It openly showed couples shooting heroin into each other’s arms, and it all took place by my mother’s apartment, downtown. My mother was no longer shooting heroin at this point - she’d moved on to doctors - and in a way it felt like an insight into my past. I think I’d tried to avoid some of my reality, then, on purpose, but this felt like something I shouldn’t be watching, and yet I did. Eventually it felt like something I shouldn’t be doing, so I remembered this feeling, and having somebody willing to do it with me – or even worse, agree with me – always made my life more complicated. It did these couples, too, and yet they needed it. To be understood, when you’re in it, means everything. They needed each other just like they needed drugs.

Tatum had moved away to California for a year when I was in high school - I don’t think it was a good one - but she moved back for a time before I went to college. We went to visit, once, during that year where she gave up custody, and she picked up my brother and me from the airport in a van with a guy with long red hair and they mostly listened to rap music as we drove. They brought me to her home in Venice - a small apartment, near the beach - and she looked too skinny. She told me she would give me one hundred dollars if I learned to rap an entire song.

I found out afterward that he was her drug dealer.

I was happy she moved back when she did because she seemed happy. New York Tatum was my favorite version of her. One night, late - I used to like to stay up late - I watched the junkie couples on HBO using around the city, and I couldn’t turn it off, even though, while doing so, I felt sickly. This is when I first started drinking, so I would buy a six-pack and leave it in my backpack and if I drank one, I’d put the empty back with the rest. I think I was trying to respect my mom’s sobriety - or wish it for her - but maybe I just didn’t want her to know. I think the sooner people found out, the sooner they’d try and change me. I think I was worried they were right, and I was like her. But I know I liked a beer in the bath.

I’ve never had the easiest time relaxing.

The couples got high and they were happy and they fought when they didn’t. They spent much of the movie asleep or looking for money, but the moments of tenderness, when they’d both hit it right, looked very beautiful. They felt the same way at the same time and that made them feel in love. They used in corridors on the Bowery and in the bathroom in Starbucks at Astor Place. I walked by that Starbucks almost weekly on my way to the movies. I eventually spent a lot of time on the Bowery, too. I couldn’t believe how close this was happening to me, and I never forgot it. People could be shooting up around the corner and if you didn’t bump into them you’d never know. I thought it was just because of the proximity that I remembered, but perhaps the story, or the temperament, struck a chord.

It felt homey.

When my parents divorced, my mother’s new, young boyfriend, Oliver, was who introduced her to heroin. I know now he was twenty-one, but even then I thought he was too young for her. They lasted a few years, I think, but her relationship with drugs continued. I remember they wrote poetry together, or they slept. I always thought it started there, but I was mistaken. I learned recently my parents had me to try to get her off cocaine.

My mom spent many years on and off drugs, but she’s never, since, had much of a relationship. With heroin, and then with doctors, and I guess, sadly, with me, but never another partner. She had spells - Rosie O’Donnell comes to mind - but she couldn’t keep a lot of people close to her because to be disagreed with would feel judgmental, and if you knew what was in her purse it was hard to not get frustrated. When you’re in it, you lose people because you have to prioritize the substance, and often you do so until it kills you. The only thing worse than losing people is if someone actually wants in.

My mom used to FedEx me Suboxone in an attempt to get me off drugs. My mom told me to keep cocaine around for if I used too much so that my heart wouldn’t stop. My mom used to remind me it was okay, and it was going to be okay, when I was on the road to liver failure. My mom used to tell me things that made me feel better, because that’s what she wanted to hear, too. My mom loves her children more than anything in the world and she did her best to raise them in the way she wished she were treated. The problem is she doesn’t like when you say no to her, and she’s an addict, so she never said no to me, unless she thought I was prying. No feels like a consequence - like you fucked up - and if we’re ever going to stop we have to feel that. It isn’t okay, ma. It can’t be okay, but that’s okay. You have to be ready - you have to be broken - to hear no.

But that’s not her role in my life. Her role is to love me, and get better. My role is exactly the same.

I don’t particularly care anymore whether you’re born with it or you find it, she’s been going for fifty years, maybe more, and it’s shaped us. If I don’t get her another box of Tic Tacs, or yerba mate, I’m going to die is how she feels, and I don’t wanna kill her. I don’t want to hurt anyone, ever, because I’ve done my share. When I got sober I felt like I was abandoning her because I didn’t think she could do it. In retrospect, it doesn’t surprise me that she overdosed around my ninety days.

I was with a girl after my first rehab and I thought we could stop together. I didn’t think I could do it on my own, or maybe I didn’t want to, and for a while she tried. But she called me one night and she said she’d had champagne and I was heartbroken. When I left treatment I drank again and I felt justified. This time she wasn’t certain and I convinced her that it would be fine, and it wasn’t much of an argument. I felt very lucky, then, that she understood me and how hard this was - is - and I’m also certain that without her I wouldn’t be alive, but she was too much like me to know any better.

We both needed outside eyes.

My wife told me the other day that Hayden Panettiere gave up custody of her child rather than fight for it, which made me think to write this. In doing research, and in particular seeing anything that has to do with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, who seems like a delight, it’s easy to think that perhaps she did the right thing. If she didn’t think she could get better, it’s not hard to find someone to get worse with, especially when you have means. It’s just an accelerant, like adding a new drug.

It’s just another hustle.

The thing that’s hard, though, having been Hayden Panettiere’s child, is that having a kid around might’ve made her think using wasn’t okay - might’ve even given her a reason - even though choosing her boyfriend probably felt better. Guilt is very useful, when appropriate. It’s hard to believe my mother would be alive if she’d surrendered us, then. I shouldn’t do that - it’s wrong - saved her life.

Or perhaps you just can’t kill her, because it also didn’t stop her. Instead, she did her best to show up to get us, and then we were around someone using drugs. I used to feel like we weren’t a good enough reason to stop for. Now I know, ‘cause I’ve been there, that she had no choice.

However, a reason - a consequence - gives you a chance that avoiding conflict, and resigning to that life, doesn’t. I have to show up for my ma - she’s had a stroke - and that certainly saved me.

I’ve got a reason and she does, too.

The issue with children is that giving them up might help them, but I don’t know. Now Hayden’s daughter just has a dead mom, and it would be hard to argue that’s better. In that way, and because it’s my family story, I respect those of us who fight, even if we often stumble, and I know that tripping hurts our kids, and everyone else around us. We torture the people we love the most. I once apologized to my little sister, saying I thought she was better off without me, and she replied we were.

While I thought it was callous in the moment, she was entirely right. Showing up late, and high, to her graduation, or sweating through her birthdays, or just being miserable somewhere celebratory isn’t gonna help her; it just makes it about me. And the scary thing is I felt like I should get a pat on the back for making the trip.

But we need to feel that to get out of this. We need to feel guilty that we did something wrong. We need to be surrounded by those who challenge us - who love us - and learn from them. But also I don’t know.

I don’t know is very important to me, because I remember what it feels like to be right, but one thing I’m certain is that I’m grateful my wife doesn’t have to understand. She’s different, and that’s better. She has absolutely no problem saying no.

No, thank you, my love. One is plenty.

I’m just guessing here, or perhaps I’m speaking from my own experience, but it’s hard to get sober with someone you used to drink and get high with - for me it might’ve been impossible - and I only say that because I tried. I didn’t think I could do it without her, but my thoughts - my way - again proved the problem. I didn’t need support, or at least anything that felt supportive. I instead needed love, and consequences.

If you keep looking for support, and people who agree with you, you’ll eventually run out of people. Then you just move farther and farther away.

Sometimes to love somebody is to tell them I don’t think that’s the right thing for you, sweetheart, and let them.

If you keep doing that I have to go.

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I love ya!

K

Jack took his mother’s Subaru after he left treatment. He took the bus down to her house to pick it up. She didn’t need it anymore. He didn’t have a license – it had expired, during heroin – and he wasn’t insured, and it wasn’t his. But he had it – her car – so he drove it. It was quickly covered in seltzer cans, and cigarette butts. Vape juice and spilled Starbucks. The sweat smell that only comes from gripping the wheel too tight. A grip of deep resistance.

When surrender makes you soft.

At first it smelled like Mom - lavender and vanilla. Bergamot and silk - but eventually it was Jack’s. He drove it to the ground, and never got pulled over, until a little later, at least. Again at least. But I’ll get there.

He drove through beach winds, and the canyons, while he visited mom, until he was allowed to go get her. The desert air, and the South cold. At night, anyway. He went to meetings, some, reluctantly. Judging other alcoholics. They weren’t eye level. Feeling for himself. Feeling misunderstood, but also like maybe he knew better.

He hoped, every day, on the way to anywhere, that he would get pulled over. Not like he drove too fast – or at least way too fast. Not like he switched lanes, without his blinker, or that his head was buried in his phone. Not like he wasn’t trying - he was - but just barely. Like he’d get pulled over if he was meant to. Like he hated what he was doing – how he was living. Like he hated himself, still, and that hadn’t changed.

Watching people fail, and die. Halfway houses, and urinalysis. White vans and the lack of a reason to wear more than red flannel pajama bottoms, out. With Bang Energy drinks, or an extra-large iced coffee - cinnamon mocha, with a splash of coconut - and always a vape. Perpetually. Fail and die. Or worse. Just fail and stay. Much worse. Just stay where you are. Stay where they were. Not believe in themselves. Still be afraid of everything, and avoid everything. Still blame everybody, and hide. Think that the best part of your day is the smoke shop and buying sneakers with your parents’ money while you watch a Hemsworth brother on Netflix - it doesn’t matter which.

Action was all you were allowed to watch because anything else might be triggering.

Jack hoped God would stop him – pull him over – and tell him enough already. This is all bullshit - I told you so. I’m begging you. Please stop. You were right. This isn’t real.

She’s still okay.

Jack busied himself with his mother. He distracted himself as best as he could. That’s hardest when you turn the lights off, so limit that time. He didn’t get high, but he felt like he should. He was lucky, he felt, to be in California – he knew no dealers, there – and a few Heinekens, from 7-Eleven, wouldn’t quite be enough. He wanted to be like her – where she was. He wanted the pain to befall him. He wanted to feel like her, and not have to be better. He wanted more than this responsibility. He didn’t think he could do it alone.

Tomorrow it was time to go pick up his mom from treatment. Tonight the sky was empty while he smoked and stood on his mother’s balcony, next to her dead tomato plants. They’d been alive before the coma - she’d always had a green thumb - but not anymore. Well there was one star. Fine. A few stars. But one’s brightness was brightest.

He felt something that felt like when you’re looking for your car in a few-story city parking lot. Jack could never find his car – always lost – but, pressing the horn button on his key fob, at least he could finally hear it. At least he knew it was there.

