Pastrix Page 3

  I thought to myself, We’re not all cut out for graduate school, Barb.

  The apartment quickly became my home, the people there my ersatz community. We shared our drugs and tried to make sure everyone was fed. Before I had arrived, someone had slapped a blue and yellow “Just Say No” sticker on the four-foot-long fiberglass bong in the living room; it rested along a nicotine-stained wall on which a “Reaganstein” poster hung (Ronald Reagan: green, bolts in head, arms raised). No one did much cooking in the apartment, other than boiling the occasional packet of ramen. (And once someone cooked a rattlesnake; a drunken endeavor designed to thrill roommates and defy convention. It rotted before someone, not I, was thoughtful enough to throw it out.) We called our filthy home Albion Babylon.

  On my first night at Albion Babylon, I unpacked my possessions, soon realizing that the apple box was the only thing I had to put my things into, so I set it on its side like a little hutch, and piled everything up inside it as neatly as I could. I took out a black marker, drew a circle around the apple and couldn’t decide whether to make it into a peace sign or an anarchy sign. Peace. No… anarchy. I tried both together and it just looked like some kind of insignia from Star Trek. I covered the old mattress on the floor with a cheery yellow flowered bedsheet and my duvet. I was so grateful to have a place to sleep that didn’t come with expectations like my parents’ house or my dorm at Pepperdine or, for the love of God, the Church of Christ.

  Yet for all its nonsense and obsession with being good and alienation of people who weren’t their particular brand of “good,” the Church of Christ I was raised in was a community. As churchgoers, our lives were shared. We gathered for worship with a congregation of people three times a week to sing and pray and share communion. And throughout the rest of the week we hung out with people from church. My parents’ home in particular was one of the popular hangout spots. People were always eating at our table, sleeping on our sofas, and studying the Bible in our living room.

  Once, a young couple showed up at our doorstep. “We’re friends of the Slaters from Detroit and we’re driving through Denver. They said we might be able to stay here.”

  “Pull up a sofa,” my parents would say. “Here’s a couple of towels. Will you give me a hand peeling carrots?”

  That was our home and it was kind of beautiful. But like every other kid on the planet, I didn’t understand that my family was weird until much later in life. Unlike my feelings toward the Christian fundamentalism from which I would soon part ways, I never stopped valuing the spiritual weirdness of hospitality and community. And without realizing it, I spent the next ten years trying to recreate a spiritual community of my own. Only I was looking for a community in which all of me would actually fit.

  So I was thrilled to have found Albion Babylon. We felt like a community. We laughed a lot in our garden-level apartment, and drank competitively and didn’t often leave the apartment. Scotty, the guy from the Mexican restaurant, had already done a stint in rehab. Once he shared with me a book he made, a brown scrapbook sort of thing with photos and drawings and writings. It was a self-awareness project he was forced to do in treatment, but in which he now hid his dope. I loved him for his poems and pictures and for keeping pot inside his in-patient memento. It felt like a fuck you to his parents who were “so concerned” about him.

  I made a book like his: a drawing, a bad poem, a list of my heroes, my faults and my strengths. Heroes: (1) Jesus Christ, (2) Che Guevara. Strength: humor. Fault: running away. I wrote that Jesus was a real revolutionary and that Christianity had unfortunately given the guy a bad name. At nineteen, my goals were to travel more, to live in a commune or intentional community of some sort, and to contribute to world peace through revolutionary action.

  We eventually picked up two more roommates and decided to move into a rental house, a blond brick ranch house on Humboldt Street near the Iliff School of Theology campus—an institution I’d eventually attend, but, at the time, I didn’t even notice. In our new home, the Humboldt House, we all felt free from the constraints of convention and being parented, and we had a yard.

