A Million Years with You (23 page)

Interestingly, the same kind of disgrace does not seem to be attached to drug addiction, or not as strongly. If my friend had asked which comedian I liked best and I'd said Richard Pryor, I'm sure she would not immediately have said he was a drug addict. People stoned on drugs tend to be quiet while drunks yell and fight, which is why alcoholism is more conspicuous and also more disgraceful, and that's another reason not to talk about it.

A third reason is that after all this happened, I joined Alcoholics Anonymous and learned that AA has twelve traditions, the twelfth being that you don't talk in public about your AA membership. But I have learned much about addiction from reading some of the many published accounts of my fellow addicts, and I'm following their lead here rather than adhering to a concept of the 1930s when the Twelfth Tradition was written. Anyway, as a brilliant member of AA once said, secrecy doesn't fit alcoholics. “They let it all out when they're drunk,” he said, “and let it all out again in the AA meetings.”

 

One man at Beech Hill made a deep impression on me and gave me an insight that will last me forever. He was a massive guy in his forties with broad shoulders and a deep masculine voice. He wore jeans, work boots, a blue work shirt, and a ponytail. He worked for a blasting company, dynamiting mountains to make way for construction projects. He hitched up his pants and looked us over carefully. Our eyes burned from the testosterone coming off him. Then he began his story.

He was driving his pickup down I-95 with a twelve-pack of beer beside him. As he drained a can, he'd crush it in his fist and throw it out the window. A police car was following him. A can bounced off the police car. The officer tried to pull him over. He floored it. The officer gave chase. Soon many police cars were speeding behind him but he went even faster until, at a curve, the pickup left the road and wrapped around a tree. Enraged, he hauled himself out of the wreckage, attacked the police, and fought so hard that it took six of them to wrestle him down and get the handcuffs on him. They dragged him to Manchester, to the Valley Street jail.

My goodness! What a story! I'd never wrapped a car around a tree or fought with police officers or gone to jail, or even lost my driver's license, for that matter, and when I heard the story, I saw no similarity between this man and me. But there was one—a very close one—though it would take me some time to realize it.

 

I left Beech Hill on New Year's Eve after a stay of two weeks. Because Beech Hill was in sight of our house, I told my fellow addicts that when I got home I would signal to them with a flashlight to show I was thinking of them. But when I got home I found our house full of guests who were waiting to have New Year's Eve dinner, which I then began to prepare, and I forgot to signal with the flashlight. My friends at Beech Hill waited in the Lung for hours, but I failed them. Although years have gone by, some of them still remind me of this. It's one of my deep regrets.

Why did my friends want to see the flashlight? Because of the fellowship. We had achieved a closeness unparalleled in any other setting. When I see one of those people on the street I get a little squirt of joy. We stop and chat. We hug each other. I think the reason I forgot to signal was that I felt out of place in my own kitchen. I was there with my family and our closest friends, but although they knew I'd been in Beech Hill, they had no idea what had happened to me there, or how much the experience had changed me.

Of course I stopped drinking, but that seemed like a relatively minor change, because the real one was greater. All of us there had known important darkness. I'd thought the darkness was my own, but I learned that others also knew it. They said things I'd never heard before. I said things I'd never said before. Many of us, perhaps all of us, emerged as different people. My friends and family in the kitchen were not those people. I don't remember ever feeling so alone.

 

A few weeks later I went to a party where I met a woman who once had been a counselor at Beech Hill. She was sipping a glass of wine, so I assumed that she wasn't an alcoholic, and I wondered how effective her counseling might have been. I'm sure she'd taken a few courses on the subject, but that's something like trying to learn to swim by reading a book. I've never heard anything useful about addiction from anyone who has not experienced its difficulties, and it's the same with swimming. You need to get in the water.

We chatted for a while. She had gone to Wellesley. I had gone to Radcliffe. We were about the same age, and wore the same kind of clothes. Obviously, we were social equals. She asked if I knew of Beech Hill. I said I did, adding that not only could I see it from my house but that I'd been there as an inmate.

