A Real Disease

I’m supposed to talk. It is Red Ribbon Week on a college campus in the Inland Empire, a region of Southern California well-known for its failing infrastructure and lack of opportunities, and I’m here an hour early. I would rather err on the side of arriving with more time on my hands than not enough, because for the better part of my life I couldn’t be depended on to be where I said I would be, when I said I would be, and I don’t want to be that person anymore. I’m getting out of my car in the parking lot when my cell phone rings.

The connection is scratchy, intermittent with static, and I’m not sure I hear him right. I’m not sure I understand his first words, but I can see from the number on the screen that it’s Nick. Nick is my sponsor, and he’s helped me get sober. He’s helped me stay sober, and in this story, at this point in time, I’ve been clean a couple months shy of three years. “Hello?” I say. “Hello?” But the line is dead. I call him back and it goes directly to voicemail. I leave a message telling him I’m down in San Bernardino and that I’ll try him again when I’m closer to home. Reception from the desert valley to the mountain is poor to nonexistent.

I didn’t sleep well last night, and after I lock my car I go in search of a cup of coffee, maybe an energy drink, something to pick me up. But the student union is packed and noisy, the lines long, the cashiers slow, and so I wander off campus. The donut shop on the corner is closed. Vandals or robbers smashed the plate glass door, probably the night before, and two men are covering it with plywood. Inside an Asian woman stands with her hands on her hips, watching them work. I walk on. The houses along the side streets are small and run-down. They are built too closely together. They have steel security doors and bars on the windows and one has an old couch on the porch. Farther down, on the next corner, I come to a liquor store.

As I go inside and head back to the coolers, my cell rings again. It could be just another lousy connection, but his voice sounds strained.

“Can you meet me at Bill’s?”

“Sure,” I say.

I’m about to tell him where I’m at, what I have to do first, but the line gets scratchy again, then dies. I text him, saying I’ll meet him in three hours. He texts me back. One word.

Thanks.

I grab a can of Red Bull from the coolers, pay for it, and drink it on my way back to the college. Inside of a few minutes all the caffeine, B-12, and whatever else they put into it takes effect. I’m awake and alert when the professor sponsoring my talk greets me at the front door of the lecture hall. I thank her for inviting me. She thanks me for coming. Her students have been assigned to read a book I wrote about my experience with drugs and alcohol, and she tells me they’re excited, that they have a lot of questions. I am lucky for professors like her. Otherwise this book, like my others, would’ve come and gone long ago. I am lucky, too, for the students she teaches. They are part of the college’s drug and alcohol counseling program and most are recovering alcoholics and addicts. They are all adults, a few my age or older, and I can tell, by the weathered faces of some, that life has led us to many of the same unfortunate places. Now they are turning their lives around and want to help others do the same.

They are poorer working-class students who come from tough neighborhoods where kindness is perceived as weakness and trust is for fools. I grew up like them. I got wasted like them, and I think to myself—yes, here I am again, among my own. Here we are unlearning the things that once brought us together and replacing them with new things, new ways of coping that serve to affirm our lives rather than ruin them. If normalcy is measured by the customary, by habit, by decades of past behavior, then it is far more normal for us to drink and get high than not. All this flashes through my mind when I step up to the podium and look out across the lecture hall. Rows and rows of students look back at me. Some are slouched in their seats, seemingly bored, but most, and I’d say there are seventy or eighty of them, have their notebooks out and pens in hand.

I thank them for being here.

I thank them for their time.

I make a joke about having a captive audience. About them being forced to read my book. I don’t suppose it’s much of a joke, but I get a few laughs. I get a few smiles and that’s enough to break the ice. Then I read from the book, not long, maybe ten minutes, fifteen tops. I’ve been to enough readings and lectures to know that shorter is better.

Afterward I open it up to questions. Hands rise. This is the part they usually like best, and in the process of answering I end up telling them how I used to love alcohol. The smell. The taste. How it made me feel. How, had I been able to stop after three or four or even ten drinks, I’d still be at it. At some point, though, it quit being about how it made me feel and started being about how I felt when I didn’t drink or use. I tell them that I started smoking weed when I was nine, drinking at twelve, and by fourteen I didn’t care what I put in my body. I tell them how great I thought all of it once was and how ugly it all became. I tell them about the suicides of my brother and sister and how they couldn’t live without drinking, and yet, at the same time, how they couldn’t continue to drink and live. I tell them all kinds of things about my experience with alcohol and drugs and how they eventually turned on me. Though I don’t recall using the word disease, something I say triggers a question about it from a student in the back rows. She’s young, maybe twenty, I guess.

“But do you honestly think it’s a disease?”

“Alcoholism?” I say.

“Yeah,” she says, “or drug addiction.”

