White Out & The Towns With A Lot of Drugs
Or: Trigger warning for heroin and addiction
But no, seriously: This post discusses a memoir about heroin addiction. Trigger warning for drugs, addiction, trauma, etc.
I grew up in a town with a lot of drugs. I guess that is every town in America. My town was on one of the major highways out of Philadelphia, a small nook trapped between the big city and Reading, PA, another bigger city with a fondness for drugs.
When you’re in the middle of a suburban opioid epidemic, you can’t always tell you’re in the middle of a suburban opioid epidemic. Especially if you are 15 or 16 or 17. Certain awful scenarios become commonplace: your best friend and dealer dead of an overdose, one friend overdosing every weekend but surviving, friends clawing at the walls, swearing they hid pills behind the wallpaper, friends nodding out on the faded pastel blue sofa in the basement with the wood-paneled walls.
Looking back, it becomes clearer. Someone on the nod might look like they are napping when you are 15, but you remember the strange warp of their open mouth, the way the hole between their lips didn’t look quite right, how their eyes were still sort of fluttering there, under the lids, not entirely gone from reality but close enough, flirting with it, pressing up against the invisible barrier between this world and whatever is next after it, beyond it.
I’ve had my eye on the new run of McNally editions for a few weeks. The covers drew me in, but what they are deciding to re-publish -- often books that have been out-of-print for decades or never published in America -- also caught my eye. Last night, I started White Out by Michael W. Clune, I read for hours, woke up at 4AM to keep reading, tearing through 200 pages almost without breathing.
As a portrait of heroin addiction, it accomplishes something I haven’t seen in addiction memoirs, which is the sort of poetic magic an addict can find themselves chasing in the high. The narrative itself becomes like the drug -- White Out is a collage of scenes that span space and time, connected only by the philosophy and bliss of the high, the past collapsing into the present and vice versa without even pausing to acknowledge the change. It’s deft that way, creating the sensation of being in the drug while reading about the drug.
Certain books are hard to read when they are too much like your life. Certain movies I have to turn off if there is too much yelling or abuse -- maybe if you’ve seen too much of something in your life, you want the opposite. If you’ve grown up in softness and love, maybe you turn to horror movies to jolt you out of it. Likewise, if you’ve grown up in trouble or trauma, certain depictions hit too close to home. Fundamentally, I’m against trigger warnings on art. But there are certain works that I sometimes wish I had been warned about, if they hit that strange nerve.
So on the premise, I should hate this book for hitting too close to home. Clune’s struggles with heroin begin while he’s in a graduate program in Baltimore, what I usually refer to as Philadelphia’s sister city because they’re so similar you could have filmed The Wire in either place and nobody would be able to tell the difference.
The book is full of whiteness. Heroin is often white, white tops are the vials heroin is sold in, Clune can’t stop seeing white everywhere as he chases his next high: white teeth, white sun, white bones inside of the bodies of everyone around him. This color running through the book holds it all together, the way Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is run through with azure.
The scenes depicted aren’t sweet -- a man with a syringe sticking out of his neck cops heroin for Clune and they boot up before a drug dealer busts in, promptly punching Clune in the face to find out where his stash has been hidden in the house. Once Clune snitches, the dealer rewards him with a white top of heroin, and Clune shoots up before heading back to his graduate program to teach his class, blood on his face and his shirt, a black eye forming.
In therapy, sometimes I mention something that happened to me growing up and my therapist has to stop me and explain that it isn’t normal, that it shouldn’t have happened. It’s a slow process, learning that a scene like Clune’s, and yours, isn’t part of how most people grow up. Learning that, in the past few years of my life, has entirely changed how I operate in the world, how I define normal, how I experience my relationships.
As the memoir moves on, we get a flashback to the first time Clune ever did heroin. It’s a deep dive into why the first high actually matters -- it isn’t because the highs that come after are lower, it’s because it is a perfect moment trapped in a drug addict’s memory, the moment they lost all desires and pain for the first time. Clune keeps trying to kick the drug through various clinics and drugs, but the withdrawals are too much, and he often finds himself back on the corner again, copping a white top.
The narrative is a quickly paced series of attempts and failures at getting sober -- it’s almost built to be as compulsive as taking drugs. Soon, you’re caught up in his quest for the white obliteration, and his drug addict logic suddenly has you sort of nodding along as he decides that if he just does a little more heroin, it will be easier to get off of the heroin, that slippery slope of addiction.
The prose here is incredible -- it’s beyond the stream-of-consciousness nonsense that underpins so many drug addiction memoirs that attempt to be poetic, Instead, Clune grapples with the philosophy and poetry of his addiction. In the preface of the new edition, Clune describes how there is no scientific definition for how long a second is. It’s something we have no clear measure for. But for an addict, or someone in chronic pain, the seconds of life become very nuanced -- there are short seconds, regular seconds, long seconds, and Very Long Seconds.
Moments like this are woven throughout the book -- facts and science that help guide us through his world. Underpinning all of it, especially the preface, is a deep understanding of addiction as a lifelong battle, and a problem that feels too big for America to solve now.
And he’s right -- like guns, the drugs are already out there. We’ve let them become available, accessible, almost impossible to avoid. Clune points out that there is no way to manage pain without opioids, and until there is, people will become addicts. It’s a sad, sick truth.
My father battled with addiction throughout his life, both drugs and alcohol. Even when he was at his worst, he would warn me not to drink too much, not to turn out like him. He said I had the gene inside of me that could make me like him.
At first, I was too young to understand what he meant. But he kept saying it until I wasn’t. When he died, he had about 17 years sober, I think. Maybe 19? I went to a few meetings with him, whenever I was home. He used to tell me that if you ever thought you had problems, all you had to do was go to an AA meeting to realize someone had it much, much worse than you. And that was true. Whenever we went to a meeting, on the way home, he would say: “You thought you had problems? You don’t have fucking problems. That guy had real problems.”
And he was right. The stories I heard in AA were very close to what Clune is recounting, rock bottoms and the destruction of one’s own life.
At my father’s funeral, there was a line of men I’d never seen before, but they all knew who I was. “You’re Sarah, right? You must be the writer.” They were all the men from his AA group, where he’d eventually become an active speaker and sponsor. One of the men told me about a night my father kicked his door down and took his stash away. Another told me he wasn’t sure how he was going to stay sober without my dad.
I couldn’t help but think of my father and his sobriety reading White Out. I sometimes say my father is proof you can change, that you can become good before you die. That’s not a value judgement on addicts as bad or good — it is a value judgement on my father’s behavior, after he sobered up, going from bad to good.
But reading Clune’s memoir, I can see the work it takes to stay sober so much more clearly, work that is just as hidden as addiction is hidden. Living with an addict, being an addict, is agreeing to keep secrets.
So when an addict gets sober, that’s often a secret, too. You might suddenly see a big drinker start to wave away a glass of wine in favor of a Diet Coke at a party, but otherwise, it’s often excruciating work that we never talk about. It’s every day work, a life dedicated to not slipping, not falling back into the gigantic black hole that is always at your feet, waiting for you, hungry for you, begging you to come back. It is impossible work, almost Herculean work I wish I would have understood better when my father was alive.
Maybe that’s why Clune’s memoir feels so critical and beautiful, as painful as it is. Clune brings all of the lies of addiction out of the shadows and into the light, so you stand side by side, staring at them together. It’s a book that turns secrets into truths.
This lowkey made me tear up...