I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (25 page)

In the wee hours of May 13, 2009, I began to drink. The preceding day had been a stressful one. I'd been recruited a month earlier to join my old pal Zack's band, Freshkills, for a ten-day tour of England starting the next day. After the sun went down, I ate some Adderall so I could stay up to pack and do other last-minute errands. At around 2 a.m., it became clear that I was actually going to finish everything I needed to do, so I cracked open a Coors Light. Far from my first choice, but it had been a long time since I'd allowed myself to keep hard liquor or even wine in the house.

I worked my way through the six-pack and polished off an old vial of cocaine I had in my drug box, a miniature wooden chest that had been a gift to the groomsmen at Chen's wedding. A couple of days after our blowout, he had confessed to sleeping with Oksana
and quit our band. A couple of days after that, he met me at the practice space to pay me back.

“Mishka,” he said, “I'm sorry.”

He held out the money he owed me. I counted it and put it in my pocket.

“Thank you for paying me back,” I said. “And now, you're dead to me.”

Shortly after 3 a.m., I left the house lugging my effect pedal board and a duffel bag my mom had given me over twenty years earlier, when we moved to the United States. “You're a big boy now,” she had said, “and it makes sense for you to have a grown-up bag.” I headed toward the rehearsal space to meet up with the rest of the band, stopping off at a bar just before last call to suck down a couple of Jameson doubles. A hired minivan picked us up with all our gear, and we were on our way.

I was pretty loose by the time we got through security at Newark Airport. I wanted to make sure I slept as much as possible on the overseas flight, so I chewed up a couple of Xanax when we were at our gate. My band mates had to carry me onto the plane.

There may be no better country to drink in than England. Why had no one mentioned to me that it was legal to drink on the street there? Though we'd never met him before, the first guy we crashed with had beer, coke, and weed laid in for us. Someone—not me—even sprang for a bottle of whiskey.

England was a welcome interruption from the knot of trouble my life had become. Our shows were uniformly unmemorable (at least I don't remember them), but with 9 percent beer and cider at every corner store and codeine for sale over the counter, I went for it like we were playing sold-out stadiums. I felt light in a country where no one knew me, unencumbered by the cell phone that had lately brought so much bad news, so many direct personal attacks that I'd had to change the number I'd held for ten years.

I starved myself so I could spend the little money I'd brought on intoxicants. While most of my band indulged in steaks and scotch,
the drummer and I drank in the park like hobos. I was accustomed to a near-constant stream of chemicals, but coupled with the lack of food, they wreaked strange havoc on me.

In a dream, I encountered Allison in a bombed-out parking lot after a busted gig. She was leaning against an ancient pickup truck. Her honey hair glowed in the imperfect urban dark, her big eyes wise with patience and pain. Most of her weight rested on her right leg, and her right hip jutted out sinisterly, as if her disappointment in me had calcified under her skin. She looked older but defiantly beautiful, like a Dust Bowl–era migrant worker, determined to survive. One child straddled her cocked hip, and another stood next to her, holding her hand and peering out at me from behind her leg. Neither of them looked like me. Allison told me that my father was dead and I had been charged with seeing to his burial.

The funeral home was a disaster. The coffin was propped up on two sawhorses, and the lid didn't fit right. I started screaming at the director—my father at least deserved to be treated with dignity in death—and accidentally knocked the coffin over, spilling my father's gauze-wrapped corpse onto the floor. When I bent over to cradle his body to try to get it back into the coffin, I felt it twist under me. I heard old bones grind, and I felt his teeth, sharp in my shoulder, as his skull tried to bite me through the disintegrating shroud.

On the flight home, I vigorously abused Virgin Airlines' complimentary cocktail policy even after the stewardesses stopped walking the aisles offering them. I'd totter back to where the flight attendants were strapped into their tiny folding seats, trying to sleep, to get them to refill five plastic wineglasses—one for each band member, I told them. Then I'd totter back to my seat and drink them all myself. Still, despite glass after plastic glass of crappy red wine, I was unable to achieve “the click,” as Tennessee Williams put it, to reach that drink that “turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there's peace.”

