Moments of Clarity

by Christopher Kennedy Lawford

  So the two of us, in my mother’s little house in Michigan, we got on our knees, and we prayed. I felt stupid. I was really glad that it was just the two of us. If there had been a third person in the room, I would have been making jokes about it. I felt like I was saving him. I was making a deal with him—“Okay, yeah, I’ll do the praying thing and then you will get some help.”

  And you know, I was so relaxed that whole day. The next morning I woke up and I got right on my knees again. I rolled out of bed, got on my knees, and asked God to come into my life and help me with the pain I was in. I had another sober day, went back to Los Angeles, and started going to mutual support group meetings. Going on twenty-four years, I haven’t had a drop of alcohol or any drugs. Every morning of my life I have been on my knees, asking God for some kind of guidance.

  So that’s really the story of how life went on through me. I was doing my brother a favor, and my father a favor, and my mother a favor. I really didn’t even believe it. I was just saying, “Yeah, what ever it takes to get this loony nut to not go to Mexico.” Which he didn’t do, by the way. He dropped out of that group pretty soon.

  But truly, the only thing I knew about praying was in the movies, like when you’d see frontier families praying before they were slaughtered by the Indians. But there was a psychic shift in my life from that day on. It hasn’t been perfect, but from that day on, I’ve had absolute God awareness in my life. I absolutely know that there is a power that I need communion with, there is a force that I need to answer to, and there is a sense of something that I am connected to in the universe, into the past and present. I don’t really see God as someone who is running the thing as much as the energy that’s there to tap into, that will tell us, one man at a time, one woman at a time, one day at a time, what the next right move is. God is just a source, that’s all. It’s not a person and it’s not a being, it’s just a source.

  I never had access to that source until that day, and I haven’t lost it since. From then on, I really did feel like a different person. I have had a lot of rough times since then, times of anguish, times of doubt, but nowhere near what I had before that day. In the old days, I would have twenty-nine horrible days to one good day, and then it just slowly shifted to twenty- seven horrible days to three good days, and now basically, I have twenty-nine great days and one bad day.

  What I wanted was to be funny and talented. I was funny for a few years because I had this wild drug-fueled energy, but I was so afraid I’d lose it. Everyone that I thought was good—Lenny Bruce, Robin Williams—they were all fueled by this wild energy. I thought sober people, people who didn’t get high, were boring. Sure enough, the act that I put together after I got sober was very disciplined, and I worked on it, but it was boring. There was no spontaneity anymore, and I wasn’t funny for a long time. I had enough tricks to make an audience laugh, but there was no greatness in it. There’s wasn’t anything close to greatness. So I let it go . . . gave it up, and I never did it again.

  So my worst fear was realized, but it took me to the whole world of writing screenplays and making films. Once I got sober, and once I let go of the idea of being a great comedian, or even a good comedian, I really was able to put a lot of energy toward learning how to make films, how to write films and to study films. It’s put me on the path that I’m on today. I still have not made a great comedy, but it’s an absolute goal for me to one day write and direct a great comedy. It might be an elusive goal, but it’s not one based on fear. There’s no fear of not attaining the goal—it’s just a challenge, a challenge to spend my life learning the craft and keep trying again and again and again to get a little bit closer to that spot on the horizon.

  Dallas Taylor

  Dallas was best known as the drummer on Crosby, Stills and Nash’s debut album, Crosby, Stills & Nash, (1969), and their follow- up with Neil Young, Déjà Vu (1970). Since overcoming his own addictions, Dallas now works as a substance abuse interventionist with recovering drug addicts and families. He specializes in helping musicians and entertainers with drug and alcohol dependencies.

  I

  totally believe that everything in my life has happened for a reason. There’s absolutely a thread throughout the whole experience, from the loss of my parents, loss of my family, to the brief height of success,

  to the depth of depravity, to where I am today. I think it took all of that to humble me enough to be able to be a half- decent human being, which is really all we can be. All of that, it was God doing for me what I wouldn’t do for myself, what I refused to do. That’s how I see everything that’s ever happened to me. It’s always been the hand of God taking a shiny sharp object away from me and saying, “No, no, Dallas.”

