13

Addicts are frustrated mystics waylaid by spirits.

—CARL JUNG

It was a Friday afternoon in early May, a day so perfect that staying indoors felt like it should be a criminal offense. I rushed home from school, threw my book bag on the couch, and hurried to make a sandwich before heading out to pick up Tyler. My parents were in Florida for a few weeks, so I not only had full run of the house, but I also had my father’s royal blue Triumph Spitfire. Tyler and I planned to put the convertible top down and drive around the beach in search of girls to impress. I’m told male peacocks do the same thing, but with tail feathers.

My mouth was jammed with food when the phone rang. I would have waited to answer, but I assumed it was Tyler.

“Hummo?” I said, trying to speak around the wad of ham and cheese now passing my larynx.

“Is this Ian?” My eyes widened and I scrambled to find my drink. It wasn’t Tyler. It was Mrs. Price, my guidance counselor.

I washed down my food with a quick swig of water. “Sorry, Mrs. Price,” I said. “You caught me with a mouthful of sandwich.”

She laughed. “Ian, I just spoke with James Fitzpatrick,” she said.

James Fitzpatrick . . . James Fitzpatrick. I scrambled through the Rolodex in my head. The name was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“From Bowdoin, Ian. James Fitzpatrick is the admissions director from Bowdoin.”

I dropped into the chair behind my mother’s desk and rubbed my temple. My guidance counselor was talking to me on my home phone. I liked her, but not in my house. She was telling me about a conversation she’d had with the admissions director from Bowdoin. This was even odder. College rejections came in the mail. Had the decision to remove my name from the wait list and reject me once and for all been so enthusiastically endorsed and celebrated by the faculty, administration, and students of the college that this guy thought a call to my guidance counselor was warranted?

“You got in,” she said.

I placed one hand on the desk to steady myself and stood up. Maybe I’d misheard. “I’m sorry—what?” I whispered.

She giggled, all sparkly. “You’re going to Bowdoin.”

Winthrop Hall, a four-story brick building constructed in 1823, was my freshman dorm. From the outside it was unadorned, New England plain, but its history was anything but.

“The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lived in this dorm,” the upperclassman greeter told me as he showed me my room, “Nathaniel Hawthorne, the guy who wrote The Scarlet Letter, was in Longfellow’s class as well.”

This was heady information for a kid who came to college knowing he would major in English.

“That building over there is Massachusetts Hall,” he said, pointing at another red-brick building on the quad. “That’s where the English department is,” he said, opening the window to let fresh air into my room. “You’ll spend a lot of time in there.”

And so I did.

The next four years were a feast. Writers like Camus, Greene, Dostoevsky, Blake, Faulkner, Donne, Beckett, Wilde, and Strindberg redrew the map of my world. Some authors were like boxers. They took me down slow, landing one left hook after another one inch under my rib cage. Other writers were more precise, like surgeons, cutting through flesh and bone until I was laid bare to myself.

Spiritually, I’d arrived at Bowdoin with a shallow root system. I’d gone to Bible studies and discipleship groups in the last half of my senior year in high school, after the St. Paul’s experience, and got more involved with Young Life, but even then I’d had trouble not slipping back into partying.

Most seniors put quotes under their yearbook pictures like, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by.”

My senior quote read, “I’ve got a few reasons for drinking, and one has just entered my head. If a man can’t drink when he’s living, how the hell can he drink when he’s dead?”

Not quite Robert Frost.

I vowed to God that once I got to college, I’d walk the narrow road.

I wasn’t there a week before I was on a five-lane interstate. The rope tied around my waist never let me forget it was there. It was long and let me wander far, but it was fighting genetics and temperament. Let me explain.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who have dimmers and those who have on-off switches.

People who have dimmers can regulate how much they drink, smoke, exercise, have sex, eat, work, or play BrickBreaker on their BlackBerrys. They can “dial it back.” They can “take it or leave it.” Their motto is “Moderation in all things.” We need these people. They become actuaries and veterinarians. Our pets would die without them.