Jack took his mother’s Subaru to Oxnard the next day to pick her up. It was, as it always was, really, really fun.

***

Eventually Jack got pulled over. He ran a red after buying groceries. He wanted to cook dinner for him and his ma. Two blocks from home, for running a red. He lived in her guest room and would try and prepare her dinner. So he could help her take care of herself. He thought it might make her smile, but he imagined this life couldn’t be forever. So he’d do his best while he was here, because he couldn’t do it forever - he couldn’t do it alone. At some point he’d go back to living his life again. At some point he’d smile past his teeth. But now they swarmed him. Four police. He didn’t have a license, so he thought it was over – thank God. It was finally over. Thank you, God. I always knew I believed in you.

“Do you know what you did here, sir?”

“I do,” sweating. When it was hot he never stopped sweating. “I sped up to get through a yellow?” He looked back out the rear windshield.

“Why are you looking all around you?”

“Because I’m nervous.”

“Why are you nervous?”

“I don’t know. I’m sober, though.”

“Now why would you say that?” More angry, an unexpected response. “I didn’t ask you that.”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry,” he watched the back of his hands grip the wheel and pearl sweat. Then his eyes went back out the window.

“Stop looking around! What are you looking for, exit routes?”

“No. I’m not, I swear…”

“Look forward!”

He found a crack in the windshield to focus on. But nonetheless.

“You’re gonna have to get out of the car, please. Now, please. Now!”

They pulled their weapons on him. He stood in the cold. He left his shallots in the bag on the passenger seat. One of them began to search the hatch.

“So what’s this then, huh?” he asked, pulling a thick, orange, jar of goo from the door. It stuck to him as he held it. “Huh? I’m waiting!”

“I…um…”

“Sound it out!”

“Vape juice,” Jack replied, sheepish. He’d rather them have found drugs, almost.

Almost.

“Oh,” he said. He threw it towards the trash, and slapped his hands together. “Gross.”

“Why don’t you have your license?” The other one asked.

“I just got the car. I have an appointment at the DMV this week.”

“Where was it before that?”

“Century City.”

“Why?”

“It’s my mother’s.”

“Why are you driving before you have your license, then?” he put his hand back on his gun.

“I was in treatment for a while. Now I’m trying to get to a meeting.”

“What kind of meeting?”

“You know, a meeting.”

“No, I don’t actually. Enlighten me.”

“Like a recovery thing?”

“Oh right. I have a cousin. Pain in the ass. Whatever.”

He shook his head.

“Where do you live?”

“Half a block away.”

He waited a little while, at a quiet, otherwise calm intersection in Burbank, near the airport. The officer stood with his arms crossed – he’d holstered his weapon – in the middle of an intersection, once idyllic, now pulled apart, at its fringes, by people like this. Rats. Nest building rats, with no scruples. The officer saw, for just a moment, a perspective above, and the town was like a blanket, with one torn thread. And he kept pulling the thread, and the hole was getting bigger, and worse, and whole, somehow, enveloping its entirety. Antithetical to his understanding. He felt baffled – disgusted by their belief. Most of the time, anyway. Jack reminded him of his daughter. What he was doing wasn’t working. Maybe she is trying? He shook his head. Maybe he’s worth believing.

Maybe I’ll try something new.

“Well drive home, then. And then don’t again ‘til your licensed, k? I don’t want to see your pussy, Demcorat headlights again.”

“Okay, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“I mean it. I don’t wanna see you out here.”

“Of course. I understand. Thank you, sir. Again. Thank you.”

He let him go. Jack drove to a Wal-Mart parking lot, close - but not too close - to home. When his mother was in the coma she stopped paying for her building’s maintenance dues, which included her parking. Jack didn’t, either, because they told him she’d never drive again. And he couldn’t imagine that, for any length of time, he’d be there. He could be shortsighted in his thought.

He was hitting the ball deep to my backhand which forces me on my heels so I can’t hit through it. I use a heavy racket, like he does, which makes my one-handed backhand drive terribly ineffective when I don’t hit it right, and I often don’t hit it right. I can hit over it when I have time, but even then it’s shaky. My racket’s too heavy so I don’t use my wrist enough. My slice is pretty good but if the ball lands too deep all I can do is chop at it. It goes too high, or it lands too short, and he’s there to just put it away.

And he always does.

He’ll either hit a winner behind me or a drop shot that I look foolish trying to run to depending on what he’s working on - I’ve never been too fast. I’m moving pretty well these days, but not well enough to get there. If I happen to it’s not graceful, and it’s just the next ball that does it - likely a lob over my head. I hope these sessions are at least helpful for him, because the only thing I feel like I’m learning is that, at almost seventy, he’s much, much better than me. I’d say still, but that’s likely forever. He reminded me, as he toasted me at my wedding, that I’ll never have a chance.

I had already accepted that some time ago.

But maybe I hadn’t, and I’ll get him next time. The idea that I’ll put it all together, one of these days, does keep me going. The idea that my time will come.

I don’t make it easy for myself, though. I never have. Not only do I use a racket like his, I use his exact same racket - just one of his spares - strung the exact same way he used to string his, like some of his magic might’ve been inherited.

Loose, so you can really feel the ball. Loose, so you have to be gifted if you want to control it. Loose, like you know something your opponent doesn’t. Loose, so you have to be sure.

Admittedly, my dad and I had had a disagreement over text about something a few days before our session, and I’m not very good at compartmentalizing, or communicating with him. If something bothers me I bring it on the court with me - I bring it everywhere with me - and I struggle. He had misunderstood something, which I finally gleaned when I called him, and I had taken that to mean he didn’t care. When understanding is your most valued commodity, you’re mad at everybody all the time. Better, for me, to be understanding than to be understood.

Or at least to just be the person who calls.

Ilie Nastase was a tennis player who played, for a time, against my father. He was known as Nasty, for his on-court behavior. He was notorious, notable as much for his antics as he was for his play.

My brother and I used to play tennis at a club called Tennisport in Long Island City. My brother had a temper - believe it or not - that he displayed when he lost. This particular day, Sean was losing. He made everybody know.

From one court over in the bubble we heard someone bellow - who is that, McEnroe’s son?

We heard everyone laugh.

My brother gave up and went back to the locker room. We found out later that was Ilie Nastase, joking around.

I played tennis growing up, but my dad never wanted us to play in any tournaments. He wanted us to know how, but he left it there. The rest we’d figure out for ourselves.

I was the captain of my high school team, and eventually, when I was a senior, my brother and I played doubles together. We were the number one seed in our league but in our year-end tournament we lost first round. My brother only brought one racket and when his strings broke he couldn’t play with my spare.

It was too heavy.

I was recruited by a few college teams but only because of my name. It seems in retrospect I could’ve felt lucky that I might get into schools for this reason, but the fact that I was considered recruited, even though no one had come to watch me play, offended me. I never liked anyone assuming they knew me before they did.

In college I didn’t play my first year - due to this assumption - but I made the team my second. I was proud of that, as I had to try out. I played doubles, for the most part - my team was pretty good - but I’d made it. After that season it was recommended that the players go to Sarasota, Florida, to train over Spring Break. As a D3 tennis player, I chose to study abroad in Europe that semester instead.

I thought Sarasota, or maybe it was Bradenton, sounded really bad, and I still think I made the right choice. Although my ideas about myself, and who I should be, can sometimes be the problem.

I started playing again in rehab, after some years off. My muscles had atrophied when I was in the hospital - I was there for a month, and I couldn’t much walk - so my first time trying to serve I fell face forward into the ground. I was top heavy - skinny legs and a chest cavity, and organs, carrying too much fluid - and I didn’t have a sense of myself.

I couldn’t carry my own weight.

Eventually I picked it back up. I was good - for rehab. I beat up on all the other junkies. I got fitter and my legs got stronger. I needed something to do besides think about me.

I eventually joined a club, when I left, and asked if there were any good players who wanted to hit. I met my friend Gabe, and we played every Sunday for about a year. I never once won - he was a former D1 athlete - but I began to take him to three sets every now and again. He had a mode he could fall into, when cornered, where he just never missed. I didn’t have the patience. We played two hours every Sunday. I got healthy, and strong, and I learned how to lose.

Gabe beat me, probably, a hundred times in a row, but I kept coming. Honestly, I think I could take him right now.

When Fern and I moved in together it was the end of COVID and we both liked upstate New York. We thought we should try it, before we made a decision, so we decided to rent and moved to Pleasant Valley, on the other side of the river from where I am now.

I joined the Poughkeepsie Tennis Club, and participated, when asked, in the local doubles tournament. I’m often asked when my name is written. I won, with another newcomer - we beat the defending champions - but that’s not what I remember. I remember Fern coming to watch and hearing people say “he’s certainly not his father.”

I remember how mad it made her. I remember I just shrugged.

A year ago I started teaching tennis because my wife didn’t want me to go back to bartending, and I needed a job if I wanted to continue to write. For the first time since I got sober I thought about quitting writing, and maybe going to, I don’t know, business school, because it had begun to feel selfish. My book wasn’t selling, so if writing isn’t helping us pay our mortgage then it’s just for me to amuse myself. I can find some other way to deal with my feelings that’s less masturbatory. Maybe I just need to shush.

But Fern didn’t want to hear that. She believed in me, like I her.

“It’s not what you do, it’s who you are.”

I shook my head.

“So then I have to work in a bar again.”

She stood up and got her computer.

“Shhh.”

I didn’t like what she was doing, as she buried her head in her laptop, but I’d scared her - moving backwards - so I decided to let her go.

I found out a few minutes later, after she’d already set up a few interviews, that she was offering me up to clubs as a tennis coach. I bristled. I didn’t like it as an identity - because I hadn’t chosen it - but I liked doing it. I’d been playing a lot - everyone wants to play with a McEnroe, even if it’s the wrong one - and she can see that. She has a sense of what’s good for me that I can’t always see. She has a sense of what’s sensible - it helps me get over myself.

I got a job at a local club and I started writing on Substack. I’d never written about myself before - I was a fiction writer with a completed novel that was sitting in my desk drawer, supposedly being read by editors - so why not. There’s freedom in desperation. Maybe I can just do whatever I like.

And I have. I’ve written about myself for the first time, and I’ve realized that I used to hide because I liked the distance in fiction - I liked to be able to say it wasn’t really about me - because I wasn’t sure what people would think. I thought if I just said who I was it might sound like complaining. I thought if I spoke too freely then someone might get mad, or sad. Then someone might get hurt, and then want to hurt themselves. I thought it might make them want to run.

Or maybe I thought it might make me.

