Let's Take the Long Way Home (5 page)

THAT AUTUMN WE
were walking the fire trails near Sheepfold Meadow at Middlesex Fells; it was a glorious Sunday afternoon, and dozens of people had wandered
out of bounds, past the No Trespassing signs near the verboten reservoir, to avail themselves of the view. A town police officer arrived and rounded up only the people with dogs, ignoring the families with strollers and the solitary amblers. He herded us into a queue as though we were a group of delinquents and began writing citations for criminal trespassing. I was planning on using a fake name, which seemed to me the obvious course of action, but Caroline, who was standing in front of me, dutifully announced who she was and where she lived. I sighed and made the decision to go down with her.

A few weeks later we were summoned to court in the neighboring town of Stoneham, where all of us—nineteen offenders—were given a comically harsh lecture for our offense and sentenced to six months’ probation. (“Where
is
Stoneham?” Caroline called to ask, the morning before court.) I stood to address the judge and began complaining of discriminatory treatment, as only the dog owners had been cited. The judge made a cursory note of my objection; Caroline looked embarrassed to be with me. Our friend Tom, having seen the particular humor in her being arrested, made her a silk-screened T-shirt with a picture of Lucille behind bars, bearing the legend
FREE THE SHEEPFOLD 19
.

KATHY, THE DOG TRAINER
who had first told the two of us to get in touch, had done so based on a hunch; she
was a deeply intuitive person who spent her days observing dogs and humans for all sorts of behavioral cues. A small, soft-spoken woman who had two German shepherd dogs, she could stop a wayward or dominant dog in its tracks with her calm demeanor and no-nonsense voice. She was equally perceptive with people and had spotted something in Caroline and me before we ever became friends. One day a few months later, when we were at a joint training session in Kathy’s backyard, I reached over to fiddle with Caroline’s collar and said, “Oh my God, I have that same vest!”

“Of course you do,” said Caroline, unimpressed. “Why wouldn’t you? We have the same life.”

DEEPER THAN MOST
of the more obvious parallels between us was the drinking history we had in common—that empty room in the heart that is the essence of addiction. Caroline and I would soon enough tell each other everything, but for the first few months of our friendship, I kept our greatest similarity to myself. The summer before we became friends, I had read Caroline’s memoir,
Drinking: A Love Story
, in a rain-soaked cabin in Truro, on Cape Cod, where I had gone for a week with Clementine. I would swim the ponds during the day and read on the screened-in porch until twilight, and I still remember sitting there, Clemmie sleeping next to me, while I read the book until dusk turned to pitch black
outside. It was the season of the first round of celebrity addiction memoirs, when Pete Hamill and a few others had come out with new tough-guy versions of
Under the Volcano
. Until now, though, most of the drinking stories had belonged to a boys’ club. That night in Truro, I read Caroline’s book straight through. I knew it was wrenching, honest, and revelatory. And because I’d poured my last quart of Jack Daniel’s down the kitchen sink twelve years earlier, I also knew that it was true.

BY THE TIME I HAD MOVED EAST, IN 1981, THE DRINKING
had revealed itself as panacea and problem both, though I didn’t yet see that one almost guaranteed the other. I came from a line of Texas Protestant bourbon lovers who had incorporated their affection for whiskey into a way of life. One exception, at least as I understood it, had been my maternal grandfather, a sweet blue-eyed farmer who sang a cappella in the church choir and pleasantly deferred to my intrepid grandmother’s every wish. Years after they had died, I asked my mother to confirm what I had always perceived as a harmonious union.

“Were Mamaw and Granddad happy?” I asked.

“Why, sure,” she said. “After Daddy quit drinking.”

I was stunned; I had no memory of my granddad ever touching alcohol. But my mother told me that day about a summer when I was about four: When we were visiting our grandparents’ farm near Breckenridge, Texas, Granddad
had infuriated my father by taking me and my sister to a bar on his way home from errands in town. His binges had been infrequent but legendary, my mother said. He would drink like a wild man for a few weeks, then reappear in church and stay sober for months at a time. After raising six kids in the shadow of this behavior, Mamaw finally threatened to leave him. He stopped drinking shortly thereafter, and because I had been so young at the time, I remembered him only as a teetotaler.

