Staff Spotlight: J Brooke

Interview

What do you write?

I write poetry and non-fiction. Most of my non-fiction is memoir, but not all my memoir is non-fiction.

Is there an author or artist who has most pro­found­ly influ­enced your work?

Salinger, Von­negut, Borges, Brad­bury, Kerouac, Eliot, Bukows­ki, Collins, Hayes, (David) Sedaris, Holzer, Johns, Basquiat, Goldin, Hockney, (Woody) Allen, (Nora) Ephron, (Mel) Brooks, Sein­feld, Dylan, (Paul) Simon, Spring­steen, Waits.

Why did you choose Stonecoast?

They extend­ed their appli­ca­tion dead­line for me.
Also, the com­mit­ment to social action was extreme­ly sig­nif­i­cant — it’s too bad that this is some­what unique to Stonecoast, con­sid­er­ing the times we live in and what an artist’s respon­si­bil­i­ty to the world should aspire to be.

What is your favorite Stonecoast memory?

At the res­i­den­cy last July, during the evening time between the read­ings and some other form of enter­tain­ment, every­one was milling around nego­ti­at­ing between mixed drinks and beers and the book table and each other, when I noticed a pair of really beau­ti­ful sneak­ers. I have always loved sneak­ers, and the ones I saw that night were par­tic­u­lar­ly nice — purple Adidas “Gazelle’s” with pale lime stripes and silver tongue logo . I went up and intro­duced myself to their owner, Aaron Ham­burg­er, and told him how much I liked his shoes. He lowered his voice to a demi-whisper and offered extreme­ly gen­er­ous infor­ma­tion I simply never would have dis­cerned on my own:“Urban Out­fit­ters, on sale, but only online”.  I ordered the shoes later that evening.

What do you hope to accom­plish in the future?

I would love to help get Trump and Pence out of office. I would like to extend my pos­i­tive impact on the envi­ron­ment beyond my self-policed carbon foot­print. I would like to see my book pub­lished. I would like to get “mental health” re-named “mind health”. I would like to make popular, as a non-binary nomen­cla­ture option, the choice of “e” as an alter­nate  to “they”, (when seeking non gender-spe­cif­ic words to replace  “he” and “she”) — this could be a user-friend­ly option for all people, not specif­i­cal­ly those who fall under the trans umbrel­la — anyone could choose to go by “e” instead of “she” or “he”.

If you could have written one book, story, or poem that already exists, which would you choose?

The song “Little Plastic Castle” by Ani Difranco.

Featured Work

On Drink­ing

I am not cur­rent­ly in therapy, although the last time I was, I checked with my ther­a­pist about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of me being an alco­holic. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the diag­no­sis (or lack of diag­no­sis) was the same as always; appar­ent­ly, I’m not.

It’s hard to get into AA meet­ings when you’re not an alco­holic. At least, that’s what I hear. And the whole AA thing is entire­ly founded on truth-telling and utter honesty, so I am uncom­fort­able about lying about being an alco­holic just to get to go to the meet­ings. I’d have to go as exactly who I am. “Hi, my name is J” (wait for response) “and I’m not an alco­holic.” The whole episode just sounds some­where between con­fus­ing and braggy. It would cer­tain­ly beg the ques­tion: “What are you doing here?”

But I hear from many people I know who are able to attend those meet­ings that I’d really like them. Sure, maybe not the heavy god stuff…but lots of folks do a mental gloss-over of that. Like so many, I can work with the “higher power” concept. The per­son­al sto­ry­telling, the anonymi­ty, the com­mu­ni­ty of other shaky souls just trying to move forward, for me, are deeply com­pelling aspects.

Eight reasons I think I might be an alcoholic:

• I like to drink every day.
• I have always had a thing for bars, bar­tenders, bar light­ing, and bar conversations.
• My father was an alco­holic and died of com­pli­ca­tions with his liver.
• My older brother has never had a drink in his life due to, I suspect, fear of our alco­holic genetics.
• I loved Pete Hamill’s A Drink­ing Life.
• I loved Drink­ing: A Love Story by Car­o­line Knapp.
• For my first mar­riage, I wanted to reg­is­ter at Sherry Lehman.
• My mother thinks I’m an alcoholic.

