Page 19 of All the Way to the River

Bitters are a staple of every bar—a potent proprietary blend of herbs, spices, and alcohol that, when added to certain cocktails, both deepens and brightens the flavor profiles of those drinks.

Bitters deliver such an intense taste sensation that you don’t need much of the stuff—just a dash.

But Rayya wasn’t using the bitters to brighten up a cocktail—because she didn’t drink cocktails, because she was sober.

And she wasn’t adding a few drops to some nonalcoholic beverage, either, as people sometimes do.

No, she was just straight-up drinking the stuff, before, during, and after every meal—on the rocks—often downing an entire bottle at a time.

And Angostura bitters have an alcohol content of 44.

7 percent, which is equivalent to most vodkas, whiskeys, rums, and tequilas.

Now, I know this doesn’t make sense—that somebody who claimed to be sober was also drinking every day—but that’s what Rayya was doing.

She was doing this, mind you, while she was still telling her story of sobriety at twelve-step meetings (including Alcoholics Anonymous meetings) and also writing a memoir about her victory over substance addiction.

Soon the bottles of Angostura bitters started showing up everywhere—not only in her purse but also in her suitcase, in the fridge, on the kitchen shelves next to her boxes of cereal, in the glove compartment of her car.

She even kept bottles of bitters— multiple bottles—at her friends’ houses for when she came over to visit.

(We all kept finding them in the weirdest places for years after she died.) She always had to check her luggage when we flew, because she wouldn’t go anywhere without a significant stash of those magical little bottles.

I never questioned any of this, because I never questioned anything Rayya did back then, because I essentially saw Rayya as a godlike figure who was always right about everything.

Nevertheless, she did once tell me that a doctor had “prescribed” the bitters to her, to help her digest her food and to take the edge off her chronic stomach pain.

Now, I don’t know what the doctor actually said, because I wasn’t there.

I do know a few things, though.

I know that, a few years later, Rayya would also tell me that a doctor had prescribed cocaine to her (don’t worry; we’ll get to that story eventually), so she may not have been a reliable narrator on such matters.

But I also know that Angostura is what’s commonly called a digestif—which is exactly what it sounds like: something that helps with digestion.

The mixture, in fact, was created in 1824 by the German surgeon general of Simón Bolívar’s army, who prescribed it to his troops in Venezuela to ease their stomach problems. Angostura bitters, in other words, were indeed once used medicinally.

Then again, so was cocaine.

I also know that Rayya suffered from chronic stomach pain, which was probably a result of the gastrointestinal mayhem that can arise from long-term opioid dependency.

That pain was also exacerbated by her hepatitis C—and by the fact that she ate like a ten-year-old at a birthday party pretty much every day.

In fact, Rayya inhabited a body that was always suffering in one way or another.

She had persistent back pain, joint pain, headaches.

Her legs—which had been broken once in childhood and again in a brutal beating by drug dealers on the street—constantly ached.

She had arthritis in her hips and shoulders, feet and hands.

(In other words, this person who always appeared to be completely comfortable in her own skin literally never was .) And given what we now know about how our bodies keep the score, I think it’s fair to surmise that her extreme physical pain was also the legacy of deep and unhealed trauma.

Whatever the cause, I knew that Rayya vomited frequently, almost daily, and her stomach almost always bothered her. So I’m sure the bitters did help to relieve her physical distress. Maybe her emotional pain, as well. Anything with 44.7 percent alcohol is bound to take the edge off.

But I also have trouble believing that any reputable doctor would recommend the daily imbibing of alcoholic beverages to a patient who not only was an addict in recovery but also suffered from an incurable and potentially fatal liver disease.

It just took me about one minute of googling to find a study by the World Journal of Clinical Cases saying that “no safe level of alcohol intake has been established for patients with cases of HCV” (hepatitis C).

Drinking with an HCV-infected liver has been categorically proven to increase viral replication, weaken the immune system, increase oxidative stress, and lead to higher rates of fatal cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma—more commonly known as liver cancer.

Which is, in the end, what killed my beloved friend.

There were some people in Rayya’s life who had more piercing questions about the omnipresent bottles of bitters than did I. They’d say, “Wait, aren’t you sober? Are you really supposed to be drinking that stuff?”

“It’s just herbs,” she would say. “For my digestion.”

“But it’s got alcohol in it!” they might protest.

And here’s where things began to get shady.

Because multiple times over the years—more times than I can count—I watched Rayya blink in amazement and then say, with convincing sincerity, “Really? It does ? Oh my gosh. I didn’t know that!”

I even remember someone once showing Rayya the label of the bottle and pointing to the spot that read “44.7% alc./vol.” To which Rayya responded, “Wow, I can’t even read that without my glasses.”

Once I even heard her say to someone, “Bitters aren’t really the same thing as regular alcohol. It’s, like, burnt alcohol.”

(His reply? “I don’t know, Ray. I’m pretty sure 44.7 percent alcohol means 44.7 percent alcohol.”)

Looking back on it now, I have trouble making sense of how I made sense of this extreme cognitive dissonance.

I was watching an allegedly sober person drink every day without admitting that she was drinking—and right in front of my eyes.

I was also watching the single most honest person I had ever met pretending—again and again—that she didn’t know her alcoholic drink had alcohol in it.

But here’s where my disease comes in: because I somehow made all this okay.

I overlooked it, rather than looking it over.

I had to overlook it. My fear- and need-addled brain could not handle a reality in which Rayya had any weaknesses or character flaws whatsoever, because she had become my place of safety.

Rayya was trustworthiness to me, embodied in human form.

And I could not let go of that. I had to keep living in a storyline where Rayya was the soul of all integrity—or else my terror of the world would come back, and I could not bear to have my terror of the world come back.

It is truly incredible what you cannot see, when you cannot bear to see it.

Please understand, I’m not judging Rayya here.

I don’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to judging anyone else’s elaborate coping mechanisms, pain-evasion tricks, or dependency-concealment strategies.

Only look at the secrets I was keeping during those same years!

It’s more that I’m marveling over the complex and intricate justification factory that is the addict’s mind in action—as evidenced both in Rayya and in me.

But it does bear noting that for more than a decade before Rayya started carrying bottles of alcohol around with her everywhere, she had been attending twelve-step recovery meetings in programs that were tailored to both alcoholics and drug addicts.

And while her attendance in the rooms of recovery had become increasingly sporadic over the years, she surely must have remembered the warnings that were constantly offered in those rooms—that alcohol is just as serious a drug as any narcotic; that addicts cannot use any intoxicating substances without running the risk of relapse; that full sobriety is a necessity for recovery; and that thinking of alcohol as being “different” from other drugs has caused many addicts to return to lives of active addiction.

Over the years, Rayya must’ve heard these warnings being read and discussed hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

So she knew.

Yet she stuck with her position: Not only was alcohol “different,” but bitters were not alcohol.

So it was all cool, as you can clearly see.

It was all totally cool.