State of the State of Mind

Some updates on the status of The Small Bow universe and another rehab anniversary.

On Tuesday, a wonderful thing happened—Publishers Marketplace announced that my oft-stalled memoir has finally found a home. After over EIGHT years of several failed proposals, two agents, and four or five title changes, a deal finally got done.

The title was taken from the annual New Year’s essay, which is remixed and republished in the newsletter each year.

The contract stipulates that I write many thousands of words, which I expected to cause me a certain level of distress, but I was unfazed. There is plenty of material to choose from, some of which you’ve read here in this newsletter, and then other stuff you have not and other stuff I have not, so we’ll both be surprised when it arrives at your local bookstore in 2027. That may seem like eons from now, but I know better. I can shut my eyes tight and open them, and the publishing day will be upon us because months and years fall faster now. 

If there is a worry, it is what toll the writing process could take on my emotional sobriety. There is a certain anxiety about re-entering some dark rooms that should be avoided. As I explained to another writer who is also in recovery, “I don’t know if it’s wise to stick my face into the furnace.” 

To keep my peace, I’ll need a more vigorous program than I have now, so I’m pulling that together with some other mental guardrails. 

But today, I’m celebrating the win—Shirley Temples for everyone.

Thanks to Erin, Jordan, and Doug for finishing the deal.

Also, this book announcement came close to the 9th anniversary of my rehab stint. One of the sample chapters I submitted was based on a TSB essay from 2021 about that ragged part of my life. I’ve included that essay in the feature pit below.

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THE END

OF THE BEGINNING

OF THE END

Originally published October 20, 2021

*****

On Saturday, October 17, 2015, I took a selfie just a few minutes before my US Airways flight departed JFK for West Palm Beach International Airport (PBI), arriving at approximately 9:50 a.m. This was the third flight I’d booked to PBI in 36 hours. I missed the first two. I wanted to “push the date,” as I frequently did then.

This time, it wasn’t an important meeting I was bailing on, a doctor’s appointment, or a work deadline, but drug and alcohol rehab, my second attempt in two months to get institutionally sober. Eventually, I wanted to go and knew I needed to go, but I didn’t want to go just yet. 

I took a selfie right before takeoff. I’m wearing a black hoodie and a dour expression, and I’m giving the finger, but I completely forget why. The photo was evidence that, yes, yes, I finally got on the damn plane. Here I am! It was time.

It was a half-empty flight, with an eerie lack of turbulence, even on takeoff. It was like the plane just floated the whole way there. I sat in the middle row. I had that paper pillow behind my neck but didn’t sleep. I had a tin of Kodiak, but I didn’t need it. I usually bought some because I couldn’t fly for more than two hours without nicotine for most of my adult life. I used to buy a Snapple at the airport, chug it all before takeoff, and then spit in the bottle throughout the flight. I’d get up once or twice to dump the sloppy brown dip spit from the bottle into that noisy toilet. Sometimes, the tobacco hunks stuck to the insides of the bowl. I would reach in with one of those cheap paper towels and scoop it out because I didn’t want the next person to think I was a scumbag, even if I was.

No dip on this flight, though. That felt like a huge first step away from the darkness and into whatever light awaits after I return. I drank two cans of “Mr and Mrs T’s” bloody mary mix without any vodka. I stared at the can and realized there were no periods after the r and the s. Without any vodka, you notice things like that.

As the plane descended, the pilot announced that the temperature in West Palm Beach was about 77 degrees. “Welcome home to those who call this home. I hope everyone else enjoys their vacation. It’s gonna be a perfect weekend in South Florida.”

I could make this a vacation, I thought. I could push the date on this rehab stint one more time. I should enjoy this perfect weather. A few days in the sun could be all I need to straighten out. What if, instead of rehab, I took a cab to some hotel and went out that night for crabs and beers like a Normal Person?

But the idea that I would disappoint people again—I can’t. Then I got really cold. I felt that kind of cold once when I had some minor heart surgery to repair a troublesome tachycardia. I’d been operated on before, but that time, for whatever reason—the scratchy gown, harsh lighting, some rando intern using a plastic disposable razor to shave my groin area—I began to shake. I shook like my dog used to when we took her to the vet. “He’s got the shivers,” one nurse told another nurse. “Can we give him something for the shivers?” 

When I left my gate, a caramel-sunburnt man of about 60 named Bud was waiting for me. He held a sign with my last name misspelled. He was there to drive me to the detox center a few miles away from the center in Lake Worth. On the way there, he talked about how he was retired and volunteered for this gig because his ex-wife was “one of you guys.” He said being a rehab taxi has made it easier to forgive her for the hell she had put him through. He let me smoke in the car the whole way there, so it was a nice ride.

This was a much better start than the last time I got a ride to detox two months prior. I can’t remember what that driver’s face looked like. I waited nearly five hours for him to pick me up, and I was pretty wasted by the time he pulled up in front of my Williamsburg apartment.

