White Out (32 page)

And in all my dreams the white thing posed in its own light. The first time, the white out. Like a pyramid, it rose anciently above the white sand. The clouds above Chip’s roof circled on its limestone face. I knelt in the white dust and a voice whispered to me:
You are not your habits. You are not what you look like. You are not what you do. You are not what you think or feel or touch or forget. You are what you want.

Those dreams—and I have them still, occasionally—cured me almost entirely of curiosity about myself. “You are what you want.” Ugh. I woke up running from that voice. Who I am is not something I need to know. “You are what you want.” Not that I’m satisfied with that answer, mind you. I’m not. But I know no way of answering that question that satisfies. The questioner is insatiable. A restless, reckless, endless desire drives the questioning. Who am I? Who am I? But who am I
really
? It’s best just to forget it.

Of course sometimes, like the day of the chair and the crow, something will happen to stir it up. Ah, you say to yourself. Oh. That’s odd. This crow is inside me? Who am I, anyway? Who am I
really
?

Just let it go. Soon, forgetting to ask the question becomes a habit. Take the average oldster, for example. The question could never occur to her. Her little dog could spontaneously combust, her car could turn into a bird. She’d wonder about the dog or the car, not about the self. And who could blame her? What cop, arriving on the scene to a pile of ash where the poodle used to be, would look at the nice old lady and say: “Who are you? No, not your name, I know that. I mean
who are you really?
”

The fact is, who I am, who anyone is, isn’t a very important question. You can’t possibly get a straight answer to it, for one thing. And if you do (“I’m half Irish, a quarter Scottish, and a quarter English”), you’re really asking about something else. If you’re satisfied with the answer, you’re not asking the question right. Who am I? It isn’t really a question. Questions have answers. Who am I? It’s more like a religion. An old religion, left over from another time. A time when there was nothing to do, maybe.

And I’m interested in doing, in action. I’m active. I could care less about the
who
of my existence. (Though it’s not what I have, not what I lost, not what I look like, it’s not what I want, it’s not what I remember, it’s not what I forget.) Who I am has little to do with addiction and recovery. Who I am isn’t the first thing I need to know to get better, it’s maybe the last thing. Who am I?

To be honest, it’s this writing that brings it up. Here where there’s nothing to hang on to, the question occurs. Who am I? Something from an old religion. And writing is an old technology. Writing is an aid to memory. An ancient technology for remembering. And it keeps remembering. It remembers in the dark. It works back to the moment of your birth and keeps going. It remembers the holy shapes of old religions in the story of your life, for example.

Who am I? The question keeps coming up in this writing. I want to stop it. I could stop it if I really wanted. Who am I? Like a fire, like this book is on fire. Who am I? The smoke curls around Eva’s face, around the white tops, around Cash, Funboy, Baltimore, Chicago…

“You are what you want,” dope whispered in my dreams. I ignored my dreams and cultivated habits. February turned into March. Huge open days, and when it snowed the snow was hard like sand. I’d stand outside my father’s house smoking, licking tea from the little slit of a Starbucks cup top. Five or six grains of snow blew around on the concrete.

I went to court and met my lawyer outside the courtroom. He explained he’d gotten me enrolled in a program for people accused of drug felonies for the first time in the city of Chicago. It was called Drug Court for short. I had to go to a courthouse once a week for four hours for six weeks to listen to drug education lectures, and if I stayed in the state and didn’t get arrested and passed regular urine tests, I wouldn’t be convicted of the felony. The arrest would be expunged from my records. I could answer no to all the felony questions on employment forms. I thought it was ridiculous that simple possession should be a felony anyway, but I had to admit that, all in all, getting arrested seemed to be turning out for the best.

I got a sponsor in NA. His name was Ryan. He’d been clean for nine months, was a year older than me, and was a successful professional poker player.

“Stay clean, get money,” he told me. “Stay clean, get money.”

After a few months his rising card career carried him out West, where I hear he’s still clean and thriving. But before he left he gave me some good advice. When I got the heroin itch and just couldn’t take it I’d call him and he’d pick up the phone and cut me off and say: “Don’t pick it up, and it won’t get in you.”

That was his advice. Don’t put the heroin in you, and the heroin won’t get in you. The brilliance of this advice shines only for addicts. To a normal person, it’s redundant. To an addict, it’s revelation. Don’t pick it up, and it won’t get in you. Revelation. Because you walk around paranoid. You’re sure that somehow the dope will just
get in you.
How? Who knows? It just gets in you. That’s your whole experience. You write “Don’t Do Dope!” notes and leave them around the apartment, and the next day, or later that same day, you’re high, writing some new ones. You ask yourself how, and there’s no answer. The dope just got in you.

For example, I remember the long narrow streets home from Dr. Hayes’s detox in Baltimore. I’d have been clean for one day, driving my car home with some meds for the withdrawals. Dedicated to kicking. Convinced. The narrow road went straight. The sidewalks were deserted, but there was a flutter of movement. What? Nothing. But the dope was hiding behind the streetlights. It was hiding in the white sky. When I got to the end of the block, the right turn was missing. When I got a little further, I was high.

