Filthy beasts, p.14
Filthy Beasts, page 14
“You’d think I would have apologized to him after all of that.” Dorothy shook her head, looking regretful. “But I didn’t. I’m not ready. He’s been sober for three years, and I’m not ready to apologize to him for anything.”
She looked up at the nodding heads around the room. “And the worst part? I could have had one whole hour to myself in my own house. I could have read a book, watched TV, called a friend, or just sat and stared out the window.” The group was nodding again and chuckling. How were they finding this story funny?
“We’re glad you’re here, Dorothy,” another middle-aged woman said.
“Keep coming back,” said another.
The people around the circle, all women, aged from thirty to seventy, spoke one by one about their struggles, all relating to the theme that Dorothy introduced: the ambiguous topic of “letting go.” One woman spoke about how she drove by her boyfriend’s house late at night to see if he was cheating on her. Another talked about how her teenage son wasn’t speaking to her because she stopped calling the school to say that he was sick when he was really hungover. Almost everyone spoke of a higher power and how they were trying hard to “let go” and “let things be” and “not control outcomes.” How was that going to help anyone stop drinking?
I slipped out the back after the meeting started to break up, more confused than when I had arrived. The last thing they said before the end of the meeting was to keep coming back, and that new people should attend at least six meetings before giving up. I assumed this message was directed at me, but besides a random smile here or there, nobody focused on me. I didn’t get the feeling that they cared one way or the other if I came back again.
But I did keep going back, the only nineteen-year-old man in a gaggle of disappointed yet inspiring older women. Their laughter was off-putting initially, as each woman told a story more horrifying than the last. But with each anecdote, and the group laughter that followed, the nature of alcoholism changed for me. I started to see myself as separate; I started to identify choices that could be made.
And I started confronting my mother—slowly, at first, and then with more urgency. I had heard these ladies say that I couldn’t cure my mother’s disease, but I had carved out an exception for myself. I showed her the pamphlets they gave me, which mapped out in detail what was happening to her, and how she could get help if she admitted that she needed it. On the nights when John was away and she was back at the house, I shared my pain with her, and my anxiety, and told her how much I loved her and needed her as she sat in her chocolate-colored chair and sipped from her scotch. I cried on one of those nights, the first time she looked up. I took that as a sign that she might yet still see that there was hope for her, but she only said, “I think you need to talk to somebody, darling.” I realized that everything I had been saying had only confirmed for her that there was something wrong with me.
At the end of the next meeting, I talked to one of the women about confronting my mother.
“What gives me the right to decide how my husband chooses to live his life?” she said.
“But they’re sick,” I said.
“So are you.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not the alcoholic.”
“So?”
I had come to discover that Al-Anon people made a habit of asking obvious questions that didn’t have obvious answers.
She continued. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you could get your mother to stop drinking tomorrow, which you can’t, and let’s say she immediately became the mother that you have in your mind that she should be, which she won’t. How does that change who you are?”
“But doesn’t how your husband acts, whether he’s drinking or not, have a profound effect on you? That’s like saying that somebody who beats his wife is ‘living his life the way that he wants to.’ ”
“His drinking has had a profound effect on all of us, and if he were hitting me or the kids I would be out of there in a heartbeat. Alcoholism is a family disease, and he’s the carrier, but we all have it. I am choosing to stay with him, for now, and choosing to address my part of the disease. I know my boundaries. I know what behavior I will accept and what I will not. I have support. I have options. I feel freer than I have ever felt in my life. I know it sounds strange to you now, but I’m telling you that there will come a point when you will look at your mother, with love in your heart, and you will be genuinely at peace with who she is, whether she is drinking or not. You’ll see.”
It had been so long since I had thought of myself outside of the context of my mother that “who I was” had never been a question that I thought about answering. I stared at the woman, and she smiled in reaction to what I could only imagine was a noticeable shift in my face. I felt like one of those mice in a maze that finally discovers a path to freedom after bumping into the same wall over and over again.
“There it is,” she said.
* * *
I LEARNED ABOUT the National Outdoor Leadership School from the same friend who told me about Andover. I asked my father to pay for me to go on a three-week kayaking trip through the Sea of Cortez in Mexico that coming January. My father hadn’t asked me much about my decision to take a year off from school, and I didn’t talk to him about it. He had once again floated the idea of community college in a few of our phone calls, like he was looking for a place to park an asset that had lost considerable value, but I would pivot to a different subject.
In the end, my father agreed to pay for the trip after I explained that it wasn’t a vacation tour but rather a grueling survival test with the high likelihood of pain, misery, and prolonged discomfort. I played the sissy card, having calculated that the idea of me being transformed from the girly boy he had tolerated into the man that he wanted would be too enticing an opportunity to pass up.