  When I experience a loss or I don’t get something that I think I really need or I really want, it sucks. And then looking back I see, “Oh, that’s why. Because I was supposed to be over here.” There has to be some kind of order to the universe is what I’m saying. There has to be some kind of power that we don’t understand and shouldn’t even pretend to. All the things I’ve done and gone through to come to this place, to be the guy people trust and invite into their home and share their deepest and darkest secrets with—that’s a miracle. Human beings trusting and bringing out that intimacy in another human being, that’s the hand of God. That’s got to be the hand of God because it isn’t me. Me, I’m a weasel dope fiend.

  I accidentally discovered heroin while I was on the road with Stephen Stills and Manassas. I was sitting there and complaining, “Man, I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep.” I’m sitting there doing coke, one line after another. I don’t know why I can’t sleep. A guy said, “Here, try this.” I thought, “Just some more cocaine. What the hell,” and I did it. It was China white, and it just put me where I wanted to be.

  It’s funny, because after I got sober, I remembered an incident with my mother. I was kind of a sickly kid. I had stomach problems, some real, some fake when it came to school—“I’ve got a stomachache. I don’t want to go to school.” I hated school from the first day. I hated myself and I hated my life, for as far back as I can remember. So my mother brought this stuff home called paregoric for stomach pain. I think you could get it over the counter then, even though it has morphine. She literally had to chase me around the house because it smelled so awful. She got me cornered, and I kind of gagged it down—and I swear to God, twenty minutes later, I went back to her and I said, “Mom, can I have some more of that?” I felt normal for the first time. I didn’t equate it with being high. I equated it with finding that missing piece. The space that always seemed to be empty was filled. That’s what it felt like when I did that first line of heroin on the road. “Oh yeah, this is what’s missing. This is what’s missing.” It was a pain reliever when I was in a great deal of pain.

  My career was going down the tubes . I got fired from Crosby, Stills and Nash and Young for a bullshit reason, a power play. Nobody stuck up for me, and that gave me a perfect excuse to lock myself up in my big house up on the hill and commit suicide by cocaine and heroin. I went through a million bucks pretty quick, and before I knew it I was out of dough, and I signed away all my rights to all those gold and platinum records on the wall in there. Then I was homeless, with my gold and platinum records, basically living off women I’d meet.

  And I just couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. I just wanted to die, because my dream, the thing that I’d counted on to make me happy, didn’t make me happy. Success didn’t make me happy. Being rich and famous didn’t make me happy. And when it hit me that none of it was going to work— that’s when I really hit the bottom in depression. I proceeded to commit covert suicide by using just as much as I could. I remember coming to, with paramedics standing over me, and getting up, walking out, and doing some more. My friends were dying, but I couldn’t kill myself. Keith Moon told me, “Dallas, man, you’re just fucking crazy. I can’t be around you. You got to leave.” And so I ended up in the streets of London. He died right around the time
I went into rehab. All my peers died, and for some reason I’m still here. I just couldn’t die. I tried.

  Around Thanksgiving in 1984 , I had a moment of clarity. I was smoking freebase with this homeless guy in this garage. Me and my wife at the time, we lived in this little one-room shack. There’s my gold and platinum records on the wall, in the scummiest fucking neighborhood that you can possibly get to. I had two kids that I wasn’t allowed to see, and frankly, I didn’t care. I loved them, but nothing mattered but getting high. Nothing. I had been on methadone for ten years, and now I was freebasing with a homeless guy. I decided to get some booze, and I went to this liquor store my wife’s uncle owned. When I walked in, they were playing one of my songs over the PA. I said, “Do you hear that? That’s Crosby, Stills and Nash. That’s me. Somebody give me twenty dollars. Give me twenty dollars because I played on that fucking record.” Everybody looked at me like I was crazy. My wife’s uncle said, “Dallas, you got to leave, man. You got to go. You got to get out of here.”

