Writing Is My Drink (5 page)

Buddhist, a writer—if you wanted-- or merely a magical person

who could read a book without leaving any evidence that you’d

passed through its pages.

In those don’t-ask-don’t-tell times, portraits of family mem-

bers evolved slowly. To boot, Pat was a student of Zen; her skill

set included deflecting, speaking in koans, and the ability to an-

swer any question with a question without skipping a beat. But

over the course of my childhood and adolescence, I collected

a handful of remarkable details about Pat, the most amazing

of which was that she was one of the first American women to

be ordained a Zen Buddhist priest. By my early twenties, Pat

loomed large in my mind. Her calm confidence made her the

poster child for everything I was not.

Two years before my conversation with Steve, I’d gone to

visit Aunt Pat on the North Shore of Oahu, where she lived in

a tiny studio apartment attached to a low wooden house just

yards away from the crazy Pacific. My boyfriend and I had spent

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the night in a mosquito-infested tent a few miles away because

I didn’t want to impose on her. We arrived after lunch on New

Year’s Day, 1983.

I was eager and excited to see her because I imagined she

would recognize how evolved I was and I would receive some

Zen master nod of approval in front of my boyfriend, Markos.

No longer a little girl afraid of women who shaved their heads,

I now saw Aunt Pat as a bit of a hippie girl status symbol and

was excessively proud that she’d studied with Shunryu Suzuki,

known to many as the author of
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
, at the San Francisco Zen Center. I’d imagined that she’d embrace

me as a kindred spirit, as brave, independent, and self-possessed.

She took us first to see her Japanese rock garden behind the

house: a series of boulders surrounded by swirling eddies of per-

fectly raked gravel. I tried to ooh and aah over the rocks in a

manner that communicated both that I understood the beauty

in the austere and understated and that I wasn’t an overly talk-

ative people pleaser. We then made our way back inside. Her tiny

place was covered in tatami mats, a couple of low tables holding

a few teapots, some books, a couple of hand-thrown bowls. The

sort of cement block-and-board bookshelf that every college

student seemed to possess in 1979 sectioned off her sleeping

area. In another corner, a cramped kitchen housed a hot plate

and a early model fridge full of alfalfa sprouts and pressed tofu.

Pat served us tea at her table by the giant windows that looked

onto a screened porch and beyond that a beach of black volcanic

rocks. The surf roared relentlessly; salt hung in the air.

“How about a walk?” she said after tea, rising from the little

table. The three of us—my tiny aunt of barely five feet and one

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hundred pounds, my long-legged boyfriend, and myself—then

headed toward the water. As we moved closer, I scanned the

rocky beach for the sandy strip we would be walking along, but

there was nothing beyond the jumble of black volcanic rocks

between which the loud, violent surf surged in and out. Pat leapt

to the first gnarled black outcropping and then sprung effort-

lessly to the next. Markos jumped behind her, not quite as quick

and agile but nearly. I scrambled up the first jagged lava chunk

and there I stood, frozen, arms windmilling to steady myself as

waves rushed up onto the rock.

Final y, I slunk down the rock, trudged through the surf, and

clambered up the next rock, bent over and clinging to the rock

with my hands for balance. I made slow progress this way. As

the gap between Pat and Markos and myself grew, I feared the

moment they would look back and then be compelled to wait.

As soon as they did, I would be separate from them; they would

be together—the competent people—and I would be left alone

with my inability, my anxiety waving like a flag. This moment

came quickly. There I was, the most awkward creature on earth,

dragging myself forward as my patient sixty-six-year-old aunt

and strapping twenty-two-year-old boyfriend looked on. I felt

completely revealed, the parts of myself I’d worked for so long to

keep covered exposed. I could barely meet Markos’s eyes. In our

six months together, I’d managed to keep my giant self-doubt

mostly out of view. What would he think?

I didn’t make it much farther before they started heading

back. Because of me, they were cutting the walk short. Ugh!

They caught up with me quickly, and we walked back to my

aunt’s mostly in silence, the two of them leaping from rock to

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rock at a visibly slowed pace and me taking up the rear, my

face burning with shame. When we reached the lawn between

Pat’s house and the beach, Markos gave me that It’s-okay look

intended to comfort but which never does. Pat looked at me

without judgment and said evenly and not unkindly, “You just

lack confidence.”

Just,
I thought, irritated. I knew I lacked confidence, but I wanted that to be my secret. I had no idea how I might possibly

gain confidence. Lacking confidence seemed so permanent, like

youth.

Besides lugging around my duffel of self-doubt, I was also

saddled with the self-imposed task of keeping the whole thing

under wraps. I talked with bravado some of the time and laughed

loudly all of the time. I figured I could talk up enough smoke

and mirrors so that no one would sense how little faith I had in

myself, my feet, my body, my abilities.

Here’s a short list of the things I could not do:

• leap from rock to rock above swirling surf (covered above)

• fall back into a circle of hands (This barely ever comes up,

although it did once in eighth grade drama class and no, I

couldn’t do it.)

• ski fast (I could ski slowly.)

