Book Review of "Drunken Angel"

A hipster gets his shit straight—sort of.

Addiction memoirs remain one of the most popular forms of autobiography on the shelves. But now, when considering a new addition to the genre, it’s impossible not to wonder whether the claims being made by the author are genuine. Since serious drunks often end up visiting the lower circles of hell during the course of their disease, hair-raising and improbable scenes are lamentably common—that is part of the genre’s charm, if that is the right word for it. But how are we to react now? The answer is, you can’t know, and you never really could, that bastard James Frey notwithstanding.

But read them we do. Alan Kaufman, the author of the lively but exasperating autobiography of alcoholism, Drunken Angel, sweetens the pot considerably. He drops so many names, and finds himself involved in so many improbably episodes of transnational mayhem and kinky sex, that the escapades could almost fill a Bond novel. But to be fair, there’s nothing debonair going on here; not from a man who describes himself at one stage as “filthy, nauseous, hungover, astonished at my gargantuan appetite for the abyss.” And a willing suspension of disbelief, an attitude of innocent until proven guilty, must hold sway in the end, else why read them at all?

Alan Kaufman is more Jack Kerouac than James Bond: One of the founding members of California’s Spoken Word scene, editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, Kaufman bounced through the beat/hippie/downtown scenes in New York, and San Francisco and Israel, writing for Jewish publications, treating his wives shabbily, and blacking out all over whatever town he happened to be in. It’s not pretty, and it’s not meant to be. The deep layer of poverty and grunge that settles over the author’s existence between bouts of the literary high life caused Kirkus Reviews to complain that “Drunken Angels” was marred by the author’s tendency to whip schizophrenically “between manic moments of literary self-aggrandizing and deeply depressive moments of shocking wreckage.” That’s true—but Kaufman is also a classic case of dual diagnosis, an alcoholic who also suffers from delusions, hallucinations, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after his time spent in the Israeli Army. (It’s complicated.) Also known as co-morbidity, this combination often makes for complicated, even potentially fatal difficulties, as on a bus ride with his wife one night, when he “realized that certain passengers were Satanists who had singled out Anna and me for human sacrifice.” Not good.

Down and almost out, he is scooped from the gutter by an acceptance letter from the Columbia University Master of Fine Arts program, where he hobnobs with Tama Janowitz and Steve Jobs’ sister, the writer Mona Simpson. But always, there are “the nightmares, the operatives, the unfolding skein of sinister designs” that Kaufman must negotiate as his mental health deteriorated. And the drinking never really stopped.

Finally, in order to both prove he’s sick and to signal his distress, Kaufman slit his wrists, then “staggered to the bathroom, wrapped white towels around the bloody wounds, and with a sense of exhilaration, called 911.” Perhaps the reader may be forgiven for not sharing in the exhilaration at this stage of the narrative, after reading about the author being ejected from crash pads by acid dealers for bad debts, dodging alimony and child support, neglecting a daughter on another continent, veering into sadomasochistic sex (in considerable detail), sleeping in filthy gutters, on warm street grates, on park benches. Kaufman made a habit of sitting down at restaurant tables to finish off the leftovers. “Ate donuts from garbage cans, pizza crusts from sidewalks, half-rotten fruit found in doorways. I kept my cash for booze…” In one excruciating scene, he tracks down an ex-girlfriend in her class at Columbia, calls her a whore in front of the class, and hits her in the face. A roomful of witnesses to that one, presumably. “In all this,” he tells us,” I never once lost my grip on the scotch bottle. Not a drop lost.”

So, that was it for Columbia. “All my life,” Kaufman writes, “ I had been going, fleeing. Leaving. Home, friends, jobs. Cities, countries, armies. Marriages, families—everything…. Anything but this, anyone but you, anywhere but here.” That was also about it for common sense from our anti-hero. We are pretty safe, it seems to me, in assuming that only a blackout alcoholic with severe mental problems is likely to wake up with a cruel hangover, married to the total stranger he finds lying in bed next to him. And then proceed to try and make the marriage work.

But in time, the story arc swings toward redemption, and Kaufmann falls in with AA and the Twelve Steppers.  “You’re allergic to alcohol and obsessed with it at the same time," an AA companion tells him. “The combination is fatal and unstoppable. Once booze hits your system, the jig’s up: you must drink.” And, to his immense credit, at long last, Kaufman gets straight, and eventually stays that way, even if the sordid circumstances of his life do not instantly change for the better. One of the most valuable lessons Kaufman takes away from AA (one of the most valuable lessons many people learn there) is a hoary old maxim called HALT: Don’t get too Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. All serious trigger conditions for relapse in freshly abstinent alcoholics and other drug addicts.

