The guy at the Metropolis who hugged me, I do remember him. I was not a hugger when I went in at the start, and I was a little bit uncomfortable with all these guys. For one thing, some of them didn’t smell that good. And I was just uncomfortable with all the hugging, a lot of hugging. I got over it. I got over it and I began to appreciate the benefit of a good hug. They’re not all as overwhelmingly meaningful as that first one, when I first walked into the Metropolis Club, but they all have something significant to them. I do recall the hug way more often than I recall that moment in Great Falls. And frankly, I’m grateful for that.
How do I deal with people in my life who need help? Carefully, quietly, respectfully, and deliberatively.
My experience teaches me that you can’t gorilla—that’s the word we use in the hood—you can’t gorilla an addict into doing what you think the addict ought to do. Nobody could gorilla me into doing anything. That’s the quietly and respectfully kind of thing that I’m talking about.
And the carefully. I will always be accessible to someone who needs what I have to give. But I was so full of shit when I was using that I think I have an antenna for those who are full of shit. I make no judgments, but I will not let someone bullshit me. My time is too valuable and there are too many people who do need some help. I won’t be wasting it on some asshole.
And deliberatively. You can’t rush that shit. I have taken guys to recovery meetings who got arrested two weeks, three weeks later. When the brother came out of jail, I not only took a call, I picked him up. “Are you ready now?” And it doesn’t happen all that many times, but sometimes—yeah, he’s ready now.
God, to me, looks like Amani. He looks like Dawn. He looks like Brendon. Those are my three kids. God, to me, looks like my wife, Kathy. We just celebrated our twentieth anniversary. God, to me, looks like Sumo. Sumo is my Akita, and I admire him because it occurs to me that that dog is telling me something every single day. Dogs don’t think about yesterday. They don’t think about tomorrow. Dogs live in the moment.
I look for God everywhere. I see God everywhere, and I’m grateful for the vision. I always believed in God, but I didn’t have a clue what God is about. I thought God was in heaven, and that was one of my biggest mistakes. I lived for years with that mistake. God isn’t in heaven. He’s in my dog, among other things.
Susan Cheever
In the early nineties, friends started telling me stories about a brilliant, funny woman who was one of the most supportive, enthusiastic, and visible members of the New York City recovery community. She’s probably best known for two memoirs: one, Note Found in a Bottle, describes her battles with alcoholism and eating disorders, while the other, Home Before Dark, is a tender, honest recollection of her father, the writer John Cheever. But my favorite is her wonderful biography of the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous Bill Wilson, entitled My Name Is Bill.
After more than a decade of hearing people sing her praises, I finally met Susan in 2005, when we were both onstage at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. I was on tour for my own memoir, Symptoms of Withdrawal, and she was interviewing me in front of four hundred people who were there to hear tales about Camelot, the Rat Pack, and yes, that 800-pound gorilla she and I both wrestled with. Her questions were surprising, playful, and insightful—everything you hope for but usually don’t get from an interviewer—and all of it was pure Susan.
One thing that struck me about her story was its basic contradiction: despite her intelligence and perceptiveness, she was completely incapable of seeing, much less dealing with, the reality of her situation. It’s such a familiar, human dilemma, and she recounts it with great humor and grace.
I
really believe that there’s a level of harmony in the universe, which I call God, and I do think that everything happens exactly the way it’s meant to happen. Often not the way I want it to happen, often not the
way I think it should happen, but there’s a holiness to what actually exists, as opposed to what I think should exist and which is not holy.
. . .
For me, it wasn’t just one moment of clarity, it was several of them, over several years, and they’re all about other people because I don’t like to think about myself, what might be wrong with me. Those moments are very vivid to me, and I think about them a lot. At the time, they were all about other people’s addictions, not mine. It’s embarrassing to me now. It was like, how many ways can my finger point before I finally get it, that it’s me.
My first moment was about my daughter, who was about a year old. When I had my daughter my whole life changed. I mean I just had had no idea what life was, no idea, for all my yak, yak, yak about everything. And the moment I had that little girl, I knew what it was to care about someone else more than you care about yourself.
But then my father died—after seven years of sobriety—and I was having a difficult year, so difficult that when my dog died I didn’t even notice. I was in some kind of numbness. I did quite a bit of locking myself in the bathroom or shutting myself in a room with absolutely no light. On the outside, life looked good. We had a nanny and a babysitter, and I was writing a book about my father. I would cross the park to my studio on the East Side and get a six-pack of Tab and a bottle of vodka. I would drink Tab and vodka and write all day, and then I would get home at about four o’clock in the afternoon and take care of my daughter. I was totally unaware that my drinking was anything other than completely normal. I just thought I was a thirty-nine-year-old with a young kid and a handsome husband, and my father had died, and I was having maybe a hard time with that. I knew I definitely was not an alcoholic. My father was an alcoholic. He was a bisexual seventy-year-old man, and I was this very heterosexual girl, so how could I possibly be what he was?
