Detritus

By Crispin Sartwell

Hating inanimate objects seems entirely senseless. Mere things have no intentions, make no decisions, commit no crimes. They aren't guilty of anything. Why or how would you hate elements of the periodic table, clouds, liquids, rocks?

Nevertheless, far more than I hate any person, I hate alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, tobacco, methamphetamine, heroin. These stuffs or substances, these chemicals and vegetables and the fumes they emit when immolated, take away everything I have and everyone I love, every time. They are mindless, worthless, without value. They are empty. Meaningless. But they are the theme of my life. I came here to think, to study, to write. I came here to make love, to make babies, raise children, make a home, a garden, find some quiet joy. And my life has been dedicated to alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and annihilation.

Addiction, I tell you, isn't an epic tale of redemption, material for your amazing memoir and appearance on Oprah. It isn't a James Dean movie, a Hemingway story, or a Jimi Hendrix/Kurt Cobain song of suffering, hyper-intense genius. It's dying by choking on your own vomit. It's common as excrement and as profound: reeking, valueless, purposeless, pointless, meaningless.

There's no little essence of wisdom suspended in the whiskey, no sparkling geode crystals inside the rock, no signal in the smoke. There just is nothing there.

In brief: My father was an alcoholic, which broke our family when I was 10 or so. He died of his addictions at 52, which I believe is longer than his own father lasted. I lost a brother in 1983 to an incomprehensible murder fueled by PCP; I found him crumpled up by the side of a country road, his chest imploded by a .357 projectile. I lost a brother in 1991 to suicide by heroin overdose, after watching him turn from a hopeful little kid to an utterly despairing addict, a liar and a thief. My third and last brother spent five years in the state pen for armed robbery. He was a junkie, crackhead and so on, and then a recovering junkie, crackhead, and so on for many years. He expired two years ago in his sleep, his body ravaged by hepatitis, diabetes, and heart disease. In our family, that's success.

I loved all these people, and at many times in their lives they were lovable: smart, funny, real people; loving people; creative, interesting people. They and I lost all that about themselves to piles of stones, lakes of polluted liquid, to chemical processes of purification and adulteration. They and I lost everything we had that we cared about, about ourselves and each other, to inanimate trash, detritus, an ugly little slag-heap of rubbish.

I've just come through a marriage that, starting in ecstasy, descended into hell for the sake of drinking, hers and mine. I couldn't stop, and I couldn't make her stop, to hold our family together, to save our home or my sanity. In order to stay alive, I had to leave, full to the brim with love and with loathing. Now I live alone, sober for some six months, in the woods, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes. The woods is the safest place for me. You wouldn't want me in your circle of friends.

My every act of love, every home place, every hint of peace or happiness, is the premonition of another recapitulation of the endlessly-repeated loss that has no point or purpose, and has no end but in death.

I've got four children and step-children in their teens and early twenties. Daily I expect to hear the worst: the car crash, the overdose, the end. I've already pre-mourned their substance-abuse-related deaths. I expect that my 8-year-old daughter, the most beautiful, joyous little sprite in the world, will grow up and marry an addict, or be an addict, or both.

If I ever again find love, family, home, I will, of course, lose them all again to this incomprehensible slop.

I've been involved in family interventions, begged people to stop, poured out my soul, shared my experience, driven people to meetings. Tried persuasion by love, or laying the smack down. I've seen people in and out of rehab. My brother Adam was in residential treatment when he overdosed; they'd let him out for a court date. He went down to 14th Street and scored, then died at my grandmother's apartment. She was in the hospital at the time. She herself died a week later, having lost a husband, a son, and a grandson to addiction.

Everyone finds their own road, and their own abyss. Some survive and some don't, for no discernible reason, with no regard for what they deserve. There's nothing I can do.

In my own case, once I start drinking, I don't know when or whether I'll stop. I've had periods from months to many years without alcohol, and I've found my way through various circuitous routes back to drinking. Then I become an evil idiot. I have no self-control or self-respect. I lie. I hide bottles around the house and drink the clock around. I puke my guts out. I'm alternately maudlin or consumed by rage. And I do all this in the service of nothing at all, of an illusion, of something that has never given me any enduring pleasure, only idiotic pain. I've devoted my life to it; it's my theme; my greatest love; my most intense relationship. And it's nothing.

Putting it mildly, I'm not alone in these sorts of experiences, and a lot of people have been through even worse. What it's like being a meth addict or actually dying of alcohol poisoning, I don't literally know, yet. But if you think people are doing things like that in order to feel good, I say you're crazy.

In my experience, in certain circumstances, booze makes you feel kind of giddy and loose for a little while. It makes you feel close to people. It makes you feel bold. That lasts about an hour, which is followed by years of just feeling physically sick, acting badly, feeling guilty, lying, pretending to be the person you used to be, breaking promises: in short, suffering, and making people suffer.

