Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls Read online

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  The disease I have is loving him. They don’t write articles about it or send camera crews to follow us. The disease I have is called codependency, or sometimes enabling, and it isn’t really a disease, though it can feel like one. It’s more like an ill-defined set of tendencies and behaviors, and depending on how badly it’s flaring, it can manifest as a lot of different things—a disorder, a nuisance, an encumbrance, a curse, or sometimes merely a sensibility, a preference, a cast of mind. It can manifest as the gentle tinkling piano notes before Patsy Cline sings that first long, plaintive “craaaaazy.” Crazy for thinking that my love could hold you. One of a hundred anthems that have come to sound vaguely psychotic as I’ve applied them to my own circumstances. So many songs are about men wriggling away from love. This one in particular would make a good codependent cross-stitch: Crazy for trying, and crazy for crying, and crazy for loving you. That would look nice above the mantel. Incidentally, the song “Crazy” was originally written by Willie Nelson for country singer Billy Walker, but Walker turned it down, reportedly calling it a “girl’s song.” According to Nelson’s biographer, Cline “didn’t much cotton to songs that made her sound so wounded.” But the song broke into the Top Ten on the pop charts and became her signature.

  Codependency is a girl’s song. The sounds of the busying and tidying of the quietly controlling. The sniveling and whimpering of the long overlooked, the caterwaul of the brokenhearted. The word has a long and complex history, but it has never been taken particularly seriously. To the extent that it is understood at all, codependency is thought to be the province of crazy girlfriends, overbearing mothers, and pathetic wives. In popular culture, women’s obsessive, controlling, or enabling behaviors are represented as assorted forms of weakness or madness. Sometimes pitiable, sometimes just sad.

  We codependents used to be called “co-alcoholics,” which is kind of funny. It gets at just how much of an accomplice you are: for them to drink like that takes someone like you to make it possible, some gullible idiot idling in the getaway car. Some people think this condition is the same as relationship addiction or love addiction, a debilitating focus on an external source of validation. Some believe that the constellation of behaviors referred to as codependent are maladaptive responses to childhood trauma that may be unrelated to substance abuse. Still others think the very idea of codependency is nonsense and that the kinds of relationships that come to be defined this way needn’t be pathologized, that they’re not that much more messed up than any other relationship. In recent years, attachment theory has come to dominate some corners of the mental health establishment, and an insecure or anxious attachment has become a more popular way to denote these dysfunctional bonds. If the style of attachment you learned in infancy and childhood is insecure, you may forever seek relationships that are laced with fear or shaded by rejection.

  The definitions are varied and sometimes weak, the diagnostic tools shoddy, and the treatments wide-ranging, but this way of being is real. In the 2003 book Love Is a Choice: The Definitive Book on Letting Go of Unhealthy Relationships, Robert Hemfelt, Frank Minirth, and Paul Meier write that codependency affects roughly four people for every one alcoholic. And current estimates of the number of alcoholics in the United States are shockingly high. A 2017 paper published in JAMA Psychiatry found that one in eight American adults suffer from alcoholism. Considering challenges in accurate reporting and the sharply rising number of drug addicts in this country, that number of sufferers from addiction in general is conservative. Hemfelt, Minirth, and Meier—all doctors who treat codependency—are not alone in arguing that “we are embattled by an epidemic of staggering degree. The unhappiness, despair, and wasted life lie beyond comprehension.”

  But if codependency is a condition that produces widespread despair, if it’s responsible for an “epidemic of…wasted life,” why don’t we know more about it? Alcoholism and its treatment entered popular consciousness long ago, and though arguably still stigmatized and misunderstood, the disease has become ever-more medicalized and normalized in our culture. Co-alcoholism, or codependency, was defined alongside alcoholism, but continues to be seen as a set of desperate behaviors practiced by sad women. The term enjoyed a moment of widespread exposure in the late 1980s and early ’90s, as the Twelve Step recovery movement ballooned, but it has since been largely sidelined and sometimes ridiculed. Even as alcoholism treatment emphasizes that addiction is a “family disease,” the codependent struggle—so often a woman’s struggle—is marginalized.

