“What is an addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.” – Alice Miller

I was a terrible waitress. Starting the evening with a bank to use to provide change to customers I often ended up losing money because of my total lack of ability to count. Luckily, the bartenders found my ineptitude endearing and usually remedied the situation by tipping me from their earnings. As long as I stayed numbed by drugs and alcohol, I remained immune to the human sadness found in most bars. One Sunday afternoon I waited on a middle-aged father who had brought his child for “one soda and an Irish coffee.” They were on their way to the zoo the little boy told me when I brought him some crayons and paper from my secret stash. The man told me he was divorced and this was his only day with his son. Hours later we poured him into a cab after determining the mother’s address. This confirmed my ongoing dark view of the world. Later that day, one of the owner’s friends came in and took Jeff into the back room, emerging alone after an hour. The place was almost empty. Instead of sitting at the bar he called me over. I knew he was a major coke dealer, considered incredibly generous and liked by the bartenders because of his ability to tell a story and the massive tips he gave. I walked over to take his order and he asked me to sit down.

I’m working,” I said. He laughed.  “Sit down with me.” He said.
“No.”
He took out a hundred-dollar bill and a lighter. “I’ll burn this money,” he said. “Unless you sit down.”

I walked back to the bar. His lighter clicked and then we watched, the bartender and I, as the money blazed in the ashtray. I took off my apron and handed my tray to the bartender. “I’m going home,” I said. I picked up my bag and left.

After that, Sam returned and again took Jeff into the back room.
“Is he shooting him up or something?” I asked the bartender.
He shrugged. “Why don’t you be nice to him? He’s really, really rich.” When I rolled my eyes the bartender added. “And smart. Like really smart. Like you.”

He was smart and rich and funny as hell. He sold cocaine to Saudi Arabian billionaires, celebrities, and college students. One night he brought me to a sale on a yacht owned by one of those Middle Eastern men. While he conducted his business one of the other men offered to give me a tour of the boat. The next thing I knew I was being pushed from behind into a dark room and when I screamed the door opened and my friend was standing there looking furious.

“I thought she was part of the deal,” the guy said.
“No,” the drug dealer said. “She’s not.”

The drug dealer was constantly disappearing probably to buy or sell cocaine and then reappearing to claim me. One day I realized I was pregnant. A pregnancy while you continue to smoke, drink, take drugs, and live like you’re trying to die is terrible. Two months on, I’m lying in bed as the sun floods my room with light, high, and sleepless, attempting to explain to my gently rising belly that I would be a horrible mother and how sorry I am. I am very sorry. I had always wanted to be a mother, desperately so. It wasn’t just babies; I loved older children, and I loved teaching. I loved the idea of unconditional support and kindness. But here I was, depressed, drugged, drunk, and dating a drug dealer who kept disappearing and who, I would soon learn, was actually married. He had gone to Hawaii on some drug dealer errand, and when I told him I was pregnant, he begged, all the way from Waikiki, that I wait for him to return because he wanted me to have his baby. I waited, and he called, and I waited, and he called, and then I realized how wrong it all was, that a baby deserved something better than an alcoholic mother and a drug dealer father. I found out he was married when Jeff Alito got viciously drunk and told me. “He’s going to shoot me now. I promised not to tell you.”

I scheduled the abortion for December 23. Kaiser Permanente offered excellent health coverage and I wasn’t working again until Christmas Day. I lied to the intake nurse, assuring her I would bring a friend, and when I turned up alone, I said he’d been delayed, but he was coming. When they gave me the shot, I clutched the hand of the nurse. “I want to be a good mother,” I sobbed. She put a cool hand on my forehead and then it was done. Afterward, they told me to wait for my imaginary friend, but finally, they gave me back my clothes, and I went to the Vietnamese restaurant near my apartment and had some noodles and a bottle of wine. A tiny, beautiful Vietnamese boy of about two came up to me and leaned on my lap, speaking in a language I couldn’t understand, patting my shoulder.