• rappel

• rock climb

• leap from log to log (It may not seem like a big deal, but I

grew up in British Columbia, where log leaping is practical y

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required of every adolescent. Many a teen beer party begins

and ends with a stint of log leaping.)

• water-ski

• dive into cold water

• dive into warm, tropical water

• emergency rescue

• trust someone to love and take care of me

• write with abandon

But maybe before I could let go—even just a little—I had to

discover what I’d been holding on to. And sometimes we can’t

discover what we’ve been holding on to before we’re utterly

ready. In other words, before we’re so miserable that we
must
.

When I was twenty-five, I moved from Santa Fe to San Fran-

cisco, where I, in fact, ended up living just blocks from that same San Francisco Zen Center where both Steve and Pat had studied.

Out of loneliness I went there once to see if I could feel some-

thing—a connection to my aunt Pat (although she hadn’t been

there since the seventies), a great inspiration to study Zen—but

I still felt lonely.

During my last two years of the four years I lived in San

Francisco, I would ride my bike across the park to the Richmond

District on Tuesday afternoons and sit in a therapist’s office. It

cost seventy dol ars an hour, roughly the tips from a night of

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waitressing. I had a problem I couldn’t name. I didn’t even know

where to dig to unearth the thing. After a year of discussing all

my everyday anxieties—over money, over relationships, over

finding my way in the world—I final y touched a soft spot, the

sinkhole I’d spun circles around for so long.

“Do you think your mother’s an alcoholic?” my therapist

asked. She was ten years older than me, with frizzy brown hair

and a last name like an Italian mountain town.

An alcoholic? I thought of an expression—one of my moth-

er’s, in fact—“a falling-down drunk.” My mother wasn’t that.

Yes, there was a glass of wine beside her in the evenings; and yes, the sound of two ice cubes hitting a glass and clicking against

each other summoned up her image. Every time. But she wasn’t

a drunk.

I thought of my real father then too. He
was
an alcoholic,

and I was allowed to call him that because he’d named himself

that when he joined AA when I was twenty-one. I could call

him that because when he drank he was loud and obnoxious.

I even had a scar on my hand from where he burned me acci-

dental y with his cigarette when I was eight. He’d been trying to

what—hug me? tickle me?—when the cigarette singed my skin.

I’d jumped back, and we’d both looked at each other, wary. The

scar is a small circle, still here although ever so faint. I think of it as a sun, a child’s perfectly round sun.

Yes, I could name him as an alcoholic easily, even casual y:

My dad’s an alcoholic. Because he’d said it himself, called it out, given it a name and a place in the world. Naming him an alcoholic involved no betrayal on my part. I could also say it because

he was dead.

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But my mother?

“An alcoholic? No, I don’t think so,” I said, eager to end the

session and get out of there.

“Would you be willing to explore the idea that your mother

has a problem with alcohol? That her drinking has affected your

relationship with her?”

I looked out the open window, to the backs of the Victorian

houses of yellow, white and blue with their fire escapes lacing

down their sides. It was a city built on disaster, on hope, on a

history of buildings col apsing, a city of people needing a way

out in a hurry.

“Maybe,” I said, and the session was over.

But final y the day would come: the day when I would take

the word “alcoholic” and my mother and put them together in a

sentence. And that—that was a changing day.

In some important way, that was the day I became a writer.

I say it began that day even though I had been writing sporad-

ical y in a creative way and routinely in an academic way for

years. I say it began that day even though the writing I would

come to think of as my “real writing” was still years down the

road. I say it began that day because that was the day I jumped

off the cliff and was willing to say what I real y thought even if

it meant the loss of everything I believed I needed to survive,

even if it meant pissing people off, even if abandonment was to

follow. That was the day I let the razor hit my scalp. The day I

made a first step in letting go of the idea that everybody needed

to like me all the time. The day I stopped making nice and ac-

cepted that the Steves of the world might never like me, and that

I would survive without their approval.

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As it turns out, I was, in fact, a grown person who didn’t

require the approval of my mother or anyone else to survive, but

without writing, I learned, part of me would never have a chance

to come to life. The story that I began to write that day was my

own version of my life, the story we each have a right to tel , if

only to ourselves. But it’s a right we must take; most likely no

one will ever hand it to us.

Like diving into cold water, writing requires some letting go.

Writing requires trust: trust that words will find you, that the

unknown will become known, that the mystery will be solved,

that the story will find its arc, that you will find your story and your voice, that your voice will be heard, that you will be understood. But most of al , writing requires you to trust yourself, the source of the voice inside you that supplies the next word, the

next line, the next idea. And until you can access some of this

trust, you won’t be able to write the stories you want to write the way you want to write them.

For some of us, the road to finding our own voice is a long one,

because we’re not ready for the truth of the fact that the only way out is through. We don’t feel ready to see ourselves reflected back to us, to sit through a million competing thoughts—the static we

must often endure before we final y find the station where our

own voice comes through singular and clear, before we can write

with abandon on a semi-routine basis, before we can press our

vision past the block, past the half-finished story, past the rewrite, until final y we arrive at a finished piece of writing that is, in fact, a manifestation of our vision and that does, in fact, tell our story the way we want to tell it. So much encouragement and faith is