Other people are born with on-off switches. They are all the way on or all the way off; there is no in-between. Their motto is “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.” They drink like the Taliban have taken over the country and plan to turn every liquor store in the nation into a mosque. They can’t jog the occasional two-miler. They won’t be happy until they cripple themselves overtraining for an Ironman. They can’t eat one Oreo. They have to eat twenty, like a Hoover set on deep shag. If the doctor prescribes one Percocet every eight hours, they take two every four and sit drooling on the couch, watching Jeopardy reruns. My four years at Bowdoin confirmed that when it came to partying, or anything else, I was an on-off switch.

Bowdoin had a reputation for rigorous academics and serious drinking. In my sophomore year a New York Times best seller entitled The Official Preppy Handbook ranked Bowdoin the second hardest drinking college in the country, just behind Dartmouth. I joined a fraternity that partied like this ranking was a personal affront. Some nights I drank until I dropped facedown into the carpet. These revels were followed by epic hangovers. Some mornings I’d have to lily-pad from one piece of furniture to the next to steady myself as I tried to make my way across a room. Did I party more than my friends? No. But in the end it was not the quantity but the ambition of my drinking that was my undoing.

My sister Caroline’s move from Paris to New York City during my sophomore year didn’t help. She was young, beautiful, and a model at the top of her game. One Christmas, walking around New York City, I couldn’t shake her. As the face for a well-known line of skin-care products, she was in every magazine, on full-page ads in the New York Times, and in store windows and counter displays. Even creepier, a picture of her face filled the side panels of the giant shopping bags given out by department stores all over the city. It’s hard to explain what it’s like to walk down Madison Avenue and see hundreds of people carrying your sister.

Some weekends Caroline would foot the bill to fly me from Maine to Manhattan to play for the weekend. She’d hire a driver for the night, and we’d hop from one club to the next. Because she was so well-known, we never waited in a line or paid a cover charge anywhere.

If drinking was politics, then Caroline was a moderate and I was an anarchist. Three sheets to the wind, I danced with Truman Capote to the music of the Village People at Studio 54. (That requires more explaining than we have time for right now.) Another night, I drank copious amounts of Aquavit at the bar at Elaine’s and got into an aria-singing competition with a bearded opera star from the Met wearing a floor-length mink coat, who wanted to impress my sister. I had a great time losing. We might rush to the Limelight for last call before heading back to Caroline’s First Avenue apartment, a block away from the United Nations.

Vacations were more of the same. I had three friends, Landon, Terrence, and Mark. One summer we made a pact to meet up and party in the same bar every night for a month. How do you celebrate an achievement of this order? Have another drink?

Drinking is fun until it isn’t.

Landon and I were in a small town near the University of Connecticut, when we stopped for a beer in a bar full of locals that had a pool table. A couple of guys came to our booth and asked if we wanted to play a game or two for beers and shots. We told them we hadn’t played much, but we’d give it a go.

If you pulled the camera back, the scene would have looked hilarious: two college kids in khakis and Izod shirts playing pool with thick-bearded men in brown Carhartt overalls covered with grease stains. You also would have known the odds were good this wouldn’t end well.

To our surprise, Landon and I played like we’d gone to pool camp as kids. We won a lot of beer and shots. After four or five games, our opponents began muttering under their breath.

“You’ve played pool before, you little snots,” one of them said.

I laughed. “Seriously, it’s beginner’s luck. “The next round is on us,” I said. “Then we’ve got to hit the road.”

“I don’t think so,” the guy with the scraggly red beard said. “Now we’re playing for money.”

My palms were so sweaty the pool cue kept slipping out of my hand. I was trying to get Landon’s attention to tell him by wink or nod to lose the game on purpose so we could pay these guys and get out. But he was leaning on his cue, looking everywhere but at me. I tried to throw the game, but I couldn’t make enough intentional bad shots to negate Landon’s miraculous performance. We beat them again.

“Do all rich punks from downstate think we’re stupid up here?” one of them said.

“Give us our money back,” the other said.

Customers at the bar looked disappointed when Landon and I both laid twenties on the table, which included a tip for not killing us.

“You guys ought to go before we take your money and kick your butts,” the red-bearded one said.

I left first, speed-stumbling in the general direction of where I thought I had parked the car. Landon sprinted past. “Why are you running?” I said, beginning to speed-stumble a little faster.

He held something up between his thumb and index fingers. Under the parking lot lights I saw what it was.

I felt sick. “Landon, no,” I said.

