Part of an ongoing series. Next chapter: fitting in.
The Pursuit of Happiness: Drugs
“The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re
walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind
and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment
you may be starting to get it right.” – Neil Gaiman
Ah, chemical indulgence and its aftermath. How many meetings
have I sat in where fellow survivors retailed their horror stories, their
brushes with death and dismemberment, with a perverse undercurrent of pride?
And it’s true that I share that survivor’s arrogance. Often
we talk of only switching our addictions to an addiction to recovery, of the
obnoxiousness and upstaging, overbearing nature of our self-righteousness, as
though we were veterans of a war we waged against ourselves, memorializing like
Henry V presages at Agincourt: “Then will he strip his sleeve and show his
scars./And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’” But, like I’ve said
before, I’d rather hear you pompously hold forth on your sobriety than keep
your hair out of your face while you puke.
This discussion is fraught with perils. Me writing about
this topic, or declaring my ever-recovering status, is seen by many as a
violation of a key principle of anonymity in the recovery community,
particularly if such writing is a play for public approval, or for the gain of
influence, or for financial reward. I firmly reject any and all three of those
possible outcomes, which are pretty damn unlikely anyway, based on my track
record.
I hope to make amends as well, though – not just to the many
individuals I have damaged, worried, alienated, or pissed off down the years. I
hope to expiate my thoughtlessness, my bad behavior, to raise the pall of
oblivion that hung over me for decades, to the universe at large. I can do it
because I have a gift for expressing myself. I hope to convince you, if you ever
feel tempted, not to start bad habits or to drop them, somehow, if you can. I
can only tell my story.
Like most people, I had absolutely no intention of winding
up here. There is a marked genetic predisposition for addiction in my family,
passed down on both sides. My father drank himself to death, basically, and
cigarettes accompanied my parents from morning ‘til night, including at the
dinner table and on long car rides with the windows rolled up. I was steeped in
booze and smoke from birth, like an indolent whiskey keg in some bar’s
basement.
This is no attempt at an excuse. Any apology that is
followed by a “but” is not an apology at all. Given the example that ground
away at all of us every day growing up, I should perhaps have been more
resistant to alcohol than I was. I know I swore I would never drink or smoke.
And, beyond isolated trials in high school, I did pretty
well. My college roommate basically ran a major distribution point for
marijuana on the Lower East Side from our dorm room, but I stuck to the straight
and narrow.
It wasn’t until I finally entered the real world via massive
nervous breakdown after college that I began to drink and do drugs. My
unprepared soul’s collisions with reality, my nightly climbs onto the stage to
feign outgoing sociability as a comic, my confrontation with absolute poverty
and life a step from sleeping in the alley, all pushed me into the arms of
Morpheus. Here’s a basic rundown of abuse, by category:
Tobacco: Disgusting, but tempting. The pain, inability to breathe,
and periodic bronchitis didn’t stop me from this affectation for decades, until
long after my father’s chain-smoking antics were curtailed by Mr. Death. There
is something so assuring and sexy about the cigarette! Blame Bogie and other
black-and-white film stars. Too bad it kills you. I smoked, in turn, a pipe,
cigars, and cigs. Favorite brands: The tasty Balkan Sobranie, Camels, and a
horrible discount, now-discontinued brand called Barclay. It was all about the
look . . . and the way it kept me from swallowing my anger, snapping and
lashing out at people.
Stimulants, club drugs, dissociative drugs: Nope. Never
appealed to me. No painkillers, downers, uppers, anything. I took speed once
while working an all-night shift at Yellow Cab. It worked fine until I came
down, whence I fell into a fit of suicidal depression. Somehow I have saved my
life to date by not taking anything that could kill me IMMEDIATELY.
Cocaine: Same thing. Tried it twice. Each time, I felt like
Superman for 10 minutes, then nothing. It was so expensive at the time (the ‘80s)
that I considered this is a swindle. Also, my penis shrank to an almost
undetectable size (I mean even more than usual).
Inhalants: No, but I knew a lot of people who liked amyl
nitrate. Tried it once. It was painful, a heart attack in a vial. Yikes.
Nitrous oxide? Helium? Spray paint? Just weird.
Opioids: Fortunately, I numbered among my friends a few
survivors of heroin, and their testimonies, along with my marked aversion to
sticking anything into me, especially something pointy, kept me miles safely
away from ever contemplating heroin, opium, etc.