I would go to mutual recovery support groups with my father and I would say, “I’m sorry, I’m not an alcoholic, although I attend these meetings,” and of course everybody was adorable. Everybody said, “You are in the right place. We are happy to have you. Come anytime.” And the level of honesty in these groups was so electrifying, and the stories were just amazing. So I went to the meetings and I felt this intense connection with these people, but I’d listen to their stories and I always just thought, “This is not for me, because I’m not an alcoholic, because I don’t do any of these things.” Anyway, that first moment. I was sitting in the kitchen with my daughter. She’s in her high chair, and I’m watching her drink her milk out of a cup, and there’s something weird about the way she’s drinking her milk, I swear. There’s just some extra hunger there in this little baby. And I think, “Oh my God, she’s an addict. What am I going to do? Okay, I’ll go to recovery meetings for her because she can’t go.”
So I started going to a support group for people with eating disorders, and I completely identified—I have an eating disorder. And I definitely got the message that I was not an alcoholic. One woman said, “When you’re hungry, just have a drink.” So I did, and it was great. I was able to control my eating disorder with my alcoholism, with my sex addiction, with my many disorders. I had so many disorders that I was able to hide each one behind all the others.
Then I started going back to the groups I’d gone to with my father, because there aren’t as many of the eating disorder meetings. I’d go these meetings for people who drank too much and they would say, “How long have you been having problems with drinking?” I would say, “Oh, I’m not an alcoholic. I’m in another program, but I just come to these meetings because I like them.”
One of the friends I made in these peer support groups suggested that I stop drinking. When I did, I suddenly felt that my life had come into focus. All of a sudden, like I’d stepped off a curb. I saw that my marriage was dead, for instance. All these big questions were suddenly answered, very clearly, but not in a spiritual way. I think clarity without spirituality is a very dangerous thing, and that’s what I had.
I was sober for about three years, went to a lot of meetings, did everything they s
uggested—except I ran my own life. In those three years, I left my second husband and married my third husband, who was an alcoholic. I thought that was fine. That’s how well I was running my life. I thought that his drinking wasn’t my business, that I could be sober while he was an alcoholic.
The next big moment was when I was pregnant with my son. At home, my water broke and my contractions were ten minutes apart. My husband could see that I was in a lot of pain so he handed me a glass of champagne. He said, “Here, this will help,” so I drank it, and then I went happily through the bottle. My contractions completely stopped. The pain entirely went away and I went to sleep, and actually what woke me up was the doctor calling and saying, “Where are you?”
So that was a moment, when my husband handed me that glass. I thought, “Okay, I’ll go back to meetings of those peer support groups. So I drink a bottle of champagne in childbirth. It won’t be a big deal. I’ll go back to meetings and it’ll be gone.” I had my son—thank God, he’s healthy—and when he was about a week old, I started going back to meetings. But I did not get it back, that precious connection, that feeling I’d gotten in the meetings I’d gone to before. I couldn’t get it. I would go, and I would feel like I didn’t belong there, and who were these people? When I went with my father, I was feeling so good there, and then I had the same thing when I went back after I saw my daughter with the milk. But then I lost it, I could not get it back.
So then I drank for two and a half years, during which I gladly trashed a lot of important things. But I did have rules. I only drank wine. I never drank in the morning. I rarely drank alone. I didn’t drink every day. I did all the things you have to do to prove you’re not an alcoholic. At the end of two and a half years I was living in this nightmare house with two little kids and my husband, who was getting drunker and drunker and less and less reliable, and of course for kids you need reliability. I just wanted to die all the time.
One night I looked at my husband and thought, “He’s an alcoholic.” I felt like I had just met him. “He’s ruining my life. He’s why I’m having a hard time.” So I decided to do an intervention. I went and talked to all the intervention people and eventually one of them said, “You know, why don’t you get sober and it’ll be good for the intervention.”
On April 3, 1992, I went back to a meeting I had been to many times. A handsome guy walked me home and I said, “I’m not an alcoholic. It’s just wine.” And he said, “Of course you’re not an alcoholic. Here’s a meeting list. Here’s my phone number. Call me tomorrow and we’ll go to another meeting.” I called him and we talked and I went to another meeting and I started going to a meeting every day. Within about a week this handsome man had a sober woman call me and take me to meetings. He got me there, and I started to get better. That connection was there, that feeling of being at home.
I was so scared. As I began to get better, in spite of myself—because I was only there to stop my husband from drinking, right?—I began to see that I had to leave that house. I couldn’t live with a man who was drinking a bottle of liquor every day. I began to see all these things, and very slowly things began to happen. People came with me to look at apartments. People came with me to a divorce lawyer. I mean it was the most amazing time. People came and helped me. The intervention with my husband never happened. He’s still drinking, whatever it is, sixteen, seventeen years later.
But I got through that time with God’s help. Up to that point, I didn’t really think there was a God. I mean I was Christian and I went to church, but I didn’t think God was interested in me. Now I have what I consider scientific proof that God exists, because before, whenever there was a glass of red wine, I drank it. I always tried so hard not to have that glass of wine, and I always drank it. I knew that I couldn’t stop on my own. So every night I didn’t drink that glass of wine, I began to believe that there was another force.