  That was when I had this out-of- body experience and saw how far down I had really gone and that there was no further I could go. I had hit bedrock. It’s not that I wouldn’t have kept digging if I could have, but I’d run out of everything. I ran out of money. I ran out of willingness. I ran out of hustle. It was over. There was no way out except for death.

  I made a conscious decision to go back to that little shack, and I grabbed the butcher knife and I stabbed myself in the stomach with it. My wife came in—I woke her up. I remember I said something like, “I’ll show you.” You know, that that’s our addict’s battle cry: “I’ll show you. Fuck you.” She came in, and I had stabbed myself right where they used to commit hara-kiri, and I remember saying, “If I’m still alive in the morning, take me to the hospital.”

  I came to the next morning. It was hot, flies everywhere. I was just absolutely horrified that I couldn’t even succeed at killing myself. I was a failure at everything. I was a complete failure.

  My wife got me to the emergency room, and of course the police showed up. I was smart enough to know that you don’t tell the police that you just tried to commit suicide, so I said, “Oh, I was trying to open a tool kit with my knife and it slipped.” So they went away. The doctor said it looked like a surgeon had operated on me. I missed the main aorta by one centimeter and took a little nick out of my liver. One more time, I couldn’t die.

  I’m in this hospital and it’s Thanksgiving, and there was absolutely nothing to be thankful about. And this little guy kept coming into my room and just sitting there. I knew who he was. He was one of those recovery people. There was a treatment center just down the street and he worked there. He would show up every day and just sit and read the newspaper. One day I finally said, “What the fuck do you want?” He says, “Well, man, I’m here to try to convince you to go to treatment.” I said, “I knew it. You’re going to try to indoctrinate me into that cult.”

  So even at that point, even after all the shit I had experienced, I wasn’t ready to surrender. They were giving me my methadone and Demerol and all my favorite drugs, so why the hell did I want to leave that hospital bed? It was like heaven.

  I was in there a couple of weeks before they felt that the knife wound had healed enough that I could be discharged. They tried to do a little intervention on me with my wife, and for some reason I said, “Okay, I’ll go.” Just to get them off my back, I agreed to go. I was so fucked up I couldn’t walk, so I arrived in rehab in an ambulance. I barely remember it. Later on, I worked for a little while with the nurse who did my intake. She said, “Boy, Dallas, you were . . . we didn’t think you were going to make it.”

  Those first few days, I was like an animal. I hunkered down in a corner and nobody could come near me. I wasn’t going to any fucking groups. I wouldn’t do any of that crap. Don’t you know who I am? Where’s my private room? You know, all that ego stuff, that entitlement stuff that I developed through my little stint with success.

  And I was up at the nurses’ station every ten minutes: “I’ve got a headache. I’m sick. I need medicine.” Well, no. I’m a dope fiend. I am a hope- to-die,to-the-curbdope fiend. I cannot be trusted with medication. I had a rough go of it through detox, and then that day came, the most frightening day of my life, when they said, “We’re going to take you off your detox meds.” But at some point I had come to my senses and realized, “Okay, if I can’t die, then I have no choice but to try to live.” I got a sense of hope from somewhere. I started thinking, “Maybe I can do this. I might as well take this train to the end of the line.”

  I think it was the experience of being confined with people you wouldn’t normally hang out with, and then discovering that we have this incredible bond, and it’s us against the world. And I remember they took us to a mutual support group and the people in there were laughing. They were alive and happy, and I thought, “Wow! This is pretty cool. These guys are okay.” I noticed there was a couple of rock and rollers in there and I thought, “This might not be too bad.”

  So it wasn’t the thunderbolt for me. It was these little things that started to build up and give me this sense of hope. Plus there was the absolute terror of going back to that night with the knife, because I never want to feel like that again. That night was the magic night. After that I was so terrified that I was in three meetings a day, morning, noon, and night. Sometimes four. Sometimes midnight meetings. I jumped into this with both feet because I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t have anything else to do.

