Moments of Clarity

by Christopher Kennedy Lawford

  But it was up and down, in and out of anger and denial for a while. About a week and a half into treatment I got into a terrific fight with one of the counselors because I was making phone calls from the phone in the detox, where I had to sleep, since there was not yet a bed in the dorm. Dottie, who worked on the ward, gave me a hard time, and I said, “I’m leaving! This is the worst place I’ve ever seen!” For a day or so I was determined to leave, and I circled on my calendar when I was going to get out so I would know when I could drink again.

  Then a couple of days later a man came to talk to us in our eve ning meeting. He was an African American from Alabama, he’d been on a chain gang, and he had a terrible story. He told us that at the end of his drinking he was in the kitchen on the second floor of the house where he was living, and he was cooking huge amounts of food for all these people who were coming to visit him. He happened to look out the window and he saw that they were all on stilts. He was having a major hallucination, and he realized he’d been having this hallucination for years.

  There was another man, a man my father’s age, who talked to me about my life as a drinking person and told me his story, and it was so horrible that I thought, “If he can get sober, certainly I can.” He had a story like my father’s, really. I felt so bad for my father and I still do. I always think of him battling against this disease with no tools, no tools at all, nobody to say, “You don’t have to live like this.”

  When I got out of detox and was moved into the wing where the regular program took place, I had a roommate who prayed every night on her knees. I was embarrassed, and a little horrified. I was not in the habit of revealing my resistance or my surrender to another person. The inner life was not something I was comfortable with, and I certainly did not want someone to see me on my knees. I brought it up to my counselor, who told me that prayer on my knees might help me with the treatment aspects of not drinking. I didn’t know how that could be, but they told me to do it and for a time, I did. They said it didn’t have to signify anything. It was not about being Christian, it was not about being Jewish, it was not about being anything. It was about surrendering to something that was bigger than you were, bigger than your little problems with alcohol and love affairs and so on.

  That was a big step for me. So I learned to pray. And the whole time I was at Chit Chat, I played an album of Joni Mitchell’s called Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. I think it helped me get sober, and still find it’s one of the most powerful influences on my life.

  At the end of the twenty-eight-day program in those hills of Pennsylvania, I felt a stirring in my heart and my brain that had been dormant for many years. I will call it an experience of God. My brother, Denver, came to pick me up when I was ready to leave. He drove me to New York and he brought me to my apartment and he said, “I’m going to take out all the booze, every last bottle,” and he did. I kept cases of booze, not just bottles. My brother carried it all out, and he told me later he dumped it all, poured it down the sink. He said he felt very superstitious about drinking any of it. I am so grateful he was there to help me with my reentry.

  I was at Chit Chat for thirty days in all. Home again, I stayed close to Stanley Gitlow. He had a therapy group, and I started to get to know those people. I started to call people and make contact and stay connected with people who didn’t drink—and that was really the network that began to feed my life. As soon as I could, of course, I made a new record, and throughout that and everything else, I stayed on the phone all the time. If I wasn’t singing in the studio or on the road or on the plane, I was on the phone. This band I had—oh my God, half of them were drunks, half of them were addicted, and they used to laugh and say, “What do you do when you get off the plane? What are you doing on the phone all the time?” They teased me about talking to my bookie, when what I was doing was talking to other drunks who were not drinking, and that’s how I did it. Many of those wonderful people got sober in the years to come and spent lots of time on the phone themselves. That kind of contact, of keeping in touch, continues to be an important part of the fabric of my life.

  Because of my work, I have to be in places where there’s alcohol. That’s life, and I try not to tempt fate. For a few years I kept wine in the house for parties and special occasions, but after my son’s suicide I had to get rid of it. I realize that this new life has been a gift, and if you get this experience of grace, you’ve got to keep your priorities straight, because you never know. The illness does not respond to rational thinking. I tried reason, and the intellect, and for me, they never worked. And who knew, if sometime in the middle of the night . . . anyway, it wasn’t anything I wanted to take a chance on.

  Spirituality was really the place where both my drinking and my musical life started. I always went to church, I always believed in another realm of existence. As an artist, I always believed in things you can’t see that have tremendous power over your life and influence you—music, art, literature, and God. I believed in God. I sang in church choirs and school choirs. I believed in grace, in ideas of another dimension, and in the power of positive thinking. I had more than one healing experience, and I always found that the practice of yoga was powerful and would calm my racing anxiety attacks. But these were intermittent experiences that helped but never really sustained my feeling of serenity or peace. My deep fear, my anxiety, always returned, until at Chit Chat I glimpsed another way, and felt the peace come over me. Finally I was pushed over into the light in a surrender that I try to keep fresh every day.

  Many of the philosophers I read speak of the need in our lives for solitude, for contemplation, for quiet. I was always looking for silence, for peace, but I never found the solitude that gave me solace without being alone, without feeling isolated and abandoned. I had been looking for it every day of my life. I think that for an alcoholic like I am, what alcohol does is to separate us from the forces that can really help us. I think removing that distance between myself and whatever it is that runs things—that was what treatment was all about. I believe in treatment, and I believe it does give people the opportunity for reflection and for support too, so that they’re not off in a black hole, a black void. I could feel there was something new coming into my life, something shedding light, when I didn’t have any way of moving in that direction on my own.

