I volunteer to stay for an extra week — partly because I want to demonstrate to Noah and Kate that I have taken this seriously, but mostly because by the fourth week I am deeply enmeshed in the community of patients and counselors. I am not in a hurry to leave this process of letting go of the many secrets that I had spent a lifetime squirreling away, hanging on to, buckling under the weight of.
In a group discussion one morning I talk, for the first time since the sessions with Dr. Dave, about my struggle with peeing. After the group, another guy, a banker from San Francisco with four kids, tells me that he wrestled with the same problem as a boy. Two days before I go home, he will sneak off the rehab property, relapse on tequila in a strip club down the road, and be asked to leave.
When I return to New York, my mother calls and wants to see me. I put off getting together for nearly a month and eventually agree to have lunch. On that day she is an hour and a half late. She finally shows up and as we order food, she describes the generations of alcoholism and drug addiction in her family and my father’s, and tells me I’m one in a long line. Despite my initial agitation with her for being late, I am surprisingly relaxed with her and feel a little of our old ease return. I ask if I can bring up something from childhood, something that I hadn’t talked to anyone in the family about but that I’ve remembered only recently. She says yes and before I get the word peeing out of my mouth, she holds her hand up above the table and shakes her head. I say a few more words, but she is now crying, asking me if I’ve agreed to have lunch only to tell her what a terrible mother she is. Stunned by her sudden outburst, I say that I only need her to tell me if she remembers anything, to confirm that it happened, because all I have are a pile of chaotic memories shaken to life by a shrink. Through tears she says something that sounds like I’m not going to talk about that, your father was the one… The last thing I remember is her asking me if I knew how hard it was for her then, what a nightmare those years were for her. I say yes, that she’s been very good at letting us know how hard it was for her, and she leaves the restaurant. I follow her out to the street as she disappears into a cab without a word. I return to the restaurant, settle the bill, and by the time I make my way three blocks north to my office, I lose my wallet, my keys, and my sunglasses.
I start an outpatient program that I never finish, follow the suggestions to stay sober that I was given at rehab and then don’t, talk on the phone a few times to my roommate and some of the other guys — the ones who just weeks before felt like family — and then, within the first month at home, lose touch with them all.
I think I have it licked. I throw myself into my job, the agency, the writers I represent, and the storm of work seems like something that I can hide in, that will protect me from temptation. I watch people drink at dinners and parties and, at first, am relieved I don’t have to anymore. As months pass, though, I grow resentful. Little fantasies of getting high will start to appear like thought bubbles in cartoons, when I am alone, mainly, and at the end of long workdays, days when I have had little sleep the night before or missed lunch and am light-headed with hunger. In October I find an old crack pipe stuffed in the pocket of a blazer hanging in our bedroom closet. I hide it in various places and circle the thing like a hawk for weeks until I finally scrape it clean of its old residue and take a hit. I feel only the faintest gust of a high, which quickly dies with the panic that I’ve relapsed. It’s over just as it starts, and Noah walks in right after it happens and agrees to tell no one. I hide the stem, bring it to my office, and somehow misplace it. I worry for weeks that someone there — my assistant, Kate, the cleaning woman — has found it and is waiting to confront me. No one ever does.
And then, seven months later, just before going to Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival, I have a plan to meet Noah for a sushi dinner at Japonica. On the morning of the day before that dinner, the thought of getting high bubbles up, but instead of flicking it away as I usually do, this time I don’t and it lingers. And it lingers long enough for me to ask: Why not? Noah is leaving tomorrow and I’ll have almost two full days in the city alone. I’ve been working hard, everything is going well, no one will suspect a thing. Within seconds I’m on my cell phone, calling Stephen for the first time in almost a year. We’d stopped using him to bartend our parties, but despite being advised at rehab to erase all drug-related numbers from my cell phone, I still have his. He picks up on the first ring and we make a plan to meet later, on the corner outside my office building. At six I go downstairs and see him leaning against the building. He’s skinnier than I remembered, older. I barely say hello, though he seems eager to hang out. I give him $400 to score and $200 for doing the dirty work and agree to meet him the next day. As much as I don’t want to reconnect with Stephen, scoring through him somehow feels less wrong. As long as I don’t start up with the dealers again, I reason, if I don’t remember their numbers, this tiny treat will be just a one-time-only thing, an anomaly, a harmless but needed vacation.
I meet Stephen on the same corner the next day, tingling with anticipation. This time he’s all business. He hands me a small brown paper bag filled with drugs and stems. I thank him and hurry away, back to my office.
I plan to smoke the bags the next night, after Noah leaves, a day and a half before I join him in Utah for the premiere of his movie. This can work, I think, this will be just a little release, a little nothing, a harmless blowing off of steam. In the swarm of faulty reasoning I still know this will end badly, that it always does, and that I’m loading a gun and pointing it at my temple. But that voice, instead of being a deterrent, becomes part of the persuasion. On the other side of this bag is either a groggy day and a no-harm-done return to life or some kind of apocalypse. Lose nothing or lose everything. And losing everything sounds like a relief.
I return to the office and make some phone calls, say good-bye to my colleagues as they leave, and see that I have two hours before I’m to meet Noah for dinner. Two hours. Just one hit now would wear off before then. Why not? I get up from my desk and lock the office door. I find a lighter in my assistant’s desk drawer, sit down at my desk, take the drugs from my jacket pocket, and hold the two little baggies in my hand. I pull out the clean, clear stem — so much lighter than I remembered. It feels like a dream as I split off a little creamy chunk of crack and load it into the end of the stem. It doesn’t seem as if it’s actually happening when I spark the lighter and move the flame toward the pipe. It doesn’t feel the least bit wrong in those first seconds after exhaling the familiar smoke, no more than a reunion with an old friend, a returning to the most incredible conversation I’ve ever had, one that got interrupted seven months ago and, now that it’s started up again, hasn’t skipped a beat. But it’s more than just a conversation, it’s the best sex, the most delicious meal, the most engrossing book — it’s like returning to all of these at once, coming home, and the primary feeling I have as I collapse back into my desk chair and watch the smoke roll through my office is: Why on earth did I ever leave?
I sit at my desk for three hours, smoking down one of the bags, and finally race out, suddenly panicked, to Japonica, to Noah, whom I was supposed to meet an hour ago. I run into the restaurant and see him sitting at a table, his back to the wall, clearly worried, and when he sees me, he goes white and begins weeping. I remember his weeping. I lie to him and say I got caught on a phone call at work, that I didn’t hear him ringing my cell or the landline at the office, and that it’s all okay, don’t worry, stop crying. He sleeps on the couch that night and leaves quietly in the morning, asking only one thing: Will I make it to Sundance? And I say, yes, yes, of course. I promise.