The rehab was crowded with crack addicts, some of them felons. I was the rare middle-aged, middle-class white man in the joint. It was loud at all hours. Scared, I couldn’t sleep. I told Brooke, on the building’s pay phone, that I had to get out. She said, “Cope,” and hung up. Saved my life.

See, Brooke is a child of alcoholics, as I’m not. I grew up and became one. She grew up and married one. She knew I was a mess but thought the drinking part was normal, until she got wise and kicked me out of the house. (Note to anyone who knows an active alcoholic: never, ever sympathize. If you suspect you’re going to, shut your eyes, plug your ears, and hum.)

I bottomed out in the rehab, where I had gone as a condition for being allowed back home. I thought I was serious. I always had been when, previously, I was dry for periods of up to thirteen months: going to meetings at first, dewy with pity for people who plainly had been far worse off than I was. I wouldn’t admit that we shared the identical fate, wherever we ranked along its descending scale.

On the third or fourth of my twenty-eight days there, I was climbing stairs and paused, too exhausted for another step. I harbored a nebulous conviction that I could tolerate only so much pain, short of a red zone in which I would go mad or die or something terrible would happen. And that anyone should see as much and want me to do anything—have a drink or a drug, for starters—to make it stop.

I thought, They say one day at a time. How about one second? I stared at my ticking watch. A black abyss opened. I was numbly aware that I wasn’t insane. I wasn’t dying. Reality was droning on as usual, with impartial sunlight streaming through a nearby window and picking out swirls of dust motes.

A perfectly demented thought blazed up. Roughly: What if they find out I’m not really an alcoholic and throw me out of here? I need this place! I believe it was the last, deepest rootlet of my denial, expelled. Not an alcoholic?

•

My daughter, Ada, has told me that in her childhood she spent years trying to interest me. I hadn’t noticed. She was sixteen when I got sober. She said, “Let’s see if I get this straight. Now you want to be my dad?” It took a lot of time and change and is still under way. I don’t know if it’s a consolation prize for Ada, or what it is, that she turned out to be fantastically interesting.

Meeting Brooke, having Ada, and getting sober are my life’s top three red-letter days.

“Have you seen the glasses I had on when I came in?” Facebook

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Shopping Cartoon by Amy Hwang

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Cigarette brands I remember smoking for at least a few months running: Alpine, Salem, Newport, Camel, Lucky Strike, Parliament, Kent, Gauloises, Benson & Hedges, Nat Sherman. Finally (and I do mean finally), Marlboro Gold (formerly Lights), the crack cocaine of tobacco products, containing all sorts of cunning chemicals and a somewhat insulting whisper of sugar.

Doing the math, I reckon that I have smoked about a million cigarettes—and enjoyed every one of them, not that you care.

Tried gum, patches, and e-cigarettes. Not the same. I use nicotine lozenges to not be twitchy on airplanes, while driving with family, and indoors anywhere except in my offices in our city apartment and country house, with exhaust fans in opened windows—challenging during summer heat and winter cold. Smoking today requires grit.

Quit now? Sure, and have the rest of my life be a tragicomedy of nicotine withdrawal.

•

Mishaps. I had polio when I was eleven, in one of the last big epidemics before the Salk vaccine. I remember riding my bike home from school, every bump like a knife through my brain. Rushed to the local hospital for a spinal tap—every bit as horrible as you may imagine, but the one sure means of diagnosis then—and throwing up in the back of the family station wagon on the way to the polio-specializing Sister Kenny Institute, in Minneapolis.

I had a bed, but there were too many kids, so some were laid out in halls. Screaming all night. Dying. And always the mechanical sucking noise of iron lungs. I had no paralysis, but I was much weakened, spending seven weeks in the hospital and subject to physical therapy for months. Meanwhile, my family was quarantined at home. Food was left at the doorstep.

For a summer just out of high school, I worked at a resort in Glacier National Park, in the Montana Rockies. I hitchhiked on days off with a copy of “On the Road” in my back pocket and a big jackknife that I practiced opening in a flash in preparation for the lethal fights that I fantasized about. I told one truck driver, in what I imagined to be the right accent, that I was from Lexington, Kentucky. He said, “Lexington, Kentucky, boy, my home town!” I feigned sleep.

Another time, I climbed a manageable-looking mountain, setting out at dawn with pockets full of candy bars. It became steep, then close to vertical. As I clung to a rockface, an eagle launched, shrieking, from a ledge just above me and sailed into the blue distance. Higher up, there was snow, and there were bear tracks in the snow. I thought the mountaintop was a sloping ridge. I crawled up it and found a sheer drop facing the inaccessible summit. Had I had acrophobia before, or did my subsequently lifelong case of it begin then and there? I hugged rock and sobbed. The next thing I remember is striding and tumbling down a side of the mountain covered in deep gravel, grabbing bushes to slow myself. I alighted in brambled woods, disoriented. I had the sense to follow a trickling stream, and I was kept on course by the feel of the water as night fell. I emerged, a tattered scarecrow, on the park’s one highway. Cars sped up at the sight of me in their headlights until one stopped.

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I’m not in physical pain as I write, though I tire quickly and nap often. I have been receiving, every three weeks, an immunotherapy infusion—not chemo, and not a cure—which, at the outset, the doctor said had a thirty-five-per-cent chance of slowing the disease. (At those odds in Vegas, you’re broke within an hour, but in baseball you’re a cinch for the Hall of Fame.) A recent scan shows marked improvement, likely extending my prospect of survival. But I have to wonder if, whatever betides, I can stay upbeat in spirit. A thing about dying is that you can’t consult anyone who has done it. No rehearsals. No mulligans.

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At a bar when I was first in New York, I smirked dandyishly at my reflection in the mirror behind the bottles. I looked handsome! I was stirring my drink, Scotch-on-the-rocks, with my right index finger, which in the mirror became my left one. The moment seemed ineffably cool. Clown!

I ordered coffee at a diner. The guy said, “Regular?” I said, “Well, sure.” Surprise: milk and sugar. In the Midwest, coffee was black, no sugar. Brooke remembers being a Texan newbie in New York and seeing a store sign that read “COFFEE RICE & BEANS.” Fascinated, she asked for a pound of coffee rice. You get to be clueless in a new place only briefly. Don’t waste the chance to have truths, great and small, burst upon you.

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Brooke was an actress and standup comic from Dallas. Introduced at a Whitney Museum opening by A., a woman connected to both the art and the entertainment worlds, we despised each other immediately. I deemed Brooke a bubblehead, and she noticed that I was a jerk. Then she attended a poetry reading I gave, which, whatever its quality, turned out to be the best of my life, because she liked it. Next, A. invited me out to dinner and then, perhaps getting cold feet at what it implied, asked if she could bring Brooke. I said something like “Sure, why not?”