Lectures

Academi Intoxication Conference 2006 - Instead of Dying by Tess Gallagher Part Two

As Ray got famous he didn’t get any less himself. He had a humility about him that was wonderful to be around. Early on he had told me a bit about his first days of trying to stay sober, how he’d needed something to fill up all that time he’d spent drinking.  He played hours and hours of bingo, in those days.  He’d also go to AA meetings drunk, he told me, with an embarrassed giggle.  But he’d sober up and try again.  He had three major physical collapses, and when he suffered a seizure in the doctor’s office, the doctor told him that if he didn’t stop drinking he’d die.  Thank God for that doctor who didn’t mince words with him! Ray didn’t want to die and began to try to get free of the alcohol from that moment on.

I admit I’d been bluffing in El Paso when I’d led him to believe I would zoom out of his life if he went back to drinking.  Luckily I didn’t have to live that “if”.   I truly don’t know what I would have done, for I was deeply in love with him at a level that was unaccountable, as if my life until then had simply been a rehearsal for meeting him. There was a way in which symbolically all the failed alcoholics of my life were seemingly being delivered. Ray was getting out for all of them.

We got to be like two mountain climbers rigged to each other on a glacier face. There was a heady, fresh exhilaration about everything we did, just because of how far we’d come to get there.  Wives of my colleagues at the University of Arizona used to ask me if Ray would help their husbands whose drinking had gotten out of control. In Syracuse where we were both teaching until 1983 I’d learn on occasion of some student who was in trouble with drink or drugs—I’d speak to Ray and he’d make time to take them aside and go to meetings with them.  He’d share his own story, for he believed these stories companioned and saved.

Once Ray was sober, he felt an obligation to help other writers who were in trouble with alcohol.  I remember, for instance, the time Ray helped my second husband when he rang our house in a “dark night of the soul”.  I was away in Ireland, so Ray had to handle it. “Michael,” he said,  “you know I’d fly to Boston tonight, if I thought I was the only one on the planet who could help you.  But you can get help there.” I believe Ray’s talking to Michael that night gave him a leg up to getting a sponsor (someone to go to in emergencies and times of weakness.) Ultimately he would go twice a day to AA to get sober.

Ray discovered so many things to do that profitably took up the time formerly spent with elbows on a bar, darkly sipping with some neighboring drinker. We would wake up at Sky House, my writing cabin on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, near the Canadian border, and I’d say: “Let’s have breakfast on the beach!” and Ray would say, “Great! Let’s do it, Babe!” I’d cook us up something portable and fill the coffee bottle. Down we’d go to sit on a log and breakfast with the waves, looking out toward Victoria.  We’d take walks along the river and watch for birds.  We’d feed chickadees and varied thrushes at the house. We’d go salmon fishing in the Strait or fly to Alaska and fish off Prince of Wales Island in a sixteen-foot skiff. Movies were another enthusiasm. We’d also cozy up and read poems in bed aloud to each other just about every night, and especially during rainstorms.

In Ray’s new incarnation we traveled to Brazil, Argentina, England, France and Ireland. We stayed in fancy hotels—Ray loved hotels!  In Belfast, a poet friend, Paul Muldoon, loaned his apartment. When Ray didn’t want to chance going to a pub, my Irish musician friends came in to play and sing traditional music for him.  But when one of them got too far into the drink, (for they’d brought their own,) Ray said within hearing of all, “Come on to bed, Sweetheart,” and disappeared up the stairs like smoke.  I quickly shuffled the friends out the door and they found themselves on the stoop, baffled and unceremoniously unhoused.

Ray didn’t like to be around people when they’d had more than one drink. When the ambience changed, he felt the company slipping away into that place to which he never wanted to go again.  He had a beautiful stubbornness and he wouldn’t let anyone or anything get in the way of his new life.  This extended even to his immediate family, his mother, his x-wife, son and daughter—he managed them at a remove, and in that distance he was able to protect himself from “old demon” territory.

My Daughter and Apple Pie

She serves me a piece of it a few minutes
out of the overn.  A little steam rises
from the slits on top.  Sugar and spice—
cinnamon—burned into the crust.
But she’s wearing these dark glasses

in the kitchen at ten o’clock
in the morning—everything nice—
as she watches me break off
a piece, bring it to my mouth,
and blow on it.  My daughter’s kitchen,
in winter.  I fork the pie in
and tell myself to stay out of it.
She says she loves him.  No way
could it be worse.

Ray’s father, grandfather and an uncle
Were all alcoholic.  He writes a portrait of his father.

Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year

October.  Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen.
I study my father’s embarrassed young man’s face.
Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string
of spiny yellow perch, in the other
a bottle of Carlsbad beer.

In jeans and denim shirt, he leans
against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.
He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity,
wear his old hat cocked over his ear.
All his life my father wanted to be bold.

But the eyes give him away, and the hands
that limply offer the string of dead perch
and the bottle of beer.  Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you, I who can’t hold my liquor either,
and don’t even know the places to fish?

He talked to his family members intermittently on the telephone and privately grieved at how their circumstances never seemed to live up to all they hoped for.  He genuinely wished things would go better there, and when they didn’t, he still kept a hope line out for them.

Yet he wasn’t willing to let his family get him down with their compounded troubles. Ray managed carefully, the once a year encounters, by renting rooms at a hotel so he wouldn’t have to bear up under their direct circumstances.

