in patagonia

El Chalten is a frontier town if instead of brothels and panning for gold and decimating the native population, settlers just wanted to climb mountains, romp around, and take pictures for Instagram. It’s a nice place to be, I’ll give you that. The stray dogs here, as in Calafate, are the town’s dogs, and the town takes care of them – makes sure that they’re fed and fixed and doing okay. I told Hannah that Argentina’s treatment of dogs places it squarely in the “second world” in the development cycle (even though I realize this phrasing is out of date): some people keep dogs and walk them and so on, but they still shit in the street.

In Patagonia it is windy and gorgeous. The Andes pop out of high desert steppe plain, and the water of Lago Argentino is turquoise like the stone. On the drive from Calafate to Chalten through gaucho territory, skeletons are stuck to wire fencing, picked clean by condors, as if to say “this was not always adventure land.” But of course it is now. How you come to terms with that depends on how you feel about moving forward through time in general, with all of its attendant loss and compromise. As I’ve grown older I’ve found myself more and more accepting of it. We’ll all be carrion to something someday.

The sun goes down at 10pm in the summer here and the light stays until about 11. The man across the street thinks this is the best time to mow his lawn. He mows it with a weed whacker. When you have hiked 18 miles through a glacial valley and to a mountain lake, the sound he makes is not as much of an impediment to sleep as you might have thought when you put your head down.

Still, it is stunning here. You hear words like “sublime” reading the romantics and kind of roll your eyes (they’re the romantics, after all), but it is deeply bizarre in a kind of out-of-body way to be immersed in such gobsmacking natural beauty all around you. There you are, embodied, eating a ham and cheese sandwich as little ice bergs bop up and down in the lake in front of you and the clouds part over Monte Fitzroy. There’s Hannah with her PB&J. There’s billions of years of geological time yawning out in front of you, a little speck in the ether. If you’re not careful you’ll miss it.

at last

On Election Night in 2016, drunk and dumbfounded, I wandered to a bar in Beverly, Massachusetts to drink. It wasn’t particularly different from most nights drinking, really, except the despair and dread had a weight to them that endless self-pity can’t quite conjure. I forget the bartender’s name because, let’s be honest, I forget most of your names, bartenders, but she was someone I knew and she was wearing a hoodie that said “Nasty Woman” on it, and I looked at the chyrons announcing Trump’s victory, and the confetti or whatever, and I sat down. I probably said something like, “Give me a double of well whiskey and a PBR,” and then we might have chatted as I think I had several more of those plus probably a pint of vodka I had gotten somewhere along the way, and then I left and I wandered around finishing my secret booze and eventually found my way home and woke up and probably gagged and thought, “I had better get something more to drink.” My plan, such as it was, was to drink and drink and drink, and eventually probably die. It wasn’t a very good plan, but at the time, it was the best I could do.

I gave up drinking and dying eventually, for reasons orthogonal to the election and American politics, but in the background there was always this despair and dread, the feeling that not only was my understanding of myself wholly misshapen by a decade and a half of alcohol abuse, but that my understanding of history as a narrative that made sense was completely and utterly wrong, that I had been taken in by shysters and charlatans whose grand unifying theories of political change were no different from any tale woven out of straw, full of gaps and ready to crumble with the slightest scrutiny. It was all moments cherry-picked to serve a story; and just as the people in AA could cherry-pick coincidences and strokes of luck to find God, so too could the Marxists and the liberals to find progress, whatever that might mean.

We weren’t exactly doomed, but I lost interest in trying to understand what was capital-g Going On, and decided my larger political goals were probably best served by helping individuals at the micro-level and doing the very obvious Right Thing at the macro-level. My ambitions shrank. I no longer wanted to be a Great Man (ew) or die for a Reason. I became the kind of person who, having barely survived a number of near-death experiences, is grateful everyday to simply be alive.

Some days are, of course, better than others. Some days, of course, we get to exult in the narrative arc, even if it’s a fiction. Some days, as we walk to the coffee shop in the middle of a pandemic, our brothers and sisters might text us, “On my run and people started cheering,” and then pots and pans will bang from a window across the street, and our partners will text us a screenshot from CNN announcing a foregone conclusion, and we will shiver and well up and whistle at the people banging pots and pans and allow ourselves, if only for a moment, to feel relief.