His book is a reminder that all of an addict’s life problems do not blessedly vanish the instant he or she stops drinking or using, any more than a regular schedule of insulin injections ends all problems for diabetics—the more so in cases where addiction is mixed with diagnosable mental illness. Getting clean and sober does not eliminate Kaufman’s sexual aggression, his tendency to lie to his wives, or bring back his ability to write steadily for a living.

In the end, Kaufman met a lot of famous people, managed to get published in some very hip venues, helped spark a poetry movement in San Francisco—and has now been clean and sober for more than 20 years. So what does he have to say about the prime mover of this amped-up narrative, alcoholism itself? It happened in the usual way—a formative alcohol experience at a young age. In early high school, a football player, Kaufman went out with some school buddies and without much thought began passing around those big gallon jugs of cheap Gallo wine. “I felt the universe swim into view. I stumble, drunk, to the grass and lay with arms and legs akimbo, like an altar sacrifice smiling at the blazing stars. For the first time in my life, I felt connected, happy, sure that life belonged to me and I to it. And I drank myself unconscious.”

Travelling alone in Germany, late in the book, after a nightmarish tableaux of temptation arranged for him by a cadre of Russian soldiers ready to pour vodka down his gullet in the spirit of macho brotherhood, Kaufman breaks away and finds a quiet spot in a deserted train car, and holds his own AA meeting in his head. “My name is Alan, I’m an alcoholic,” he says silently to himself. And then he says the Serenity Prayer, “then the 12 steps, and, appointing myself as guest speaker, shared about the experience I’d just had with Russian soldiers and endless vodka.” The phantom faces of his AA friends “kept me company right until I reached Berlin. And they are always with me, to this day, the meeting that I carry in my soul.”

Photo credit: http://www.booksmith.com/

Falling Down and Getting Up: Nic Sheff’s New Addiction Book

 

Sheff jumps back on the carousel, lives to tell about it.

What would it be like to have written a drug memoir and an autobiography before you turned 30? Would it seem like the end or the beginning? Are there any worlds left to conquer?

The last decade has brought us fleshed-out young examples by Augusten Burroughs, age 37 (Dry); Joshua Lyons, 35 (Pill Head); and Benoit Denizet-Lewis, 33 (America Anonymous). This more or less fits the pattern established by the doyenne of the genre, Elizabeth Wurtzel, who, at age 35, wrote the addiction memoir More, Now, Again. And now along comes Nic Sheff to put them all to shame, making geezers out of every one of them.  Sheff wrote Tweak at 24, telling the world about addiction and how he’d conquered it. Well, as it turns out, not really. But for twenty-somethings, a week is like a year, so two years later, in actual time, comes We All Fall Down, in which we learn—if we didn’t learn it the first time—that the author is still learning about addiction, doesn’t have it figured, and isn’t really qualified to give out lessons to anybody just yet. Or perhaps I should wait for We All Stood Up Again two years from now before drawing any conclusions.

I know I am being a bit unfair to this well-intentioned young author. I blame it on the flood of weighty pronouncements found in the addiction memoirs that have flooded the market lately. God bless ‘em all, but Amazon, by listing Sheff’s book as “Young Adult,” probably gets it about right. You can’t go into these projects expecting great literature. Sheff’s text, perhaps in a deliberate appeal to younger readers, is peppered with whatevers, and clauses that begin with “like.” His favorite adjective, without question, is “super.” Too many one-sentence paragraphs give the book an irritatingly staccato effect at times.

But let’s get beyond that. There are good things here, and Sheff is certainly qualified to tell an addiction story: “We stayed locked in our apartment. I went into convulsions shooting cocaine. My arm swelled up with an abscess the size of a baseball. My body stopped producing stool, so I had to reach up inside with a gloved hand and….” And so forth.

