10
Psychology
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At noon, the aftermath of lovemaking, I was still wandering around the apartment naked, makeup smeared beneath my eyes. I messaged Sarah: Come to meeting with me. Her reply: I don’t need that stupid shit. I’d known Sarah since middle school. My father called us the interchangeable parts.Â
Just go with me. For fun. You promised you’d support me.Â
About your self-proclaimed alcoholism, she said. I assure you that in Paris I became Europeanized in that respect and recognize the puerile and puritanical attitudes that surround liquor in our country – as well as its dangers.Â
But yeah. I’ll go.
We went to Young People’s. About two hundred of us, most under thirty. A month into this thing, I’ve met many of these people at similar gatherings in every part of Seattle. I never thought I could meet so many strangers and like them so much. And, no questions asked, they would like and accept me in a way I’d never experienced.
When Sarah dropped me off afterward, George was curled up in bed. Renewed and caffeinated, I jumped on him and kissed every part of his body. I want to have a baby, I said.
That’s a first.Â
It’s overwhelming. Ever since I turned twenty-three, I felt this way.
Well, I’m not participating in that feeling right now, George said. As he stroked me, I had a vivid flashback to my first weeks at college. I found almost everything more interesting than fumbling sessions in a shared dorm room. When Sarah made love with her latest boyfriend about two feet from my head, it didn’t sound fun. You’re hurting me, she said. You’re too rough. I feel you forget me and I’m beginning to dread making love. Our room smelled of sweat.
One night when Sarah was out and I sat in bed studying and nursing a migraine, George, from my lit study group, showed up. He suggested we have sex. Do you want to take your clothes off, or should I? You, I said. My head ached beyond belief. He slipped my robe off, removed his jeans and shirt, and climbed into the narrow bed.Â
Sarah showed up. Is he staying here? Clearly, she expected my response to be no.Â
You’d better go back to your own room, I whispered.Â
Within a few weeks, George and Sarah were a couple. She moved out of our room and into his single. I ran into them everywhere.Â
I thought you were supposed to let go of resentments, George said after I recounted my feelings. Look at your part in it. He rolled over and fell asleep.
In grade school, I was convinced I was ugly. With three younger sisters oohed and ahhed over since infancy, my assignment was to be homely but smart. I didn’t want to be smart. I wanted to be liked. I prayed nightly to be the most popular girl in the school.
In seventh grade, Sarah and a girl named Candi Higgins cornered me in the restroom. They tugged at my hair and smeared color onto my cheeks and eyelids. If you would just work on yourself, you could really be cute, Sarah said.Â
When they learned my parents worked during the day and attended college classes at night, they organized a sleepover at my house. Candi brought a Mason jar filled with bourbon filched from her parents’ ample supply. After downing half the jar, I had my first blackout. That’s like a recording that ceases to record, but during that blank, you are still functioning and doing God knows what. For me God knows what was for the next two hours, I screamed at Candi, the most popular girl in the school. I hate you, I said again and again.
Candi cried, Sarah told me the next day. Her eyes were bright. You made Candi Higgins cry.
From then on, as soon as I arrived home from school, I gulped from my parents’ meager supply of cheap wine and then watered down their bottle. I stole alcohol from homes where I babysat and hid a flask in my locker at school. I was no longer afraid to walk the halls. On weekends, when my exhausted parents went to bed, I climbed out my bedroom window and headed out for parties with older kids.Â
When I was a sophomore, a guy I’d been dating invited me to senior prom. Candi and I were the only sophomores invited. You took a place that could have been a senior’s, a cheerleader told me. You should be ashamed.Â
Brian didn’t invite a senior, I said. He invited me.Â
Go, then, she said. But everyone will hate you.
My parents had no interest in proms, but their best friend, our family’s funny uncle, Dan, paid for the required hair styling, dress, and shoes. My parents disliked me dating boys my age, but they let Dan take me to movies and plays. When drunk, which was most of the time, he would kiss and grope me. I was convinced I could hold him off just as I held off Brian. Never tell anyone, Dan said. Particularly your parents. They wouldn’t understand a love like ours.
