Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell Read Free Book Online

whiskey; I surrounded myself, unconsciously but probably intentionally, with people who drank the way I did. Some of them got straight and some of them died, and a few of them calmed down, grew up, and settled for one martini instead of seven. I did my part for my generation’s collective crisis of adulthood by moving east, with the brazen notion of becoming a writer—surely, according to myth, a way to reinvent one’s life. When I left Texas, I had two quarts of whiskey in the trunk of my old Volvo, which I figured would cover the five days on the road that were ahead of me. I had a few friends in New York and knew two people in Greater Boston, where I was going, and however scared I was, I knew there would be a liquor store wherever I landed. By then I was thirtyyears old, and I’d learned that courage in a bottle could get you through all kinds of doors, and all kinds of trouble, and a lot of dead-end nights alone.
    In the early 1980s, hordes of people were leaving the Northeast for the softer industries and climates of the Sun Belt. New England was cold, dark, and unforgiving, people warned me; the more precarious truth was that I had no job, no place to live, and enough savings to last a year. My writing résumé consisted of a couple of rejections slips from venerated magazines; my confidence came from a few gruff encouragements from professors. But however fragile the external scaffolding looked, I suspect that I was trying to save my life, not just relocate it. I had grown up staring at the vast, imprisoning horizon of the Texas Panhandle, a region I understood how much I loved only long after I had left it, and I had jumped free of that place with a kind of high-octane terror. If conservative Amarillo, with its oil rigs and churches and cattle ranches, promised a provincial life, for years I challenged every dictum I perceived my family to possess. A decade later, I had to assume an equally resolute posture to get out of Austin—to leave behind what I loved and what I feared was killing me.
    I was equal parts bluff and fear, I think, poised there on the verge of a life unfolding, not knowing whether I would leap or fall. In my last couple of years in Austin, when I had been teaching at the university and pretending to read for doctoral oral exams, I had let my heartlead me to the water’s edge of a writing life—an inner sanctum of such power and solace that it staggered me with its reach. I lived in a few rooms of an old southern mansion with ten-foot ceilings and poured-glass windows, and I would sit there at night before my typewriter, primed with a glass of scotch and a pack of Winstons. One night before the drink kicked in I had written something that so excited me—I have no memory of what it was—that I leapt up from my chair and kept typing standing up. Probably every young would-be writer has such moments, the crystal-clear elation that keeps one going. But now I see the moment as pivotal and even Faustian: the amber light, the whirring typewriter, the young woman full of yearning and joy. The writing was the life force and the whiskey was the snake in the grass. For as long as I could, I chose them both.
    YOUTH AND PRIDE can be decent weapons against the woes of alcohol, but only for a while. I kept jobs, I threw cold water on my face each morning, I swam laps to counter the effects of the booze and then drank to wipe out the gains of the swim. For years the psychic balm of alcohol—its holy grail certainty that it could take me through anything—eclipsed the hangovers and emerging fear that I was in trouble. I had a silver pocket flask that I filled with whiskey for backup drinks; I figured if I looked the part, then I could get away with the reality.The booze took the rough corners off, and I tried to right the equation with coffee and protein and five milligrams of Librium to ease the comedown. I was a well-oiled machine, with a 4.0 grade-point average, and nobody knew. Or so I believed.
    Why