Like a “flamethrower” one person who’d known him when he was young, described the intensity of his inner core. In order to do his writing, calm was as necessary as oxygen to him, and with that in mind, recall that the title of his first book written thirty years ago this year, was Will you Please Be Quiet, Please. Ray’s nerves seemed very exposed without alcohol to deaden them.  He sent me out once to shut down all the dogs in the neighborhood, for he was especially sensitive to loud persistant noises. Ray was a great avoider, and that was his characteristic mode in turmoil.  He’d get himself away from the trouble, and he was always looking ahead to see what might be coming. I think he developed a kind of talent for sidestepping difficulty. His life depended on it. He didn’t consider running to be cowardice under these circumstances.  He learned the dangers: what triggered his “jitters”, his “god-help-me’s”, his cave-ins of the spirit.  Standing next to him, I came to know these hazards too.  I tightened the rope between us.  I sunk my piton into the ice.  I let him know I was right there with him.

And this companioning is probably a necessity for anyone coming out of alcohol, to have those who give strength close at hand. He called me “the rock” and I’ll take that.  I know I tried to be. Ray’s poems and stories leave a trail of strength. In them were admissions of that “other” life, the “bad Raymond” times he’d lived at the mercy of alcohol. They make a dire portrait of what he didn’t want to re-live. 

His poem Limits speaks to a sense of going beyond limits, whatever the occasion, and of the spiritual bankruptcy and vacuity that often accompany lives given over to alcohol.

Limits

All that day we banged at geese
from a blind at the top
of the bluff. Busted one flock
after the other, until our gun barrels
grew hot to the touch.  Geese
filled the cold, grey air.  But we still
didn’t kill our limits.
The wind driving our shot
every whichway.  Late afternoon,
and we had four.  Two shy
of our limits.  Thirst drove us
off the bluff and down a dirt road
alongside the river.

To an evil-looking farm
surrounded by dead fields of
barley.  Where, almost evening,
a man with patches of skin
gone from his hands let us dip water
from a bucket on his porch.
Then asked if we wanted to see
something—a Canada goose he kept
alive in a barrel beside
the barn.  The barrel covered over
with screen wire, rigged inside
like a little cell.  He’d broken
the bird’s wing with a long shot,
he said, then chsed it down
and stuffed it in the barrel.
He’d had a brainstorm!
He’d use that goose as a live decoy.

In time it turned out to be
the damnedest thing he’d ever seen.
It would bring other geese
right down on your head.
So close you could almost touch them
before you killed them.
This man, he never wanted for geese.
And for this his goose was given
all the corn and barley
it could eat, and a barrel
to live in, and shit in.

I took a good long look and,
unmoving, the goose looked back.
Only its eyes telling me
it was alive.  Then we left,
my friend and I.  Still
willing to kill anything
that moved, anything that rose
over our sights.  I don’t
recall if we got anything else
that day.  I doubt it.
It was almost dark anyhow.
No matter, now.  But for years
and years afterwards, living
on a staple of bitterness, I
didn’t forget that goose.
I set it apart from all the others,
living and dead.  Came to understand
one can get used to anything,
and become a stranger to nothing.
Saw that betrayal is just another word
for loss, for hunger.
 

If one is to survive as a recovering alcoholic, one must leave the elements and the friends of the drinking life far behind, for like the goose in the barrel, they call out.  At ten o’clock without fail every night, Ray would unplug our telephone.  He didn’t want any of his “boozed up” friends calling us, breaking in on our peace.  He was securing the parameters, making sure.  In the book Carver Country he writes to a young writer who’s trying to make it out of his drinking. He tells him that he didn’t do anything except try to stay sober for years.  He made it his priority.  He didn’t care if he ever wrote another thing, if he could only stay sober and alive.

Even in sobriety, there were skittery times.  I’ve written about them elsewhere.  In one of these, shortly after Ray had learned that his lung cancer had accelerated, he set out to attend an AA meeting in the nearby town. The phone rang.  It was Ray. He’d gotten lost.  He was in a bar.  “I didn’t drink anything, he said, “but I ordered something. Its still sitting on the bar.”  I took a breath and then like a hypnotist of the moment, I told him: “Just get to your car and drive straight home.  I’ll be waiting in the driveway.”  He did just that.  He drove home, stopped the car before reaching the house, and got out to hold me, like someone clutching a life raft.

During my time with Ray, I learned that there are all degrees and kinds of recoveries from alcohol, some where the desire to drink hits a person like a javelin and it’s all they can do, to keep from falling to their knees. But when the desire to drink left Ray, it simply left him.  He got to the clear ground.  And I was privileged to be there with him.  What’s there to say, except we’d wish this escape for anyone suffering from alcohol or other addictions. We’d hope that it happened sooner than later--that the path for life, instead of death would be chosen.  That the “instead-of”s which sustain a life without drinking could be discovered, moment by moment, hour by hour--each day, each night.

In Ray’s final poem, Late Fragment, we can experience the condition of his heart, his acceptance of himself as someone who’d met his demons eye to eye, who’d vanquished them--with the help of others and by grace.  He’d left a legacy to show others the way—those poems and stories in their fearless clarity to say just how it had been to nearly die, then in a moment turn back toward life, exemplifying Rilke’s mandate which Ray was fond of quoting: “you must change your life.”

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Tess Gallagher

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