But they haven’t - not yet, anyway - and nor have I. This has been a life-changing medium - writing, but Substack in particular - in that people truly want to support each other, here, so for that I’d like to say thank you. Thank you for supporting this - which lets me like my job teaching tennis - and thank you for my tennis job, too. I really like that I get to help people get better. And thank you for letting me be me, and for caring. Thank you for letting me write too long, because it reminds me I’m human. AI now summarizes emails - the world wants everything shorter - but sometimes people don’t know what to cut, especially when they’re trying to be honest, so thank you for letting me stumble.

Thank you for letting me share.

In many ways, teaching tennis is healthy bartending. I help others - I stay out of the way - and I work on my feet. I have to remember their names - which I’m horrible at, just like I was then - but I try to. I have to say chief, or big guy, when I forget - it’s much harder when I get groups of women - but I try to just not write it off anymore as “just not my thing.”

I try, and when someone says something like Michelle with two Ls it gets easier. I immediately wonder why that’s important when I’m not writing down her name.

I’m tired at the end of a long day in the sun but I feel like I did something. When we had a leak in our basement I was able to pay it off with my tips, not my book.

I’m fitter, I’m stronger, and I’m capable - none of which seemed possible when my liver was failing - and the goal, in life now, is to be able to hit with my dad, and enjoy myself, and to write whatever I want and maybe, sometimes, take my wife out to dinner.

I’ll let you know when I get there.

What surprises me most is that one hand feeds the other. I like writing more because it doesn’t have to be something I don’t want it to be just to sell it. I can pay my mortgage over there and love writing, here, because I don’t need it: I’m choosing it. It’s 6:17, and I have to be at work, at 8:30, and this is my choice.

And I like tennis more, too, because it helps me. It doesn’t hurt me anymore. People find out and I’m proud of my name, even if they’re disappointed. Sometimes it makes their day, just the proximity. I’m also realizing that maybe, the whole time, they were just disappointed I wasn’t proud.

There’s a long hill that leads down to the courts, and I have to bring two hoppers with me each time I coach. Walking up the hill, after a long session - three hours in the morning, two in the afternoon, plus three privates - is the hardest part of my day, and it’s always the hottest, and each and every time I consider a world where it’s the last time I have to do this, but I get to the end and I drop them off and feel better. I do it because it’s what’s good for me - what’s great for me - even though it’s not what I would’ve guessed would be. It’s something I never understood about my own recovery - that you can make changes, yes, but sometimes you can choose to be what you are. And maybe what you are isn’t all that bad, anyway.

By the time I get to my car I want to come back the next day.

Or, at least, I’m willing.

If you’d like to read the first part, click below.

Let me know what you think.

I love ya.

K

When her kids came to get her, finally, Clover was mad. She’d been in there for so long. She’d been in the hospital for six weeks in a coma, and then to UCLA restorative rehabilitation, for strength, and flexibility – where she’d learn, again, to walk. Then she’d been in Oxnard another month, for long-term care, where she relearned some ability to speak – reading and writing was over – and where she tried to escape a few times, which is when Jack knew she was still herself. During most of this Jack was in treatment, himself, and he couldn’t visit anyway due to strict Covid-19 restrictions. Her daughter came, once or twice, and stood outside the window and waved to her, but this almost made it worse. A mouthful of freedom with no taste – so bland she couldn’t even swallow. They were only allowed to touch her when they were going to come get her to move her, and that time had finally arrived.

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If you hung in there, let me know what stayed with you the most.

Or, even better, what’s a place that changed you?

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If you want to catch up on the previous chapters, click below.

Otherwise, it’s time for me to go home.

Love,

K

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The Opposite of Adventure: Part 1

The Opposite of Adventure: Part 2

If you’ve read already, then let’s go to Spain. I love ya.

K

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“How’s 2:45?”

Not that helpful.

It was supposed to be a fifty-minute journey from Heathrow, but at some point I got on the wrong way for a few stops. There were four transfers on my way to Imperial Wharf. One of them had a lift, the other three didn’t. I had two overstuffed, rolling pieces of box luggage that I’d checked - one of which only contains fancy clothing - and I’ve carried them up and down many flights of stairs, and my hands hurt. When I got on the wrong way, with all my luggage, I didn’t notice for two stops, and when I did I started to laugh. A sign of growth, I suppose, or maybe just age. Or maybe that’s what real defeat looks like - just kill me now.

I think I’m finally ready to go.

I understand that Fern is supposed to be having fun right now—she was in Paris, at a bachelorette party. Don’t ask—but when you’re walking from the train station to the hotel, dragging her luggage, it’s a little too easy to wish she wasn’t, or at least that whatever she’s currently doing is only just fine.

I’ll never say recovered, because I’m in recovery. There’s far more work to be done.

My leather weekender - a gift from Fern, which often subs for my tennis bag - is still around my shoulder, even as I sit. The concierge is reluctantly holding the rollers behind the desk, over there. After a few minutes I stand and go back and ask if there’s a cup of coffee, somewhere. He looks bemused, and then frustrated. “The restaurant isn’t currently serving, sir. Breakfast is over.” He points me to a coffee shop a few blocks away. He gives me a ticket to hold the suitcases with the bellman but I keep my bag with my computer. I walk to what seems to be Britain’s version of Le Pain Quotidien.

There was a time after I stopped drinking that I was still miserable, which reminds me of now. I hadn’t changed and I didn’t know that was possible. I had only ever lived one way - where how I felt mattered more than anything, or anyone, else - and abstinent of drugs and alcohol I felt badly. I was ashamed of my past, and worried about my future. I felt guilty for who I was, and who I wasn’t, and I thought I was over the hill. I’d made so many mistakes, with my career, family, and just about any and all issues to do with love, that I felt hopeless. Is this all there is? I’d often ask myself; if so, I don’t know if I can do it much longer.

That’s the trick of it all, your brain wants you using again. They don’t want me to die, but I can’t live like this, so I have to. They want me to suffer, so I have no choice. If you were me you’d do it, too. Anybody would go looking for painkillers.

I didn’t believe that I could get better, because there’s no way that anyone feels as bad as I do. They must’ve had a different problem than me, when I’d see anybody grateful. I’d never felt grateful before, so I didn’t buy it. They’re either fundamentally different, or they’re making it up.

I honestly almost found it offensive. Off-putting, at a minimum. I don’t wanna hear how lucky you are to be here. Please, please, leave me the fuck alone.

One of the first times I visited my mom after treatment was around this time. I was flying to the west coast, and I had a middle seat. My mom wanted to have another surgery, and I had to go meet with a doctor, and I couldn’t believe it. She’d had so many - somewhere between ten and twenty, depending on how you’d define a surgery - and going under the knife again meant opiates, and at this point that was so, so hard to believe. Not that they’d prescribe them - doctor’s do that - but that it was still in her.

A desire to not feel.

I knew, even then, that this thing never goes away - it’s still in me - but she’d had a stroke, and we weren’t sure how it would affect her brain, and there was a thought - a very foolish one to look back on - that the damage might even help her. Maybe she might not want to use?

Maybe it would damage that part of her brain, and maybe she’d wake up, and feel peaceful. Maybe whatever always hurt her might not always hurt so much.

But she still wanted what she wanted when she wanted it, and she still can, even though it’s better, and when that’s a surgery that’s a scary thing. She’s had so many different procedures, by so many different doctors, that they complicate each other, so she is in pain. It’s almost impossible to know what’s real and what isn’t. Well, it’s all real, but I suppose I mean, what’s the difference?

It’s a fool’s errand to try to separate the active addict from the individual. If there’s a miracle, in retrospect, then they can begin to parse it out themselves.

She’s never learned to hear no, my mom, so that wasn’t helpful either. That’s what happens when you make a million dollars before you’re twelve. I’ll just go with whatever the doctor says, I thought. Maybe he’ll say no, and then she’ll listen. Or maybe then we’ll just have to find somebody else.

So I was sitting in the middle seat, on my way to her, head in my hands. We flew into a choppy airstream, and it got turbulent. More than I could remember, from when I used to travel, and I got scared. I never liked turbulence - I don’t get frightened very much, but I’m often startled - and these bumps pulled at my stomach. But I leaned into the fear, and there was peace in it. I thought to myself, “Thank God.”

“Maybe it’s finally over.”

But then it rattled a while longer, and I gripped the armrests tight, but then it stopped. I opened my eyes, as the plane leveled, and I was shocked to realize that as a sober person I still wanted to die; it took someone near me dying to make me consider that maybe I shouldn’t. That she wouldn’t want that for me, and I thought of her. I trusted someone, and she believed in me, and that mattered. Before I call it, at least, I should try.

The plane landed and I showed up for my mother. Surrendering to this thing was much harder than stopping - stopping was just a lateral move - but it’s the only thing that ever made me happy. I’m not that important anymore - thank goodness - and somehow that allows for the possibility that tomorrow might be okay. We go to the English countryside, in the morning, so I hope so. A wedding in the Cotswolds, for this junkie, still feels very surreal.

My wife is almost here so I’ll walk back to the hotel, now. The two gentlemen filming themselves drinking matcha have also made it easier to want to go.

Fern and I came to England and Ireland for our honeymoon, and there was a restaurant in Chelsea that we particularly enjoyed. It felt British, in the way that can be charming, and the food is good. In the UK, it isn’t always, so we were looking forward to it. I like that we’d been there before, and I knew it was reliable. To face the unknown, I like to know what things I can count on, so I insisted. This may have been when I should’ve gathered that something might go wrong.

To get to rural England we were shipped on one of two large buses, for three hours, and our driver didn’t believe in air conditioning. We stopped at a rest stop and most bought canned wine. One tall gentleman, with tan skin and a peptide waist and whiter teeth than the ones he was born with, walked by and asked, wine? Julia, Fern’s friend, nodded.

“Pussy,” he replied, and held up, triumphantly, his bottle of Ciroc French Vanil.

There are sheep here, everywhere, and trees. There’s rolling hills, and golden wheat sprouting from near marshes. There’s a beautiful deck, off where we stay, with beautiful deck furniture, and there’s a hot tub gurgling in the corner. The top is off, but no one’s in it. There are packs of thin cigarettes, Vogue Slims, from Paris, strewn about, and Aperol Spritz are being made in the kitchen. Fern and her three friends from college are here - all of whom I love - but I avoid them. I’m having a Diet Coke outside. Partying has always been challenging for me. Before, I knew how to make it less so, by doing more so. A couple of pops used to round me right out.

Since I stopped, though, I’ve never had a problem with people drinking around me - please, do you - but it’s drinking with the express purpose of “having fun” that I do find off putting. People don’t usually invite the sober person for this reason - because they feel judged - but I'm not judging. I’m some combination of jealous and mournful. It reminds me why I did it at all.

