by Susan Juby
NICE RECOVERY
ALSO BY SUSAN JUBY
Alice, I Think
Miss Smithers
Alice MacLeod: Realist at Last
Another Kind of Cowboy
Getting the Girl: A Guide to Private Investigation,
Surveillance and Cookery
Nice Recovery
Susan Juby
VIKING CANADA
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First published 2010
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Copyright © Susan Juby, 2010
Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists
94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6
Excerpts from The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited by George E. Vaillant, pages 22, 263, 268, reprinted by permission of the publisher, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, copyright © 1983, 1995 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Excerpt from Tweak: Growing up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff reprinted with the permission of Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division. Copyright © 2008 Nicholas Sheff.
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Juby, Susan, 1969–
Nice recovery / Susan Juby.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-670-06917-0
1.Juby, Susan, 1969–. 2. Recovering alcoholics—Canada—Biography.
3. Recovering addicts—Canada—Biography. 4. Authors, Canadian
(English)—21st century—Biography. I. Title.
PS8569.U324Z472 2010 C813’.6 C2009-907030-8
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For everyone who has ever tried, and failed,
to learn to drink like a grown-up
“Recovery is for quitters.”
—overheard in meeting
P r e f a c e
ADDICTION MEMOIRS have an odd reputation, and I find myself a little embarrassed to be writing one. Not because I am ashamed of being an alcoholic, or because fabulists have given the genre a bad name, but because there are a few things that make them tricky. So before I begin to tell you the story of my downfall, which was not of the epic but rather the badly bruising variety, I will state outright just how much truth and accuracy you can expect herein.
Just because I was a teenage alcoholic and have been in recovery for many years doesn’t give me the right to tell anyone else’s private business. That means that I’ve changed other people’s names and details of their stories and combined or disguised their identities to protect their privacy. Also, this book is not about my family. It’s not my job to go embarrassing them. I’ve done enough of that already.
Some timelines and specifics may be inaccurate in my stories and those of others. This is because I’m writing about a period during which I and my subjects spent considerable time in a blackout. It surprises me that people go to addiction memoirs looking for accuracy. It’s like going to the Amnesia Society looking for detailed family histories. I’m also highly suspicious of any addiction memoir that describes in minute detail exactly what happened when. Addicts and alcoholics are notorious fabricators. Just be aware. In short, you might want to look to memoirs of teetotalling genealogists with photographic memories if perfect recall and accuracy is your bag.
Most twelve-step programs are based on a principle of anonymity. That means that members do not break their anonymity at the level of press, radio, and film. Or books. My discussion about my (or others’) membership in any self-help programs will be kept general to respect these traditions. This book touches on twelve-step programs and what they entail, but if you want more information, each program has its own literature. It’s very useful stuff, and if you’re interested, I encourage you to read it.
What you can count on being accurate is the general trajectory of my drinking and using career (determinedly downward) and how that affected every part of my life when I wasn’t drinking. I have invented no dead friends, possible homicides, or trips to Turkish prisons (or Turkish baths, for that matter).
The sad truth is that, as I think about embarking on this book, I worry about not being hard-core enough. This is not uncommon. Some people in recovery worry about that sort of thing a lot. Until they get over it. I was never a Blood or a Crip or a full patch member of the Hells Angels. Nor was I homeless or a prostitute. I did not use needles except to sew. I did, however, cheat extensively on my eye exam in an attempt to get cute reading glasses and consistently told the dentist that I flossed when I didn’t. This is the sort of person you are dealing with. Some of the profiles of young people in recovery include more crime and street involvement. The reality is that it’s all the same. If you scratch the surface of any alcoholic or addict, underneath the veneer we seem to have the same busted equipment for dealing with life. When we let go of our illusions, our denial, and our love affair with our substance of choice, many of us feel like brittle shells constructed of equal parts fear, self-loathing, and self-obsession. Whether a person is addicted to alcohol, pot, crystal meth, cocaine, or heroin, or most likely some combination of these, there always seems to be a gaping hole where the sense of self should be.
I and the people I spoke with for this book know what it is to be beaten within an inch of your life by an addiction, to see your waking hours filled with anxiety and obsession and to have an already tenuous self-esteem obliterated by your own self-destructive behaviour.
The other thing we know is what it’s like to sober up as a young person (in my case, at twenty) and to stay sober over the long haul, a task that requires faith, courage, and epic quantities of assistance; it is a journey as fascinating as any a person can take.