Hallucinogens: Well. It took a long time for the doors of
perception to open for me. When they did, I was fortunately in good company and
under friendly supervision – although spending my first night on them atop a
wind-swept microwave transmission tower overlooking the Front Range with no
safety railing was probably not such a great idea. I always treated them as
journeys unto themselves, not accompaniments to a night out or a social
occasion. While not indulging too much in either acid or ‘shrooms, I think that
the experiences did leave me with at least a marginal benefit, an ineluctable
and lingering sense of the positive interconnectedness of all life, and an
awareness of a larger universe, for which I am grateful. What they did NOT do,
for me at least, was provide specific insights that had portability into
non-altered life. Like so many other supposedly creative people, the reams of
notes I would take while tripping would, on examination in the cold light of
day, be either incoherent or banal. Plus the experience was awfully wearing on
me. Psilocybins are mellow and gentle, lasting only a few hours; LSD, vastly
more dangerous in my mind as it is manufactured by humans and therefore
completely untrustworthy from batch to batch, is a hard-edged taskmaster that
scoops you up and works you for a dozen hours at least. In both cases, you are
trapped in the experience once you begin – no sobering up, no stepping off the
moving vehicle. (I became the go-to babysitter for people who were having a bad
trip or who were, God forbid, dosed as a prank, back when that was considered funny
and not a crime.) Both kinds of trips were exhausting, and I ended up feeling like
I lost something proportional to whatever it was I gained.
Weed: As, yes. My favorite. If there was anything designed
to fit my neural receptors, it was marijuana. It relaxed me, it made me
funnier, more spontaneous, social, outgoing, empathetic. I could live and work
in the real world with calm and assurance. I thought. It was a part of our
rebellious young culture growing up, a brotherhood, a common sacrament. It was
cool. Did it save me? In some ways. Perhaps. For a time. In fact, it pushed my fear away but did not diminish it. It preached
oblivion to me, lowered my resistance to other drugs, kept me stupid, froze me
to change. I had my own foot on my own neck and didn’t realize it. For decades,
it was a daily part of my life, all day long. (I found out later this is common
for only about 2 percent of the population, and about half of all smokers
nationwide). I was addicted. I was not OK without it. My life revolved around
its acquisition and use. Now, of course, it is available everywhere – an irony
not lost on me that makes my occasional craving for it all the more pathetic,
and makes my arrogant little pride about not going there anyway more precious. When
I finally stopped, all that fear reared up and bit me in the ass, and it took a
great deal of time to get over that. However, I could remember my dreams again,
in more ways than one.
Booze: The killer. I feel worse about this than any other,
as I should have known better, based on family history. I learned that the
human capacity for self-deception is boundless. I became a wino. I wound be
being able to (or unable not to) drink a bottle in about 20 minutes; a magnum
was a challenge not a deterrent. The brands got cheaper and cheaper, the
drinking started earlier and earlier. A huge side effect was a zone of amnesia
that would envelop the time before, during, and after drinking, to the extent
that there are now huge empty patches of memory in my life. I have potentially
almost killed myself, my companions, even my children; I will never know for
sure. My apologies and amends continue to this day and stretch to the end of my
foreseeable existence. This was by far the most difficult thing I ever
accomplished (TO DATE: never ever ever say that you are cured or a former
alcoholic; I have seen many many people prove the adage that you are only one
drink away from being back in the shit again).
I don’t know how I did it. According to the 12-step program
I have followed, I didn’t do it at all. My simply willing to stop never changed
anything. It was only a surrender of a kind that made it happen. All I know is,
I stopped feeling like a victim. I stopped figuring I deserve to get wasted,
since life sucked so hard. I took responsibility for, not the choice I made to
use, as having a choice implies that I was or am in control, but for forgiving
myself for being stupid and scared. It was only when I got real about feeling
worthless, incompetent, and unlovable that I realized that I was none of those
things. It’s not all about me; it’s not about me at all. I got out of my own
way.
Now I live one day at a time; under stressful circumstances,
an hour at a time or five minutes at a time. I avoid the past like the plague.
I am never interested in the hazy good old days. I stay out of bars and
cocktail hours. I avoid crowds. I read, I write, I work in yard. I love my
kids, my wife, my family, my friends. I feed my soul with art, music, baseball.
I have the strength to take care of myself and make choices that won’t harm
myself or others, to the best of my ability. I found a God that works for me,
and I pray a lot. It makes some people uncomfortable. Tough shit. I am still
only beginning to figure out who I am and making sense of my life. Tough shit! I
laugh at myself, and go on.
And life is bearable. It still sucks sometimes. I am still
an idiot. But when I think something, I remember it, and I am capable of
transmitting to others. When I feel something, I am really feeling it. I can
help other people now.
There is no shortcut to enlightenment. Maybe there is no
enlightenment. But I am really here. Right now. I am part of life, and it’s all
the more precious to me because I almost destroyed it. Cheers!