By the very nature of her question, I presuppose, possibly wrongly, that she isn’t a recovering addict or alcoholic. So I tell her what Nick once shared at a meeting, and I remember it close to verbatim, because he had put into words what I had felt for some time: that like many other sicknesses, alcoholism is chronic, it has definite symptoms, and its progression follows a predictable course. And I tell her, in my own words, that once addiction sets in, once it develops, that if it’s left untreated it’ll eventually kill you just as sure as any other terminal illness.

“But it’s still not like heart disease,” she says. “Or cancer. Those are real medical issues we don’t have any control over.”

I didn’t come to argue or impose my opinions on anyone, and so I agree. I tell her she has a good point, and that, yes, there are those in the medical community who believe that addiction isn’t an actual disease. But then there are also those that do. Soon it’s time to wrap it up, and because I like to leave them with a sense of hope, I tell them that although there’s no cure for this thing, this illness, whatever you want to call it, you can arrest it. You can put it into a state of remission. Every day addicts and alcoholics can and do turn their lives around. We can and do regain our health, lost dignity, honor, and respect. This is my pitch, and I believe what I say.

Back in my car, I try to call Nick. Again it doesn’t go through, and I send him another text message: I’m on my way. Be there in forty-five. I’m concerned. It isn’t like Nick, wanting to meet right away, out of the blue. Almost always I’m the one asking when we can get together, and on the rare occasions where it’s the other way around, it’s always been with a few days’ notice. He’s a sales manager of a national lighting company, and when he’s not traveling across the country, he does his best to spend what little free time he has with his family. Somehow he also finds time to sponsor me and two or three other guys from our group.

We usually meet at Bill’s Diner, this little place with those old tuck-and-roll vinyl booths and a long Formica breakfast counter, a stone’s throw from our A.A. club. Usually, if it’s empty, we take the corner booth with the most privacy, and he’s there when I arrive, hunched over a cup of coffee. Nick is originally from Boston, and though he’s lived in California for the last twenty years, he still has traces of his Southie accent. He used to be an anesthesiologist back east, Brooklyn, I think, but he lost his license for stealing pain meds from the hospital dispensary and pilfering the same from his patients. He wound up strung out on heroin and booze, living off the streets on skid row in the old Bowery, sleeping in alcoves and alleyways until he somehow found his way into the rooms of A.A. I know his story is longer and more complicated than this, with all kinds of bumps along the road to getting clean and sober, but he doesn’t like to discuss the details. Somewhere in there he burned through a marriage, as I did, and eventually landed, miraculously, back on his feet two thousand plus miles from where he started. He remarried. He began a new life.

I slide into the booth. He looks up at me. I can see it in his eyes that he’s troubled, and his face looks thinner, like he’s lost weight. When did I last see him? It can’t have been more than a couple weeks.

“You feeling all right?” I say.

He shakes his head. He lowers his eyes, then looks back up at me.

“I went out,” he says. “I got a room in Huntington Beach and stayed drunk for five days.”

I have to let that settle in. He had sixteen years of sobriety.

“Just booze?” I say.

“Just booze,” he says.

I don’t know if that makes it not as bad, slipping after all that time, but I’m glad it wasn’t with heroin. It’s so easy to overdose.

I sit back in the booth. For a while it’s quiet. He takes a sip of coffee, and I flag down the waitress. I ask for a cup. When she leaves, I look at Nick again.

“What do you think set it off?”

“Does there have to be a reason?”

“I guess not,” I say. “But there’s triggers.”

“There’s always triggers but never a reason. No good one anyway.” He smiles, a tired smile. “You need to get another sponsor.”

“Don’t even go there.”

“I’m serious.”

“I’m serious, too. How long has it been since your last drink?”

“Three days.”

“That’s a good start,” I say.

He holds up his hand. His fingers are trembling.

“Look at that.”

“It’ll pass,” I say, like it’s no big deal, and it isn’t. The shakes, the nausea, the physical part of withdrawal is the least of our troubles. The real problem is the obsession and the craving for more when we take that first drink or drug and then try to stop and can’t.

“The first week is the hardest. Isn’t that what you said when I slipped, what, almost three years ago?” And in saying those words, I remember when I messed up and met with him a couple weeks later, all beat to hell from drinking and using speed. I’d had a little over six months’ clean time under my belt, and I expected him to drop me as his sponsee, especially because this wasn’t the first time I’d slipped. I remember asking if he wanted me to find another sponsor and how he laughed and shook his head. “People like us fuck up more often than not,” he’d said. “It’s actually pretty rare for drunks to get the program first time around and never drink again.” So we started over. I did the Steps again. He made me commit to reading the Big Book at least twenty minutes a day. I had to attend a meeting once a day, too, for the first ninety days. I had to meditate. I had to pray at night and in the morning and anytime in between if I felt even the slightest urge to drink. “Why,” he asked me, “do you think so many drunks and addicts can’t stay clean? Because it’s work, man. Hard work.” But he also told me that it gets easier with time and if it didn’t he doubts he’d be sober himself.

Now Nick has slipped and it’s my job as his sponsee to act, if only briefly, as the sponsor. I tell him exactly what he told me when I slipped.