Eight reasons I think I might not be an alcoholic:

• I don’t actu­al­ly drink every day (but not because I don’t want to).
• I’m as happy hanging in a bar without the alcohol as with (almost).
• I don’t like gin (I always think real alco­holics like gin).
• I love non-alco­holic beer.
• I loved Pete Hamill’s A Drink­ing Life.
• I loved Drink­ing: A Love Story by Car­o­line Knapp.
• I have never been able to con­vince a physi­cian or a ther­a­pist that I do, in fact, have a drink­ing problem.
• My mother thinks I’m all sorts of things I’m not.

I drink less than my spouse and less than most of my friends. My friend Carly (name changed here because she wouldn’t like this) is a famous New York City surgeon and drinks mul­ti­ple drinks every single night. Never to the point of drunk, but always to the point of what the Inter­net tells me is excess. Her husband, Walter (name changed here because he wouldn’t like this), a wildly suc­cess­ful sports mar­keter, drinks every night along with her, but plays with myriad mod­er­a­tion tech­niques, like not having his first drink until 9 p.m. Walter and I often compare mod­er­a­tion tech­niques. In addi­tion to the wait-until-9‑p.m. one, Walter takes a month off each year from drink­ing alcohol. Walter con­cocts his non-alco­holic cock­tails as if they have booze in them…tons of fresh ice, freshly blended fruit juices, design­er tonic and/or organic citrus. Walter feels this “tricks his inner child into not feeling denied” when he’s on the wagon. I often wonder when Walter’s inner child started drink­ing, but I have yet to ask. I have done the “one month off” thing every so often, as well as three months in a row. I also have tried only drink­ing on week­ends, only drink­ing on week­days, only drink­ing every other day, only drink­ing when not at home, and only drink­ing when at home.

A couple years ago, I went on the Paleo Diet. The diet elim­i­nates all wheat and grains. Fruits and plants are fine, though. So this nar­rowed my alcohol choices to wine (from a fruit) and tequila (from a plant). This restric­tion alone rad­i­cal­ly reduced my drink­ing. I don’t love wine, so I often skipped it in favor of a great green tea or a tonic with bitters on the rocks. And while mar­gar­i­tas are good, at 500 calo­ries each, they kind of defeat the weight-loss poten­tial of the restric­tive Paleo Diet.

The drink­ing age was eigh­teen when I was growing up. In the NYC set I moved within, we were pretty much allowed to drink subtly start­ing at Bar Mitz­vahs and openly begin­ning with Sweet Six­teens. We all took taxis every­where (so drink­ing and driving was a non-issue), and bars didn’t check IDs. Too many weekend nights to count, my friends and I would go to a great place called Trader Vic’s in the base­ment of the Plaza Hotel and crowd around long wooden tables drink­ing com­mu­nal scor­pi­ons and Mai Tais out of giant barrel-shaped bowls with mul­ti­ple straws ema­nat­ing from them and fresh orchids float­ing on top. We were all in high school, and if our parents needed to reach us they would call the bar­tender and he would summon one of us to the phone.

My Trader Vic’s moments and my more recent Paleo Diet restric­tions aside, I’ve really always been a beer drinker. I love beer. My father, who basi­cal­ly had nothing to offer me as a child, offered me beer. Sips when I was under ten. My own serv­ings after that. My father was, among other things, a largely unavail­able parent. The good news was that beer, I found out, was pretty readily avail­able. There was always some in the back of my fridge at home, and my mother didn’t seem to care if I grabbed a can of Heineken instead of Tab. Friends’ houses always had beer, and the deli near my school had it right next to the Yoo-hoo. My “cel­e­bra­tion snack,” as I called it back then, was a Heineken and a Twinkie. It’s what I had after I took the SATs, when I got my first accep­tance letter to college, and each time I was elected to Student Council. At Nathan’s (a cafe­te­ria near Grand Central Station), you could fill a large Slurpee-sized cup with lemon­ade, 7‑Up, Coke, or Budweiser—put a cap on it, stick a straw in it, and go. My tenth-grade boyfriend and I would do the Bud­weis­er-via-straw while walking around the Museum of Modern Art, enjoy­ing our buzzed expe­ri­ence of Kandin­sky and Munch.

In college, I learned about kegs and how to deal with the foam. I bought cases of Black Label and Rolling Rock for absurd­ly cheap prices at “package stores,” and learned that a beer bottle fit better than a can in the back-right pocket of my Levi’s when dancing to “Come on Eileen” and “Tainted Love.” When I got my own apart­ment and then my own house in my twen­ties, my friend Sebok (name not changed here because he would very much like this) schooled me about how plastic drawers in refrig­er­a­tors could hold a case of beer neatly and that the dis­placed lettuce and veg­eta­bles fit almost any­where else.