There is work yet to be done. But tonight — tonight I am setting off fireworks.

mercy

The really weird thing about almost all of my problems — from despair to anger to booze — is that I’ve never been able to solve them by myself. It’s weird because it runs counter to how I want it to be — I want to solve them alone, as if my solving them alone would somehow give the solutions some sort of merit they wouldn’t otherwise have — but the fact is that I’m almost singularly unqualified to solve my own problems. It’s terrifying that this is the case, but as far as I can tell, it’s true. I have had to have the courage to be embarrassed and look weak and to go to someone else, hat in hand, and ask for help. And then a funny thing happens and people say, sure, I would be happy to help you, what an honor for you to ask.

A therapist in a rehab once had me go through a list of human rights that was a page and a half long of mostly platitudes about what we deserved as individuals, and the therapist (his name was John) asked me to make a note of whether I disagreed with any of them. I disagreed with exactly one. “Nobody has an inherent right to be happy,” I said. “Happiness is something that you earn. Shitty people don’t have a right to be happy, and I really hope that some of them aren’t.”

He kind of let this go, and if he’d argued with me I would have argued with him and it would have been a whole scene, but the point is that I don’t know if I was right, or if I was just being difficult because happiness seemed like such a chimera a week out of detox with nowhere left to live and all out of fucks to give. I don’t know if I was right because I don’t know if a thing like happiness is transactional, or really if we should think of anything so particular as a feeling as simply the upshot of debts repaid or boxes ticked off on our way to moral rectitude. Sometimes shitty people are happy and sometimes righteous ones are not. It happens.

I talked to a psychiatrist today and I said, “Hey,” and she said, “Hey,” and I said, “Look, I don’t think I’m depressed and when I was really trying to figure out if I was depressed at a rehab my psychiatrist told me I wasn’t depressed, but I figured I would ask for a second opinion.” And she said, what’s going on? And I said, “This is stupid and I can intellectualize all of this and I know what you’re going to ask, and because I know what you’re going to ask I’m not sure if I can trust myself to be honest, and I don’t have any of the classic physical symptoms of depression, and what I really have is this deep abiding existential despair, and my last psychiatrist basically said I’ve gotta just carry that shit.” And she said, go on. And I was like, “Look, I get that my problems are super not important and that other people are dealing with some real shit, and part of me feels like this is a waste of time or like I’m using resources that could be better deployed elsewhere, but the fact is that I am still having them and I’m not looking for a silver bullet and I’m not really sure what I’m looking for, but in AA” — she is an addiction specialist, and that’s why I chose her — “in AA, I have plenty of people to talk to about problems. But I don’t want this overriding framework of ‘alcoholism’ to be the way we talk about them. Because it’s not the totality of my existence or whatever.” She asked me how long I’ve been sober and I said two years a week from today, and she said congratulations.

And then she said, “I want you to know that it takes courage to ask for help, and that you’re not wasting my time.” I said I know. She said, “Everyone deserves to have some sort of chance at happiness,” and instead of bristling or fighting back like I did with the therapist at rehab, I kind of had this moment where I believed her, where the lights went on and I thought, “Maybe it would be okay to be some version of happy.” Maybe I don’t need to want to be eternally dissatisfied and filled with dread and unfathomably fucking angry. Maybe I can stop pretending that there is something wrong with wanting to be happy. Maybe happiness doesn’t mean what I’ve always thought it meant.

In AA we don’t pray for happiness, we pray for serenity. The serenity, I think, is supposed to come through the service, the helping of another alcoholic. The little goals we set for ourselves come in 24-hour increments, and there’s something very tangible and good about those small goals — the kind of goals you can touch when your head hits the pillow at the end of the day. There is something sacred about honoring the fulfillment of those goals in ritualized form. There is something very basic and true about AA’s fundamental mission, which you’ll hear repeated a thousand times if you ever need to go: “Don’t drink, go to meetings, ask for help.”

But I don’t pray, really, unless mouthing the words is prayer, which they say it can be, the people who pray, if you do it enough. “Fake it till you make it” is, at least apocryphally, an AA-ism, and it’s probably true when they say that you have to be careful who you pretend to be. And so I have prayed to God sparingly in order to avoid becoming a person who prays, for reasons that probably have much more to do with me than they do with God.

