Works in Progress
Vol. 3, Issue 12
It's the first Tuesday in February so that means it's time to publish Inverse Pitching. To refresh your memory, here was last month's prompt:
What was your last-last night drinking and using drugs? Or will you have one soon?
Most of our readers wrote about their last drinks, some more memorable than others. And there's one person who wrote about the last time she threw up. We'll hear more from her in a future issue.
Here's my contribution, which barely nips the edges of the prompt, but since I wrote about my last-last night for the newsletter titled "The Pathos of Things" that ran at the end of 2020, I figured I'd go a little rogue. So here's a quickie about kindness – or what I hope will be my last moment of unkindness.
****
Did you ever read the George Saunders essay "Congratulations, By The Way," the one he read at Syracuse University's graduation ceremony in 2013? The New York Times snagged the transcription and published it and the internet got gushy for a minute or two about it before it went back to eating its own face.
It’s truly wonderful, but here's a confession: I've tried to read George Saunders’s other work - his short stories, mostly – but they were … not for me. He's a beautiful writer, for sure, but he’s one of those people who writes too well. His writing makes me feel not just uneducated – but uninvited.
This isn’t a critique. It’s mostly an admission of my own failure. George Saunders is magnificent and I hope to enjoy more of his work someday when I grow less stupid. (Also on the when-I'm-less-stupid list: Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith, Charlotte Bronte. Shakespeare? Sure, Shakespeare, why not.)
But “Congratulations by the Way” is different. It’s still ornately crafted and full of side-arm literary wizardry but it’s definitely more radio-friendly than, say, Lincoln in the Bardo.
And what did George Saunders, a truly wise man whose cognitive horsepower is capable of uniquely original thoughts, bestow upon these hungry young literary minds?
Be kinder.
Because his biggest regrets in life were moments he calls “failures of kindness":
Those moments when another human was there, in front of me, and I responded … sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
So he was never outwardly mean – he just did the bare minimum to not be an asshole.
I bring this essay up because after I cleaned up I was still a real A-plus asshole: Unreliable. Untruthful. And fiendishly unkind.
I had my moments of kindness – mild, at best – but they were probably transactional and manipulative. That’s still tough for me to write and even tougher to accept, but this is the way.
Early on in recovery, I certainly received kindness from others, kindness I did not possess. For example, in August of 2016 Hulk Hogan’s lawyers put a lien on my meager checking account for hundreds of millions of dollars. I was already broke, and now I was more broke, because a professional wrestler and his gang of Florida shit-kicking lawyers were having some fun picking their teeth with me. They just wanted to wail on me.
All of these filings were public so the reporters covering the trial wrote about this extra demoralizing plot point. Twitter had its fun with how broke and pathetic I was and then, when it felt like no more cosmic pranks were left to be had, Gawker’s lawyers dropped me. “Conflicts,” they said.
It was a truly awful time for me. I’d just reset my sobriety day count about a month before, too.
Friends began to look after me closely. Lots of them wired me cash, some sent groceries. I received emails from people I hadn’t heard from in a while who were deeply concerned, but there were others who just wanted to rubberneck. I never heard from some friends and colleagues at all. Maybe they thought the kindest thing they could do for me at that point was to say nothing.
On August 20, 2016, I received an email from a man named Jeff MacGregor, a sportswriter I barely knew, and one I had definitely forgotten. I think he wrote a book about NASCAR and we excerpted it on Deadspin in 2009 or 2010. I didn’t interview him for the site because I thought NASCAR was incredibly boring, but I liked his editor so we ran an excerpt anyway.
This was the email he sent:
Hi AJ -
I got your email address from Tommy.
Just wanted to check in and see if I could help with anything.
If you ever need a few bucks to make the rent or buy some food, please let me know.
In the meantime, I enclose warm regards.
I responded graciously, but I was suspicious and a little annoyed. This guy doesn’t know me. He probably wants something.
What else could it be? He didn’t even have my email address.
Either way, it was nice of this person to drop me a line. He had clearly taken some of the “most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines” that Saunders encourages the class of 2013 to seek out. Good on you, Jeff.
He emailed me again – 22 more times, to be exact. Nothing ever too pushy or intrusive, most under 30 words with subject lines like “MacGregor checks in" and the sign-off would be some variation of “enclosing warmest thoughts of the MacGregor household,” which sounded a little too earnest and kooky to me.
The last time he emailed me was in November 2019 – more than three years after his initial email. Here’s what it said:
Thought of you this morning and wanted to say hello.
All well here - happy and healthy and busy.
Everything OK?
I enclose warmest thoughts of the household.
