This River Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  TALKING TO THE DEAD

  BLOOD AND DUPLICITY

  INSTRUCTIONS ON THE USE OF ALCOHOL

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  REMEMBERING LINDA

  THE APPRENTICE

  THIS RIVER

  DIRTY MOVES

  SOME KIND OF ANIMAL

  AMERICAN MARIACHI

  OUR JAPAN

  INSTRUCTIONS ON THE USE OF HEROIN

  RELAPSE

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  Praise for This River

  “Sometimes a way to gauge the quality of a creation is to think about what it took, what was overcome, what price it extracted. In this case, the proof is in your hands. This River is raw and palpable and beats like a heart. Brown gave everything he had: infinite strength, exacting discipline, fearsome courage. When you put this book down, trust me, you will think about it for a long time.”

  —Robert Olmstead, author of the national bestseller

  Coal Black Horse and winner of the Chicago Heartland Award

  “James Brown has shaped from the English language something rather different: an exacting, muscular prose both tender and unforgiving, rigorously concise in its refusal to dilute the darkest realities and yet capacious and nuanced in its pursuit of redemption and familial love. Brown is one of our most accomplished writers, and this brilliant memoir among the finest of its kind.”

  —B.H. Fairchild, author of the National Book Critics

  Circle Award–winning Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower

  Midwest and National Book Award Finalist for The Art of the Lathe

  “James Brown’s provocative, beautifully written and gut wrenching memoir illuminates a life rich in those elemental passions that govern our lives—anger, fear, depression, death, and love. Sometimes tender, sometimes manic, but always wise and insightful, This River never falters in the muscularity of the writing, all of it filled with riveting details that kept this reader turning the pages as fast as he could read them. Mesmerizing from beginning to end. Unforgettable.”

  —Duff Brenna, author of The Book of Mamie, winner of the

  AWP Award for Best Novel, and Too Cool, a

  New York Times Notable Book of the Year

  “This is a harrowing and beautiful memoir, shot through with excess and violence and shocking, heart-stopping compassion. James Brown renders his extraordinary life in tight, muscular prose, sparing neither himself nor the reader the hard lessons of addiction and recovery. The result is an unforgettable book, stripped of irony and pretense, that lays bare the darkness—and the light—in all of us.”

  —Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Corpus Christi: Stories

  “Sequel to Brown’s indelible Los Angeles Diaries, this cycle of linked narratives is equally powerful and complete in itself. Brown’s profoundly authentic story of Brown, survivor of sibling suicides, drinker, user, writer, teacher, father, husband, is as fully imagined as it is unsparing. In speaking from the edge of loss, Brown’s eloquence recalls Robert Lowell’s ‘my eyes have seen what my hand did.’”—DeWitt Henry, author of Safe Suicide

  For Paula

  Of this book, earlier versions of chapters appeared in: “This River” and “Dirty Moves” in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. The latter piece was also reprinted in Best American Sports Writing (Houghton Mifflin) and Fathers and Sons and Sports: An Anthology of Great American Sports Writing (ESPN Books). “Some Kind of Animal” was published in GQ under the title “The Beast in Me,” “Talking to the Dead” appeared in the Santa Monica Review, “Instructions on the Use of Alcohol” was published in Redivider: A Journal of New Literature under the title “How Some of Us Become Drunks and Junkies,” and “Blood and Duplicity” appeared in Ploughshares under the title “Missing the Dead.”

  Although this work contains descriptions

  of people in my life, many of their names and other

  identifying characteristics have been changed

  to protect their privacy.

  TALKING TO THE DEAD

  There’s another side to this story, when my brother and sister visit late at night, or in the early morning hours, and we simply talk. They are glad to see me again, as I am glad to see them, and we like to catch up on things. If only for a brief while, I am dreaming my brother and sister alive, and I’m grateful for their company.

  Other times I’ll wake up shouting, the tips of my hair damp with sweat. Paula says that when I sleep my legs are like live wires. She even writes a poem about it. A dark poem about nightmares and personal demons. Afterwards, I’ll lie in bed for hours, afraid to close my eyes. Add to the mix my long-standing battle with depression and I’m blessed with what in the field of psychopathology is regarded as a deeply disturbed mind. These are the things that inspire Paula to put such personal matters to paper. We’re married by this time, and I suppose, in some ways, that gives her the right.

  Not a day goes by where I don’t think of my dead brother and sister, my dead father, too, and now, most recently, my dead ex-wife. I could be in the middle of a conference with a student at the college where I teach and it’ll flash on me, my brother, recoiling from the gunshot that took his life. I could be driving home and I’ll see my sister sprawled out on the concrete bank of the Los Angeles River, her limbs twisted in all the wrong directions. I try not to imagine her bleeding. I try to blank out how the blood drains, the pool widening around her. The fall from the overpass wasn’t more than twenty-five, thirty feet, and I doubt she died on impact. The skull, I’m sure it cracked, but the heart may have continued to pulse. I pray she went into shock quickly, and alive or not, for however long she possibly lingered, that mercifully she soon felt nothing. And I cannot pass a hospital, any hospital, without hearing the sickening thump-and-hiss of the ventilator on which both my father and ex-wife spent their final days, unable to speak.