The implication in what I’m saying, though, is that without you can’t have, or aren’t, fun, and with that I really fundamentally disagree. I really like my life, and dinners, and movies, and sunsets and the beach. The ocean, really - I don’t love too long at the beach - but Knicks games. I like remembering what happened in the last episode of the show I’m watching, and I like winning at things.

My wife and I play chess, sometimes. That she finds that fun makes me know I did something right.

I also never really liked partying, so to try and put it on, and go the other way - something like the sober guy at Bonnaroo - feels equally distasteful, too.

So I’ve allowed myself the grace, I suppose, to let others be themselves, without inherent judgment, which somehow makes me okay with me. I’m not everyones cup of tea, to use the parlance of my surroundings, but that’s okay. They can do that - they can drink Aperol Spritz, now, mimosas in the morning, and espresso martinis later on - if they so desire. If I’m having fun with them, and that, I will, and if I’m not, that’s okay, too. I’ll just be myself, without trying to change anything, and see what happens. The idiom I find most settling is that I get to watch the circus - I don’t have to join.

I’m comfortable with that rubric.

A few hours pass and I’m beginning to feel heavy. It’s almost time to get ready, and we only have a bathtub. Fern suggests I cold plunge - my first warning that she’d like me to shake things up - and instead I go back outside. I look out, again, and I’m reminded of the paintings of trees, and hills, and sheep in a pub, that I’d only look at in line for the bathroom. When I wasn’t having fun, I was often in the bathroom, hoping that this line might get me there, but it didn’t. It just made my heart beat fast enough that I’d have to focus on that - on slowing that - so that I’d get another shot and forget what the mission was. So I’d have another drink to try to balance out.

I didn’t pay much attention to the painting, then, because it always seemed so far away. To actually be here - to be in the painting, with the sheep, and to notice - makes me remember why I’m outside. They can be inside, in the pub, but I like being here. The world’s much bigger, here. As I finish my Diet Coke the sheep continue to baaah.

My wife has gone upstairs to get ready, and I’ve moved on to smoking one of the two cigarettes I allow myself a day, although when I’m on vacation that can become more. I finish and I consider that, but I’ll wait. I’m sure, at some point, I’ll need one. Although to need, in that context, is certainly worth taking note.

When I was in college I studied abroad in Italy, and my mother came to visit for the weekend. I gave her the address where we’d meet, but when I got there she was nowhere to be found. Her phone wasn’t ringing, and I was concerned, but I thought it might be international service. But somehow, while the former thought is rational, I also knew. I always also knew.

Somehow, someway, I ran into her, and she was frazzled. It turns out someone gave her something on the plane.

We went to dinner that night - we got her to her room, and she pulled it together - but she was drinking too much. She told me she was allowed to drink on vacation - that her sponsor had said so. I nodded but I knew. She went to the bathroom, with red teeth, and I poured the rest of the bottle into my glass and drank it before she got back to the table.

I saved her.

I stood upright ‘til she got to bed that night and then I stumbled home.

Last night, at the wedding - it’s already tomorrow - and my wife and I got into a fight. I’m not good at pretending I’m happy, and Fern sees that as rude. I wanted to be honest - she wanted me to wait. Fine, then I won’t say anything.

“You’re embarrassing me,” she said.

For whatever reason that crushed me. Well, actually I think I know the reason, and more so, perhaps, she’s right; looking uncomfortable is reason enough. In her defense, my uncomfortable looks like fuck off. My uncomfortable looks like I hate you.

I felt bad being there, at times – I felt out of place, and felt like I should try to get in place, like I used to – and I remembered why I liked to drink. It’s not that I wanted to drink - trust me, that’s happened to - but I recognize why it helped. It pulled back my nerve endings, like when you pull back your covers before bed, and getting in like that, into fresh bed sheets, when it’s winter and it’s cold out, can feel good. It makes you warm, and cozy. It can make you comfortable, and smile easier. It puts you right at home.

I chose to stay out of bed and feel bad last night. And I don’t have good circulation.

Everybody else was drinking – they were enjoying themselves, they can – and I wasn’t. I didn’t. I’m the one declining. I’ll be over here.

I don’t find being in recovery hard, anymore - in fact it’s something I’m often proud of. I love the people, and the purpose. I like not thinking so often about what in the hell is wrong with me?

But sometimes I find being the only person in recovery, somewhere, isolating. I don’t like what it does to certain other people’s faces. I feel like they know too much.

So when four or five different men, in an attempt at selflessness, and camaraderie - brava - tried to hand me a Guinness, I declined. A few times in a row, in fact, and to the last one, perhaps because I hoped he would spread the news, I offered, “I don’t drink anymore.”

“How long?” the gentleman with long hair replied.

“About as long as you’ve been vegan.”

He’d told me he was vegan, earlier, since 2018, although he didn’t have to. Again, he had really long hair.

“I get it, man.”

“You mean because you’re vegan?”

He nodded.

“Are you the only one here?”

“What do you think?”

“Fair enough.”

For a moment, with that, I did feel some camaraderie. But to really connect, supposedly, you have to want what they have.

It was hard to believe that meat, for him, at one point was the only answer.

Later on, paloma jello shots were passed around. I said no, but I didn’t feel proud doing so. I didn’t feel like I was doing something good, for my wife, and my family. I didn’t feel like I was saving my own life. I felt like I was a party pooper, ruining everyone else’s good time. I felt like if I could be anywhere else in the world I’d go there. I felt like I wished I was someone else.

Luckily how I feel isn’t indicative of what I do.

If it was, I’d be drinking. I’d be fun, and then I’d be drunk, and then I’d be divorced, and then dead. As I ponder this I sit in the corner and watch people dancing. At some point - mid wistful, and not because they’ve made it look attractive - I decided I should dance. I don’t get low, though, with Fern’s friend Cara and the groom’s mom. Cara has stolen the aux chord and is playing early 90’s bar mitzvah rap, and she’s a hit. I don’t get low, but I find my wife, and I dance with her. Some of the best men grind on each other as their wives watch. When their shirt’s start coming off I call it.

Let live.

I did my best to try and explain, later that night in bed, but when I looked over at Fern, after I was done with my perfect soliloquy about my feelings, she was already asleep. Somehow this makes me love her more - even though it’s necessary, I find that shit so boring - but for the first time that evening I was actually alone. I’d felt that way for a while, but in a way, now, I might need it. I was able to reflect, some, and somehow that gave me some distance from my thoughts; with distance they become less painful. With distance, maybe, I have a choice.

The choice I made last night - and I’m still making - is that it’s not her fault that I drank and used myself to death, and would’ve, at this very place, before I knew her (although I wouldn’t have gotten invited - the Butterfly Effect. I swung with a pretty different crowd.)

My discomfort is not something she can fix, but luckily nor can alcohol. The person that she fell for doesn’t make his feelings go away, he allows them, even when they’re trying to hurt him, and he can see that some aren’t true. He doesn’t bow to them, or reward them, because to honor that is a jello-shot, and a cocaine number. A separation, and getting arrested and then another judge. A DUI and then a weekend in the tombs and then a bus ride to another rehab. Maybe a halfway house, or then sober living, if I’m lucky.

And not one in the Cotswolds, either.

He - this he. He now. He that knows that the alternative is to kill himself - feels them, and he stays anyway. He kisses his wife’s head while she’s sleeping, after two and half Aperol Spritz and a glass of pinot gris, and he tells her he loves her the next day. He doesn’t hold it against her that she forgot to tell him she drank seven shots at the bachelorette party (“first of all it was three - maybe four…” says Fern, exasperated) but he notes it. He figures that must’ve slipped her mind.

I know she doesn’t want to fight in public, and Fern likes that people look to us as the couple they want to be. To me, we are - we always are - but perhaps for slightly different reasons than she realizes. I don’t care what other people think, but I care what she does, even when it’s hard - sometimes maybe too much. I care how I feel about her, and her me, and I want to do better because of it - because that’s what she deserves. I care enough that it makes it the hardest thing I’ve ever done to pretend. But I care so much that I’m willing to try anyway.

I care that we get through everything, so in the midst of our strife last night, during dinner, I stepped out for a minute or two and looked at the stars. Even if it’s sometimes hard, what’s right isn’t always what I want, but I’ll do my best to get there. In fact, it’s sometimes more closely the opposite, because what I want in the moment and what I care about are different, and I care about her feeling good, today, right now; so with that I’ll do everything that I can to help her. I’ll go back inside and I’ll smile, and I do, even if to me it’s inauthentic. I’ll hold her hand, and nod along to whoever’s across the table, because it’s not always about me. I’ll try and remember their names, and feign interest in their tech jobs. I’ll eat my short ribs, or pork chops, or tuna tartare, because that’s what’s appropriate. I’ll have cake, because whatever. Humility comes at a cost.

But I’ll look forward to my next church basement, too, where other people who remember delirium tremens, or acute withdrawal, and have tattoos like to go. Where we don’t like small talk and we joke about suboxone and we’re okay with that fact that we’re not. I’ll look forward to then, and I’m pretty sure she will also. She’s claimed I’m more chipper after, too.

It was difficult to wear my tuxedo like a loose garment last night, but I did it. I’m here, now, and no one else is awake, yet, and it’s the morning.

I got through it - I wore it - even though my cummerbund was very snug. At some point I took off my neck tie and it got easier. I thought about her and forgot about me.

To combat the chaos of my former life - the one where you’re forced to live in the moment, because there’s no future beyond the next one - a routine became essential. I had to know where I’m going, and which people I’m seeing. I have to call this person every day - ideally at the same time every day - and I have to work out religiously, but by religiously I mean consistently, because I also shouldn’t bow down to my physique. I have to take time every morning to remember who I am, and then ask for help to forget it. I have to do what I did in the beginning, and be desperate. I have to always remember exactly who I was in order to leave room for who I am. I have to be specific, and remind myself. That’s one of the reasons I write the way I do, and what I do.

I repeat myself to help remember. It’s part of my disease to forget.

However, I can become rigid in that, and my life can get small again. I can eat the same thing, at the same time, and sit in the same place every day to keep me safe. I can listen to the same podcasts, the same day, every week, and I can smoke my same cigarettes on my same porch when my day is over. I can stay still, in my comforts, and I can drown myself in what’s working in order to remain there.

But then I die there, too. Rigidity, it turns out, also conflicts with adventure.

I got sober to open my eyes; perhaps even more so than they ever had been. I got sober to get better, and to not know everything - and ideally anything - and then things get bigger.

I got sober to deal with things I don’t like, not to avoid them.

I didn’t die so I can really live.

So I stayed. Eventually, I danced. I got over myself. I smoked more cigarettes than I normally do - Julia bought something like ten packs of the thinnies from France - but we get rid of these things in the order that they’ll kill you. Better that, I figured, than the small talk that had been killing me. And the skinny cigarettes hardly count.

