Revealing the Roots and Behaviors of Addiction
Malaria is Not as Scary as Crystal Methamphetamine
I joined the Peace Corps. Everyone freaked, except for my dad — Day 12
It’s getting to the point where I’m no fun anymore.
— Suite Judy Blue Eyes, Crosby, Stills and Nash, 1969
Dryuary Day 12
Life is like a downhill slalom. If a bomb goes off at the second or third flag, you’re gonna have a hell of a time navigating the rest of the course.
My husband Anthony and I are not cut from the same cloth. We both grew up in a war, so to speak, but, as a youth in Lebanon, he had to carry a semi-automatic rifle. I just had to carry a handful of false gods. He is very steeped in the problem-solution mentality.
Anthony (Lebanon, 2010): “Someone yelled at you on the road today?”
Me: (very upset) “Yes.”
Anthony: “Don’t worry, baby, I’ll go kill him for you.”
Whenever I’ve been threatened in such a way, I can always count on him to create a moat around me full of snapping crocodiles. When I loudly barked out my childhood horrors yesterday, his first inclination was to seek and destroy, but you see, yesterday I was already way beyond that.
Anthony’s grief process usually lands him smack dab in the middle of the rage stage. Kill ’em all. Let God sort ’em out. I had already swiped all those loose papers from my mental desk, trying to find the right metaphor to connect with his sensibilities, to communicate where I am in this process.
Life is like a downhill slalom. If a bomb goes off at the second or third flag, you’re gonna have a hell of a time navigating the rest of the course. Some go down missing a leg.
In my youth, I went down without a head.
And so, in my adolescence, I had left the course altogether and ended up in the woods, blindly rushing down, down, down, through thorns, ramming into trees, killing innocent wildlife. The skis just plummeted and I had no control over where I was going. My body became a battered, bleeding mess.
When I met Chris in 1990, our parallel downhill runs converged. I had been nothing if not a naive daydreamer, so despite the rocks and forest ahead, I had an image in my mind that our path was clear. He would get his doctorate in psychology; he would work his brilliant mind into a professorship at Kent. I would cut my teeth at some fledgling newspaper and become a writer. We would have a small, purple Victorian house around all the townies. There would be flowers and beer and the occasional joint. We would have a happy life. We would follow the Grateful Dead for Summer Tour.
We would, we would.
So we both got on this magic carpet. There were two loose threads, one of my abuse, one of his mental illness. Each was moored to a rake on the ground when we took off. The carpet, over time, slowly unraveled, until we found ourselves at terminal velocity plunging back toward the earth.
Out on the road today I saw a deadhead sticker on a cadillac A little voice inside my head said: “Don’t look back, you can never look back.” I thought I knew what love was What did I know? Those days are gone forever I should just let them go,
- Boys of Summer, Don Henley, 1984
From the age of twelve, I would be in the woods for fourteen years before I caught a glimpse of the course again. It was wide and white, the edges of my skis floated in switch backs on the thick powder. A pair of large, wide, glossy eyes had emerged from my neck, and for a time, I made it around most of the flags.
Back in 1992, in my senior year of college, I had picked up some information about applying to join the Peace Corps. It sounded so wonderful. But I was orbiting around Chris at the time, and stay in that orbit I did, until it spit me out onto my mom’s front porch. That was the late spring or early summer of 1994.
I reapplied that fall. I was accepted in early 1995. At the time, I lived in New Mexico with a rekindled love from college. He became a casualty of the situation. Poor Mark. I led him around by the nose, knowing full well his love for me was abiding and true. I just couldn’t reciprocate. I still feel pangs of regret for having hurt him the way I did. He was just another rabbit in the woods, someone else who got pummeled under my unfettered descent.
Mixed reaction in my family to my acceptance into the Peace Corps:
My sister: (sucks in breath through teeth)
My mom: “Wow! Cool!”
My aunt: “Isn’t it dangerous in……what country is she going to?”
My grandma: “I don’t know, that sounds risky.” (to the reader, knowing my story, isn’t this hilarious?)
My father: “If ANY of you do ANYTHING to discourage her, I’ll kill you myself.” (paraphrased)
I don’t think my dad had breathed since 1985. Now that I am a parent, I look upon my daughter with wonder. What if she at such tender age were to disappear, trapsing across the country with no word or care, using drugs, calling on a garbly line for money? I would wither and die inside.
My dad was elated with my decision. Even my being in a third-world country (at a time when we had no Internet), there would be less worry, not as many sleepless nights. Malaria was way less scary than San Francisco, empty roads, broken down cars and apartments full of speed freaks.
And he could allow his broken heart to feel something it hadn’t felt in a very, very long time.
Pride.
Josie Elbiry, 2021
Wow! You have made it to Day 12 of this 31-day journey! Revealing the Roots of Behaviors and Addictions is a series chronicling my participation to abstain from alcohol during the month of January 2019. By now, you can see that sobriety brought with it much clarity and conundrum. I was and remain grateful for the experience.
You can catch up with installments 1–11 here: