I think that the toughest thing in the world for those of us who are alcoholics to accept is success. It’s not just the drama—we’re used to that. It’s learning how to say thank you and shut up. Not just in a small way—in a big way. This also concerns receiving love in relationships, and learning how to become successfully intimate. We have to learn what it’s really like to be with a loving companion.
All of us are in such a process of integration, constantly, whether we want to be or not. What the opportunity of recovery or sobriety does for me is I become conscious of the integration. Even if I’m doing the same things without alcohol, I can learn from that situation now. I don’t have to go back into that rat’s cage again and again and again. Which is what alcohol does. It makes me forget. It’s a disease that keeps saying I have no disease.
Once when I had just come out West, I was going to do a movie called Come Fly with Me. Dolores Hart and I were going to do it together. She was one of these young starlets under contract, and I just fell in love with her. We were going to go on this incredible trip with the wonderful actor Karl Malden when I got sick. I ended up with a crazy doctor who said I had hepatitis but I didn’t, and another actress got the part. Then Dolores got smart and became a nun. My work with survivors was getting very heavy because I wasn’t a trained therapist. I hadn’t seen Dolores for forty-five years when I went to her as a spiritual adviser. We sat opposite each other, with this makeshift trellis between us in this tiny cloistered room, and I said, “I’m in trouble. I want so much to be of use, but I don’t know how to continue doing this.” I expected her to say, “Why are you going back to that place: your pain?” To the contrary, she said, “Mariette, this is your journey, your mission, probably why you were born.” And I went, “Oh fuck!” Then she talked about resonance. When you drop a petal in the water and the ripples go, do they stop at the water’s edge or continue? Then she said what stayed with me. “You know, I’ve learned in my thirty years of contemplation …” You know, that blew me away because if I’m quiet for fifteen minutes, I think I’ve died! She said, “One’s deepest wounds, integrated, become one’s greatest powers.”
We are all traveling on this earth together, and what these unexpected visitations in your life, the angels, do is help us to shift. I’ve had more of a chance of recognizing angels sober. That’s a glory of this experience. I can learn from my mistakes. I don’t have to hide from anybody. I’m a part of the Good Host. It’s the recognition, and being still and knowing. Once I finally surrendered—and this is what I wish people got—you have to be careful, because it’s bright. The light is very bright. And people who hide don’t necessarily want to see it. … Holy God, it’s like learning how to live all over again!
The field of moral choice affords man’s
Feet crackling ice
To tread, and feet are
A sensational device.
—Marianne Moore, “Man’s Feet Are a Sensational Device”
Dick Beardsley
(long-distance runner)
* * *
AFTER LOSING MY home in Malibu to a messy and painful foreclosure, I moved to the Hawaiian Island of Maui to chill out. I hadn’t yet quit living wildly or using drugs, but I did start to make some important changes. I began eating with some consciousness, enjoying the fantastic array of local fruits and seafood. I even decided to reclaim my physical body, which had taken far too much abuse the past several years, and joined a six-man outrigger canoe team made up of five other guys over the age of thirty-five.
To get in shape for the difficult daily ocean paddling workouts, I decided to start running. I’d never been very fit, and my first attempts were far from pleasurable. I purchased a pair of serviceable running shoes and took daily early morning jaunts on gravel pathways paralleling the ocean. How exhilarating these workouts became. Slowly, but surely, I gained strength and endurance, and my running went from being a chore to a pleasure to a passion.
Fat began to melt away, replaced by the leanness associated with long-distance runners. I became fanatical about my running. My addictive personality was switching from negative and self-destructive drug addiction to life-affirming exercise addiction. Within six months, I was running several miles a day, pushing myself in the early morning sun to go farther, run faster.
