Writers On The Edge E-Book

• Herausgeber: Modern History Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Serie: Reflections of America
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 294

Beschreibung

Writers On The Edge offers a range of essays, memoirs and poetry written by major contemporary authors who bring fresh insight into the dark world of addiction, from drugs and alcohol, to sex, gambling and food. Editors Diana Raab and James Brown have assembled an array of talented and courageous writers who share their stories with heartbreaking honesty as they share their obsessions as well as the awe-inspiring power of hope and redemption.
"Open to any piece in this collection, and the scalding, unflinching, overwhelming truths within will shine light on places most people never look. Anyone who reads this book, be they users or used, will put it down changed. And when they raise their eyes from the very last page, the world they see may be redeemed, as well." --Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight
"Writers On The Edge is a thoughtful compendium of first-person narratives by writers who have managed to use their despair to create beauty. A must-read for anyone in the recovery field." -- Leonard Buschel Founder, Writers in Treatment
CONTRIBUTORS: John Amen, Frederick & Steven Barthelme, Kera Bolonik, Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Maud Casey, Anna David, Denise Duhamel, B.H. Fairchild, Ruth Fowler, David Huddle Perie Longo, Gregory Orr, Victoria Patterson, Molly Peacock, Scott Russell Sanders, Stephen Jay Schwartz, Linda Gray Sexton, Sue William Silverman, Chase Twichell, Rachel Yoder
About the Editors
Diana M. Raab, an award-winning memoirist and poet, is author of six books including Healing With Words and Regina's Closet. She's an advocate of the healing power of writing and teaches nation-wide workshops and in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.
James Brown, a recovering alcoholic and addict, is the author of the memoirs, The Los Angeles Diaries and This River. He is Professor of English in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at California State University, San Bernardino.
From the Reflections of America Series
Self-Help: Substance Abuse and Addictions--General

Leseprobe

Writers On The Edge:

22 Writers Speak About Addiction and Dependency

Edited by Diana M. Raab and James Brown

Foreword by Jerry Stahl

Reflections of America Series

MODERN HISTORY PRESS

Writers On The Edge: 22 Writers Speak About Addiction and Dependency

Copyright (c) 2012 by Diana M. Raab and James Brown. All Rights Reserved.

From the Reflections of America Series

For a complete list of work which has been reprinted in this volume please consult Acknowledgments beginning on p. 167.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Writers on the edge :22 writers speak about addiction and dependency / edited by Diana M. Raab and James Brown ; foreword by Jerry Stahl.

p. cm. -- (Reflections of America)

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-61599-108-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61599-109-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Authors, American--21st century--Biography. 2. Addicts--United States--Biography. 3. Addicts--Literary collections. I. Raab, Diana, 1954- II. Brown, James, 1957-

PS509.A27W74 2012

810.9’3556--dc23

2011036028

Modern History Press, an imprint of

Loving Healing Press

5145 Pontiac Trail

Ann Arbor, MI 48105

www.ModernHistoryPress.com

Tollfree USA/CAN: 888-761-6268

London, UK:

Distributed by Ingram Book Group (USA/CAN), Bertram’s

Books (UK/EU)

Advance Praise for Writers On the Edge

“All addictions, at bottom, are the same; and each of us who battles addiction is different. I dove into Writers On The Edge. When I came up for air, I knew that I was in good company.

Mary Sojourner, author

She Bets Her Life: a true story of gambling addiction

“An honest, unflinching book about addiction from a tough group of talented writers. These hard-hitters know whereof they speak, and the language in which they speak can be shocking to the uninitiated—naked prose and poetry about potentially fatal cravings the flesh is heir to—drugs, booze, cutting, overeating, depression, suicide. Not everybody makes it through. Writers On The Edge is about dependency, and the toll it takes, on the guilty and the innocent alike.” Dirk Hanson, author

The Chemical Carousel

“Recovery from addiction is, at its core, a deeply personal experience rooted in shared pain and hope among those seeking freedom from their addictive behaviors. Writers On The Edge offers intimate storytelling of such eloquence and insight that readers will be left with genuine insight into the power and complexity of this destructive but fascinating human condition. This book is a must-read for anyone wanting the real-life inside scoop on the human side of what addiction is all about.”