At nineteen, I was among the youngest members of our NOLS group of fifteen, the oldest being two fiftyish men, one a hippie professor and the other a fit Republican businessman. All of us had arrived the night before at a central camping spot not far from the “put in” and had been instructed to pick an area to roll out our sleeping bags and get some sleep before an early start the next morning. The lead instructor, Debbie, was rosy-cheeked and solidly built, with a smile that never left her face. She explained that we would be alone for three weeks, with no communication from the outside world, and each day we would be working together on how we were going to kayak the twelve or so miles a day we would need to cover to meet up with our support team at the end of the trip. We would carry all of our food, with only two restocking opportunities at predetermined stops. If we didn’t hit those stops when scheduled, we would have to survive on what we had until we did. The weather was unpredictable, so each day we would need to make the call as to whether we could paddle that day, keeping in mind that if we lost a day of paddling because of weather we would need to make it up on another day. The instructors would not make the decisions for us; as a group we would choose together and live or die on those decisions.
Our days began with a wake-up call at 4 a.m., in preparation to be on the water no later than 5. We had six hours of paddling time. Secluded coves, as identified by the maps, were the ideal stopping points, as they offered protection from the fierce winds that kicked up every morning at 11 a.m. In the afternoons we learned how to spearfish, took hikes in the desert to learn about the local flora and fauna, and practiced our kayaking skills. The instructors taught us how to execute a full roll, as it was always preferable not to dump supplies if your kayak tipped over. Even with Debbie standing beside me, I panicked and evacuated as soon as the kayak went over, unable to relax for the moment it took to position my paddle, twist my body, and come back to the surface. I was one of only two people in our group who never mastered this skill.
Each of us spent one day completely alone, hiking far enough into the coastline desert that camp wasn’t visible, but not so far that we couldn’t find our way back. I looked forward to this part of the trip, imagining my time as a vision quest during which I would receive new insights. Instead, I ended up finding a small cliff where I could look out onto the ocean, not a single boat or other sign of life besides the occasional gull, and a deep loneliness descended. I started to hyperventilate.
Instead of achieving spiritual enlightenment, I jerked off on a desiccated bush, hoping it would put me to sleep and make the day go by faster. I curled up into a ball and looked out at the sea, curious that I could witness something so beautiful and not be moved. I wondered whether there was something I needed to get out before anything new could come in.
We had one kayak, a single, that was significantly slower than the others. When it was my turn to paddle it, my body reached the limit of where my brain decided it could go, and I slowed down as the pod ahead of me pulled away.
“You need to keep up,” Jessie, one of the two male instructors, said as he pulled up next to me.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Yes, you can,” he said.
“Can you slow down a little?”
“No.”
I stopped and rested the paddle across my kayak, dropping my head.
“You need to keep going, Kirk,” he said, “or you’re going to be out here alone.”
Jessie caught up to the rest of the pod, each of the kayakers paddling rhythmically, as one, as I sat and watched them go. None of them looked back, and I remembered my first Al-Anon meeting. They weren’t going to wait for me. Nobody was coming back to save me. I picked up my paddle and started digging back into the waves, paddling for the first time beyond the limits of what my mind thought possible. As I started making up the distance lost, each stroke took me into new territory.
About halfway through the journey, we visited a small fishing village. The villagers greeted us and offered us lunch of a small portion of freshly cooked fish, which ignited a larger hunger that was our constant companion on the trip. I watched as a couple of people in our party took a second helping, and resisted the urge to do so myself, realizing that we were probably eating into the villagers’ allotment for that day. We played a game of volleyball. The villagers laughed at every missed hit. I thought of how my Al-Anon group celebrated the power of simplicity, a concept I had yet to grasp.
A few days before we were scheduled to arrive at our final destination, the instructors sat down with each of us around a small fire to discuss our experience.
“I wish I could go back and do the solo outing again,” I said when it was my turn.
Debbie smiled. “You seem more at ease than when we first met,” she said.
“I can’t stop smiling.”
“You did a great job, man,” Jessie said.
“I don’t want to go back,” I said. After three weeks on the water, my body had changed. I had always been skinny, but now my arms were tanned and rippled with the beginnings of muscles I had only seen on people like Ethan. I never realized a defined muscle could help you feel as strong on the inside as you did on the outside.
On our last day on the water, I lingered in my single kayak, waiting for the biggest wave I could find to ride into the beach, no longer satisfied with the safest route to shore.
Chapter 10
In August, I returned to Tulane for my sophomore year. It was hard to return to college life. Al-Anon had outfitted me with new tools, and I was energized from my NOLS experience, but the depth of my losses was only just settling in, and I had yet to realize how permanent they would become. I moved into a one-bedroom apartment a mile and a half from campus, in one of the sketchier parts of uptown New Orleans, my freshman-year friends having established strong social networks and living situations of their own in the year that I was gone. I hadn’t had regular contact with anyone besides Ethan.