I muscled through it. I did it for Fern, and because it was the right thing to do, and I accidentally had fun that way. That often happens when I forget what I want.

Once, I used that same expression - muscled through it - after a difficult night to an old counselor from a rehab, whom I was still oddly in contact with, who then insisted that I didn’t have to do that anymore.

“You never have to muscle through anything again!” She swore. “That’s what we tried to teach you!”

She was one of the one’s who didn’t actually have a problem with alcohol. Perhaps I was right to suspect.

I think what she might not’ve understood, when she pressed me, again and again, about people places and things, all those times over, is that there is a part of me that will avoid all people, if a certain wish got granted, and most places, unless they looked and smelled like a bar with other miserable, unknown, chums who no longer had it in them to judge. The nice thing about alcoholics is that they’re so self-centered they don’t have much time for you, so if you want to be in someone’s background, you very easily can. If you want to float through, without ever connecting with anyone, that’s your choice, and often your prerogative. Maybe even, in terms of things, that’s your thing - that you don’t want company - and at a certain point that becomes your identity.

Your way is I’m different, so I don’t have to do what you want me to do. Your mode is you don’t understand me, so small talk is never worthwhile. Your thing, again, is you’re somehow worse off than everyone else at this wedding, and so somehow, in your mind, that makes you better - like the worst junkie in the rehab - and therefore exempt. I don’t have to participate, Fern, if I don’t want to, so stop looking at me like that.

But then you’re embarrassing me, too, and she’s right. I’m making this about me, again, and I don’t want to be that person anymore. I’ve proven that that wasn’t, like, a good plan.

If I avoid people places and things then I’ll avoid everything, and my life gets small again. If I muscle through it, sometimes, then maybe I’ll get stronger. I’m leaving this wedding, and I’m sober, and I think maybe I’m fitter, and my wife still loves me, and I her.

A good day in recovery is when everything’s perfect. A great day in recovery is when it wasn’t - and you weren’t - but then you leave and everything’s like that. You’re still here, and you still have a few yesterdays, and that gives you a better chance at a tomorrow.

So what else is there?

Fuck it. Let’s go to Spain.

Let me know what you thought of my adventure!

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And if you had fun please share!

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Perhaps fun isn’t the word, but you know what I mean.

You made it, too.

See you next week.

Love,

K

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Of both parts, this one’s the one.

Trust me.

Love you so, and thanks for the great questions!

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What was the primary driver of your addiction? Fame? Anger? Carelessness?

Tatum: Sadness. And my heart. Just not a very good...

I was very...

Not quite a broken heart. That’s not as good. I was homeless in my heart.

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I don’t care that this is long - it’s my championship opus! I hope you stick with me, though. I really like how it ends.

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When you live your life thinking that tomorrow will be worse than today, it often is. That’s how I lived mine for most of it. I remember a teacher in Lower School asking us about our sleep patterns, and at the time I was having a hard time going to bed.

“Why do you think that is?” She asked.

“You have to look forward to tomorrow to want to sleep,” I answered.

She looked concerned.

There’s been a lot of talk of healing around this Knicks championship, and I’m normally not so big on that word, nor any buzzwords, but only in that they’re often overused, or perhaps used most often by people who seem to have too many answers. Like their way is the best way.

However, in this moment, it does feel appropriate, as I’ve taken a beat away from Knicks coverage just to think about what happened, and feel it. With some time away, and by that I mean about two weeks, it does feel like finally winning, after all these years, has changed us. Like BC could stand for before championship, and AD, after drought. Like we don’t have to be quite so wounded. That it doesn’t have to be quite so bad.

As New Yorkers, mind your business is a way of life, and the fact that we’re all going somewhere else, head down - keep it movin’ - is ingrained so deeply that we don’t even see “outta my way” as rude. In fact, we see the opposite as true. You’re rude for walking slowly. You need to pay attention and move.

We all know how to keep to ourselves on the Subway, even when our chin is on your chest. We are sewn together, most of the time, through our temperament; we all know how to be separate, looking for ours. In many ways, that’s the point - different, disparate people all in line in their mentality; I need to get where I need to go and so, again, you should scatter. If we were to look out for each other then we wouldn’t get there as quickly. That’s what gives New York its pulse.

But now - and maybe it’s just right now - we have a different heartbeat.

It’s slower, and steadier, as people from all around the city, and beyond, come together. It’s palpable, and consistent, as we all care about the same thing - the same team - somehow, and we’ve become temporarily unified not in where we’re going, but in the fact that we’re willing to stop. Those with scars from team’s past can identify with each other’s plight, so maybe we break harder, as we no longer feel so alone. We get to pause and embrace and be present - as though it’s the first time we’ve ever seen each other - as we’ve survived hardship, and we believe that the collective consciousness is more important than the individual, or even the pulse; that the team is bigger than me, and the city gets to pick its head up and stare at the same thing for a while. We get to admire the Chrysler Building dressed in a Knicks jersey.

We all get the same view.

The Knicks winning might have changed the city, even if just for a moment, in a similar way to how sobriety changed me, and being a witness to the shift is something of a spiritual experience. We haven’t felt close at all since before Covid - things are different all over the world, and tribal. Boroughs and neighborhoods have more distaste for others than I remember, and something like Dimes Square has cultural relevance just because it’s new, which makes its residents feel superior. I spent a few years in Dimes Square before it had a title - my mom lived in the Forward Building on East Broadway. She moved because she didn’t like the spitting and the fish smell.

Back then it was called Chinatown. At least according to her.

We haven’t come together, as a city, in a real way since 9/11, and this is different than that. After tragedy, we needed each other. The blackout, slightly, as well, and maybe Hurricane Sandy, but nothing like this. And we’ve had more down years, since then - Covid did the opposite. We retreated, but we survived, and it finally feels like we’re back, or at least we’re still here. There’s nothing like the city when the Knicks win. The city’s different when the Knicks are good, but winning a championship was something we never thought possible.

Don’t leave before the miracle happens.

I’m forty, I’m married, and I have a dog and a little life upstate. We still have a place in Harlem - my wife had a rent controlled studio when we met - but I don’t feel like I need to live “in the mix” anymore. I did that for a long time, and my apartments were just where I slept, and eventually had a hard time leaving. The “underground man” chapter of my life contained less romance than I thought it might, and nature, and neighbors, and community, have something I didn’t think I needed - a little less of myself. My mom moved over ten times while I was growing up, and I felt like I wanted roots. We’re still in the city almost every week, but I think I found them.

My wife is my roots.

For many, many, many years before this, the closest I came to happiness was a break from reality, which I found in a number of different, dissident, and unfortunate, ways. A girlfriend, in high school, showed me that it didn’t have to be so bad. A painkiller in college, alongside a professor telling me I was good at something, allowed me to breathe a little easier. A promotion at my job, even if it was just from barback to bartender, showed me that life was worth living. A drink worked, as it dulled my senses, but eventually felt more like laughing gas at the dentist in that time moved quicker, yes, but I still knew I was getting drilled into. I still knew something hurt, somewhere, I just wasn’t quite as aware of where it was coming from. My breathing was steadier, but I didn’t have as much energy. I just wasn’t quite as able to leave.

Drugs worked best, in that, initially, they truly quieted the noise, but I was already drinking by then, so then it became both. It became worse, and so more, and then so much worse, so then so much more. I heard somebody say, once, that they had to get high to think about getting sober, because they couldn’t do anything until they got something in them. They needed to feel better before they could think.

I knew what he meant, and at that point you become defeated. By that point I’d given up.

But then something happens, if you're lucky, that changes your course. You either stop, or it kills you. Sometimes people say jails, institutions, or death, but you often stop in jails and institutions because you have to - you just don’t like it because you didn’t have a choice. So you comply, for a while, and when you get out you start over - fuck you for making me - and hopefully it gets bad enough that you’re willing to change. Either that or it’s over.

For most who get it, you lose enough, and you’re wrong enough, that you have a moment where you can see straight, and you make a decision. But for me it feels more cosmic than that, because I don’t remember.

I don’t know that I made a choice. It’s like I just survived long enough that something good finally happened. It’s like sometimes there’s a benefit in just not dying.

I didn’t want to live the way I was living, but I guess I didn’t want to die, because I didn’t kill myself.

Good things happen, too.

Something like switching to rooting for the Nets, when the Knicks were bad, in this greater Knicks metaphor, would be synonymous with giving up, and so certainly worse than death. You go down with the ship or the ship, somehow, gains footing. You stay the course because you’re loyal. You don’t see loyalty as a choice.

I don’t remember thinking that my sister had gotten sober, and having that inspire me. I don’t remember most hours of most days, then - just waking up, and getting right. I don’t remember giving up on the Knicks. I don’t remember not caring.

Getting high in my kitchen, while I watered my plants and listened to sports talk radio, I don’t know that I actively stopped being interested, but I know I couldn’t care as much as I used to because I couldn’t handle it. The good, or the bad, I couldn’t deal. I avoided the ups and downs of my life, which is all that it is to be a sports fan, because I avoided my feelings.

I wanted to feel nothing. I wanted to be ice cold.

I don’t remember making the decision, but I’m here, and I don’t remember thinking that my sister had done something to change our family’s course, but I know that on her 90th day she said a prayer that her brother, and her mother, would get this, and she has three more months than me.

Eighty seven days, actually.

When she wished, I was in the hospital.

I don’t need to know much more than that.

In addiction recovery there is discussion of progression - the idea that we only get worse. You always need more, and you will always need more after that, and then the things that you have to do to get there - lie, cheat, steal, isolate, hurt others in doing all of the above, and care very little about anyone other than yourself and how you feel in doing so - become who you are. I’m speaking in the second person because this is a disease, and the idea that I was different than you almost killed me, but the truth is my experience is just me doing those exact same things. I would’ve done anything to feel better, and I still would, and will, if I’m not vigilant about my recovery - most of which makes no sense to me. To do things beyond my understanding allows me to let my life get bigger, which is counterintuitive, but I have gleaned this; my alcoholism manifests in my resistance, so if I let go, I’m happy. If I don’t, I’m not, and it’s your fault. I hate, and you’re the problem. How dare you not let me have my way.

This thing never leaves - it waits for you. It’s waiting for me now, I think. It likes when things don’t go my way.

But it also doesn’t have great judgement. I’m still uncomfortable saying positive things about myself - my sadness was my identity - but I can see past it today, because I see it, but I see more than that, too. In doing so, I’m okay, and things in my life have worked out in a way I wake up every day awed by. I’ve lived long enough to see my city come back to life, and unify, as the Knicks have won the championship, and I care. I imagine, for some people who read this, that a sports team accomplishing something feels like who cares, too, but perhaps I can try to describe what it means for someone like me. Perhaps I can articulate what caring again, and then winning, represents to the little kid I was, because he was still a dreamer, and he lost some of that along the way, but this reminds me I’m still him, too.

