AN: I've been out of the game for a while so let me know how I'm doing. For the past year-and-a-half I've been working on my novel for my senior project. It's finally done, so now I have time for fanfics again. Please leave a review. I love feedback.
Step Five: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
--
His mother was always playing music when he was a kid. Janis Joplin, Nico, sometimes old-timey heroines like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. His mother's music gave him an appreciation for misery, something Liz was an expert on. She would make these plans—Nest year Jessie, next year we're going to move Down South to Louisiana, to North Carolina, to Tennessee—and every time it made him feel sick. At least in New York he had signs to point him in the wrong direction. South of the Mason-Dixon line, all his vantage points would be ass backwards.
She was always talking about buying an old pickup and getting out of the city. Even though he hated the idea of mosquitoes and sickly sweet tea and rickety screen doors, sometimes he wished his mother was serious. Escape was always a convenient option.
Liz was a romantic, and, being so, got herself into trouble in a social class full of blue-collar burnouts. Jess saw the light in his mother's face become replaced with a haggard, distracted expression. She was too busy orchestrating her working-class fantasy to see what she'd spun in her own home. But Jess noticed. He realized early on what it would cost to bring his mother back to where the rest of his family stood, and decided it wasn't worth the effort. However misguided, Liz was happier left alone. Maybe he should have done the same for himself.
--
When he turned twenty-four everything exploded, but his mother wasn't surprised. "I knew you would do it," she said, knitting needles clacking at the scarf and hat she made for him every Christmas. "You've always been special."
Luke agreed. On a creek in Connecticut, fishing pole held in his hands, baseball cap flipped backwards, he told Jess the truth. He'd read the book. "All I've got to say is, Jess, thank God you're alive."
"What do you mean?"
"You did a great thing. Probably the healthiest thing you'll ever do for yourself. I'm proud of you."
The space between his heart and the world was very small. Jess felt every word as is was delivered. "Thank you."
His uncle reeled in an empty line, examined the bait, and recast.
--
Prozac suited him well. And so did Lithium. Dr. Wolf told him that mental illness, most prominently depression, ran in families. Jess believed him.
It was before the book had hit the market, when it was still a winning lottery ticket for Random House, under wraps. "Am I always going to take this?"
"Of course not," the elderly doctor crooned, fatherly in his mismatched dress wear and spectacles. "Anti-depressants treat the illness, not the symptoms. I have a feeling that you'll do very well on this medication. Everyone's heard of Prozac for a reason."
Jess restricted the urge to open his mouth, to say, Everyone knows about Prozac because of Elizabeth Wurtzel and Christina Ricci and Prozac Nation, but he knew the doctor was right. After six weeks on the miracle drug he began to feel how everyone else in the world probably felt; maybe better. After three months Dr. Wolf added Lithium to his mental health cocktail, and he knew that it was finally over. All his aching cold black days of distance were cured. The glass visitation screen that had separated him from the world had lifted, attention and acclaim rushing in just in time for him to appreciate it.
In its first week Five earned him enough money to support him for the rest of his life.
Jess socked it all away in a savings account and didn't spend a dime for a couple of weeks, praying that the cash landslide he'd started wasn't about to be claimed by someone else. A month went by, and he was famous.
Luke called with daily news. "You're on the television."
"Great," Jess deadpanned. Financial security was probably the best part of his book deal so far, but publicity was the worst. Five had a spread in the Sunday New York Times, but he wasn't answering telephone calls. He'd unplugged his landline and switched his cell phone number.
Now he got invitations to important parties; more than just literary people knew his name. When his editor read the first draft of his book, he said, "This is a baseball bat to the head. Kid, this is the shit Oprah's Book Club is made of."
"I guess." He didn't write it to get closer towards anything but sobriety. He had seven months, twenty-three days, a handful of hours. "Don't expect the same thing when I finish step six."
--
He left the house only to go to NA meetings, to go to therapy with Dr. Wolf, to pick up groceries, to drop off signed copies of Five at his favorite independent bookstore. Sometimes he'd go to a party in the Village, or a press management gig in Manhattan. He went to an interview with Evan Rachel Wood for the movie deal, and he got a letter in the mail from Henry Rollins. He'd blown Cormac McCarthy and James Frey and Chuck Palahniuk out of the water, and everyone knew it.
It felt different only for a little while. Eventually, it was just as normal as copping on Avenue D had been, or exchanging war stories with Courtney Love in rehab almost eight months ago. Jess had written the book in a matter of weeks, edited it in two, and mailed it off to the publisher only a few months post-rehab. In NA he had to face all the destructive shit he'd done to his body and everyone else in his life. All the names in the book were real. Jess figured that nobody would mind because it was supposed to be an apology. The only villain was himself.
--
I always smoked heroin alone. If I had friends over we'd snort lines, because somehow that's more socially acceptable than holding some loaded aluminum foil over a candle, and I didn't start injecting until the very end. Most of the people I knew were drug users, not drug addicts, so cutting up lines and rolling dollar bills didn't feel foreign to them.
My friend Lucy got me into chipping. She introduced me to most of my contacts, taught me how to prepare heroin in its many forms, but she also laid out the rules. Use only once a week, twice at the most, with a couple of sober days in between to prevent addiction. Test your smack before you really dive into it. Quickly, though, I made my own rules.
Use when you feel sad, when there is nothing you could imagine doing besides heroin. Use when you feel lonely, when the idea of being around anyone seems more isolating than being by yourself. Use when you are in pain. Use all the time.
--
The first thing Jess figured out about NA was that dissociation was a plan for destruction. The only way to get better was to face it, to say: I am Jess Mariano, and I am a drug addict. This is happening to me and not someone else. I am the person sitting in this chair, having a panic attack whenever someone offers me Oxys at a party, knowing that, either way, if I say yes or no or maybe, I am going to die from suffocation from a heart attack from being burnt alive from my own panic.
Eventually it got easier. Jess moved into a new apartment, got a sponsor in NA, spent a lot of time visiting Luke and his mother and talking to Jimmy on the phone. His old man was proud, but solemn.
"You nearly died, Jess. What do you want me to say?"
Jess swallowed hard, tried to remember why he'd picked this sunny, inviting apartment over his old opium den. "You don't have to say anything. I understand."
Jimmy sighed. "I'm not angry with you, I'm proud, I really am. I just wish you didn't have to get it this way."
He tried not to take offense. "By telling the truth? Give me some time. I'll work on a sequel to A Million Little Pieces."
His father laughed, pulling the sound out over state lines and airwaves. Jess had never felt so alone.
--
For the first time in his life, going down south seemed like a viable option. He'd finished up the book tour for Five and the constant calls and requests for interviews had gotten old. He'd come out of NA to find photographers on the sidewalk, usually just a couple, but still too many.
Jess went home and packed a bag. Lightweight clothes, short sleeves, his Ray Bans. He had an old Coup de Ville convertible in storage in Jersey. He secured refills and phone therapy with Dr. Wolf, assuring his doctor that he would be okay on his own for a couple of months. In April, it was still a little cool in New York. Jess decided it was time for a vacation.