Returning to the Scene of the Crime

I’m grateful for a trip to Iowa and for time with my mom. I’m grateful for junk food on road trips. I’m grateful for co-conspirators and people who make me laugh. I’m grateful for feeling like I can be me. I’m grateful for what happens when I let it. I’m grateful to be sober today.

song of the week:

Welcome to the end of September. Summer is an orange ball in the rear view mirror and the pumpkin spice apocalypse is upon us. I am returned from a trip to Iowa, which includes a 4-hour drive to and from Chicago and thus, plenty of time for reflection. Iowa City holds an interesting place in me. It’s where I grew up, it’s where I became an alcoholic (or at least discovered I was one), it’s also the last place I inhabited before I became an alcoholic.

I very often say that recovery is about finding the version of you that was lost. I read a lot of Encyclopedia Brown as a boy. I very, very much wanted to be Encyclopedia Brown, what with his insanely clever deductions about door hinges and the spinning properties of hard-boiled eggs.¹ One thing I learned from Encyclopedia Brown was that if you’re looking for something you’ve lost, it makes sense to start with the last place you knew you had it. For me, that place sits roughly between exits 242-244 on Interstate 80.

One thing I love about Iowa is the landscape. There is something I love about the expanse of soybean and corn fields, stretching flat to the horizon, dotted by little farms surrounded by a windbreak of trees left to provide some protection against the really brutal winter winds. I’ve seen that landscape literally thousands of times and am still struck by it nearly every time, in the same way I’m still struck by the New York skyline every time I return home.

I think it’s very interesting that those are the two places that evoke the same reaction. When I spend time in Iowa City and bump into my mom’s friends, and they ask which one this is (which son), my mom points and says “he’s the one in New York.” While Midwesterners are generally very polite, maybe too polite, there are exceptions and this is one of them. People feel very free to tell me that they could never live in a place like New York: what about the Mad Max levels of crime, what about the dirt and grime, what about the constant risk of death on the subway?

Anyway, I feel a deep connection to both of these places, and while others may have a hard time reconciling that, it seems like I’ve been told by many a recovery counselor that being able to believe that two different things can be true at the same time is part of recovery thinking. Maybe ironically, Iowa is the place where the seeds of the idea of living in New York were planted.

I spent a lot of unsupervised time in libraries in Iowa City. I often waited for my mom to pick me up at the public library on her way home, and my dad let me roam the massive University of Iowa library. The card catalog filled one’s vision, like those endless soybean fields that stretch out to the horizon. Since I was unsupervised and the card catalog didn’t feature anything like parental controls, let’s just say I found it very, very educational.

One thing I loved doing at the University Library was going to the 3rd Floor, “Bound Periodicals.” This was where copies of magazines going way, way back were kept. You could read Harper’s Weekly from the time of the Civil War, the great newspapers were kept on microfiche and you could read accounts of World War I and II in the New York Times. I found and started reading The New Yorker and kind of fell in love.

I began reading The New Yorker and gradually worked my way backwards through the incredibly rich literary history. I was completely transfixed by Roger Angell using such beautiful prose in essays about baseball. I read Dorothy Parker and E.B. White and came to believe that I needed to live in New York just like them. I wanted to feel the same sense of wonder and excitement every time I looked up at the impossibly tall buildings all around me touching the sky. At the time, this seemed outlandish; high achievers in my high school class maybe went to Chicago or Minneapolis, but that was about the extent of it.

Like so many things, I kept this to myself. I already had a sense of this looming gulf between me and the rest of the world, the normal world. I felt different, saw things differently and felt that I needed to obscure this as much as possible. I needed to be like other people; the problem is that this felt like a very tremendous leap for me, it required bravery and self-confidence and I didn’t have very much of that back then. Et voila—grain alcohol and pink jesus punch solved that problem.

I still kept my secrets, the burgeoning drinking habit just enabled me to move seamlessly between the two lives. There wasn’t that much of a difference at first, but as the years stretched on and the drinking intensified, during the occasional moments of clarity I could see how far away I was drifting. I would have this very real sense of “how the f*** did I get here.” When the Talking Heads sang about “this is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife,” I very much knew what they meant.

That sense of disconnection grew and despite growing material success, I felt emptier and emptier inside. The cheerful and positive version of me gave way to a resentful, envious, jealous, very insecure high achiever. As the distance between the two poles increased, so did my need to not think about it too much and that’s where the drinking became so useful. The song of the week was very much an anthem, I knew I was leaving, knew that I was going somewhere else and felt a real sense of loss about leaving.

I started drinking in bars in Iowa City and my first regular spot was Magoo’s on North Linn Street. Magoo’s is where I realized I was an alcoholic. It’s no longer there, but that block is pretty seared into my memory. My first sponsor was from Iowa City and I did my first 4th and 5th Step at a monastery in Dubuque, Iowa.²

Iowa City is also where I developed my love of reading, my love of music and record stores, my love of wandering around downtown at night, letting my mind roam free. Those things that are kind of essential parts of my personality all took root and grew in Iowa City. So did my love for and desire to live in New York. It was those kinds of dualities that made me so uncomfortable that they required anesthetizing.

When I visit Iowa, it’s very much like visiting the past and I’m presented with those very same dualities. I’m sure I seem like a fish out of water there, I walk way too fast, get impatient with long explanations about routine things, kind of prefer people with a bit of an edge instead of the nice all over that is everywhere. Those kinds of differences used to make me feel uncomfortable, made me feel like I needed to change things about myself so that I would fit in. I learned how to do that, but I always knew that I didn’t quite fit in either place—the drinking kept me in a weird limbo where I could inhabit either world pretty easily. The strain was moving between them.

These trips to Iowa are gifts. A chance to be with my mom, maybe it has some aspects of a living amends to it—I just know it means a lot to both of us. The other part of the gift is the time travel part of it—the part where it feels like I’m visiting 17 year-old TBD. A lot of the places I haunted are gone, there is no jazz club in that alley and up the stairs. The black vinyl booths and jukebox from Magoo’s have crumbled into dust. The friends I hung around all moved away.

I still wander the same streets when I go back. I still drive the same gravel roads to unknown parts of Johnson County and listen to way-too-loud music. I still love the corn and soybean fields touching the sky at the very end of the known world. I think people with fancy degrees and actual education and training in psychology refer to resolving this duality as “integration,” or maybe “reintegration.” It’s the resolution of the civil war between the different versions of oneself that brings peace and happiness and stability to life.

“Field of Dreams” was a novel written by an Iowa Citian and made into a movie with Kevin Costner. When James Earl Jones first sees the magical baseball diamond with the cornfield outfield fence in the movie, he says, “this must be heaven,” and is told, no, this is Iowa. For this alcoholic, it’s not about choosing New York City vs. Iowa City, it’s not about selecting one persona or another, it’s realizing that it’s all one beautiful journey and being sober means I don't have to shuttle between the different versions of myself. I don’t have to choose anymore. I’m always home.

Happy Friday

1. Doors always swing “towards” their hinges. I think about this many times every day and it’s always an homage to Encyclopedia Brown.

2. About 90 miles away.