He never left me.

So what this means to us is that all the years waiting, and hanging on, were worth it. It means that all the effort you put in is eventually rewarded - even though it doesn’t look like how you thought it would - and that when it matters people love each other, and care for each other. They look out for each other, and they don’t fight all the time, and they don’t leave. People don’t leave. We won’t leave.

We don’t.

There’s an immense amount of attention spent on gratitude in recovery, and I’ll admit the word used to really bother me. But, like any insult that actually stings, there’s a reason for that, and that’s because I didn’t have any, and likely never thought I could. I define gratitude today, though, as the not just the understanding that I’m lucky to be alive, but the practice - the discipline - of finding a way to frame that in response to my initial reaction to the world. If I like what I have, and I don’t need anymore, then if somehow more comes, then I’m lucky. If it doesn’t, I’m good, too, because I’m lucky to be alive - this part’s all dessert. If I don’t do that, then the world’s the problem, because I don’t have enough, and that isn’t fair. And when the world’s the problem, I’m mad at it, and the Knicks never win. Or, at least, I never get to see it, because I don’t survive long enough to get here. I wouldn’t have made it otherwise - I assure you. Quitting drinking and drugging and still being angry - and still blaming you - was a lateral move for someone like me.

I’m lucky that that got bad enough, too, because otherwise I would’ve never changed, and now look what I get to be a part of.

Dang.

It’s a hard life wringing your hands, wishing things were different. You don’t like your cards so you fold. It makes you wonder, when they say is that all there is, if they’re right. But gratitude isn’t the self-help code word I thought it was - the way people use protecting your peace today. Gratitude is wanting what you already have, and then getting out of the way, and then things get better.

Gratitude is belief when it’s hard to believe.

Both recovery and fandom require an irrational faith that tomorrow will be better than today, and I personally couldn’t have one without the other. I certainly couldn’t have gotten to see the Knicks win without recovery, but believe it or not I’m not sure I could’ve gotten this far in recovery without the Knicks. The Knicks remind me of that kid that I was, and remembering him, and embracing him, feels like a guiding force when the world gets sad and hard again. When you and your wife are so different that it feels like the best thing you can do for her is leave her alone. When that’s heartbreaking, but you do it anyway because it’s the right thing, and you're doing much better than you feel. But your thoughts are, then, unmanageable, and when you try and manage them and you get dark again. When the room gets too hot so what makes most sense is to try and figure out where and how to go.

But you stay, even when it doesn’t make sense to you, and you’re rewarded. You stay in New York when Ojai’s nicer - you buy an air conditioner for your house. You stay watching the Knicks when over a two year stretch - from 2018-2020 - they won a combined 38 games. The next year they would 41 - the same year you got sober - and then over fifty, every year, since then. You don’t believe in coincidences - you make that choice. You stay when it’s uncomfortable because it makes you better. You stay because that’s what faith is - that you’re doing the right thing, and your feelings aren’t as important as that. You stay because you’re strong, and your feelings make you fearful, and that feels weak, but it makes you sturdier to disprove it.

Pray for patience and you’ll get traffic. You trust that instead of crashing your car.

There’s been much discussion recently about what it means to be a New Yorker, and specifically that you have to be “born here” to consider yourself as such. However, the person who made this claim most famously lives somewhere like the Hollywood Hills, and given that New York City prides itself as a “melting pot,” this feels like a territorializing claim that’s unfounded. It feels like someone trying to prove something. To me, that feels wrong.

However, so does the recent transplant whose identity becomes New York City, and whose conversations become entirely informed by films like King of New York and The Professional and who reads mostly Knausgaard. Whose head is most certainly hot under that beanie in the summer off of the Jefferson L train. Who drinks to go margaritas from The Turkey’s Nest in August in McCarran Park. Who knows to get to Roberta’s early because the wait is part of the experience, but who prefers Ethiopian on Flushing and will be sure to remind you before your tables set.

To me, if you’re a Knicks fan you’re a New Yorker, but if you really want to start bragging about it stick with them when they’re bad, like I did. Prove it to yourself. Watch a season when they struggle, which I assure you will happen, at some point, and don’t walk away.

That’s how you prove yourself, to yourself, because you're not proving it to anyone else. You’re showing you how strong you are, because you’re learning what failure is. You're getting disappointed, and you’re feeling it, and you’re not running away.

We don’t run away.

I imagine it’s hard, sometimes, for people who don’t consider themselves that bad to really want to surrender to this disease. When you struggle enough - in my case, when you’re yellow enough - you don’t have a choice, and that makes it easier. You change or you die, as is oft quoted - and was, in the hospital, specifically told to me - and you get to know whether you want to survive or not.

Almost dying allowed me to be present, and grateful, when the Knicks finally won. I’m lucky to be alive, and to be a fan, and a New Yorker. I’m grateful I got to struggle - we did - because it made me better, and now the city gets to celebrate.

And even if most of the people didn’t stick through the hard times, we get to love them anyway - we can empathize - but they’ll never understand. It’s because we struggled, and don’t expect anything, that our life is sometimes perfect.

And even when it’s not, it’s still beyond our wildest dreams.

When I was working on my last book - a novel I just turned in about addiction in the city - I would watch Soft White Underbelly during particularly trying scenes because it was an exercise in empathy, and I needed to find some for my characters, and for myself. I’d never written about myself, or that time, before, and until that book I had I just wanted to erase him. It turns out I just needed to help walk him through.

In recovery, we can tell truly galling stories about ourselves - ones that outside of a church basement would most certainly end in death, or worse - but the fact that we’re there to tell them, with our head held high, is all the assurance we need. The worst things that we did, or situations we were in, become inspiring, because we remain.

The fact that we’re there and willing to tell our stories is both the answer, and the question.

Should I? He did. So, maybe? Maybe.

I understand that SWU is exploitative - it is - to have active addicts and alcoholics on camera, and Mark Laita would admit that. I worry that he gives his participants money, but where I’ve come down is to say that I think it’s better that these stories exist, even before recovery, because we get to see these people as people. I think it’s different than Euphoria, because he’s not deciding how they should be, and there’s no romance. He’s showing them, and the point is the warts, because it is far too easy to write off people in the midst of their disease. We should be faced with it, to deal with it. Looking the other way reminds me of what I wanted to do with me.

Moreover, many, many addicts and alcoholics portrayed seem sweet, and genuine, as they talk about the way they’ve lived, and continue to. They blame too much - usually their family - because they have to. If it’s their fault they’ll have to change, and many of them can’t, or at least don’t think they can. Oftentimes, they have to tell their story almost in third person, disconnected from themselves and their reality. Every once in a while they’ll stumble into something that forces them to feel remorse, which becomes guilt, and then shame, all within seconds, and you can see it, and this is usually when they want to leave, to use. Fear of their feelings makes death seem preferential. In the old days - as in, like, five years ago - there used to be heroin addict stories, but now those are gone. The heroin stories are almost entirely, now, fentanyl. Since that changed there are fewer and fewer people who come back for round two.

However, there are some episodes that portray not just the darkness, but how some people get to the light. In one episode, titled Padlocked in a Doghouse, Jeanine Coulter shares about the phenomena of Post Traumatic Growth. She was gnarly - used as hard as just about anyone - but somehow found recovery, and says that, through tools like sharing your story, being of service, and finding emotional regulation, you can come out of traumatic experiences better than you would have had you not gone through them at all. Sometimes dealing makes you stronger, and, in doing so, you gain a newfound appreciation of life - one that you might not have had otherwise.

In other words, she claims, all of the bad things that have happened to her may have happened for her, and I’m positive the same is true of me, and maybe my Knicks. Even though something like this sentiment might have been the exact sort of thing that kept me out of recovery early on - I was pretty cynical - but that just speaks to my resistance; pessimism is the easier choice. Doing something hard makes me feel capable, if I can survive it, and being optimistic, now, qualifies.

Our scars make us useful.

Jeanine Coulter further shares that the “girl in high school, who had so much promise, doesn’t have anything on the woman I became, and that’s “as a direct result of [her] addiction.” Through the disruption of a core belief - often something like I’m not enough, or I don’t deserve it - she became kinder, smarter, and stronger. She became the heroine of her own story; through her hardships she became a better version of herself.

I really admire her strength, especially given that, for a time, she actually lived in a doghouse.

The Knicks didn’t win a championship for 53 years, and I spent all of my twenties, and some of my thirties, fucking my life up. I didn’t feel like I deserved it - I wasn’t enough. Writing that feels trite now, because life is about so much more, but I didn’t know any better. I didn’t feel good and I made it go away.

But I survived, and so did the Knicks, and we’re better off for it. We had the most joyous parade - I couldn’t even get in, but I didn’t give a shit. I went with my wife and we walked around and tasted it. I breathed in the sort of win you can only feel when you’ve lost a lot, but you keep going anyway. You find something, like Jalen Brunson always does, that lets you keep trying when it doesn’t make sense to - something bigger than you - and you believe, and your belief lets you know.

And once you know - the moment you know - they’re in trouble.

You’re better, like Brunson, because you felt overlooked, and incapable, and you found a way past it; you’re better because you were worse.

Recovery doesn’t change your past, it just gives it some meaning. My dad once said to me, in treatment, that he “wanted his son back,” but I didn’t like myself before, so I thought the only way I can make this work is if I get better.

And I think I got better.

The Knicks won, and maybe, today, I’m a little better than the guy with the towels tacked over the windows, and that makes me look forward to tomorrow.

I’m pretty sure that’s called hope.

Share, comment, love you so!

K

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Part One: Paper Moon, Hollywood, and Becoming Tatum

My mother suffered a stroke in 2020 that left her with aphasia, but she’s still got a voice and she’s tough as nails. Your questions were so good, and there were so many, that I had to choose her favorites, and still I had to split into two parts.

So thank you! I’ll make sure to do this again.

We sat down and spoke for over an hour on zoom, and I’ve resisted cleaning up her answers too much. The way she arrives at an idea is often as revealing as the idea itself. The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity, but the voice is all hers, and sometimes mine.

Answers are for the paid tier.

Can’t wait to hear what you think!

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I think some will be through text message - you’ll see - or I’ll do my best to transcribe. It’s almost impossible to capture how she talks now, but it’s pretty beautiful. It’s sometimes vulgar, and volatile, but there’s a poetry to it. I read, once, that…

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This story follows her after and between the events of those two novels and continues her adventures.

Fiction can have “a greater impact than the truth, and be more truthful.”1

Wink.

So get involved, if you feel up for it!

I love you very much.

