White Out (35 page)

I went back to court sometime in July and they had the papers verifying that I’d completed all the conditions for first-time drug offenders to get the felony expunged. They said I could legally say on job forms that I had never been convicted of a felony. What did I care, the last thing I wanted was a fucking job, I told Cash. Yeah but you can get a gun, he said. For the diarrhea. When the really bad diarrhea comes, a gun is the only toilet paper that works.

One day, just before it was time for me to go back to Baltimore and grad school, Cash and I decided to drive through the suburbs where we’d grown up. It was forty minutes by car from Cash’s apartment in the city. North of Chicago. West of the fashionable North Shore. East of the cornfields. South of the dead shapes of Kenosha. In the center of our first maps. Libertyville, Wauconda, Lake Zurich, Mundelein.

First we drove around the edges. The high school we’d gone to. The long straight roads where we had invented or discovered the idea of being high. The little stores with flat roofs that sold bottles of Coca-Cola.

Then we drove through the heart. In three slashes. The house off Route 12. The house off Route 176. And the forest preserve. And that was it. We left it there, bloodless, with nothing coming out of the holes we’d driven through it, and we left it lying there.

Maybe it wasn’t a heart but an old, sprung trap. There’s no way to pry it back open. The iron teeth, rusted with old blood, locked in a dead smile, harmless forever.

I
’ve been clean for over a decade. The habits I formed in early recovery are like a machine. The machine’s still running. I meditate, go to NA meetings, don’t pick it up so it won’t get in me, exercise. At night I make a list of stuff I have to do tomorrow. I don’t think about the future.

Thanks to the machine, I’ve arrived at a good future without having to think about it. I live in a nice house in a nice suburb with my wife. My academic career has gone pretty well. I finished my dissertation in 2006, managed to get some good jobs in a famously crappy academic job market. Moved from Michigan to Florida. Now I’m at a great university in Ohio. I’ve published a couple academic books that have been well received. We have two nice dogs.

The machine’s still running. It’s no jet engine, but it works. The recovery engine: a makeshift contraption of group love, meditation, and common sense. Lashed together and set going. It works. From the outside it might look a little rusty, but once you strap your life to it, it’ll pull you out of death and into good futures.

The problem is that not every addict can strap their life to it.

At first it seemed like every month I’d hear about another one of my old friends dying or getting locked up. Now most of them are gone. But I still get messages from the world of terminal addiction. I just heard Cash went away on a weapons charge. Last year a guy I used to go to NA meetings with committed suicide. The year before that a girl I knew in college overdosed. It’s not unusual. The statistics are murky, but it’s clear that many addicts never experience sustained recovery. The recovery machine works. But for one reason or another, many addicts can’t seem to hook themselves up to it. It’s easy to blame those who can’t. To say that Cash, for example, is just too pigheaded. Or allergic to things spiritual. Or weak. Or lazy. But the truth is he isn’t any of those things. At least not any more than I was. The truth is that no one really knows why our makeshift recovery machine works for some and doesn’t work for others.

One day there will probably be a cure. We’re still in the early days of addiction science. One day people might look back at us and wonder what the hell we were doing with our meetings and slogans. One day there could be a treatment that works not just for 10 percent of addicts or for 50 percent, but for everyone.

Maybe they’ll even have a vaccine, like for polio. Maybe they’ll be able to tell if you’ve got the gene that makes you susceptible to the lure of that never-fading first time. And if you do, they’ll give you a nice shot of permanent forgetfulness when you’re a baby. People of the future will never have to hit bottom. They’ll never have to kick in jail. Never have to lose their friends, their minds, their lives.

I hope we find a truly effective treatment soon. Thousands of smart people around the world are working on it. Dozens of research institutions, treatment facilities, government agencies. Progress comes slowly, incrementally. But there are hopeful signs.

In the meantime, we work with what we have. And I’m profoundly grateful for it. My daily life is good. I’m totally hooked into the recovery program. Most days I don’t dwell on the problem. But when a kid I’m sponsoring relapses, when my niece just can’t get clean, when I think about the faces that show up once to an NA meeting and never again, then I know that the cure that will replace our creaky recovery machine can’t come soon enough.

But I have to admit there’s something about the machine, something about the disease itself that I’ll miss.

The addicts of the future, the addicts who have immediate 100 percent effective treatment, will be better off than we are. There’s no doubt about it. But won’t they lose something too? Along with all the gains, won’t humanity lose something when the disease is eradicated? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a sadist. Of course I want a cure. But when they empty out the bathwater of addiction and recovery, there might be a little bit of baby that goes out too.

There’s a story by Franz Kafka that captures what I’m trying to say. The story’s about a prison. In the prison, they have a very old machine. It’s a baroque, makeshift affair of needles, knives, and wires. When a convict is sentenced to death, they strap him to it. The machine very slowly carves the convict’s sentence into his skin. It takes hours. It’s agonizing. But at the very end, just before he dies, a look of total comprehension, total ecstasy, flashes across his face. To the prison guards, it looks as if the dying convict has been granted a glimpse of Eternal Truth.

The prison is in a distant, backward part of the country. One day an official arrives from the capital. He’s educated in modern theories, a believer in scientific methods of rehabilitation. He’s absolutely disgusted by the torture machine. It’s barbaric! Inhumane! He orders it dismantled immediately. And of course, reading the story, we want the machine dismantled too. We’re not sadists. Get rid of that medieval torture device!

But still, that look on the dying convict’s face…

Perhaps one day, the book you’ve just read will tell the same kind of story as Kafka’s tale. Addiction and recovery. A process where you have to hit a total bottom until you become willing to accept a spiritual therapy that works for only a fraction of us. In the future this might look like Kafka’s machine: baroque, superstitious, makeshift, even barbaric. Right now this recovery machine is all we have—and it works. It saved my life. It saves lives every day. And it gave me something else. Like Kafka’s convict, once my sentence had been carved into me, I received a glimpse of eternity.

But still we must hope that someday there will be a more effective, more efficient cure for addiction. The misery of the descent into addictive hell will be history. The slow, painstaking, creaky trip back up on the makeshift engine of recovery, that’ll be history too. Tens of millions of lives will be saved. Billions of dollars.

And that glimpse of timelessness, that little chip of immortality that lies at the center of the disease and recovery—the endlessness of my first time, the endlessness I discovered meditating in my parents’ basement—that’ll be history too.

Something in a book. Something to wonder about.

M
ichael W. Clune is an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University and is the author of scholarly books on literature and science published by Cambridge University Press and Stanford University Press.

Hazelden
, a national nonprofit organization founded in 1949, helps people reclaim their lives from the disease of addiction. Built on decades of knowledge and experience, Hazelden offers a comprehensive approach to addiction that addresses the full range of patient, family, and professional needs, including treatment and continuing care for youth and adults, research, higher learning, public education and advocacy, and publishing.

A life of recovery is lived “one day at a time.” Hazelden publications, both educational and inspirational, support and strengthen lifelong recovery. In 1954, Hazelden published
Twenty-Four Hours a Day
, the first daily meditation book for recovering alcoholics, and Hazelden continues to publish works to inspire and guide individuals in treatment and recovery, and their loved ones. Professionals who work to prevent and treat addiction also turn to Hazelden for evidence-based curricula, informational materials, and videos for use in schools, treatment programs, and correctional programs.

Through published works, Hazelden extends the reach of hope, encouragement, help, and support to individuals, families, and communities affected by addiction and related issues.

For questions about Hazelden publications, please call
800-328-9000
or visit us online at
hazelden.org/bookstore
.