Our plane landed, but we were not ready to part. It was his first day in New York, and it was only 11 am, which meant we had time to spray paint the town before we parted. I paid for the cab ride to the Ace Hotel in Midtown, a place where musicians and writers often stayed, and I treated him to lunch at the restaurant, full of downtown charm and bustle. “You are giving me one hell of a story,” he said, and I smiled, because he was doing the same for me.
We sat on the couch in the lobby, my legs on his lap. We were surrounded by strangers typing on their laptops, headphones on. Did they notice us? What did they see? He fiddled with my hair, which fell across my brow. He traced his fingers around mine as my hand rested on his knee. Have you ever noticed how astonishing it can be, holding hands with a person? Such an everyday thing, such a nothing gesture. But two hands, barely touching each other. It can feel like flying.
He kissed me then. Right in front of all those people. I didn’t care. They were too busy with Twitter and Facebook to pay attention. “I want to put down my credit card and take you upstairs right now,” he said. I smiled, and ran my fingers over his sweet face, that face that had taken him so far in the world, and I said, “Not this time.”
His body fell back in the couch. “So that’s it? You’re going to leave now?”
I smiled. That’s right. I was going to leave now. But I gave him my number, and I told him to text me if he ever needed me, and I walked out to the bustling sidewalk feeling so light.
It’s a fine day when you finally figure out the right time to leave the party.
ELEVEN
POWER BALLAD
People who quit drinking become terrified they will lose their power. They believe booze makes them the people they want to be. A better mother. A better lover. A better friend. Alcohol is one hell of a pitchman, and perhaps his greatest lie is convincing us we need him, even as he tears us apart.
I needed alcohol to write. At least, that’s what I believed. I had no idea how people wrote without alcohol, which is a bit like wondering how people construct buildings without alcohol or assemble watches without alcohol. I’m sure it happens all the time, but I’d never done it.
Years ago, when I worked at the Dallas paper, I used to sit at the bar with the other writers, and we’d elbow each other out of the way to reach the punch lines. Writers are often insecure by nature, but in those hours I felt indomitable. We could disagree about music, politics, the use of the serial comma, but we never disagreed about drinking.
Writers drink. It’s what we do. The idea made me feel special, as though I got a pass on certain behaviors, as though self-destruction were my birthright. The bar also made me feel like real work was getting done, even if the real work turned out to be arguing the merits of Saved by the Bell.
I liked talking about writing much more than actually writing, which is an unspeakably boring and laborious activity, like moving a pile of bricks from one side of the room to the other. Talking about writing was exciting. It was all possibility. Let’s talk about the story at the bar! Kick it around over a few drinks, brainstorm that bad boy. And in those sinking moments when I realized two hours had passed, and no one had brought up the story we were supposed to fix, I had the perfect antidote in front of me. Another glass of guilt-be-gone.
But booze wasn’t merely a collective procrastination tool. It was the tool I took home with me when I needed to sit by myself and get the words out onto the page. Writing is a lonely profession. Nobody wants to walk in darkness alone.
Alcohol was an emancipator of creativity. It silenced my inner critic. It made me bigger and smaller, and my writing required both delusions: to believe everyone would read my work, and to believe no one would. I even loved writing hungover, when I was too exhausted to argue with myself, allowing words to tumble onto the page.
If I ever grew anxious about the empty bottles my work required, I could wrap myself in an enabling legend. Writers drink. It’s what we do. As long as the work gets done, you can coast on these words for a very long time.
But the dynamic pivoted for me. The drain and the time suck of my habits became too much to tolerate. I was no longer a writer with a drinking problem. I became, as Irish author Brendan Behan once said, “a drinker with a writing problem.” Something had to go, and given how conjoined my writing and drinking were, I figured it had to be both.
Well, actually, I did have a history of writing without alcohol. It was called childhood. Kids are wizards of imagination, and I was one of those youngsters scribbling all day long. Children are not hobbled by an awareness of others or the fear of people’s judgment. Children don’t have to face professional failure, public disinterest, the criticism of colleagues, lacerating Twitter commentary, the scorn of strangers. They skip through a grassy meadow where every picture they paint is important, every story worth telling, whereas today’s online writer traverses an enemy territory where any random dude with a Tumblr account can take you down.