K

Clover awoke in panic. She was in a small room that was barely big enough for her hospital-sized bed. No padding.

She could think. Her thoughts were as follows. Where am I? Why? Who are they? And then, soon after. Oh no.

Not again.

She looked at her wrists - she was connected to her hospital bed. She looked at her feet – she wore blue socks. As she tried to look farther she was halted by the tubes in her mouth. She laid back down. She tried to close her teeth but couldn’t. She was intubated, and this made her scared. It wasn’t the first time – she was a heroin addict, for a long time, after all – but that doesn’t necessarily make it easier. In fact, sometimes – and this is often true – this would be considered a fate worse than death. That to fall out, and go off, comfortably, is the process of many, and it’s natural, and sometimes even the goal. To enjoy the process is to fight falling asleep and feel it – all of the nothing all around you, and swim there a while.

But instead to wake up somewhere you don’t know, un-high and without the ability, isn’t even fathomable, and thus never considered an option. It’s the worst case scenario. This road means something went wrong.

It means somewhere you got lost, and for that sometimes you beat yourself up for all the mistakes you made - you make - and how you continue to. It means you hate yourself, and you should – or, at least, your behavior and actions might warrant that. Spending a lot of time loathing yourself means spending a lot of time considering yourself. It leaves you with a trying attitude.

She wondered if wondering about someone else might help. She fell back to sleep trying just that.

Soon, after re-rousing, she realized she was still strapped down with knit cuffs, but they’d been loosened, but the tubes were still in her mouth and nose. She looked down, but this time past her feet. Her eyes widened. One of her walls was a window – but locked – and it looked into what seemed to be a busy, buzzing nursing station. All of them wore strange blue masks – or larger white ones – over their mouths and noses. Some also had plastic shields, which swung down from their foreheads, atop those, like beekeepers. Her eyes got even bigger as she watched them, but soon, again, they began to close. She didn’t have the energy to hold them open - the meds - and so her lids became heavy. They fell down again and it got dark.

Even though she could think – she knew because her thoughts made her sad – when she tried to speak past the plastic tubing she couldn’t. She fell in and out of consciousness. She had an IV in - she must be on something - but she felt more than she could remember. She wanted to say she was in pain because she knew to do that every other time and she knew that might help, but she couldn't. And she was, but not in the same way she was used to. She was in pain because she was scared. She was in pain; she was uncertain. She wasn’t calm, and that hurt. She was all of the things she didn’t like to be. All those things felt worse than living.

When she woke up again, tubes were still in her mouth, but her hands were free. She shook more so someone entered and changed her banana bag – she must be on something, she thought as she got sleepy, but not something she liked. Not the way she needed it. Her son would have to help her.

Where’s my son?

Every time she woke back up she grew more and more suspicious. She thought without speaking. When her eyes started talking, or she bit down on the tube in her mouth, an orderly came back in and changed her IV and put her back down. They noticed very quickly that to do so they’d need more, and it was growing. For a long while she remained this way – progressively twilit – as she recovered. It was deemed better for her, but it was also easier for the staff to manage.

They were also afraid for when she’d wake up.

Another day – eyes opened – the muscles that did so the first to gain strength, she watched an orderly lather himself in sanitizer – disgusting – and then put on gloves and one mask, and then another, and then a face shield before picking up a tray. A female one opened the door while the first one backed in – tray second – and made his way to Clover’s bed.

“Hi Clo! How are you?” asking mechanically. Hollow, tinned. He didn’t expect an answer. There hadn’t been even an attempt at one yet.

They had just taken the tubes out that morning, and her throat felt scratchy; she was weak. She didn’t try the first few hours - she grunted to herself - but she’d grown curious. She gathered as he came in.

He put the tray down and she beckoned for him to come closer.

“You want me to come in?”

She nodded. He leaned.

Clover swallowed and started groaning, but he couldn’t quite make out what she was trying to say. It was hard to tell if she was still in there - most in her condition, decidedly, were not. The first time they unlatched her hands from her bed post she tried to pull out her feeding tube so they re-latched them, but now they found they could just keep her medicated. What they didn’t know was that some of her restfulness was her choice.

She tried, again, to whisper, for internally she felt strong. Just give her a chance. She was capable. Like she could do anything if she set her mind to it.

Little girls can do anything, my father used to say.

“Clo,” came out, garbled and drooly and yet somehow also hoarse. She swallowed again. “Clo-vuh.”

“Hey!” he answered. “That’s your name!” And he clapped his hands.

“Clobuhhh,” she tried again.

“Amazing! Look at you go!”

“Clo,” and then she just grunted for the second syllable. That was it. That was all she could muster.

She breathed through her nose tightly. He could tell she was done. He used his heels to stand and he gave her a standing o.

“Bravo!” He cheered for her. “You keep it up! You keep trying, honey. You’re more and more yourself every day.”

She started with her name, or at least an attempt at it. “Clova. Me,” she said, later. She tried pointing to herself but her hand just got to her belly button.

“Clo. Clovuh,” quiet scratching. Hissing. Frothing, even though her mouth felt dry. Spitting, like a bulldog, she coughed out who she was when she had the energy, and me. That’s it. Me, Clover, and she pointed to herself. Clover. Me.

No matter her thoughts, that’s all she seemed to say. That’s all that she had in her - that’s all that could come out.

“Oh, Clover! You’re doing good with that one! I’m so happy you’re trying to try!”

Another nurse was with her, now, and her enthusiasm moved her. She was a woman - she figured the man was just being nice to her because he had a crush. “You just keep talking, sweetheart. You’re doing great!” Now she’d gone too far. Now she was too lively. Great wasn’t honest, and she knew it.

You’re doing too much, Clover thought to herself. Inauthenticity was Clover’s litmus test.

It was time for her to go.

Clover watched her leave. She didn’t have much strength for anything other than breathing, but it was growing. When she woke up in the morning, she could growl. Her hands weren’t as heavy anymore – better than the beginning – and she’d lost weight. Not eating all those weeks besides through her feeding tube was helpful, she thought. That part was a plus.

A few weeks of this later – uncuffed and without feeding tubes – Clover began to grow restless, as was her way. She wasn’t progressing, and their enthusiasm was no longer enough. She took notice of the nurses; which ones were prompt and proper. When were their shifts? Who watched TV, on the propped up TV in the station’s corner, and when? Which shows, even though sometimes that was obvious. She always could tell when someone watched Judge Judy. She could always spot her own.

For the ones who did crosswords, how long did they keep their eyes down? Who worked graveyard, in particular? Who paid the least attention to her?

Who isn’t paying me enough attention?

She could tell from their skin who smoked, and from their fingers. Who had a boyfriend, boy or girl, and who was happy. Who judged her. They all judged her, but perhaps some could empathize, too. None seemed happy, but the least judgmental she took notice to. They were the marks.

So she waited, and she waited. She bided her time. She had a few more meals with them, over a few more days, and weeks. Jell-O and government chicken. Beans and rice. Quesadillas. A club sandwich, if she was lucky. A hot pretzel on Sunday nights.

Whilst plotting, she considered her life. Her children didn’t care about her. In fact, maybe they put her here? Maybe they think I should be in jail? I’ve been with them since they were born. At least I wanted to be. Those ingrates! They have no respect for me. You can’t lock me up! I birthed you.

But now you’ve backed her into a corner, and she lives for that.

You underestimate me - you don’t love me. Forget me, like they all do. Forget me, just like my dad. Forget me, just like my dad always has my whole life.

You’re just like my dad.

Clover found herself outside, that night. She’d waited until cigarette time – about 2:15 AM, Wednesday, during their break - and she was beyond the parking lot by three. Without the ability to read, write, talk, or particularly walk, she’d found freedom. Against all odds, she was free.

Her hips had faltered while in the coma, and they had begun to split when she fell – “I cracked,” she’d later say. Her muscles had atrophied, and she was on wobbly legs, but even still she did it. She was lousy with grit.

She unclasped the window and she crawled over the side, onto the grass – it was a first floor facility – and she made her way to the gate. Falling, some - stumbling - but every time she fell she got back up. With bruised hands and knees, and gravelly paws, she got out. She unlatched the latch and pushed through the gate and was on the side of the highway. Without the ability to talk, she flagged down a KIA. It pulled up beside her and rolled down its window.

With a heavy tongue, Clover would explain herself. She’s an actress; she was a star! I’m trapped here against my will. My kids did it to me! They don’t care about me at all! I need your help, okay? So, help me? Help me! Please help me!

But that’s not what came out.

Eventually they found Clover crawling by the highway near an entrance ramp. Still in her blue hospital gown, but untied. The car she’d stopped quickly sped away. Luckily there weren’t many others. Covid was new, so the roads were clear. That saved her.

Claudette finished her cigarette and looked back in on the room and saw that it was empty and that the window was open. She couldn’t understand how Clover was capable, and more so willing, to escape from care. But it was hard not to admire it.

Soon after that they called her son, Jack, to tell him.

It was time for her to go.

Part 2 coming soon!

The Clover series will be a multi-part new project for premium subscribers, once or twice monthly, so, as I said before, get involved!

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Also, I’m thinking of a new mailbag called Questions for Tatum, so if you have any join the chat or send to me directly, if you’d prefer to be anonymous.

I love you all,

KJM

When my dad and mom got divorced, there was about a year before he met Patty, and Sean and I had two beds in our room. He took turns sleeping with us, or we played rock, paper, scissors. The short end of the stick was t…

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It’s a little hard on my mom - they’ve had a tough go of it, at times, and for some reason Tatum often takes it out on her. But I wanted Emily to know that someone sees it, and gets it - that I see her, and get her - and I wanted her to feel that that day. That seemed like a good present.

Emily has stepped up a bunch recently, and I can’t quite be there, so I wanted to say thank you.

Sometimes love is a hug and sometimes it’s letting someone know you know. It’s pretty personal, so it’ll be behind the paywall. I’ll see ya’ll next week!

K

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I’m doing this from memory, so I’ll take a little grace.

“What’s up, killer?” I shoute…

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This is a special Mother’s Day release. Back Tuesday, May 19.

I call you Tatum, sometimes, because you weren’t always a mom, although when you were you were at your best, and that’s why you’re still here, today. I call you Tatum because your name is Tatum but also because it was a reminder that maybe, sometimes, I needed more, but that doesn’t mean I’m going anywhere — I know me leaving has always made you scared. I called you Tatum, most of my life — and sometimes still do — because you liked to say we were friends. I called you Tatum because you were happiest — or at least you smiled the most — when someone called you my sister. I call you Tatum because sometimes I miss my mom.

But today I can call you Mama, and I do. When I was little, you were my mom, until your boyfriend gave you heroin. You were my mom when you were clean, between rehabs, but then sometimes you were Tatum, too. Tatum used to leave in the middle of the night and sometimes not come back before morning. Tatum didn’t have a choice.