Marijuana may be a youth cult, a medicine, a sacrament, a symbol. But really it just makes you feel kind of fuzzy and dazed; it amounts to a kind of apparently enthusiastic self-lobotomy. I've smoked every day all day for years at times in my life, and never gotten back anything worthwhile or even pleasurable.

There are various ways to try to make addiction make sense, but I think that in the end it shows us nothing but the void, a kind of yawning maw of meaninglessness. Addicts often turn to God, and Lord knows our only hope may well be omnipotence. But addiction, in my view, stands as a refutation of the existence of a benevolent deity. Any God that created these materials, and who created addicts, and then placed us all in the same world is, at best, morally blank.

For that matter, addiction refutes the theory of evolution, at least the version on which we're adapting ever-more successfully to our environment. Folks like me aren't adapting to our environment, we're using it to drive ourselves and everyone around us into despair, then using it to commit suicide. And generation after generation, we're passing forward our calamitous genes.

The drugs, they tell us in the current neuro-biological metaphors, light up the pleasure centers of the brain. Then they dull these centers, leading to the need for ever-higher doses. But the pleasure, in my experience, is fleeting and valueless, the dullness interminable, eventuating in excruciating pain and unredeemed death.

I've been in literally thousands of twelve-step meetings, and one thing you often hear is people affirming even their own addictions. There was something they needed to learn, and they came out better people. In the end, they found a kind of peace. This is sort of true in some cases and I have tried to think it through that way myself. But fundamentally, we wouldn't need this particular redemption if we hadn't subjected ourselves and everyone else to this particular degradation. And if addicts and addiction can be redeemed, we just as or more often simply descend by endless pain into meaningless annihilation.

I'm familiar with the themes preached at the funerals of people like me. The idea that people die in order to teach other people lessons - don't drink or do drugs, maybe - would be ridiculous even if we were, in fact, capable of learning those lessons.

If you think that addicts are hedonists, or that we suffer from lack of will-power, I tell you that you are wrong. Addiction is an incredible discipline of pain. It takes gigantic will to keep drinking in the face of a crumbling world and a crumbling personality, to keep giving yourself over to the nothingness when there are real people, things, and values all around you. It takes incredible dedication.

During our marriage, my wife took heroic measures to keep drinking, every day. I was sober thirteen years when I married her. A daily heavy drinker for many years, she said the fact that I was a recovering alcoholic was one of the things that drew her to me. She declared herself to be an alcoholic (a declaration long since totally repudiated) and swore off. Once she started again, two years into our marriage, nothing I could do stopped her for a moment, could give her pause: no argument, no effusions or withdrawal of love. Not staying; not leaving. Not my binge-drinking, or attempts to recover. No suffering, endured or inflicted. No lies, heard or spoken. No betrayals, of her or by her.

She had her reasons. There were drawbacks to my husbandry from the getgo. I have trouble trusting people; I have "control issues," perhaps familiar to people raised by or partnered to alcoholics. I also, I must say, gave a lot of love; I was a fiercely monogamous husband and devoted to our home and children. At any rate, drinking became a symbol, the symbol, of her autonomy, freedom, and integrity. That's a lot of weight to put on a glass, far more than it or I or our marriage could possibly sustain. Indeed, the image of substance abuse as freedom is, in my world, too fatal to be ironic. She loved me totally and forever, didn't want me to leave. And when I asked her to quit for a month, for what I conceived to be, for me, a matter of life and death, she simply refused. I don't have a problem, she said, over and over. It's your problem (well, no denying that). Then: I won't change my whole life. Can't you love me for who I am?

The nadir in our relationship came last December 26th, when after yet another of my struggles toward sobriety, and after yet another week during which she was out drinking every day, I started swallowing the contents of and then smashed her bottle of pinot noir on a counter. Smashing that bottle was a threat, a cry of despair, an expression of desire and of hatred, an act and an end of communication. It exploded the brittle form of our marriage and splattered the black-red stuff of our very blood all over the kitchen.

Then I was driving randomly around Pennsylvania with a liter of vodka in my passenger seat, or passed out in $20 hotels, learning nothing. Trying not to think about who I was or what I'd done. I thought about driving north for a couple of days, becoming someone else. But I am a coward, and I came back to that same damn house. And after that? Into the woods, no longer living with my kids or my garden or my lover, gone from what had been my life for a decade. Among other things, doing to my children what my father did to me.

She's the most generous, the most loving, the most loyal person I've ever known. And she has seen this reality as much and as clearly as anyone. Her first husband was, like my brothers, a spectacular addict, and he and her sister's husband both died of AIDS, from the intravenous drugs they all did together. While our marriage was in its final throes, her mother was dying of lung cancer: Nana kept smoking until she couldn't light a cigarette, all the while denying passionately that she was smoking at all, or had ever been addicted to tobacco. And she was, as they said over and over at her funeral a brutally honest and consistently forthright person.

