Riven (Riven 1)

I’d come from having dinner with a woman I’d met at my meeting—a playwright I’d started talking to at the break. I’d never seen her at a meeting before, and the things she said had resonated. She talked about how for her, part of the struggle wasn’t just the cravings for drugs themselves. It was the craving for what it meant that she could give in to them. The freedom. The desire to act on her impulses, her wants, without feeling like she had to slap them down.

Huey nodded as I told him about our conversation. “The desire for oblivion starts with desire for oblivion,” he mused. I raised an eyebrow at him as I often did when he spoke in the kind of irritating Yoda-esque tautologies I associated with the support-group-speak.

Huey fixed me with an incisive stare. “First comes the desire not to exert control. Then comes a mode of losing it. You don’t want to have to control yourself. You want to have the freedom to act as you wish. Then you fulfill that desire. You’re as addicted to the sense of freedom as to the thing that brings it. I’m just restating what your friend said, Whitman. Don’t give me that look like you’re smelling shit.”

“I think that’s what freaked me out so much with Theo. There was all the fame stuff. Like, how dangerous it seemed it would be, getting sucked into that lifestyle, the scrutiny. But mostly it’s…how much I wanted him—the way I wanted him. It felt too close to that craving, you know? Felt too close for comfort.”

Someone raised a glass from down the bar, and Huey held up a finger to me and went to provide a refill. As he was doing so, a few customers walked in, shaking off the rain, and he served them.

The irony of my sponsor owning a bar was not lost on me. But, as Huey often said, “Hey, I ain’t got a problem with booze, so what’s the harm?” The first time he’d said it, I’d suggested that the harm might be the fact that he had to watch people struggle with their own addictions all the time—that some people might argue he enabled them just by existing. That’s when I realized his sense of humor was so dry it threatened to blow away in the breeze. It was also when I learned that Huey didn’t trust in his own sobriety unless he constantly proved to himself that it could weather any storm. I wasn’t there yet myself, but I admired the hell out of his attitude.

As always, Huey just picked up where we’d left off.

“You know all this shit about codependency and replacing one addiction with another. Only you know if you were having healthy patterns with Theo. Maybe you were, maybe you weren’t. And maybe you needed to clear everything out, including him. Reintroduce shit back in one at a time, like one of those allergy tests. See what’s poison and what’s nourishing.”

I nodded. That was how it felt. Like over the past month I’d scrutinized every detail of my life, held each one up to the light and asked myself if it harmed me or helped me.

“At a certain point, though, Whitman, you gotta trust.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust him, it’s—”

“No. Not trust Theo. Trust yourself. You gotta be able to say, okay, I want this person and that’s okay. Or, I want this person and I shouldn’t have them. I ever tell you about Maxine?”

Huey liked to illustrate his points with stories from people he’d sponsored or known in the program over the years, and he always referred to them by fake names. I asked him once how he chose the names but he just gave me a look.

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay, so Maxine. Coke and booze. Plus she had issues with food. She ditched the coke and the booze, right? Went to meetings, did the whole bit. Took her a while, but she did it. After she’d been clean for about five years, you know what she told me? She said that she didn’t talk about it much at meetings because people didn’t take it serious, but the hardest thing for her to get under control—harder than coke and booze? Her eating disorder.”

“What? Why?”

He nodded. “You can draw a clean line with coke and booze. Say never again, and stay away from them, period. Food? You gotta eat that shit three times a day every day for the rest of your life, and you gotta make choices about it every time. Imagine if you had to use, and you had to use just a certain amount every day and not go off the rails, but not quit it? Imagine looking that needle in the face, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

“Fuck me.” Just the thought was making my heart race.