I needed to talk to someone, anyone. Zack. He'd known me through all this. He'd have some insight, or at least he'd be able to make me laugh. Zack was asleep. All my band mates were asleep. The entire plane was asleep except for me. I closed my eyes.

It was never just darkness. Covering my eyes didn't just shut them off; they kept looking, kept searching. On the plane, my vision swam. Afterimages became objects, then morphed into other objects, advancing and retreating at the same time. I pushed deeper into the swirling field in front of me, seeking something, anything: a sign, an omen, any kind of information at all.

I saw an old man—maybe only fifty-nine, so younger than my father, but absolutely an old man—washing glasses behind a bar. Silver hair, gray-yellow face, thin shoulders and arms, fat tummy, hunched back. It was me.

I would get weaker and fatter and grayer and more pathetic, the weird old barback at some old-men's bar in the Village that took pity on me, that guy who had once been in a band you'd heard of but never listened to, a guy who was supposed to do Some Great Thing but then had done nothing.

That vision I'd had of the underwater garden in Denver, Jesus, eleven years before? I had been convinced my life was in danger, that if I went too deeply into the underwater garden, I would die. I had been wrong. This vision was worse. More banal and bleaker, like some
Twilight Zone
deal with the devil.

Alcohol would never kill me. It took singular focus to die from alcohol, focus that I lacked. Instead, alcohol would keep me alive for an eternity, in suspended animation, like a fetal pig in a jar of formaldehyde, except alive, just barely. It would slowly strangle all the good out of my life, until my life was so base that death would be a release.

I would create nothing: no songs, no stories. All I would create was pain. As I had hurt Oksana, as I had hurt Allison, as I had hurt countless others, I would hurt countless more, any person foolish
enough to care about me, every person foolish enough to care about me. As I had hurt my family, I would hurt my family. I would go on hurting my family until I finally died, and then the last thing I would do in this world would be to hurt them some more.

I opened my eyes, my heart hammering. I knew what lay ahead, and it terrified me.

CHAPTER 8

Breaking the Beast

B
y thirty-two, I'd been chasing oblivion for nearly twenty years. Sure, I had taken a couple of breaks, but I'd always known it was temporary. I was like a painter, I'd told myself, and my drinking was like a large, complex painting that had gotten away from me. I needed to take some time away from it, but eventually I would return to finish my masterpiece. That chilly spring of 2009 was different. Before our plane even touched down, I'd sworn to myself that I would I quit drinking. For good.

The first days were misery, but I'd endured misery before. I stuck it out, through the chills, the shakes, the night terrors, weeping in my sleep, the poison sweats, my writhing spine, the clacking-too-fast heartbeat, the phantom pains, the nameless dread, the invisible death in the room. I tossed and turned all night, sweating my sheets into wet piles of slush. I awoke smelling like dry-cleaning fluid. Worst were the waves of shame and humiliation, so powerful that they manifested solely as a physical sensation, like some cold hand was slowly strangling my soul. I felt bad about nothing in particular, and I felt bad about everything. I didn't want to die; I wanted to never have lived.

After a couple of days, I got through the acute physical withdrawal. I walked to the grocery store in slow motion, then had to sit down on a bench to rest before I could make it home. I was reminded of National Geographic clips I'd seen as a kid of listless Ethiopians so malnourished and sick from dysentery they could barely move, then felt horrible for comparing my plight to theirs. I had done this to myself. Still, had a fly landed on me, I'd have been hard-pressed to shoo it away.

After detoxing, I felt less bad without actually feeling better. I avoided Esteban. I ignored my phone. I rarely left the house. I was subject to abrupt, intense depressions. They happened with so little warning and derailed my mood so definitively that I can only compare them to the childhood experience of walking through our house in socks and suddenly stepping in a cold puddle of dog piss pooled on the hardwood floor.

