You Should Have Seen It In Color
When you are wide awake at 2am because the weight of the world is sitting on your chest, agitating your sleep apnea, don’t do what I do: watch true crime documentaries on Youtube. What I find soothing is surely disturbing for some people. No. No, no. It’s healthy to combat sadness with happy things, depression with uplifting things, and tears with laughter.
The Andy Griffith Show, right? The epitome of wholesomeness. Small town problems, resolved with a gang of small-town characters exuding small town charm… Opie wastes his savings on a fancy fishing pole and needs to learn the value of a dollar, Barney gets duped into buying a lemon from an old lady and nobody wants to break Aunt Bea’s heart by telling her that her pickles taste like gasoline. Maybe it was what the viewers wanted, or the limitations set by the FCC, or the frothy moral standard of America in the late 1950s… but I don’t think so. I think it was the monochrome.
Think about it-- Mayberry was a problematic little Eden. Rampant petty crime, constant bureaucratic interference, moonshiners, ignorance by vehicle of colloquialism, bullies, prostitutes (“The Fun Girls” weren’t just naturally “fun”), a widower/commitment-phobic single father, all existing in a charming, suburban vacuum surrounded by gun-toting, inbred mountain people. So, it wasn’t the plot, or the people, or the location. Audiences are made up of average individuals who are simply more comfortable when everything is in black and white.
I don’t have much experience with rigid boundaries. I could give a lengthy, informative PowerPoint Presentation on gray areas and moral ambiguity, but I have no viable knowledge of a so-called “black and white” situation. I’m a 30-year-old, divorced undergraduate, so I know not of a carbon copy college student. I’m a 30-year-old, divorced, female alcoholic, so I’ve wrecked that ol’ pigeonhole too. As far as addicts go, I’m an advocate and a realist, so I distribute hugs and support as often as I say, “fuck off and get your shit together.” It just, you know, depends on the situation… at the time…
Three afternoons a week, through a local rescue mission, I get to collaborate with some fantastic kids while they do their English and history homework. They have to collaborate with someone else to get their science and math homework done, cause… they don’t need to be turning in worksheets with 100% wrong answers. After I spend the afternoon empathizing with these brilliant, frustrated, displaced children, I go down the street and empathize with their abusive drunk fathers who are the reason why those children and their battered mothers are residing in a shelter in the first place.
I am not Walt Whitman, I do not contain multitudes. I am a novice circus clown, idling on a unicycle and juggling emotions like understanding, repulsion, compassion, infuriation; cradle one, launch the other, forward pedal, back pedal, repeat.
It would be easier to embrace the idea of everything being black and white, but where does that leave me? In a cell with Otis every night. In a world of clear-cut categories, I’m a drunk-- stamp it, ship it, tattoo it on my ass, that’s all, folks! But that can’t be true because I haven’t been drunk in a long time. Since I am still alive and my days are full, there must be more to me than someone who used to get drunk. If there is more to me, there is more to the other drunks too. There’s more to their “poorly behaved,” neglected, homeless children. There is absolutely more to their wives and girlfriends that they’ve been using as scapegoats and speedbags.
In Mayberry they’d blame the drunk and maybe the no shirt, no shoes, dirty overall-wearing bootlegger too. In sepia tone, they are not wrong. But in color—and I mean the most vivid colors: blood red, bourbon copper, bruised-knuckle plum, canned bean green, indigo police lights and onyx blackout—those hues don’t go into a mixer and come out gray. It would be impossible for the majority of the Mayberry township, but our minds are going to have to accommodate a little more than that.
The desire to view a situation in black and white is part of the human desire for closure. I get it. If we can catalogue who is right and who is wrong, we can slap shut a file folder and move on. …right? Once blame is cast and cemented, a wife can go on food stamps and get a restraining order granted, a husband can contemplate if it’s more practical to put a gun in his mouth or chug along to send the insufficient child support checks. If you aren’t already convinced that no one is winning in this scenario, then remember that their children are coming to me for help with arithmetic. Everybody here is screwed.
I am aware of the ethical archetype here. I’m touched by alcoholism, not oblivious to it. I’m a consequence of it, in more ways than one. The shelters, the food stamps, the busted families, the traumatized lovers, the damaged children, the existential uncertainties are all direct results of addiction. Addiction devastates through the vehicle of an addict—a horse is a horse, of course, of course. That may seem black, white, cut, and dry to everyone else, but I dwell in the gray area, and I know that addiction isn’t a death sentence—for the addict or their casualties. Every tragedy has a before and an after. If you whistle the intro, you’ll eventually roll the credits.
Its indecent to compare tragedies, but the bomb hit Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, and by August 7th, 30% of (remaining) households had their lights back on. You can’t tell me that a diagnosis of addiction is the end all, be all of a life. There will be damage. There will be hurt. There will be resentment. There will be bitterness. There will be mountains to climb. Some things that once were, will be no more. Regardless, there will be a life afterward.
