The Harder They Fall

by Gary Stromberg

  I had been a very shy and worried child, with a lot of feelings of not fitting in or being pretty enough or being too smart or more-than or less-than. An egomaniac with an inferiority complex. I had a tremendous amount of pressure on me scholastically, ’cause I was good at it. I was a tennis champion, and I really couldn’t hardly enjoy anything like winning. I couldn’t bear losing because I had such a fragile, fragile sense of myself, all based on how I was doing, which was never quite good enough. And at about the age of twelve … I skipped a grade, I skipped the fourth grade, so when I was twelve or so, in junior high school, I was already a year younger and much less developed, and I had this crazy, wild hair and just didn’t weigh anything at all and felt really ugly and just so desperate to be loved.

  Some girls brought some beer to a dance. This was all in Tiburon, California, and we went out back to a baseball field and drank it. I’d had beer before. My older brother and I had already started drinking. We always snuck sips or were given some. I remember chugging part of a beer once and getting really tipsy. But the first real intentional drinking I remember was at twelve, and I slugged down a beer as fast as I could with these popular girls and I went back to dance and I felt like I had been given a new lease on life. I felt like I could breathe. I felt like I was prettier, and I just felt that the real me had finally arrived. And after that I just always knew that there were girls that drank and girls that didn’t drink. There were good girls and there were popular girls—bad girls, and by the seventh grade, we were all drinking and smoking dope.

  I was born in 1954, so this was all taking place in about ′66. I just loved it and couldn’t wait to do it again. From the beginning, I always drank differently than the other girls. We’d get beer and wine that we’d steal from our parents. Sometimes we’d get older kids, who had ways of scamming it, to get us six-packs and red wine, which we’d mix with 7-Up. The other girls would have a drink and maybe a little bit of a second one and they’d be high and want to do all these slightly girlie things: brushing each other’s hair or putting on the soundtrack to Hair or doing these kind of vaguely mystical teenage girl things. And I would just want to have another drink. I remember always wanting another one. I remember getting the whirlies at this girl’s house a couple of times, and I wasn’t even embarrassed. I would just lie down on the bed to try to get the whirlies to stop, and all I’d think about was how to get another drink without the girls judging me.

  It escalated. I started doing more of everything. Mostly at home on the weekends. I started smoking dope. I’d practice tennis really hard every weekday and often was in tournaments, but there were always kids at tournaments that drank. Everywhere I went there were people like me. I call them “The Sevens” now because somebody once said that maybe one in ten of us are alcoholics, and before we come down to Earth, God has everybody who is going to get a human body call off from one to ten. After that’s done, he says, “All the sevens step forward.” And these are going to be the alcoholics.

  I started developing a taste for hard liquor—very disguised hard liquor. It was not discouraged at my house to have wine in front of the adults or at a party. There were all these blender drinks going around. Mostly the women were given the whiskey sours and could always pour a glass right from the blender.

  I loved it. It sort of gave me a chance at a real life. A feeling like I wasn’t a piece of shit. Those first couple of sips felt like the oxygen tube had been untangled, and I could breathe again.

  So I was off and running. I got into a lot of trouble, not with the law or anything, but by often disgracing myself. Passing out at parties, doing stuff no one else would do, doing things with boys I wouldn’t even remember having done. Never wanting to stop. Even as a girl, I had that feeling of loving to get high. I just loved to get drunk. And then I started to find more interesting drugs. This was all in the late sixties in high school.

  I went to this little hippie high school, and there were a lot of drugs available. Cocaine was very rare back then. People were taking acid, but I wasn’t. There was hash you could buy for five dollars a ball, wrapped in a little silver foil, but it had been soaked in opium, and it was so unbelievably delicious and good. It gave you that feeling of floating, that kind of amniotic feeling. So a girlfriend at my school had made me this little hash pipe out of clay. I had it in my pocket. We’d been smoking hash with opium in it at lunch, and we came back to my very favorite class, with this teacher I just adored. A literature course, and I really lived for him. He was really an important figure in my life. He drank but he wasn’t a doper. He was actually disgusted with all the dope at this school. I was seen as a good girl because I was a tennis champ and because I wasn’t ostensibly “out there.”