A thing that I have almost never admitted is that when I finally got sober, after six years of trying in and out of AA, after six medical detoxes and the second rehab, and after four months in a halfway house — when I moved out of the sober house to a cabin in Bath, Maine, by myself, with no one around to keep an eye on me, I spent the first night thinking I wasn’t going to make it. And when I had a fire going in the wood stove that first night, and all of the crazy unwelcome alcoholic thoughts about how ‘one drink wouldn’t hurt’ were just bombarding me, I got on my knees and I begged for God’s help. I begged for God’s help to make those thoughts stop, and I got through the night. The next day I found out that Jimbo had died, and when I got back to the cabin I had another fire and wept, and I swear to you those thoughts have never come back.

things i wish i’d known before the pandemic came

In late January, I landed in Boston and stood in line at Dunkin Donuts for coffee because it was early in the morning and I hadn’t slept on the flight and I was tired and grouchy and I still had to catch a bus back to Portland. Behind me was an airport worker with a mask on, and as I was waiting for my order the woman behind the counter, who knew the worker, said, “What’s with the mask?” And the man said, “Unloading planes from China today. Don’t want to get the coronavirus.” I kind of wasn’t sure if the dude was serious or if he was being racist because the Dunkin Donuts woman was Chinese, or if I was maybe just being an asshole for suspecting the dude was being racist because who knows what it’s like to be pulling luggage from an airplane in January for a living and who knows maybe the vague threat of coronavirus was more serious among airport personnel than I had been led to believe. It didn’t really matter, so I got my coffee and I got on my bus with the woman I had gone to Puerto Rico with, and we sat across the aisle from each other on a mostly empty coach, each of us with headphones on, because we’d decided we hated each other on that trip and were practicing an early version of what has since come to be known as “social distancing.”

In time, I suspect, we’ll come to learn that by the time of that miserable bus ride, coronavirus had already arrived in the United States and the first domino had already fallen and so on. Some genealogy of the pandemic will be written and it will be excellent and we will come to know exactly how and when and why and whence and whither and whodunit and all the rest. We will learn about the failures and the missteps and the heroics and the sacrifices and the tiny gestures of good faith and the gross malevolence and the banal neglect and the altogether too human choices that will lead to wherever this ends up going. With this knowledge we will maybe be better about things like being decent and kind to one another while we are still here living and breathing and despairing and loving and feeling our feelings. Or maybe we will not. There’s really no way to tell right now.

And so I am afraid, and even though I know that it’s okay to be afraid nobody said I have to like it.

s & f

The first time I tried getting sober I met Derek at, like, my sixth meeting and Derek said, after I’d asked him to be my sponsor and as we were driving around in his yellow jeep through Bushwick in the late summer, “No one cares what you think.” It was August or September in my first year in New York and Derek was some vaguely handsome and grizzled 40-something dude with a permanent five o’clock shadow and a leather jacket who, well, drove a jeep and had a big stupid dog that drooled a lot, and y’know Derek was fucking some hot AA chick who seemed like she’d probably be wild in the sack in that way some women just have that look about them — and really, if you’d asked me at the time whether sobriety seemed cool, I would have said, unconditionally, that it did. Because AA in New York was cool, and I was desperately looking for a way to find some sort of social life after a woman had left me, and before I’d met Sian, and before Sian and I would go on to have our own little on again off again for pretty much my entire time in New York, and really, goodness, that’s just its whole own thing that I’ll probably never be able to process or that I’ll just spend years talking about in some not-quite-ever-done way, and whatever. Whatever because, as Derek said, no one cares what you think. Or no one cares what I think. It’s all the same thing anyway.

I saw Sian over the summer in Baltimore and she looked like a million bucks and we ate Italian food that I expensed and we walked around the city and got ice cream and sat on a bench and Sian said, “You know I kind of figured at one point that I’d just hear through the grapevine that you drank yourself to death.” And I looked at the sky and back at Sian and back at the sky and back at Sian and took a deep breath and sighed kind of self-consciously and said, “Yeah I think I was living some sort of narcissistic death wish thing, and then I figured out that I didn’t really want to die.” And Sian smiled in that sad way that says “I am trying to understand, and I heard you and I am trying to understand, and I am a good person so I will try to convey to you that I am trying to understand.” And I didn’t really get that at the time so I just changed the subject I think, or maybe that was when the kind of crazy lady bummed a cigarette off me and proceeded to sit down and invite herself to chat for fifteen minutes before we finally excused ourselves and walked around in the muggy Baltimore twilight just long enough to feel okay about saying goodbye for maybe ever.