“If you don’t pick it up, it won’t get in youse,” Ryan said with his hoarse Chicago whistle at the end of the
you.
“Before you get high, youse gotta get the money. Youse gotta get in your car. Youse gotta drive to the spot. Youse gotta give the dope-boy the money. Get home. Get the dope out. Get it in you.

“That’s some steps to getting high. It don’t just happen. Every one of them things is things you can
not do
, and if you don’t do every one of them things, the dope can’t get in you. You will never get high.”

It sounded insane, but he was right. He was a successful poker player. The method involved giving certain areas of my life a kind of close focus. It involved knowing when to really pay attention. I’m driving in the car. OK, now close in. There’s the entrance to the highway. If I get on it going south, it goes to the dope spot. If I get on it going north, it goes home. Since I want to go home, I make a right turn and accelerate up the ramp, and pretty soon I’m at home, sober.

Another example. I’m in the restaurant by myself. Here comes the waiter. Now is the time to pay attention. What I say next will determine what I will drink with my dinner. If I say “gin,” the waiter will bring it. I will drink it. I’ll get loose and get busy and get dope and I’ll be fucked. So I pay attention. When the waiter asks the question, I say, “sparkling water.” Then I relax, life goes into soft focus again, with bubbles.

Another example. I’m in the bathroom at a friend’s. There’s the medicine cabinet. This is not the time when I relax. This is not soft-focus time. This is the time when I concentrate, focus, and don’t open the medicine cabinet door. The door doesn’t open. I don’t know what pills are in there. When I leave the bathroom I’m sober.

This wasn’t the way it used to work. Every addict knows how dope just gets in you. Dope just arranges things so that your actions are like a ball rolling down a hill, and at the bottom of the hill you’re high. But there’s a trick. There’s a secret. It seems that dope comes from everywhere and goes anywhere, that it’s omnipresent, omnipotent, a white god. But it doesn’t and it isn’t. It just seems that way. It’s like when you wake up and your room is full of music. It seems like it’s coming from everywhere. Then you realize your window is open. When you shut it the music stops. It’s like that with dope. It only seems to be everywhere. In reality, it hides in certain places, certain spots, and if you know where those spots are, you can shut the window before it gets in you.

One place dope hides is in the moment when the dope-boy asks you for your money. Another place it hides is in the turn that goes to the dope spot. Another place it hides is in Funboy. If you’re alert, and you know about the places in the world where dope hides, you can stay not getting high. The trick has two parts. The first part is to be alert when you’re passing the place where the dope is hiding. The second part is to not snatch the dope out of that place and do it. This two-part trick is called a “choice.”

“If you don’t pick it up, it won’t get in you.” That was the invention of choice for me. My life wasn’t like a ball rolling down the hill into the dope-hole anymore. I don’t want to overemphasize the power of choice. It didn’t exactly turn my life into an airplane either. It was more like a hollow ball with a little hole in it for a window and a tiny mouse inside. By leaning hard one way, the mouse can alter the direction of the roll. It’s a very sleepy mouse, and it can’t pay attention all the time. But it can learn to recognize a couple simple signs and when it sees them, to sit up and pay attention.

I don’t want you to misunderstand me. The mouse isn’t exactly Einstein. This is where Ryan and I parted ways. For example, one day I picked up a popular music magazine that featured a glowing review of a new CD by the guy Eva had been living with in New York since we broke up. I slowly ate my heart out as I read it. Where was the choice here? The mouse woke up and started leaning and leaning and then he fell asleep. I said nothing to anyone. Here was a whole other world. I didn’t know what to say.

I secretly followed the music charts and was secretly glad when the album flopped. But now I knew. Outside the world where friendly people patted me on my head and said “you didn’t get high” in happy surprised tones and fed me mercury-laced tuna was a world where hot girls kissed guys who rode foreign cars and made complicated choices with their heads while their hands moved faster. I was twenty-six. When you’re twenty-six, you need more than a sense of humor and a choice.

My habit of fantasizing that I was the president when I ran on the treadmill took on a new urgency in the face of these revelations. I was the president. The president! The trance music got louder and I ran faster. Cash called and left a message while I was running. Cat left a message. My one-twentieth-finished dissertation blinked on the monitor in my bedroom. The dayghost rippled on the wall. It was raining outside. It was springtime.

On a chilly spring evening, I stood in front of my parents’ living-room window and pressed my fingers to the glass. The sunset sky reminded me of Morocco. And when the colors hit my eyes they turned into Eva’s smile, her smell, the color of her skin. That spring, everything I’d lost found me. Eva was just one example. A famous writer once asked why, when we fall asleep, do we wake up with our own thoughts, our own memories? Why ours instead of someone else’s? But we do. And I’d been asleep for years.