I used to think Tatum took my mom away. Now I think Mom and Tatum just wanted something different. I think Mom and Tatum didn’t always get along.

I remember when I was in treatment and they asked me to distance myself from you, because you were still using.

“She’s sober, for her,” I said.

“That’s not a thing,” they answered.

“She’s doing as well as she can,” I offered.

“That’s what enabling is,” they leaned in and told me. “Low expectations.”

I tried to do what they said, Tatum, but you fought it. When I got sober it felt like abandoning you because I don’t think you thought you could, and you knew we couldn’t be close anymore. I always knew you being my mother was keeping you alive, but Tatum kept growing inside you.

The bigger she got, the more I could only remember my mom.

“Boundaries,” they said. Boundaries, everyone says. I used to tell them that they didn’t understand. That if I didn’t answer your call you might kill yourself.

Until one day I didn’t answer and you did.

You were in a coma for six weeks, Mom, and I was in treatment. When you woke up you couldn’t talk, or walk, or remember. You couldn’t read when you got out of the coma, but you started drinking again. “For my pain,” you said. “For my rheumatoid.” I hoped — we all hoped — that the brain damage the stroke caused might kill Tatum, and just leave Mom, but it didn’t. Tatum has ninety-nine lives.

I don’t care that one of my earliest memories was you sending me to buy your cigarettes, or that I used to throw away your drugs. I don’t care that when I found a mirror, once, on your bathroom counter, your answer was I can do a line, if I want. I’m your mother. I don’t care that you had an overdose, again, which led to a stroke, and brain damage, and then tried to escape from the memory care facility, and then you drank. In a weird way I’m proud of you for that. That’s when I knew you were still alive. That’s when I knew you can’t kill Tatum.

But maybe, Mom, they can’t kill you.

I always believed that if I lived my own life, I would be abandoning you, but today I won’t. Today, taking care of you might actually help me. It’s hard to understand, but I don’t have to. It’s easier to do than know.

I used to tell those same counselors, again, that they didn’t understand. That I don’t want to give myself affirmations. That my problem is too much me.

“You need to give yourself more empathy,” they said. “Like you do your mother.”

But I spent too much of my life explaining myself and worrying about myself. I spent too much time justifying my behaviors and trying to be understood, always wondering what was wrong with me, and resenting you for not having a good answer.

I never asked anybody how I could be helpful.

I never asked you, Mom, how are you?

I didn’t know that in order to do that I’d have to forgive you. And I didn’t know that if I forgave you then maybe today might be okay for me too.

I wonder if I just feel guilty that I couldn’t save you, and that’s why I do what I do. I answer your calls, even though there are plenty. I arrange your doctor’s appointments, even though you go just to be seen. I order your groceries, even though you’re addicted to granola. I love you even though sometimes you make it hard.

But I also don’t have to save you anymore because you’re safe. Like a year and a half ago you told me you wanted to kill yourself. On your phone, you have voice-to-text enabled, but also text-to-speech. When there’s a word you want to remember, you save it in your notes and find it when you need it. It talks back to you flatly, like a computer. Suicidal — you pressed your phone and it read. You were drinking, then, and I thought to fly out, and rescue you. I thought of what I’d always done.

But instead, I finally understood that I can’t convince you to want to live.

I said: “Okay, mom. I love you. If you wanna try and stop, I think I can help you. But if you don’t I understand that, too.”

You told me to go fuck myself, but then you called me and I helped you. You haven’t had a drink since then, or a drug, and for that I’m proud of you. I’ve never really seen you, at anything, really try. But you do today. Sometimes I call you and you’re busy and you don’t have time for me. Somehow that feels less like Tatum and more like my mom.

I’m sorry I used to drink just to deal with you. When you called, I’d have a drink before I dialed you back. I promised myself I would never be like you — that I knew exactly what not to do. Yes, I drank. And then coke, because I worked in a bar, and doesn’t everyone? And painkillers, because they weren’t dope. And more painkillers, because I work so hard. And then more to just get out of bed. And then all of them because I had to. I felt bad for you — I sympathized — but I was different.

Today I’m so very lucky that we’re exactly the same.

We’re not the same in our experience, or in our point of view. You’ve been through everything — from an Oscar and a bad dad, to a divorce, a heroin problem and a young boyfriend — but I haven’t made it easy on myself, either. I almost drank myself to death, and you were almost at my funeral. I was so positive that I was different than you that I ended up being, in many ways, worse.

But the worst ones sometimes get better because we have to. We either die or we have to change.

I’m so lucky that I’m like you, because I get it now. Because I empathize I can forgive. I remember when I turned a corner with drugs, and it felt like there was no coming back, and I said, “Oh. That’s why.”

That’s why you used drugs around us. You didn’t have a choice. I didn’t have a choice.

But you do today, Mama, and I believe in you. But also that doesn’t matter — you have to believe in you. It doesn’t matter how much you love me if that doesn’t help you try.

So maybe we’re okay, and we can just love each other. There doesn’t have to be any lies, or secrets, anymore. You don’t have to complain about your pain all the time because I believe that you’re hurting. I don’t have to fly to LA every month to prove to you I love you. If you want, Mom, you can just believe me, and maybe if you do that you’ll believe in you, too. You could even believe in something bigger, if you wanted, because that makes you feel normal. Something that’s bigger than celebrity, because I think that’s only ever made you feel small.

In my mind, your stroke is the best thing that ever happened to you, and us. You’re alive today, which you most certainly wouldn’t have been, and there’s some hope you might be tomorrow.

Your other son told me, after what happened, that he’d already grieved you — that that’s how he survived — but I didn’t believe that. I believed he did — he has — but I didn’t believe that you were gone. Soon after your facility called me to tell me you escaped and I was positive. You can’t kill my ma. In fact, she’ll kill you for trying.

So I don’t care today, Mom — I love you for who you are. I don’t care, and I guess that’s what they mean when they say unconditional. A wiser person than me once told me there’s no such thing as unconditional love. If you get punched in the face you might pull away — that’s a condition. But you did that a lot, and you still can, but I’m not going anywhere. In fact I respect your fight.

I’ll still help you, Tatum, because you’re my mom. I forgive you, and you forgive me, and we forgive others, because we have to. Otherwise we’d both be dead.

And with forgiveness, I can see, and then I remember. I can see, first, how much you’ve always loved me, and how support is your first thought. I know how much you worried about me, and how much I kept you up. I know how guilty you felt about me using, too, and how much that broke your heart. I can see how big your heart is — I can see it coming back — and how you want what’s best for the world. I understand your causes — although they always make me scared, because they always make you sad — but you believe the world can be better, and for that you’re willing to fight. You gifted me with a big heart, and you taught me how to use it. You taught me about Big Love, which comes with big fear, and big heartbreak, but if you can manage those, you showed me how to give myself entirely to someone, and wear my heart outside my chest. You’ve always been mine, ours — the world’s — champion, and being there for you has let me see it. I get to see you get better, and fight. I get to see you be a mom, and support me. I get to see you find your way back to the thing you were always the best at, loving me, and your two other children. Loving yourself has never been so easy, but you can get there.

All you have to do is try. I’ve only ever hoped you could try, and I remember the day, teaching you to read, when I realized that’s just what you were doing. When I knew I was right all along.

I know what you mean when you sometimes say you want your life back. I’ve been there, too. This can’t be all there is — I miss shutting it off for a while. In many ways, for us, that feels better. But I promise you it’ll get better, Ma. It’s just the beginning. You’re alive, and you want to be alive, and I don’t care that you’re crazy, because I’m crazy, and I want you to be alive, too. So when you feel sad just try and remember. When you feel Tatum coming back, just call yourself “Mom.”

So Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. And Tatum too. Oh yes, and Nana — you’re a grandmother, now. Your mom never got better, but you can. You are. We are.

I’m proud to be Tatum’s son.

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Here’s part two.

When Tom moved to Craryville he thought maybe he’d reacclimatize himself with nature. That he’d become a regular at a bakery. That he’d be up early, on Sundays, to beat the line for scones. That he’d take long walks, and not need headphones, and maybe even wear a weighted vest - or ruck sack - so he could get stronger. That he’d buy an old truck and not wear his seat belt and get a dog and hopefully, eventually, that he’d call old friends when he got lonely and maybe they were better, too. He wouldn’t watch as much TV up there. Maybe he’d get a record player. Maybe there’d be a record shop. Maybe he’d start a dad band, after he learned how to play guitar. Maybe he’d become a dad.

Maybe he’d find an artist girl who he could teach about the world. Maybe they could teach each other. They’d talk about Didion and what was wrong with America. They’d talk about Pavement and how much they missed Layne. They’d muse about where they would retire – he liked Nerano, in Italy, off the Amalfi coast. He’d read about it once - it’s where they invented spaghetti with zucchini.

She’d be preferential to Spain - she’d like late dinners, and she’d like to sleep a lot, so they’d take siestas, too. They’d sleep naked together, and meld with each other, and they’d be happy – he’d be happy – again. Or maybe even for the first time.

Instead he went to a sparsely attended AA meeting in Ghent because the ones in Great Barrington were too loud for him. When he felt lonely in the past he’d done the same - find people - but he hoped this time would be different, even though it had never helped enough before.

At this point, in his life, he was still interested in being hopeful.

Before Tom got arrested and moved upstate he would occasionally try and get sober. He was in his late 20s, and she had forced him to do so. The one in reference was named Tammie, but this wasn’t the only time. He felt resentful that he was forced. It wasn’t his idea so it was a bad one.

Well, not forced, but Tammie certainly pressured! She told him if he didn’t she’d leave. That he was a deadbeat. That even though they were squatting that she didn’t have to be - she just did it to be with him.

“We’re artists,” he’d say. “We’re not squatting. We’re taking advantage of a system that doesn’t look out for us. Instead of getting lost we hide.”

“Whatever,” she replied. “You’re whiny,” and then she walked out of the room. “No more drugs or I’m gone.”

She said that he used more than she did so he needed to stop first. He relented, but just not to fight.

He used to wait outside the meetings drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes - so when she tracked him he would look like he went - and he would stare at the cop bar across the street. He couldn’t ‘til she was asleep ‘cause she could smell it on him, so he waited. The bar was called The Triangle. It had green floors and neon and a pool table which leaned down towards the back right corner - so your ball always trailed right - and bloodless artificial light.

The type of place you might go to hide for a while, where other people were running from the law. Where the bartender’s an older woman because the men who frequent need to feel cared for. Where you’re surrounded by other people who hate their family, and so you’re right at home. Where they don’t wanna admit this is the closest they can come to being back in the womb. Where cigarettes make them breathe better.

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