The woman was astonished. This, from a social equal? “You're not an alcoholic,” she said in disbelief.

“If I'm not, nobody is,” I told her. Then a question struck me, and with it the abovementioned insight that I'd gained from the man in the pickup with the beer. With whom did I have more in common, this woman who had gone to Wellesley or the man in the pickup? I sometimes tell this story in AA meetings, and the response is always the same. Unanimous agreement. Of course and without question, it's the man in the pickup.

That makes me happy. He was stronger than his addiction and I'm glad to be stronger than mine. And the lawless aspect of his story detracted nothing from his narrative but made me admire him all the more. After I got my driver's license (first thing in the morning of the day I turned sixteen) I would drive into town and make a U-turn in front of the police station. This wasn't alcohol-related, as at the time I didn't drink, but at sixteen I didn't need any help to be lawless. I was a fearless, independent spirit, showing the law my upraised second finger. Imagine, then, my disappointment to learn that a U-turn was perfectly legal. But at least I'd had a tiny whiff of what it might be like to drive at ninety miles an hour throwing beer cans at police cars.

 

For many years after that I didn't drink. Then Steve got sick. He experienced weakness in his legs and feet, collapsed a few times, and couldn't get up without help. We went to a clinic. A neurologist examined him, and when she finished she said, “There is no good way to say what I must tell you.”

Then she told us he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease. There is no cure. People with ALS live for three to five years after diagnosis, she said.

Long ago I had said “until death do us part,” but not until that moment did I know what it meant. I saw white light and felt myself fainting. I stayed on my feet but must have turned pale, so the doctor left us alone to absorb what she'd told us. Steve, in contrast, has never been unnerved by any situation, not even this. Judging from his reaction, the doctor might have said that it looked like rain. But I began to cry. Then I heard Steve saying he was sorry. He put his arms around me to comfort me. He was apologizing! He was sorry to be the cause of my crying.

In some people, the illness moves more slowly and the people live longer. Steve turned out to have the slow-moving kind. Death would not part us quite so soon. When it became clear that Steve would probably be with me five years later, I'd tell people that he was doing fine, and he didn't worry about his body anyway. All he cared about was his scholarly brain, which was functioning perfectly. He needed his body to keep his brain off the floor and focused on the book he was writing about ethnic conflicts in Czechoslovakia after World War I. This had been the subject of his graduate studies, and since his retirement from the political scene he had been researching those issues.

With that, we settled into our new lives, Steve writing his book, me doing all the things I'd already been doing, plus the all the things he had been doing, plus all the things I gladly did for him, such as making special meals and bringing him things that he needed. I too had been writing a book, but I gave that up, because my office is far from the house and I didn't dare stay there for long because I was afraid that Steve might need me.

Meanwhile I wasn't doing as well as I'd hoped about fighting off the thought that he might not survive this illness. We were just barely grownups when we began our lives together. I had long since forgotten where he began and I ended, because over the years we had more or less become one person. Now all that was crashing. I was fully aware that something similar faces all people—especially older people—who have emotional attachments, but somehow this fact didn't help.

I can't do this
, I told myself one cold winter morning, leaning on the snow shovel to rest for a moment.
Fuck AA. I'm going to drink
. And I did. Gin and water. Nor did I need to look far to find the gin, because for all those years, Steve had enjoyed a martini in the evening. When he became ill, I bought the gin for him. We had plenty of gin.

Alcohol helps when nothing else will, at least for a while. The relief was enormously welcome. I remembered the life-saving relief I'd gained from those teacups of gin in Nigeria. But soon enough I was drinking as before, and of course the relief disappeared.

A friend has since asked why I even considered drinking, knowing from experience what would happen. Her question surprised me. Isn't that why it's called addiction? And it's not confined to our species. I was told of an article, perhaps from the
Journal of Science
, about male fruit flies who, if spurned by female fruit flies, turn to alcohol to solve their emotional problems, and these flies become addicts too. If fruit flies, so far from us on the evolutionary tree, share a problem with us, the problem must be fairly powerful. I've heard addiction expressed in memorable ways by people in the AA meetings.
We have minds we can't trust. The pilot light is always on. I know the alcohol is there and it knows I'm there. Alcohol waits for us—it's very patient
.