  My friends and I now had a proper home, and while the slightly toothless guy from Alabama created hydroponic grow rooms for the dope, I decided to take on more traditional homemaking practices. Knowing nothing about bread baking or vegetable gardening, I tried my hand at both: the results of both being dry and sandy. I would throw seeds at the dry ground thinking we would be fed by the results. No food grew. And I was still hungry. I also decorated the edge of the linoleum floor in my basement bedroom with my empty vodka bottles which were endlessly being kicked over by my roommates and their boyfriends and girlfriends (whom I would “accidentally” sleep with).

  On some Sunday mornings, when I was able to shake off the hangover, and without really knowing why, I would sneak off to a nearby Quaker meeting, which was a liberal church where no one said anything. Their worship service was an experience in shared silence, so there was no preaching and no men going on endlessly in show-offy prayers. Sitting in the oak-planked pews with a community of people felt reassuring and familiar; plus, I appreciated not being told what to do to be good. The people who sat around me on those silent mornings grew actual gardens and protested wars and read the New York Times. They were kind and never mentioned the smell coming off of me from not having totally metabolized all the alcohol from the night before.

  Still, although the Quakers were a community, I wasn’t really part of it. I was more of a spectator. My community was down the street still sleeping it off. But things were starting to fall apart at our house. People were getting sloppy. One guy now had a gun, and our redneck roommate started to sell speed and more and more strangers were showing up. No one cared about gardening. I didn’t actually care about gardening. We all just did whatever we wanted. Everyone disappointed me, and I baked bread only that one time.

  Turns out, what I wanted was to be in a community with people who wouldn’t, say, disassemble the engine of a 1981 Honda Civic and leave it in the living room for four months. People who, if their tomcat peed on my duvet, would consider neutering the cat or at least offering to pay the dry cleaning bill. They wouldn’t just use it as an opportunity to inform me, glassy-eyed, of how uptight I am and that people really have no right to manipulate the reproductive systems of other animals… man. And perhaps more than anything, I wanted to be in a community with those who could not only love a once bug-eyed girl, but also could reliably flush the toilet. And hell, perhaps they wanted to have a roommate who didn’t sleep with their boyfriends and girlfriends.

  We had started out caring about each other, but in the end none of us knew how to care for each other. But this experience taught me that a community based on the idea that everyone hates rules is, in the end, just as disappointing and oppressive as a community based on the ability to follow rules.

  I moved out two weeks before the cops busted the house.

  CHAPTER 4

  La Femme Nadia

  I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

  —Romans 7:15

  The Sunday after New Year’s Day 1992, I was six days sober and sitting in a dingy, generic room filled with cigarette smoke and sober women—suburban housewives, haggard cocktail waitresses, a couple of grandmas, and a lawyer—on the second floor of York Street. York Street is an old Victorian house that is being used as a center for alcoholism recovery meetings in Denver. The grandeur of the home had faded after over twenty years of continually being used as a meeting space for sober drunks. The grand wraparound porch, which long ago hosted corseted Victorian ladies and cummerbunded gentlemen, was now dotted with half-full butt cans, homeless men, and attorneys briskly sliding into their Audis to avoid being seen at a recovery center by colleagues or clients who may be driving on actual York Street.

  You used to be able to smoke at York Street, but only on the second floor, and smoking is helpful when you are shaky from not dr
inking and dubious about the prospect of recovery in the first place. I wasn’t at all sure this thing was going to work for me or that I belonged at York Street or that any of these women had ever gone through what I was going through. But I did know that I didn’t like any of them.

  As we sat in a circle on the second floor, they talked about God, blah blah blah, and surrender, blah blah blah, and I didn’t buy it. My skin felt like the rough side of Velcro, and every sound was tearing away at my nerves. My right foot was furiously bouncing my leg up and down like it was its job. I thought of my sober friend Nora, who once said that if she weren’t an alcoholic she’d be drunk every day. I smiled at how much that made sense. What I really wanted was a couple shots of vodka, but what I had was six days of sobriety and what now seemed like a nervous disorder.