  So I got that, and I got something else. I got joy. I was not a joyful person before. When I was drinking, I stood behind the microphone, played the guitar, and kept my eyes shut. Louis, my husband, has spent years helping me learn how to use the stage, how to move around, how to do things, how to talk. He literally has been a godsend. He’s just amazing. I have more fun doing my work today. This could be illegal, having this much fun and enjoying your life this much.

  One of the greatest gifts of sobriety is that I sleep now. When I go to sleep, I very often think about the first few days when I was detoxing, with this howling maniac in my head. I was hallucinating and frightened, and I think about that transition a lot, and how within the first few days a peacefulness descended on me. I am grateful that the serenity has never completely left me.

  The tragedy that happened to me in sobriety came at a time when I was thirteen years sober and my beautiful son, Clark, took his life. I was devastated and not sure I could live through it, but I listened to people who had gone through terrible things and survived them and had not found it necessary to drink. I listened to what they said, did what they did.

  I look back at that spring before I went to treatment. I was in misery, and I’d done almost nothing creative in terms of writing in nearly four years. I wrote two songs under huge duress, as well as the liner notes to a collection of my recordings called So Early in the Spring: The First Fifteen Years. I sweated over those pages. There were wineglass stains on those pages, and vodka stains, like tears. There probably were tears, as well. I had gone over and over and over those pages; it took me months. I told myself I was having a creative block. I was not having a creative block at all. I just cou
ldn’t stop drinking. I don’t know how I got through those three or four years, because everything was so heavy and so dark.

  Thank God my life isn’t that dark anymore, but full of light and full of faith.

  Mike Binder

  Mike’s an actor, director, and screenwriter. His first screenplay was 1990’s Coupe de Ville, and his directorial debut came two years later, with Crossing the Bridge. Since then, he’s made several movies, including The Upside of Anger and Reign Over Me, and he also created and starred in the HBO series The Mind of the Married Man. Mike’s a good friend and was one of my chief employers in my early acting days. We made three movies together: The Sex Monster, Londinium (also known as Fourplay), and Blankman. I’ve always appreciated his commitment to recovery, and his preoccupation with making movies that have something to do with sex.

  One of the questions I asked people was “Is there something you were afraid of that kept you from sobriety? If so, did that fear come to pass?” For Mike, it did—but it turned out not to be such a big deal after all.

  M

  y worst fear was realized, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I think that’s one of the things that having a God-centered philosophy of life gives you. You get a sense of

  being in touch with the universe, getting the right signals, being in tune with a power greater than yourself. When I got centered, got conscious—I mean I still don’t know what’s the best thing for me, I just know that I’m going to do what my senses tell me to do today, and I’ll take the ride where it goes.

  I left Detroit and I came out here to be a comedian, and within weeks I got a job as a doorman at the Comedy Store. At the time, it was the center of the universe to me, a place that I’d read about and came out here to be close to. So now I had a job there, but I was miserable. I can remember leaving work, going home, and lying in bed and thinking, “I’m going to kill myself. I hate this life.” I was broke all the time, and every time I got a chance to audition for something, I would blow it because I was high. I would reason to myself, I had these long talks with myself, every morning, every day—“I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to get high.” And within an hour of getting up, I was high again and back on the treadmill of the things I needed to shove into my body to make myself keep going.

  By the time I was twenty-four or twenty-five, I couldn’t make a living. I had started with a lot of promise and I was on a lot of shows and I made a lot of money, but it was all gone. I was so hopeless. Day after day, after day, after day, after day—I was really at a low bottom in terms of pain.

  My thing was marijuana and cocaine, together—I just needed them, and I would do anything to get them. I couldn’t go half a day, let alone a whole day, without getting completely obliterated. It was really hard on me. I would ask myself, “Why am I so weak? What am I doing?” I saw all these other guys doing things, coming up with new routines and writing screenplays and getting acting jobs—I was just a slug. I remember thinking that, “I’m just a slug.” I was overweight. I smoked two and a half, three packs of cigarettes a day.

  I had an enormous desire to change, but it’d last about an hour and a half. And not only that—as soon as I would slip back into getting high, it wasn’t “Okay, now I’m happy.” I would just spend the next twenty-three hours miserable because I’m still doing what I don’t want to be doing. This went on for years. That was helplessness to me; months and years of this saying, “Okay, I’m going to do it” and failing every day. I never had a day without the monkey on my back.

  I knew a young guy, another young comedian, named Jesse. I’d smoked pot with him a lot of times and done a lot of drugs with him and I’d shared my shit, so I saw him one day and I said, “I need some payback. I’ve got nothing.” He said, “I’m clean. I don’t do it anymore.”