And slowly, very slowly, I began to believe that I was an alcoholic. I began to believe that an alcoholic can be a person who only drinks wine. I began to believe that I didn’t have to go to jail and have DTs, like my father did, to be an alcoholic.
I remember the first time I heard the Saint Francis Prayer, the one that begins, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” I was married and I was having an affair with a married guy, and the two of us were hanging out with another woman with whom he was also having an affair, who was also married. The other woman’s uncle died, and we all went to the funeral. I was there with my husband, and this man with whom I was sleeping was there with his wife, and of course the woman who was also sleeping with him was there with her husband. It was her uncle’s funeral. So ridiculous, I can’t stop laughing about it now. She stands up and speaks for her uncle and she reads the Saint Francis Prayer. She gets to the part that says, “Lord, grant that I may seek to comfort rather than to be comforted; to understand, rather than to be understood; to love, rather than to be loved.” I hear that and I think, “That is crazy. That is craziness. Who wouldn’t rather be loved? Who wouldn’t rather be comforted?” I thought it was a joke.
Now I love that prayer. It gets me through everything. I taught it to both of my children, and we’ve recited it before meals for years and years and years. That’s how I live my life now.
Before, for all my moments of ecstasy, for how good I looked and how many fantastic clothes I had . . . I was very, very unhappy, because it was all about getting. And once you get, then you want more. My whole identity was a person who got stuff and had stuff. I wanted to be pretty. I wanted to be fancy. I wanted to be sexy. I wanted to be rich. I wanted to have whatever anybody else had. I thought all that would make my life good.
And it didn’t, and the only way I was able to live like that was by using these addictions. I was afraid the whole thing would come down like a house of cards, which is exactly what it was, and then I wouldn’t have anything. All the things that I thought made me happy would be gone. And to some extent, they are. That thing that I used to do with men before, I can’t do that sober. A lot of what happened was over a lot of very good wine. There are moments when I miss that, being able to operate in that way. I think it’s important to say that. I did lose a lot of what I was afraid of losing. But what I got in return is so precious that I really don’t mind.
Here’s the beauty of getting sober late. I slept with everyone. I traveled everywhere. I drank thirty-year-old scotch and I took heroin. I did all that stuff and you know what? It didn’t make me happy. So in a way I’m a little grateful that I got sober late because I tried everything else and it added up to nothing. And now I know that.
Now I have peace. I feel like I’m at peace with the world most of the time—not always, but most of the time. I know how to behave most of the time—not always, but most of the time. And if I don’t know, I can just remember that it’s not about me, it’s about you. Then I can just behave in the way that would be of more service to you, and that really works out well for both of us, right? I just know how to live now in a way that makes me extremely happy. I’m very content. I’m very grateful. I go to bed every night and I say to God, “Thank you.”
Chris Gerolmo
Mississippi Burning put Chris on the map as a screenwriter. Since then, he’s written and directed the HBO movie Citizen X, about Rus sian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, and he and Stephen Bochco cocreated the FX Network’s series Over There, about the U.S. troops in Iraq. Chris is also a talented musician; he wrote the theme for Over There, and has an album out called I’m You r Daddy. Chris and I went to elementary school together in Manhattan but we didn’t reconnect until we both became members of the L.A. recovery community. He’s both smart and thoughtful, and I knew he’d have something interesting to say about recovery. I interviewed him in his office, and while we talked, he strummed his guitar. He wrote his own sound track to his story while he told it.
I
’m a dyed-in-the-wool atheist and have been since I was ten years old. In fact, I was an atheist altar bo
y. So I don’t think of my recovery in spiritual terms, although I do believe there is a spiritual component
to what has happened to me. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, wrote that the basis for all the world’s religions is that oceanic sense of connection to all living things. Sensing it gives you the same kind of awe and wonder and excitement and even terror you can get from looking out at the ocean.
I don’t believe in any religion whatsoever, but I do acknowledge that oceanic sense of connection. I tend to think of it more in scientific terms, of course—that we are all made out of DNA—so it makes perfect sense to me to feel that connectedness to all living things. I feel it when I go to a meeting. I feel it when I share with other alcoholics, other human beings. An hour later, when somebody turns left from the right lane and cuts me off, I can temporarily lose my sense of connection to all living beings, but it never totally goes away, and I still acknowledge that it’s a part of the change that’s going on in me. It’s not so much about myself and my own tiny, private, desperate corner of the world anymore. It’s more about taking my place at the table with everybody else.
There wasn’t really one moment when I realized I had to get sober. It took a long time, and I really was kicking and scratching and clawing, trying not to realize it. I can tell you about some of the moments that didn’t do it for me, as remarkable as they were.
First, I never considered myself an alcoholic. I knew I had a cocaine problem, but alcohol was just something I drank to go to sleep at night. One morning I woke up in the most excruciating pain. It was like a 9 on a pain scale of 0 to 10. So I was really in excruciating pain, and I ended up at my doctor’s office and then in the hospital, where I remember being really paranoid about falling asleep. I was on Demerol in the hospital, but normally if I didn’t have my vodka, I had a lot of trouble sleeping. I remember demanding that they give me something to help me sleep.
Moments of Clarity Page 4