One day, I read in the newspaper about the upcoming Honolulu Marathon, and a new challenge was born. I would have about two months to train, and it became a full-blown obsession. I bought a book on marathon training and followed it religiously. It was extremely hard work, building my endurance for this grueling ordeal, but I loved it. Aside from my daily training runs, I continued paddling canoe. Since I wasn’t working, preparation for the marathon became my life. I ate properly and got plenty of sleep. All was going exceptionally well until about two weeks before the marathon was to be held. I was in the best shape of my life, both physically and mentally, but I began to notice pain in the toes of my right foot. I tried to continue my training regimen, hoping it was only a temporary condition, but the pain got progressively worse. Finally I made an appointment with a local doctor and discovered, to his seeming amusement, that I had fractured three of my toes from the continual pounding. I was told there was no way I could run with this injury. I was more than disappointed not to participate in the Honolulu Marathon, an event for which I had worked my butt off. But I still experienced an inner joy because I had found a life force deep inside me that I never knew existed.
Two years later I was back in Los Angeles, still running with conviction, entering 10K races almost every weekend, and becoming a complete devotee to my new sport. I had begun reading all I could about running and was fascinated with what I was learning about the marathon. The idea that anyone, let alone me, could run 26.2 miles was mesmerizing.
I started to read about this runner named Alberto Salazar, who was tearing up the world of distance running with his record-shattering marathon performances. I remember being totally spellbound watching him do battle with a runner named Dick Beardsley in the 1982 Boston Marathon, while both of them broke the existing world’s record. The race was referred to in Runner’s World magazine as “the duel in the sun.” They ran so close to each other that for most of the last half of the race, Beardsley, while in the lead, monitored Salazar’s progress by watching his shadow on the asphalt. “Neither man broke, and neither, in any meaningful sense, lost,” according to the magazine.
“Damn,” I remember thinking, “this is something I got to do.” In the summer of 1984, I ran and completed the inaugural running of the Los Angeles Marathon. Who would have suspected that twenty years later I’d be interviewing Dick Beardsley for my book on recovering substance abusers?
I met Dick at The Lenox on Boylston Street in Boston on April 19, 2004, twenty-two years to the day when he competed with Alberto Salazar in the most momentous Boston Marathon ever run. We went up to his room to do the interview and check out the marathon on television. I asked him if watching the elite runners line up at the starting line didn’t make him itchy to run with them. A huge smile burst from his face and he chuckled. He told me that to ensure against this happening, he had gone for a leisurely twenty-mile run the day before. No way could he compete in a marathon today. Especially in heat that was approaching eighty degrees.
If you met Dick, you’d guess he is a runner. Rail thin, high-waisted, with a powerful chest, bones in his face that stretch the skin taut, and legs that are extra long. A person who shucks off running three marathons in two weeks, winning one of them, as “no sweat.”
Dick tells his story with great enthusiasm, eager to share his experience with those who might be helped by it.
To account for my addiction, I go back to my childhood. My mom and dad drank a lot. They were both alcoholics, but I didn’t know that at the time. From when he got up in the morning until he went to bed, for the most part, he held an alcoholic drink in his hand. But as a young kid, you never think much of that. And my mom—you hardly ever saw her dr
ink except if my folks had company over. But playing hide-and-seek with my two younger sisters, we’d find empty bottles under the bed or a half-emptied bottle in the utility room—some kind of booze. Every once in a while my sisters and I snuck into the back room hiding, and my mother would be there drinking out of a paper bag. We never put two and two together.
When I was in the neighborhood of eight, it started getting rough around home in the evenings. My folks had been drinking all day, and my dad had a short temper anyhow. And then when he was drinking, it just took the smallest thing to set him off. And when my mom would get to drinking, she’d get real obnoxious. If you said, “It’s a beautiful day out,” she’d reply, “Nah, it’s terrible out.” We’d get around the table for supper, and, gosh, my dad all of a sudden would blow up because there wasn’t enough. We’d be eating sweet corn and there wasn’t enough butter on the table. Or the saltshakers weren’t completely filled up.
I remember a couple of times seeing my dad whack my mom right off the back of the chair. I thought, gosh, when I get older and have kids, that is not for me. I’m not going to be drinking and doing that kind of stuff. And my parents—I’m sure it was because of the alcohol—after about twenty-two years of marriage, they ended up divorcing.