The rest of the family tree had a root system soggy with alcohol, and the memories were not so opaque as with Granddad. One aunt had fallen asleep with her face in the mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner; another’s fondness for Coors was so unwavering that I can still remember the musky smell of the beer and the coldness of the cans. Most of the men drank the way all Texas men drank, or so I believed, which meant that they were tough guys who could hold their liquor until they couldn’t anymore—a capacity that often led to some cloudy version of doom, be it financial ruin or suicide or the lesser betrayal of simple estrangement. Both social drinkers, my parents had eluded these tragic endings; in the postwar Texas of suburbs and cocktails, their drinking was routine but undramatic.

From my first experiment with drinking at an overnight slumber party, when I was thirteen or fourteen, it was clear I would be lining up with the blackguards in the family. Our young hostess mixed us a noxious blend of
scotch and Diet-Rite cola; every other girl had just enough to get goofy or sleepy. I had six tumblers of the stuff, then got on the dining room table to dance while my placid friends snoozed around me. Barely on the verge of adolescence, I was still a shy girl who preferred math homework to boys. I was neither daring nor particularly unhappy, but booze flipped a switch in me I hadn’t even known was there.

By high school I was known for having a hollow leg. A good friend told me what the circulated story was on me. “‘Caldwell is the most expensive date in town,’” he quoted the other boys as saying. “‘She’ll drink you under the table and she’ll never put out.’” My dad would have no doubt appreciated both traits as signs of character. In some of my earliest memories, he had ended his days with a cut-crystal glass of bourbon and Coke, and this magic concoction seemed to make his humor mellow and his voice a little more velvety. By the time he had switched to bourbon and branch water, as he called it, I was a brainy, wild teenager in a macho Texas town, and as much as I fought my dad, I also emulated him. Whiskey took an ordinarily rebellious adolescence and sheathed it in golden light. I had a fake ID at sixteen; on my twenty-first birthday, I became a daily drinker. By then I had wandered through college and the antiwar movement and tried every drug and insurrection in sight, but the pendulum always swung back to the sweet promises of booze. Whenever I would go home to Amarillo, my father
would stock the liquor cabinet with scotch and bourbon, then tell me to show some restraint—the excellent duplicity of Texas drinking etiquette, which counseled that you drink like a man and act like a lady. “There are two things a man can’t stand,” my dad would say after our first couple of belts, his voice gravelly and full of self-satisfied wisdom. “A woman with round heels, and a woman who drinks too much.” We would both nod sagely, and I would ask him to explain the first part. He would make a pushing motion with his hand and shake his head. For years I thought that round-heeled meant spineless, because he was too modest ever to explain it.

But he always knew, I think, that drinking was going to be my problem. He knew because I got too happy and animated even at the sight of a drink, and because he shared this dark affection and yet had managed to cap the geyser at its source. If half the people on both sides of our extended family had loved the drink too much, I tended to laugh about it because I couldn’t bear to consider the consequences. My relatives also had a constitution that allowed them to live well into their nineties, and in the calculus of denial, I used this longevity to counterbalance our affliction. “In my family,” I used to say, “if alcoholism or suicide doesn’t get you, you’ll live forever.”

I usually said this with a tumbler of whiskey in my hand. (“But you always just had that one glass,” my sister said, years after I had stopped, when she was trying to
piece together the mosaic of the past. “Yes,” I told her, “and it was always full.”) Because my tolerance allowed me to drink hugely but functionally for years—I survived most of graduate school with a cache of scotch—I cultivated an image that waffled between tragedy and liberation. The self-perception was constructed to fit the need: With alcohol the mandatory elixir, I would erect a stage set to justify its presence. I would be the sensitive heroine, or doomed romantic, or radical bohemian—I was Hamlet, Icarus, Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart. God forbid that I simply face who I was, which was somebody drunk and scared and on my way to being no one at all.

