Bad Habits Anonymous
BY JOSEPHINE WU
Have you experienced any triggers or cravings?
I watched as the police found a little girl’s intestines unspooled in the bucket of a Trader Joe’s shopping cart, abandoned in the alleyway dumpster behind my apartment. They didn’t know where the rest of her body was, so they hired a detective to memorize the intestines with his hands, to imagine the body that came with it. But he squeezed too hard and the cold blood vessels burst in his palms like a pimple. Because of that, the detective knew it was a little girl he was holding—or rather, what remained of her. I tell this story to everyone at the meeting and someone asks, I don’t get it how did he know it was a little girl? and I reply that the intestines were dyed green from the victim eating lime jello every day, a food so saturated with sugar it could have only been eaten by a girl. “The dye didn’t die with her,” I joke, but nobody laughs.
“Well, what did you do when you heard about it?” interjects Johnny, the group leader. He is a skinny white guy who has been sober the longest. His addiction—or bad habit, as he makes us euphemize—was peeling off his hangnails in one continuous belt until he stripped his fingers bare. Once, he showed us the exposed bone, how it glistened like clean teeth. It’s like unwrapping a present and getting the same thing every time, he said, licking the wound. It got infected the next day, his saliva the culprit. The doctors had to surgery away half of his pinky. The amputation didn’t make much of a visual difference—the pinky looked the same, just shrunken—but it prompted his journey to sobriety. And now he’s been sober long enough to teach us what not to do.
I can tell he expects a certain answer out of me. “I didn’t do anything,” I respond defensively, crossing my arms.
“It just seems like you know a lot about her, that’s all,” Johnny says.
“Well, I don’t.” I don’t tell him that I created the Wikipedia page for her murder already. I don’t tell him that I snuck under the neon crime scene tape the night they found her, or that I climbed inside the dumpster imagining my body as hers, wishing to decompose until all that was left of me was my hunger.
Have you made any progress toward your recovery goals since the last meeting?
Before Bad Habits Anonymous, my habit was worse. I used to thumb through the newspaper every night, the one with local obituaries listed on the back page, and find any girls who died violent, unjust deaths. The obits had headshots of the dead girls in black and white. They looked like classic Hollywood actresses posing for a magazine cover, not at all like victims memorialized in a newspaper that nobody read anymore, apart from dead people’s families and old men afraid of cellphones. I was only interested in the girls if 1) they died violently and 2) they were unclaimed. Eventually, after I joined Bad Habits Anonymous, Johnny had suggested that I add a third criteria to my list to make my habit harder to accomplish: 3) they had long names. “Try for three syllables at least or something,” he had suggested. “If most of the dead girls don’t check all your boxes, maybe you won’t be able to indulge in your habit at all.”
It helped a bit, but I still reveled in the violence that I could find. I didn’t care if they died of a heart attack or gum disease or a tumor that swallowed up their lungs. I wanted to read about the puncture of a blade, the closing of a fist. When I discovered girls who fit the criteria, I would scour their homes, memorize the locations of their deaths, try to find the family members who they belonged to. I figured that someone should be missing these girls, not just me. But despite everyone I tried to track down, no one ever claimed them. So, the obituaries became graveyards, housing girls who didn’t have any other home, even in death. I promised that I would never leave them and they would never leave me. Unlike some people.
Sometimes I wondered if this obsession was because my mother let me watch the video games that my brother played. On the only computer in the house, he sawed down monsters with a glowing purple blade and flattened enemy soldiers in seconds. Even then, I dreamt of my stomach at the opposite end of his sword, my body folding into the blade like paper.
It was my brother who brought me to Bad Habits Anonymous. It’s for people whose habits have hurricaned, he said. What was left unsaid: Your obsession with dead girls is storm-worthy. His bad habit came from the womb; he liked raw meat ever since he was born sucking on our mother’s placenta like it was a watermelon Jolly Rancher. After his birth, our mother swaddled him with her flesh. She blended her placenta into a smoothie and fed it to him in a blue baby bottle because grief made her milkless. After that, he grew up carnivorous, desperate. He rattled his teeth against raw T-bones and sipped egg yolks by the dozen. His stomach was rounded by the fact that no one told him no—at least, not until Bad Habits Anonymous.
The meetings took place in a church attic. Little figurines of Jesus clung to the walls. My brother told me that Bad Habits Anonymous wasn’t a Christian organization, despite the religious location and the recovery liturgy we recited every meeting that sounded vaguely cultish. “The twelve principles of BHA are honesty, hope, surrender…” we intoned, our mouths merely homes for our voices to meet. Every meeting, my eyes skimmed the room, wondering, does everyone buy into this? It was the oddest sight, how we all prayed with our eyes open. Even the wooden Jesuses on the walls hung wide awake from their crosses, yoked to our misery, our addictions.
“We couldn’t afford the sanctuary,” Johnny admitted when we first met, his pinky finger a knob. Around us, other members of the group milled in small talk, waiting for the meeting to begin. “Hi, I’m Johnny and I’m a bad habit indulger.”
“Bad habit indulger?” I repeated, dumb.
“Bad habit indulger,” he confirmed sheepishly. “I know it’s not super catchy, but I think it’s the best way to put it. Oh, hey Ben”—he pressed my brother into a one-armed hug—“nice to see you again! How’s Honey?”
“She’s getting so big now,” my brother replied, pulling out his phone to boast a picture of his pet piglet. I told him it was a bad idea (You’re gonna eat her one day), but he claimed it was an aggressive tactic to force recovery upon him. I love her so much I don’t even wanna eat her, he rationalized. She’ll make me so sad at the thought of even eating meat at all. My doubts receded after he professed vegetarianism, a far cry from his previous propensity toward protein. He stopped eating anything but lettuce with ranch and ketchup; even Honey had a better diet, unleashing her tongue against the chicken scraps I fed her during dinner. After a few months, my brother’s teeth grew so soft I could pluck it out of his gums like fruit. Yet, he had fully recovered from his bad habit, a success story for the Bad Habits Anonymous Twitter account to advertise—with Ben’s permission, of course.
“So you’re the guy that got my brother to abandon raw meat,” I said.
“No, he did it himself,” Johnny declared proudly, thumping my brother on the back. Ben scrunched his face into a humble smile. “Everyone does it themselves. We had a guy who smoked candy cigarettes every day until he gave himself diabetes. Look at him now, he’s running a marathon. Here, why don’t you sit over there—we can introduce you at the meeting today. Just follow my lead.” Dog-whistling the group together, he squeaked his beige card table chair against the unfinished linoleum floor until we all rearranged ourselves into a circle. “Come let’s all get started. How are you, how’s it going, looking great Sarah, love the new hair. Let’s get started now.”
How can anyone have this much energy? I thought.
“Let’s all welcome our newest member, Ben’s sister!” Johnny waited for the sparse applause to dissipate. “Just introduce yourself like I did.”
“Hi, I’m Anna and…Do I say my bad habit?”
“Share as much testimony as you want. For example, this is what I say—stop rolling your eyes, Ben, I know you’ve heard it a million times—Hi, my name is Johnny and I’m a bad habit indulger.” Hi Johnny, everyone echoed. “When I was six years old, I was diagnosed with psoriasis on my cuticles. There were so many hangnails on my fingers, it burned to touch anything. I began peeling my hangnails a little, and then it became so addicting to pull centimeters of my skin off at a time, then inches, then feet. And then…” Johnny paused to catch his breath, kneading his knuckles into his forehead. Someone reassuringly squeezed his shoulder. “Sorry, it doesn’t get any easier to share this. My life changed when I had to get my pinky amputated.” He held up his shrunken appendage to the circle. “Because of what I thought was a small bad habit…I lost the ability to do so many things. To throw a solid punch, to give a worthy high-five. It really, really sucks.”
