I went to those mutual support group meetings, and I just remember I was there with people who were talking honestly and lovingly, and they were the family that I had been seeking. They spoke with humor and they spoke with humility. I remember thinking, “This is who I am. This is who I am.” I’m someone who wants to be honest, I’m someone who wants to be connected, I’m someone who wants to live, I’m someone who wants to participate. I don’t want to isolate. I’m someone that wants to communicate.
There’s a list I saw early in my first year, a list of opposites: We drank to do this, and yet we were that. We drank to be social, yet we were isolated. We drank to be the life of the party, yet we were dull. I can’t remember the whole list now, but I remember reading it and going, “Yeah, this problem, this pursuit, made me into someone that I’m not. That’s not the real me.”
God got me sober. That day, God was a black, sixty-five-year-old retired postal worker named Lenny. If you told me that Lenny was going to deliver the message for me, I would have said, “I don’t think so.” Lenny . . . well, he had that kind of preacher vibe to him, and I wasn’t into listening to preachers. All those Lenny-isms . . . “Yesterday is history; tomorrow is a mystery!” But when Lenny said, “You never have to feel this way again if you don’t want to,” I remember sitting there thinking, “This guy really cares about me.” And God to me is anyone who cares, who really cares.
You go into a recovery meeting and you realize people really want you to do better. That’s what they’re passing on, among other things— traditions and literature and so forth—but they want you to know they really do care and they really want you to get it.
They were my family. In that room I had many fathers and mothers; I had many brothers and sisters.
Sobriety ruined my career , and sobriety saved my life. The attitude that developed as a result of sobriety, the clarity that developed as a result of sobriety, ruined my career. One of the things that happened to me when I got sober was that I became almost unable—this is a pretty sad thing to say—I became almost unable to exercise the kind of selfishness and careerism that is demanded of you in order to make it in this business.
I’d been sober four years or so when I realized I hadn’t done some of the things I might have done for my career. I’d lost the kind of vanity necessary to better my career, because I didn’t want it enough. There was nothing I wanted more than the serenity and the comfort of sobriety. After I did Hunt for Red October I was in a phase where people were saying to me, “You’re going to do this, and this, and this, and this, and it’s going to be great.” It was like they wanted me to get high again. It didn’t feel like sobriety to me. This business has always been a tremendous challenge for me, something that I wasn’t sure of. . . . Sobriety, I was sure of.
Another thing in this business is, you start doubting your instincts. Someone calls you up and says, “The following writer has written this material, the following director will direct this material, and the following actor is going to be your costar. It’s the trifecta, it’s all great, it’s all good. This is the next thing you should be doing.”
And I’d read the thing and I’d go, “This is a piece of shit.” I had to live in my reality, that’s what I’d learned. So I’d say, “I can’t buy into what you think. I don’t want to do that. I’d like to go do A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway.”
And they go, “You’re not going to do the movie?” and I was, “Nah.” I mean, this is an easy one. Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway with Jessica Lange, or a really mediocre movie script with a really mediocre director . . . And I said to myself, “It doesn’t seem sober to me.”
Stardom and fame and high-end entertainment careers come with little spiritual satisfaction. This is why it’s usually a young person’s game. Younger people seem to function fairly well without a reliable spiritual program. As you get older, you can’t survive without that. I remember saying to myself, “These guys are all torching up the pipe and getting high on the movie business.” And I’m going, “I’m not one of those people anymore. I don’t give a shit about that.” If you’re in recovery, you know people who would get high with you and drink with you and then when you got sober, they didn’t want to be around you. That’s very common, and the same was true with my career. I don’t want to do drugs and I don’t want to drink alcohol. I want to live in the realm of the spiritual, of God. I transpose that into my work, which means I don’t want to live in the world of the commercial, where I know that there’s nothing nutritive for me, there’s nothing satisfying. I want the world of art and the world of the spiritual, and the two became linked and have been inextricably linked for the last twenty years.
Now when I get offered a job, there are times I say to myself, “You want to give me a lot of money for one week’s work to come and do this really shitty comedy? ” and then I’ll think, “I’m free that week. I’ll take the money. You seem like a nice guy. We’ll go have some fun.” The movie is a steaming piece of shit, but every couple of years I’m going to step up to the griddle, I’m going to flip a shit patty this year.
And that will be fine. The money liberates me to do other things. I mean now I’m more comfortable with what I’m doing. Now I make a conscious choice. No one’s manipulating me. Now I’m doing this TV show and these people say to me, “How do you feel? In your career, you did movies blah, blah, blah . . . and now you’re doing this sitcom?” I say to them, “This is great.” And it is. I’m almost fifty years old, and these people are paying me to go tell jokes in Queens for a couple of days a week. I said, “Where’s the bad?” I am truly grateful for this opportunity.
When I went through the Sixth Sense phase,* I was miserable. And there was a constant stream of people who literally, in so many ways, would say to me, “I’m sorry . . . you must really feel like shit. Do you feel like shit? Because you really ought to feel like shit.” I just kept telling myself, “That’s their thing and that’s not my thing.” Now I don’t even think about it. I never worry about what might have been. Never.
