Losing True

I can see Dallas

I've gotten a bunch of calls and emails over the past few days from people I scared with my last post. While my instinct is to immediately reassure, I've been thinking. First. For once.

I have such a collection of shorthand imagery culled from beloved movies it would take years to list them all. I use these scenes as metaphors and analogies to help me understand my own life. (Maybe this is because I think in metaphor; maybe I'm just nuts. You pick.)

One of my favorites is from Alien:  Dallas, the ship's captain, is crawling though the vents with a flamethrower, intent on frying the shit out of the monster if he finds it. The crew watches his progress on a monitor, safe in the ship's control room. Dallas is a blinking electronic blip moving along, and they're guiding him. Suddenly they see another blip, which is, of course, the alien. The crew starts to scream at Dallas that the alien is almost on him, as Dallas, still calm because he can't see any danger, is wheeling slowly around in a crouch, trying to see what they see. Their pleas become hysterical as he turns, still in confusion, and then the alien blip overtakes the Dallas blip and it's over.

The way I've always used that image is to be Dallas--I've heard people pleading with me over the years that, even though I don't seem to see it, there's a monster on my tail. Things have changed, that much I can say, because now I'm standing behind the crew, and I can see Dallas. And the alien. I get that the monster is fatal, trust me. I know it bleeds molecular acid. But where I was once in that pitch black tunnel, my useless flamethrower flickering on the metal walls, now I'm with the crew. I can't say I'm pleading in hysteria with Dallas yet. I'm a little curious about what the hell he's planning to do. And I may yet figure a way to get him out of there.

I would say to everyone: Don't worry; I'll be fine. But that would undersell the monster. And it is one scary son of a bitch.

My boyfriend's back

People in recovery often personify alcohol or whatever substance they’re struggling to kick. They’ll say that while they’re in a meeting—feeling cocky and safe—alcohol is out in the parking lot doing one-handed push ups. They’ll say that alcohol is a mugger hiding in an alley, waiting to bring them down; they say that alcohol wants them dead. Years before I started trying to beat this I snuck into a meeting (ironically, the same meeting I go to most often now) and a man spoke at length about how deeply he respected alcohol. He said he found it the most formidable opponent he’d ever come up against—when he was clever, alcohol was more nimble, far smarter; that when he was strong, alcohol was the Terminator, punching a hole through the tissue paper of his strength. His speech chilled me, and I left, knowing I was no match.

I’m still afraid. What scares me the most is how fast alcohol is, how perfect its timing. I’ll climb into my car, feeling as if I don’t even have the energy to press the gas pedal in the face of the sadness and loss I am up against, and there in the passenger seat he sits, smiling at me. He is gorgeous—the epitome of physical appeal. He looks at me knowingly, his compassion radiating like a heat.

“Hi baby,” he says, tucking a lock of my hair behind my ear. “Miss me?”

After a drug-induced nap

I was sick for two days, a neat package of irony after my last post. Put your money where your mouth is, my body seemed to say. I finally got some antibiotics and started them this morning; this evening they began to work—or more accurately, the bone-deep exhaustion that had me barely able to brush my hair transformed without warning into a two-hour nap. I woke up (it is 11 pm) feeling as if life might actually be worth living, at least until tomorrow.

I fell asleep as the movie Notes On A Scandal ended. I had seen it when it came out in the theaters, but this time I found myself watching the husband's pain very closely. How well he handles it, and how honestly. As he waits for his shamed wife to leave the house, he paces. I noticed (of course) that the couple drinks a lot of wine in the movie, and I thought, as I watched on the edge of sleep: Drink. Now is the time to get blasted. But he wasn't drinking. He seemed to feel this would not be a good time for narcotics. Instead, as he sees his wife out the door, he is able to ask her why she didn't come to him, why she let the communication break down. I watched that—a scene in which a person facing enormous emotional pain just deals with it—like a scientist. I'm like a Vulcan now, watching the inexplicable but fascinating antics of humans.

The nap's fog lifted enough that I remembered I had promised to bring in the mail for a neighbor, and not any neighbor, but the man who is now the ex-husband to my ex-husband's wife. I walked to his mailbox, and then down his driveway.