  I try to forget these things.

  I try to push them out of my thoughts.

  If it’s during the day, and I drink enough, I’ll sometimes succeed. But at night when I fall asleep, as the alcohol wears off and the subconscious comes into play, all bets are off. My brother shot himself in bed, and often my dreams fuse with memory, so that I find myself reliving a heightened version of the actual experience, cleaning up his room after the suicide, etching into my mind images of crystallized blood and fragments of bone. These dreams, or visions, whatever you’d like to call them, unroll frame-by-frame, in glimpses and flashes, and for years they’ve kept me from countless hours of sleep.

  Time after time the dream that begins with promise quickly grows dark, and I’m returned to consciousness by Paula shaking me, shouting, “wake up, wake up.” Eventually her patience wears thin, and one morning over coffee, she confronts me.

  “You need to get help.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know exactly what I mean.” She reaches across the kitchen table and touches my temple with her fingers. “It’s a circus in there, and you don’t even see it. I’m worried. I’ve been worried a long time, Jim, and I really don’t know how much more you can take of this.” She only uses my name when she wants to instruct, and her tone is sincere. “Every night you drink until you pass out because you can’t sleep, but the drinking only makes the nightmares worse. Something has to give,” she says. “There must be some kind of medication you can take.”

  Medication, I think, is for the truly troubled psyche, and I don’t see myself quite that far down the line. And strangely enough for an alcoholic-slash-addict, I don’t want to get strung out on whatever some doctor might
prescribe. Depression and nightmares, however, frequently go hand-inhand, and I figure that if I can remedy one, I’m bound to see improvement in the other. I’m also not altogether enamored by the idea of bearing my soul to a psychiatrist, so in my initial plan of attack I make an appointment with a general practitioner. On my first visit I tell him that I’m depressed.

  “Have you had a recent crisis?” he asks. “The loss of a loved one, your job, a divorce?”

  “Not recently,” I say.

  “But you’ve been depressed?”

  “Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “A couple years.”

  It’s been much longer, but I don’t want to make a bigger deal out of this than it already is, so I lie. And it’s that easy. Ten minutes later I’m out the door with a prescription in my pocket, cautiously hopeful that maybe, just maybe, these pills might work.

  This day marks the beginning of my journey through the world of psychotropic antidepressants. In the months to follow, through the tedious process of trial and error, I learn that what lifts the dark clouds from around the psyche of one troubled soul may in fact cause a hailstorm in another. As millions of others before me, I start with Prozac, and inside of a week I find that it does take the edge off my depression. But it also takes the edge off every other feeling, from joy to anger, and I find myself living in a haze of emotional mediocrity. Even worse, I can’t get it up in the bedroom, and as a result I sink into a depression uglier than the one I’m trying to shake.

  I return to the doctor.

  This time he prescribes Zoloft, a close cousin to Prozac in the family of antidepressants known as serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or simply SSRIs. It helps with my depression, but again I’m an utter failure in the bedroom. Next on the list is Effexor, chemically different than its predecessors but equally effective in the treatment of chronic despair, and though I don’t suffer for it sexually, it raises my already elevated blood pressure to even more dangerous levels. Then comes Serzone, an antidepressant in a class all its own, but it renders me almost completely incapacitated with a constant, shrillpitched ringing in my ears.

  By now nearly a year has passed, and I’ve just about given up hope of ever finding any relief in the form of a pill, when as a last resort my doctor suggests Wellbutrin, yet another antidepressant but one typically prescribed only after all the others have been tried and failed. The primary reason for caution is the high rate of seizure in its users, but for me, as it turns out, it’s a drug well worth the risk. It relieves the gloominess. It gives me energy and improves my mood. Had I been honest with the doctor on the first visit when I filled out the questionnaire in the waiting room, the one asking whether or not I use or have ever used narcotics, I could’ve saved myself a lot of needless misery. As it turns out, Wellbutrin is often prescribed for those of us who’ve used too much cocaine, for too long, or any of the various amphetamines. In doing so we’ve damaged our brain’s ability to produce dopamine, one of three neurotransmitters responsible for a feeling of well-being, frequently condemning the worst of us, the hard-core abusers, to a lifelong mental slump.

  My search for the right antidepressant ends well, but as far as the nightmares go, they remain unfazed through the entire ordeal. In some ways they’ve actually grown worse, and several months after the unnecessary death of my former wife, I finally snap. Soon, I wind up in a hospital for people of my condition, those who are suddenly unable to cope, who drink and use too much, what California police refer to as a “fifty-one-fifty” call.

