I want to tell you about my life, but then I’m like, who cares. Full disclosure is a cry for help, the kind of bad habit responsible for my twenties’ most mid-grade regrets; I want to tell you about the man I met at the end of last summer, in whose house I live now in Texas—but then what if that’s what curses it, the going and telling, then come to find out the whole time I’ve been a victim of LOVEBOMBING or some other thing they made up? This is, of course, my newsletter, a vanity project if there ever was one, but the thought of spilling my beans to god knows who—me, a woman of the target age demographic of the When We Were Young festival, let’s put it like that—gives me the fucking willies. But lately I’m so self-conscious it hurts. I’ve been sober now 65 days.
I could tell you it’s been the Best Decision of My Life and I’d be lying, and in fact I’m even lying when I say it’s been 65 days, because I’ve cheated, I’ve totally fucked it. Seven weeks down and you know what got me? The goddamned Chicago Bulls, the Bulls who just had to start losing at exactly the moment I figured I was cool to watch basketball in bars. I know, I know, but try to understand… when the Bulls are losing, it feels like I’m being abandoned by God. For real. Besides, I’m homesick.
So anyway, I drank again and where’d that get me, nowhere. “You know who you look like?” the bartender said, attempting goodwill as I leered at ESPN. “…Alanis Morissette.”
I imagine it’s not much help what I’ve been doing, which is re-reading all the abject drunken fiction I’ve been known to idolize — to live a little, scare myself straight, I don’t know. I’ve got time to read books, anyway, so I do, rummaging around the wreckage of my understanding of what is “fun.” The Dua Lipa song at the supermarket grabs my throat in the yogurt aisle; all the regulars at the Lighthouse, for whatever reason, loved her, went nuts when “Don’t Start Now” came on the TouchTunes. Does anyone there think of me?
(I watch old seasons of Vanderpump Rules, too, in the shower, for similar reasons. Amphetamine-addled millennial alcoholics, trying to out-sociopath one another in the twilight of the 2000s. Everyone’s eyes are glassy, scary, like animals caught on security camera in the dark. Spring break…… FOREVA.)
About The Lost Weekend, Charles Jackson’s 1944 novel about a man and his five-day bender… it feels like drinking to read it. Scary. The man looks for a sign from the universe, a sign that it’s time to start drinking, and finds it. The man is alone, and a liar, constantly carelessly breaking his poor brother’s heart. He’d promised he wouldn’t go to the bar, but what do you know, there he is, and life is redeemed the instant the drink is set beside him, before he so much as touches the glass, so much so that he begins to compose his masterpiece (of course he’s a writer), the perfect title, perfect ending—and then, “a fit of boredom, of ennui so staggering descended upon him with such suddenness that he was scarcely able to stand. He wanted to put his head down on the counter, in the wet and all, and weep: tears, idle tears, I know damned well what they mean.”
“He had pictured himself as the sensitive gifted man going to the dogs with practically noble abandon, seeking destruction with gallant and charming and even amused resignation. Balls! He was a drunk, that’s all.”
And all the while he grasps at an answer to why he is doing the things that he does; why he was always doing them, over and over again. “Obviously there was the will in him to destroy himself; part of him was bent on self-destruction—he’d be the last to deny it. But obviously, too, part was not; part held back and expressed its disapproval in remorse and shame.” The best answer he can come up with—“All the things that had never happened yet were never going to happen after all”—is very Mark Fisher, I think. It’s the same deal with everything now. Life continues, but time has somehow stopped.
The first month sober wasn’t so bad. The second one is where it went sideways. I miss talking to strangers, talking about anything. It’s considered weird talking strangers when you’re not drunk.
The man I mentioned, my husband now, I met him in a bar: the Oasis Tavern on Sheridan, which stays open til 4 AM, and meanwhile men fight one other in the alley and women fight in the bathroom. Guys who go to the Oasis, “The O,” sometimes refer to the women there as “O Hoes.” It isn’t generally known as the place to find true love, is all I’m saying. But anyway. He wore western boots and a Bears t-shirt, his hair nearly as long as mine; he was going back to Texas in two days, in town only to drop his daughter off at college. His voice was the deepest I’ve ever heard, like a sexy Old Testament god. We swam in the lake in the dark and drank tequila on the beach as the sun rose; I won’t even bother trying to explain what the sun was doing that morning. Then I went to work, 45 minutes late. “Would you please come back to Austin with me?” he texted me while I was there. I didn’t go back to work the next day, or at all.