 

But for those of us who are lucky, help may be at hand. One day I went into our kitchen, where, to my surprise, I saw a man named Jack.

He had come to save me. The reason he did is a story in itself and began when we met in Beech Hill. The police brought him in on the night I got there, so we were due to leave together. We became friends while talking and laughing in the Lung as if we would always be there, safe and happy, and nothing would ever go wrong. But then I learned that when he left Beech Hill, he had nowhere to go. After years of drinking and drugging, combined with a deep, unmanageable rage, he had alienated everyone he knew. When I learned that his worldly goods amounted to $15, a plastic trash bag with a shirt in it, and a rusty old pickup that had been impounded, I brought him home with me.

 

All this was before Steve got sick, of course, but both of us were getting on in years; hence the fact that Jack wanted to be helpful was welcome. He mowed the lawn, shoveled the snow, and fixed all the things that were broken. He later moved to an apartment in town but our friendship continued. I was grateful.

He was a contractor by trade, a very good one, and like me he loved the woods. Of course he took every construction job that came his way, but when he wasn't working he was hunting or fishing. He spent much of his time on a nearby lake, fishing from a canoe in summer and from a bobhouse in winter, when he fished through the ice. Sometimes I'd go to the lake with him, and I loved it. The breathing forest, the water or the ice, the open sky, the wind, the silence. I'd think of my dad, and how much he would have liked this. In fact, except for Jack's rages, he sometimes reminded me of my dad.

I'd roam around the woods with Jack just as I'd done with my dad, which to me was very important. Jack's interests were the same as mine, he was even more skilled at walking quietly, and he showed me places I hadn't noticed before, like a certain microclimate where the deer go when it's cold.

One day in the woods we happened to pass the embankment beside the wetland where, so long ago, I sat with my father and saw a towhee, the place where I learned to sit quietly for hours. I mentioned this to Jack, who said, “Your dad must have been a hunter. This is exactly where I'd wait for deer.”

I was greatly surprised. As has been said, I was slow to realize that my dad knew about hunting before he went to the Kalahari, and this moment with Jack was when the truth first struck. Of course my dad had been a hunter. That's why he knew so much about the woods. That's why he knew how to say “The moose saw us first” in Micmac. (It sounds like
dyam mukduk numinumkwe
.) And that's why he was such a good shot. I sometimes assumed that he had learned to shoot from serving in the field artillery during WWI, but aiming an artillery piece is not the same as aiming a rifle, nor is the target likely to go bounding away. All this came in a flash of comprehension, and if not for Jack, I might never have seen it. I wished that my dad had known Jack. They would have liked each other.

 

Jack told me about his childhood. It may have been something like my father's, and it was certainly like my dog Cokie's. From infancy all through his childhood until he left home at seventeen and joined the coast guard, he suffered fearful abuse of the kind that results in ER visits and broken bones at the hands of his angry, alcoholic father. His mother did not protect him. But that's how he came to know the woods. Children who suffer as he did have few resources, so he stayed in the woods as much as he could. He was safe there, and he wasn't alone. His only friend, a dog named Spook, went with him.

Perhaps that's why I felt protective of Jack. Perhaps because he sometimes reminded me of my father, it was almost as if he were one of my children, hence one of my father's grandchildren, perhaps by way of a spiritual gene.

Then too, a person such as he who doesn't have a helpful mother sometimes looks around until he finds one, and for Jack I may have been that mother. He was every inch a grownup—a big, tall guy with a mustache, dark hair from a Micmac grandparent, and
Don't fuck with me
written all over him—but for me he didn't fit the image of a grownup. I happened to know where he had lived as a child, and one night I dreamed I was driving on that road. In my dream, I was in my twenties. It was late at night and very dark, and the road was empty except for a ghostly boy about seven years old but big for his age, walking alone by the roadside. I knew the boy wasn't mine and that I might be accused of kidnapping if I took him, but I picked him up anyway and brought him home with me.