Sleep was the only respite available from the life I didn't want. Fittingly, it constantly eluded me. I sleepwalked through each day. I submitted to jarring, sweaty, unsatisfying naps like a cranky infant. I went to bed shortly after sundown like an old man. The minute my head hit the pillow, my heart raced, my blood itched in my veins, my eyes sprang fully open for the first time that day. I had been anaesthetizing myself for so long, it appeared I had actually forgotten how to fall asleep. I tried to remember how I'd done it in the past and could recall neither the process nor the experience.

When sleep finally came for me, I wished it hadn't. My drinking sleep had been a negation, a thought bubble filled only with
Z
's. Dreams had been such an infrequent occurrence that even pleasurable ones had been jarring. My sober sleeping life was crowded with deformed creatures, bizarre symbolism, and people from my past, rendering it more vivid, meaningful, and exhausting than my waking life. Everyone I had ever loved gathered on a street corner to throw a party in my honor when a tractor-trailer careened out of control and killed them all. My family turned evil, and I dismembered them in a grisly, methodical manner only to have their limbs
stitch themselves together so they could rise up and attack me again and again.

Sobriety was relentless. Sobriety was life without eyelids. Sobriety was a bare white room with painfully bright fluorescent lights, buzzing constantly. I felt like I had braved some Herculean task equal parts agony, anxiety, and boredom—let's say seventy-two hours of cramming for a certified public accountant exam, only to be rewarded with life as a CPA. Like I'd fought my way out of the ninth circle of hell only to be rewarded with the eighth circle of hell. Still, progress is progress.

I forced myself to tidy up, performing maybe two solid hours of work over an entire day. My life had become so small—my buzzing, overheating laptop, a desk I'd found on the street, an end table I'd found on the street, a rolling office chair I'd found on the street. The only piece of furniture I owned that hadn't come from the garbage was my dresser. It was a nice, rugged piece, dovetail drawers, each front a broad, unbroken expanse of handsome blonde wood. Allison had bought it for me five years earlier off Craig's List. She'd wanted me to have something nice. Three of the drawers now failed to close properly because I'd piled stuff on them when they were open—dirty clothes, guitar parts, jugs of wine, books, porno mags, plates of old food. The top was shellacked with gray matter, dust and lint that had stuck to the moisture left by cups and bottles. When I scrubbed that off, I found deep scratches in the wood from cutting lines with a Bowie knife.

When the cleaning was finished, my sunlit living room oppressed me. It felt like a crime scene after the broken bodies had been moved, the tape taken down, and the floor and walls scrubbed with bleach. Though there were no obvious signs of violence, pervasive bad mojo hovered in the air.

I refused to allow myself to hope that this was a new beginning. That always ended in heartbreak. If someone hadn't already opened a dive bar called New Beginnings, then that was just another way in which humanity had disappointed itself. I couldn't even put a
name on this time. No wishing, no dreaming, and “Hope” was just an ironic name for a prostitute. Focus on the basics; just keep the body alive. Eat—good food, raw fruits and vegetables. Drink—water, just water, gallons and gallons of it. Get sunshine. Bathe. Sleep.

The best and worst thing about drinking was that it had paired so well with other vices. STD testing would have been pointless when I was drinking; I slept around enough that the results would be obsolete by the time they came back. But after three weeks of sobriety and solitude, I figured I should find out what diseases I was carrying. There wasn't one specific encounter or potential affliction causing me anxiety, but I knew my lifestyle was what one might call a “risk factor.” I biked down to the free clinic on Atlantic Avenue and took a number.

While I waited, I was handed an alcohol questionnaire to fill out. I love New York, and I believe in social welfare, but I knew that in Great Recession—era Brooklyn, there was no way anyone was actually going to be reviewing these. Fuck it, why not be completely honest? God forbid you learn something about yourself.

The questions—“Have you blacked out?” “Has your drinking caused tension with your friends?”—applied to the previous thirty days. I hadn't had a drink in three weeks, but if I was honest, I had to check the yes box, question after question. They didn't provide an upside-down answer key like I'd seen at the end of quizzes in magazines, but I realized I didn't need one as I double-checked my work:
A plus!
A gold star! What do I win?

I turned the questionnaire in with the rest of my paperwork and took a seat. Almost right away, my number was called. I got dirty looks from people who had gotten there before me and were still waiting. That's kind of odd, I thought as I was ushered out of the waiting room.