By then I don’t think Jeff MacGregor was too concerned about whether or not I had someone to talk to, or if he was volunteering to be that guy, but he wanted to make sure, which, man, what kindness level is that? Send one email, yeah, okay, you’re what most people would consider a “good guy,” but 22 times over the next three years? That’s extra kind. Definitely not mild nor reserved.
I haven’t thought about Jeff MacGregor since about a few hours before I wrote this. I knew I wanted to write about kindness and the Saunders essay because I wanted to fully process and remember the last time I was ever truly unkind. That was a couple of years ago in October of 2019. My father was in town, his dementia was in full bloom, but so was his anger. I knew he was sick, but I pretended he was not just so I could say hurtful things and not feel guilty about it. It didn’t matter that he was ill-equipped to fight back – I wanted to wail on him.
I regret doing it. Especially now that he's deteriorated so much since then. What would kindness have brought to that moment?
But I should definitely email Jeff MacGregor back, just to check-in, and send warmest regards from the Daulerio household. I Googled him to see what he’s been up to and, wow, he was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2019. Turns out he’s been nominated like six times. Huh. I never knew that.
Edited email: Warmest thoughts of the Daulerio household … and congratulations, by the way.
It's a start.– AJD
When Everything Was A Lot
by The Small Bow Orchestra
Beginners and Enders
Now let's get after it.
"My last night drinking was more of a last weekend. I went to Palm Springs with my girlfriends for an event that I can’t remember now and spent the whole weekend taking stupid Instagram pictures and only hydrating with booze. I didn’t know it was going to be my last weekend. To be honest I barely remember it. What I do remember very clearly is drinking a few Tecates on Sunday morning before driving back to San Diego with my friend in the passenger seat. She has two sons. I drove drunk with a mother in my car and was so shaky that we talked the whole drive home because I didn’t want to have a panic attack.
Once we got back to my house she wanted to stay and hang out because she lived out of state and I basically kicked her out because I wanted to keep drinking and I wanted to do it alone. I drank all night and went to work the next day but left after a few hours because I couldn’t stop shaking and thinking about jumping off a bridge. I got home and figured I was either going to kill myself on purpose or by accident so I drove myself to the emergency room. One suicide, please!
They gave me the no-slip socks, took my clothes, sat me with a nurse who hated her job, gave me a breathalyzer, and pumped me full of Ativan. I ate some pudding then puked it up and when a doctor asked me if I wanted to stop drinking, I said yes." - Michelle R.
****
"I kept Googling "carbs White Claw" and assuring my friend, who'd bought my way into a wristband party with three free drinks, that I could pry two more out of the bartender. It was Southern Decadence, New Orleans's big dirty clothing-optional version of Pride, and I was the only girl in the room. A welcome sight to the straight bartender, who gave me a mango White Claw on the house.
I wish I'd planned for my last night and my last drink better; I'm confident the bartender would have offered a Scotch for my troubles." –J.
****
"Wanted to talk about the last time I made myself throw up. It was September, years ago, and my father was dead. He had been dead for a week, which was both the longest amount of time in the world and, now, the shortest amount of time (to have a freshly dead father is much better than a long-dead one, see). I had mostly stopped throwing up, but sometimes I still did, when everything was a lot. I spent $30 at the Five Guys and threw up in the bathroom, easily, no problem. I didn't know I was done. I don't know I am done, actually, except that was 11 years ago, so I guess I kind of am. " –Kate D.
****
"Totally anti-climactic - the last booze/drugs I had was one single shitty Miller Lite on New Years Eve two years ago. The previous four months of chaos that followed early August discovery led me to believe (thankfully) that maybe I should take a break from booze and drugs for a little while. Maybe get my shit together, you know? Dry January led to some additional self-reflection and an eventual acceptance of my powerlessness against booze too."–Anon.
****
Mylast-lastnight, was actually a day, Noon to be exact, on a Friday, March 30, 2018. Most people’slast-lastnight would have been a night, two weeks prior, when a fragmented memory of a trip was made in the back of an ambulance, and I was intubated in the ICU, or the two nights prior to that day when I spent another blacked-out night in the ER.
Nope, mylast-lastdrink was two vodka and Sprites, quietly sipped on my couch, at around 11 am in the morning, on a weekday. I dumped the last shot out of the bottle, bewildered and angry at myself and at the glass in my hand. “This has got to stop!”
Well, 1,003 days later, I look back at that day, and it really is ‘mono no aware’. No send-off, no formal goodbye, just done, but no idea at the time it would really stick." ~ Rosalyn
Illustration by Edith Zimmerman