  Back in the classroom, I remember him asking me a question and I realized I couldn’t get my mouth to work! I’d gotten too stoned, which is basically the story of my life … too drunk, too stoned, too often! He asked me a question, and I was concentrating so hard on getting my lips around the answer that very slowly the hash pipe slid out of my pocket and crashed to the floor and shattered. I got a big shot of adrenaline and my friend tried to pick it up. There were only about eight kids in my classes and everyone knew what it was, but I’m not sure if he did. It didn’t matter though, because I went into such a terrorized state of paranoia from being stoned and also the hash pipe being broken in front of my cherished teacher that I felt like I had completely lost my mind. I had to sit there while everyone around me cleaned it up, tried to get rid of the evidence. My teacher looked at me like … oh, God! All I could think to do was to try to win back his love—after I could think again.

  It never occurred to me that I should think about the fact that I was so stoned that I couldn’t answer a question, that I couldn’t form an English word. What I thought was I just had to find a way back into his heart, ’cause it made me feel of value. That such a cool teacher loved me.

  I had to try to get the schedule right. Get the levels right. I remember a number of times being way too stoned to function or to pull it off. I really liked getting impaired. I tried to find that edge where I could still sort of function but have that wonderful feeling of no feeling. That sort of vague stoned floating and the energy and the music. And being with other stoned and drunk people. I really drink to get impaired. I don’t like to get “a little drunk.” Many, many, many times, beginning in high school, I would get so that I couldn’t walk, couldn’t get up off the floor, and it didn’t bother me that much. I just learned to sort of sit it out. Somebody would come by with cocaine or methedrine or a nice diet pill and get me going again. And I wouldn’t even think, “Gee, that’s scary. I couldn’t even get off the floor.” I would just think, “Thank God for crank!”

  I went off to college in Baltimore for a couple of years and sort of loved it but really wanted to be a writer. While I was there, there were the girls that I hung with and many of them were hippie feminists. I went to a women’s college called Goucher. They were older girls who could buy alcohol legally for us, and I just always gravitated toward the type of people who liked to get drunk and who liked to be alone. We all started smoking by then, and there would be five or six of us listening to Carole King or whoever we were listening to and getting stoned and drunk. Talking about life and then going out and doing really silly, goofball, dumb things together. I was not able to stay in college, although I loved English, philosophy, and literature. I think I scheduled them later in the day because there was one bonehead science class that everyone took … astronomy, and everyone took it because no one had ever failed it in Goucher’s history. I failed it because I was just so sick in the mornings. I’d get there okay, but I’d feel like the journalist in Bonfire of the Vanities when he’d describe his hangovers and how he’d feel like there was a mercury sack in his head, like a yolk sack, and the nausea would kind of roll back and forth increasing the nausea. Oh man, I just always got bad hangovers. I had a number of blackouts and disgraced myself a number of times. Showing up
at parties where there were teachers, just shit-faced.

  I dropped out of school when I was nineteen. Wanting to be a writer, I moved back to San Francisco and worked in a nuclear quality assurance department, as a clerk typist. I got food stamps and my best friend, Pammy, who I’ve written a lot about, lived on B Street and I lived on Bush and Leavenworth, which was this fabulous upper tenderloin with lots and lots of bars. We just always had alcohol. My dad would buy me booze, a nice bottle of Tangueray. He’d come over, and we’d have a couple of martinis. Then he would go home, and I’d drink the rest until I passed out. I got these terrible gin hangovers.

  I would disgrace myself always. I remember there was a Christmas party, and I just got so bombed that I could hardly stand up. I was dancing with the boss and it was getting very erotic, in front of everybody. His wife was there, and a couple people came over and told me that it probably would be better that you weren’t dancing with the boss that way. Maybe you should go get a cup of coffee. That was the last thing I remember. I came to at my apartment on Bush, very sick, like I’d been food-poisoned. I didn’t have a car. It turned out that I’d driven it onto the sidewalk, and the police department had towed it. I just kept thinking alcohol is not the problem, I have a pacing problem. I don’t pace myself right. I tried to switch to just beer and wine, and, you know, I didn’t really want to quit.