A friend told me once, he said the worst thing in the world for an alcoholic is to be misunderstood, which I think is true. And part of that also would be being falsely accused. And here in this debacle with my ex-wife, with this tape of me that got out—what really hurt me was this representation that I’m a bad father. Everybody who knows me knows I was a very good father, and I know very few men who put out what I put out. I’m always there, I set my ego aside, I showed up, I worked hard to be there.
It’s been tough. It is tough. The business? That’s not tough. This custody thing with my daughter . . . that’s been tough. That has brought me to my knees. If it weren’t for a spiritual program, I would have killed myself back in 2003. God kept me alive. For some reason.
* When you’re dead but you don’t know it.
Judy Collins
Judy’s famous for that crystal-clear voice, captured in over thirty albums and compilations, including In My Life, Hard Times for Lovers, and Shameless. She’s also a tireless advocate, working on behalf of UNICEF, organizations to ban land mines, and family mental health. In 1987 she wrote her first memoir, Trust Your Heart, and later, in Sanity and Grace, she wrote about the struggle to heal after her son’s suicide.
Judy is legendary not just in music circles but in recovery communities too. I first heard her speak at a dinner in New York early in my own recovery, and I was touched by her story and profoundly affected by her ability to be so public about it. The fact that she’s stayed sober through the most devastating blow a parent can receive says a lot about her strength, and the strength of her support network.
I
n the winter of 1977, my career was at the top in terms of what you could see from the outside. My records were on the charts, and when I did concerts, I was used to singing to huge crowds all over the world.
The movie I had produced and codirected with Jill Godmillow, Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman, had been nominated for an Academ
y Award. On the outside, things looked wonderful. On the inside, I was in terrible trouble, and partly because of alcohol, I was beginning to have difficulty with my voice. During the previous year, friends began to call my mother, sobbing, saying, “She’s lost it. It’s gone.” My instrument—the voice that had brought me success and saved my sanity—was coming apart. Drinking will do that, tear your life apart. Alcohol was bringing me to my knees.
My career was carrying on in spite of me, in spite of everything. I was working on the energy from my childhood—from the discipline and training I had been given, the studying I had done, as well as a strong sense of self-preservation. But I’d been drinking around the clock for about four years, and I was at the point where my blackouts were severe. I would pass out, come to, get myself together, and try to get ready to go out and do whatever I was doing, but I was really unable to work very much. I would go on tour and do a show, and the next day I would be too hoarse and too wrecked to go on, vocally. My band and I—musicians, road managers, drivers, perhaps my agent—would arrive at a hotel with a swimming pool, and I would swim and drink and go to a doctor for the voice problems I was having. I would be prescribed prednisone, which is a steroid, for a week or two weeks to bring down the inflammation, and it would help me through another round of concerts.
I had what the doctors called a hemangioma on the surface of my right vocal cord, and my doctor told me that I might not sing again. He said if there was any hope, it would be to have a new, unproven surgery on my vocal cords. And so, in October of 1977, I had surgery. I was very fortunate, as the laser in the hands of my wonderful doctor, Don Weissman, made a clean, perfect scar, and the problem—at least the physical problem—was gone.
But I was still drinking. In March of ’78 I went to a fasting farm, where I took drugs to sleep, and although I did go ten days without drinking, as soon as I was home, I worked to get the alcohol level in my body back up. I could not stop drinking.
I remember my son, Clark, saw me one morning—it was early, eight o’clock in the morning—and he looked at my coffee cup, which he knew was filled with vodka, and he said to me, “Do you know what time it is?” That was all he said. It’s funny how little things get you.
By then, I’d tried to get help in every single way possible. I’d been to a tremendous number of therapists for a number of years, and I was always looking for some way to get help, but I didn’t know what to do.
Then, one day in April, I was reminded of a man I didn’t know well at all personally, but I knew that he was a serious drinker, and when he was on a bender, he’d sometimes get into fights and wind up in the pages of the New York Post and the Daily News. His name was Patrick. I knew his wife a little bit because I was in a dance class with her. I was constantly exercising—dancing, running, swimming—just to keep a little ahead of the curve of the disease. I could usually show up and look okay, and my therapist of the moment would say, “You can’t possibly be an alcoholic.” They didn’t know—they didn’t understand the disease.
So I called Patrick’s wife because I realized that I hadn’t seen him in the papers for a long time. We exchanged a few social words, and then I said, “Patrick hasn’t been arrested lately, has he?” She said, “No, he doesn’t drink anymore.” And before I asked, she said, “He’d be happy to talk to you about it.”
She gave me his number in California and I called him up. He talked to me for about forty-five minutes. By then I knew I had to write everything down, write it down and date it, because otherwise I would forget it all. Patrick said, “You have to go and see this doctor, his name is Stanley Gitlow, and he will help you because he understands.” So the next day I called Dr. Gitlow and made an appointment.
I felt completely out of control by this point. It was hard to look myself in the eyes, I couldn’t fit into my clothes, I couldn’t hold a conversation with anybody without having a few drinks. Up until then, I’d had a tremendous amount of deniability because I worked, I showed up, I was professional, I was always there on time. But that preceding year, with the surgery and the voice coming apart . . . everything had fallen away. I felt as though I was at the bottom of a well.