For what felt like dozens of hours, he drove to a gray part of North Jersey surrounded by spooky farmland and sandwich shops. The facility was called Sunrise or Sunbeam or Sunshower—some sort of regenerative Sun. I arrived there late at night, full of Xanax and blow, and once I was all checked in, my good insurance allowed me to choose between a room with a twin bed and a roommate or a private room with a queen bed. Easy choice.

I was given Librium and Trazodone and told to grab something from the kitchen if I was hungry. They had a fridge drawer full of those Uncrustables peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that were so cold and perfect. It was one of the greatest meals of my life.

I avoided most people and kept my routine tight: Wake up. Smoke. Eat. Smoke. Half-hearted pushups in my room. Smoke. Pretend to sleep.

Everyone there was so young, but many had gone to detoxes like this two, three, half a dozen times, from Jersey to Florida to Arizona. One kid attempted to make small talk with me about my drug of choice (“What’s your DOC?”) and asked me where I was from—the usual icebreakers of the lost—but I mumbled and cut him off because he had a giant bubbly abscess the size of a cockroach on his right hand. Whatever I mumbled was probably not what I wanted to say, what everyone wanted to say: “I’m not supposed to be here.”

One of the Sun-something technicians (that’s what they call the non-medical staff there) was an arrogant 30-something dude who strutted around like a lifeguard, but instead of twirling a whistle, he carried a giant vaping device about the size of a wizard’s scepter. He ran group therapy one day and tried to browbeat us all into sobriety. “Does everyone here want to be a loser their whole life?” No one answered.

The first couple of nights in my private room, this same technician woke me up to take my vitals every hour, and he’d always remind me not to isolate. “Don’t isolate, bro.” Every time. “Don’t isolate, bro.” But that’s exactly what I did because that’s all I wanted to do. I left after nine days. 

*****

When I got dropped off at the Lake Worth detox, it, too, was called Sunrise Detox Center. I didn’t have any drugs or alcohol in my system this time around, which meant I only had to stay there a couple of days, and I would get the first available bed at the rehab. I was given Trazodone but no Librium.

There was a couple who checked in together the same day I did. They couldn’t have been more than 30, with shirts so big on their skinny bodies that it looked like they were wearing hockey jerseys. You could tell they’d been up for several days but were totally in love. They were always in each other’s laps, making out next to a sand-filled ashtray like they were at a beach house after prom.

I had to share a room and slept on a small single bed with a plastic fitted sheet. The other guy in my room was thrown out within the first couple hours I was there for sneaking in oxy. He caused a whole scene and accused the staff of stealing his money and sweatshirt.

There was another fridge full of Uncrustables, but I didn’t touch them. One of the technicians there told me David Cassidy from the Partridge Family had recently stayed for two weeks. He died two years after that from liver and kidney failure due to his alcoholism, and his daughter said his last words were “So much wasted time.” 

*****

A bed finally opened up. Bud The Driver returned to drive me from the detox center to the HARP rehab facility, a small, holistic-based program in Singer Island, Florida. Based on the website photos sent to me via email by the rehab broker I hired, HARP looked like many of the 55-and-over rental condos my parents looked at before they moved to nearby Jupiter.

Singer Island sounds fancy, but it’s more like an abandoned resort town, the kind of place that a developer in a ten-gallon hat had high hopes for until he ran out of money. And here’s some twisted geography: West Palm Beach is one of the easternmost cities in South Florida. Lunacy. 

I wanted to try harder at HARP and punish myself for my many failed attempts to get sober. So I handed over my iPhone to one of the intake people, who put it in a locker. I even agreed to share a two-bedroom dorm with three other dudes in their 20s. It was pretty much what I expected. They always bummed cigarettes, pounded pre-workout drinks before breakfast, and wore shower shoes everywhere. They also gave each other haircuts with expensive clippers in the kitchen, so hair was all over the dishes. I was sure one of them would be dead in a year. They were all nice, though.

In early morning group therapy, the facility prided itself on integrating new clients as quickly as possible, sometimes on their first days. One of their methods was straight out of an EST orientation: tell everyone three fun facts about yourself. Go. 

“I have blue and brown eyes, I love plants, and I’m getting sued by Hulk Hogan for One Hundred and Fifteen Million Dollars” was what I came up with. 

That didn’t land the way I thought it would. Another 22-year-old, who was not my roommate, looked at me strangely and asked if I was joking. He was annoyed, vaguely threatening. I wasn’t, but yeah, sure. Haha.

I was desperate to show I was smarter than them. I never got to be smarter than anyone back in New York. But I assumed I was Mensa material at this janky place in Abandoned Hobo Resort, Florida. 

During one of the group spirituality sessions, the in-house therapist discussed David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, “This Is Water,” and showed an artlessly remixed YouTube version titled “THIS IS WATER!” on a projection screen. 