Before I knew it, I began to laugh. Everyone turned to stare at me. I could even feel the Jesus on the south wall goggling at my back. “Sorry, I know it’s serious and horrible and everything…but a half pinky doesn’t seem life-changing,” I said.
“Hey—” Ben knocked his knuckles on my head.
Johnny chuckled. “It’s okay, Ben. Don’t worry, I’ve heard that plenty of times. It’s not about the loss itself, really, like the pinky or the skin that I’ve peeled over the years of my addiction. It’s about the loss of control. It’s about the fact that you don’t own anything in your life anymore, not with your bad habit.” He leaned back against the card table chair, his jaw slicked into a knowing smile. “What have you lost, Anna?”
Have you lost anything to your addiction?
After the meeting where I lament the fate of the lime jello girl, Johnny grabs my elbow. His fingertips are calloused and his nails outgrown, as if he’s been too afraid to touch himself. I imagine the strips of his skin belting my arm to his.
“Did you know most addicts relapse?” he asks. “So this is a no judgment zone.”
“I figured.”
“Well, try this for me. Instead of finding girls with three syllable names, how about four? It’s clear that cutting your habit cold turkey isn’t working out for you. Maybe we need to be less ambitious,” he suggests.
No judgment zone, I think.
Unfortunately for him, there’s a girl named Chrysanthemum in the obituaries who died after her girlfriend pushed her off their apartment’s fifth-floor balcony. When I search the news, I read an article where the girlfriend Sally cried that it was an accident: she was high on acid and thought the cement below was a trampoline. When she pushed Chrysanthemum off the balcony, Sally believed Chrysanthemum would fly back into her arms like a sparrow. I’m a physicist by trade, she wailed. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. I thought the trampoline would propel her back to me. It was just for fun.
I save the article to my desktop. What a shit physicist.
That night, I pace the perimeter of the apartment where it happened. By now, I knew that nobody would claim Chrysanthemum, so I wanted to find the spot where her body crushed to the pavement, to own the exact moment when she died. That’s the most intimate part about a person: their death. By knowing it, I could claim her, let her be homed by someone other than herself. By the time I arrive, though, the city had already repainted the cement, this time with a dye that is darker than coal. When I lean down, pressing my palms against the pavement, my hands come back muddy. The paint is still wet. It feels like blood.
Before she returned to China, my mother had a habit of dying. Not dying, but dyeing. She tried to replace the color of everything we knew: her graying hairs, our old cotton t-shirts, the water of the fishless fish tank. I still don’t know if our goldfish disappeared from my brother’s hands or my mother’s, if it was devoured by hunger or grief. By the time I entered high school, everything was a different color from what it was meant to be. The lunch I brought to school every day was a stale strawberry yogurt, the lid torn halfway, the curd dyed neon green. Food dye was only a few cents a bottle, and it could dye the strongest of materials. Once, the dye in my yogurt scissored my tongue, and I bled so much that the blood rendered my lunch inedible. Even then, the strawberry yogurt remained green. The dye claimed my entire mouth, and I walked around the school speaking in a color that wasn’t my own. Nothing can withstand the power of dye, not even yourself, she said, her eyes shining.
I didn’t have a father. I don’t know if it was because he died or he stayed in China; my mother never divulged. Instead, she swore at the only picture she had of him, the one she frayed by jamming it into the slim back pocket of her jeans. He left, he left, he left, she would say if I asked about him. He’s good-for-nothing, that loser. Left me with you. She dyed the photograph a pulsing black by coloring over it with a Sharpie. Once, after her overnight shift at the hospital, I looped my fingernail into her pocket and filched the photo from her jeans. It was still wet from the ink. My mother was right; dye was stronger than anything I could name. It was so strong I couldn’t tell my father’s face from the darkness. I slipped the photograph back into her pocket and crept back to the room I shared with my brother. Later, my mother locked me in the backyard for three hours with the crows. She had caught my crime by the holes of black parading on my fingertips.
Have you been able to make amends or work on healing relationships affected by your past alcohol habit abuse?