“I want to put a ring on it,” he said one afternoon, and took me to the antique store and bought me one, a moonstone. Later on, back at The O, my former co-workers found us and attempted to kick my ass. The next day we went sailing on Monroe Harbor, I mean in a real-deal sailboat, the whole Chicago skyline in our wake! But you get the gist.
Sorry to all the sad ladies out there, but I don’t like reading Jean Rhys anymore. I tried the other week, but her girls wear me out now: another bar, another Pernod, a dingy little room, and so on. “I’m a sad girl, I’m a sad girl, I’m a sad girl.” Yeah, we got it! But I do like this, from the introduction to the most recent edition of Good Morning, Midnight: “After a profile of Rhys in the Guardian appeared under the headline ‘Fated to be Sad,’ Rhys wrote in a letter to a friend that she resented how interviewers always pushed her into a ‘pre-destined role, the role of the victim.’ Eventually she put out a ‘Declaration of Rights,’ directed at her interviewers:
I am not an ardent Women’s Libber
Or a Victim (eternally)
Or a darned Fool.”
I thought it was a Jean Rhys interview I’d been remembering lately, but in fact it was Marguerite Duras, my own sad girl of favor. It’s a wonderful profile, scary and glamorous, five years before she died. To the question of why sex and death seem entwined, the 77-year old answers: “‘It's difficult to articulate. It's erotic.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘I had a lover with whom I drank a lot of alcohol.’ She pauses, staring straight at me. Her face is expressionless, her dark eyes are absolutely still. ‘I'm acquainted with it, the desire to be killed. I know it exists.’”
Duras published Practicalities in 1987, five years after getting sober, one year before entering an eight-month coma. (And then she just… woke up.) There’s a chapter in there, “Alcohol,” that sort of says it all.
But the best, if you ask me, is Lucia Berlin, though she isn’t really a sad girl, just a drunk one. (Well, formerly. She’s dead now. She got sober, too, in the ‘80s, and wrote things like: “I’m glad I got sober before I moved to Boulder… The liquor stores are gigantic Target-size nightmares. You could die from DTs just trying to find the Jim Beam aisle.”) But Lucia Berlin is wonderful, the girl version of Denis Johnson; I don’t know why more people don’t talk about her. She’ll break your heart but be funny about it, and sneaky, with feminine wiles, and she’ll start a story like, “Wait. Let me explain…” Or, “I like working in Emergency—you meet men there, anyway. Real men, heroes. Firemen and jockeys.” She’d write about cleaning other people’s houses, absconding to Mexico for affairs or abortions, drinking before her kids got up for school. Four sons, three husbands (jazz musicians, sculptors), three divorces. Lived all over the place—Santiago, Albuquerque, Oakland. And she was gorgeous.
“Don’t show your feelings. Don’t cry. Don’t let anyone know you.” That’s how she described her style.
There’s a story in her best book, A Manual For Cleaning Women, called “Silence.” It’s about her uncle, sort of.
Last night, my man took me to see the Bulls in San Antonio, the two of us and his 11-year old kid, who wore a Dennis Rodman jersey; I’d dyed his hair Benny-the-Bull red earlier that week. Our seats were okay for the nosebleeds, but for everyone getting up and sitting down. My husband said to follow him, and we walked downstairs and past security into three empty courtside seats like we belonged there, three yards back from the Bulls bench. I could’ve passed a note to DeMar DeRozan if I’d wanted; I’d never been that starstruck, or so in love like that. They lost, and I didn’t care. It didn’t cross my mind to drink. Okay, I’m lying—but just once or twice. “I felt, well, I felt full of joy… Why do I hesitate to tell you this? I don’t want you to think I’m sappy, I want to make a good impression. Anyway I was happy…”*
* Lucia Berlin, “Stars and Saints”