But the good part of that whole story is my dad finally found sobriety in 1982 and had fourteen years sober before he passed away from cancer. And he became my best friend. It was amazing how when he quit drinking, we reconnected big time. My mom found sobriety a lot later in life, but she did before she passed away, unfortunately also from cancer. So I saw them drunk and realized, “Man, this isn’t for me.” Then as I got older and into high school, of course on the weekends—I came from a small town—kids were always partying and doing drugs. I never did any illicit type of drug in my life. But I remember coming back to school on a Monday and a bunch of my buddies said, “Oh Beard, you missed a great kegger out in so-and-so’s pasture Saturday night. Man, we were all drunk and havin’ a good time.” And I thought, “Euh!” I could see what the drinking did to my folks. When I turned eighteen, in the state of Minnesota back then you could legally drink. So I thought, “I want to just see what it’s like. I might as well try it for myself.” Some buddies had a birthday party for me in some pasture. I was going to stay there all night, so I wouldn’t be driving. We had a bunch of friends and a big bonfire, and I had, I don’t know, fifteen, eighteen beers. I went from not drinking at all to all those pints. I mean it was coming out both ends! I had a headache for a week. And I thought, “If this is what drinking is all about, forget it!” So that initiation was a good thing. It turned me completely off of that.
Of course—I was in high school in the early to mid-seventies—all the kids were doing drugs, smoking dope, stuff like that, and it never even crossed my mind to try the stuff. I was offered it but just turned around and walked away. You got called names and teased, but I thought I’m just not interested at all. Plus this was about the time I started getting into running a little bit. I wasn’t very good, but I thought, “No way.” And that was against the rules anyhow. So I went from there, and my running time did start to take off when I got into college. Drunks and drinking, nope. And when things started to change was after my competitive running career. I retired from competitive racing at that high level, back in 1988 after the Olympic trials, and then we moved back to our dairy farm. About two months after we’d been back, I got into a real bad farm accident. It busted up all my ribs and punctured my lung. I broke my arm and had a piece of steel driven into my chest. My left leg was just about torn off. At that point, I was laying on the ground and my wife Mary’s calling the ambulance, and we’re waiting for them to get there, and you don’t know if you’re going to live or die and are in an incredible amount of pain. And so the ambulance finally arrives and they get into our little hospital and do all this checking out. And about a half hour later, after I go into the hospital, the nurse comes in and says, “Richard, I’m going to give you a little something. It won’t take the pain completely away, but at least it will kind of take the edge off a little bit.” She gave me this shot. And I had no idea what it was. And I’m telling you, about twenty minutes later, I got this warm, fuzzy feeling in my head that I had never felt before. And it was like a million bucks. The pain was still there but it was like, “Ah, big deal!” I didn’t even care. I remember waking in the room. I said, “Man, what was that you gave me?” She said, “Well, it was Demerol, a narcotic painkiller.” Every three or four hours, she would come in and give me another shot. Honest to goodness, at that point, if the sheriff of our county, who came out to the farm accident, would have come into my hospital room and said, “Dick, we could take you out to the farm and wrap you back up in the maw of that machine and turn the power take-off on and let you flap around a few more times and kind of re-create how the accident happened,” I would have said, “That’s fine, but bring that nurse with the needle.”
I was already getting off on that stuff. I didn’t know it yet, but I was. I’d never felt a drug high before. For a couple of days, I was in our local hospital. They got me kind of stabilized and then transferred me down to the Twin Cities [Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota], where I had two or three operations. I was in the hospital for a number of weeks. After a week of the shots, one day the nurse walks in and says, “Richard, we’re going to discontinue giving you the Demerol shots.” It was like they were taking away my teddy bear. And I go, “You’re kidding me. Man! I just got out of surgery a couple of days ago. I have a lot of pain.” “Oh no, we’re not stopping it, we’re giving it a new way ’cause your butt’s like a pin cushion.” And I said, “How’re you going to do it?” And she said, “I’m putting a needle in your vein. See that plastic tube?” “Yeah.” “Well, it’s attached to that pouch of Demerol up there.” And she handed me a little button thing. “This is set so that every three-and-a-half minutes you get a dose. And instead of having to wait twenty minutes to hit you, it’ll be instantaneous.”
