The Harder They Fall

by Gary Stromberg

  When you see that and go, “Hey!” you get some experience in feeling like “I can get as high as I ever was using drugs from this sober way of life.” I realize that I never even needed to do that in the first place! Some people have a harder time, where you can see they’re just dying for their drug, their alcohol, whatever. They miss it, but I don’t. I can honestly say that being sober is better than getting high. No question about it. And I consider myself an especially blessed person because I have all this proof of it. Having a recovery program that works is a miracle as astounding as healing the blind or crippled, or walking on water, or raising the dead. It’s more miraculous to me personally because I know I was gone. That person was not going to write that book. So to me recovery is a miracle, and I have proof.

  As I’ve said elsewhere, Elizabeth realized she could let me court her because I put my desire to meet her in a letter. She had seen me unreliable but could trust my written words. To me, even at my most disturbed and deranged, there was always something sacred about the written word. Paul Valéry said that poetry is the voice of someone happier, more profound and intelligent, and happier than any real person, and I always take that seriously.

  I don’t find myself inclining to the old manipulations with my wife that I was known for when stoned. When you do, you know you’re doing it, and you know that when you do other things to get high that don’t involve substance abuse—another way like sex, but there are a million ways to get high and still have the exact bad behavior as if you were using. But if you’re in recovery, you immediately have a conscience about it. You know that the sense of joy that you have of being in the light when you are in real recovery is darkened immediately when you lie. The minute you use another person for your own benefit, the moment you stop seeing other people in affliction that you want to help, and see them as objects that you want to use and manipulate, the whole universe gets dark again just as if you had a hangover. Then you go, “Oh shit!” and you do something about it. Otherwise you go back to being—without using drugs, without drinking—you go back to the same state of mind you were in when you were drinking and using drugs. So it’s not hard to tell. If you have any honesty at all, it happens immediately … the whole world gets dark again! You feel scared, paranoid, remorseful, terrified. Everything you feel when you use comes flying back, and you go, “Fuck, I have to do something about this,” and then you try to do something about it. And you go back in the light, for a while. It’s not spiritual perfection but spiritual progress. You make progress, fall down, get up, fall down, and get up. That’s all there is, because we’re not going to become saints. Most of us are not saint material. We’re material to be, like, psychopathic criminals! And yet we have this chance to live a normal life.

  Think about what alcoholics went through for thousands of years, being put in a cellar somewhere and have the key thrown away. Right up until the fifties and sixties, they put you in a mental hospital and threw the key away. Now people have another opportunity. This is why I say access to a recovery program has saved my life. It has enabled millions of others to be sane and lead normal lives, and therefore is of the same significance as any other medical breakthrough in the twentieth century. Somebody should get the Nobel Prize for this! I understand Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was actually in line to receive it but made it clear that in keeping with the principle of anonymity he turned it down! Recovery is as unbelievable and incredible as the development of antibiotics, just that it works in a mysterious, spiritual way.

  Walt Whitman said somewhere to spend time with powerful, uneducated people. I always read that and thought, “What a fine idea.” Having lived my whole life of addiction with a sense of entitlement, being, like, “I’m this special person who has this special gift, and I should be treated differently,” I go to my recovery program here in Waltham and know I’m a regular person and always was. I’m a human being among other human beings for the first time in my life. I wasn’t that special or lower than everyone else, which is the corollary of being better than everyone else. No, I was the same. That was the central big relief in my life. I go to my recovery program that is filled with working-class people, or people who do not have jobs, sometimes do not have a place to live or enough to eat. I go to meetings with people for whom recovery is a matter of life and death, and over a period of five years, it’s just kicked the shit out of all sense of being different. I have come home, and I feel freer to exercise the talent that I do have. If I wrote ten poems in a year in my previous life, when I was drinking, when I got into recovery, I was able to finish ten poems in a month. And they are better poems. So I have that proof too.

  That insane asshole is dead

  I drowned him

  and he’s not coming back. Look

  he has a new life

  a new name

  now

  which no one knows except

  the one who gave it.

  —Franz Wright, “Baptism”

  Boney’s high on china white, Shorty found a punk

  Don’t you know there ain’t no devil, there’s just God when he’s drunk

  Well this stuff will probably kill you, let’s do another line

  What you say you meet me down on heartattack and vine.

  —“Heartattack and Vine”

  Grace Slick

  (musician)

  * * *

  I WAS HAVING A hurried lunch at a nondescript burrito joint near Greenwich Village in New York one day, when a poster of Grace Slick and The Jefferson Airplane caught my eye. Amid the traditional Mexican art prints hanging haphazardly, there was an odd sampling of rock-and-roll psychedelia from the sixties. Shows from the legendary venues of the time: the Fillmore East, the Electric Circus, the Avalon Ballroom, and the Fillmore West. The one that stood out was promoting a 1968 extravaganza at San Francisco’s Winterland. It featured new sensations—The Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead—with the acid poster boys, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. I noticed at the bottom of the poster that the ticket prices were $5, $4, and $3. The tip to the parking-lot attendant costs you that now.