There is a standard tension in addiction memoirs by young writers. The dictates of group therapy and 12-step treatment programs clash mightily with their innately sensitive bullshit detectors. It is hard—understandably—to buy into some of the more narrow-minded and coercive treatment programs they’ve been tossed into along the way. I was chilled to hear Sheff quoting substance abuse counselors threatening to commit him to lockdown psych wards, or blackmailing him into signing contracts about who he could or could not be friends with in the compound. For a free-spirited, open-minded young artist, the distinction between rehab and a Chinese re-education camp is pretty much lost entirely when personal freedoms are arbitrarily limited by lightly qualified drug counselors. One of the more compelling themes of the book is that rehab, as practiced in many treatment centers across the country, is something of a cuckoo’s nest joke.  It is a mutual con, where everybody fools everybody in order to turn a profit, on the one hand, and discharge legal or parental obligations, on the other. “Infallible institutions,” as Sheff derides them, “that know, absolutely, the difference between right and wrong.”

So Sheff plays along, he shucks, he jives, he lies, and it’s hard not to sympathize with him as he summarizes one counselor’s admonitions: “We don’t allow any non-twelve-step-related reading material, and you won’t be able to play that guitar you brought with you—so we’ll go ahead and keep that locked in the office.” Much like prisoners who leave prison chomping at the bit to commit new and more lucrative crimes, these kids are coming out of misguided drug rehab centers with nothing but an urgent desire to wipe away the bad memories of mandatory treatment by getting wasted as soon as possible.

And yet, and yet… “Once I had some knowledge about alcoholism and addiction, it was impossible to go back to using all carefree and fun,” Sheff writes. “The meetings and the things people told me had pierced the armor of my fantasy world. Somewhere inside I knew the truth.”

Maybe there won’t be a need for a third memoir. The book has a provisionally happy ending. Sheff found the right doctor, got on the right medications after a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder (comorbidity, the elephant in the rehab room), and, when last seen, is clean and optimistic.

Sheff does have an appealing, Holden Caulfield-type persona, and this Catcher in the Rye mentality perhaps excuses the litany of things in this world that are phony, fucked up, and lame to this endlessly hip kid. All carpets are faded, all motel rooms are dingy. Even his airline boarding pass is “stupid.” But the style sometimes works for him: “Thinking, man, even that cat’s got enough sense not to jump on a hot grill twice, no matter how good whatever’s left cooking on there might look to her.” Or the time when he realizes that, like any old alkie, it was time to “start switching up liquor stores. That goddamn woman makes me feel as guilty as hell. And, I mean, who is she to judge? Christ.” And he’s got some nice truisms to deliver: “The most fucked-up detoxes I’ve ever seen are the people coming off alcohol. It’s worse than heroin, worse than benzos, worse than anything. Alcohol can pickle your brain—leaving you helpless, like a child—infantilized—shitting in your pants—ranting madness—disoriented—angry—terrified… You don’t go out like Nic Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, with a gorgeous woman riding you till your heart stops.”

Photo Credit: http://www.goodreads.com/

A River of Rage and Redemption

An interview with writer James Brown.

“Who could blame a reader, after James Frey's discredited 'A Million Little Pieces,' for being skeptical of the pyrotechnic literature of addiction?” asks Susan Salter Reynolds in her review of James Brown's “This River” in the March 20 Los Angeles Times. Besides, it’s a cliché to assert that former addicts always know more about drug addiction than the so-called “experts.” But Los Angeles writer James Brown, a professor of creative writing at Cal State San Bernardino, is a special case. Brown has a sharp, restless mind, a hair-raising background, and has read just about everything worth reading on the subject of addiction. In “This River,” James Brown has come not to bury us in bullshit, but to praise the ineffable mysteries of the human condition. The author writes of the time when, battered and baffled, he clung to the notion of sheer will, of having total mastery over his own destiny—even as the devastating deconstruction of everyday life that drug addiction produces was proceeding apace all around him.

What saved him from dying of drug-related misadventures, like his brother and his sister and a shocking number of his childhood friends? “This River” is no ordinary tale of redemption, but rather a dogged, unadorned, very human description of one man’s attempts to understand his disorder, and to find some way to control it.

 I asked Brown if he would submit to a brief Q and A by email to be published here at Addiction Inbox, and he graciously agreed.

Q. Recent surveys suggest that kids who had their first drink at 12 or 13 are far more likely to experience alcohol dependence as adults. Did you have any early formative experiences with alcohol or other drugs that in hindsight seem significant to you?

James Brown: I’ve heard about this survey, along with another statistic cited in Under the Influence: A Guide to the Myths and Realities of Alcoholism by Milam and Ketcham that children born to an alcoholic mother or father have a four times greater chance of becoming alcoholic themselves than if they’d come from teetotaler parents. 

