Bottom

Photo Credit: MorgueFile by biberta

Today's post is a response to the GBE2 prompt: Bottom. 

What follows is an abridged and modified version of a working rough draft from my memoir. I left the ending out. You'll have to stick with me and read The Tidal Zone when I'm done with it if you want to know if I lived. (I wonder if this blog post is a spoiler...)

At seventeen, I was a drug addict. I had spent my high school years in the way every parent fears, among dangerous boys, in dark and dirty spaces, doing nasty things. I was always chased by monsters. My acid trips went bad. Pot made me nauseated and my skin crawled. Drinking ended inevitably with vomiting and humiliation. Nothing I used would work for me anymore. I could go deeper in–to heroin, to cocaine, to meth–or I could stop. Exhausted and afraid, I stopped, giving up all my drugs without fully knowing what I was doing. My arms full of chemicals, I dropped everything at once and watched dumbly as it all clattered to the floor.

I wasn't really sober. I was drunk on my new control. The next nine months of my life were spent in directing all the destructive power that had been my drug addiction inward instead of out. Having passed my high school equivalency exam, I went to community college, volunteered at a local detox center for psych credit and developed bulimia. I had a 4.0 average, I was clean now, and, finally, I was thin. 

My parents and friends complimented my appearance and apparent success. I kept a scale in my bathroom and had a chart taped to my wall. I would weigh myself once, twice, three times a day and chart the results. I ate and digested enough to assume that some nutrients had been absorbed, then brought everything else up. The second full semester of college I ran into problems when I could no longer get dressed in the morning. Upon choosing an outfit, I would invariably find that it made me look fat. I would change, change again, change again. Finally, admitting I had missed the last bus, I would tearfully give up and settle in for the day. On one occasion, I can recall watching Montel Williams with a panel discussing eating disorders. I nodded my head vehemently, recognizing the insanity and the societal pressure that drove it. At the commercial break, I vomited up my lunch.

With several months of sobriety under my belt, it had never occurred to me to go to twelve-step meetings. I rationalized that, since I had decided I believed in the Goddess rather than a male patriarchal god, I could find no home there. I justified that my own process would be private, inward, empowering. At the detox center, I met people who were sober, all of them members of AA or NA and became curious. An older counselor one day sat me down with the local paper to show me a section called “You are Not Alone,” which listed every type of twelve step and support group in the county. Apparently, I was fooling only those who didn’t know what to look for. To her mind, I was visibly unraveling–a tightly woven fabric run through with fear, brittle and weak.

At detox, I met a man who had bitten his tongue in half during DT's. Another man had eyes yellowed with jaundice from his alcohol-soaked liver. Most striking, a young woman arrived, coming off of heroin, whose face was picked and scabbed from a night on meth. After several hours, she left abruptly, announcing her intention to return to the San Francisco Tenderloin and score within the hour. The men informed me gravely that she had been as beautiful as I was only months before and was hardly any older. Again and again, the same men and women appeared. The same movies played. The Lost Weekend. Less Than Zero. Clean and Sober. Despair and redemption. Vomit and whiskey and hope. I cleaned bathrooms, talked to clients, folded towels. The kitchen was covered with greasy scum to which I applied bleach and a scrub brush.

I met a man there, also a volunteer. He was twenty-nine and three months clean, and I was still seventeen. He became my boyfriend. Like all adult addicts, he was a child, but to me he seemed clever and wise. At first, I hid my problem from him. Then, as we sat in a hot tub one night talking about various things and the conversation somehow led to weight, I said to him,

“I would rather be dead than fat.”

“I know,” he acknowledged simply. 

Within days, I found myself telling him the truth and he was unsurprised. With his support, I was determined to stop. The weekend of my eighteenth birthday, he took me camping. I had to get away. The significance of the age of eighteen threatened to pummel me. Adulthood. We camped near the ocean in Sonoma County by the rugged coastline, a gorgeous and private landscape hewn out of granite, sea foam and cypress. Once there, though, I could not stay awake. I was freezing. I spent hours lying in the tent, clawing at consciousness, attempting to get a hold to no avail. After we ate dinner, I found myself vomiting in secret in an outhouse. And then again after our breakfast. 

I had tried to stop and I couldn’t. I seemed strangely to have no say in the matter of my own actions. We walked out onto the beach to find a seal that had been shot and was slowly dying. Its sad eyes were trained on us, driving beams of fear into my marrow. I felt helpless in this and in everything.

Returning home from our trip, I shortly learned that my thyroid had almost completely failed and that I would need medication for the rest of my life. I visited an anorexia and bulimia support group, at which all of the attendees looked like faint vestiges of humans. They were accompanied by parents who clung desperately to hope and to the bodies of these children who would pay for beauty with life. I could easily have imagined them all dead within the year. Coming home, my boyfriend ordered us a pizza with extra cheese and I became hysterical. I had put together 20 days and then blew it. 

I had finally reached the end.