The last time I walked down that driveway, it was a cold spring afternoon with a heavy drizzle falling. I was walking fast, with a grim determination. I had just uncovered an upsetting truth about my husband and his now wife and I was practically hyperventilating on adrenaline. On that day, my ex-husband's now wife was still my neighbor's wife, and she saw me coming; she was unloading a saddle from her trunk. I remain proud of myself for speaking to her in a calm tone of voice, for saying what I thought clearly and succinctly, and for leaving her to tell the news to her husband.

Of course, I then had to walk back through that drizzle to the newly dawning hell in my own house, which, for the sake of my children, I did not burn to the ground.

Junking it

When I was 13 I took care of two small children for a week. The parents were friends of my mother’s, and somehow—possibly due to the pot being smoked around my house at the time—had been fooled into thinking I was responsible enough to perform this duty. They put me in charge of their 5 and 3 year old, their beautiful three-bedroom condominium in a development with a pool and playground, and a wad of cash for housekeeping. Then they left for a week on their 50-foot Chinese junk. I guess the parents’ instincts were right to a certain extent, since no one drowned in the pool or got hit by a car during our twice-daily excursions across a highway for candy. In the end, they paid me $100, which seemed like a massive sum in 1972.

They also promised me that the moment the weather was right, they’d take me out on that junk for a weekend sail along the coasts of New England. I loved their boat; it had red billowing sails and a dragon’s head at the prow.

The right autumn weekend dawned clear. I packed for the trip the night before and everything would have been fine except for the fact that I was coming down with the flu. My head pounded, my throat throbbed, and I was shivering with a high fever. I didn’t tell my mother. I willed myself to ignore the feelings—I remember closing my eyes and clenching my fists and trying to force myself to repress the illness. I don’t remember who drove me to the harbor, but I remember the bright September light was blinding. I worked very hard on not puking. I never thought to myself: maybe if I tell someone, they’ll let me have another chance at sailing. That option never occurred to me. I slid out of the car and walked unsteadily onto the boat, hoping my secret would stay safe.

I adored these two adults. They were fun, and kind and loving with their children (despite their wild-assed choice of a sitter). The mother was pretty and blonde, and the father was tall and dark. I knew without having to think about it that my being sick was too much trouble. To be honest, at my version of 13, I didn’t even have that conscious thought. It just was the truth already in my head.

I don’t know what the couple thought about me that first night. I remember wishing I could run and laugh with the two little kids on the wide wooden deck. They grilled on a hibachi and everyone smiled sweetly at me, a little confused, probably, at my withdrawn stillness. I tried to smile back. I couldn’t swallow, but I forced down a few bites of food and attempted to answer when spoken to. I guess the thing that saved me was that I was too young to realize what I looked like.

All night the boat rocked slightly on the calm water and my fever spiked again and again. I put the pillow over my mouth to muffle the sound of my tears, furious at myself for giving in. I don’t know if the grown-ups heard me, or if they finally decided enough was enough, but when it was time to get up for breakfast, the mom came and sat down next to me where I sagged, probably looking like I had a terrible hangover.

“Honey? Don’t you feel well?”

Their reaction to my being too sick to continue the weekend stunned me. With absolute and gentle determination they bundled me in blankets, gave me aspirin, turned the boat around, somehow contacted my parents, and drove the whole family home. No one complained or criticized or blamed. The kids kept being kids and having fun and didn’t pout. The parents seemed to think it was normal to get sick at the wrong moment. “I’m so sorry,” I croaked at the father. He gave me a puzzled look and patted my head. “Just feel better,” he said.

Years later, in therapy, I stumbled on this memory and told it with pride. I could still feel the way the bright sunshine turned my stomach, and how hard it was to smile. At the time I was illustrating my ability to repress for my therapist in the same way I would flex a tricep for you now (that is, if I would get to the gym more than once a month). But my therapist sat looking at me with a dark, meaningful expression.

“What?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said. “That’s just a really sad story.”

I was confused. “What was sad about it?”

And even now there’s a part of me that watches the scene from the end of the boat, watches that 13 year old hunched against her fever, and thinks: Oh suck it up.