I sat with weird heartache for a couple of days about Sian and thought about doing stupid shit because I am hopelessly romantic about things that never happened but should have happened if only I hadn’t fucked them up when I had an honest-to-goodness shot at it. And then I did practically nothing and let the weird needless pain subside and allowed myself to feel my way through it and forgave myself and accepted that it’ll just be one of those things I’m gonna have to carry until we all die or the worms start eating my brain, which will hopefully only happen after I’m good and planted.

Franny was always kind of bothered by Sian and I don’t know why because I was head-over-heels for Franny in that “this is the woman I’m definitely going to marry” way that you get maybe two or three times in your life if you’re lucky. I mean, Christ, you’re lucky to get it once, right, and then — and here’s the crucial part that I’ve never been able to really execute on — you should marry that person! I guess I’ve had it with two people — just women I’ve been desperately in love with — and Franny was number two (Emma was number one, not Sian). Anyway Franny was kind of bothered by Sian because I told her about Sian and Franny didn’t know that she, Franny, was the woman I was definitely going to marry. So then I was like, “Franny, we should get married,” and she was like, “Duh,” and it was good, really, for a little while. And by the time it wasn’t it was unsalvageable, and by the time I realized what I’d done it was way too late but I tried anyway and you know that feeling when you’re trying just so you can say that you tried but you know it’s already over so you’re half-hearting it and you know that by half-hearting it you’re going to regret that you didn’t do it all the way with the trying and now you’re sabotaging everything and you’re really destroying it all right now right here this very moment why can’t you stop doing this just stop get it together get your shit together you’re fucking this up please.

It was like that for a while at the end there, too.

A few years ago, Franny and I saw each other in New York before she left for London and we had this very cinematic “let’s get day drunk and talk about the past” thing where I got way day-drunker than she did because I’d brought a pint of bourbon and snuck swigs off of it in the bathroom. We smoked cigarettes and kind of hashed things out and then when we said goodbye on the subway we kissed and walked, like, the opposite way away from each other to separate trains and, man. Man, oh man, oh man. That was the goodbye, the really excellent and perfect thing to wrap up our fucked up relationship thing that dangles just enough of a question mark for the audience to wonder if maybe there could be a sequel. “What if Franny and Tom weren’t so cruel to one another? What if Tom weren’t such a fucking boozebag?”

It’d probably be a Richard Linklater movie, is what I’m saying.

We do this thing in AA sometimes where we get sober and by the time we’ve given ourselves a little bit of time to get our shit together we remember that we’re really actually alive now. At least, this is what I think I’ve done. When you’re alive, I’ve come to realize, no one really cares what you think, but they might care about what you do. And when you’re alive, I guess, you get this tremendous opportunity to take those unsalvageable trainwrecks and heartaches and the attendant cruelty and pain and awfulness and look at all of that and say, “Hey, about all of that awfulness, if there’s anything I can do to make it better, let me know.”

Franny and I met up at Devocion on Sunday and the weather was awful and very November rain in New York and I got there a few minutes before she did and these two young women left their table just in time for me to hover over like a vulture and snatch it up, and when Franny arrived she was smiling and looking like ten million bucks and I was like, “Franny!” And she was like “Tom!” And we hugged and she got a latte and I pretended to look at my phone and I was like, “Oh christ, this is going to fuck me up real good,” and also like, “No one cares what you think. Just do the fucking things that are the right things to do and it’ll be –” and then Franny was back with her latte and smiling again and I remembered how I’ve always kind of loved her slightly imperfect bottom teeth and that tiny snag in one of her canines because they made me feel less self-conscious about the gap in my front teeth, like we were two people with regular not perfect teeth and that helped make us work — and just like that I was back to projecting all sorts of who knows what onto the thing and none of it mattered because no one cares what I think people care what I do so do the things.

Somewhere relatively early on when we were kind of leading into the conversation about our past I said, kind of flustered, “Do you mind if I do an AA thing?” And she said no. I don’t know why I introduced it like that. Maybe because I’m imperfect or because I wanted to hedge, or because I wanted to make sure that if it came out weird that I didn’t seem like an idiot, or something. It came out fine. It was always going to come out fine and I had nothing to worry about.