The newly sober, especially those who are young, often resign themselves to lives of colourless monotony. It turns out that while the highs and lows aren’t quite so reminiscent of The Perfect Storm, there is also less degradation and pain involved in being sober. It’s a completely involving journey with limitless nuance and, best of all, possibility for actual and profound change.
If telling these stories about addiction and recovery helps one person,
it will have been worth it. Just please don’t sic the accuracy police on me. I’ve done the best I can with the tattered remnants of my abused memory.
I remember enough.
p a r t I
Drinky Pants
1
Hate to Be You If I Were Me
I SOMETIMES IMAGINE my pre-drinking personality as a rich field just waiting for some mind-altering substance to come along so that my alcoholic self could sprout and flourish. But in my case it wasn’t the first drink that took root. This was a bit disappointing, at least from a storytelling perspective, because when you enter recovery for alcoholism and/or drug addiction, everyone wants to know about your first drink. It’s supposed to be spectacular and set the stage for the complete wreck you later became. In an ideal war story, the first drink should end with you falling down, throwing up, and, if at all possible, in prison for an armed robbery and attempted kidnapping committed during a blackout.
Unfortunately, I only dimly remember my first drink. This fits with the fact that I can’t remember most of my childhood. When I tell my story, I usually just pick an early drinking experience that illustrates the fact that right from the beginning I had an unusual (by which I mean unusually enthusiastic and dramatic) reaction to alcohol. But when I really think about it, I recall two first drinks.
I took my first drink at a wedding. I was eight or nine. The wedding was held outdoors in the country and was one of those all-day affairs that slowly disintegrate into social anarchy and moral dissolution. The wedding started at eleven in the morning, and by nightfall there was no one really paying attention to us kids. We marauded around like a group of short bandits with severe attention deficit disorder who couldn’t decide what to steal first. The freedom was heady and a little dizzying.
We went charging past one of the guests’ cars, an enormous panelled station wagon, and I noticed a pair of brown leather dress shoes protruding from underneath the front bumper. The shoes were attached to the feet of one of the guests at the wedding party. Contrary to appearances, he was neither working on the undercarriage of the car nor dead. He’d chosen that somewhat curious location to take a nap.
“Is he okay?” asked one of the kids.
“Sure. That’s Mr. Ronson,” said my cousin.
“What’s he doing under the car?” asked the first, who was not a blood relative. Anyone from our genetic line knew exactly what the man was doing under the car.
“He’s passed out,” explained another of my cousins, with an air of infinite, unflappable world-weariness.
I was impressed with Mr. Ronson’s resting place. There was something so final about it. Nothing was going to disturb him, unless of course someone started the car and ran him over. Mr. Ronson probably wasn’t the drunkest person at the wedding, but he appeared to be the most peaceful. I’d already been in plenty of situations, especially social ones, that made me want to retreat under a car. It seemed that you needed to be an intoxicated adult to actually do it.
“Should we tell someone?” I asked.
“Nah,” said one of the older kids. “He’s happy where he is. Let’s go get ourselves a drink.”
The bartender originally stationed in the bar tent had disappeared some time ago and the rest of the adult party-goers who hadn’t gone home or passed out had disappeared into the still, sultry night to talk and drink in little groups.
The tables in what had been the dining tent were covered with empty bottles and glasses. The plastic tablecloths were crusted with melted wax from the candles that had been jammed into Chianti bottles to lend a little class to the event.
“Here,” said one of the older kids. He handed me a half-full wineglass.
I inspected it carefully.
“Go ahead. There aren’t any butts in it.”
The other kids, ranging in age from seven to twelve, stood watching solemnly. I had no real desire to try drinking, perhaps because of the spectacular results I’d seen it produce in some of the adults around me. But something about the restful aspect of those shoes poking out from under the car had captured my imagination.
I raised the glass to my lips and took a sip of wine, trying to ignore the lipstick marks on the rim. My eyes watered and my stomach churned as I drank it down.
“Cheers!” said one of the older kids. He poured the dregs from several glasses into one. He took a powerful swig and I could see him struggling not to vomit.
And that was it. My first drink, after which nothing much happened.
LUCKILY FOR STORYTELLING PURPOSES, the second drink had a better arc to it. Let me set the stage. As I moved out of childhood into adolescence, I was disappointed to discover that I wasn’t socially gifted. This can be explained by a few crucial factors. First, I spent an inordinate amount of time wandering around in swamps imagining that I was a young, female Gerald Durrell. Second, as a kid I was happy to chat with anyone and tell them, in more detail than was wise or necessary, what I thought about almost any topic. Third, I expected the best of people.
