Raymond Carver's short story "Where I'm Calling From" is about a recovering alcoholic and his relationship with J.P., another alcoholic in the "drying-out facility" of Frank Martin's.
The narrator has been through Frank's place before, but it is J.P.'s first time. The story is first and foremost about the difficulty of alcoholism and getting and staying sober. It is also about the difficulty of having a relationship when a person is sober, and how it is almost impossible when a person is drinking.
One of the people in the facility has a seizure, and the narrator is afraid that he might have one, too. J.P. and the narrator have a long conversation on the porch of the facility, or, rather, J.P. tells the narrator a long story about him and his wife and their adventures in chimney-sweeping. The narrator is happy to have his mind occupied listening to J.P. tell his long story.
J.P. tells about meeting his wife-to-be, Roxy. Roxy came in her chimney-sweep uniform, with tophat, to clean the chimney at a friend's house where J.P. was visiting. They begin dating, they get married, and Roxy's father takes J.P. in as a partner in the family chimney-sweeping business. But J.P. start drinking heavily, and soon it is out of control: "He tells me that he was starting off the morning with a couple of drinks. He'd have a belt of the stuff before he brushed his teeth. . . . He'd go to work with a thermos bottle of vodka in his lunch pail" (162).
The narrator has to keep coaxing J.P. to tell the story. J.P. says he and Roxy began to have bad fights, physically battering each other: "But he kept on drinking. He couldn't stop. And nothing could make him stop" (162). Roxy finds a boy friend and J.P. finds out about it. They fight and he cuts her wedding ring up. He loses his driver's license and his job: "He was here at Frank Martin's to dry out and to figure how to get his life back on track" (163).
Then the narrator tells his own story. H...