The Harder They Fall

by Gary Stromberg

  For some reason, that dose of reality resonated and sent me a big message, like, “Hey pal, you’re an alcoholic. And you’re a drug addict. And your life is changing.” I felt my music deteriorating. This whole trip to Miami was very revealing. I was down there commissioned to do a record, and went and played live at this club one night. I thought I was doing a great job. The crowd was cheering and going nuts. The artist I was working with, who happens to be the most anal artist I’ve ever known, recorded every single note of music that night. The next day I went to his house and he said, “You want to hear what you played last night? You thought it was great, right? Well, check this out.” He played it, and it was the worst thing I ever heard. I was so embarrassed. So what brought me to my knees was realization and embarrassment. Not me being destitute, not me being poor and losing all my money, or any of that stuff. It was pride. I had worked so hard to develop a sense of belonging and accomplishment and achievement, and it was all going to be taken away from me because I couldn’t even play guitar anymore. And here’s the proof. This is what I play like. But meanwhile, I thought it was great. I realized all at once that I could think one thing, but it not be true. That people were after me, and it not be true. I could think I’m a great musician, and it’s not true.

  I realized that I was deluded, and that dose of reality started me on a quest to find what was real and what wasn’t. I called my shrink, whom I’d been seeing for many years, and he convinced me to check into a hospital called Silver Hill. And I did. And for some reason, maybe because I believed I was going to lose what I worked so hard to achieve, my problem became real to me. I got a new focus and sense of purpose when I realized that drinking and drugging was as natural to me as breathing. So to not do it required a huge amount of discipline. My music teacher used to always say to me, “What do you consider the working definition of discipline?” I would think about it, and he’d say, “Discipline is the ability to delay gratification.” He says, “You practice now to be on the stage later. One day you’re going to be gratified.”

  And when I crossed over, that’s what I kept thinking. A lot of alcoholics have a tough time dealing with time. “Hey, you made it to thirty days, now you got to get to ninety.” For me I thought, “All I have to do is be disciplined.” So now I had to take that discipline and not drink for one day, one day, and the next thing you know, I’ll have ten years. Then twenty, or whatever. That’s my take on sobriety.

  I remember once I worked on that big charity project Live Aid. You know, “We Are the World.” Lionel Richie told me and Clapton and all these people, “When we go on stage, no one can grab the microphone, because the sound-mixing guy is so far back he won’t be able to tell which microphone you’re on, and he might turn up the wrong one and get feedback.”

  And we all looked at Lionel and said, “Lionel, come on man, we’re all professionals, we know that.” The next thing you know, we play the intro to the song, and Lionel starts the song off ’cause he wrote it. And as soon as he goes to sing, he grabs his mike and starts stomping up and down just like what he told us not to do. What I realized is that people do what they’re comfortable with. They go back to the things that they know. I knew what it felt like to do the same thing over and over again until it became second nature. To me, getting through one day sober was the same as practicing the scales.

  The words still resonate to this very day: “The working definition of discipline for me is the ability to delay gratification.” I don’t need the gold record today. I can work towards that gold record, and the day I get it, well that’s cool. My music teacher used to say, “Doing the work teaches you how to do the job.” And when I got into a program of recovery, the work was getting through a day. I was so glad to get through it without taking a drink. That was work. It wasn’t natural. Natural was “Forget this, let’s get some vodka.” So not to drink was almost an oxymoron, because not to do an action was an action. That’s how the practicing of the scales was the same as “don’t drink.” So I sat there and didn’t drink today. And it was incredible. Once I was able to come up with a philosophical approach to my recovery, it all felt natural.

