A popcorn ball to a hungry man

Tomorrow, if I don’t drink, drug or die, I will have been sober for 16 years, a quarter of my life. Put another way, I took my first drink and smoked my first weed at 13 and got sober at 48—35 years of using—so I’ll need to live until I’m 83 to balance my life. I don’t think that’s likely, but since I didn’t think I’d reach 23 or 33 or 43, my predictions don’t hold weight.

First, I need to survive tonight.

After making local arrangements, I’m being driven by 4X4 into the desert with a tent, sleeping bag, food and water. I’ll get dropped off around 7:30, pitch my tent and experience the nighttime alone. In the desert. Until midday tomorrow. If my driver remembers, he’ll pick me up. If not, I’ll waste away slowly, the sun cooking me, evaporating every last bit of moisture, until, after a week or two, I’m just Keith jerky.

Of course (I hope), I’m just kidding (please, Lord). Yusuf will return (let it be so).

I mentioned a book yesterday, and part of the reason I want isolation and solitude is to feel, if only a tiny slice, the nights my characters experience. Listening to the silence, staring at the stars, pondering how many people over the millennia had the same thoughts I have. It’s only a night, but a night alone in the Sahara is powerful, even if it’s not a lifetime.

This isn’t the first time I’ve spent a night alone in a tent for what was to have been a book. More accurately, I spent part of a night, and not a big part at that. Three years before I got sober, I took a year off to write, producing On Account of Because (the novel I was sure would make me a millionaire, rather than the thousandaire I remain). Once I’d finished that, and was searching for an agent, I started another novel, this one based loosely on my (pre-drinking and drugging) early adolescence. I’m still proud of what I did with that, so I’ll avoid my self-effacing for the sake of humor act. I like it so much, I’ll even give you a look at the first chapter, below.

Cult of One takes place around a camping trip by three boys beside the Lamprey River in Durham, something I did all summer as a kid.

As part of my half-assed immersion process, I went to the site, put up my tent and tried to get comfortable with being alone, with no music to distract me, with not having anything to drink. Oh, I’d brought a bottle of wine. A single bottle of wine. As if I were a normal person. Or maybe a normal person camping alone wouldn’t bring any wine at all.  At that time, being relatively flush with cash if not good taste, I was drinking two five-liter boxes of chardonnay every three days—or a little bit more than four bottles a day. Bringing a single bottle of wine was like giving a popcorn ball to a hungry man!

I was in no danger of the DTs (says every heavy drinker who’s needed to go without a drink), but I was terrified of being moored, zeppelin-like, to myself. Wine or beer or vodka or, later, mouthwash were the scissors that cut me loose from me. To be tethered to myself for a whole night scared me more than a grizzly bear, a forest fire or a burning grizzly. I couldn’t stand it.

Saving the bottle of wine for the drive home—just in case—I abandoned the tent (it may still be there today), grabbed my sleeping bag and hiked in the dark the mile back to my car. Not wanting to examine the contours of my inner abyss, I turned the music up loud and drove home, where a box of wine and oblivion were waiting.

When I wake up tomorrow, 16 years in, I’ll likely feel roughly the way I do now—comfortable being alone but looking forward to seeing who’s over the next hill. I’ll drink some cold coffee, smoke a cigarette, and watch the sun rise. No zeppelin. No abyss. Just a man at peace.