“He see you sad,” his mother said. I smiled and his face changed. The light in his eyes was breathtaking. His older sister came over and calmly uncurled his fingers from around my hands. “Stupid head,” she muttered, leading him away.

My roommate had gone to a sex therapist Christmas week at Big Sur. I was alone and empty of life. I wanted to go home.  I had lived in San Francisco for two years yet there was no friend to call to take me for an abortion. I hadn’t managed to read a book or visit a museum or learn a simple script since I’d left the phone company.  I went to the bar to pick up my last check.

“Good luck,” Edwardo shook my hand.
“What will I tell him?” Jeff Alioto asked, more concerned about the drug dealer killing him than his losing a waitress.
“Tell him I left.”
“I love you,” Johann Jr. was trying to extricate himself from the embrace of a chubby female fan. “Don’t leave.” He was a fatherless boy with an alcoholic mother and a terrible habit of his own. But drowning people can’t save each other. I kissed him and drove away in my yellow VW, alone again for the cross country drive.

Instead of driving right home, I decided to visit my Uncle Kevin and Aunt Dee Dee in Baton Rouge. First, I headed to Houston where I went to a cowboy bar and in a blackout ended up in a Dennys at five o’clock in the morning where I met a man whose father owned a number of Houston hotels.

“I’m Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s daughter,” I announced.

This was a lie. A curious lie, since we had once rented the Moynihan’s house in Cambridge when my father was teaching summer school at Harvard. I had slept in Maura Moynihan’s canopy bed, and we had run amuck in the Moynihan’s mansion, getting stuck in their dumb waiter and picking the locks into closed rooms. Moynihan’s wife was named Elizabeth like my mom and one morning the phone rang and it was Julia Child asking for “Liz.” I handed my mother the phone and saw her face suddenly change, suffusing with surprise and delight. My mother was an aficionado of Mastering The Art of French Cooking and trusted Child in all things culinary.

Despite her being an imposter they made a date to go food shopping together. Our relationship with the famous and the semi-famous had always been slightly odd. Our dentist in London was Peter Sellers’ dentist. We took an ocean liner home that had the cast of Fellini’s most beloved movie, La Dolce Vita aboard. Being three, I don’t remember, but my oldest sister swore the boat was swarming with sexy Italians. My mother danced with Ralph Ellison, my father hung out with James Baldwin, and Norman Mailer encouraged me. We leaned towards the literary, which meant most of our connections failed to produce anything helpful like a job.

Of course, none of this explains my claiming to be someone I wasn’t in a Houston Denny’s. I spent three days with the scion of the hotel chain and a year on, responding to an amends, he told me he had never believed I was the daughter of the infamous Moynihan as I was “too normal”.

Arriving in Baton Rouge, I was immediately cosseted by my mother’s wealthy brother, Kevin, who sent my car to be serviced while providing me with hospitality that included telling their cook what I craved to eat for breakfast. I seldom saw my mother’s youngest brother growing up. He was more like a legend, crowned king of the Mardi Gras, very wealthy, handsome, and southern to the rest of my family’s New England roots. After our first dinner together, we were standing outside in the humid Baton Rouge evening, my uncle smoking a cigar while I had a cigarette when Uncle Kevin turned to me.

“What do you really want to do with your life?” he said.

No one had ever asked me that before. I had been told, advised, ordered, bullied, and threatened but no one had ever asked me what I wanted. Looking at him sideways, I wondered if this was an elaborate trick. I would be cut to shreds by my father's articulation of the uselessness of my ideas or yelled at by my mother for hoping to achieve something difficult.

