Addictions, Part One

    The first thing I can remember being addicted to was fantasy. Not Game of Thrones-style fantasy, with magic and swordfights and all that; I’ve always found that stuff a little tedious, notwithstanding the fact that I have watched the TV show and made a run at the books. No, what I was addicted to was the dreamy state of pretend, a world where I was a hero or a great writer (most often) a baseball star. For hours and hours on many a summer day, I would stand out in the front yard of our house on 28th Avenue, a bat in my hands, slowly enacting an entire career that inevitably involved being the youngest major league player ever, breaking every hitting record in the book, winning several World Series, and ultimately being inducted into the Hall of Fame on a unanimous vote, acclaimed generally as the greatest player ever — far, far better than mere mortals like Ruth, Mays, or Cobb.

    I continued to indulge in this fantasy for a long, long time, long after the age at which most people cease so intensely to pretend. As I got older my sense of narrative improved, so often I was drafted by some out-of-the-way team like the Brewers or the Reds, who underestimated my talent until it became so overwhelmingly obvious they could no longer hold me back. I continued in it, in fact, after I was cut from my high school baseball team at age 15, after I passed the draftable age of 18, and even after college, where the closest thing I had done to actually playing baseball was hurt my elbow trying to throw an apple over a dorm while drunk. I did it in much the same way, too, standing in the yard of my parents’ house with a bat or a glove in my hand, acting out the games, inventing the heroics, making myself quite thoroughly a legend, if only in my mind.

    There are a lot of reasons I call this an addiction, but the main one is that the role that these fantasies played in my youth and adolescence was not entirely unlike the role that other, much more harmful addictions would come to play in my adult life: they were a way to check out of a world in which I felt strange, alienated, fearful, bored, fat, ugly, unlovable, awkward, and (increasingly) guilty. In a pretend game of baseball, one that ended with me twirling the final strike or clubbing the final homer, I could be in a world in which what I did was not just good, but unambiguously so. This was also true in a world in which I became a famous director and married Kerri Russell, or won a Nobel Prize for literature and was lauded as the greatest since Shakespeare, or found secret messages from the government under a rock and then rode to the rescue of people in distress. Fantasy had the ability to numb the anxiety and pain of being human, something at which I have never been good. Can you think of anything else that does that?

    Too, this kind of fantasy and my earliest stages of serious drug use are intricately linked. I smoked pot and got drunk a few times in high school, and even then I had an intuition that maybe I liked doing these things too much. The thing is, when you’re a 16-year-old who’s trying to prove he’s smarter than everybody else by getting straight A’s, it’s a little bit easier to just say, “Okay, I like this too much, maybe let’s not fuck around with it.” So for the most part I didn’t. It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college, when I was experiencing my first real breakup from my first serious girlfriend, that the incentives switched. I was so miserable, and so inexplicably — we’d broken up because we lived hundreds of miles apart, we’d been drifting from each other for months, and I’d wanted to do it, and yet still I felt sad about it all the time — that when I got stoned for the first time in years and it put me in a dreamy, otherworldly state not unlike the one I’d once accessed with a bat in my hands in my parents’ yard, I thought, Aha, this is the thing for me.

    And so I think it’s probably not surprising that one of my favorite activities, back when I was a pothead, was to pick up my old baseball bat, and go out in field behind my dorm — at Pomona College, these fields were rather preciously called “beaches” — to construct yet another in an endless string of triumphant baseball careers. People must have thought I was strange, a 20-year-old kid in his bare feet and a sleeveless t-shirt, silently, slowly swinging a bat and then staring into the distance, but I didn’t really care that much. That was part of what I loved about pot, back then; I could retreat into the little world of one where I didn’t feel judged or even noticed, where I could forget the times I’d been rejected or done something awful to someone who didn’t deserve it, and just space out. It was such a relief, especially in college, where my feeling of alienation grew more complex and harder to solve as the issues of sex and sexuality became increasingly present and important. Those were the areas where I was most confused, most likely to have been rejected, and most likely to have done something awful to someone who didn’t deserve it. After that first relationship, I began a pattern I have perpetuated ever since, becoming serially involved with people I didn’t care about much because there was little risk involved and I was (for lack of a better word) horny, and then affecting to be complexly traumatized by people I did care about because I freighted our interactions with such intense, often imaginary baggage. (This was before I had added the real jackpot to the mix, getting involved with people I did care about but didn’t really want to be with, thus adding the double whammy of having done something awful to someone who didn’t deserve it and finding that our friendship had become a veritable No Man’s Land, pocked with emotional landmines and artillery craters.)

    Eventually the pot sort of turned on me, and began to cause an intense self-loathing every time I smoked it — which I continued to do, to diminishing returns, until I was about 23 or 24. With it went my access to that fantasy world, the relatively harmless addiction that, I think, also had its uses: I don’t think I would be a writer today if I hadn’t spent so much of my early life lost in a world of my own construction, if I hadn’t come to feel the power of narrative and a built universe. I’m no longer able to stand in a field of grass with a baseball bat and really effectively pretend that I am a great hero of the diamond, a man whose feats elicit the adulation — and, ultimately, acceptance — of millions. Instead I’ve had to find other ways to numb the pain. But that’s for a later date, I suppose, this has already got longer than I meant for it to.