  My father and mother had split up when I was in college, and my father really liked to drink. He was a very functioning, high-bottom alcoholic. I would say he loved to drink. Now he’s dead, so I’ll try not to hurt his feelings. He had a number of drinks every night and sometimes got quite drunk and sort of passed out early every night. He was glad for me to be drinking. We were best friends, and we smoked and drank. He had a girlfriend, and we all would go out and drink martinis, but I was always on my best behavior with my father ’cause I just loved him so much.

  My mother was living in Hawaii then. I remember going to visit her and saying I wouldn’t come over unless she got me some dope. So she bought some pot from her friends. It was the first time I ever smoked pure Hawaiian sinsemilla, but of course I smoked it like it was from San Rafael, and I started tripping as if I were on acid. Tripping out of my mind. And I remember crawling down the hall holding on to the wall trying to get to my room, and my mother sort of being aware of what was going on but we couldn’t talk about it. Of course I didn’t throw it out, I just learned to take one hit and then drink a lot, which I could control better.

  I ended up working at Billie Jean King’s sports magazine, which was called Women’s Sports. It was my first great literary job. I was nineteen and there were all sorts of fantastic writers there, and we all drank. Just like they do at a literary gathering, but it was so enveloping. I felt like I found my spiritual home. I was off and running. I moved out to Bolinas and then we all quit one day, a political issue, and by that time I was just a falling-down drunk with absolutely no borders.

  I started trying to make it as a writer. I made a new friend in Bolinas, and we drank together. We also did coke, acid, and methedrine. I preferred meth ’cause I was always broke and it was so much cheaper. Also, I always had eating disorders, and you didn’t have to eat while on methedrine. I could go for about three days on just milk.

  Just lived with no boundaries, anything, with any man, any time. I stole drugs from people who had cancer. I had elective dental surgery just to get Percodan. All the while, I was putting away close to a fifth a day. I was a real bar drinker. This friend and I were there almost every night. We were just legendary. Everyone loved us, and we were both hilarious women, with no boundaries and just devoted to each other.

  Then, when I was twenty-three, my dad got sick with brain cancer, and the world just came crashing down on us. It gave us total license to begin each day with a drink if we needed it. We were eventually living with my dad, taking care of him. My younger brother and I alternated taking care of Dad, so if it was your night on, you stayed with him in this little cabin we had, and if it was your night off, you got to go to the bar. We had a little trailer outside. It was so disgusting. It was about the size of a queen-size bed, and we took all of our boyfriends and girlfriends there. We were so drunk and hungover, but it was like an oasis because inside the cabin our very, very beloved father was losing his mind. He basically had cancer of the everything. So he died and my consumption continued, even grew. Seriously hungover, in blackouts. I tried to quit drinking with my friend sometimes, and we’d go for a couple of weeks and we’d feel so great. Our minds would be clear, and we’d be horrified. We’d count up what we might drink typically, and the calories involved. Once we figured that if we were drinking a fifth each day and a few beers, we figured we could each eat a chocolate layer cake with the same amount of calories.

  I had two books out by the time I was twenty-nine: Hard Laughter and Rosie. I had supplemented my writing by giving tennis lessons and cleaning houses and doing whatever jobs I could get. My books had done great critically but hadn’t sold enough for me to feel secure. Rosie did pretty well. It sold ten thousand copies, which was pretty great back then, but I couldn’t get any self-esteem going. My dad died when I was twenty-five, and I don’t really remember a lot of the next five years. I was writing. I was becoming famous. I was still in horrible relationships with men who mostly didn’t love me but found me mesmerizing, and who discovered that I loved to use and drink just like they did.

  I started disgracing myself as a writer. The worst experience I can tell you about is at the age of thirty or so: I was doing some sort of benefit in the city at a Basque restaurant. I believe it was a library benefit. The restaurant had long tables with green generic bottles of wine and family-style eating. I was supposed to speak as soon as dessert was served, but I started getting bombed. I’d gotten stoned before I got there on some really good pot. I was stoned and floating and good, and after two glasses of wine, I was fabulous. Then I had six, seven, eight, and I was wasted. All the people at my table were getting very worried because I was getting loud and kind of weepy. I started thinking about my dad. I hadn’t written a speech. I just thought that I’m at my best with a crowd and a few too many.