We left an hour later and I walked Franny to the subway. It was puddles and wind tunnels and gray and gray and gray, and the sort of stilted conversation you’d expect from two people who are walking to a subway station that only one of them is entering. We said that it would be nice to hang out again the next time were were in each others’ neck of the woods — and who knows if that’s true or if it’s something we’re just supposed to say to people we may never see again. We hugged goodbye and I looked at Franny and I thought man, it would be nice to kiss this woman and to wake up to this woman and to tell this woman all of the things I really think about and dream about for her and me right now in this brief moment while we’re imagining things that could have maybe been once upon a time and which have now been forever rendered impossible. I thought maybe she thought it would be nice to kiss me, too, just from the glint in her eye that I’ve seen before because I know this woman or at least I did know this woman and maybe I also don’t know her at all anymore. And really and truly, I know that no one cares what I think, so I hugged Francesca and said goodbye we both turned around and walked away.

364

Because at first it was hard for simple reasons, and now it is hard for reasons that don’t make sense. A man I heard speak once said, “Is this all there is?” And I talked to a friend of mine sometime in January and said, “I have that same question that the man had,” and my friend said, “I’m pretty sure this is it, yes.” And I wept on the bench in the sun and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and squinted and rubbed my face and dried my red eyes in front of the pane glass and straightened my tie and went back to work. Because this is what there is, and it is hard for reasons that don’t make sense.

I have spent most of my life looking for God or meaning or some combination of the two, and I have spent most of my life claiming to have an answer that’s better than nothing. I have read books that have helped and books that have not, and I’ve climbed mountains and flown on airplanes and ridden on buses and looked at the stars and done more than my fair share of mind-altering substances looking for a way out of answering the question about what there is or is not, and what that means about responsibility and purpose and duty and how we conduct ourselves in the world. I have learned that this is very little I know with absolute certainty, and I have learned that I am a very poor judge of what even constitutes certainty in the first place.

I read a book once that flattered my ego when it said, “Most people do not have philosophical problems.” It flattered my ego because I am awash in them most days, and it flattered my ego because, according to my self-serving interpretation, it set me apart from the crowd. That I then took it upon myself to prove the point through years of alcohol abuse was, I suppose, a bit unfair to the people who love and care about me, but I submit that there was other shit going on there that I let get the best of me for a long, long time. You don’t know what you don’t know, and I didn’t know how to stop drinking alcohol. I still really don’t, except that you really do do it a day at a time.

I went to India once, and as I was standing out front at JFK smoking my last cigarette before I got on the flight there, I said to this guy who was also smoking, “I’m going to India and I don’t have a plan.” I was slightly drunk at the time, because I am almost always slightly-to-very drunk in my stories about my 20’s, and he said, “How long is your flight?” I said, “I dunno. 20 hours?” And he said something pretty great that’s always stuck with me for reasons I don’t understand, he said, “That’s enough time to come up with a plan!” and he went inside.

A year ago tomorrow I went back to detox for the sixth time with no plan. I had nowhere left to live and I was down to my last $2,000 after liquidating my 401k and being fired from a bagel shop and a bar. In detox I met a guy named Matt, who was a drunk like me, and who’d spent the past two years in and out of detoxes and rehabs, and we played whist while we got over withdrawals with librium and hospital food. We went to the same rehab in Petersham, Massachusetts after detox, and at one point while we were there I said to Matt, “I’ve been coming to these things for a year. If I keep doing this, I’m going to kill myself.” We were on our way to lunch. Matt is a Harvard guy and a friendly enough fellow, and he just smiled and said to me, a bit too cheerfully, “You haven’t killed yourself yet!” and went to get his food.

I’ve only attached significance to this in retrospect; at the time, it meant almost nothing. What it is now, though, is an organizing principle and a prayer. It is an affirmation and a call to action. It is my Molly Bloom moment — my “yes I said yes I will Yes.”

You haven’t killed yourself yet!

No, I have not.

Amen.

saturday december 15 2018

One of the things you’ll hear in AA pretty frequently if you decide that you should go (which, hey, maybe you should, who am I to judge?) is that AA isn’t a religious organization and that it’s not a cult. The former claim has the virtue of being technically true, while the latter is an open question depending on your definition of “cult.” (I tend to think of it less as a cult and more as a fraternal organization whose members can perhaps be a bit too overzealous at times, but who are by and large mostly harmless.) You’ll hear it pretty frequently because it turns out that AA has a reputation as this weird cult-ish religion-y thing out there in the world of people who don’t go to AA meetings. I’ve been going to AA on and off since 2012 so I’d mostly forgotten that part, but when I moved to Maine, it was as though every meeting had someone who’d mistaken it for a sales call. When this happened — when a person would tell their story about their reluctance to come into AA because of the God stuff, and how it was misplaced because it turns out God was actually there the whole time (!) — I kind of just rolled my eyes and let it slide. Again, I’d been going to AA for six years, so nothing that anyone said in a meeting really surprised me anymore, but it seemed almost counterproductive in a way. Part of it, too, is that I’ve worked in sales in various capacities for most of my adult life, and I don’t like sales people. Or, rather, I like sales people who aren’t pushy, and converts to the cause can be a bit excitable.