Arnold M. Washton, Ph.D., Addiction Psychologist, author,Treating Alcohol and Drug Problems in Psychotherapy Practice: Doing What Works

CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Writing for Life

Perie Longo

Under the Influence

Scott Russell Sanders

Toys in the Attic

Chase Twichell

Cancelled Elegy

Molly Peacock

Pretty Red Stripes

Linda Gray Sexton

Last Day Out

Sue William Silverman

The Bottom

Denise Duhamel

Lisa

Kera Bolonik

The Doppler Effect

B.H. Fairchild

Thrall

Frederick and Steven Barthelme

Putting Down the Duck

Margaret Bullitt-Jonas

To Dettner

Diana M. Raab

Sweet Rolls and Vodka

Victoria Patterson

Sunset Boulevard

Stephen Jay Schwartz

23

John Amen

The World Breaks Everyone

Ruth Fowler

A Better Place to Live

Maud Casey

On the Other Side

David Huddle

Night of the Violet Universe

Rachel Yoder

Sayonara Marijuana Mon Amour

Chase Twichell

The Beep

Anna David

If There’s a God

Gregory Orr

Instructions on the Use of Alcohol

James Brown

Acknowledgments

Appendix – Support Groups and Organizations

Contributors

Index

Creative work can act not only as a means of escape from pain, but also as a way of structuring chaotic emotions and thoughts, numbing pain through abstraction and the rigors of disciplined thought, and creating a distance from the source of despair.

~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Author of Touched with Fire

FOREWORD

I really hate the term “edge.” Forget the fact that the term, itself, has become a soiled staple of Hollywood producer-speak, with studio execs forever dispatching their legion of hacks to “give them something edgy.” Or that it’s all but impossible to find advertising copy that doesn’t march the word out by way of lending whatever thriller or airport novel or toothpaste the suits are pimping that season some frisson of danger, of savagery, of, God save us all, cred. (“Squeeze a little Squirm on your toothbrush—and you’ll have edgy breath all day!”) Of late “extreme” may have edged out edge, but the term is still dragged out by those who make their fortunes hustling the public into thinking theirs is a product generated not by corporate jim-jims who want to separate you from your money by conning you into thinking whatever you’re buying will transform you from a dweeb to a badass, but by, you know, really edgy people, who’ve done edgy things, in an edgy way, and if you buy this sweater, pick-up truck, CD, or deodorant, you too will be touched by the sexy, seen-it-all-splendor that separates the be’s from the wannabe’s.

The truth, of course, is that anyone who tells you they’re living on the edge is, almost by definition, deluding themselves—or trying to delude you—in the same way that guys who talk tough generally aren’t. Because the ones who are, will never say anything about it. They don’t have to. What’s more, as anyone will tell you who’s actually lived there, the edge is not on the edge at all. It’s in the middle. Select any story or poem from the collection you have in your twitching little fingers right now, and you will see. Whether you were a drunk or a cutter, a gambler or over-eater or dope fiend, the dirty little secret is that whatever habit you ultimately have to quit to continue living does not exist on the periphery of your existence. It exists in the middle. Everything else is just what you do until you do the thing you can’t stop thinking about doing. Your life revolves around the drink or the drug or the fuck or the cut or the bet or whatever the addiction happens to be.

The dirty little secret of our confessional era is that anyone who has, to employ yet another cliché, “been there and back” now believes they have the right, if not the money-making opportunity and duty, to write a memoir (or a mini-series, or a concept album, or a trilogy in verse) about their experience. Just as we, happily, have the right not to read or watch or listen to it.