  There was a problem, though, when I wanted to order one last bottle of wine, and people around me were getting that very nervous, slightly angry look that I became very familiar with. The waiter said, “Do you guys want a bottle of wine or don’t you?” They all said, “No,” but I said, “I would. Please bring a bottle.” That was humiliating in itself. The waiter poured me a glass. I raised it to my lips, and it was the last thing I remembered. I went into a full-fledged blackout. I came to on stage, barely able to keep my balance, like Truman Capote at the University of Maryland, when he was staggering around saying, “I’m an alllcoholic.”

  Apparently I was in the middle of saying the sentence that “I dreamt of a colorblind world,” like I was channeling Dr. King or something, and I came to and there were two hundred people looking at me attentively, and I had no idea what I was talking about. I didn’t know whom the benefit was for. I had no speech. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be talking about. So I said, “How’m I doing on time?” This brought the house down ’cause the first and only sentence I said was “I dreamt of a colorblind world!” Then I started staggering around trying to talk about how much I loved writing and reading or something, and I was just stunning! To this day, people still talk about it.

  So then I had another book come out, Joe Jones, which was just a devastating flop. I couldn’t really work by then. My mind was getting sort of spongy. I always worked really hard. I sat down at the same time every morning, which was 8 a.m. I would always wake up early. Pretty sick, I would go for a run, take a shower, have a lot of coffee, and have some speed. I might smoke a little bit of pot to just get going, and I wouldn’t drink till the afternoon. I would try to get my work done. It was like I was on an elevator and kept going down, one more floor, and trying to make it be okay. Then I would try to set limits. I would onl
y drink beer and wine. Night Train, wino wine, or Mickey’s Stout Malt Liquor, the “green death.” So I’d say, “I’m only going to drink beer tonight,” but I’d drink six or seven 16 oz. Mickey’s or Ranier Ale, which is even stronger, get shit-faced, take a bunch of sleeping pills, and go to sleep.

  I remember my one effort at sobriety. It was called going “on the wagon.” I was kind of aware that there were sober people out there. Communities with people not drinking, and some of them were very hip. There were a number of musicians that I loved, and writers, who had crashed and burned and were sober. I would hear stories about them and think, “I’m not that bad” or “I was still so young.” I was thirty. I was thirty-two when I quit on July 6, 1986. So I tried to go “on the wagon,” so I could have some control over my drinking, and this is what it looked like.

  I decided I would go “on the wagon” and not have anything at all to drink. This was on a Monday. I would just take some Valium. I had a Nike box filled with Benzos [Benzedrine], opiates, and speed, so that all bases were covered. So, I would have a couple Valium and maybe go for a walk. Well, I had a couple Valium and realized it was ludicrous, and that the new rule on the first day of being “on the wagon” was that I would only have two beers at night, come rain or shine. So, I went and got two 16 oz. Ranier Ales and drank one very quickly, to get off. Then I took a Valium, and then I tried to sip the second one. (I had to take a Valium and a number of Halcyons just to get the night to end.) It was about 6:30 p.m. I woke up the next morning at 6 a.m. I got about twelve hours sleep because I had taken those Halcyons, which is a very potent sleeping pill. They were deadly, with lots of terrible side effects. I felt great ’cause I had slept for twelve hours. I loved this! I loved being “on the wagon.”

  I thought, “Two beers and pills. That’s all.” People would call and say, “How you doing?” And I’d say, “Great, I’m ‘on the wagon.’” I’d always call people in the morning when I was hungover and try to figure out how badly it had gone. I wouldn’t remember what had happened at the bar or in the car. I’d call and say, “How you doing, Gary?” And you’d say, “I think we need to take a little break from each other, and not talk for a while.” And I wouldn’t have any idea of what had happened. So I would get on the phone trying to piece together what happened.