  In movies, TV shows, and magazine articles about addiction, the family is usually present, but on the sidelines or in the shadows, their anguish an unfortunate effect of the disease, not a contributing factor, a puzzle to be worked on, or a condition unto itself. We are inclined to think that family members are not, after all, the principal characters in the drama, just its supporting cast. But living alongside addiction is a distinctly bewildering experience. It is grueling, depressing, infuriating, and often terrifying. Perversely, it is not without its perks—for many, there is some kind of emotional payoff involved. Living in proximity to addiction enables codependents to feel righteous and smug, or victimized and manipulated. This illness gives our lives their texture, in some cases their purpose.

  I’ve come to see that the tale of the lonely alcoholic, the lonely junkie—peddled largely in the literary accounts of male addicts, from Thomas De Quincey to Alexander Trocchi to John Cheever, and cemented in film representations of tortured, scruffy souls—entails an act of obfuscation. Of course, we know that a profound solitude attends the machinations of the addict. Being in the throes of the disease entails a miserable, yawning existential aloneness, a confrontation with one’s weakness and powerlessness that has proven rich fodder for artistic expression. But addiction is also necessarily a relational condition. In all but the most abject circumstances, someone, somewhere, is making the money, covering for the addict, cleaning up the mess. Someone is sitting by the window, waiting. Someone is believing, hoping that today might be different.

  The mythic male genius artist was long thought to be divinely inspired to create masterpieces in isolation. Except that was never the complete picture. We have by now come to understand the ways that story conveniently conceals the labor of wives, apprentices, and assistants, as well as all of the structural forces and institutional particularities that elevate certain work and idolize certain individuals. Often, at the center of addiction narratives, we find a sole individual: the addict, on a lonely hero’s journey toward salvation or else free-falling toward death. But why should he be seen in isolation? Why do we not as a matter of course acknowledge that behind every junkie is a veritable symphony of hidden energies? And why shouldn’t we care about those?

  This book arose from a desire to interrogate the ideas that underpin codependency and reinvigorate a conversation around what it means to love those who are dependent on substances. I wanted to write about the ways that living around addiction habituates us to chaos and fear, invites us to dwell in perpetual victimhood, and drives our decision-making in self-destructive directions. I wanted to better understand how this problem was articulated in the first place, by whom and for whom. In the days before they could own property, hold paying jobs, or vote, women were arguably the people most severely impacted by alcoholism. Was codependency a schematic they designed themselves in order to describe their own reality? Or, as with so many conditions specific to women, was it identified and elaborated by a mostly male psychological establishment? Does it really exist? Can it really be treated? Ameliorated? Cured? Should it? Is there something liberating about choosing to apply this lens to our lives, or are we simply reproducing tired ideas about gender, family, relatedness, and love, not to mention addiction?

  This book is not just about my life. It’s also the story of nineteenth-century American women who for so long felt helpless watching men in the
ir lives succumb to alcoholism, and who eventually fought to ban alcohol entirely. It’s about the women who, after their husbands found their way to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in the early twentieth century, discovered they had a great deal in common and formed the coffee klatch that became Al-Anon. It’s about the men and women who ushered in a boom in self-help literature in the 1980s and ’90s and the ways they broadened existing notions of codependency beyond alcoholism.