No matter that these things we drink or smoke or shoot up are small simple materials of limited usefulness; they always become an astounding symbol, until people are using the words synonymously with freedom, love, integrity, truth, art, self-esteem: synonymously with their own proper names. In their essential relation to us, they are lies; and the spawn and origin of lies, our selves as lies. In vino veritas, or maybe just fucking alcohol, a sign only of nihilism, of the journey we make - together, and each in our isolation - into oblivion.

The stuff is the void not only around us but inside us. We swallow it, and it in turn swallows us. Finally, it's all that's left: "who I am," "my whole life." From a recreation, it becomes our origin and our destiny.

I'm sorry to show you only the rage and emptiness. But the emptiness is my true home, the darkness where no one can hear me raging or sobbing; giggling maniacally at the fatal ironies; reciting the mindless, mechanical repetitions; telling over the losses; where no one can find me where I'm hidden. The loss is infinite, and infinitely repeated, and utterly unredeemed by time, God, or meaning.

It may be that addiction is genetic, or that, as they like to put it, it has "a genetic component." My family seems to confirm that. Maybe it is a biochemical problem. Perhaps addicts have no control over our ingestion. One thing that believing this might do for me: relieve myself and people I love of some of the overwhelming, the unbearable responsibility for the terrible things we've done to ourselves and each other. It gives us the gift of fate. And though having a dark fate is depressing, it's also of course comforting in comparison with retrospectively examining the decision to shape the disastrous future we now inhabit.

I find myself confused about this. Every time I have raised a bottle to my lips, I have felt free, and I have felt compelled. I made a decision, and the decision felt inevitable. I could have done otherwise, and I did what I had to do, what my identity and history demanded. Indeed, every time I raised a bottle to my lips, I kept faith with my father and brothers and my wife, my love; I shared their life and death. I kept faith with what we are, and I betrayed us.

Finally, I don't forgive, and I don't want to forgive. I don't forgive my father, who left and never could be counted on to be where he'd said he'd be, or be what he said he was. I don't forgive my brothers, and my love for them is mixed with hatred and the most bitter disappointment. I don't forgive my wife, who, like all these other people, chose blank stuff instead of me, over love. And I don't forgive myself. I want responsibility for every act, and I can't bear it. I swing back and forth day by day, and on a bad day like today, minute by minute. Maybe it's our genes, our upbringing, our disease. But I don't forgive.

If it comes to us as fate, addiction makes us into inanimate objects. We are the sheer substances we abuse. But I can't even stop blaming mere things: the crap we imbibe. That too, might offload some responsibility, might be a lie that gives comfort.

On the other hand, maybe alcohol can't support hatred any more than it can love; perhaps it's no more an adequate symbol of stupidity and degradation and lies than it is an image of God and beauty and truth. But I can't achieve any real neutrality, and if it were up to me, I would simply erase abusable substances and substance abusers from the universe, and believe that the universe had become a better place.

I'd like to leave you with a positive little moment, a warming hint of redemption. I have not entirely foresworn that possibility, even in a world of pointless self-inflicted suffering. Despite all the rock-solid evidence to the contrary, I still have hope for myself, and for any of us who have survived thus far. I'm still looking for a map of the void.

If there is redemption for me in addiction, it is in being made to see, by force, the darkest of truths; being forced to see, through the destruction of illusion after illusion, the emptiness at the heart of everything. Finally, what I hate most about addiction is its lies, our lies, layer after layer of jive. In my darkest moments, I conclude from rich experience that there is always a lie even at the center of love. Truth sucks, but lies are murder.

But though addiction makes us lie, feeds on lies, it also finally - or at least this is what I hope - makes the falsity of these lies undeniable. Peel back the lies and you find, at the heart, nothing. And arriving at nothing is finding the truth.

I worry that in finding what we need to recover and to forgive, finding God or identifying our actions as a disease, we just find more illusions, that we're still, after all the awful confrontation with the truth, lying to ourselves. I want any illusion that will keep me alive. And I want out of all illusions, to see plainly the awful heart of reality.

I turned fifty yesterday, itself something of an achievement in my world, and I keep wanting to be alive, to believe love can be real, to grow tomatoes, to take care of children. My little woods are beautiful and alive with birds, this time of year. There's something that so far keeps me quitting, which is why I've outlasted most of the people and things I've loved. I still want it all to make sense, and still suspect that every way of making it make sense is another layer of falsehood. But at this moment the only account that's true to my experience is one that keeps faith with the senselessness, the sheer loss, and leaves it at that.