I started saving up. The rotor was thirty-nine dollars, I think. I saved up, literally, pennies here and a nickel there. I published a newspaper. I shoveled walks. I raked lawns. The whole time, I used to go visit the rotor at the television store in Springfield where I lived. Finally I had the thirty-nine dollars or whatever it was, but then there were taxes. So I had to go back and earn the taxes. I never forgave the government for that.
When I finally got enough money, including taxes, I called up the guy, and of course he knows I’m the kid coming in and worshipping at the altar of the rotor. I said, “I’ve got the money. Could you come over and install it?” He said, “Oh, it’s Friday. I’m closing in an hour. It would take me too long to install it. I’ll do it Monday.”
For me—first of all, Monday was a lifetime away. Second, if I got it installed Friday, I’d have the whole weekend to play with it. Third, like every good alcoholic, I need immediate gratification. I wanted it before now. But he said he couldn’t do it.
I decided, for what ever reason, I was going to pray. That’s how extreme my feelings were. I went up into our bathroom. I remember the feel of the linoleum under my knees and the bright enamel and everything. It was like being in heaven, I guess. I think of heaven as being filled with bright enamel. And I start praying. I said, “If there is a God, this is a way you can prove it to me. If there is a God, have this guy come with the rotor today.” I had no hope whatsoever that the guy was going to come. He had said no already, but I still prayed.
I was in the middle of the prayers when I heard my mother call and I jumped up, guilty. If she’d caught me jerking off, it would not have been more embarrassing. I think in our house, praying actually was more embarrassing than masturbating. I jumped up and I came running down to see what she was calling about. The guy was there, downstairs. He said he was on his way home, and he knew how much I wanted that rotor, so he figured he’d take a detour and just put it in.
At that moment, I decided there was a God. What my relationship to this God was, I didn’t know. Whether or not this God cared about me or whether I had access to him, I didn’t know. But I knew there was a God. He’d answered my prayers. I’d prayed and He’d answered the prayer, which was miraculous, because this rotor guy had said no.
Many, many years later, I was walking to my dealer’s place, trying to convince myself I wasn’t going to go and use. It was a beautiful day, one of those crisp New York days, sunny, not too cold. I was wearing my bomber jacket and jeans. I was aware that it was a beautiful day, but I was not able to appreciate it. I felt like I was in a fugue state, a kind of dream state where I would just keep walking. I mean, it was a beautiful day, and part of me thought, “God, if I weren’t going to do drugs, this would be a great day to just feel alive.” But I knew once I started doing the drugs, I’d be at a sleazy hotel with the shades pulled down and wouldn’t see daylight for three days, beautiful or not.
Anyway, I got closer and closer to this guy’s apartment, and I was still playing the game: “Well, I’m not really going over there. I’m just going to walk down the block. I’m really not going to his building. And when I get to his building, I’m just ringing his buzzer, I’m really not going up. And when I go up, I’m just going up to visit him, not to buy drugs. And when I buy the drugs, I’m really not going to use them. And when I use them, I’m only going to snort one and throw the rest away.”
Just before I turn the corner, I remembered the moment when I was a kid when I prayed. I decided, “Well, I prayed once and it worked. The people I know in recovery tell me to pray,” and I started to pray. I said, “I don’t want to put you on the spot, God. But if I shouldn’t be doing this, You better do something, because if it’s up to me, I’m going to use. I’m turning it over to You.” I really, really did not want to use, and when I said, “Okay, it’s up to you,” I really meant it. I couldn’t have been more serious. This was a real challenge to God. Like “Okay, big shot, you’re supposed to be the higher power, I’m supposed to turn it over, and that’s supposed to help. Fine, I’m turning it over.”
The minute I finished that prayer, it was like a switch went off. Suddenly I experienced the brightness of the day and everything. I mean, it was delicious, the feeling of being in the day and not trying to keep reality at bay. The awful burden of consciousness, which is how I used to think of it—the awful burden of consciousness no longer seemed a burden. It seemed a glory. And the need to use was gone. Miraculously. I mean it wasn’t a struggle. It was just suddenly lifted. It was gone.