  I’m immediately sedated with heavy doses of Valium, and Clonidine for high blood pressure, for it has skyrocketed in the early stages of withdrawal, and my memory of my first days here are a blur. But as the doctors slowly reduce the dosages of my sedatives, my brother and sister pay me a visit. He’s the same as I last remember him, as he always is, frozen in time at the age of twenty-seven, forever young and handsome. For my sister, who took her life at forty-four, and who hasn’t been gone nearly as long, I see her much as she’d probably look today had she chosen to carry on. You’d think it would come up in conversation, how it is that Marilyn and I have aged while our brother remains young, but it never does. Somehow we all assume it’s the natural order of things in the netherworld of life-after-death, and yet I still see myself as the youngest, not physically but in terms of my rank and title as little brother. That role is one of respect and deference, and so I typically listen more than I talk.

  In this dream, I’m sitting on the couch in the living room of my brother’s last residence, an old run-down house in a poor Los Angeles neighborhood known as Echo Park. My sister is seated beside me. Barry reclines in a beat-up La-Z-Boy, flipping through the pages of a screenplay. I’m not certain, but I believe it’s the script for Piranha, a low-budget B-movie, the last he ever worked in. He hands me the script.

  “Read this,” he says.

  In yellow highlighter, he’s marked off the dialogue of a security guard, and the language strikes me as stiff and artificial. I shake my head.

  “Bad, huh?”

  “Terrible,” I say.

  I pass the script to Marilyn, and you can tell by the look on her face that she doesn’t think much of it, either.

  “Now watch this,” he says.

  Marilyn grins, because she used to act, too, and knows what’s coming. I’m in the dark. Barry stands up from the La-Z-Boy, and inside of a minute he’s taken those stiff, forced lines and made them credible without altering a single word. It’s a small but impressive performance interspersed with gestures, movements, and just the right inflections of voice.

  Marilyn applauds. I do the same.

  “You can’t change the lines. You can’t rewrite someone else’s story. But there’s ways of making it better. It’s about improvising, Jimmy. It’s about reinventing,” he says, “and letting go.”

  I wake up then.

  My breathing is even and calm, and later that afternoon I meet with one of the staff psychiatrists. Paula has been called in to accompany me. In this uncertain period of my middle years, and more or less a mental wreck, my resolve to keep my private life private has weakened in light of the risk I’ve become to myself. I worry that if I’m not careful, if I don’t watch out, I could easily become a permanent member in my own dreamworld of the dead. And I can’t do that. I have my sons. I have a wife who sees in me what I’ve lost the ability to see in myself: that I’m something more than a drunk, someone worth saving.

  He asks for my story, and for the most part I tell him straight up. Paula, however, isn’t about to let me slide and frequently interjects, elaborating on what I persist in minimizing, embellishing on what I diminish. The doctor’s diagnoses, when all is said and done, is bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. He further speculates that I may be mildly schizophrenic, given my family history of depression and suicide, my tendency toward rage, and the fact that my mother was also once diagnosed as being mentally ill.

  “Like alcoholism,” he says, “it’s a genetic illness, passed down from one generation to the next. We know this now. The studies are irrefutable. But what we didn’t have before, and what we have today, are the better medications to treat it.”

  True or not, I resist the idea that mental illness and alcoholism are somehow inborn. Accepting that premise means embracing the notion of fate, and I don’t. I prefer to believe that I’m in full control. That life is in no way predetermined by some flawed pairing of genes and chromosomes. And again, when medication is recommended, I balk at the idea, not wanting, oddly enough, to get hooked on whatever it is he thinks I should take. In this case, it’s a powerful antipsychotic drug called Seroquel, and the mere suggestion of it possibly helping prompts a deep sigh of relief from my wife.

  “I don’t know about this,” I say.

  “He said it’ll help you sleep,” my wife tells me. “Why can’t you at least try it?”

  Understandably so, she is tired of being jolted awake by my dreams. Underst
andably so, she is tired of always having to follow me up to bed, because I’m afraid to be alone, afraid of where my mind may take me. She, too, is worn-down from my dreams, from rarely getting a full night’s rest, and on several occasions I’ve apparently even struck her in my sleep, though I recall nothing about it. So for my wife, as well as myself, I agree to try the medication.

  It’s strong, this Seroquel, and I’m still in the process of adjusting to it when they release me from the hospital. In that first week home, about thirty minutes after I take the stuff, and I only take it at night, I have difficulty coordinating my arms and legs. Navigating the stairs up to bed is a real test. My wife trails close behind, and once I’m safely in bed, when I attempt to speak, the words come out garbled. My tongue feels thick and fat. Somehow, through grimaces and gibberish, I’m able to communicate my frustration with Seroquel. She gently places her hand on my shoulder and rubs it.

  “Relax,” she says. “The psychiatrist told us it would take a while for your nervous system to adapt. We just have to give it a chance.”

  We, I think. Right. She’s not the one transformed into a babbling idiot every night. By the end of the week, however, my brain quits misfiring, and I haven’t had a single nightmare. The mechanism by which this drug works is unknown, but it’s believed to act as an antagonist on a number of different brain receptors. It’s prescribed for psychotic disorders, in particular schizophrenia, and by and large it proves a mixed blessing. Though it provides me with a well-overdue respite from my own troubled mind, it doesn’t distinguish between the good dreams, or visits, and the unwelcome ones, and in the end I’m left with a certain emptiness. A certain longing for the company of the dead.