 Given both studies, if there’s truth to them, and I believe there is, I got off to a great start. I took my first hit of marijuana when I was nine, by twelve I’d begun drinking, and by fourteen I had my first taste of heroin. Alcohol and drugs were a way of life in the neighborhoods I grew up in, poor neighborhoods in poor apartment complexes, where nearly all of the kids were raised by single parents, typically mothers.  

All the kids I knew and hung out with drank and used. I lost contact with nearly all of my childhood friends over the years, but one became a heroin addict and bank robber (and a good one, if there is such a thing, with over 40 robberies before he got caught), and is currently in San Quentin; another shot one too many loads of meth and died of a heart attack in his 40’s; and a good friend, one of my best friends, is still hanging in there. He always loved his marijuana and now gets it prescribed, but he’s quit drinking.

So if I’m any example, and if my childhood friends are any example, I’d have to say, based on personal experience, that I believe there is a strong connection between addiction and getting off to an early start at it.

Q. Tom McGuane once referred to alcoholism as "the writer's black lung disease." Why do you think so many prominent writers have been addicted to alcohol or other drugs?

James Brown: The list of alcoholic writers is long: Hemingway, Kerouac, Eugene O’Neil, Dorothy Parker, Fitzgerald, Jean Rhys, Poe, Faulkner, and on and on. The only rationalization I can come up with, at least in regard to my own addiction, is spending long, long hours alone in a room, trapped in my own head, imagination, feelings, memories and thoughts, and when it’s time to resurface, to leave that room and return to the world that exists outside the sheltered perimeters of my mind, I’d want a drink to ease myself back into it. Without that drink, and the many that followed it, because not even from the beginning could I or did I want to stop after just one or two, it was stimuli overload.  Lights seemed brighter.  Noises louder. I was expected by my wife and children to just return to earth and join their lives when a big part of me was still locked up in that room.

But these are rationalizations. As the years passed, and the alcohol and drugs took greater hold of me, using and drinking was no longer about easing back into the world but eluding it altogether, where I didn’t have to feel or think.   Did booze or drugs help me creatively? No. That’s myth, a lie, this notion of the tragic artist. Outside of Kerouac’s On The Road, which he wrote on speed, and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which he purportedly completed in 21 days spun on coke, and maybe a few other writers, maybe a dozen other exceptions, generally speaking writing under the influence typically produces work that reflects an insensible, messed-up consciousness.  That’s scribbling, not writing. Good writing requires clarity of mind and vision. 

Q. Can you describe your experience with the controversial drug Seroquel?

James Brown: For me Seroquel has been something of a miracle drug and helpful in maintaining my sobriety. As I’m sure you already know it’s categorized as an antipsychotic and classified as a “major tranquilizer,” as opposed to the “minor tranquilizers,” typically members of the benzodiazepine family. Why Seroquel has become a drug of abuse, I have no idea, because it doesn’t get you high, at least not for me, and there’s no sense of the euphoria associated with Valium and Xanax. Why there’s this big push (all the TV ads) to prescribe it for those suffering from depression, I also have no idea, other than the obvious, which is to make the pharmaceutical companies more money. Seroquel is potent stuff, and was prescribed to me for manic-depression (I prefer this term because it more aptly describes the nature of the illness than the euphemistic “bipolar”), post-traumatic stress syndrome and mild schizophrenia.

It took my nervous system about a week or better to adjust, with side effects of blurred vision and garbled speech, but once the sides passed the drug made a major difference in my ability to sleep without the nightmares that have plagued me for many, many years. Also, it made a big difference with the mania aspect of my mental illness, keeping my system at a relatively even keel, but I can only take it at night. If I use it during the day, I can’t function well, I can’t think clearly or quickly, and I have to be focused when I teach and write.  For depression, I use Wellbutrin, which is effective for me.  Again, I don’t understand, or agree, with the aggressive marketing of Seroquel.  It’s nothing to mess around with and should only be taken if absolutely necessary for ones mental stability.

Love, Loss, and Addiction

Review of “This River” by James Brown.

James Brown, author of “The L.A. Diaries,” has offered up another candid and courageous memoir in his new book, “This River.” In a series of related vignettes, the book amplifies and extends the basic story of Brown’s life as chronicled in “L.A. Diaries,”--a harrowing tale of genetic fate and social failure; a dysfunctional family riven by alcoholism and drug addiction, culminating in the suicide of the author’s brother, followed by the suicide of his  sister.