  Our views of love and dependency are complex, informed by our family stories and personal experiences, and shaped by the culture we live in. Codependency as it expresses itself in romantic relationships looks a lot like the representations of “true love” we see in literature and film (and that many women like me grow up gorging themselves on). The work of separating the threads of our love relationships, exploring what makes them tick and what makes them toxic, is daunting and also exciting. I wonder what it would look like for us to bear witness differently to the exquisite pain addiction causes in people’s lives and the ways we try to square that pain with love.

  chapter two

  “This is the love our grandparents had,” I once said to K, and it became something like a tagline for our love, a line he repeated to me many times when he admired me in a new dress or sought to soothe me after an argument. I think he repeated it also to remind me not to expect too much from him—ours was not a therapized love, after all, not a gender-neutral love, a love between evolved equals. It was an old-world romance, loud and lively—roaring with violent uncertainty—into which some tears and some lies were bound to fall. Some objects were bound to be hurled across the room. That seemed the price for such gargantuan affection, for the love notes stashed in the books I was reading, the pleasure he took in bringing me flowers and buying me records, in scaring me half to death and ravenously kissing my neck while I stood soaping the dishes. Date nape, we called it.

  “Young girls, they do get weary, wearing that same old shaggy dress,” sang Otis Redding in “Try a Little Tenderness.” “Looo-ooo-ooove is their only happiness.”

  Before K, I’d grown weary in record time, in a marriage that should have, maybe could have, nourished me. My husband and I were wed just a few years earlier under a weak North Bay sun, in a little backyard ceremony at his sister’s house, where the guests had applied fake heart-and-banner tattoos of our names to their biceps and forearms. Our mothers, smiling proudly, posed for a photo together, arm-to-arm, showing off their matching tattoos. I can’t believe I get to marry you, I’d said during my vows, looking up into his big, aqua eyes, gulping forcefully to stop myself from more crying. I was prone not to demure tearfulness but to real sobbing in these moments, the slightly fearful sense of being positively overcome. That evening, a cool breeze blew in. My husband and I fed each other bites of a layered white sheet cake bedecked with fresh flowers and fresh strawberries and cream in the middle. Our son was the size of a strawberry, too, growing there behind my dress and a tacky lace BRIDE thong, my something blue.

  It felt like a beginning as auspicious as any other, but it wasn’t long before I felt emotionally alone, before I was pining for a more desperate variant of love, something a little wilder to make me feel more alive. Not long after K walked back into my life, I detonated my young marriage for a chance to step fully and honestly into a life with him. I had a two-year-old and a two-month-old. I was insane, in other words.

  K was sober at the time, but it didn’t last. He overdosed and died the day we moved in together, into a tiny sublet I’d found, secured, and paid for. He was shooting speedballs with his friend Will, an unrepentant junkie I would come to know well, who had the presence of mind to call 911 (no small or un-risky thing for someone whose whole life is illegal). The EMTs arrived, defibrillated the flatlined K back into being, and delivered him to me, the button electrodes still stuck to his chest with tacky adhesive. The apartment was full of unpacked boxes. That night, we lay in silence in bed. He smoothed the baby’s colorless sprouts of hair as I nursed her.

  Sobriety, it turned out, was not a thing I could expect from him. The things I could expect, however, seemed to be the important things, to me, perhaps sadly, the only things—protection, fun, laughter, extraordinary sex. Drinking Slurpees together in my car on a street corner was pure joy. The once soul-deadening errands that defined my days—food shopping, dry cleaning—were, with him, extravagantly entertaining.

  As if to resist the always-imminent threat of his death, we made a romance from a distant era. He was handsome and I was pretty. I learned his mother’s recipes. We decorated the Christmas tree and changed diapers and threw dinner parties and had date nights and wheeled the trash cans out to the curb on Wednesday nights. We took comfort in the traditions we built or sustained as a bulwark against the chaos we lived with. And for long stretches, we made do—on no money, no sleep, no one’s approval, just love. It existed only for us, this clunky, blind, and stupid love, it was a solar system that held our two planets alone, and gave our lives myth and meaning.

  “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret,” wrote Neruda.

