a primer of some kind, that everyone else had read and understood but I had never seen. Like so many of my worries, Jack tells me, this one—right down to the word manual —is one of the bedrock feelings of most alcoholics and addicts. Again I’m relieved in some way, but also humiliated and annoyed that most everything I complain about he is able to label and place within both his own experience and the broader population of alcoholics and addicts. You’re just a garden variety junkie, he tells me yet again and says good night.
At one of the gay meetings I meet, or re-meet, a guy named Luke whom I met a few times through mutual friends over the years and who, to my surprise, is sober. He’s a screenwriter, my age, has a sober boyfriend, and has stories of using that make me wish we’d gotten sloppy together at least a few times. He feels like family from the second we reconnect, and even though he is only a year and a half sober, he seems like one of the Big Kids, like Madge and Rafe and Pam. Luke went to college with Noah and they know each other vaguely. The mutual friends, Noah connection, and similar stories of using make Luke one of the few people from the rooms who bridge both my old life and new. Everyone else is a world away from book publishing and my life with Noah, which is mainly a relief, but sometimes, when I am trying to relate details of the life I lived and ruined to people like Polly and Asa, it can be frustrating. When I try to explain this frustration to Jack, he just laughs and says, Honey, keep coming back (an expression, minus the honey, people use in the rooms, usually when people counting days raise their hands and share).
So. The silver. It just sits there. I bump into it a few times while pulling shoes down from the upper shelf of the closet, or knock against it as I’m putting away some blanket or box. This is Mom’s, I remind myself each time, not mine. I have a few thousand dollars in my account—money remaining from a former client who repaid money I’d loaned her last year to cover an unexpected tax bill. Kim contacts the former client when I’m in Lenox Hill and miraculously a big chunk of cash materializes just as a deposit is needed for rehab. It is only in the last week that Kim has transferred the remaining money—just a little over two thousand dollars—into my checking account.
After the deposit at the rehab (which represents less than a quarter of the total bill, which they’ve agreed to let me pay back over time), the next big expense is the apartment. The deposit on the apartment and the broker’s fee came from money I borrowed from Elliot—a guy I had an affair with a few years before, who became a friend. He lived with his ex-boyfriend a few blocks from One Fifth and they had, a few years back, broken up. The affair is short and boozy and ends weeks after it began on a weekend when Noah is away. Afterward, we become friends and see each other for dinner every few months or so. I don’t see Elliot much in the six months preceding my relapse, but once I make it to White Plains he is one of the few people other than Jean who visit on a regular basis. He comes on the weekends to play tennis on the cracked, weed-choked asphalt slabs that pass for courts. We play for a while and walk the grounds. We don’t talk much, but the distraction of the game and the easy air between us are welcome reprieves from the tormenting thoughts of my recent history and my all-too-near future. Elliot arrives each time with tennis racquets in hand and little gesture toward or judgment of the dark path that led me here. Elliot is exactly my age, exactly my height, similarly featured and colored, but has an enviable midwestern openness and ease that I don’t possess. Elliot runs a highly respected nonprofit organization, we have virtually no one in common, and besides Dave and Jean and Julia and Cy, he is one of my few remaining friends. My once crowded life has dwindled to a few resilient
At one of the gay meetings I meet, or re-meet, a guy named Luke whom I met a few times through mutual friends over the years and who, to my surprise, is sober. He’s a screenwriter, my age, has a sober boyfriend, and has stories of using that make me wish we’d gotten sloppy together at least a few times. He feels like family from the second we reconnect, and even though he is only a year and a half sober, he seems like one of the Big Kids, like Madge and Rafe and Pam. Luke went to college with Noah and they know each other vaguely. The mutual friends, Noah connection, and similar stories of using make Luke one of the few people from the rooms who bridge both my old life and new. Everyone else is a world away from book publishing and my life with Noah, which is mainly a relief, but sometimes, when I am trying to relate details of the life I lived and ruined to people like Polly and Asa, it can be frustrating. When I try to explain this frustration to Jack, he just laughs and says, Honey, keep coming back (an expression, minus the honey, people use in the rooms, usually when people counting days raise their hands and share).
So. The silver. It just sits there. I bump into it a few times while pulling shoes down from the upper shelf of the closet, or knock against it as I’m putting away some blanket or box. This is Mom’s, I remind myself each time, not mine. I have a few thousand dollars in my account—money remaining from a former client who repaid money I’d loaned her last year to cover an unexpected tax bill. Kim contacts the former client when I’m in Lenox Hill and miraculously a big chunk of cash materializes just as a deposit is needed for rehab. It is only in the last week that Kim has transferred the remaining money—just a little over two thousand dollars—into my checking account.
After the deposit at the rehab (which represents less than a quarter of the total bill, which they’ve agreed to let me pay back over time), the next big expense is the apartment. The deposit on the apartment and the broker’s fee came from money I borrowed from Elliot—a guy I had an affair with a few years before, who became a friend. He lived with his ex-boyfriend a few blocks from One Fifth and they had, a few years back, broken up. The affair is short and boozy and ends weeks after it began on a weekend when Noah is away. Afterward, we become friends and see each other for dinner every few months or so. I don’t see Elliot much in the six months preceding my relapse, but once I make it to White Plains he is one of the few people other than Jean who visit on a regular basis. He comes on the weekends to play tennis on the cracked, weed-choked asphalt slabs that pass for courts. We play for a while and walk the grounds. We don’t talk much, but the distraction of the game and the easy air between us are welcome reprieves from the tormenting thoughts of my recent history and my all-too-near future. Elliot arrives each time with tennis racquets in hand and little gesture toward or judgment of the dark path that led me here. Elliot is exactly my age, exactly my height, similarly featured and colored, but has an enviable midwestern openness and ease that I don’t possess. Elliot runs a highly respected nonprofit organization, we have virtually no one in common, and besides Dave and Jean and Julia and Cy, he is one of my few remaining friends. My once crowded life has dwindled to a few resilient
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