“I love acting. I’m good but I made a friend in Dublin who was breathtaking. So, maybe writing. But I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” my uncle asked. “Your dad’s a fine writer.” I was afraid to tell him the truth lest I seem ungrateful. Ingratitude was another mortal sin right up there with pride.
“I can’t. I mean, I studied acting while I was at the phone company but it was impossible. I was too worn out.”
“Won’t your parents help you?” he asked, looking at me carefully.
“They think acting is a waste of time.”
“What about the writing?”
I shrugged. I didn’t want to betray my parents by explaining they were largely uninterested in my life choices unless those choices reflected on them.

The next morning at breakfast Kevin handed me a check. “Here’s what we’ll do; I’m making you a speech writer and sending you two hundred dollars a week. That will pay for acting classes. You need someone to give you a chance. This is your chance, Molly. Take it.”

After assuring me he would give me writing assignments and that the arrangement was not charity, I left via New Orleans, where I stayed in their company suite and picked up a fireman when the hotel was briefly evacuated because of a kitchen blaze. I woke up the next morning to see an axe and a pair of fireman’s boots in the doorway. I had terrified myself in San Francisco but I hadn’t reached bottom yet. It would take another year before I was in so much trouble I would find myself back in California trying to persuade a 7-Eleven owner to tell me where I could buy a gun so I could shoot myself in the head.

Meanwhile, I headed home. Before I went to my parents’ house in Princeton I drove north to New Brunswick and spent a single night with my last college ex-boyfriend, the one with the psycho girlfriend.  I was afraid to go home, afraid my parents would see the truth and throw me out or lock me up. Because I was a coward and a manipulative bitch, I seduced him. Afterward, we were lying in bed, and he pulled himself up on his elbow to look down at me.

“I still love you.” He smiled. “But I’m going to marry Joanne.” She was his psycho ex.
“You can’t do that. She’s crazy and awful.”
“She needs me. You don’t need me.”
“I’m in trouble.”
“You’re going to be okay. You’re so smart.”
“I told someone in Houston I was a senator’s daughter.”
“So? I told someone I was a roadie for the Grateful Dead so he’d give me cocaine.”

We both laughed. He put his arm around me, and for the first time in ages, I slept without having nightmares.

Knowledge had never been my friend. Despite all the information available in 1983 about addiction, I knew nothing. A friend of a friend of my parents had been in AA but I only knew that because my mother always referred to him using the word “poor” before his name and also that he was a mediocre piano player. My father’s father had been tentatively identified as an alcoholic, but when that word was used, my mother flinched, and we might as well have said he was a space alien or a serial murderer or a protestant for all the information the word ‘alcoholic’ conveyed. He was missing, absent, disappeared, and died in an alleyway, the reason my father and his older brother had spent a year in an orphanage, a terrible place depicted in my father’s gorgeous first novel, Sisters and Brothers. I read that book at thirteen and was thoroughly confused.

“Why did Daddy write about a little boy in an orphanage getting beaten by nuns?”
“Because that’s what happened to him.”
“Poor daddy.”
“Yes. But he’s fine now. He has us.”

He never talked about it. His older brother, my Uncle Teddy, was a charismatic madman who occasionally turned up, once as a giant puppet at a child’s birthday party, another time leading a demonstration to save the Kurdish people in Harvard Square. I constantly thought about how hard my dad’s life was and wished on everything, birthday candles, wishbones, and pennies in fountains that he was happy and would stop drinking. At some point, I added my sister Catherine to that wish as I had learned she was depressed and she took drugs. My mother’s brother, Uncle Brendan, was always drinking, making trouble, charming people, especially married women. He knew everybody, lived in New York City, had a glove compartment full of unpaid tickets, and once appeared at a party with Shelley Winters as his date. He was brilliant and bad and when he finally died of cirrhosis, my mother cried to me, “Why?” and I, a few years sober, answered, “He was an alcoholic, mom.” She stiffened and pulled away and said, “He wasn’t that bad.”

My mother held onto her honorific as the Queen of Denial, and I welcomed her lack of acceptance because, really, could I ever live a life free of self-hatred, guilt, and disappointment? Could I really stop spinning, lying, luring men into my spider web, and then leaving them tangled in the sadness of my life or watching them finally manage to rip themselves free? By the time I was twenty-four, seven different men who had once loved me said: “I don’t want to watch you die.” And yet, I understood nothing. Also, I believed they should watch me die. It was the price of admission.