  To this very day it still feels natural. I’m in the rock-and-roll business. I’m around people who get drunk and do stuff all the time. I’m not a hypocrite—I loved it. I’d probably love it now if I could do it safely. But I’m an alcoholic, I’m a drug addict, and I can’t do it safely. If I take a glass of champagne, I’m not stoppin’. I want all the glasses of champagne. It’s pretty clear to me. A sip is not interesting. I’m a very grandiose personality. Working at being humble is discipline. That’s my job. I have to work hard at keeping grounded. It’s very natural for me to say, “All right, let’s go to Paris for lunch.” Now that the Concorde isn’t flying, it’s hard to be so grandiose, but I would do that just on a whim. Twenty thousand dollars to go have lunch. It was grandiose, and alcoholics are grandiose. Like they say, an alcoholic is the only person who could be lying in the gutter and think he is better than you. Do you know what an alcoholic uniform is? A crown, a scepter, and a diaper! And that’s how it is. There I am, I’m lying on the floor saying, “I’m the guy who wrote ‘We Are Family.’ I’m a genius.”

  I’m so thankful that I found recovery, so thankful that I can be an honest person and not be a hypocrite. I love alcohol. I love drugs. I have all my life. And I know, if I could use them safely, I probably wouldn’t be the person I am today. Now that I know that I do have a life without it, the person that I am would not choose to get high, because I like the way I feel sober. It took a long time before I could feel comfortable in a room full of strangers and face embarrassment. Now embarrassment doesn’t kill me. I go talk to strangers, and if they don’t like me, I’m not going to commit suicide. In the old days, I could walk past strangers and hear them laughing, and think they were laughing at me. Now I realize, whether they were or not, it’s none of my business. I can actually live by that now. I can be in situations that used to devastate me, and I handle them with relative peace.

  Hey you all look out let a man come in

  I got to have fun I’m gonna do my thing

  Way over yonder can you dig that mess

  The sister standing out there dressed up

  In a brand new mini dress

  Look hey over there

  do you see that boy playing that horn

  And dig that soul brother look at him doing the popcorn

  Hey everybody I got a brand new start

  Hey, hey everybody I got a brand new start

  I ain’t gonna hurt nobody

  I just, I just, I just wanna help my heart

  Gonna have a ball sure as you’re born

  Gonna have a ball sure as you’re born

  I’m gonna dance, dance, dance do the popcorn

  —“Let a Man Come In and Do the Popcorn”

  We find out the heart by dismantling what the heart knows.

  —Jack Gilbert, “Tear It Down”

  Glenn Beck

  (broadcaster)

  * * *

  WHEN GLENN BECK talks, people listen. According to ratings, this entertainer-pundit averages eight million listeners a show. These are people who either get a huge kick out of his political incorrectness or get very riled at his perspective on the world at large. Beck, whose radio talk show is currently ranked third in the nation, is famous for his candor, often questioned for his provincialism, and appreciated for his quick jumps between seriousness and levity.

  His self-description on air: “I am a conservative who doesn’t happen to be a Republican.” Commenting on spirituality, family values, and politics, Beck says he tries not to hide anything, because if he plays “every single one of my cards face up on the table they can never be taken from me and played against me.”

  A native of Mount Vernon, Washington, north of Seattle, Beck started his radio career in 1977 when he was only thirteen. After high school Beck landed a job as a Top 40 disk jockey in Corpus Christi, Texas, becomin
g at eighteen the youngest morning host in the United States. His career took him to Top 40 morning shows in Baltimore, Houston, Phoenix, Washington, D.C., and New Haven, Connecticut.

  After suffering a long struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction, Beck found his way into recovery and branched out into a new career in talk radio. The Glenn Beck Program debuted in 2001, airing on WFLA in Tampa, Florida, and catapulted Beck from local radio to the national spotlight. The show now airs on more than two hundred stations live on weekday mornings. Since 2006 Beck has hosted an hour-long TV show weeknights on CNN’s Headline News. This is his forum for commenting on everything from world events and national politics to pop culture and the incidentals of daily life. CNN calls it “an unconventional look at news of the day”; Beck calls it “a talk show for people who can’t take the news anymore.”