Afterward, I pulled the counselor aside—an incredibly kind and hope-filled woman named Lauren—and told her that it seemed odd and crass to show that here with so many desperate people. “Ya know, the guy who wrote that essay hung himself, right?” She nodded politely but exasperatedly, and then she asked me why it was so necessary to tell her that information. I had no answer. 

I didn’t get lonely until Halloween. There was a silly, no-costume costume party in the common TV area, and everyone got to eat one piece of candy and drink one can of soda. Back in Brooklyn, I knew a huge house party was happening. There would be kegs and real costumes and mushrooms. If I hustled, I could catch a flight and be there before it ended. What if nobody wanted me there, though? 

*****

Around early November, three weeks in, things clicked for me—I got good at rehab. I perfected a backward half-court shot that would knock people out in H-O-R-S-E. I knew the exact amount of time it took to make perfect microwave popcorn. I learned how to play spades. Beach volleyball ruled. Lauren, the counselor who was annoyed by me in week one, now treated me more like a peer than a patient. She told me I was very wise, and I believed her.

*****

I still have dreams about rehab, specifically, the vans that would drive us around. They would seat ten, sometimes 12 people, and it would either have the raucous energy of a party bus headed to a wedding or be silent and nervous like we were driving through a dense fog. Our vans took us to group therapy sessions in the morning and AA meetings at night. Sometimes, we went out for donuts and coffee if we were good. We went bowling once, and I felt transported back to a 5th-grade birthday party.

One very early Sunday morning, the van took me and two very young people who were skinny and washed out from heroin to church. I wasn’t converting or even searching; I just wanted to pretend I was participating in a normal Sunday ritual anyplace else on earth with other normal Sunday people. 

Once, the van took us to a nearby shopping center where we were allowed to get supervised haircuts or pedicures. The pedicure option was primarily for this kid named Joe, whose toenails were so black with grime it looked as if a stampede of cattle had trampled his feet. He would always wear flip-flops, too. Nobody ever sat next to him in the van. 

On the way back from the shopping center, a 20-something kid named Julius was in full lament about the James Bond film Spectre. “I hope it’s still in theaters when I get out of rehab.”

After he said that, I felt a real sense of loss. The idea that the 45-minute, very, very limited excursion was the highlight of my Saturday—and felt like a true luxury—reminded me that I was nowhere.

I wondered why I didn’t run away. We weren’t shackled. The technicians were not armed with batons or tasers. But if I did run, where would I go? We weren’t allowed to carry wallets or phones. I would be running away for another mile, probably to a Publix parking lot or another shopping center that would look exactly like the one I’d run from, just to return to the treatment center without anything to show for it. Here was my old life and new life, separated by the windows of this van, like the plexiglass between a prisoner and a tired family member who’d had enough. 

But rehab changed me, just not how I thought it would. Once I got out and re-entered the world, I realized I knew less about myself than when I took that middle finger selfie.

I still have my rehab journal. It’s a crinkly old green Mead One Subject Wide Ruled Notebook. 70 sheets of paper. It has only one entry written in pencil on October 19, 2015. I wrote, “This is the part where you try to figure out how this all happened.” Then there are about 100 more words of halfway contrite nonsense, but my tone suggested I had already considered myself healed. And underneath that entry, also written by me in pencil, is a note with an upward arrow: “This guy sucks.”

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This is The Small Bow newsletter. It is mainly written and edited by A.J. Daulerio. And Edith Zimmerman always illustrates it. We send it out every Tuesday and Friday.

You can also get a Sunday issue for $8 a month or $60 per year. The Sunday issue is a recovery bonanza full of gratitude lists, a study guide to my daily recovery routines, a poem I like, and more exclusive essays.

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Thank you so much for your support! Follow us on Instagram if you want more of Edith’s illustrations. We also have merch.

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ZOOM MEETING SCHEDULE

Monday: 5:30 p.m. PT/ 8:30 p.m ET

Wednesday: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET

Thursday: (Women and non-binary meeting) 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET

Friday: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET

Saturday: Mental Health Focus (Peer support for bipolar/anxiety/depression) 9:30 a.m. PT/12:30 p.m. ET

Sunday: (Mental Health and Sobriety Support Group) 1:00 p.m PT/4 p.m. ET

*****

If you don't feel comfortable calling yourself an "alcoholic," that's fine. If you have issues with sex, food, drugs, DEBT, codependency, love, loneliness, depression, come on in. Newcomers are especially welcome.

FORMAT: CROSSTALK, TOPIC MEETING

We're there for an hour, sometimes more. We'd love to have you.

Meeting ID: 874 2568 6609

PASSWORD TO ZOOM: nickfoles

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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:

The Thing Is

by Ellen Bass

***********************

to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you’ve held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you down like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.

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ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN