Out of the Drink

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When I first met Ray in 1977 in Dallas, he was still shaky from a scant five months of sobriety. He was determined to stay sober at this Texas writing conference, where the two main pastimes were drinking and carousing. Somehow he managed it, but not without having to hide in the shower from a woman who'd taken a shine to him.

I'd see him at breakfast, since we were both early risers. He'd greet me with 'How's my little pal?' smiling down from his six-foot-two vantage on my five-foot-five, all sun and radiance. We ate eggs and bacon and toast with plenty of jelly. We grinned a lot, and every now and then he'd say, like a mantra to ward off evil: 'Aren't we having fun!'

We hadn't the least idea then that we'd be spending the most important years of our lives together, years that would never have been possible if Ray hadn't sobered up and stayed sober. At that point in my own life, I'd had enough of trying to haul alcoholic men out of the abyss. My father had been an alcoholic, as had my second husband, and also the lover I would return to, briefly, after having met Ray. That man drank beer while taking lithium and slept with a revolver under his pillow. He had considerable writing talent, but the drink ran him in circles, and I could see it would take him years to find his way out.

When Ray and I met a second time in Texas, he had been sober a year and a half, but nobody was giving him good odds of staying that way. I remember he said he'd never written anything while he was drinking. All his stories and poems had been written during dry spells.

I took a gamble that Ray might make it and actually stay sober, if he had someone who could hold the high ground with him. I knew I could do that, but I wanted no repeats of my previous misadventures. I gave Ray to understand that he'd have to maintain his lucky streak if he wanted to be with me. Here the word somehow has to come in, because somehow he gradually gathered himself into a place where he lived for the promise of the future, where each day without drinking had a glow and a fervor. Once we were living together and he was steady enough, he took heart from seeing me at my writing. After four years of not being able to write-ever since the publication of his first short story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?-he began drafting the stories that would earn him a place not just in American literature, but in world literature, for his books have now been translated into 29 languages.

In our 10 'gravy' years together Ray would get up in the morning like a cat that thought it could leap as high as any bird flying. And he did leap. The leopard of his imagination pulled down the feathers and blooded flesh of stories fueled by his previous failures and delivered as the result of his recovery. Whereas earlier he'd simply chronicled the deterioration of mostly working-class lives, his new stories actually allowed for recovery and revelation.

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