Most of this self-actualization was unfolding in Austin in the 1970s, when the streets flowed with cocaine and whiskey; I surrounded myself, unconsciously but probably intentionally, with people who drank the way I did. Some of them got straight and some of them died, and a few of them calmed down, grew up, and settled for one martini instead of seven. I did my part for my generation’s collective crisis of adulthood by moving east, with the brazen notion of becoming a writer—surely, according to myth, a way to reinvent one’s life. When I left Texas, I had two quarts of whiskey in the trunk of my old Volvo, which I figured would cover the five days on the road that were ahead of me. I had a few friends in New York and knew two people in Greater Boston, where I was going, and however scared I was, I knew there would be a liquor store wherever I landed. By then I was thirty
years old, and I’d learned that courage in a bottle could get you through all kinds of doors, and all kinds of trouble, and a lot of dead-end nights alone.

In the early 1980s, hordes of people were leaving the Northeast for the softer industries and climates of the Sun Belt. New England was cold, dark, and unforgiving, people warned me; the more precarious truth was that I had no job, no place to live, and enough savings to last a year. My writing résumé consisted of a couple of rejections slips from venerated magazines; my confidence came from a few gruff encouragements from professors. But however fragile the external scaffolding looked, I suspect that I was trying to save my life, not just relocate it. I had grown up staring at the vast, imprisoning horizon of the Texas Panhandle, a region I understood how much I loved only long after I had left it, and I had jumped free of that place with a kind of high-octane terror. If conservative Amarillo, with its oil rigs and churches and cattle ranches, promised a provincial life, for years I challenged every dictum I perceived my family to possess. A decade later, I had to assume an equally resolute posture to get out of Austin—to leave behind what I loved and what I feared was killing me.

I was equal parts bluff and fear, I think, poised there on the verge of a life unfolding, not knowing whether I would leap or fall. In my last couple of years in Austin, when I had been teaching at the university and pretending to read for doctoral oral exams, I had let my heart
lead me to the water’s edge of a writing life—an inner sanctum of such power and solace that it staggered me with its reach. I lived in a few rooms of an old southern mansion with ten-foot ceilings and poured-glass windows, and I would sit there at night before my typewriter, primed with a glass of scotch and a pack of Winstons. One night before the drink kicked in I had written something that so excited me—I have no memory of what it was—that I leapt up from my chair and kept typing standing up. Probably every young would-be writer has such moments, the crystal-clear elation that keeps one going. But now I see the moment as pivotal and even Faustian: the amber light, the whirring typewriter, the young woman full of yearning and joy. The writing was the life force and the whiskey was the snake in the grass. For as long as I could, I chose them both.

YOUTH AND PRIDE
can be decent weapons against the woes of alcohol, but only for a while. I kept jobs, I threw cold water on my face each morning, I swam laps to counter the effects of the booze and then drank to wipe out the gains of the swim. For years the psychic balm of alcohol—its holy grail certainty that it could take me through anything—eclipsed the hangovers and emerging fear that I was in trouble. I had a silver pocket flask that I filled with whiskey for backup drinks; I figured if I looked the part, then I could get away with the reality.
The booze took the rough corners off, and I tried to right the equation with coffee and protein and five milligrams of Librium to ease the comedown. I was a well-oiled machine, with a 4.0 grade-point average, and nobody knew. Or so I believed.

Why did I drink? When my therapist asked me this several years after I had stopped, I thought it one of the most ludicrous questions I had ever heard. Why
wouldn’t
one drink? I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I shrugged and answered as honestly as I knew how. “Be
cauuse
,” I said, with a little scorn. “The whole world turned golden.” It took me hearing the words out loud to realize that the hue of the sublime had itself been an indicator of trouble.

A few professionals over the years had made feeble efforts to address the problem; in Texas in the 1970s, “substance abuse” wasn’t even a phrase yet. My last couple of years in graduate school, I went to see a nice woman psychologist to address, or so I thought, the ordinary stresses of work and love: I was in a demanding academic program, I had just broken up with someone, I was having difficulty sleeping. We ate Milano cookies together, the therapist and I, and laughed about how hard life was. “I think I drink too much,” I said one day. “I’m throwing down five or six glasses of whiskey a night. Maybe I need to check in to Shoal Creek.” Shoal Creek was the psych hospital in Austin where people went to dry out; a lawyer I’d worked for (and who taught me how to drink scotch and eat raw oysters) had considered it his spa. “They
wouldn’t take you,” my lovely, nonconfrontational therapist said. “You look too good.”