Ethan didn’t seem to want to spend time with me anymore. When he stopped responding to my calls, I called his girlfriend Paisley and asked to see her. I had met her once, and understood that she knew a lot about me from Ethan. I knew that Ethan thought we were alike. But I didn’t know her well enough to enlist her help in reconnecting me with her boyfriend. She sounded surprised to hear from me, but agreed to meet at my apartment.
I watched out my window as she pulled up behind my rusted Corolla in a brand-new Accord, got out of the car, and looked around as she walked toward my front door. One of the benefits of having developed a personal old-money narrative was the inoculation it gave me from feeling poor in comparison to others. I was brought up believing that someone who drove a shitty car and looked like a homeless person could be the richest person in the room, while someone who appeared wealthy could be swimming in debt. As Paisley looked for a clean place to sit on the secondhand couch that I had purchased from a thrift store, I saw no indication that she registered my overt poverty as a disguise to hide wealth. She just looked uncomfortable.
“Did you lock your car?” I asked.
“Ethan’s truck has been broken into a few times, so he insists I lock my car wherever I go,” she said.
“Good idea,” I said. I didn’t mention that my rusted, ten-year-old Corolla was broken into daily, and I had taken to leaving it unlocked so that the thieves didn’t feel the need to break a window. “Thank you for stopping by. Can I get you anything?”
I didn’t have anything.
“No, I’m fine. Thank you,” she replied.
I wasn’t sure what to say to her, so I just took a moment to see her for the first time. She was beautiful in an unconventional way, and had a fragile, soft-spoken quality that I knew Ethan would find appealing, much as my vulnerability attracted him.
She tried hard not to look sad for me as I explained that I was having a hard time getting in touch with him, and did she have any suggestions as to what I might do? “Maybe you just need to give him a call and set up a time to get together,” she said. “I know Tuesdays are usually less busy?”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “I’ll call him and see if we can get together Tuesday. Thanks so much for coming by.” I realized she pitied me. I wanted her out of my house.
“I was glad you called. It was good to see you,” she said, getting up.
I got on the phone as soon as she was gone and left a message for Ethan. I don’t know how long it took for him to get back to me. I assume she told him to call. He greeted me as if he couldn’t wait to talk to me and had been dreading it at the same time.
“Kiiirrrrrkkkk. What’s going on, mane?” I recoiled when he used the term, just as I had when he called me “brah.” We made plans to get together the following Tuesday morning. When I pulled up to his apartment, I could see his Sigma Nu brothers scattered outside like extras in an all-white production of West Side Story.
Ethan’s roommate didn’t know where he was or when he would be back. I sat on his couch as guys in backward baseball caps came and went, looking for Ethan, sharing with one another fuzzy memories from the previous night’s events. One of his brothers was in the midst of a vomit-themed tale when Ethan came in forty-five minutes late. His face dropped when he saw me.
“I was so surprised to see you here, man. How are you? It’s great to see you,” Ethan said, walking over.
“You’re late,” I said.
He sat down beside me and shook his head, letting out a long, exhausted sigh. “I totally forgot, man. I am so sorry. It’s the God’s honest truth. It just slipped my mind.”
“You have a lot of friends waiting on you, so I’m gonna go.” I motioned to his fraternity brothers, who were lingering near the door and glancing in our direction every few seconds to see when we would be done. “It’s no big deal. We’ll just get together another time when you’re free.” I hated that he knew how hurt I was. I was embarrassed that his world was too full to remember specific plans with me, and my world was so empty that those plans were all I had thought about for days beforehand.
That night I sat in my apartment and tried to cry, but nothing came out. I could feel the sadness stuck inside of me, and no matter how hard I tried to dry-heave it out, it felt fixed.
* * *
ABOUT MIDWAY THROUGH MY SOPHOMORE year, I received an unexpected call from Avery, asking me out to dinner. I had not heard from her since our date freshman year. After some awkward small talk at the table, she took a deep breath and apologized for disappearing. “The night after our date, I was attacked in our apartment,” she said. “He did things to me that I didn’t talk to anybody about for a year. I don’t know what would have happened if somebody hadn’t come home and scared him off. I’m talking about it now, finally, and I needed to tell you because I really did have a nice time with you, and felt bad that I ignored your calls.”
She continued. “On the day that you were leaving, freshman year, I came to say goodbye. Do you remember you called me one last time to tell me that you were leaving school and weren’t coming back?” I shook my head no. I couldn’t speak. “Well, you called and wanted to say goodbye, and I could tell by the message that you didn’t expect that I would come. I was surprised that you called as many times as you did after I never called you back.”
“I really liked you,” I said meekly. I held her hand across the table.