With AA, the God stuff never really bothered me. I’m pretty indifferent to the specifics of the belief systems that help people get well as long as they’re getting well. There isn’t some grand utilitarian calculus being figured by a JS Mill in the sky, casting aspersions on AA for not being better than it is. (And if there is, it turns out the AA people were right about the God stuff, after all.) What bothered me was that AA told me to quit drinking. And I loved to drink. All of the things in the world were reasons to drink, and as a consequence there were never enough drinks to sate me. I would get drunk, sure. But I wanted liquor to destroy me. That it was destroying me wasn’t enough, either, because it wasn’t destroying me fast enough. I had it in my head that in order to be a fully realized tragic hero I had to die. If I died, then you would finally understand my suffering, and if you happened to suffer in the process, well, then, the proof was in the pudding.

Why that made sense to me is probably something I’ll never get to the bottom of. I was talking to my sponsor about all this “why” shit one day — why did I drink, why did I want to drink even when it stopped working, why did I do this to myself and to everyone around me — and he said, quite simply, “You drank because you’re an alcoholic.” I don’t know if it was a white light moment or what, but I’ve gone back to that moment over and over again when I start going down the rabbit hole of “why.” Because the truth is, I don’t know why I drank except that I’m an alcoholic. I’m not uniquely tortured, I’m an alcoholic. I’m not a character in a drama, I’m an alcoholic. I don’t really need to figure it all out, I just need to not fucking drink alcohol. Maybe try to own my shit and help out other people when they ask. Boom, that’s the program. That’s your 12 steps.

To the extent that the God stuff bothers me now, it’s because it fits so cleanly into my tendency to structure my life as a narrative — as something that I’m not actively living, as the world-acting-upon-me. It’s partly why I’m wary of sharing my own story at meetings. Early on in AA, way back in 2012, I was telling some dudes outside a meeting that I’d run a book-donation program for a nonprofit and that I’d seen countless copies of the AA Big Book donated in that time. Some guy chimed in, “Ha! That’ll be part of your story one day.” And it could be. I could go through my past and pick up all of the little plot pieces and string them together and tie them up with a bow and maybe convince you, or someone who wanted to believe badly enough, that me being sober today — hell, being alive today — is part of the Plan. I’m living in a cabin in Maine right now because I met some woman in my second rehab after my sixth detox who said that she had a cabin in Maine and I said, “Huh, I’m moving to Maine,” and she said, “You can live there,” and I said, “That’s good.” And I got sober because I had no other choice after years of trying and failing and generally burning my life to the ground. And let me tell you all of the stories about grace and chance and redemption. Let me tell you about how I was made whole again.

It’s convenient, but it’s just the flip side of my original narrative, which also involved the world revolving around me. What I’ve learned is that I don’t know if there’s a God, but I do know that I’m not it. And if that’s the only thing I ever learn, I can live with that.

eulogy

One of the last things I said to Jimbo, aloud anyway, was that I wasn’t going to his funeral. This was as he moved the last of his things into the back of his Honda Accord from Myrtle Street. He was leaving the sober house in the middle of the night — only it wasn’t the middle of the night. It was closer to eight. It may as well have been the middle of the night, though, since he was bailing on the rent he owed Tommy without telling anyone. Trying and failing to keep it hush hush. He had been flirting with the idea of leaving for a few days, which meant that he’d already made his decision, but a few of us were trying to talk him out of it.

“Where are you gonna go, Jimbo?” we said.

Jimbo said he had his eye on a couch in a living room in an apartment in the West End. $500 a month. The guy who was on the lease was a former manager of the sober house where we lived. Nobody could really figure out the angle, which meant that the angle was clear as day. Jimbo had his eyes on another run.

