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What It’s Not

THIS IS NOT ANOTHER STORY ABOUT ADDICTION.

It’s not The Heroin Diaries and it’s not Trainspotting and it’s not William Burroughs and it’s not a Million Fucking Little Pieces, OK? I’m not gonna be on Oprah and I don’t have a series of meaningful vignettes to relate that can compete with the gazillion other stories of druglife. It’s not Crank and it’s not Tweak and it’s not Smack. No matter how marketable the addiction story has become, this is not that story. My life is more ordinary. More like … more like everyone’s.

Addiction, she is in me, sure enough. But I want to describe something else to you. Smaller. A smaller word, a smaller thing. So small it could travel a bloodstream.

When my mother tried to kill herself for the first time I was 16. She went into the spare bedroom of our Florida home for a long time. I knocked on the door. She said, “Go away, Belle.”

Later she came out and sat in the living room. I went into the spare bedroom and found a bottle of sleeping pills - most of which were gone. Alone in the house with her, I scooped up an armful of vodka bottles and pills and brought them to her in the living room, my eyes full of water and fear, my mind racing. She looked at me more sharply than I ever remembered, and more focused than I’d ever seen her. Her voice was weirdly stern and two octaves lower than the southern cheery slurry drawl I was used to. She said: “Stay away; this isn’t anything for you. I’m not talking about anything.” And she turned her gaze to the television. General Hospital was on.

I went straight into the bathroom and sat on the toilet and ate a wad of toilet paper. My face felt hot enough to ignite. I cried hard. That hard kind of cry that brings guttural grunting rather than sobbing. I muscled up my bicep and I punched the wall of the bathroom. It left a small crack. My hand immediately ached. How I felt was alone. Like I didn’t have a mother. Or a father. At least not ones I wanted. When I came out of the bathroom I felt a little bit like a person who could kill her.

It scared the crap out of me. I didn’t call my father. I didn’t call an ambulance. I called my sister, who lived in Boston, where she was busy getting a Ph.D., trying to erase her origins. My sister told me to call an ambulance and then to call our father. My mother in the living room watching soaps.

I didn’t know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. I didn’t know then how deeply my mother’s song had swum into my sister and into me. I didn’t know that something like wanting to die could take form in one daughter as the ability to quietly surrender, and in the other as the ability to drive into death head-on. I didn’t know we were our mother’s daughters after all.

My mother did not die. At least not that day. Eventually I did call an ambulance, and she went to the hospital, and they pumped her gut out. She was diagnosed with severe manic depression, and her doctor assigned talk therapy as part of her recovery. She saw a therapist five times. Then one day she came home and said, “I’m done.” But when she came home she was a dead woman masquerading as a live one. Drinking. Slowly. Surely. What she did next, well, sometimes it’s difficult to tell rage from love.

When I was 17 my mother signed me into an outpatient teen drug treatment center. She found dope in my pants pocket while doing laundry one day. The place I had to go to every day for eight weeks was a soft Khmer Rouge. I was told that “behavioral healthcare” is your “doorway to choice and hope.” That was the motto. I didn’t find choice and hope through the doorway. I found bibles and Christians with thick gator-mouthed drawls and skin cancer tans counseling me on self-esteem and a purposeful life. They fed me bible passages. I brought Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with me every day for moral support. They always made me put the book at the front counter, but I knew it was there. I knew it had my back. Not like my mother.

Through the doorway to choice and hope were the saddest girls I have ever met. Not because someone beat them or because someone molested them or because they were poor or pregnant or even because they put needles in their arms or pills in their mouths or weed in their lungs or alcohol down their ever-constricting throats. They were the saddest girls I have ever met because every one of them had it in her to lose a shot at a self and become her mother.

My rage became nuclear. But I did my time. I exited the program with a certificate. I wanted to punch my mother - my mother the puffy hypocrite, the woman currently putting away a fifth of vodka a day - in the face. But she was the same woman who would sign the signature on my scholarship papers a year later. So I did not punch my mother’s mouth off of her face. I just thought this: get out. Hold your breath until you can leave. You are good at that. Perhaps the best. This woman’s pain could kill you.

Later in life, after I flunked out of college, I lived alone in Austin in a crappy-ass efficiency off of the freeway. I got into some more trouble living on my own that led to another round of mandatory drug and alcohol counseling for six weeks in a very strange basement of a medical clinic serving underprivileged folks. Poor people, Mexicans, unwed mothers, African Americans, and me.

There, I was meant to “find meaning in life’s traffic through clearing spiritual barriers.” A different healing slogan. More self righteous hypocritical Christians. There was even a woman in my sessions named “ Dorothy.” My mother’s name. Or The Wizard of Oz. I did my time there too, and left with yet another certificate. Trust me when I say I definitely found “meaning in life’s traffic.” Eventually.

So then this is not an addiction story.

It’s just that I have a sister who walked around for nearly two years when she was 17 with razor blades in her purse seeing if she could outlive the long wait waiting to get out of family.

Her first round.

It’s just that I had a mother who ate a whole bottle of sleeping pills at middle age with only her daughter the swimmer at home to witness the will of it.

Her first round.

I know that will well now. It’s the will of certain mothers and daughters. It comes from living in bodies that can carry life or kill it.

It’s the will to end.