William Keesing’s codeine addiction

William Keesing’s codeine addiction is a persistent part of his life as a poet and teacher, but its clearest consequences emerge in the private collapse of his marriage and in the uncertainty surrounding his sudden death. The narrative places his drug use beside his literary work and employment rather than treating it as an isolated episode: Keesing continues taking pills while his wife, Cecelia, says she can no longer live with the drugs and their effects on their household.

Background and Literary Connection

The narrator first encounters Keesing’s work in Bull, a mimeographed magazine edited by Doug Fazzick, during a period when he himself is working eleven-hour nights as a postal clerk. Keesing is described as an ex-Marine who served in Korea, had been imprisoned, and was supported by Cecelia. The narrator begins writing him long, vividly colored letters, and identifies him as a drug addict whose drug of choice is mostly codeine. Their correspondence precedes their in-person meeting by years.

By the time the narrator travels to Illinois to give a university reading, Keesing has obtained a temporary teaching position and picked up one or two degrees between drug busts. The narrator warns that teaching can be dangerous for someone who wants to write, yet notes that Keesing gives his students plenty of the narrator’s work. His addiction thus appears alongside, not in place of, his literary and professional activity.

The Addiction at Home

During the narrator’s stay, Cecelia retires early because she has to work the next morning. Keesing then tells the narrator that she is divorcing him. He connects her decision to years of living with his drugs and their aftermath, saying that she has endured his drug use and vomiting until she can no longer take it. He also says he has moved out and has a room, though he offers several arrangements for where the narrator might sleep.

Keesing takes out a couple of pills and drops them while discussing the separation. The small action keeps his drug use present within a conversation about its cost: the marriage is ending, yet the pills remain part of the immediate scene. The narrator chooses to stay with the couple, and the visit gives him direct access to the damage Keesing’s addiction has done to their domestic life without reducing their relationship to that damage alone.

Death and Its Uncertain Cause

After the narrator has left, Cecelia tells him that Keesing complained of feeling very bad, was taken to a hospital, and died two hours later. She expects people to think he overdosed, but says he did not. She adds that, although she had been planning to divorce him, she loved him. The account confirms Keesing’s death but does not establish a medical cause; his codeine addiction is part of the circumstances surrounding it, not proof of an overdose.

The narrator accepts Cecelia’s statement and calls her again that night and on the following nights before stopping. He reflects that people drink after bad news to forget, after good news to celebrate, and when nothing happens to make something happen. That reflection concerns the narrator’s own drinking, not Keesing’s codeine use, but it places Keesing’s story within the book’s wider pattern of substance use as a recurring response to life. Keesing’s addiction remains consequential and unresolved: it has strained a long marriage, continued through his professional efforts, and shadows a death that Cecelia explicitly refuses to attribute to an overdose.