Which—wasn’t that an edgy way to start a book about life “on the edge?”—brings us to the good news. Simply put, I don’t trust anyone who hasn’t been to hell. I can be friendly, respectful, kind, but those who don’t, have that look in their eye. The no-need-for-words thing that lets one survivor know they are in the presence of another. And, to a man and woman, everyone in this extraordinary volume has, at one time or another, not just gotten their mail in hell, but even more “intense” (we can’t forget about “intense!”) they have not known, for certain, whether they were ever going to make it out. Not, I hasten to add, because they were “victims.” (And nobody, as the great Hubert Selby used to say, can clear a room like a victim.) Quite the opposite. These writers were more often than not, perps—their own or somebody else’s. It’s roughly akin to reading a recollection of Nagasaki survivors by people who dropped the bomb on themselves.

America, at this point in time, may not manufacture much. But we do manufacture addicts. According to some statistics, one out of four citizens in this fine nation qualifies for that grim and perplexing title. (And no doubt their family, friends, co-workers, cell-mates, bed-partners, bar dawgs and drug buddies have the scars to prove it.) But fuck statistics. What the tremendously brave, eloquent, and (occasionally) hysterical writers in this volume offer are the kind of stories that only veterans can tell. I speak for the record, as one who has done some personal research of his own on the subject of addiction. Not that a decade and change on the needle gives you an expert’s badge. What it does give you, along with the usual liver damage and lifetime of amends, is an incredible nose for bullshit. Plus an appreciation—make that reverence—for the truth. And the redemptive powers only the truth can unleash.

Open to any piece in this collection, and the scalding, unflinching, overwhelming truths within will shine light on places most people never look. Because they never have to. As addicts, however, we have no choice.

Anyone who reads this book, be they users or used, will put it down changed. And when they raise their eyes from the very last page, the world they see may be redeemed, as well.

~ Jerry Stahl

Author of Permanent Midnight

PREFACE

Use the word addiction and the first images that come to mind are ones of pills, powders, needles, crack pipes, and bottles of booze. Most of us might picture a homeless man staggering down the street clutching a brown paper bag in one hand, or a bone-thin junkie with a syringe dangling from his arm.

But times have changed.

Minus the severe physical, potentially life-threatening withdrawal symptoms of the alcoholic or narcotics addict, today’s definition of addiction includes all kinds of compulsive behavior. Gambling. Sex. Overeating. Even love. Chronic depression and suicide also fit neatly into the subject, for it is hard, if not unwise, to separate them from the conversation, given that as often as not they most certainly feed into the same tributary.

Writers On The Edge challenges the traditional boundaries of the term addiction to include the two most basic elements that define it: obsession and the compulsion to self-destruct. And what distinguishes this book from so many others on the subject is that it is written by well-published writers and poets who have been there, on the edge, who know the hellish terrain of addiction, obsession and mental illness, and through their art take us to those dark places with them. Some discover light at the end of the tunnel. Others do not.

The causes of addiction have been identified as genetic, physical and spiritual. Addiction, for many, is the result of an attempt to cover up psychic, emotional or physical pain, and in some cases reflects an unconscious and non-violent form of suicide. According to psychologist Stanislav Grof, the deepest force behind alcoholism and addiction is an unrecognized and perhaps misguided craving for tran-scendence. Thus, it could be thought that the writers in this collection are searching for something beyond what readily meets the eye. As complicated as the subject may seem, the message is simple. There are those who by whatever means necessary will turn their lives around and survive as a result, and others whose obsessions will consume them. Those chosen for this anthology skillfully articulate their personal struggles, triumphs, and failures, presenting poignant perspectives for reflection, concern and acknowledgement of addiction and its associated issues.

In Scott Russell Sanders‘ classic essay, “Under the Influence,” we witness the slow, painful disintegration of Sanders’ alcoholic father. It is a story of a father and son, and their unrealized love, stunted if not destroyed by alcoholism.

For Chase Twichell‘s “Toys in the Attic,” the journey takes us deep into the psyche of the chronically depressed, having lived for fifteen years “with psychoactive drugs in my brain, among them Ambien, Celexa, Desyrel, Effexor, Elavil, Pamelor, Paxil, Serzone, Traivil, Valium, Wellbutrin, and Xanax.” The goal is to stabilize mood rather than heighten or distort it as one does with alcohol and narcotics. But how do these psychotropic drugs affect consciousness? And how, in turn, does a consciousness altered by these drugs influence Twichell’s poetry, which she describes as “the ultimate art of self-annihilation?”