  Anytime we could, we fucked all day, every conceivable permutation of fucking, and then one sweet missionary one, his body covering me completely as though we were brothers in arms and might be lying next to a grenade. In the beginning it was summer, and sex with him was summer sex, powered by the sun, grimy and gruff. We smelled of bicycle chains, something industrial, metallic, and sweet that passed between us as we bit at each other’s lips. Pineapple juice and heroin. I liked it best when he was rough, the look on his face when I was Bambi-eyed and frozen in fear. Be a dear. Be a little deer. Afterward, I slept beneath his muscled arm as though tied down by heavy rope.

  Weeknights I was weak-kneed, tiptoeing over and over again to the freezer in an apricot vintage slip, refreshing the ice in our drinks, pouring just a couple fingers more. We slow-danced in the dark, with the kids sweetly snoring in their beds and the dishwasher sloshing and whirring. The day’s drudgery lightened by lust. Is this not every young mother’s dream?

  Sometimes we got stoned and watched reruns of Chopped, and he made me laugh so hard I peed. It was like getting away with something, laughing like that every day.

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  Fifteen years before his blood was splattered on our bathroom walls, we met on Thanksgiving Day, 1997, at the Tower Records on the corner of Market and Castro Streets in San Francisco, where I was a clerk working the 4:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M. closing shift with a motley crew of disaffected minimum-wage earners. We passed the time pranking one another or using the label maker or bits of foam core from the art department to make funny signs and little art projects. From the masthead of one of the porn magazines we sold in the store, I’d clipped the words Barely Legal and taped them to the yellow plastic name tag I wore around my neck, where my name was supposed to go—a small act of guerrilla crafting that says virtually everything about me as a teenager. I lusted after boys, but more than that I lusted after being lusted after. I applied creamy lipsticks in mauves and wines and brilliant reds, pulled my black hair into a high ponytail, and daily practiced my gait, the sly, steady pendulum of my hips and my heart-shaped ass as I walked upstairs to the count-out room. The name tag was an act of interpolation, a way of insisting I’d be viewed in a particular way by every stranger who walked in. Welcome, I’m fuckable! But it wasn’t all advertisement. “Barely Legal” was also literally true: by Thanksgiving that year, I’d been eighteen for exactly two weeks.

  The days at Tower were punctuated by smoke breaks, when I leaned against the red banister outside the store, sucking down Marlboro Mediums and ashing into a large potted plant. Sometimes I would pad down Market to the bookstore to make eyes at the clerk or to Sweet Nothings for a coffee and a slice of apple cake to be picked apart throughout the remainder of my shift. At work I was gregarious, but once thrust outside alone, I felt shy, uncomforta
ble, and exposed. I felt young. It was cold. In California, I was always freezing. I wore tights and boots and pulled my sweater sleeves down over my hands, tapping at the cash register keys with the exposed tips of my frigid fingers, rocking onto the balls of my feet for the chill and my anxiety. This is how he found me.

  K, with his thick, black, Italian hair slicked into a throwback pompadour with Tres Flores brilliantine, greasy as Vaseline, its cloying petroleum-geranium fragrance trailing him. He came into the store—tall and lean and clean and beautiful, tattooed everywhere with sacred hearts and the lyrics of Smiths songs—and bought an Alice in Chains CD called Dirt. My eyes burned at the sight of him.

  He knew instinctively, by my clothes or my attitude, the special sneer of the record-store employee, that I would disapprove of his selection—I’d made a point of looking like someone who was clearly into deeper cuts. He walked to the register with a defense already prepared. I drove all the way across town so that no one would recognize me buying this, he said, smiling as I rang him up. I smiled, too, and looked at him skeptically.

  I’m on my way out to my mom’s, he continued, and just needed something to listen to on the drive, but now I feel suddenly ashamed.

  You should, I said. That record is terrible. We laughed and I shrugged as if to say I don’t make the rules.

  K pulled his wallet from his pocket and I completed the transaction nervously, under the hot spotlight of fresh desire. I knew for certain he could see me squirm. The CD and receipt I put inside the little yellow plastic bag and thrust it out to him, my eyebrows raised in anticipated parting.