They say in the rooms that you relapse a long time before you ever pick up again. In that regard, I’m not sure Jimbo ever really got clean. He was a big gorilla of a man. 6’2”, 230, and bearded with wild in his eyes. He’d recently become obssessed with going to the gym, and we all speculated that he was shooting testosterone into his ass, but hey — better to get swole than die with fentanyl. Jimbo was a delight to call your friend. He’d been kicked out of Myrtle Street early in the summer for buying Johnnies from another guy in the house, and gone on a hell of a tear, but we were all glad he’d made it back in one piece. When he was out, he’d apparently overdosed with some people he knew, but they’d brought him back with Narcan. He’d gotten the tip of a syringe stuck in his arm from God knows what — nodding off after shooting up probably. He’d left his brand new AC unit in our apartment when he got booted, and texted me one day in July to get it back. I don’t know why I didn’t say no, but I didn’t, and it went straight into his veins.

He’d made it back, though. He’d heard about how Chris had died in our bathroom, and he’d ODed himself. He said it put the scare into him. He was ready to do it different this time.

*

About a week before Jimbo left, my housemates and I were sitting in our living room being sober and boring when we hit on the idea of starting a pool to bet on people we thought were going to be the next to relapse. We never did start it, but we all agreed that Jimbo was the best odds. Maybe because we’d all been to more detoxes than we could count, or because we’d spent enough time living those odds ourselves — the simple fact is that if you keep doing what you were doing before your last relapse you’re in trouble.

And so it was that Jimbo was still hung up on an ex-girlfriend. So it was that Jimbo stopped going to meetings after about a week back. So it was that the little unpunished transgressions against house rules piled up. Jimbo got a shitty call center job, went to shows after curfew, and ruined Tinder for the rest of us. (On what was probably his last Tinder date, he drove half an hour to a woman’s house, brought her wine, fucked her, and left when she asked him to make her come.) And we let him get away with it, because what else could we do? How can a group of people who are barely keeping it together tell the most gregarious of all of them to dial it back for his own good? What sort of credibility do we have?

A good suggestion made in the rooms is to refrain from taking another person’s moral inventory. It’s something we all do anyway, but it’s probably best to keep it to yourself for the most part. After all, very few people react well to being told they’re fucking it all up, and even less so the person in the throes of addiction. So why risk it? Why risk inciting the unwell part of the brain into saying, “I’ll show you who’s fucking up!”

What you do instead is take your own inventory, and try very hard not to make the same mistakes you’ve made repeatedly. In the 12 Steps, this process is undertaken in the 4th and 5th steps. The 4th is your reckoning — as best you can muster — and the 5th is your confession. It’s all very Christian and American and confusing, and for a lot of people it arouses suspicion and skepticism. And maybe that scrutiny comes from a good place. But maybe trying to believe in something you don’t believe in at all is as sincere a gesture as you can make sometimes.

I don’t know.

What I do know is this — when I’d finished my 5th step with my sponsor, sitting on a park bench across the street from Starbucks, under-dressed for the crisp fall air in the early morning light, rushing through so I could get to work, he stopped me and said, “You can be very mean,” and I winced. I can be very mean. I’d already known that I could be selfish and arrogant and needlessly strident and deceitful and on and on. But I didn’t know I was mean. I thought everyone knew how kind I was. Or how kind I wanted to be. I thought that even if my ideals about the generosity of the human spirit didn’t always shine, at least it was clear to everyone how excellent those ideals were. Always. But it turns out I was wrong.

So when I told Jimbo as he was leaving Myrtle Street that I wouldn’t go to his funeral, I corrected myself, because that was mean — just needlessly mean. I said I was sorry, and I told him not to go one more time. And of course he left. And since we all know how this story goes, last week he died in that living room he was renting for $500 a month, alone and unwell. His roommate had been arrested earlier in the week during a standoff with police, so his body sat there over the weekend, rotting from the inside.

Everyone who knows him is shattered.