Throughout his descents into hard drug use, his ups and downs along the alcoholic’s rehab trail, Brown remains a fierce observer of his own behavior, and, heartbreakingly, its effect on those around him: “Worrying, damaging, terrorizing those closest to us, intentionally or not, is what alcoholics, addicts, and the mentally ill do best.” As was true of “The L.A. Diaries,” Brown writes in a spare, direct, unflinching style—a bracing antidote to the Stuart Smalleys of the world.  His observations on A.A., anti-craving medications, and antipsychotic drugs are those of a man unwilling to let prior prejudices and built-in excuses deter him from a search for the true nuts and bolts of his condition.

Reaching that point of understanding, and comprehending the need for action—none of it typically comes fast, cheap, or easy. Brown, who teaches in the MFA program at Cal State San Bernardino, masterfully captures the internal monologues of the addictive mind:

"Getting hooked is for weaklings, the idiots who can’t control themselves, those losers who end up broke and penniless, wandering the streets at night like zombies, like the walking dead…. For the budding addict, the supply is never enough, but your only regret, at least to date, is that you didn’t come across this miracle potion sooner."

The internal dialog eventually becomes an existential struggle: “True or not, I resist the idea that mental illness and alcoholism are somehow inborn. Accepting that premise means embracing the notion of fate, and I don’t. I prefer to believe that I’m in full control.”

As who among us does not. And although none of us are truly in full control—we are all a conflicting welter of “I”s, of shifting identities and roles—it is through the dissociations characteristic of addictive illness that the Jekyll and Hyde nature of these changes, which are somehow “in the blood,” sometimes manifest themselves most graphically.

Does the author prevail? He does, for now, and that is how we must leave it:

Things are changing deep inside you and have been for some time: hormones, genes, brain chemistry, all of it adapts to the alcohol and drugs you continually dump into your body. The cells habituate. The cells literally mutate to accommodate your cravings and now they crave too. Now your addiction has more to do with physiology than psychology. Now it’s the body that robs the mind of its power to choose, and it’s not long before you’ll wish you never came across that miracle potion, those powders and pills.

With suberb jacket reviews from the likes of Tim O’Brien, Robert Olmstead, and Duff Brenna, “This River” is a short read that will lodge itself firmly in your memory.  I read it in one sitting, and I bet you do, too.

Photo Credit: http://radaris.com/p/James/Rivers/

A (Belated) Review of "The Los Angeles Diaries"

A powerful—and true—memoir of addiction.

I’ll admit it: I don’t like drug memoirs. I didn’t like drug memoirs even before James Frey blew up the whole genre by telling a heartfelt story about addiction that turned out to be a tissue of lies.

But The Los Angeles Diaries by James Brown transcends all that. I’ve never read a better true story about addiction. It’s also one of the best modern autobiographies I have ever read, addiction notwithstanding. In addition to having been an alcoholic and a meth head, James Brown is a very talented writer, the author of four novels, and it shows.

First published in 2003, The Los Angeles Diaries is a spare, utterly harrowing account of the author’s experience in a family marked by a history of virulent alcoholism. Brown’s unvarnished truth-telling about addiction is evident early on: “I know there’s no excuse for getting drunk when you’re supposed to be home with your family and I wish knowing this would stop me from doing it. I wish that’s all it took. That I could will it to happen. But it doesn’t work that way, it never has, and in my state of mind, at this particular moment, I can’t imagine living without it.”

While offering up memorable sketches of his boyhood in Los Angeles, Brown paints a devastating picture of the “denial and rage” that characterize full-blown addiction. He deals with the suicide of family members, divorce, the neglect of his children—all of it caused by addiction—without a shred of self-justification. It is, he writes, “a constant quest for more when there can never be enough.”

Interspersed throughout are the author’s mordantly funny adventures in the screen trade, as book after book is optioned for the movies, taken apart and ultimately scrapped before reaching the screen. However, we are never far from the author’s chilling revelation: “Never underestimate the power of denial.”

I can’t improve on the review that appeared in Washington Post Book World: “It’s the balance of agony and grace, of course, that makes life so ferociously interesting. Brown has perfectly captured that balance in his unpretentious, very profound book.”

Inspiring, witty, and bleak, all at the same time, James Brown’s book will appeal to anyone with an interest in addiction—and anyone who enjoys tough, spare prose.

addiction drugs alcoholics anonymous