  It blew my mind, because I knew him so well and I knew myself so well and I didn’t know anybody who would clean themselves up. This was probably ’81 or ’82, somewhere in there, and people didn’t go to rehab. So this guy said to me, “I’m clean,” and it just blew my mind. I remember walking away and coming back and saying, “What does that mean, you’re clean?” I mean, that’s how remote the whole thing was.

  He said, “I’ve been going to these mutual support groups,” and he started talking about it and I thought, “Oh, okay, that’s obviously some Christian thing and I’m Jewish. It’s not for me.” That’s the first thing I said to him. He was like, “No, no, it isn’t organized religion at all. You got to come.” In my mind I was thinking, “Well, probably they’ll go into Bible readings or something. It’s probably the hokiest thing I can think of.” But I was in so much pain, I called him about a week later and I said, “What’s that thing you were talking about, how you got off drugs?”

  Jesse told me about a meeting in Beverly Hills and I met him at the place. I just thought it was worth trying. I was in so much pain, and I wasn’t talking to anyone about it. I think the whole notion of getting help was so foreign to me that I thought, “Fine, I might as well try this.”

  I went to this thing and it was huge. I remember the guy was off to the left of the stage, and right away he started talking about God, and I thought, “I knew it. This is not for me.” So I left.

  Two guys from the support group followed me outside, and I remember thinking, “Here it comes, here comes the hard sell, these are Moonies.” I started talking to them, and there were just these two guys. Their names were Mike and Nicky. They said, “Look, come on back into the meeting and just listen.” So I went back in with them. Then after the meeting, they went with me up to do a set. It was the first time I had ever been straight to perform. I hadn’t gotten high all day, and I really wanted to shake these guys so I could go and have a few drinks, snort something, and get ready to go onstage. They said, “Look, we’re going to go with you. We’re going to walk you through your first day.”

  So I went onstage, and sure enough, I just wasn’t funny. I couldn’t concentrate, I was sweating, and I came offstage and I was mad at them. They said, “Let’s go get a cup of coffee and let’s talk about it.” They seemed really interested in the fact that I was in so much pain and there was no one in my life who really gave a shit about whatever was going on in my head, what I was thinking or feeling. I sat with them until like eleven or twelve that night and then they said, “Okay, let’s go home and go to bed. Just do the rest of this day, this one day.” They wrote down their phone numbers and they said, “Call us, wake us up if you have to, but just get through one day, and then tomorrow we will reconvene on the whole thing.”

  That was really my first day. It was just so rare at that time that anyone had any interest in me. I didn’t have a girlfriend, my good friends were either completely in the same rut as I was or older and completely straight and didn’t understand the problem, so I wouldn’t talk to them about it. They would just tell me, “Drugs are bad, so don’t do them. Your friends are losers and you’re acting like a loser, but you are better than that,” and that’s the end of the conversation. No one ever said to me, “I know exactly what you are going through, I’ve gone through it. It’s not easy, but it is what your life is now. You just need to make some changes, and here is what I did”—no one ever said that, until that day.

  The guy I got closest with was Mike , who was a poet. I liked his writing. He was honest and he was a real artist, so I gravitated toward him, but there was still that God thing. I remember one time he said to me, “Well, have you gotten on your knees and prayed?” and I said, “No, never.” That wasn’t how I was raised. He said, “Even when you’re in trouble or when you’ve been afraid, you’ve never said, ‘God, please help me’?” And I said just, “No.” God wasn’t in my lexicon. That wasn’t in my sense of the world, to get on my knees or just talk to God. I didn’t want that aspect of recovery, and I told him that. I said, “I’m not the kind of person who thinks the God stuff is going to work for me. It turns me off.”

  Then I went back to Detroit to
do a little movie there, The Detroit Comedy Jam. Mike kept sending me this literature, very God-oriented literature. God-says- to- me- to-do- this stuff, on some day-by-day-God’s- plan thing—and this God, God, God really was very creepy to me. The whole time I was there, I stayed clean, getting ready for the show, and then the night after this show, I got drunk and everything started up again.

  At the same time, there’s all this stuff going on with my brother Jack. He’s about five years younger than me and he was always a wild kid— wilder than I was. He was the brother that I was the closest to. He went to school at Michigan State, and he was kind of a lost kid. He got hooked up with these Jesus freaks at school. I never knew the full story, but they really got him to the point where he was a full-on Jesus freak for about three months. He was going to go to Mexico with them, just wander with the group.

  My parents were really worried about him because he had quit school and he had given everything away and he was wandering the streets of Lansing, Michigan, trying to proselytize to bums and stuff. My dad called and said, “You need to talk to him. Take him out partying, get him high. Get the old Jack there.” They were really worried.

  My mother set it up so that Jack and I came to her house at the same time. He said to me, “Mike, have you ever asked God into your life, ever?” He was just so blazing with spiritual love that I was embarrassed by him. He was going to leave the next day for Mexico. I said to him, “I want you to do me a favor, and just agree that you are not going to go to Mexico for another month or so.” He said, “Tell you what I’ll do. If you get on your knees right now with me and you pray for God to help you, I’ll postpone my trip to Mexico.” And I said okay. I was willing to do anything just to get this guy to calm down a little bit.