  While the lawyer spoke, my mind wandered to a week before, when on Christmas Day I had started drinking at ten a.m. and woke up twenty-four hours later in the bed of a line cook from the restaurant where I worked—whom I had no memory of either hanging out with or ever being attracted to. But the thing that horrified me was not that I had drank so much that I had ended up in a strange house with little memory of the evening before. I had engaged in the consistently stupid for quite a while at that point: getting tattooed in a junkie’s living room, snorting cocaine in the bathroom of Nell’s in New York, crashing my motorcycle on a patch of ice (not being sober enough to consider that maybe winter isn’t motorcycle season). Instead, what was horrifying that Christmas Day was that none of it horrified me.

  If my poor mother had known even a small piece of it, she would have never recovered, but I had acted as if it was all just a part of my starring role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s version of Nadia, and wasn’t I fabulous? I carried a bravado about my drinking like I was a hero of debauchery. But on that Christmas Day, it felt like shit. I had a vague realization that I was just trying to keep up with some version of myself that I had decided was accurate.

  I assumed I’d be dead by thirty. I’m not certain of the exact origins of the idea, but I’m guessing it was a biopic about Jim Morrison. Or maybe it was Sid and Nancy. Whatever Hollywood movie I had absorbed and decided was “me,” the fact is that it took me years to become willing to rethink this idea of myself. The idea that I was slightly out of control (but in a charming way) and would die young had become like a favorite outfit I refused to vary because I liked how I looked in it. And at first this was exhilarating. As a teenager, I loved how I looked in the outfit of using drugs and exercising poor judgment. I had tried it on, spun around in the mirror, and decided I would choose this look, this image, this identity. But eventually and without my realizing it, the ability to choose had gone. I had become what at first I had only pretended to be.

  When you can’t control something—like how if I take one drink all bets are off no matter what motivation I have for controlling myself—it’s easier to arrange a life in which it looks like you’ve chosen it all, as opposed to facing the truth: You have lost your ability to choose any of it.

  On December 26, 1991, six days before the meeting I was sitting in now, I showed up to my first twelve-step meeting to prove to my friend Sandra that no, I wasn’t an alcoholic. Sandra was a semiprofessional con artist who made a lot of our drinking money ripping off old people by selling them more hearing aids than they needed. She was my most recent drinking partner and had been in and out of recovery programs for the last six years.

  We were on our fourth round at Ms C’s, a lesbian country and western bar, when she blurted out, “Girl, I gotta try to sober up again.” Her face was swollen from a bender, and at the time I thought to myself, Quitter. “And seriously Nadia,” she continued, “you’re a fucking alcoholic.”

  I wanted to prove her wrong and maybe also get some tips on how to just control myself a little so I could enjoy my drinking without the bother of vomiting. So the next day, I sat pretentiously on an old sofa in the corner of a church basement, certain everyone in the room knew I was not supposed to be there. Now it was six days later, and my leg wouldn’t stop twitching. I was still looking for an affirmation that I wasn’t an alcoholic, so that, dear Jesus, I could go drink again.

  Margery, a leather-faced woman with a New Jersey accent, was talking about prayer or some other nonsense when suddenly a sound like a pan falling on a tile floor came up from the kitchen below us. I jerked out of my seat like I was avoiding shrapnel, but no one else reacted. Without skipping half a beat, Margery turned to me, with a long slim cigarette in her hand and said, “Honey, that’ll pass.” She took a drag and went on, “So anyways, prayer is…”

  In that moment I realized that, because of how immediately she turned to me and said this, Margery knew what it meant to be shaky from not taking a drink, knew that it apparently was temporary, and she maybe even knew how to keep from drinking, even though it sucked so much. I was in the right place. I started, very gradually, to go to these meetings and listen to old broads like Margery. Even when they started talking about God.

  And these people talked about God a lot. But never about an angry God who judged or condemned or was always disappointed in people. The God they spoke of was not the God I was taught to fear.

