Dawn #3
I couldn’t help thinking that she’d emailed me at a fortuitous moment, right as I was beginning to question my own drinking silently to myself. These days, I understood much better what she might have been going through back then.
“That’s sweet of you,” she said, “but it’s easier to start a new habit than to break an old one.
Rekindling old friendships with people who bring me joy has been easy.
Walking away from Jed has been much harder.
Somehow it feels harder than breaking up with drugs and alcohol, because those had stopped giving me any pleasure.
Jed still makes me happy a lot of the time. ”
“And you think the road trip will help you…how?”
“I’m not sure. I just feel called to do it. Something tells me that the trip itself will reveal the answer to me.”
Audrey’s words stoked my own excitement. “I know what you mean. There’s something about the promise of discovering the author of Vineland, and even maybe meeting my father, that feels like exactly what I need, too.” A quest. A grail. A yellow brick road.
Where would it lead me?
“Have you read more of the Vineland books?” Audrey asked.
“I tried listening to the second one on the drive down, but I couldn’t concentrate.”
“We can listen on the drive tomorrow.”
I nodded, then asked, “Are there any clues in the later books about where the author might be?”
“I wondered the same thing, and no. I even skimmed them all again to make sure. Except for the beginning, which takes place in the so-called real world of Phoebe’s original home, the books are all set in the magical world of Vineland. There’s no other geography.”
We sat in silence for a bit, finishing our bowls of noodles and vegetables.
“Sooooooo…” Audrey said, her tone suddenly solicitous.
“How would you feel about going to a meeting? Because my favorite meeting is happening tomorrow, and the ladies are always cool for us to bring a friend. It’s also in Rancho Mirage, right outside of Palm Springs, which just happens to be where I think we should start asking about the author. ”
“Why?”
“Because there is a man down there who knows people. It seems like he knows everyone in recovery, especially the famous people because the Betty Ford Center is down there.”
“Do you think the author went there? What if he wasn’t famous when he got sober?”
“People don’t realize this, but loads of regular people go to the Center, too.
And everyone takes the anonymous part of the twelve steps very seriously.
There is so much stigma around addiction.
No one should have to talk about this publicly if they don’t want to, even though I think it’s important for more people to recover out loud.
I mean, Betty Ford herself was a huge, public, loud-mouthed proponent of recovery programs. The twelve steps saved her life, and she wasn’t shy about telling people about it. ”
“No kidding.” I couldn’t even call to mind what President Ford’s wife looked like.
“Yeah, she has this unfortunate bubble-haired, old-lady image, but she was a total badass. She also brought national awareness to breast cancer. After she went public with her diagnosis, there was something like a 15 percent increase in mammograms. It’s called the Betty Ford effect.”
There was something undeniably cool about this. Maybe sobriety didn’t have to be boring after all.
“Sounds like her life is tailor made for a movie.”
Audrey gently whacked my knee with the back of her hand. “Why don’t you make that movie?”
I blew out a breath in sarcastic self-deprecation. “Right.”
“Why not? I’d help you make the right connections.”
“You want to play her?” I felt a tingle of that old excitement, when we’d lie around in the dorm-room dark dreaming up movies to do together.
She fiddled with her bowl. “It’s not a bad idea.”
“Is this where our road trip is actually leading? A movie instead of an authorial unmasking?”
“Isn’t that where all road trips lead?” Audrey leaned back into the soft embrace of her many couch cushions.
“Well, I do not want to wind up like Thelma and Louise.” I took a final bite of curry.
“A movie is not a bad idea, really. Maybe old Betty will break both of us out of our ruts.”
Not wanting to get too close to this idea—I’d found hope to be the most painful and disappointing emotion over the years—I said, “Okay, yes. To answer your first question, let’s go to the meeting.”
I was going all the way down this damn rabbit hole.
Later, while I was brushing my teeth and washing my face and then walking Alfie for the last time, I found myself thinking, I feel fine now. The craving for a drink is gone. Maybe I don’t really need to quit.
This is exactly the conversation you want to stop having with yourself, I immediately replied in my own mind.
I’d been on this merry-go-round of deals with myself for years.
I’ll just drink on weekends; I know I said none today, but today sucked; tonight I’m going out with friends; I’ll only have one per night, “so that the idea of alcohol won’t get too big in my imagination,” as F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s character Charlie Wales put it in “Babylon Revisited.” And then I’d think to myself, If I’m taking advice from a writer who almost drank himself to death before his forty-fifth birthday, I’m in deep shit.
Sober means sober.
I’m going to start using that word, to try it on for size.
I’m going on a sober road trip.
It’s just a road trip. It’s not forever.
Oh my god. Had I really just told myself to take it one day at a time?