Add to the mix “Pretty Red Stripes” by Linda Gray Sexton (daughter of the late poet Anne Sexton, who committed suicide), and you have a stunningly graphic account of that obsessive, destructive practice known as “cutting.” Like a drug, drawing a razor through one’s skin brings to some, a sense of relief, pleasure, and release. “It’s a way of letting the poison out,” Sexton writes, “To bleed is a way of knowing you’re alive.”

That same need for “knowing you’re alive” segues smoothly into Sue William Silverman‘s book excerpt, “Last Day Out,” on sex addiction. The need, the compulsion, the obsession for a heightened sense of pleasure once again crosses the line between what society considers normal versus abnormal behavior. Here is a woman who feels marriage a mundane institution in which she can never be content, and so feels compelled to regularly engage in one night stands with strange men for what she refers to as a need to be “loved.”

In “The Doppler Effect,” renowned poet B.H. Fairchild masterfully captures the essence of the unspoken sadness and self-alienation drinkers feel simply sitting in a darkened bar, wondering why they are there, and if not realizing, at least coming to suppose that belonging of any sort is at best perhaps an illusion.

We join and honor the other fine writers and poets in this collection, including, John Amen, Frederick and Steven Barthelme, Kera Bolonik, Maud Casey, Anna David, Denise Duhamel, Ruth Fowler, David Huddle, Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Gregory Orr, Victoria Patterson, Molly Peacock, Perie Longo, Stephen Jay Schwartz, and Rachel Yoder. They all follow in the great, though unfortunate tradition of their literary predecessors. Charles Baudelaire. Edgar Allen Poe. Jack London. Ernest Hemingway. F. Scott Fitzgerald. William Styron. Dorothy Parker. Virginia Wolff. Raymond Carver. Tennessee Williams. Eugene O’Neil. Jean Rhys. Truman Capote. The list of alcoholic, drug addicted, suicidal, chronically depressed and mentally ill writers goes on and on. But don’t be misled. Though some might consider these afflictions simply an occupational hazard of being an artist, for each name here there are dozens of others who have lived healthy, clean and sober lives and produced great works.

It is hoped that this anthology will be helpful to all artistic personalities who wish to gain a stronger sense of how their colleagues navigate their way through addiction, mental illness, suicide, and other obsessive, self-destructive behaviors. These battles are not fought alone and perhaps these stories will also provide insight and hope to all those and their loved ones struggling with some form of addiction and its inevitable consequences.

~ Diana M. Raab and James Brown,

Editors

WRITING FOR LIFE

Perie Longo

On the edge

he signs his name

with a skid mark

voice a hollow drum

willow without stretch of deer skin

to bring the rain.

Having been on the edge ourselves,

the long way down—or up—

either way barely bearable

we hide behind neatly dressed words.

He writes in such a jumble

(word salad

with blood dressing)

no one understands but that’s the whole idea.

Last time someone figured it out

he was sent down the river

(figure of speech) to get his head screwed on

straight

straight

straight

locked in a room

full of curve balls.

“I just wanted to stand out,” he says

slinging up the umbrella of his misfortune.

“As if your nails are trying to hang

onto the sky?” I ask (up talk it’s called).

He laughs a cry,

his strong hand over his wet, pale cheek.

Curse the screw of chemicals

that leave who we love tweaked

and double crossed.

UNDER THE INFLUENCE

Scott Russell Sanders

My father drank. He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food—compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling. I use the past tense not because he ever quit drinking but because he quit living. That is how the story ends for my father, age sixty-four, heart bursting, body cooling and forsaken on the linoleum of my brother’s trailer. The story continues for my brother, my sister, my mother, and me, and it will continue so long as memory holds.

