If anything can be said in defense of the person I was in 2008, the year Sasha made amends and Polly was born—the year I turned thirty—it can be only that I was least forgiving of myself. Every move I made was aimed at harrying myself toward greater excellence. But certain things, like sleep, resist rigid control. In high school, my insomnia had made it possible to excel academically while also playing three varsity sports, working for a tree pruning company, and pleasing a finicky girlfriend. I bridged the gaps with peanut butter, which I ate by the jar, and teenage energy. But Polly was colicky, and by then I was the youngest partner in my law firm’s history, and the workload was crushing. I started taking sleeping pills at night and Adderall in the morning to get me going—and eventually throughout the day to keep me sharp. When the Adderall made me jangly, I’d calm down with Xanax or Percocet in the afternoon before knocking myself out with more sleeping pills at bedtime. I saw this metabolic tinkering as nothing more than taking care of business, and the ease with which I chemically managed my deficits, coupled with a slight drug nausea I often felt, made me doubly impatient with everyone else. I became, as they say, “irritable”—hard to work for and harder to live with. My high standards intensified the pressure I felt personally, which meant that I wasn’t home with our kids enough （three in five years, in keeping with our plan） or much of a partner for Trudy—who had suspended her law career to enable our childrearing—sexually or in any other way. All of which made me more irritable, because I sensed that I was failing when all I’d ever done, my whole life, was try to succeed.
To the naked eye, things still looked fine at that point. I was bringing in business and seeing it through, albeit at the cost of some popularity at my firm. At home, everyone seemed happy, as I reminded myself daily by checking Trudy’s Facebook—later, her Instagram feed. She was a genius at capturing offhand moments and making them look iconic. Scrolling through her trips to the beach, the park, the zoo （often with our neighbor Janna and her four kids）—ice cream dribbling from chins; a video of crayoned pinwheels twirling in the breeze—I could actually feel my heartbeat slow, my blood calm. Any fragment of time I’d managed to wrest from work and spend with them was always front and center, and I gorged on Trudy’s shots of Polly hugging me; of Michael, our older son, throwing me a ball; of me spooning mashed bananas into the mouth of Timothy, our baby. Everything was fine, I told myself, drawing deep breaths at my cherrywood desk in my towering, glassy office. They were still there, still happy—we were happy, all five of us in our beautiful home by the lake, exactly as Trudy and I had fantasized after making love between law school classes—just waiting for me to come back.
In 2013, with the opioid crisis exploding, my doctor—until then a trusting prescriber of whatever I told him I needed—abruptly put the screws on. The prospect of being cut off from my prescriptions awakened in me a naked terror: I could no more function without those pills than I could without oxygen. My sleep, my focus, my ability to work and relax—all of that would end; I would end. With a sense of having swallowed a stick of live dynamite whose fuse was rapidly burning down, I lurched through actions that seemed alien to me even as I took them: first groveling for my doctor to renew my prescriptions; then raising my fist at him and being dismissed as his patient; drawing skeptical looks from potential new doctors when I cataloged my needs （two sent me away with literature on treatment programs）; driving to pill mills in surrounding towns where doctors who looked more strung out than I was wrote scripts with shaking hands; and finally, on learning that Illinois would soon be enacting a prescription drug registry to keep people like me from collecting scripts from multiple doctors, forking over several hundred dollars to a pill mill doc in exchange for an introduction to a bona fide drug dealer.
Damon and I would meet in our cars at an appointed corner and drive until we were able to stop side by side at a red light under one of several sets of elevated tracks whose dappled shadows obscured what took place below. We rolled down our windows and I tossed an envelope full of cash into his car. Damon, who could have passed for a junior litigator at my firm, tossed a baggie full of drugs through my window, flashed a grin, and off we drove. It was a triumph of efficiency! Why had I wasted so much time wrangling doctors? Damon sold the same brand-stamped pills I’d been taking from the start, and I had enough disposable income not to have to economize by chopping and snorting them, much less resort to hideous cheaper alternatives like crack and heroin.