Failure

Aside from all of the injuries during my vacation, the summer of 2003 was disastrous as far as the consequences of my drinking went.  I fell in my apartment, once breaking my favourite antique mirror, another time breaking a coffee table I loved, and once I fell without even tripping over anything, and sprained my ankle.  Once I poured destop down a plugged drain in a blackout—I saw the empty bottle the next morning, deduced that I’d been housecleaning while drunk, and was amazed that I hadn’t poured destop all over myself.  It could’ve been a real disaster.  Thank God I was rarely a black out drinker out on the town.  And there were the suicidal thoughts that had come to obsess me especially while drunk.  So drinking within the safety of my home wasn’t actually safe as safe as I thought.  Worse yet was that I hadn’t fully learned my lesson about not going out once drunk.  I’d gone out drunk in order to purchase more booze and been hassled by men who wanted to take advantage of my state often enough to learn to buy more booze than I could consume in an evening, but every once in awhile a great temptation would lure me out of my boozy cave. 

One night my friend Pierre called to say that there was a party at his place and I should come over.  I hesitated because I knew how people would react when I arrived falling down drunk.  But my alcohol soaked brain decided to go because Pierre was a great guy, I hadn’t seen him in a long time, and I really wanted to see him and meet new people.  I made it down the six flights of stairs somehow, got my bike out of the bike shed, and took it out to the street.  My balance was so poor that I immediately tipped over, stopping my fall by reaching out to a parked car.  Intent on going, I decided to bicycle from car to car, to bicycle by brail so to speak.  After a block of riding like that, I managed to find enough balance to continue unaided by the parked cars.  Soon I was hopelessly lost, I couldn’t recognize the complex intersection I was at (which I knew well), and somehow I made it through the intersection without getting hit.  Then I fell splat off my bike.  Several Arab men ran out of a nearby café to see if I was ok.  I said I was fine as I was climbing back on to my bike.  One of the men replied: “You’re too drunk, you need to go home.”  “No,” I protested, “there’s a party I really want to go to, let me try just one more time.”  I immediately fell splat back onto the pavement.  So one of the men said: “You’re too drunk to get home, I’ll take you.”  Realizing he was right, I didn’t protest.  He dismantled my bike, put it into the trunk of his car, and drove me home.  He asked if I’d eaten, which I hadn’t, so he cooked up dinner.  Then we made love.  Sami the angel, as I called him, and I remained lovers for awhile.  Who knows what would’ve happened if he hadn’t come to my rescue.

On the 21^st of June, which happened to be the Music Festival, one of my Internet lovers called, he wanted me to go to a swingers’ club.  I was falling down drunk as usual, and turned him down, but gave in because he was so persistent about it.  I set off on my bicycle—when you’ve got a bike using the metro is out of the question—and managed to navigate through the thick throngs in streets, without hitting any of the pedestrians.  How I managed that I cannot tell you.  All I can say is thank God I spent my entire drinking career in Paris where having a car is more of an inconvenience than anything else.  Anyway, needless to say I got hopelessly lost and couldn’t find the club.  I bicycled along in the crowd at foot speed, chatting with partiers who were heading away from the police who were shutting down the streets because it was the end of the night’s festivities.  The group I was chatting with decided to stop and sit and drink along the Seine.  A bottle of vodka was passed around until it was emptied.  Then it was decided to continue the party at my place, I said I’d prefer to go to their place, but they said that was impossible because they lived far out in the suburbs.  So my place it was.  


The next morning when I got up, the first thing I noticed that all of my camera equipment was gone.  After years of struggling to work as a photographer with minimal equipment, I’d just recently gotten a bank loan and purchased all of the professional equipment I needed.  I remembered them asking me what I did, and my saying that I was a photographer, without it occurring to me that I was setting myself up to be robbed.  Of course I didn’t have the means to replace it, and I spent years paying for equipment that I no longer had.  I felt like I’d been amputated.  I had no more arms or legs.  I’d always felt like I didn’t exist if I didn’t do my photography, it was core to my identity.  My career in commercial photography was amputated, much worse than that was that I couldn’t do my art photography.  That broke my heart.  Getting into top galleries had been the biggest success of my life.  No gallery is going to keep representing a photographer who isn’t producing new work.  So soon enough I lost my galleries.  That was devastating.  Getting into them seemed like the achievement of a lifetime.  I couldn’t imagine getting a second chance.  My career had failed when it had just begun.