It’s probably not the case that a mental illness has a telos, but I can tell you from experience that it feels a whole hell of a lot like addiction wants you dead. When everything in your rational mind is saying, “Do not do this, you are going to die,” and that argument is just utterly steamrolled by your disease — that happens every day, all the time, all over the place. All of the accumulated wisdom of the rooms and the rehabs loses. It’s the reason people in recovery suggest taking things a day at a time — the implication being that it only takes a day to kill you. And while cliches and platitudes aren’t always sexy, and are sometimes so unsexy as to be anti-sexy, they occasionally have the virtue of being true. If you’re incredibly lucky, you might live long enough to know that in your bones. And if you’re not, for reasons I don’t get but I understand, I truly hope you find your peace. Because I will miss you terribly.

a little tenderness

lloyd died on my kitchen floor at about 1:30 in the morning on friday the 13th, 2018. yesterday. naked from the waist down, blood coming out of his nose from either the fentanyl or the narcan (i had run next door to get narcan after we found him in the bathroom, so i’m not sure if he was bleeding before or after we gave it to him and anyway it doesn’t matter), pallid face slowly losing heat, me on the phone with 911 — “i’m not certified in cpr anymore i was certified in cpr five years ago,” just absolutely frantic, the dispatcher on the other end of the line, very calmly, “you don’t have to be certified” — and then me pushing my housemate ryan’s hands lower to the base of the breast bone, my left hand on top of his hands, 911 in my ear. we push and push and push and push and i tell ryan, “go fucking harder break his ribs it doesn’t matter,” and ryan stops and i yell, “don’t stop keep going,” and he does, and i’m really trying to help break his ribs here when the fire department arrives and takes over. i tell 911 thanks and they say thanks and hang up and we all go outside and talk to a dozen cops and detectives for a while and give statements and correct them when they fuck up the timeline, and wait. another ryan — the one who helped me get the door open — he and i both know he’s dead, and so we don’t bother to stand on tiptoes to look through the kitchen window and assess the situation. there is no breaking news anymore. and anyway news doesn’t break it just unfolds and there usually isn’t a thing you can do about it.

i only remember later that you don’t have to request a person’s permission to perform cpr or first aid when they’re unconscious — that their consent is implied, and that that’s why the 911 dispatcher had told me that i didn’t need certification. i learned this in my certification class, and i remember this as i’m sitting on the steps at the sober house next door to my own at 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning, sitting with everyone else in silence, a light rain falling, waiting for the crime scene unit to take the body away.

when they finally do, my housemate not-cpr ryan and i go back in and throw away the bath mat that’s covered in blood and shit, clean up the blood on the kitchen floor, and mop. tommy, the house manager, helps out and tells us to get some rest, and ryan and i are just like, “it’s fine, tommy.” i spray air freshener to get rid of the smell of death and take out the trash and tommy leaves and ryan and i sit on the couches in the living room and wait for exhaustion to come. when it finally does i go back to my newly single room, lie down and look at lloyd’s bed for a minute or two before rolling over to face the wall and go to sleep.

a review of your favorite concert of the year

sean is weird. it’s not that he’s weird so much as that he’s simply this dude who was completely there when i was small, and now he’s also there but it’s different now because people on the internet know who he is. people on the internet don’t know who i am. i kind of like it like that, but i’m not gonna lie i wish i had the attention paid to me that sean does. because baby i wanna be famous. i’m not gonna lie about it. most people probably wanna be great. i just wanna be famously great. i want people to be like, there’s tom, and i’ll be like feigning, ‘heh, i don’t want this,’ but i’ll secretly be curious about whatever person i’ve constructed for public consumption. like, how’s that person doing? i hope okay.

it’s weird. people i know are famous. i’m just kinda like, ‘i remember when you and i lived together and you never did the dishes.’

full disclosure: i’m not talking about sean here

fame is the last thing a bunch of interesting people say they want, but even those of us who aren’t particularly interesting want it. because whatever. we live in a place and in a time where being famous is validating and you’re like maybe i’ll be a footnote one day. because a footnote means a biographer. and who wouldn’t want a biographer?

*

sean and i said hello and i said, ‘my gosh i don’t know a thing about you’ to myself, and realized that i never will because to be close means to maintain space, and i do neither with sean. so i get the performative sean. which is all any of us ever get with one another. i said this in rehab when john, ‘if you ever discuss any of this outside of this room you’ll be violating hippa and may be subject to termination in the program’ the psychiatrist suggested in group that i was being ‘brave’ by acknowledging the fact that we were all playing roles in rehab. that it was exactly what we were supposed to be on guard for. like ending a sentence in a preposition. which maybe i acknowledged as some meta commentary que sera style, or maybe i was just flattered that someone finally said it, until everyone said it — to wit, ‘you’re so interesting’ — and i was like, ‘fuck omg i created this mess. i am a performance  and a caricature of myself.’

which fuck you you are too

*