Did I say that I dwell in gray area? I undersold it. What I meant was: I am the sovereign of the gray area. The gray area is the kingdom under my rule. I travel through it freely and easily because I know it’s geography like the back of my liver-damaged hand. As I said, I empathize with everyone in the gray area, but empathy is not the principal emotion that I operate from. I’m a realist. People often confuse realism with cynicism or pessimism, but they are not related by definition or by me. How can pessimism exist in a circumstance of drunks and their human collateral damage? It doesn’t get any worse than what it already is (knock on wood just in case.)
Realism. It’s not pessimism, it’s not cynicism but just to even the score, let’s remove any indicators of idealism too. Take vast concepts like forgiveness, redemption, conciliation, reparations, and absolution and put them on a high shelf-- they’ll probably have to stay there for a while. It kills me to see it in the eyes of the women and children who are on the frontlines of this prevalent war with addiction. Addicts enlisted. Our families got drafted. No, it isn’t fair. Not much in this life is.
Before I continue, I feel compelled to keep stressing that I am not defending addicts, nor am I justifying addiction. If my readers (that’s you) haven’t grasped that by now, I’m doing something very wrong here.
Hardline blame… is fine. It gets the necessary papers signed. The way I see it, which is from both sides and in color, blame solves nothing. Not long term. For starters, addicts are just people and like all other people, we don’t have superpowers. We can’t travel back in time and not do the things we’ve done; not ruin the events we ruined, not say the horrible things that we said, not waste the money we wasted, not humiliate the ones we humiliated. We are brutalized by our limited anthropology because we are constantly shown and told that what’s happened has happened and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it. We are told to just sit there, with our messes, with our guilt, in our folding chair, in the circle of others with messy guilt, and let our emotions chafe and blister until we die. Deserved? Maybe. Wasteful? Completely.
No, addicts don’t have superpowers. What we do have is a disproportionately high awareness of ourselves and the world around us. Which is why it frustrates us to tears when we feel that, if we can’t retroactively undo what’s been done, then we can do nothing at all. It’s just not true. Or proactive. We are more willing than we’ve ever been and more capable than we’ll ever be again. Our hands used to shake from withdrawal, now they shake from the build-up of potential energy we have to make the effort and do the work. We can’t fix what was, but we can improve what is. Here. Now. You just have to let us.
As Queen of the gray area, I know that addicts aren’t reliable and there is no grayer word than “sober.” Your blood stream could be as clear as glacier water, but if you are still a marionette in the hands of your demons, you aren’t sober. You won’t be for long, at least. I’m an addict, so I have the displeasure of knowing that to be true. Some addicts do get sober-- sustainably sober. The right way, for the right reasons, with an eagerness to apply all that rightness to the prevailing wrongs they’ve done. I’m an addict, so I have the pleasure of knowing that to be true. Unfortunately, there is no way to know who is going to be who until they show you what they are capable of, one way or another.
I don’t want to see anyone fail in life because of addiction. I certainly don’t want to see anyone fail because of what the world has told them that addiction is. Not just the addict, but their children, their spouse, their friends, their parents, their neighbors… Addiction causes enough hurt without someone being banished to the wrong side of stigma, which is why black and white thinking doesn’t apply to a plague that differs case by case.
I’m too deeply embedded in this, but I chose the side of the fight with an understaffed army and I have a lot of roles to cover. A lot of what I see is discouraging, yeah. But the resilience and the positivity of people shimmers enough to divert the senses away from the actions of the lazy nay-sayers. I don’t know if *Mackenzie’s father is going to get sober, but I see her mother across the room putting together an interview outfit with clothes from the donation bin. If her mother knows that life continues past rock bottom, Mackenzie is going to know that too. Maybe it’s just schoolwork right now, but if Mackenzie can transcribe her emotional reaction to Where the Red Fern Grows, then she can verbalize her emotions to a therapist. I see a young lady who will be able to process her traumas, address her mental struggles, find positive outlets for her fears and frustrations, lovingly rebuke her parent’s mistakes, and live a happy life. To cover all my bases, though, I’ll be verbally accosting her (still) drunk dad at 8pm at the Baptist church.
For the time being, it’s better for everyone if I only offer tutoring in the social sciences, but maybe I’m not bad at math, as I’ve always thought. Maybe I’m repelled by math’s notion that a problem can only have a singular correct solution. Never once have I known that to be true. I only know of ambiguous problems that require multiple options of creative solutions. Not black, not white; multicolored and muddled as can be. Even silly problems—Mayberry problems—don’t have a right or wrong answer. They call it “black and white television,” but to the human eye, it’s all shades of gray.
The innocence and pleasantness that we associate with The Andy Griffith Show was never about the morality of the small town or the uncolored film… we felt happy because the characters were happy. Happy-- not perfect. They had deaths and they had drunks, the lovers had spats, the children hit awkward milestones, and there were plenty of moral and ethical dilemmas for everyone along the way. So, what did Mayberry have that we don’t? An underlying tone of positivity. The belief that laughter and tears were appropriate in the same space. Confidence that the bad times were temporary and merely a price they paid for the abundance of their happy, easy times. Faith in family, faith in love. At least, that’s what I remember about their world. I haven’t watched The Andy Griffith Show in a while because it reminds me of Sunday mornings with my dad and Saturday afternoons with my ex-husband and those wounds are tender. It’s ok. I also harbor the belief that laughter and tears belong in the same space. That’s life in technicolor, kids.