Honest to God, I could hardly wait to push that cotton pickin’ thing. Seeing me react, she laughed and I pushed the button, and right away felt a tingle go into my arm. And it was like, wham, boom, right to my head. The problem was that they were giving me a pretty big dose and it knocked me out. It would make me fall asleep. So I remember getting that first shock or first push and losing consciousness. I woke up thirty minutes later thinking, “My gosh, I missed eight doses!” So I wore my runner’s watch. I set the alarm to go off every two-and-a-half minutes, and I set it next to my pillow. So I’d give myself a little jolt, knock myself out, and two-and-a-half minutes later I’d hear ding, ding, ding, ding. Whether I needed relief or not, I’d push that button again. At the time—now it’s so much easier to look back and see all those signs—but at the time, you don’t think anything of it. So then eventually they weaned me off of that and put me on Percocet, which is heavy-duty too. But I took it in a normal pill. I was sent home with some Percocet, and then gradually they weaned me off of that.
Most people get off the analgesic and don’t have a problem with it. I, too, was fine for two-and-a-half years, until we—my wife, Mary, my small son, Andy, and I—were coming home from a couple of days away from the cows. And we were about forty miles from home, and a lady came barreling through a stop sign on a connecting road and just T-boned our car. I busted up my back and had some whiplash and a bruised spinal cord—and I was right back in the hospital. As I lay in the ambulance, I knew I was hurt but that I wasn’t going to die. But, man, all of a sudden it was déjà vu: “I betcha I’m going to get some more of that Demerol.” Sure enough, it was almost the exact scenario. They went from the shots over to the drip in the vein, then down to the Percocet. I got out of the hospital after a couple of weeks and was sent home with the Percocet, and was using it not as I ought. If it said one to two tablets every four to six hours, I took two every four hours. I would call for more, and because I was from a small town, with that kind of drug you’re supposed
to have a written prescription. Well, our pharmacy, that certainly didn’t have a fax machine, said, “Listen, Doc, we’ll take it over the phone, and just send it to us.” So the pharmacist would fill it for me without a written prescription.
After a couple of months, I went back for my last checkup with her. As I left, she said, “Dick, this is your last. Here’s a prescription for 30 more Percocet, but when this is done, it’s done. You’ve started to feel better now and it’s been long enough. Ibuprofen or aspirin should do the trick.” “Okay,” I said, but home again, I started having an anxiety attack. I’m thinking as I pull into the parking lot of the pharmacy, “Man!” Before I know it, I’m looking at this prescription. “This is it. Thirty and it’s gone!” So there was the store next to the pharmacy, and I knew they had a copy machine in there. So—again, I had never stolen a piece of bubblegum in my life, I’d never been in any trouble—but I went in there and thought, “I’m just going to run this through and see what it looks like. And if it looks really good, maybe I’ll keep an extra one or two, just in case.” Well, I ran it through there, making sure no one was looking. The second I pushed the button, I felt guilty. Then I really felt stupid. When I came out and looked, you could tell it was a copy. The pharmacist would have had to be the most stupid person in the world to take it. I thought, “You’d better throw this away before somebody happens to find it. They’re going to start asking me questions.” So I sat out on my truck, and I’d never smoked in my life and had no idea how to operate the cigarette lighter. It took me about five minutes to figure out you have to push it in for it to heat up. Finally figured that out. It got hot and I sat out there and lit that copy on fire. Opened the door of my truck, and the sheet burned, and I watched the ashes blow away in the wind. Went in with the real prescription, got it filled. Took it as prescribed but to the max side of it. Once I go through with it, I’m fine. Back working on the farm, fine. That was late July or early August of 1992, and I was fine until January of 1993.
The Harder They Fall Page 18
