Maybe it’s just the light but in that first picture of me I don’t look born as much as I do unearthed, the way dad’s holding me out like some product of an archaeological dig. Dad’s so young his beard looks drawn in like one of those 70s kid’s toys with the magnetic wand where you drag iron filings over a cartoon face. I look more like a glistening worm, my fat rolls segments.

That photo album from the 70s is pretty slim. There’s the red Volkswagen bug, the park across the street, the place we used to go by the Delaware water gap with a funny name that came from the Indians: Bake Oven Knob. In the 70s they are still unapologetically the Indians and at school we celebrate Thanksgiving with cardboard hats and potlucks like it was one big powwow, everyone friends.

The story of our lives is like that too, born or unearthed, brought from the dark into the light. And the dark is a place of uncertainty as we first confront our fears, our imagination. It follows us in some form our whole lives, it’s where we all start and end. And it’s a form of secrecy the dark, a place to hide.

It was a funny name Bake Oven Knob learning it as a kid, like the words didn’t fit together right. Many years later I went back for the first time as an adult after a long night of partying and we ran around in the dark on rocks and though there was broken glass and we were barefoot no one got cut, not even a nick. So spirited we were by what we’d taken it’s like we were spirits ourselves, so high our feet didn’t touch the ground. And if I was a cat with multiple lives I don’t think I used one that night, there were so many more nights like that, that photo album’s much thicker.

There’s a picture I have, not a real one but one in my head, of me doing beer bongs in the shower fully clothed as a teenager, in the shower so I could spit the foam down the drain and wash out the funnel. When I worked at the video store I could do several like that before my shift and no one noticed.

There’s the image of my landlord Glen with his shirt off and his middle-aged man boobs out slumped over the railing with a cigarette and me wondering had he relapsed or was he still sober. The color of those old tattoos always a vague blue-green, his stories from the military being pissed out of his mind and no one the wiser. Could drink a fifth and still look straight (and aim straight, he grinned).

To cop to it, the secrets and the lies, to flip over the rock and expose the million squirmy things was a beginning to recovery but by no means the end. Because the squirmy things just wriggled back into the dark. If you wanted to get better you had to root them out one by one. You never got them all. Because they weren’t foreign agents or just in your mind they were real, a part of you. You had to figure out where they ran for cover. All the therapists wanted to go back to the start, to childhood.

The first weeks of sobriety were the hardest because that’s when the substance really fought for dominance, in dreams where you felt like you’re constantly relapsing or fighting the temptation to, or wondering did you slip?

The twisted, self-defeating logic of the substance ricocheted off any available surface, wriggling itself in wherever it could. The substance became more your true substance in that parasite-host fashion where the balance flips and what you consume starts consuming you. The substance died in your sleep, in dreams, in the dark where it all began. It went back into its shell.

Toward the end for me it just came down to the ritual. I kept the drinking to myself standing in the garage; the weed smoking in the shed. It wasn’t the substances so much as the feeling of doing it unseen, unknown, that held sway. And why the need to cleave to these dark secrets, not out of shame, but more like some juvenile thrill of breaking the rules, being off-grid.

But at times when I caught myself in the mirror it was like a different part of myself saw myself and acknowledged what I was doing was wrong. Like the secret had been exposed. Like one self was looking out for another self saying you have to stop. So I did. But the secrets and the dark are still with me. What I did, who I am.

Now I go back home on the shoulder seasons, spring and fall. Last year we met at Bake Oven Knob for an autumn hike: my dad, his younger brother and sister. We climbed the trail to the ridge below the power lines but dad was having trouble with his eyes and needed to stop. I got him a stick to use as a cane coming down and sat with him on the rocks; I think he felt bad needing to stop but I reassured him. It didn’t matter I said, I’ve been here before. I’ve been to the top. After a while he said you should go on with them, I’ll be okay here, I’m fine.

It was one of those banner fall days, the sky pilot-light blue, all the leaves bright red, yellow, brown. None of it looked the same as it did the last time I’d been there in the dark, back in the 80s. But there was a photo of me as a kid, one of my favorite times with mom and dad when they were still together, me leaning against a tree with a stick over my shoulder posing, maybe 8 or 9. I don’t think my parents are in that picture but I’ll put them there so it’s all three of us, and that’s the version I’m keeping.

Categories: Addiction, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, identity, Memoir, recovery