Home. It feels like I’ve been gone for a million years and like I never left. I emulate my parents’ routine: a balanced breakfast at eight o’clock in the morning, a boiled egg, one piece of toast lightly buttered, or cereal, fruit, or plain yogurt. The papers, The New York Times and local, my mother does the puzzle, and my father supplies answers. I have been living amongst savages and have lost the practice, more than a practice for me, an obsession, and an addiction to reading. Reentry is challenging and my mother stares at me hard as if she can discern all the drugs, the alcohol, and the men. I don’t really like breakfast but it is important to conform. I murmur an answer, beating my father to a crossword question about Sylvia Plath. This inspires my mother to announce that Richard Murphy, my friend Emily’s father, had spent the weekend with Plath before she stuck her head in the oven.

“Evidently she didn’t have a good time,” my father says.
“Well, Richard’s gay,” my mother, says.
“Maybe she was depressed,” I say.
“Of course, she was depressed,” my mother says. “Ted Hughes was a pill.”
“Did you meet him?” I ask. They have met nearly everybody in literature that matters
“Yes,” my mother says. “At the Amis'. Are you depressed?”
I look up. They are staring at me.
“Maybe,” I say. “I guess so.”
“You’re depressed? Why? Is it my fault?” I looked at my father. This felt like a trap. “We’ll pay for therapy.”

She returns to her puzzle. My father is still looking at me. He smiles. I smile back. My bedroom is unchanged, same flat pillow, wooden bed, slanted attic ceilings, and old wood floor. The walls are painted white and except for a postcard, a Modigliani of a woman, they are bare. April is cold and cruel. Small ice crystals form in the corners of the windows. There is mail, letters from the Irish girls, and one from the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival. I have been accepted as an acting intern for the summer and beyond. No pay but a place to live for the summer. Normally, this would be impossible, but I am now the recipient of the Kevin Reilly Arts Scholarship. The Festival starts in June. I need only survive two months at home. My mother stands at the bottom of the stairs calling my name. “Molly?”

“Yes?”

Silence. It has always been so. I must descend to be told it is lunchtime. I no longer decide when, what, or whether I eat. Lunch is a salad with additions from the previous evening’s meal and other bits of things that emerge from the refrigerator. I can’t remember the last time I sat down to eat a proper meal unless it was the drug dealer feeding me lobster or molten chocolate cake. Nothing normal. I had been lying to my mother about meals for so long I had entirely invented menus to draw from: chicken, green beans, noodles, pork chops, roast potatoes, zucchini, broccoli, salmon, and rice. Lying was the default setting since I had been raped at fifteen because telling the truth was dangerous. My childhood reversion is to become mother’s little helper, snapping green beans, setting the table, and feigning interest in how she manages to make such delicious dinners.

At moments I am tempted to blurt out the truth, to articulate how awful life was in California, to confess about the drug dealer, the abortion, the drugs, the drinking but I know she will crumble and moan and I will become the comforter and that is worse than anything else, watching her fight with my father when I was so little, terrified yet on deck to make her feel better, thinking someone should take care of me. I was a child and had no power.

My father looks at me hard across the table. “San Francisco wasn’t magical?” he asks. I could tell him the truth, and I know he would help me, but then I would be breaking so many rules.

“No, Nobody reads books.”

After the drinking fights, I ran secret errands with my daddy, stuff to make mommy feel better, presents like a purse or perfume. Back then I was so confused. He hurt her but then asked me to be his special helper. Pleasure mixed with pain and guilt, a familiar sense that I was somehow implicated. Now I still ride shotgun, to get last minute milk or to the hardware store for something mysterious my mother requires. We discuss books, and I reach back into the education I gained during my three years at Rutgers, one at Trinity College Dublin to comment on Hardy or Joyce, or possibly we agree that Beloved is a masterpiece, but then we stop talking.

