(Magnolia Pictures, via Associated Press)

Lots of addicts in recovery worry that they might relapse if they hang out with old friends, if they lose their job, or if a loved one dies. I worry I might relapse if an exciting opportunity to get wasted with a celebrity comes along.

Recently, a friend told me an amazing story. During the summer of 2004, she had been in Aspen, Colo., when her pal’s cell phone rang. The pal answered the phone, explained the situation to my friend, and said, “Are you in?” The next thing she knew, she was at a house known to many as Owl Farm. There, she and a small group of people clustered around a bald man with tinted glasses and a penchant for pills. It was Hunter S. Thompson. And, while my friend and a few others smoked pot and drank wine, Thompson actually read to them — excerpts of his own work from original 1970s issues of RollingStone magazine. Several months after my friend had met him, the great writer died. “Huh,” I said. After composing myself — I wavered in a kind of stunned jealousy for a few moments — I became consumed with just one thought: obviously, in that situation, I would have to relapse.



I was and am a Thompson fan. Perhaps because his addictions and his prose were so entwined and so visceral. Perhaps because he was writing during a time I always wished I had come of age in. And so, for several long days, I obsessed over what avenues I might have taken in life to put me in a position to meet Hunter S. Thompson and have him read to me from an original Rolling Stone magazine while at Owl Farm. I even realized that — ha! — the night in question was almost a year before I quit drugs and alcohol. As if the fantasy could now be guilt-free. As if now, should time travel suddenly exist and should I be able to become my friend for a night, I’d be good to go.

And I can imagine it so well! While Thompson tells me about the Vegas articles, he hands me some patented cocktail of substances; maybe I demur at first, but then he says, “Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals—and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether.”

More and more, it began to seem prudent to plan for such an evening, not of time travel and body-swapping, but of not-to-be-missed relapse opportunities. I thought I should make a top-five list, a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card should the chance arise to, say, party and jam with George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars. I would flash my relapse pass to the heavens and say, “It’s cool. I’m allowed to drink in this situation.” But then I realized I hadn’t listened to Parliament-Funkadelic since college and I don’t actually play an instrument, so jamming would just be embarrassing. Really, Clinton and crew just seem like a fun bunch, but they’re not actually relapse-worthy. In fact, the more I tried to create a relapse pass, the more I realized how few potential scenarios excited me.

The truth is that there is no one alive I want to lose my sobriety over. Who is there? Amy Winehouse? We could spend the night shooting up while she nursed a pet mouse and I slouched on her tanning bed and waited for dawn. It just seems like a waste of a trip to London. Lindsay Lohan? We could drink vodka and Red Bull, dance until we sweated out our glitter body lotion, and then drive her Bentley into her beach house. I’m exhausted just thinking about that. While there are plenty of living artists I would love to meet, I cannot think of any with whom I would need to have an exotic chemical experience. Now, if Jack Kerouac passed me “tea” and whiskey at a jazz club, Truman Capote offered me a cocktail, or Dorothy Parker ordered a bottle and then asked what I was having — well, those are different stories altogether. Clearly, I’ve romanticized drinking with dead writers.

Alas, with my living celebrity relapse dance card still empty, I thought I might plan for a more realistic scenario. Like nuclear holocaust or asteroids. So I briefly flirted with including the end of the world on my relapse pass. But then I remembered that I was not 16 years old, and I would much rather spend time with my husband, dog, and family in my final hours than with a bottle of vodka and a gallon of Ocean Spray cranberry juice. If anything, I’d like to be so sober at the end of the world that I can clearly communicate to my loved ones how much they mean to me and be open to receiving that kind of message, too. I’m all about soaking up the love. (Even now, though, I can hear a former version of myself gagging a little and saying, “Oh, puhlease!” Of course, that’s the same version of myself who thought that it was just hysterical when I almost burned down my apartment building. Whoops!)

But these days, I am mostly out of the habit of thinking about the next raging party. When I watch a movie with lots of drugs and alcohol, I squirm. When I see friends drunk, I want to flee, not join in. These days my fantasies are more likely to be about the single glass of wine with dinner, the cold beer on a hot day, the champagne flute raised in a toast. And, apparently, anything Hunter S. Thompson hands me. But there are no get-out-of-jail-free cards for this disease. There are no relapse passes, because once I take that drink, I don’t know what’s going to happen. Thompson’s party, after all, ended with a gun in his mouth. And my experience tells me that as soon as my brain gets a taste of that witch’s brew, wires will crisscross, sanity will bend, and reason will wither. Experience tells me that sobriety isn’t something I can slip in and out of without consequence.

So I have to ask myself, what am I willing to lose for this relapse? Am I willing to lose my husband? My job? The small world of good friends and neighbors I have created around me? My self-respect when I look in the mirror and realize I have to climb once more from the depths of addiction? Relapsing might come easy, but how many recoveries do I have in me? That’s why I’m giving up on the top five relapse pass — even the time-traveling, body-swapping Hunter S. Thompson relapse fantasy. Because, when the weasels close in, I am way better equipped to handle them sober.