The Best of Me(101)
I have an English friend named Ingrid, and her father was an alcoholic. When he lost his license for driving drunk, he got himself a tricycle and would pedal it back and forth to a pub, everyone in the village watching.
“Not a regular bike?” I asked.
“He would have fallen off!” Ingrid told me, relieved to be at the stage where she could laugh about it. Her father was a horrible person, a mean clown, which makes it easier, in a way. Our mother did nothing so cartoonish, and if she had we’d have felt traitorous making fun of her. Instead, we separated her into two people and discounted what the second, drunk one did. For that wasn’t really her, we reasoned, but a kind of virus talking. Her father had it too, and drank until men in white coats carted him off to the state hospital, where he received shock treatments. I look at pictures of him after his release and think, Wait, that’s me. We didn’t resemble each other when I was young, but now we could be twins.
The big moment on Intervention is when family and friends of the alcoholic or drug addict confront him or her. It’s supervised by a counselor and often takes place in a sad hotel conference room with flesh-colored furniture and no windows. The addicts are usually in full blossom, drunk or high or on the nod. “What the hell…?” they say, looking around at their parents, their brothers and sisters, their wives or husbands, all together, seated in a semicircle.
The subjects of the intervention already feel ambushed, so steps are taken to keep them from feeling attacked as well. It’s easy to lose one’s temper in this situation, so the counselor has instructed the friends and family members to organize their thoughts on paper. The letters they read are never wholly negative and usually kick off with a pleasant memory. “I remember when you were brought home from the hospital” is a big one. This is the equivalent of a short story beginning with the main character’s alarm clock going off, and though I know I shouldn’t get hung up on this part of the show, I do. Oh please, I think, rolling my eyes as the combative meth addict is told, “You had a smile that could light up a room.”
The authors of the letters often cry, perhaps because what they’ve written is so poorly constructed. Then again, reality TV is fueled by tears. Take another of the shows I like, My 600-lb Life, about morbidly obese people struggling with their weight. At the start of each program loved ones appear, always weeping, always saying the exact same thing: “I don’t want to have to bury my own child/sister/nephew, etc.”
Yes, well, I wouldn’t either, I think. If digging the grave didn’t do me in, I’d surely die trying to roll that massive body into it. There’s crying on Hoarders as well, though rarely by the pack rat, who sees no downside to saving all his used toilet paper.
After everyone on Intervention has had their say, the addicts are offered a spot in a rehab center. Not all of them accept, but most do. The places they’re sent to tend to be sunny: Arizona, Southern California, Florida. We see them two months into their stay, most looking like completely different people. “Here are the wind chimes I made in my arts-and-crafts group,” the woman who earlier in the program was seen shooting speed into her neck says.
Not everyone stays the prescribed ninety days. Some leave early and relapse. Others get out on schedule and relapse a week or six months later. The heartiest of them are revisited several years down the line, still sober, many with jobs now and children. “All that time I wasted,” they say. “What on earth was I thinking?”
I asked Ingrid once if she ever talked to her father about his drinking, and I think she was ashamed to answer no. Not that I or anyone in my family ever confronted my mother, no matter how bad it got. Even my dad, who’s super-direct and tells complete strangers that they’re loud or wrong or too fat for that bolero jacket, said nothing. Then again, it built so gradually. For as long as I was living at home, it never seemed a problem. It was only after five of her six children had left that she upped her quota. The single Scotch before dinner became two, and then three. Her wine intake doubled. Tripled. She was never a quality drinker—quantity was what mattered. She bought jugs, not bottles. After dinner, she’d switch to coffee and then back to Scotch or wine, supplementing the alcohol with pills. “Mom’s dolls,” we called them.
When she told us that she would no longer drive at night, that she couldn’t see the road, we all went along with it, knowing the real reason was that by sunset she was in no shape to get behind the wheel. “Gosh,” we said, “we hope that doesn’t happen to our eyes when we’re your age.”
In that respect, you have to hand it to the family members on Intervention. Corny letters notwithstanding, they have guts. The person they’re confronting might storm out of the room and never talk to them again, but at least they’re rolling the dice. Though we never called our mother on her behavior, she knew that we noticed it.
“I haven’t had a drink in four days,” she’d announce out of nowhere, usually over the phone. You could hear the struggle and the hope in her voice. I’d call her the next night and could tell right away that she’d lost her willpower. Why aren’t you stronger? I wanted to ask. I mean, really. Can’t you just try harder?
Of course, I was drunk too, so what could I say? I suppose I felt that my youth made it less sad. The vast plain of adulthood stretched before me, while she was well into her fifties, drinking alone in a house filled with crap. Even sober, she’d rail against that: all the junk my father dragged home and left in the yard or the basement—old newspapers and magazines, toaster ovens picked out of the trash, hoses, sheets of plywood—all of it “perfectly good,” all of it just what he needed.