  As I waited at CNN’s New York studios to interview Glenn, a bulletin flashed across the bank of TV monitors in the reception area: news of a suicide bomber wreaking havoc in Baghdad. Images of frantic people filled the screens. In a moment a production assistant appeared to tell me that, unfortunately, Glenn had to delay our interview for a few hours while he wrote a new commentary for that night’s show, responding to this newest tragedy. If I was willing to wait, Glenn promised to do our interview when he finished.

  Things like this often happen when interviewing celebrities. I’m used to being told to wait, so this came as no surprise. What I did find unusual was Glenn’s ability to focus on our interview right after such a horrific event. Clearly upset by the latest massacre in Iraq, Glenn was able to place his emotions on the shelf and give me all his attention. The result is the interview that follows.

  My mother was an alcoholic and drug addict, which I didn’t fully know until right before she committed suicide when I was thirteen. I’m one of those guys who is not convinced that alcoholism is hereditary. Not that I much care. In my case I think it was self-fulfilling prophecy: seeing my mother’s patterns and thinking, “That’s the way I’m going to go.”

  My family was relatively poor. Success to me was being able to afford a nice car and house, so in my early twenties, I was having great success. I was earning over $250,000 a year at twenty-two and thinking that I was absolutely the greatest thing ever. I was buying my own BS. The more I acquired and the more I achieved my goals, the more empty I realized myself to be. It was always “I’ll be happy if I do this. I’ll be happy if I get that.”

  My mother committed suicide when I was thirteen and I got into radio when I was thirteen, and I don’t believe that the two were a coincidence. My mother gave me a record album called The Golden Days of Radio when I was eight. I listened to the album and suddenly knew what I wanted to do, and so I buried myself in this.

  It lit up my imagination to listen to old radio programs. I could imagine on my own something more powerfully than the TV producers could enact. That imaginative faculty, fostered so early, has allowed me to be successful. I see something in my head almost like a painting and know it can be done. Also, my father taught me that “as you believe, it shall be done.”

  I was always a socially awkward guy and, at least in my twenties, a self-hating egomaniac. I started drinking at thirteen, taking drugs at fourteen, and from fifteen or sixteen smoked pot every day of my life until I was thirty-one. When I turned thirty I was friendless, my marriage was falling apart, and I hated myself. I had tried to commit suicide. I was a wreck as a human being. I was working in the smallest radio market I had worked in since I was sixteen, making the least amount of money since I was eighteen, and my whole life was in shambles. And I was still drinking and using.

  And the alcohol and drugs were all that was keeping me going—for a while. In a sense they numbed me to the point where I could function without recognition of my internal struggles. For instance, for me cocaine served as an anesthetic, just as it might on a battlefield where you have multiple injuries yet can continue, on the drug, to fight.

  What happened was that, because I was so successful in my career at such an early age, I believed that I was the “it kid,” whereas the truth was nobody wanted to work with me. Until recovery I was impossibly exacting and on the alert for any sign of mediocrity. My ego made me a nightmare. I was best described—and self-described—as a self-hating egomaniac. Looking back, I remember that I once fired a guy for bringing me the wrong kind of pen to sign autographs. I was so mean and nasty to people because if I could find fault in other people, I was somehow better. I built myself up so I could believe in myself while tearing others apart. I just couldn’t find happiness at all. First it was money that would solve my problems, then drugs would solve them. Sex was going to solve them, or whatever. But I couldn’t find any solution.

  It was my thirtieth birthday and I was lying in bed and looking at the clock. I watched it clock over to twelve midnight, which made it my birthday, and I looked up at my ceiling and was overwhelmed with a feeling that my life was about to change. I didn’t know why, but I knew with certainty that it was. A couple of months later I was having a physical and my doctor said to me, “You’ll be dead in six months if you keep drinking.” He asked me how much I drank and I said, “I dunno, probably one or two drinks a night.” What he didn’t know was that I was using a sixteen-ounce tumbler and filling it with Jack Daniel’s. So he said again, “You’ll be dead in six months if you continue to drink.” I said, “I don’t know what you are talking about. I’m fine.”