  Sucking down my veggie burrito with extra hot sauce, I began a trip down memory lane. I may indeed have been at that show. I often flew up to San Francisco from my home in Los Angeles to attend rock shows. Because I was a player in the rock-and-roll business, I had backstage access to the shows I attended. Many a night was spent getting high in somebody’s dressing room.

  The Jefferson Airplane, whom I saw perform a few times, were unusual in that they were fronted by one of the few female lead singers of the time. Grace Slick gave the impression of being right in her element among the bantam roosters of rock. She could kick ass and get high like one of the guys. She bragged that she has done “most drugs known to men, and most men known to drugs.” How could you not appreciate a woman like that?

  There’s a whole bunch of alcoholics on both sides of my family, but they function in the sense that everybody kept their jobs. There were no divorces, except for my grandmother, but she’s not an alcoholic. She was just a wild child like I was. Our alcoholics all kept their jobs and stayed married.

  In their generation, you just drank. Everybody’s parents drank. There were no question marks anywhere about it. Some were better at it than others. As a little kid, I remember being amused by the mother of one of my friends. She kept on her chenille bathrobe all during the day, and her eyes were so puffed up that they were slits. She always wore her bathroom slippers, and she was puffy. Not that she ate too much, but puffy from too much alcohol. Her husband was skinny and away more than he was home. That mother was spooky, ripped all the time. So I knew there were varying degrees to handle drink.

  My own father was an alcoholic, but he was never mean. He just sort of drank a little bit all the time. He was a peaceful kind of go-to-sleep-at-nine-o’clock drunk. I’m a periodic. I detested being drunk all the time. I didn’t like being foggy. Yet I didn’t see myself as sober all the time ei
ther.

  My parents and everybody else’s of my youth asked why we took those drugs. Didn’t they notice when they were reading to us? Some of the children’s classics our parents read us alluded to chemicals, but the parents didn’t notice this. Before I was five, Alice in Wonderland was read to me, and Alice takes at least five different chemicals. A mushroom has psychedelic properties. Round things say, “Eat me.” God knows what they are. Alice gets literally high and too big for the room. She has to take another drug to come down and get small. One says, “Drink me.” She goes around Wonderland taking drugs.

  Then there are the opium poppies in The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy and her companions all fall asleep in a field of poppies and wake up and see the magical Emerald City. Then you sprinkle some dust on yourself in Peter Pan, and you can suddenly fly and have adventures. As a child, I understood that the chemicals were going to make it so you have these magical experiences. It wasn’t conscious, but when you hear these stories, you take that in. Chemicals can change you instantly! I thought maybe the parents weren’t paying attention to what they were reading. So the song “White Rabbit” was actually addressed to the parents … “One pill makes you larger, one pill makes you small…. But the ones that Mother gives you don’t do anything at all.” I wrote the song at a red piano that was missing ten keys, and I was trying to tell my parents’ generation that this wasn’t open to interpretation, it didn’t have to be figured out, but was right there in those books.

  I had a Leave It to Beaver childhood. My parents didn’t fight and stayed together. There wasn’t any stuff that I was trying to get away from. There’s no whining going on here in my adulthood about my family circumstances: “When I was little, my parents did such-and-such to me.” In my case I believe the alcoholism is genetic, but also environmental in the sense that drinking too much is what everybody did. So, if you have it genetically, and you start in, boy, you’re screwed!

  In high school, we would go out and sneak beers or gin or whatever, pretty much like everyone else we knew. College, the same thing. I was a little racier than the others though. I’m from California, and I went to Finch College in New York City. Now the deal with Finch College was that it was a bunch of rich girls who didn’t have the grades to get into Vassar, Wellesley, or the Cliffe, so they went to Finch. Finch basically teaches you which fork to use and how to get a Princeton boy, or Yale boy, or Harvard boy. It was also a suitcase school, and we would go to Princeton or Yale on the weekends.

  I remember one time this friend of mine, who eventually married John Huston, the movie director, she and I went down to Princeton, as we usually did on the weekend. She was dancing around with her clothes on. She wasn’t doing anything weird, but she was dancing by herself. I was singing and playing the guitar. Singing a Chaucerian folk song that had dirty lyrics.

  And the guys—not the older proctors who, at thirty-five or forty were keeping an eye on the college kids, but the students—were so shocked they said they didn’t want us around anymore. They said we were dirty girls from California. I thought, “Oh, this is way too snotty for me. What the hell is this? If one of their male college buddies had sung the same song, would they have said ‘Leave and never come back’? No, they would have laughed it off.” I thought, “There’s no way I can stand this crap.”

  Sure enough, years and years later, I talked to this old friend of mine I had gone to high school with, and she told me she was envious of the life I had led, what with rock and roll and all of that kind of stuff. She had married one of those Princeton guys, and raised some kids, and was the perfect soccer mom. She had kept it together in the sense you do what you’re supposed to have done. But once you get to be old and look back, it’s not what you did that you regret, it’s what you didn’t do. At this point—I’ll be sixty-five shortly—I’m glad that I had the life I did. The only thing I regret not doing is not screwing Jimi Hendrix and Peter O’Toole. I missed that!