In the perennial present of memory, I slip into the garage or barn to see my father tipping back the flat green bottles of wine, the brown cylinders of whiskey, the cans of beer disguised in paper bags. His Adam’s apple bobs, the liquid gurgles, he wipes the sandy-haired back of a hand over his lips, and then, his bloodshot gaze bumping into me, he stashes the bottle or can inside his jacket, under the workbench, between two bales of hay, and we both pretend the moment has not occurred.

“What’s up, buddy?” he says, thick-tongued and edgy.

“Sky’s up,” I answer, playing along.

“And don’t forget prices,” he grumbles. “Prices are always up. And taxes.”

In memory, his white 1951 Pontiac with the stripes down the hood and the Indian head on the snout jounces to a stop in the driveway; or it is the 1956 Ford station wagon, or the 1963 Rambler shaped like a toad, or the sleek 1969 Bonneville that will do 120 miles per hour on straightaways; or it is the robin’s-egg blue pickup, new in 1980, battered in 1981, the year of his death. He climbs out, grinning dangerously, unsteady on his legs, and we children interrupt our game of catch, our building of snow forts, our picking of plums, to watch in silence as he weaves past into the house, where he slumps into his overstuffed chair and falls asleep. Shaking her head, our mother stubs out the cigarette he has left smoldering in the ashtray. All evening, until our bedtimes, we tiptoe past him, as past a snoring dragon. Then we curl in our fearful sheets, listening. Eventually he wakes with a grunt, Mother slings accusations at him, he snarls back, she yells, he growls, their voices clashing. Before long, she retreats to their bedroom, sobbing—not from the blows of fists, for he never strikes her, but from the force of words.

Left alone, our father prowls the house, thumping into furniture, rummaging in the kitchen, slamming doors, turning the pages of the newspaper with a savage crackle, muttering back at the late-night drivel from television. The roof might fly off, the walls might buckle from the pressure of his rage. Whatever my brother and sister and mother may be thinking on their own rumpled pillows, I lie there hating him, loving him, fearing him, knowing I have failed him. I tell myself he drinks to ease an ache that gnaws at his belly, an ache I must have caused by disappointing him somehow, a murderous ache I should be able to relieve by doing all my chores, earning A’s in school, winning baseball games, fixing the broken washer and the burst pipes, bringing in money to fill his empty wallet. He would not hide the green bottles in his tool box, would not sneak off to the barn with a lump under his coat, would not fall asleep in the daylight, would not roar and fume, would not drink himself to death, if only I were perfect.

I am forty-two as I write these words, and I know full well that my father was an alcoholic, a man consumed by disease rather than by disappointment. What had seemed to me a private grief is in fact a public scourge. In the United States alone, some ten or fifteen million people share his ailment, and behind the doors they slam in fury or disgrace, countless other children tremble. I comfort myself with such knowledge, holding it against the throb of memory like an ice pack against a bruise. There are keener sources of grief: poverty, racism, rape, war. I do not wish to compete for a trophy in suffering. I am only trying to understand the corrosive mixture of helplessness, responsibility, and shame that I learned to feel as the son of an alcoholic. I realize now that I did not cause my father’s illness, nor could I have cured it. Yet for all this grown-up knowledge, I am still ten years old, my own son’s age, and as that boy I struggle in guilt and confusion to save my father from pain.

* * *

Consider a few of our synonyms for drunk: tipsy, tight, pickled, soused, and plowed; stoned and stewed, lubricated and inebriated, juiced and sluiced; three sheets to the wind, in your cups, out of your mind, under the table; lit up, tanked up, wiped out; besotted, blotto, bombed, and buzzed; plastered, polluted, putrefied; loaded or looped, boozy, woozy, fuddled, or smashed; crocked and shit-faced, corked and pissed, snockered and sloshed.