“You need a meeting,” I say. “Let’s both hit a meeting tonight.”

The plan is to pick him up around six thirty and if he’s up for it we’ll grab another cup of coffee and something to eat after the meeting and talk some more. His wife gave him a ride to the diner to meet with me—sober or not he’s in no condition to handle a car—so he needs a lift home, and later, on the drive back to his house, he tells me straight up. His voice is reasonable. His voice is calm.

“I have stage-four cancer,” he says.

I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what anyone can say when someone you care deeply about tells you that they’re dying. But I do not act shocked. I do not tear up. I just drive.

A semi hauling a load of logs blows past us. We’re on the highway that runs along the rim of the mountain. On one side of the road are tall pines, dry and brown, stiffening into the sky, and on the other is the barren desert far below. Much of our forest has been decimated by several years of drought and you can look out over the mountains and see vast swatches of naked land where strong trees once stood, and higher up, you can make out the sagging branches and brown pine needles of more trees that have yet to be felled by the loggers contracted to cut and haul them away. But they will be back, the trees. The undergrowth. I’ve seen this devastation before, and when the patterns of heavy rain and snow return, the forest will replenish itself.

“When did you find out?” I say.

“A week ago.”

I think of his wife. I think of their children. They have three daughters. I would think of them first if this were about me.

“How’s your family taking it?” I say.

“I haven’t told them,” he says.

I don’t say anything to that because I’m not sure what I would do or say if I knew I was dying. I’ve never thought about it until now, and I don’t mean death. I have thought about death plenty of times, but I’ve never considered what it would be like to tell those who most love me, knowing that it will hurt them. That it will burden them. I think the burden would be worse because they would begin to think about what they need to do for the dying and there is nothing you can do for the dying, not really, except comfort them as best you can and then move on with your own life when they pass. I know that role well enough. I served it with my father. I served it with my mother, and I coped, poorly, with the sudden and unnecessary deaths of my two older siblings. I also know that if someone I loved didn’t tell me they were dying that I would later resent them for denying me the choice of how I wanted to spend with them what little time they had left. I don’t suppose, if it were me instead of Nick, that that choice would be mine to make. I don’t suppose, since our lives are inextricably linked to the lives of others, that it’s any choice at all.

“Can they treat it?”

“They can try.”

“So there’s a chance?”

“With chemo, I might have a couple years. Depends. It started in the prostate,” he says, “but it’s spread to the bones and liver.”

I turn off the highway and onto the road that leads to his house. The pines here, along the shady side of the mountain, have fared better. There is undergrowth and grasses beneath them and their needles are still green.

“You know you have to tell them,” I say.

Nick looks away. He stares out the window and then something inside him breaks and the words come, not fast or anxiously, but evenly, steadily, how he doesn’t think Joan can handle it, how she depends on him, how she needs him and that it’s not dying, no, not dying so much as how she’ll get by, how the girls will get by when he’s not around, when he can’t bring home a check. That’s what scares him. He can’t afford to die. They live month to month and the first thing to go will be the house. Then the cars. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Who knows? He’s confused and that’s why he wants to talk to me because Joan is fragile and he fears this will break her. He doesn’t want them to have to see it, either, the withering, the weakening as the cancer eats him up from the inside out so that his breath stinks of it, and he goes on like this until I put my hand on his shoulder and tell him that he’s wrong. About them having to watch. My father, I say, died of cancer and I didn’t care how he looked. Of course I didn’t want to see him in pain, and of course it was heartbreaking, but none of it made any difference because I loved him just as your children and wife love you. It’s about time and only time and so far as what Joan can or can’t handle is not for you to decide. She needs to know as do your daughters, so they can make their own decisions.

You owe them that, I say, and from here on out you have to take it a day at a time, like we do as drunks, only now it is a different, more insidious disease. Alcoholism can be arrested, but when stage-four cancer metastasizes its progression is ultimately unstoppable.

We’ve reached his house. I pull into the driveway but he doesn’t get out, not right away. He’s still staring out the window.

“You okay?” I say.

He nods and it’s understood that while one burden has been lifted another has taken its place. This, too, will be lifted when he speaks to his wife.

“I’ll pick you up at six thirty,” I say.

“You sure it’s no trouble?”

“I’m sure.”

Many homes in Lake Arrowhead are built on steep mountain slopes. A long flight of stairs takes you up to Nick’s house, and I watch him climb them with deliberation. In the months ahead, as he begins to weaken, these stairs will become more difficult for him. I will watch my friend use the tools of prayer and meditation and a belief in a Power greater than himself. I will watch him use the very things he taught me.

Now Nick reaches the door. Now his wife steps out onto the porch to greet him. They kiss. Then she looks down at me, sitting in my car in the driveway, waiting. Waiting. Even from this distance I can see that she is smiling at me. It isn’t in me to return her smile. But she waves, too, and I can do that. I can wave back.