I turned around and I got giddy. I couldn’t believe it. It’s like God tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Back at you, big shot. Now you have to do a little bit of work too. I’ve shown my cards and I’m calling you. What are your cards?”
That was the turnaround moment. Suddenly it’s like the lights went on, and the most sensory thing was really the feeling I had and still have every day, that the day is a gift and I don’t have to hide from it. I really feel this, every day. A lot of my use was an attempt to turn down the volume, turn down the lights, get everything a little bit less intense—turn down the consciousness. I don’t feel that need anymore.
So that was my moment of clarity. An absolute stillness and silence. And then into that stillness and silence is the stilling and silencing of all the static in my head. And then after a moment of stillness and silence, just the world, the wonderful sounds of the world . . . it’s like a CinemaScope sound track suddenly turning on. I heard birds. I heard horns. I heard kids laughing. I heard muggers. But it was the sound of reality.
It’s not like my life became that moment of clarity. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t seriously think about using. For me, coke and sex were associated, and when I quit, I felt like my libido was turned down low. Part of me says, “What if I just have a snort or two?” But I don’t have the obsession. I don’t get locked into that zombie state where I have to use. And just as every day there are moments when I want to use, every day there are moments of clarity comparable to that first one where I simply say, “Oh my God.” I take a minute and I suddenly notice the day.
That used to happen a lot before I got drug- addicted. My drug addiction was meant to turn down that kind of intensity, whether it’s intense joy or intense involvement in working. I don’t regret the time I spent using, because I learned a lot, but I figure I’ve lost five books that I will never recover. Part of it was the intensity, which sometimes is the intolerable burden of consciousness—it’s too much. But it’s also where I live when I’m writing, when I’m consciously existing and feeling best about the world.
So every day I do have the desire to use, and every day I do have moments when I suddenly am grateful that I’m living in what ever passes for reality, but most of the time it’s just the normal muddle out of which those two intense feelings pop. I think the big change after that moment of clarity was not that I then lived in a moment of clarity all the time, but that at least I had hope. I didn’t have to give up on myself. I knew that there would be times when I really wanted to use, but I could decide not to. I wasn’t quite sure if I could always get there in the same way, and I didn’t want to. I have this image of God being very busy, and I didn’t want to call on Him all the time. But it’s like, He answered me once, and now it’s up to me.
I would say I think about that actual moment when I felt God’s presence maybe once every few weeks, but I’m aware of the experience of suddenly having a silence when the reality floods in every day. It gave me a model for experiencing the world in a way that the intensity, instead of being threatening, becomes joy-producing, physiologically. Joy and anxiety and excitement and fear—physiologically, the same neurology is going on. It’s just our interpretation that differs. We describe it to ourselves as one thing or another, and so I’m learning more and more how to describe that feeling not as anxiety or fear but as joy. You can feel it as joy most when you’re moving in the same direction that God is moving in the world. You’re not in oppos
ition to God’s motion. When you’re in opposition, it feels like fear and anxiety. When you’re moving in the right direction, it feels like joy and bliss.
In a way, I don’t believe in time. I think everything exists at once, and we experience that existing sequentially as time. Our moments of free will exist, but they exist in a pattern. Instead of being the people walking along the path, which is how we experience it, God looks down, sees the path and us and every moment on the path at once. Did I have to go through all that stuff to get where I was going? I guess I had to, since I did. It’s part of the dance. It’s part of the pattern of my life. That’s how I got sober.