I was already in the alcohol treatment program when this happened.  In the program they say that every alcoholic must hit their bottom before they can become sober.  Hitting your bottom can be losing your job, your house, your spouse--it can be many different things for different people.  People don’t come to the rooms and stay in the rooms just because they need to, you have to really want to, and that’s a crucial difference.  If you come into the rooms desperate and smarting from a bottom, really wanting to get sober, then you’ve got a chance.  You’d think having my camera equipment stolen would be my bottom, but I must have been willing to lose even more since I kept on relapsing.  What more can I lose?  My sense of identity which has been closely tied to my being a photographer since I first began taking pictures.  


Perhaps one of the reasons I kept drinking after my cameras were stolen was that the theft left me feeling like a total and utter failure—how can you be a photographer without any cameras, when you’ve lost your galleries and clients?  I had been raised with the expectation that I succeed beyond any reasonable expectation.  Preferably I would do something that would be remembered by generations to come.  As a child my mother constantly told me that I could become the first female astronaut, the first female president, or the C.E.O. of a multinational corporation selling products I’d invented, and so on.  I think this was a mixture of being supportive, her feminist belief that the great American dream belongs to women as well as men, with projections of her own grandiosity.  Most of all she wanted me to become a writer, not just a writer mind you; I was going to write the Great American Novel.  She repeated that expectation seriously after I graduated from high school, when she suggested that I begin by going to journalism school.  I’d always written poetry, and couldn’t even imagine writing a short story, much less a novel.  Since the age of thirteen, I’d been telling myself that if I didn’t manage to publish my first book by the age of twenty-one, I’d have to kill myself.  I couldn’t imagine living with that kind of failure.  At seventeen the clock was running out.  After my mother’s comments following my graduation, I stopped being able to write.  I continued to try sporadically for several years, but it was all drivel. 


Photography gave me a new identity, and one that I didn’t share with my mother, who’d aspired to write herself, before having four children and embarking on an ambitious career path.  When I first brought my art portfolio to the US, my mother snuck it out of the apartment while I was gone and took it to an artist friend to ask her if it was art.  Her friend said it was, but that apparently wasn’t sufficient. When I was exhibited in L.A. while she happened to be there with a friend who knew about photography, she took the friend along to get her judgement.  Finally my mother told me how exasperating it was that she couldn’t judge for herself, saying that if only it was writing she could judge since she can judge literature.  I asked why she couldn’t rely on the judgement of the owners of top galleries.  She had no reply to that.  She needed to be the judge.  Drinking helped dull the feeling of being a failure; it masked the emptiness that I felt now more than ever.  But that meant I had to stay drunk.  And even drunk the feeling of being a failure was present, whether I realized it or not.  I called a friend in a blackout, and spent an hour on the phone crying about being a failure.  I couldn't even remember having had the conversation when my friend brought it up the next day, but I wasn't surprised. It wasn't the first time I'd gotten really drunk and called someone up to bewail my failure.  Alcohol's funny that way: it makes problems hazy or makes you forget them altogether, but sooner or later it clobbers you over the head with them.

When I was a child my mother frequently repeated to me that my older brother had been noisy and constantly called out for attention: “Thank god you were so quiet I could forget you.”  What I heard was that I was lovable if I was forgettable.  Being lovable as long as I was forgettable turned me into a very competitive person.  My mother wasn’t a warm and emotional person, but she was present for us intellectually and artistically, so I tried to win her love through achievement.  I excelled academically, but that wasn’t enough for me, I had to be the best at every subject in my class, I was above my grade without effort, so I pushed myself hard to reach even higher grade levels.  I loved arts projects, and jumped at every chance to enter an art competition.  I competed in sports, always going for the gold, and dreaming of the Olympics—it didn’t matter in which sport, just that I got the gold.  What I got the most attention for though was my poetry, and I wrote diligently  not just because I got approval for it, but because I truly loved writing.  Now I’m trying to rebuild my life once again, but this time foremost in my mind is the importance of building a life in which I’ll be happy just being me, happy for example to be taking pictures without dreaming of becoming a famous photographer, happy with small goals.  


Wow, I just digressed from drinking disasters into things that I drank over.  I think the point here is that my worst drinking experience, my bottom, having my cameras stolen was oddly enough lower than the bottom that led to my sobriety.  

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