I had an appointment with Dr. Gitlow, but the day came and of course I was drunk, and I didn’t show up. I called his office back to reschedule, and his nurse, Liz, said, “We don’t do that. If you miss the first appointment, he won’t see you.” I was desperate enough that I begged. I begged and pleaded because something told me if Patrick wasn’t drinking after seeing this man, then there was something about Gitlow that I must find out about. Liz finally agreed to rebook my appointment.
At that time I was wearing head scarves so you couldn’t really see my face, and I remember having a pink scarf on. I was bloated, puffy, and felt maudlin as well as depressed—I felt melodramatic, but the truth was that many problems in my life seemed to have no solutions.
I walked into Gitlow’s office, and there was this good-looking, trim fellow in a white suit. After a few moments of my telling him what I thought was wrong in my life, he said, “You’re an alcoholic, and there’s a way to help you.”
Stanley Gitlow was not a man to mince words—ever! He had not even really said hello to me before he told me what was wrong with me. The next hour we spent talking about what I would do. He said, “You could check into a mental institution, that would be one choice. You could go on drinking and you’ll soon be dead. Your liver is shot. The third choice is you can go into treatment.”
I said, “Treatment?” Who ever heard of treatment? It was 1978, nobody was talking about treatment. But by the end of the session I had picked up the phone and called Chit Chat. (Chit Chat is a rehabilitation center in the farmland of Pennsylvania that, since my time there, has evolved into a center for the treatment of the family disease—the “ism” of alcoholism—but people still go there to get sober. It’s also changed its name to Caron Treatment Centers, but I always think of it as Chit Chat.) The receptionist at the farm said, “Fine, we have a bed. You’ll have to stay sober for seventy-two hours before you get here.” I said, “I don’t think you understand. That’s not possible for me. I cannot stay sober for the next hour.” She said, “I’m so sorry, we can’t help you.”
I hung up and looked at Gitlow, who shook his head. Perhaps I thought I was not going to have to get sober, but his face said otherwise. The phone rang again, and it was the woman at Chit Chat calling back to say, “It turns out we do have a vacancy in our detox unit.” I told her it would take me a few days to get ready and said I could be there in a week.
The only people that were still talking to me were my assistant and my accountant, and God bless them, a week later they got up at I don’t know what time in the morning and we took a 5 a.m. flight down to Wernersville, Pennsylvania. I was already drunk when I got on the plane. I had a suitcase full of books, and I had my typewriter and another suitcase full of clothes and vitamins and things, including a jelly jar full of vodka, and I got off the plane and drank the vodka in the bathroom of the Wernersville airport. I stepped into the stall and poured it down my throat.
April nineteenth is the anniversary of my last drink, there in the bathroom in the airport in Wernersville.
At Chit Chat they put me on Valium to keep me from going through the roof, and I was just coming off of my euphoric drunk, so happy to be in the country! Then the staff took my vitamins and my books and my typewriter away from me. I was in a complete fog, sitting around a table with a bunch of other people in soft slippers, and I remember being upset that they’d taken all my vitamins. All my books! A nurse came in and sat down and smiled and said, “Why don’t you let us drive?”
I must have known I was in the right place. I heard what she was saying and I thought, “Oh my God, it’s going to be all right.” The next day is my sobriety date, the twentieth of April, the first day I did not have to drink.
Spring was just digging its way out of the mud in Wernersville and there were flowers everywhere on the farm, bloom
ing, blossoming, practically shrieking with color. There were tulips and daffodils and forsythia and all these yellow and purple blooms. They told me there was a meditation meeting at 6 a.m. the next day—six o’clock in the morning! Who has ever heard of getting up to do something at six o’clock in the morning? Not in my lifetime. But I started getting up at five thirty and having my decaf coffee (they took us off caffeine, as well as all vitamins and all mood- altering chemicals) and I started going to this recovery meeting, and I’d look out the window at all the flowers while we read inspirational books and meditated on the words of the Saint Francis Prayer.
Everyone has a job at Chit Chat, and the woman who ran the job assignments, Carmela, said, “We’re not putting you out in front of everybody waiting tables, believe me. We’re going to put you someplace where people are not going to gawk at you. You are nothing special here, my dear, you are just someone who is trying to get sober, and the attention you might get in the dining room will not help you.” She assigned me a job driving the garbage truck with Fred, another patient, who hauled the cans in and out of the back end of the truck. In between stops, we told each other our stories. I had a great time driving the garbage truck up and down the roads throughout Chit Chat, watching the flowers bloom, listening to Fred. Carmella might have thought twice about this job if she had known that I loved it, adored it. I even had my assistant send me my old leather driving gloves. It was fantastic to me, perfect.
The day I was going to graduate from detox and go into regular treatment and start doing all the things that one does there—going to the groups and getting a counselor and doing an intake—I remember taking a shower, getting out, drying my hair and looking in the mirror, and realizing that I hadn’t been able to look myself in the eyes for years. I was suddenly dazzled . . . surprised to be alive but also so absolutely astonished at the world.
Moments of Clarity Page 8