It is a mostly humorous lexicon, as the lore that deals with drunks—in jokes and cartoons, in plays, films, and television skits—is largely comic. Aunt Matilda nips elderberry wine from the sideboard and burps politely during supper. Uncle Fred slouches to the table glassy-eyed, wearing a lampshade for a hat and murmuring, “Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker.” Inspired by cocktails, Mrs. Somebody recounts the events of her day in a fuzzy dialect, while Mr. Somebody nibbles her ear and croons a bawdy song. On the sofa with Boyfriend, Daughter giggles, licking gin from her lips, and loosens the bows in her hair. Junior knocks back some brews with his chums at the Leopard Lounge and stumbles home to the wrong house, wonders foggily why he cannot locate his pajamas, and crawls naked into bed with the ugliest girl in school. The family dog slurps from a neglected martini and wobbles to the nursery, where he vomits in Baby’s shoe.

It is all great fun. But if in the audience you notice a few laughing faces turn grim when the drunk lurches on stage, don’t be surprised, for these are the children of alcoholics. Over the grinning mask of Dionysus, the leering mask of Bacchus, these children cannot help seeing the bloated features of their own parents. Instead of laughing, they wince, they mourn. Instead of celebrating the drunk as one freed from constraints, they pity him as one enslaved. They refuse to believe in vino veritas, having seen their befuddled parents skid away from truth toward folly and oblivion. And so these children bite their lips until the lush staggers into the wings.

My father, when drunk, was neither funny nor honest; he was pathetic, frightening, deceitful. There seemed to be a leak in him somewhere, and he poured in booze to keep from draining dry. Like a torture victim who refuses to squeal, he would never admit that he had touched a drop, not even in his last year, when he seemed to be dissolving in alcohol before our very eyes. I never knew him to lie about anything, ever, except about this one ruinous fact. Drowsy, clumsy, unable to fix a bicycle tire, throw a baseball, balance a grocery sack, or walk across the room, he was stripped of his true self by drink. In a matter of minutes, the contents of a bottle could transform a brave man into a coward, a buddy into a bully, a gifted athlete and skilled carpenter and shrewd businessman into a bumbler. No dictionary of synonyms for drunk would soften the anguish of watching our prince turn into a frog.

* * *

Father’s drinking became the family secret. While growing up, we children never breathed a word of it beyond the four walls of our house. To this day, my brother and sister rarely mention it, and then only when I press them. I did not confess the ugly, bewildering fact to my wife until his wavering walk and slurred speech forced me to. Recently, on the seventh anniversary of my father’s death, I asked my mother if she ever spoke of his drinking to friends. “No, no, never,” she replied hastily. “I couldn’t bear for anyone to know.”

The secret bores under the skin, gets in the blood, into the bone, and stays there. Long after you have supposedly been cured of malaria, the fever can flare up, the tremors can shake you. So it is with the fevers of shame. You swallow the bitter quinine of knowledge, and you learn to feel pity and compassion toward the drinker. Yet the shame lingers in your marrow, and, because of the shame, anger.

* * *

For a long stretch of my childhood we lived on a military reservation in Ohio, an arsenal where bombs were stored underground in bunkers and vintage airplanes burst into flames and unstable artillery shells boomed nightly at the dump. We had the feeling, as children, that we played in a minefield, where a heedless footfall could trigger an explosion. When Father was drinking, the house, too, became a minefield. The least bump could set off either parent.

The more he drank, the more obsessed Mother became with stopping him. She hunted for bottles, counted the cash in his wallet, sniffed at his breath. Without meaning to snoop, we children blundered left and right into damning evidence. On afternoons when he came home from work sober, we flung ourselves at him for hugs, and felt against our ribs the telltale lump in his coat. In the barn we tumbled on the hay and heard beneath our sneakers the crunch of buried glass. We tugged open a drawer in his workbench, looking for screwdrivers or crescent wrenches, and spied a gleaming six-pack among the tools. Playing tag, we darted around the house just in time to see him sway on the rear stoop and heave a finished bottle into the woods. In his good night kiss we smelled the cloying sweetness of Clorets, the mints he chewed to camouflage his dragon’s breath.

I can summon up that kiss right now by recalling Theodore Roethke’s lines about his own father:

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

Such waltzing was hard, terribly hard, for with a boy’s scrawny arms I was trying to hold my tipsy father upright.