  Eight months later I was still drinking. For two, maybe three years before that, I knew that I had a problem. The last year it got so bad for me that every day I promised myself I’d stop. “Today I’m not going to have a drink; today I’m not going to do drugs.” Each day I would see myself in the mirror and look myself in the eye while I was brushing my teeth and say, “You’re not an alcoholic. You’ve got it under control. You just have to say no. Don’t drink today. Don’t drink today and you’re not an alcoholic.”

  Sometime during the day I’d say to myself, “Well, today is different,” and I would start to drink. The next morning I would get up and declare, “Well, last night was different. Today’s the day.” It wasn’t long before when I brushed my teeth I had to open up the medicine cabinet and face the mirrors to the wall because I couldn’t stand looking at myself and lying. Each time I saw my face I’d think, “You are so weak and pathetic. You’re such a bad person.”

  All of these horrible things I couldn’t stop, but I was a functioning alcoholic, and so it wasn’t afflicting my business. In fact, Mark Mays, who now runs Clear Channel, called me once at about 11 p.m. my time and said, “Are you still up?” I was hammered out of my mind but I said, “Yeah.” So he said, “Listen, I want to talk to you about something we were discussing today.” We spent about a half-hour in conversation and I took the phone in bed with me, close to my wife. Looking at me, she noticed the self-doubt and said, “You look funny, what are you doing? What’s wrong?” When I hung up I said to her, “What did you think of that conversation?”

  She looked at me like I was from the moon and said, “Fine, why?” … Well, I was just dripping with sweat, thinking, “This guy’s going to know that I’m drunk out of my mind on a Wednesday.” But he didn’t. I was really good at hiding it.

  The turning point was when I had a hard time playing with my children—a hard time slowing down enough to play with them. I’m also riddled with ADD [attention deficit disorder]. Alcohol would slow me down. I could lie on the floor and play with them for a couple of hours. I was never a mean drunk, always a fun drunk. Not necessarily the life of the party, but a nice drunk. I was nicer drunk than when I was sober.

  So every night when I would tuck in my kids I told them a story about Inky, Blinky, and Stinky, the three little mice, and I would make it up. They went to the Island of Cheese where it would rain Parmesan and they would sail out in their marshmallow boat. I’d make it an adventure. Every night I would invent as I went along. One night I tucked my children into bed, told them
a story, and the next morning, a Saturday, they came running down the stairs and into the kitchen. They sat down and began pouring their cereal when my daughter said, “Dad, you’ve got to tell us that story again, the one you told us last night. That was the best ever.”

  I almost said to them, “I didn’t tell you a story last night.” I realized that I had no recollection of telling a story or even taking them upstairs and tucking them into bed. I had absolutely no recollection of that. This wasn’t my first blackout, but it was the first where I was missing time with my children. I suddenly realized that I was going to miss a portion of my children’s childhood.

  Then I did something worse. I tricked them and said, “Let’s see how much you remember,” and I made them recount the story of which I had absolutely no recollection. And that was my bottom. That’s when it dawned on me that “I’ve got to get to a recovery meeting.”

  So I delayed one more day and went on Sunday night to a Twelve Step meeting in the Congregational church in Cheshire, Connecticut. Cheshire’s this sort of snotty community, and I expected to see “alcoholics.” I didn’t think I was alcoholic. I’d seen winos depicted. You know, movie alcoholics. They were out of control, didn’t wear nice clothes or look like respectable business people. I went in and all these people were there, like Buffy in her stylish sweater and pearls … I’d arrived a little early and stood in the back of the room. I thought, “When are these church people going to leave and when will the alcoholics arrive?” I sat down and soon realized, “Wow, these guys are the alcoholics!”