“Are you all right?” my father asks. Of course, I’m not all right.
“I’m not sure. “
“Do you need money?”

I don’t need money. I need to tell him how I lost my way so badly in California there were times I wondered whether I could continue to live. I need to tell him my skin hurts, my heart hurts, I’m afraid I’ve failed, and by failing, I am no longer loved. I need to tell him I love him and I need him. We are silent. I ask for a ride to the train. On our way we pass the pig farm.

“Pigs are very intelligent,” he says.
“How can you tell?” I say. “Can they understand irony?”
“You can teach them things,” my father says.

I like this definition of intelligence. I feel unteachable; unlovable, unfuckable; untrustworthy, unintelligent, inarticulate. I got a job at a diner, a diner on Route 1 with overweight waitresses and a lack of service that fit my level of skill. During one lunchtime rush Gertha, the biggest, scariest waitress who is inexplicably popular with customers actually snatches the food from my customer’s hand as the sandwich reaches his mouth. He is left like a cartoon holding air in the shape of a sandwich. I have mistakenly taken her order, or maybe not, but no one argues with Gertha. I wear a hideous polyester waitress uniform, beige with a brown attached apron. My mother looks at me leaving the house, pencil behind one ear, hair scraped into a messy ponytail, the uniform stained with ketchup, white nurse’s shoes, support hose, and her sigh could collapse a building.

I am thrilled. Downward mobility is the ultimate revenge. During my seven-hour shift not a single customer uses a word longer than two syllables. Gradually, I feel less motivated to change. I’m not drinking every day but I still drink to blackout nearly every time I go out and pick up men to keep from going home. I have reunited with a friend from high school, Palmer, who projected a serene calm in high school that I found puzzling, given the craziness of much of what occurred during those days. Palmer was best friends with Alison, who had moved to Madrid. I manage to inspire Palmer to heights of self-destructive behavior, getting extremely drunk and finding ways to scatter plastic dinosaurs into various potted plants that decorate the bars we patronize. The perfect enabler, Palmer practically descends to the same depths I am seeking except she has a switch to keep herself from going into a blackout and picking up men who may or may not be safe.

Those mornings I woke up to alien ceilings, a body previously craved but now the merest contact will make me sick. There is sliding and crawling and creeping involved during these mornings, wallets withdrawn from pants to check the name, the address. At times I stick my head out a window to try and decipher a street sign. What town, what city, what fresh hell is this? I find a phone and call her.

“I’m looking out the window,” I tell her. “I think I’m in Trenton.”
“You left with the drummer from the band.”
“What band?” I am trying to locate a glimmer of a memory, a sense that the man I have slept with the previous night has a name. I locate his pants, pull out his wallet, and find his driver’s license. All is darkness. I can’t imagine how I reached this state of prolonged chaos.

Both my older sisters are now married. This should not have been a worry. After all, I was the youngest, the fairy tale favorite, father’s darling, and the grabber of the gold ring. I tell myself I am waiting for something fabulous but darkness hovers. Driving, I imagine crashing, on a roof, jumping, in possession of drugs, overdosing, seducing a stranger, murder. The future appears tiring, uninviting, and unpleasant. The past was sad, laced with bad decisions, loss, and regret. At twenty-four, I was discouraged and defeated, aware that I was blessed with gifts that I had trashed and squandered. Serving bad coffee to long-haul truckers, I hold the pot aloft while they tell me about their routes from Florida to Maine, flat tires, bad drivers, slutty women, stories that lack even a glimpse of understanding that their lives were deadly dull.

Deeply depressed, I draft several beginnings to my suicide note, “I’m sorry, I tried, It’s not your fault, I forgive you.” I wasn’t sorry, I hadn’t tried, it was their fault, I didn’t forgive them.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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