Alec Baldwin
According to Alec, he’s “a middle-aged TV actor.” I’d say he’s a guy who might win an Academy Award, become governor of New York, or both. He’s got that much energy and that much talent. I’ve known Alec since he was on Knots Landing, when he’ d show up at the Robert F. Kennedy Tennis Tournament at Forest Hills and drive all my sisters and female cousins crazy. For all these years, he’s been a friend, a mentor, and an inspiration. I’ve watched with admiration as he cut his own path in his career and his life, regardless of the consequences, staying true to the principles that guide him. He was the first person I wrote asking to participate in this book. He turned me down initially because he didn’t want to make any pronouncements on recovery, but when I told him how badly I needed him, he said yes. I’ll be forever grateful to him for that and for his wonderful metaphor of the movie business as a crack pipe.
T
here were times I did what I did because I was looking for God. There were times I did what I did because I was looking for a wife and a companion. And—this is the most dominant—there were the
times I did what I did because I was looking for a family. I do believe in my heart that everything I did was to replace the family I lost when I grew up and left my house. I like being in a room full of funny, animated, un- selfconscious people. That was my family.
In the early eighties, in New York, there was a basic rule that you weren’t even conscious of—you were just dysfunctional. Everyone was partying hard, or so it seemed. You were just living, and you weren’t really examining it too much. Also, in New York, someone else is always doing the driving, so you could drink until you fell down, you could drink until you passed out. I didn’t do that too often. I wasn’t a crazy drinker.
Then in 1983, I was in Los Angeles. I’m driving on the Santa Monica Freeway at four o’clock in the afternoon with a plastic quart container that you get take-out Chinese soup in, filled with ice and half a bottle of Chardonnay poured over the top. And I’m driving down the road, I’m having a drink. It’s four o’clock; I’m supposed to have a drink. But one day I went, “I don’t see anybody else in their car with a plastic take-out container filled with ice and wine.” They’re drinking coffee, they’re drinking Diet Coke, they’re not drinking wine. So I think, “Maybe I should stop drinking while I’m driving.”
So I switched from drinking to other things. What other things? Assume that I did everything. Make a list of every drug, and I’ll say to you, I took that drug. I don’t care, what ever you want to think. I did it all, all right? And that was when everything changed. I got into this white-hot period for two years from the spring of 1983 until the spring of 1985, and I had friends—you know, that’s a big part of it. The influences. Always has been, no matter how much you think you outgrow that. They were guys who I would meet and we just wanted to have a good time. It was never anything sloppy or graceless. We’re there and we’re talking and we’re laughing, and everything just suddenly appears, and the next thing you know the other people have gone home and gone to bed. It’s two thirty in the morning and you’re still going strong.
I’d find myself in a room with people, in a house with people, at events with people . . . and if you took away whatever it was we were having communion over—sex, drugs, booze—if you took that away, what was there? I didn’t know them. I had so little in common with them. The room was full of people getting high and drinking and talking about all this bullshit. All those 3 a.m. conversations where everybody’s talking, urgently talking about something that doesn’t really matter. “Yeah, but the Warren Commission, man! You don’t understand.” Arguing about Dallas, Texas, all these years later, all jacked up on drugs and alcohol. I’d look around and I’d think, “Where do I belong? Where’s the room full of people that I have some connection with, that I have something in common with, that I could have a healthy exchange with about something that means something to me and be myself and have a good time that doesn’t involve this?”
I’ve had pretty bad insomnia my whole life , and around this time it was full- blown. I couldn’t sleep regardless of what I did or didn’t do, so I used to go to a video game parlor on Westwood Boulevard, this gigantic building, the old- style video game parlor back in the eighties, before everybody had Wii and Xbox and everything. It was a big warehouse, and there’d be this guy who just loaded a change machine, and some soft drink machines, and there’d be 150 video games stacked all around you. I’d be waiting at the door for them to open. I am not kidding you. This was the only way I could go “beta” and go into that state I needed to be, where I could calm down and take my mind off of everything. I didn’t want to see anybody, talk to anybody, deal with anybody. I needed to get my soul in shape and I didn’t know how, and so I’d go to the video game parlor. I would play video games from like 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., and I would wind down. Then I’d go home and go to bed.