But my therapist and I decided to use the memory as shorthand for what I do when I think my feelings will be a problem. Which is pretty much any time I have a feeling that doesn’t align with what everyone else wants. I didn’t always junk it, as he and I came to call it. Six months after that summer, I learned to drink the feelings away, and that worked pretty well, too.

Floaty

I keep trying to compose a post, but I feel as if I’m zigzagging my way through a grand museum on a caffeine overdose—I’ve sucked down one cup too many, and it changed my fragile coffee buzz from I Just Remembered I Am Massively Talented And Will Probably Make A Boatload of Money into Jesus CHRIST My Heart Is Pounding So Hard You Can See It If You Look In My Ears. So when I pause in front of something I’d really like to focus on (I put a poster of The Winged Victory over my desk at work, and I’ve been trying to sketch a post about her, for instance) my mind floats away. I wonder what's for dinner. Or: I need a pedicure.

Perhaps this is a quality of the newly sober.

I want to be able to calmly contemplate all the huge issues that present themselves to me these days, exhibits in that museum. It’s huge that my life as I knew it is over and starting new, that in front of me lies an unwritten-on expanse with no horizon. Yet that seems equally important to me as the fact I need to paint my toenails (or find some nail polish remover and get the chipped crap off my toes that once was the shade Wife Got Back).

From the sublime to reality

“Excuse for me, lady? I ask to you a question?” I look up from paying a pile of bills to observe the guy from the Ukraine (or somewhere syntax is totally screwed up) on my kitchen floor. 

“Can you give to me the nail polish? Do you have any of this?” he asks me. I’m a bit confused, since he’s sprawled inside the hole where my dishwasher should be, which instead of being in the hole is in the middle of my kitchen, where mounds of dirty dishes and glasses are stacked on every surface because we have no water. Anywhere. Nail polish doesn’t seem like a solution to me at the moment.

But I digress.

My kids and I had to get up early today so my youngest could get to a bus by 7:30 for a field trip. When he woke to the gloomy weather he uncharacteristically burst into tears and wouldn’t accept comfort of any kind. He sobbed next to his breakfast, which he refused, for half an hour. Just as he began to calm down enough to take a first bite, we lost power. The three of us squinted warily at each other through the dark of the family room. Hell day shifted into first gear.

After wrestling with the ornery and pollen-grimed garage door, I dropped my son at his field trip bus, drove my other son to school, and then drove to the car repair shop where I had an appointment to deal with a dragging sound that’s been coming from my brakes. I dropped the car off in the pouring rain, accepted the free but clunky courtesy car, and drove home to see if the power was back on and, with luck, to clean up the breakfast mess and possibly start some laundry before I left for work exactly five minutes from that moment. Forget a shower.

The good news was the power was back on. The bad news was that its return blew out the computer board on my dishwasher. Of course the dishwasher was full of grimy dishes, including every single glass in the house. Is there any other time a dishwasher breaks? I called an appliance repair company who said someone could come between the hours of 4 and 8 pm. Fine. Whatever. Second gear.

As I stood in the center of my kitchen wondering what next (when I should have run) the phone rang. It was the window cleaning company I had made an appointment with six months earlier when—well, all I can say is I wouldn’t have made that appointment today. But I had contracted for the work, and even though the rain was pouring down as I answered the call, the windows were undeniably filthy. And it was four years and give or take a decade of filth. The washers could come.

I drove to my office, punching randomly at buttons on the courtesy radio because I forgot to grab any cds from my car. The humidity was so thick the little placard they’d hung on the rearview mirror that read Courtesy of Honda curled at the edges. I ground out as many hours of poorly paid work as I could (though I say again: the people at my company are so nice). In the middle of those hours the car repair guy called. 

“Can you describe again the noise you thought you were hearing?”

I couldn’t believe he really said that. I thought repair guys only said that in movies.

I assured him there actually was a noise, and that I would come as soon as I could to go for a scenic drive with him, maybe stop for a picnic, and we could chat about the election.

Just then my older son called me from home; he’d had to get driven by his father after school because of the weather. The window washers had left me a surprise, my son said: a huge bill. Duh.

