This River A Memoir
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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