Landon had stolen the cue ball off the table—apparently without anyone noticing, since I hadn’t heard any gunfire yet. We jumped into the car and bolted out of the parking lot, but not before I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the front door of the bar fly open and men pour out like angry ants. That’s the last thing I remember.

The next morning I woke up in the backseat of the car and had no idea where we were or how we’d gotten there. I shook Landon awake, and he gave me the play-by-play. The guys from the bar had chased our car for a few miles, during which we’d passed a truck at seventy miles per hour and come within inches of hitting an oncoming car. We’d finished the night having more drinks in an all-night diner. Landon complained that he’d left the stolen cue ball on the seat of the restaurant booth.

I started the car and looked around. We were in the parking lot of a strip mall. It was 9 a.m. and customers were arriving. “Where are we?” I asked. Every car had a license plate I didn’t recognize.

“We’re in Rhode Island,” Landon said.

I whipped around to face him. “We’re in Rhode Island?” I said.

“Don’t you remember how we laughed our heads off when we saw the ‘Welcome to Rhode Island’ sign?”

I swallowed hard. “No,” I said.

“You should. You were driving.”

The red warning light indicating that I’d experienced a blackout flashed on my brain’s dashboard for days until I reached behind it and ripped out the sensor. Life is easier when you refuse to know what you know.

I lived with the dissonance and torment of this double life from the day I arrived at college to the day I left. I’d go to the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship one night and be smashed and dancing on tables at my fraternity the next. I took comfort in the knowledge that St. Augustine had suffered similarly. He was the guy who wrote the famous prayer: “Lord, make me chaste— but not yet.”

I totally got it.

The Bowdoin Christian Fellowship totally got it too. Bowdoin had roughly twelve hundred students; maybe thirty were members of the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship. Given the ratio, you’d think I could duck them, but they were everywhere.

“We’re praying for you, Ian,” one would say passing me in the lobby of the library.

“How’s your walk with the Lord?” another would ask in a cafeteria line.

One of the leaders of the Fellowship stopped me on the quad. “We’re always here for you if you need us, Ian,” he said.

A few of them were overzealous. Some were gloomy, and others were way too nice, like Walmart greeters on Adderall, but not one was insincere. They were fine souls who sensed the anguish of my dividedness and wanted to help.

There was one girl in the Fellowship who turned my head. Her name was Anne Nelson. She was the quintessential Colorado tomboy type. She’d been a cross-country ski racer in high school and climbed fourteeners on the weekends. Every time I saw her, she was either cooling down after a long run, or heading to her dorm, sweaty and red cheeked from playing a field hockey or soccer game. Her laid-back personality masked a crazy competitive spirit. She hated to lose more than she loved to win, and I was smitten. People in the Fellowship couldn’t figure out why a sweet, Christian girl like Anne would want to be with a backsliding sinner like me.

For some, the question persists.

I’m told that under certain conditions it takes a large ship several miles to make a complete turn at sea. It’s slow, one degree at a time, hardly noticeable. That’s how my drinking changed. What had once been occasional recreation was now a daily ritual. I drank to get buzzed, and usually no more during the week, but I started obsessing about that buzz around lunchtime. If I came home and discovered there was no beer in the fridge, I’d simmer and go out to buy more. One night I made a beer run in a blinding snowstorm because my housemates and the neighbors had sucked the house dry before I’d made it home. There was a Nor’easter blowing outside, and my friends wondered why I would go out in it just for a couple of six-packs of beer, but I wasn’t to be dissuaded. By morning we might be housebound by the storm, and the idea of a house empty of anything to drink made me antsy.

A Christian friend astute beyond his years told me he wouldn’t drink with me anymore.

“We’re talking a few beers a night,” I said. “What’s the big deal?”

“It’s not how much you drink, Ian,” he said. “It’s how important it is to you.”

I was spiritually tone-deaf, but God still found ways to speak to me. My English professor, Lawrence Sargent Hall, was one.

I’d seen Larry, as he let students call him, walking around campus. If Moby Dick were produced for Broadway, Larry would have been cast in the role of Captain Ahab without an audition. He had a deeply grooved, sea-weathered face framed by white muttonchops. If a pipe wasn’t in his mouth, a cigarette was. He wore a beige felt slouch hat, the type where the brim droops on one side while the opposite side is pinned against the crown. He wasn’t hard to spot in a crowd.

To get away with being eccentric, though, you’ve got to have talent and a few achievements to back it up; otherwise, you’re just a kook. Unlike other professors, Larry didn’t just teach about great writers; he was a great writer. His short story “The Ledge” won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Collection in 1960. John Updike said it was one of the best short stories of the twentieth century. A year later, he wrote the novel Stowaway, which won the William Faulkner Award for best debut novel.

I was a freshman when two other English majors, Chris and Rollo, both upperclassmen, relayed an experience they’d had with Larry earlier that day.

“We got to class and Larry was sitting in his chair at the head of the oval table, staring at the blackboard on the other side of the table,” Rollo said.

“It’s like he was hypnotized. He didn’t even say hello when we came in,” Chris said.

I frowned. “What was he looking at?” I asked.

“Eight lines from T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Four Quartets,’” Rollo said.

“So the class sat and waited for him to say something,” Chris said.

“And?”

“He made us sit there for fifteen minutes before he said a word,” Rollo said.

“What did he say?”

Chris smiled and lowered the pitch of his voice to sound like someone much older. “‘Well, men, I don’t know what it means, but it’s one hell of a great poem,’” he quoted, snorting and laughing.

“Then he said class was dismissed,” Rollo added.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

Rollo shrugged. “Neither did we,” he said.

I was a senior before I took classes with Larry. I don’t recall one thing I learned in them, but I did solve the mystery of what had happened in Chris and Rollo’s class three years earlier. Larry wasn’t embarrassed to admit to a group of twenty-year-olds who worshiped his genius that he couldn’t always plumb the meaning of a great piece of writing. He was an internationally recognized authority on literary criticism, but he never made up an impressive-sounding but hollow answer to impress or to protect his reputation. More than once I watched him recite a flawlessly written passage from a classic, then place the book on the table, fold his arms, and gaze out a window for a minute or two.

It was better than church.

I was one of a handful of students Larry would invite to his home on Orr’s Island for drinks and dinner. These parties often turned into drinks, immediately followed by after-dinner drinks, with no dinner in between.

One night he took six or seven of us out to his writing cabin. He’d named it Fishouse, because it had once been used for codfish-drying. He explained to us why he intentionally misspelled the name of the cabin, but the story eludes me now. The pale glow of the moonlight that evening revealed the hut to be no larger than eight feet by eight feet, the plank siding made gray by the salt air and wind. Tall wisps of phragmites stood guard on either side, and the roof was crowned by a stovepipe that from fifty yards looked like a witch’s hat threatening to blow away in the gusty northerly winds.

Inside Fishouse was a chair, a plain table with an ancient typewriter on it, a thesaurus, a picture of his dog Jack, and a decanter filled with an amber liquid. A short stack of firewood sat next to the black stove. Larry had worked in that cabin for fifty years. Those of us who came in last stood on our toes and looked over the shoulders of those in front of us, vying for a glimpse of the ancient typewriter on the table, on which “The Ledge” and Stowaway had been birthed.

“Larry, what do you think Conrad was trying to say in Heart of Darkness?” a clueless kid asked from the back of the cabin. He was leafing through a copy of the book. I suspect it was a signed first edition.

Larry parted us like the Red Sea. He gently lifted the book from the boy’s hand and returned it to a crude pine shelf. Then he looked at the boy. “Sometimes it’s wiser to reverence than to parse,” he said.

The Fishouse went quiet. In the distance a foghorn sounded its plangent tone like a rabbi blowing a shofar, to call us to prayer.

There were kids in the Bowdoin Fellowship who were C. S. Lewis and Josh McDowell addicts, eager to develop a rational case for the faith so they could defend it against the intellectual objections of pagan professors. I wanted to fit in with them and enjoy discussing apologetics, but it was thin gruel to me. I didn’t want to parse God—I wanted to be swept up in his glory. I didn’t want to understand the Holy One; I wanted to be consumed in his oceanic love. I yearned for heaven, and as long as it remained beyond my reach, my life was tinged with disappointment.

How could I know that my growing attachment to drinking was nothing more than a displaced longing for this kind of ecstatic experience of God?

Besides, what would I have done differently if I’d known? I would have tried to figure out a way to have both Spirit and spirits. How else can I explain a twenty-year-old trying to swim in the depths of God, while clutching a glass of Scotch over his head?