I left my office, took the car repair guy for a spin and listened to him explain there really wasn’t any noise—well, there was a noise, yes, but technically it wasn’t a problem noise, and if I had been born with a penis, I’d understand the difference. He took pity on me, though, and recorded my imagined noise on the computer when we got back from our drive so that, if I ever hallucinated in this way again, they’d have a history with which to convict me. I drove my still-thunky car home to face the window-washing bill.

Not long after I had hand washed enough dishes to get us to the arrival of the dishwasher guy, I left to pick up my son, who—little ray of sunshine in the center of Hades—managed to have a great time on his trip, including purchasing a stuffed tortoise he named Steamboat Willie. I thought, for an instant, how nice it was when I had a family that included another adult and enough money that extra bills didn’t require a major juggling act and stuffed animals could be paramount. Then reality snapped shut on us again.

So here I sit with Borat the repair guy in the midst of my dismantled kitchen. He needs nail polish to mark a screw hole so that he won’t forget where the screw goes, should a miracle happen and he actually finds the screw again. I won’t have a dishwasher for at least three days, and whatever I get will cost me more than $400. The windows were stunning for about half an hour, and then there was a thundershower. (But: they scrubbed the sills! They cleaned the screens!) The car still sounds like it’s dragging a dead weight, and neither the dog or I have had dinner. I offered Borat some of the salad and pasta my children left behind on the table, but he wasn’t hungry. He said to me, “Oh no, already I eat my friend’s house, long time later.”

He’s probably faking that diction. I bet he and the guy who owns the company sit around laughing about it. “And she completely bought it!” he’ll say.

He can laugh. I don't mind. I got this far through the day without numbing myself against it. How bad could tomorrow be?

Today was big

Today marks 90 days since I’ve used alcohol or prescription drugs. For those lucky enough to be outside the world of substance abuse and addiction, know that 90 days is like getting into the major leagues of sobriety—as a rookie, of course, but still. And I’ll probably sit on the bench for the season, maybe two. No problem. I can wait. I know enough to know I know nothing.

It’s risky for me to talk about this here, but since so much of my time and energy has been poured into this effort of late, I’ve had little else to say. And writing is a direct meter reading on my health: I write, I’m ok. I don’t write, things don’t go so well. I took notes throughout the first month of kicking this, and I’m trying to form those into the core of a longer piece. I have to believe that writing about my sobriety can do only good at this point. Besides saving my sorry ass by talking about what happened to me, maybe I can help someone else. Either way, I’ve got to have an outlet.

I’ve been more lonely and humbled and confused in the past three months than I can ever remember; but the fear—the ever-growing sensation that something soulless and crushingly powerful was trying to hunt me down and kill me—that is gone. I was terrified for years. I drive past funerals and I think: that was almost me. I hear about people getting DUIs or wrapping their cars around telephone poles or dying of overdoses and I think: that could have been me. 

When I had only three days, I cried on the shoulder of a man who had 35 years. “I wish I had what you have,” I said. “Oh no, we’re even,” he replied. “We both of us have today, and that’s it.”

And today is a good day for me to have.

Lately

I like

 • my children.

 • Green Day’s “American Idiot” (again). Damn, that’s a burning hunk of adolescent angst.

 • my bed, which I spent a fortune on in my past life. It’s one of those luxury beds from one of those luxury hotels, and lately, when I am lonely and tired and longing for Russell Crowe but with a Rupert Everett side who anticipates my moods and knows what I need but is not gay and (to quote Juno’s dad) loves me for exactly what I am: good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, who thinks the sun shines out my ass…when I'm wanting that, and can't have it, my bed understands.

 •how I sleep lately. I turn out the light and the next thing I know the alarm is chirping. (Note:  could be related to the second bullet.)

 •7-Eleven coffee with fat-free half-and-half and two Splenda. (Or as they say in Massachusetts, Splender.)