For years, the chief source of those incriminating bottles and cans was a grimy store a mile from us, a cinder block place called Sly’s, with two gas pumps outside and a moth-eaten dog asleep in the window. A strip of flypaper, speckled the year round with black bodies, coiled in the doorway. Inside, on rusty metal shelves or in wheezing coolers, you could find pop and Popsicles, cigarettes, potato chips, canned soup, raunchy postcards, fishing gear, Twinkies, wine, and beer. When Father drove anywhere on errands, Mother would send us kids along as guards, warning us not to let him out of our sight. And so with one or more of us on board, Father would cruise up to Sly’s, pump a dollar’s worth of gas or plump the tires with air, and then, telling us to wait in the car, he would head for that fly-spangled doorway.

Dutiful and panicky, we cried, “Let us go in with you!”

“No,” he answered. “I’ll be back in two shakes.”

“Please!”

“No!” he roared. “Don’t you budge, or I’ll jerk a knot in your tails!”

So we stayed put, kicking the seats, while he ducked inside. Often, when he had parked the car at a careless angle, we gazed in through the window and saw Mr. Sly fetching down from a shelf behind the cash register two green pints of Gallo wine. Father swigged one of them right there at the counter, stuffed the other in his pocket, and then out he came, a bulge in his coat, a flustered look on his red face.

Because the Mom and Pop who ran the dump were neighbors of ours, living just down the tar-blistered road, I hated them all the more for poisoning my father. I wanted to sneak in their store and smash the bottles and set fire to the place. I also hated the Gallo brothers, Ernest and Julio, whose jovial faces shone from the labels of their wine, labels I would find, torn and curled, when I burned the trash. I noted the Gallo brothers’ address, in California, and I studied the road atlas to see how far that was from Ohio, because I meant to go out there and tell Ernest and Julio what they were doing to my father, and then, if they showed no mercy, I would kill them.

* * *

While growing up on the back roads and in the country schools and cramped Methodist churches of Ohio and Tennessee, I never heard the word alcoholism, never happened across it in books or magazines. In the nearby towns, there were no addiction treatment programs, no community mental health centers, no Alcoholics Anonymous chapters, no therapists. Left alone with our grievous secret, we had no way of understanding Father’s drinking except as an act of will, a deliberate folly or cruelty, a moral weakness, a sin. He drank because he chose to, pure and simple. Why our father, so playful and competent and kind when sober, would choose to ruin himself and punish his family, we could not fathom.

Our neighborhood was high on the Bible, and the Bible was hard on drunkards. “Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine, and valiant men in mixing strong drink,” wrote Isaiah. “The priest and the prophet reel with strong drink, they are confused with wine, they err in vision, they stumble in giving judgment. For all tables are full of vomit, no place is without filthiness.” We children had seen those fouled tables at the local truck stop where the notorious boozers hung out, our father occasionally among them. “Wine and new wine take away the understanding,” declared the prophet Hosea. We had also seen evidence of that in our father, who could multiply seven-digit numbers in his head when sober, but when drunk could not help us with fourth-grade math. Proverbs warned: “Do not look at wine when it is red, when it sparkles in the cup and goes down smoothly. At the last it bites like a serpent, and stings like an adder. Your eyes will see strange things, and your mind utter perverse things.” Woe, woe.

Dismayingly often, these biblical drunkards stirred up trouble for their own kids. Noah made fresh wine after the flood, drank too much of it, fell asleep without any clothes on, and was glimpsed in the buff by his son Ham, whom Noah promptly cursed. In one passage—it was so shocking we had to read it under our blankets with flashlights—the patriarch Lot fell down drunk and slept with his daughters. The sins of the fathers set their children’s teeth on edge.

Our ministers were fond of quoting St. Paul’s pronouncement that drunkards would not inherit the kingdom of God. These grave preachers assured us that the wine referred to during the Last Supper was in fact grape juice. Bible and sermons and hymns combined to give us the impression that Moses should have brought down from the mountain another stone tablet, bearing the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not drink.