 As soon as we arrived at the prom, held on a ship moored in Seattle’s harbor, Brian ditched me. I hid in the bathroom, peering out only to see him laughing with other seniors. I rode to the after-party at Ocean Shores with Candi and her boyfriend Joel. While they made love in the car, I drank beers until I gained the courage to walk out into the ocean. Candi saw me, and Joel swam out and dragged me to shore. My dress was torn, my shoes lost. I was convinced death was the sole solution to my shame.
Rather than return home reeking, I moved into Candi’s basement. Based on books I’d loved as a child, I thought my parents would come looking for me, and then we would all be close. By then, my father was writing his master’s thesis on B.F. Skinner. Ignore bad behavior and reward the good, my father proclaimed.
For a teenager, pretty much akin to death.Â
I pursued what by then was my singular preoccupation: getting drunk. School was an afterthought. My friends and I stole and wrecked cars, shoplifted, and trashed construction sites. Even as I participated, I watched myself with horror. By the end of sophomore year, even Dan was fed up.Â
You can have a summer of fun, he said. Only he was old and said summer of kicks. You can try drugs, drink, and party all you want. Then, when school starts in the fall, you’ll have it out of your system.
Couch-surfing between friends’ houses, where parents were rarely in evidence, I felt empty and lost. One day, at Sarah’s, I found a set of watercolors. I spent the day drawing and painting, once my obsession and joy. I left my two best pieces on the counter, but when I peeked in later, the paintings were crumpled in the garbage. I wrapped myself in a sleeping bag. My own family was at our beach cabin a hundred miles away. I decided to join them even if I had to walk.
By morning, that seemed daunting, so I got drunk instead. Wandering the streets, I ran into Candi. My high was already starting to fade. Like me, Candi no longer lived at home, but in an apartment with an older half-brother. We could break into his stuff, Candi said. When we got to the apartment, two guys her brother’s age were there.
Don’t leave me alone with them, Candi said. In comparison to what she suggested about her brother and his friends, Dan’s drunken groping seemed benign. When I told them my parents were out of town, the guys drove us to my house and sat at the kitchen table stuffing some kind of powder into capsules.Â
Do you want to try some? It’s fun.
No, Candi and I said at the same time.Â
But once again, as the alcohol wore off. I craved what I called the click, my need for an even greater high. Let’s just try a few, I said. You need to take at least nine to get off, the guys said. I carried the can to the kitchen sink, and with a large spoon, shoveled powder into my mouth.Â
You stupid bitch, why’d you do that? One of the guys grabbed the can and glanced out the window. There’s a car coming in the driveway, he said. He sounded scared.
My parents. I giggled. This seemed hilarious. Tell them you know my brother. Trailed by Candi, the men dashed outside. I wrapped myself in a blanket and arranged myself cross-legged on the floor. My mother, dressed up and pretty, appeared in the doorway.Â
You’re here, darling? she asked in her melodious voice. There were some strange guys out there with your friend Candi. They said they were friends of your brother, but they didn’t seem to know his name. She walked over and knelt in front of me. You look strange, she said. What’s the matter?
Nothing, Mommy. Right before I blacked out, I heard my mother scream. John, John, something’s happened. Call an ambulance. Call the police.
8 PM Fifteen-year-old patient admitted. Weight 122. Appears intoxicated; unable to walk; odor of alcohol present; pupils dilated. Found by her parents who tonight returned from Hood Canal. Has been in present stuporous state since found. Police checking re-companions and possible drugs. Wine bottle found in home. Patient is groggy, incoherent, and irascible. Will speak a bit. Says peers at school say she’s conceited. Says she’s not conceited she’s shy.
11:30 PM patient acting more bizarre, pupils more dilated, non-reacting. Acts like having pleasant hallucinations. Placed in observation ward in restraints.
11:50 PM Transferred to public health hospital. Police notified re-transfer. They have companion, female, same age, acting similar but no alcohol odor.
I slid in and out of awareness. At one point, I was a monkey swinging from the ceiling. At another, I tried to leap out the barred window. I took off my clothes and screamed, I’m not ashamed of my body as I ran naked down the hall. Someone fastened my arms and legs to a bed. Teach her a lesson.