In spite of the fact that I was socially delayed, I had some friends. Up the hill from our house lived a family with three young girls, one of whom was my age. At home I had three brothers. The oldest was five years my senior, the younger were six and seven years my junior, and I felt a bit marooned between them. My lack of female siblings caused me to romanticize the notion of sisterhood to a nearly pathological degree. I was obsessed with Little Women, and as soon as I met the sisters up the hill, I wanted to spend every moment possible at their house, pretending I was one of them. Giselle, Christina, and Denise’s commitment to the world of makebelieve was absolute. I was a hardbitten realist in comparison. They played elaborate games, some of which took entire days, including the Hungarian Bulgarian Good Guy Dance Contest, which involved making up routines to suit songs on their Mellow Moments eight-track while wearing unfortunately hued leotards. They’d devised a kidnapping game that involved sending elaborate ransom notes in a made-up language, loosely based on the sounds made by their chickens, and they did death-defying routines on a stick and rope. These performances were scored using the Olympic system.
Giselle, Christina, and Denise and their lovely French-Canadian mother welcomed me into their family. Giselle, who was my age, was like a charitable foundation of one. She very kindly overlooked the bossy and annoying qualities that caused other kids my age to avoid me. I loved the girls’ intensely social world but was also aware of being the extra, the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other.
When I wasn’t peering into mud puddles in a swamp, lecturing adults and other kids on my opinions, or “chicken talking” with Giselle and her sisters, I read with the focus of someone breathing through a straw. My reading wasn’t confined to books about sisters. I read anything I could get my hands on.
Looking back, I’d have to say that it may have been a mistake to use books as a guide to life. This is because books misled me about a few things. Thanks to warm-hearted stories like Anne of Green Gables, I expected to encounter kindred spirits on every corner, as well as gruff but caring old people. Rather than ridding the world of gritty books, book-banning advocates should pay more attention to banning sweet books that set up false expectations. More Brothers Grimm, less Trixie Belden!
Books hoodwinked me into believing a set of lies about what was and was not important in life. In books and in my family, having a good vocabulary was crucially important. When I went to school it turned out to be a serious liability. In books a lack of concern about clothes and personal appearance showed solid character. In school such unconcern spelled social disaster. In books knowing a lot about a lot of things, such as breeds of horses and varieties of pond scum, was admirable and likely to be rewarded. At school it pretty much guaranteed that everyone would think you were a show-off and a bore and would shun you. In books people were mostly nice, and the ones who weren’t nice were easy to spot. In school villains were everywhere and they were well disguised.
Had it not been for the society
of Giselle and her sisters, I would have been completely friendless. And the more trouble I had with people, other than Giselle and her sisters, the more twisted my personality got. I seemed to be afflicted with both shyness and overbearing confidence, a uniquely loathsome combination. This, plus a haircut that rendered my gender indeterminate, caused most would-be peers to avoid me. The rest used me to work out their aggressions. The more I was bullied at school, the more my paranoia, self-consciousness, and self-centredness grew. In other words, my field grew ever more fertile. A few other hapless kids and I rotated in and out of the uncoveted position of “least popular.” Even a short-lived transfer into Catholic school didn’t help.
By the time I hit middle school, I was suffering from a case of school-induced post-traumatic stress disorder and felt nothing but despair about the future. For the first seven years of school, I’d tried to tell myself that every little cruelty or betrayal or instance of meanness was a mistake. But by the time I started middle school I was convinced: other people sucked and so, more importantly, did I. What I learned from kindergarten through grade six is that everything I’d thought I had going for me was, in fact, a handicap. By grade seven I knew that the only solution was to change everything.
The old blues guy Robert Johnson is said to have stood at the crossroads and sold his soul to the devil. Others have made similar pacts in a variety of locations, such as at the bedside of their first-born. If the devil had come strolling by our house the morning before I started grade seven at Chandler Park Middle School, I’d have hit him with as many offers as a used SUV dealer in a gas crisis. “My first-born? YOURS!” “That extra kidney I’ve got kicking around? TAKE IT!” But the devil didn’t stop by, unless he was disguised as one of the mean girls who cruised the hallways like bull sharks. I was going to have to be the author and engineer of my own personal revolution.