The scariest and most illuminating Bible story apropos of drunkards was the one about the lunatic and the swine. We knew it by heart: When Jesus climbed out of his boat one day, this lunatic came charging up from the graveyard, stark naked and filthy, frothing at the mouth, so violent that he broke the strongest chains. Nobody would go near him. Night and day for years this madman had been wailing among the tombs and bruising himself with stones. Jesus took one look at him and said, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirits!” for he could see that the lunatic was possessed by demons. Meanwhile, some hogs were conve-niently rooting nearby. “If we have to come out,” begged the demons, “at least let us go into those swine.” Jesus agreed, the unclean spirits entered the hogs, and the hogs rushed straight off a cliff and plunged into a lake. Hearing the story in Sunday school, my friends thought mainly of the pigs. (How big a splash did they make? Who paid for the lost pork?) But I thought of the redeemed lunatic, who bathed himself and put on clothes and calmly sat at the feet of Jesus, restored—so the Bible said—to “his right mind.”

When drunk, our father was clearly in his wrong mind. He became a stranger, as fearful to us as any graveyard lunatic, not quite frothing at the mouth but fierce enough, quick-tempered, explosive; or else he grew maudlin and weepy, which frightened us nearly as much. In my boyhood despair, I reasoned that maybe he wasn’t to blame for turning into an ogre: Maybe, like the lunatic, he was possessed by demons. I found support for my theory when I heard liquor referred to as “spirits,” when the newspapers reported that somebody had been arrested for “driving under the influence,” and when church ladies railed against that “demon drink.”

If my father was indeed possessed, who would exorcise him? If he was a sinner, who would save him? If he was ill, who would cure him? If he suffered, who would ease his pain? Not ministers or doctors, for we could not bring ourselves to confide in them; not the neighbors, for we pretended they had never seen him drunk; not Mother, who fussed and pleaded but could not budge him; not my brother and sister, who were only kids. That left me. It did not matter that I, too, was only a child, and a bewildered one at that. I could not excuse myself.

* * *

On first reading a description of delirium tremens—in a book on alcoholism I smuggled from the university library—I thought immediately of the frothing lunatic and the frenzied swine. When I read stories or watched films about grisly metamorphoses—Dr. Jekyll becoming Mr. Hyde, the mild husband changing into a werewolf, the kindly neighbor taken over by a brutal alien—I could not help seeing my own father’s mutation from sober to drunk. Even today, knowing better, I am attracted by the demonic theory of drink, for when I recall my father’s transformation, the emergence of his ugly second self, I find it easy to believe in possession by unclean spirits. We never knew which version of Father would come home from work, the true or the tainted, nor could we guess how far down the slope toward cruelty he would slide.

How far a man could slide we gauged by observing our back-road neighbors—the out-of-work miners who had dragged their families to our corner of Ohio from the desolate hollows of Appalachia, the tightfisted farmers, the surly mechanics, the balked and broken men. There was, for example, whiskey-soaked Mr. Jenkins, who beat his wife and kids so hard we could hear their screams from the road. There was Mr. Lavo the wino, who fell asleep smoking time and again, until one night his disgusted wife bundled up the children and went outside and left him in his easy chair to burn; he awoke on his own, staggered out coughing into the yard, and pounded her flat while the children looked on and the shack turned to ash. There was the truck driver, Mr. Sampson, who tripped over his son’s tricycle one night while drunk and got so mad that he jumped into his semi and drove away, shifting through the dozen gears, and never came back. We saw the bruised children of these fathers clump onto our school bus, we saw the abandoned children huddle in the pews at church, we saw the stunned and battered mothers begging for help at our doors.

Our own father never beat us, and I don’t think he ever beat Mother, but he threatened often. The Old Testament Yahweh was not more terrible in his wrath. Eyes blazing, voice booming, Father would pull out his belt and swear to give us a whipping, but he never followed through, never needed to, because we could imagine it so vividly. He shoved us, pawed us with the back of his hand, as an irked bear might smack a cub, not to injure, just to clear a space. I