From time to time, a grave-faced man and woman appeared. Who are you? Why are you staring at me? I asked them. Discharged at dawn into their care, I leaned forward from the back seat and told them everything I’d done in the past few years. I took truth serum, I said.Â
 Time collapsed, unraveling moment by moment behind me. I thought I had been with my family all along. My sisters and brothers were overjoyed to see me. I showed them my arms. I couldn’t stop stroking the fine light hair. They’ve turned into peach fuzz, I said. I pointed out strings of tiny dinosaurs that hung from the cabin eaves like shot birds. I built a fire in the wood stove and brewed coffee, then carried steaming cups into my parents’ room.Â
Get away from me, my mother said. I can’t bear the sight of you.
Why are you so mean? I asked. I badly needed a drink. Once again, it seemed clear I needed to die. I headed to the rural highway where a stream of logging trucks endlessly hauled off chunks of forest, and I lay down in the middle of the road.
No trucks came, and after a while, I walked back to the cabin. She doesn’t seem to know what happened, my mother told my father. You tell her.
My father and I sat side by side on the beach. You ingested a large quantity of a hallucinogenic drug. The doctors said you took enough to kill three grown men, especially mixed with alcohol. The tide was low, exposing the nearshore algal garden, and I inhaled the sweetness of salt. You can either end here or you can begin from here, my father said. Only you can decide.Â
I want you to know we love you.
And I wanted him to know I could care less.
I contacted my friends. I’m being held prisoner, I said. Sarah told me not to bother coming back. Everyone hated me. The police arrested those guys, and they are in real trouble.
Dan seemed to forget he’d told me this was my summer of kicks. I’m disappointed in you, he said. Maybe he intended my summer of fun to be with him. No adult anger or pain meant anything to me. But when my friends didn’t want me, I was flattened.Â
I believed I was evil incarnate.
Marooned just weeks into summer, I read the books that lined our cabin walls. I loved James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Katherine Mansfield. I too was life’s delicate child. I too yearned to be an artist, although I wrote in my journal that I doubted a girl could ever be one.Â
When I returned to school, I focused on academics, helping out around the house, and on weekends, two back-to-back jobs. Suggesting they could get me drugs, a few guys asked me out, but I had no interest.Â
With their own college debt and six kids, there was no question of help from my parents. I applied to the state university the furthest distance from my home only because Sarah was going. I held three work-study jobs and babysat for professors on weekends. As classmates puked in dorm bathrooms, and Sarah bragged about what she called her lusty laugh of weekends with George, I felt aloof. When my advisor organized a group travel-study semester in Mexico, I asked if I could work instead. I’d studied Spanish since seventh grade and prided myself on my fluency. An orphanage in an isolated rural village needed someone to set up a kindergarten, he said. Can you teach? In exchange, I’d earn free room and board.Â
The village, with its five hundred inhabitants, was enclosed by a low stone wall. Burros, cattle, and chickens wandered freely. Everyone hauled water from a single well. The villagers worked on units of land called parcelas. The orphanage had its own parcela, where the children worked when they weren’t attending class. I had my own room, the walls lined with books in Spanish. My kindergarten space was an abandoned granary, ceiling open to the sky.Â
I became addicted to the children’s chatter, learned local songs and dances. I lived, spoke, taught, and dreamed in Spanish. I witnessed children read their first words. It was joy unlike anything I’d ever known.Â
To celebrate my final night, the teachers replacing me bought a bottle of Tequila. They had a sip or two and then stopped. I continued drinking until the bottle was empty.Â
Rather than return north, I wandered Mexico, hitching rides with other young people I met in hostels. Sometimes I awoke violently ill, without recollection of anything that had happened. Near the end, on a hammock near the Guatemalan border, I was drunk on Mescal for five days straight.Â
My advisor had warned me about reverse cultural shock, but the words failed to prepare me for my return. Supermarkets threw out enough food every day to feed the entire village where I’d lived. One course of antibiotics could have saved children who died overnight from staph. Prescribed multiple medications, I was once again marooned at my family’s cabin.Â
Pt. says medication causing depression, the doctor wrote. I feel it is due to deteriorating family relationships.Â
Go back to college, he told me. Do something with your life. He wrote more prescriptions, and off I went. Sarah was in Paris, and I got together with George. It wasn’t that I particularly wanted to be with him, but that being with one man protected me from others.Â
Early on, perhaps from combining my growing list of medications with alcohol, I hallucinated that dead babies littered our room. As George cleaned my vomit from the rug, I promised I’d never drink again.Â
But of course, I soon realized the problem wasn’t booze or medications but my friends. And George. If someone didn’t drink the way I did, I abandoned them. I believed I could control my drinking if I wanted to. I just didn’t want to. When I drank too much and careened out of control, it was because I was tired or didn’t have anything in my stomach or somebody rejected me. When I accidentally skipped a day of drinking, I had the shakes and made sure never to miss a day again.