  “You just have to find a higher power you can do business with,” Margery suggested one morning when I admitted that I hated Christianity. “This isn’t about religion, honey.”

  For her, God was the key to staying sober. Her relationship to God wasn’t doctrinal. It was functional.

  “Just stop thinking about it so damned much. When you get up in the morning ask God to help keep you sober, and before you go to sleep thank him.” I cringed at the male pronoun, but that night, I did it anyway.

  You know those friendships where time and distance are irrelevant, and you can pick up where you left off even after years of not talking? My relationship with God wasn’t like that. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in God. I had never managed to actually be an atheist. I believed there was something in the universe, some great creative force that bound everything together. Something I was connected to. I liked to call it spirit and goddess, and now and again I was willing to maybe call it God, as long as Christianity stayed out of it. Still, talking to God felt like I was starting from scratch.

  I went almost every day to those meetings at York Street and in various church basements. I’d sit in metal folding chairs on linoleum floors and drink light-brown coffee out of Styrofoam cups while sober drunks would speak of God, often simply as their higher power. The lack of theological specificity was perhaps the only thing that enabled me to keep showing up. But once in that first six months, I was sitting in a twelve-step meeting in an upstairs room of a Masonic lodge when someone shared about something he had read in the Bible that week that really spoke to his sobriety.

  I stood up and walked out. The Bible had been the weapon of choice in the spiritual gladiatorial arena of my youth. I knew how, wielded with intent and precision, the Bible can cut deeply, while the one holding it can claim with impunity that “this is from God.” Apparently if God wrote the Bible (a preposterous idea), then any verse used to exclude, shame, harm, or injure another person is not only done in the name of God, but also out of love and concern for the other person. I had been that person on several occasions, lying spiritually bleeding on the ground, while the nice, well-meaning, and concerned Christians stood above me and smiled in condescension, so pleased with themselves that they had “spoken the truth in love.”

  The book that God “wrote” had been used to hurt me and others, so when someone mentioned it in a twelve-step meeting, that was all I could think of. And if I had to find “a God I could do business with,” as Margery put it, it wouldn’t be the guy who wrote a book like the Bible. Who knew that later I would come to love the Bible, once I discovered all the amazing parts no one ever talked about when I was growing up.

  But the connection—the deep, ongoing, and personal connection people like Margery had with God, a power greater t
han their alcoholic selves—was in no way based in piety or righteousness. It was based solely on something I could relate to a hell of a lot more: desperation.

  When I look back on it now, I see it all as an interruption. It was as if God abruptly, even rudely, interrupted my life. I had been fine with trying to attain a rock-and-roll early death. I thought it was hilarious that I would show up for my waitressing job with rashes on my face from having fallen asleep in a puddle of my own vodka vomit. All the times I had said that I should really try to stop drinking were just a way of saying look at how good I am at being a drunk, which was just a way of saying, aren’t I an adorable mess?

  So when I stopped drinking, when I stopped going to bars every night and instead went to church basements, it felt like it was not a matter of will. It was against my will, actually, and I was furious about it. I seethed about having had booze taken away from me when it was the one thing I could rely on to even slightly loosen those muscles in my chest that knot up from the fear and pressure of just being human.

  But I kept going and I kept not drinking and I kept listening to women like Margery, because in those rooms, I heard truth spoken. Despite my desire to just learn how to drink like a lady, I stuck around to learn from these people about how folks like us manage to stay sober. I had heard the familiar truth of my own drinking problem coming out the mouths of old men and street punks and lawyers and old dames like Margery, enough that to deny it would take a stronger act of will than to just surrender myself to it.

  I relate it to that great French film Le Femme Nikita (and later a lousy American remake, Point of No Return), from the early 1990s. Nikita was a teenage drug addict and the sole survivor of a police standoff with her band of thieves. The government faked her death, put her in prison, and then gave her the option to occupy the grave in which she was supposed to be lying or work for them, quid pro quo.