I was led down a hallway and into a side office where a portly balding man sat behind a desk. He was holding my alcohol questionnaire.

Motherfuck
.

I sat down.

“My name is Brian. I wanted to go over some of your answers on the questionnaire we had you fill out.”

Good heavens, whatever on earth for?

“The input that you've given us here indicates a pattern of alcohol use that could lead to long-term health problems, including alcoholism or addiction to other substances.”

I brushed aside his mincing questions about my drinking. He had seen my hand. I wanted to see his.

If I would agree to sign a few papers, he said, he would enroll me in Project Link, an outreach program for drug and alcohol abusers. They would help me get on Medicaid and arrange for me to see an addiction counselor each week. I'd have to provide contact information for a friend so that, if I went AWOL, they could come track me down. After six months, I'd have one follow-up interview. Then I would be free to return to my wicked, wicked ways if I wanted.

My body filled with dread and resentment. Finally, finally, finally, I had been found out. I was hopelessly, irreversibly caught. And also, I faced a great opportunity.

Do or die, motherfucker, I thought, do or die. I signed up.

I was led back to the clinic waiting room to mull over the dark days ahead. When the room had emptied out, the receptionist asked me what my number was. She huffed when I told her.

“Where were you? We called and called, and you didn't respond!” She didn't wait for an answer, just led me back to the examination room.

A harried looking doctor with graying brown curly hair and wire-rimmed glasses came in. She introduced herself but didn't
offer her hand. She picked up my folder and briskly began asking me questions about my health, number of sexual partners, and drug and alcohol history. I forced myself to answer every question honestly. It felt terrible. It must have sounded even worse.

I listened to the rationalizations coming out of my mouth. “We looked and looked but we couldn't find a condom.” “She didn't seem like the kind of girl to sleep around.” “I knew that I was clean.” “She said she couldn't get pregnant so . . . ” And my recent default response for every difficulty that had risen up in front of me: “Fuck it. At this point, what difference does it make?”

In each instance, in the moment, in the dark, I had let myself off the hook. But as I spoke to the doctor, a diagnosis became clear. I was, simply, an asshole. It was one thing to put myself at risk—my life was mine to throw away if I chose to do so—and another to put other people at risk, people who cared about me and people whom I purported to care about.

The doctor frowned at my paperwork, then looked closely at me.

“Are you feeling okay? You look tired.”

“Yeah, I just . . . I've just been here for a long time, and I haven't had much to eat today.”

She nodded knowingly.

“I know we've had you answer a lot of questions today, but as long as it's okay with you, I'm going to ask you two more.”

Hit me, I thought. There's nothing you can ask me that's going to make me feel worse than I already do.

She didn't wait for a response before continuing.

“You have listed your occupation as ‘musician/unemployed/asshole.' You have the rare distinction of achieving a perfect score on our drug and alcohol abuse questionnaire, checking ‘yes' to every single question. Oh wait, you don't inject drugs intravenously—yet.

“You engage in all manner of risky sex with multiple partners around the country, which makes you a very effective vector for spreading disease. You have engaged in and continue to engage
in selfish, self-destructive behavior that will negatively impact not just your health but the health of those unfortunate enough to be intimate with you.

“At twenty-seven years of age, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and even Jim Morrison had each created a body of work that guys like you are still ripping off today. At thirty-two, you seem to have done nothing. Or at least I have no idea who you are.

“So my two questions for you are: What do you intend to do with your life? And what exactly is your fucking problem?”

The revelation several days later that I was clean brought me little comfort. I wanted to be punished for my hideous transgressions, my wasted years. A physical at St. Vincent's, my first in ten years, brought similar results: my blood work was boringly normal. I sought bad news from a reliable source, the dentist. I'd last been to the dentist's office a decade earlier, at my mother's insistence and on her dime. I'd had a cavity but declined to have it filled—I knew better ways to spend $300. I braced myself for the news that the dentist was going to have to tear all my teeth out and start over again clean.

“No cavities,” the dentist stated flatly in his Russian accent.