to it, it’ll pull you out of death and into good futures.

  The problem is that not every addict can strap their life to it.

  At first it seemed like every month I’d hear about another one of my old friends dying or getting locked up. Now most of them are gone. But I still get messages from the world of terminal addiction. I just heard Cash went away on a weapons charge. Last year a guy I used to go to NA meetings with committed suicide. The year before that a girl I knew in college overdosed. It’s not unusual. The statistics are murky, but it’s clear that many addicts never experience sustained recovery. The recovery machine works. But for one reason or another, many addicts can’t seem to hook themselves up to it. It’s easy to blame those who can’t. To say that Cash, for example, is just too pigheaded. Or allergic to things spiritual. Or weak. Or lazy. But the truth is he isn’t any of those things. At least not any more than I was. The truth is that no one really knows why our makeshift recovery machine works for some and doesn’t work for others.

  One day there will probably be a cure. We’re still in the early days of addiction science. One day people might look back at us and wonder what the hell we were doing with our meetings and slogans. One day there could be a treatment that works not just for 10 percent of addicts or for 50 percent, but for everyone.

  Maybe they’ll even have a vaccine, like for polio. Maybe they’ll be able to tell if you’ve got the gene that makes you susceptible to the lure of that never-fading first time. And if you do, they’ll give you a nice shot of permanent forgetfulness when you’re a baby. People of the future will never have to hit bottom. They’ll never have to kick in jail. Never have to lose their friends, their minds, their lives.

  I hope we find a truly effective treatment soon. Thousands of smart people around the world are working on it. Dozens of research institutions, treatment facilities, government agencies. Progress comes slowly, incrementally. But there are hopeful signs.

  In the meantime, we work with what we have. And I’m profoundly grateful for it. My daily life is good. I’m totally hooked into the recovery program. Most days I don’t dwell on the problem. But when a kid I’m sponsoring relapses, when my niece just can’t get clean, when I think about the faces that show up once to an NA meeting and never again, then I know that the cure that will replace our creaky recovery machine can’t come soon enough.

  But I have to admit there’s something about the machine, something about the disease itself that I’ll miss.

  The addicts of the future, the addicts who have immediate 100 percent effective treatment, will be better off than we are. There’s no doubt about it. But won’t they lose something too? Along with all the gains, won’t humanity lose something when the disease is eradicated? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a sadist. Of course I want a cure. But when they empty out the bathwater of addiction and recovery, there might be a little bit of baby that goes out too.

  There’s a story by Franz Kafka that captures what I’m trying to say. The story’s about a prison. In the prison, they have a very old machine. It’s a baroque, makeshift affair of needles, knives, and wires. When a convict is sentenced to death, they strap him to it. The machine very slowly carves the convict’s sentence into his skin. It takes hours. It’s agonizing. But at the very end, just before he dies, a look of total comprehension, total ecstasy, flashes across his face. To the prison guards, it looks as if the dying convict has been granted a glimpse of Eternal Truth.

  The prison is in a distant, backward part of the country. One day an official arrives from the capital. He’s educated in modern theories, a believer in scientific methods of rehabilitation. He’s absolutely disgusted by the torture machine. It’s barbaric! Inhumane! He orders it dismantled immediately. And of course, reading the story, we want the machine dismantled too. We’re not sadists. Get rid of that medieval torture device!

  But still, that look on the dying convict’s face…

  Perhaps one day, the book you’ve just read will tell the same kind of story as Kafka’s tale. Addiction and recovery. A process where you have to hit a total bottom until you become willing to accept a spiritual therapy that works for only a fraction of us. In the future this might look like Kafka’s machine: baroque, superstitious, makeshift, even barbaric. Right now this recovery machine is all we have—and it works. It saved my life. It saves lives every day. And it gave me something else. Like Kafka’s convict, once my sentence had been carved into me, I received a glimpse of eternity.

  But still we must hope that someday there will be a more effective, more efficient cure for addiction. The misery of the descent into addictive hell will be history. The slow, painstaking, creaky trip back up on the makeshift engine of recovery, that’ll be history too. Tens of millions of lives will be saved. Billions of dollars.

  And that glimpse of timelessness, that little chip of immortality that lies at the center of the disease and recovery—the endlessness of my first time, the endlessness I discovered meditating in my parents’ basement—that’ll be history too.

  Something in a book. Something to wonder about.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael W. Clune is an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University and is the author of scholarly books on literature and science published by Cambridge University Press and Stanford University Press.

  Hazelden, a national nonprofit organization founded in 1949, helps people reclaim their lives from the disease of addiction. Built on decades of knowledge and experience, Hazelden offers a comprehensive approach to addiction that addresses the full range of patient, family, and professional needs, including treatment and continuing care for youth and adults, research, higher learning, public education and advocacy, and publishing.

  A life of recovery is lived “one day at a time.” Hazelden publications, both educational and inspirational, support and strengthen lifelong recovery. In 1954, Hazelden published Twenty-Four Hours a Day, the first daily meditation book for recovering alcoholics, and Hazelden continues to publish works to inspire and guide individuals in treatment and recovery, and their loved ones. Professionals who work to prevent and treat addiction also turn to Hazelden for evidence-based curricula, informational materials, and videos for use in schools, treatment programs, and correctional programs.

  Through published works, Hazelden extends the reach of hope, encouragement, help, and support to individuals, families, and communities affected by addiction and related issues.

  For questions about Hazelden publications, please call 800-328-9000 or visit us online at hazelden.org/bookstore.