When I was preg­nant, of course, I wouldn’t drink at all. That’s when I dis­cov­ered how much I loved non-alco­holic beer. Not the lousy O’Doul’s or Kaliber that bars not con­cerned with non-drinkers offer, but Coors Cutter that mim­ic­ked real beer taste. When I trav­eled to Europe in my forties I real­ized Euro­peans had per­fect­ed non-alco­holic beer, treat­ing the brew just as seri­ous­ly and offer­ing many dif­fer­ent ver­sions on tap. These days there’s a Clausthaler and a non-alco­holic Beck’s that are really worth drinking.

I think beer is a cop-out drink in many ways. When you’re young, it’s one step above soda—so you don’t con­sid­er it a serious sub­stance. As adults, my friends and I don’t care when the not-quite-yet-twenty-one-year-olds in our fam­i­lies have a beer during our back-deck bar­be­cues. But if the same under­age kids were having a vodka tonic with the ham­burg­er and hot dog off the grill, we might feel differently.

Which is weird. Because I know better. When our twenty-three-year-old was fifteen, she got in some trouble (not with booze specif­i­cal­ly, but that was a small part of it). She ended up spend­ing about a year at a ther­a­peu­tic board­ing school that helped her get back on track, and also schooled us heavily on par­ent­ing, toxic behav­iors and envi­ron­ments, drugs and alcohol. Repeat­ed­ly, we were instruct­ed “a drink is a drink is a drink.” Alcohol is alcohol and format (wine, beer, grain, fruit) doesn’t matter to the brain, the blood, the liver. I sat with my spouse Beat­rice, and about twenty other parents, in multi-hour train­ing ses­sions once a month, getting edu­cat­ed on all sorts of things, but largely on sub­stance abuse. We would also see our fifteen-year-old for work­shops and ses­sions, and many of these involved intense cau­tion­ary edu­ca­tion regard­ing sub­stances. It was a very dif­fi­cult time for us as a family, includ­ing the four younger kids we had to leave at home in order to attend these monthly visits. We weren’t like any of the other parents we met in so many ways, and yet all the fam­i­lies had their own stories and hard­ships that bred and main­tained a common empathy among the larger group. At the end of the first day of each monthly two-day visit, Beat­rice and I drove the twenty minutes back to our hotel, and before even check­ing into our room we’d hit the hotel bar. It was a his­toric hotel, the great dark bar in the base­ment had been left largely intact from colo­nial times. We’d order a fast drink, and shortly after, another, and soon we felt the intense knot of the day begin to loosen. Some­where during that second drink we allowed our­selves to take in the visual of the bar’s other drinkers. Table after table, dark­ened corner after dark­ened corner, it was always the same story; we nodded “hello”, exchang­ing somber smiles with the fellow parents of all the other trou­bled teens.

The fact that this real­iza­tion wasn’t pro­found­ly sober­ing in the truest sense of the word…the fact that I spent hours and days over many months learn­ing the thor­ough­ly poi­so­nous attrib­ut­es of alcohol and then dealt with it, as quickly as pos­si­ble, by drink­ing, makes me think I surely have a problem. I must cer­tain­ly be the reluc­tant acorn fallen not so far from my father’s tree. And yet my work, my days, my rela­tion­ships are not, nor ever have been, adverse­ly affect­ed by my alcohol con­sump­tion. I’m able to abstain when­ev­er I choose and for however long I choose. These last two sen­tences are what the psy­chi­atric com­mu­ni­ty I have long checked in with to deter­mine if I am pos­si­bly an alco­holic point to as the reasons I am, in fact, not an alco­holic. Of course, until 1974, the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Asso­ci­a­tion con­sid­ered homo­sex­u­al­i­ty a mental disorder.

So they’ve been wrong before.

J Brooke has a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College (major at Haver­ford College). Pub­li­ca­tions include The Sun, The Southamp­ton Review, The East Hampton Star, RFD Mag­a­zine, Hart­skill Review, Rub­ber­top Review, Mom Egg Review. Brooke’s mis­spent youth was spent in adver­tis­ing. They hope someday not to own an iPhone.