I’m still at Chrysanthemum’s crime scene when Johnny emerges from behind the brick corner of the apartment building, his eyes narrowed. “I knew you’d be here,” Johnny says. “I did a little research myself, reading the obituaries of the day. You’re predictable.”
“Sorry for disappointing.”
“I never said you disappointed me. I just said that you’re predictable.” He picks up a broken piece of sidewalk and examines it under the streetlight. There’s a bit of wet paint on it, so his jagged hangnails pick up the color. After getting to know him, I’ve learned that he plays with any small object around him, as if to displace the energy that turns him animal against his own cuticles. “It took me a while to find you. I’m worried about you, Anna. I know you must have done a lot of research to figure out where this place is. It’s obsessive. It’s an addiction.”
“I’m not harming anyone,” I say.
“Yes, you are. Yourself.” It’s so cliche that I snort, the breath misting up in front of me in a column. “You aren’t giving these girls a home. You’re not claiming them. You refusing to leave them alone hasn’t changed anything—your mother still left you. This isn’t going to bring her back.”
“I know you think it’s about my mother, but it’s not,” I insist, tears flecking behind my eyes. “Not everything is Freudian like that.” I regret telling him about the dye, the photograph, how she disappeared the day I left for college and she no longer had to claim me on her taxes. How long have you been waiting for this, I had thought, Ben pressed against the door as he listened to me cry in the shower, feeling the water pelt my skin, the steam caressing me. How long have you been waiting to unclaim me?
“Can you be honest for once in your fucking life,” he snaps. I don’t respond. I can’t. All this time I’ve known him, he has never cursed in front of me. He even replaces crap with crab.
“I am honest,” I say, but this time my voice sounds hollow as a conch shell, the waves ringing back to me. Hi Anna, I hear the group ricochet my name. You’re a bad habit indulger. The waves swell in intensity, lacerating my eardrums. You’re a bad habit indulger bad habit indulger bad habit indulger. I can feel the ground wavering underneath my feet as I suddenly lose my balance, my vision dotted with black.
“You’re falling over,” he warns, catching my arms as I tip over. Leading me to the edge of the sidewalk, he sits me down and brushes the back of his hand against my forehead. “You’re running a fever. You haven’t slept, have you?”
“I guess not,” I manage, my mouth so dry that I can feel each taste bud if I run my tongue against my gums. Suddenly, I begin to laugh. The areas where I touched Johnny’s arms to catch hold of him have blackened into bruises.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’ve dyed you,” I point to the dots. Frowning, he swivels his arms under the criss-crossed beams of the streetlights. “My mother used to say that dye is indestructible. You can never take it off. I’m permanently on you now.”
He touches my cheeks. The black paint on his cuticles have surely transferred onto my face.
“Now you’re on me,” I say. “It’s forever.”
This time, he is the one who laughs. “Nothing is forever, Anna,” he says. “Things change. People change.” Except for him, I think—he has never changed, has never missed the opportunity to teach a lesson. He stoops down to show me his fingertips, which are cavitied in black. Looks like late-stage chicken pox. “The loss, the pain doesn’t have to be forever. Watch me take it away.”
“No, stop,” I say, realizing what he means. “Don’t do it.” I know that if he does, he will begin the process of losing himself. It’s the same reason that Ben continues attending BHA meetings even though he’s sworn off raw meat for three years, for the same reason that he only eats lettuce, not even cooked meat, not even tofu or tempeh or any other meat alternative. It’s the same reason why each girl’s death propels me into another death, and then another, and then another, until all that’s left of me is a collection of dead girls with no mother.
Shrugging me off, Johnny digs his fingernails under the skin of his amputated pinky. He winces for a second—hesitates—before beginning the unraveling. Under the cold beam of the streetlights, he strips his skin into a noose, untying his body from the black of his fingertips, his hands a crime scene, a cool salve against the heat of my forehead. I wonder if I love him, or if I just miss my mother.