  I was aware that I was famous as a singer in the band, but I wasn’t aware that I was in the same category that I could have “my people” call “their people” and say that I would like to meet Jimi or go out with Peter O’Toole. I didn’t know I was capable of that, unfortunately! I know it now, but I didn’t know then that it could have been arranged. Because I would have gone and done that real fast!

  Like I said, I don’t regret much of anything except hurting people. Occasionally I stepped on people along the way who objected to my behavior. My parents from time to time.

  Anyway, I was going to the University of Miami in my sophomore year in college. I left Finch because on Easter vacation at Finch I went down to Nassau in the Bahamas for a vacation. And I went, “Hey, this is great!”

  I never went to college because I wanted to learn anything. I went to see New York. You don’t say to your parents, “I’d like to see New York. Why don’t you give me $20,000 so I can go hang out for a year?” Going to college sounds better, so they give you the money. You couched it by going to an easy school. And the next year, I wanted to hang out in and be around Nassau, so I went to the University of Miami. While there, I got a letter from a friend of mine, in conjunction with having first heard of Lenny Bruce. Lenny Bruce was unknown to me when I heard him in a record store when I was buying something else. I was mesmerized. So I got a Lenny Bruce album and laughed so hard my face hurt. I’d never encountered anything like it. Also in Miami at that time, I got this letter from my friend Darlene saying, “You got to check out what’s happening in San Francisco. There is some stuff going on here.” She enclosed an article by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. Herb wrote about the new Bay-area scene. Herb Caen had coined the word “hippie,” and he was talking about all these bands and the action, and I thought, “Well, that sounds like a good deal.” Especially since Darlene had already proved her instincts for promising scenes. So I went back to the West Coast, which was probably the most pivotal decision in my life, considering where I ultimately headed. My idea, though, was just to go around and hang out where the good times were.

  So I returned home, and sure enough, Darlene and Herb Caen were right. Things were going on. Included with alcohol was now marijuana and the psychedelics, and new rock and roll. As you know, it took off from there. Now at that time, taking drugs was not something you went into rehab about. Everybody had their drug. Some guys like speed. In The Jefferson Airplane, there were a couple of guys in the band who favored speed. Paul was more of a marijuana guy. Marty and I drank. Spencer drank. Everybody had their drug of choice, but we all took pretty much all of them. Except our band was not into heroin. Heroin was not a no-no. From my point of view, it was too much trouble. You had to have somebody else that you relied on, and I don’t care for that. Now, cocaine …

  We had a guy living in our basement who was a carpenter and he taught karate or kung fu. Also he was a coke dealer, so we had our own coke dealer living in the basement. It was easy. You see how lazy I am. If a drug was easy, fine. Apparently it was easy to get nitrous oxide. We had a tank of it in the basement. What’s more, the coke dealer living in the basement, Owsley, was around all the time with LSD.

  There were a lot of pranks. Tricia Nixon went to Finch College ten or twelve years after I did, so she didn’t know me. Finch College is so small that she could and did have a tea party for all the alumni. She got a list of everybody that went to Finch, and Grace Wing was on the list. So Grace got an invitation to a tea at the White House from Tricia.

  Grace cracks up because she realizes they don’t know who Grace Wing is. That was my maiden name. So Grace calls up Abbie Hoffman because the invitation said you could bring your husband or boyfriend, and I thought Abbie and I would go as husband and wife … and take a shitload of acid.

  I know about formal teas because that’s one of the really important things they teach at Finch. Abbie and I got dressed, showed up at the White House on time, had our invitation ready, and were standing in line. I wore a black fishnet top and black skirt above the knees and
tall black boots up to the knees. Everybody else was dressed like straight Republican women. If I had worn a camel hair coat, the security guards might not have recognized me. We dressed Abbie so he didn’t have a flag T-shirt or tie-dye. He had on a suit, but he’s so dark that putting a suit on Abbie, he looked like a Mafia hit man. Both of us looked pretty strange.

  We had to go through some security because the president of the United States was in there. What I was going to do was … At a formal tea, what happens is everybody stands and there is a long table with big tea urns at each side, and you have somebody—and this is so corny—somebody that you prize or your best friend do the honors at the tea table. I knew the setup. I figured that “Tricky” would be standing there with his teacup in his hand. I got my teacup. I also have lots of acid in one of my pockets, and a long fingernail to scoop it. All it takes is a little acid to get you to the moon. Entertainers gesture a lot, and I’ll be talking to Tricky and I’d kind of gesture over his teacup and the acid would drop in there, and he’d never taste it, and in forty-five minutes, the guy would be gone. So I was standing in line, and I fully intended to do it, when one of the security guards came over to me and said, “I’m sorry, you can’t go in.” And I said, “But I have an invitation.” And he said, “No, we know you’re Grace Slick, and you’re a security risk.” And I thought, “They’re right! Isn’t that interesting? They don’t know why, but they’re right!” So they wouldn’t let me in.