I ran across a questionnaire about drinking. I checked every box. What stupid bullshit, I told George and Sarah. This is so fanatic anyone would come out an alcoholic. My stupid doctors won’t acknowledge something is wrong. Sarah agreed the questions were idiotic. We agreed that if we ever had a problem, we’d do something about it.
I landed the perfect job. The county was surveying social services, and all I had to do was interview three directors a day using a set script. By then, I had my drinking down. A little rum in my morning coffee, a couple of beers with lunch, and by the time I returned home, a martini or four, triples, because I’d worked so hard.Â
One morning I was scheduled to meet someone called Doris about a forty-minute drive away. I felt queasy, so an hour before the scheduled appointment I called to cancel. I’ll interview Doris over the phone, I told the guy who answered.
No ma’am, a nasty voice informed me. You have an appointment. She’s expecting you. I stormed around the office begging everyone to go in my place. Everyone declined. And so, I sped off to interview Doris about her medically-based rehabilitation program. Instead of the grim barracks or loony bin I expected, I found a lovely cluster of cottages tucked into a forest. Doris welcomed me into her office. I’m a recovered alcoholic, she said.Â
Yeah, I’ll bet you are, I thought. Middle-aged, bleached hair, she looked the type. I pulled out my stipulated questions, but rather than respond, Doris insisted on talking about what she called the disease of alcoholism. I felt as if she was reading my mind, and it pissed me off. How did she know all that stuff about me when I hadn’t said one word? My stomach hurt, and I wanted to vomit. I counted the minutes until I could return to my car. Instead, cheerful Doris insisted I tour the facilities. She showed me what she called the acutes, semi-conscious in hospital beds. Yeah, they look like alcoholics, I thought, middle-aged, reddish skins. I was lucky not to be anything like these losers.Â
Doris offered coffee. No thank you, I said. Although I still hadn’t conducted the interview, I ran toward the parking lot. I didn’t make it. Too much time had passed since my last drink. I leaned over and vomited.Â
I walked back to Doris’ office and tapped on the door. Maybe I will have a cup of coffee, I said. She looked at me and smiled. I think I might have a problem, I whispered. With all the compassion and calm in the world, Doris said if you think you have a problem, you have a problem.Â
Well maybe, I said. I’ll do something about it after I get out of this relationship I’m in.
Or you could do something about it now, she said. She told me about something she called the biogenic paradigm. Someone with a predisposition to addiction, maybe as the result of heredity, could become an alcoholic no matter how smart or good or kind they were. Something like that. Tapering off doesn’t work. Nor moderation. Alcoholism is a progressive disease, and the only cure is not to drink.Â
But I’m afraid, I told her. All the time. I can’t face that fear without drinking.
Oh baby, Doris said. If you think you’re afraid now, just keep on drinking. Then you’ll know what fear is.Â
I returned to my car and dry-heaved for fifteen minutes.Â
After that, I drank as much as I could. George told me he couldn’t take it anymore. Not the drinking, but me. We were fighting daily. I called each of my sisters. I might be an alcoholic, I said. They weren’t surprised.Â
One day, while out for lunch with coworkers, I order a Coffee Nudge. Something to warm up a cold and rainy Seattle day. Five nudges later, I was drunk and still had interviews that afternoon. I returned to the office, scared shitless to lose my job. I was also driving drunk, something I’d sworn I’d never do. I felt something terrible was going to happen. I knew I had to stop. That was when I realized I couldn’t.
I looked up a program I knew was for old worn-out drunks like Doris and her acutes. After everyone had left the office, I finally called. A man answered. I would like to inquire about your program, I said in my professional agency-interviewing voice.Â
For you or someone else?
This was sticky. For myself, I said. I sounded like a five-year-old.
Let me change phones. He sounded so casual. He asked my first name and what part of Seattle I lived in. That sounded suspicious, but I was so relieved to have called, I would have stood on my head if he asked me. Okay, we’ll get one of our girls to call, he said. Several live right by you. Gee. People like me lived in my neighborhood.Â
I had only been home an hour when a woman called. I had about four martinis in me by then. I guess I have a problem, I told her. She seemed to understand everything I told her in a way George and Sarah had not. As we talked, I had a few more drinks.