My moments of clarity came when I’d be “acting out,” shall we say, and then suddenly I’d see myself reflected in an unlikely mirror. That happened at the video game parlor. The guy that ran the place was a fifty-year-old Spanish guy named Julian. He didn’t own the place; he was a guy who had a set of keys and a job, to come down and open up in the morning. I was doing a TV show then, making tens of thousands of dollars a week, which was part of the problem. That’s part of the reason I was at the parlor at nine in the morning. It connects. Julian would put the key in the lock and open the door, and he would just kind of look at me, like “Wow, I’m glad I’m not you,” and I’m going, “You got no idea, Julian. Julian, I need you. I need you to get that key and open that fucking door and let me in. I got to go play Galaga.”
I met an actress then, and it was like the way Lenny Bruce describes Honey Bruce—I took one look at her and I said, “I have to have that, that must be mine!” All ego. She was the most gorgeous girl I’d ever seen in my life. We lived together for a while, and like a sweet young girl from Texas, she said, “Well, I don’t think we should live together unless we’re engaged.” I think I ran all the way down to Westwood and bought an engagement ring that day—I flashed the ring and said, “You mean like this?”
She’s a lovely woman and a fabulous person, and I remember she was doing a show in Denver, Colorado, with this young heartthrob—we’ll change his name, we’ll call him Tommy. I had moved there to be with her, and she comes home one day from work and says, “You’re not going to believe what happened! These men came, the producers and some of their lawyers and other people, and they got Tommy in his dressing room. And Tommy doesn’t really know the words to the songs, he hasn’t really learned the dance numbers, because he’s up all night partying and he’s pretty screwed up. So they told Tommy they’re going to break every bone in his body if he doesn’t learn the songs.”
And one of the first things I thought to myself was “Tommy’s been getting high in Denver? Obviously I’ve been hanging out with the wrong person in the cast here.”
So her driver is this big Hawaiian guy and you could tell—you get a kind of radar for people in that underworld.
“Hey, Big Kenny. I feel really bad about Tommy having all these problems.”
“Yeah, it’s real bad. They told Tommy they’re going to fuck him up if he doesn’t straighten out.”
“Denver’s such a nice town. They got a drug problem here?”
“Oh, man, a lot of drugs . . . bad, real bad.”
I said, “Really? So if, for example, somebody wanted drugs, they can just pick up a phone and make a call?”
He’s looking at me in the rearview mirror.
“Yes, that wouldn’t be hard to do, Mr. Baldwin.”
The next thing you know, I’m having brunch with my girlfriend and her grandparents, and these two are right out of Norman Rockwell. I get up and go to the bathroom like six or seven times during the brunch, and her grandfather is watching me, he’s looking at me with that unmistakable look, like “There’s just something not right with you.” Sweat running down me like I had just gone through a triathlon, even though it’s like 70 degrees and beautiful. I’m just looking at him like “What? What? What’s up?”
One of the first mutual support groups I went to, a guy spoke up and he said, “I told my wife I was sorry and I would never do it again, and the problem was that at the moment I said it I meant it, but I was not able to sustain it.” That’s what it was for me. I was incapable of being a man of my word, incapable of being who I knew I was. What ever problems I’ve dealt with in terms of addiction, that all ended in February of 1985, when I was six weeks from my twenty- seventh birthday.
When I first went to the meeting, I had not read the book, but one guy referred to the “incomprehensible demoralization,” and that was so apt for me. I was incomprehensibly demoralized. I was sick and tired of seeing myself, the person I had become, reflected in the eyes of other people, because I knew that’s not who I was.
And then a guy in the meeting said, “You never have to feel this way again if you don’t want to.” That just landed on me like a bird landing on my shoulder.
I believe that there are people who come to this really tragic understanding of their lives . . . that’s who they are. They are clinically depressed, they’re deeply despairing and hopeless people. I remember saying to myself, “That’s not me. I am not that.”
Moments of Clarity Page 7