 •telling the truth

 I do not like

 • the women in my town who fail to pull up to the correct line when dropping their child at school. To review: Ladies—wrap a tennis skirt or yoga pants around this idea if it helps you get it—the children at this school are between the ages of 9 and 11. It’s safe to assume your child will not melt if he gets wet during the 7-step walk to the gym door, and the 7-step walk is not painful for your child. You will see your child in a few short hours. A long heartfelt goodbye and detailed instruction on what to do with the homework you did for them is not required, I promise. Besides, the real point is that when you stop where you do every morning major hell is unleashed across acres and acres of cars behind you. It’s like braking unnecessarily on the Tappan Zee—it could cause someone innocently driving along the Merritt to sit for an extra hour. I am this close to getting out of my car and having a little chat with you any morning now. All that’s stopping me is my son, who I ask, every day, if I may have a little chat with you. He meets my eyes in the rearview mirror and says, with some reluctance, “I guess you better not.” But you’re pushing me, girlfriend. My son will always love me, and the scar of his mother getting out during drop off to speak to the Starbucks-sucking driver of a small country disguised as a motor vehicle will fade.

 •high heels

 •lamb or venison. I don’t know about things like rabbit or squirrel. I’ve eaten boar, alligator, rattlesnake and grasshoppers, and they were all fine. Not lamb.

 •the effects of coffee, except for the taste and the first five minutes of optimistic hype-out.

 These lists could be longer. But today they’re exactly this length.

 

Raising boys

My son has a pretty big part in the school play, and today is the dress rehearsal. He said last night, and again this morning, that he was very nervous about how it would go.

One of my stock techniques in attempting to make my children feel better about things like this (which reveals, no doubt, my own demented take on life) is to ask, "Well, what's the worst that could happen?"

My son had no answer.

I offered: "I guess the worst could be that you would fall off the stage, and your costume would get torn in half, and your pants would fall down."

He looked at me with barely concealed pity. "Mom. That is NOT the worst."

I waited. Then he said: "The worst thing that could happen would be if terrorists decided to unload a giant nuclear attack on New York City, and the flame wall came this far and destroyed everything in its path, and helicopters with suicide bombers were dropped on our school and we all died."

I had to concede he was right; that was worse. But then I said, "Yes, but we'll all be dead, so no one would know about your pants falling off. Or even remember it."

He had nothing after that.

Out my back door

It's been a long time since I've really written here. For months I've just been posting. Do you know what I mean? For months I've braided everything I could into a sort of code, the kind of code I have to use when I blog, because that's the way it has to be, for reasons of privacy, and for the safety privacy typically grants. But I've been doing a lot of thinking about what, if anything, that privacy has really bought me. I'm not sure it's much of anything.

And it's no big news, now, that the past few weeks have been witness to many BlogWorld collisions with RealWorld. I've been watching it from a distance, my usual distance. When I first started reading blogs (and I no longer remember how this initially came to be true) the writers were women struggling with infertility or pregnancy or early motherhood. A few of them were actually writers, and in the beginning (for me) they wrote the blogs I read the most often. But little by little blogging shifted more toward what it is now, and the writing mattered less by definition of the genre. For the five years I've been reading blogs, and the more than two I've been writing a blog, I've been charmed and frustrated by the unified voice of it—I love the tone, the bravado, the (usually) guarded feints at revealing true darkness. But not many people out there delve very far into the darkness because, as we've all noted a zillion times over, it's dark. And when it's too dark, things get pitch black and thus hard to decipher. Also: boring. Far better to talk about the hilarious sidebars, the ironic middle, the details of—to pick a topic—motherhood, than to get mired in the guck.

But the truth is my world has been very dark and gucky for a long time. I got so used to it being dark I became pretty good at seeing in it, like a coal miner, I guess. Right now I'm standing at the entrance to the mine, blinking at the light. And trying to decide whether to bolt for the dark again. Or to describe where I was.

It's quiet in my backyard tonight. The night is so still; it's almost summer-like (I cringe writing that, lest I anger the God of Sort Of Endless Late Winter, and bring raw drizzle down on our heads again). I stood out behind my house watching my dog rush around the same space he's rushed around for his whole life. Everytime I open the door and let him out there, he acts as if he's never seen the scraggly row of forsythia, the lily garden choked with years of weeds, the decaying swingset. He explores everything all over again no matter how many times he's explored it in the past few hours. I envy him his optimism. Maybe he knows something I don't. (Or maybe he's about to get skunked again.)