There’s a young people’s meeting downtown, she said. Would you like a ride?Â
No thanks, I said. I was going to do this on my own if it killed me.
The only problem was that I already had the shakes. I downed a final sip of gin, and the shakes worsened as soon as that pittance wore off. I dressed in my nicest clothes, painted on a thick layer of make-up, brushed my hair, and took the bus to the address the woman had given me. I thought maybe five or ten people would be there. They would stare and then shake their heads. Or pray out loud. Or, worse, know how drunk I was and send me home. I tried to open the door of what seemed to be a community center, but it was locked. Better go home, I told myself. Nothing here for you. Two young girls were practicing cheerleading drills on the lawn. By then, shaking like crazy, I was ashamed to tell them what I needed. My survival brain forced me to speak. Do you know where the meeting is?
Sure, one of the girls giggled. Mom’s there. You have to go to the basement. She pointed to a short flight of concrete stairs. With what strength I had left, I descended and pulled open a door. Inside stood a handsome man. He looked like a film star, but old. At least thirty. Your first night? he asked. In an auditorium behind him, about two hundred people were just breaking up from a large group. Okay, the gorgeous man said. You go to Beginners, right over there in the kindergarten room. Then he laughed. I couldn’t believe it. A drunk, laughing. I was shaky my first night too, he said.Â
In the kindergarten room, seated around a child-sized table, sixteen people around my age chatted and laughed. Someone poured coffee into thick ceramic mugs. The youngest there, with a round cherubic face, looked to be about fifteen. She was knitting. No way could she be an alcoholic. Alcoholics don’t knit. The guy at the head of the table said, My name’s Dean, and I’m an alcoholic.
Hi Dean! everyone said at the top of their lungs. Dean, straight-looking and clean-cut, talked about being in the penitentiary four times. I didn’t believe him. After he’d spoken for a few minutes, he turned to the guy beside him. Now that one could be in a penitentiary. He had a pierced nose and tattoos laced his neck and arms.Â
My name is Brook and I’m an alcoholic and drug addict, he said. I’d never heard anybody admit to being a drug addict. Everyone I knew tried to pretend they weren’t. Again, with utter joy and affection, everyone called out, Hi Brook! He spoke of college and work and relationships, and I identified with everything he said. He talked about morgencolla, his terror when he woke needing to drink even in the face of impending death.Â
As they made their way around the table, each person said something that rang true for me. When the hour was almost up, Dean turned to me. Do you want to say anything? To my utter surprise, I introduced myself as an alcoholic. Until listening to my peers around that table, I still believed the awful things that happened when I drank were isolated incidents. I never connected the narrative. I’d been an alcoholic not for the past few years, but since that first drink when I screamed I hate you at poor Candi Higgins, head cheerleader voted most beautiful of our senior class. And, at twenty-three, already dead, murdered by a lover. And I, the ugly one, survived.
Everyone nodded and laughed. As if: of course.
 And then it all fell apart. Dean stood, and so did everyone else. And now we will close in the usual way, he said. Everyone clasped hands and recited a prayer. I closed my eyes and mouth. Here was the clincher. They wouldn’t let me in unless I agreed to find god. A Christian god.Â
Later, as my brain started to clear and then my eyes, I was assured I could choose my own beliefs or none at all. I saw that others stood silent. Although I wanted an excuse not to trust these people, the survival part of my brain again drew me back, not out of desperation, but because I felt happier than in any group I’d ever been in. I landed in my body with an almost palpable thud. Drinking had been a camouflage I tried on, and when it was snatched from me, as I saw it then, I had to find a new way to soften the scary places.Â
In open-mouthed terror at life unanesthetized, a child in my light clothing, I went to meetings all over. I liked the high-brow gatherings in Magnolia and Laurelhurst and the Eastside, and I also liked the hard-core ones with active drunks careening around and cursing. I didn’t want to give up seeing myself as a bad girl, a tough girl. A body caught by a giant tidal wave, I flung myself here, flung myself there until at last, I came to rest.
Sarah and George claimed I’d gone crazy. I suspected I’d gone sane. Though of course, nothing is ever as easy as that.
Psychology
NIGHTDRIVING
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