  I had a friend in recovery, an old jazz musician named Buddy. I was trying to get back into the music business and it just wasn’t happening. They weren’t having me back. I remember calling my sponsor one night and saying, “Buddy, I don’t know what to do.” He said, “Man, you got to get a job.” I said, “What do you mean, get a job? I’ve never had a job in my life. I wouldn’t know what to do in a job.” He said, “I’ll give you two choices. I can get you a job at Pizza Hut or I can get you a job as a tech on the adolescent unit at this treatment center.” I had no idea what a tech was, let alone an adolescent unit, but I knew I wasn’t going to work at a Pizza Hut. Sure enough, somebody would come in and say, “Hey! You’re that guy. Crosby, Stills and Nash. It’s a long way down, isn’t it?” So I picked the adolescent treatment center, and thus was born my middle life of being of ser vice and helping other alcoholics, addicts, and families.

  But I don’t walk in thinking I’m going to do anything. I just walk in and try to be a channel. Either the universe is going help this person, or this person isn’t going to take the offer. It’s out of my hands. I can’t take credit, nor can I take it personally if it doesn’t work.

  That might seem like a cold way to handle it, but it’s the only way that I know how to do it. You can come aboard the lifeboat, but I’m not jumping in after you, because there are sharks out there.

  Ed Begley Jr.

  When I interviewed him in spring 2008, Ed’s play about César Chávez, César and Ruben, was getting great reviews in L.A. He’s been in countless TV series, including Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; Arrested Development; Six Feet Under; and The West Wing. He’s had starring roles in St. Elsewhere and Battlestar Galactica, and the series Living with Ed chronicles his deep commitment to living green. My cousin Bobby Kennedy introduced us; they know each other through their environmental work. Ed’s father was a Hollywood actor too, so we have that in common, as well as being on this recovery journey together.

  What impresses me most about Ed is his ability to let the slings and arrows of life bounce off him, to let the everyday hassles roll off his back and just be grateful. Those are the small, almost invisible changes in our nature that bring real recovery and the joy of living.

  I

  had a very dark time through most of the seventies. Most of it was self-inflicted, but there were a lot of things that happened that were beyond my control. I found a body cut up in my trash, a human torso.

  When you come upon somethin
g like that, it’s not like a movie—“Oh my God, it’s a body!” You don’t even pro cess. You go, “Wow! What’s this? Somebody must’ve hit a dog and put it in the trash can.” And then you realize it’s a person. That was the worst thing, but there were lots of other terrible things, and the common thread, the thing that put me in a lot of those situations and also made those situations worse, was my abuse—my addictions and abuse. That was the overriding influence in the seventies. I kept trying to get well and I couldn’t. I had a very bad experience in 1976 where I had the DTs and I was very, very sick. I sought help, I got my twenty-one days sober, and then went out again. I got sick, I sought help again, I got forty-five days sober, and I started thinking, “That’s enough for now,” and I went out again.

  That’s what hopelessness was for me. I could not get well, and I was in a very dark period through much of that decade.

  On September 30, 1978 , I woke up with my wife slapping me. Ingrid was slapping me, saying, “Wake up, wake up. Your color is really bad. Your breathing is bad.” They got me to the hospital and they put an IV in my arm and gave me some ipecac. I’d taken some pills to try to make the pain of the hangover and the DTs go away. “Oh, it was a suicide attempt,” they said. I said, “If it was a suicide attempt, I wouldn’t have taken them one at a time in the course of two hours. There wouldn’t be any left. I was just trying to get some relief, so I took like eight Thorazine, along with all the liquor and everything else I’ve taken.”

  I passed out, and then I went to that place where you almost die. You send enough chemical signals to your brain to shut down, and things will shut down. Fortunately, my wife was present and she got me to Cedars- Sinai and I made it. The next day, Ingrid brought in our daughter, who was about to turn a year old. She and I had a great bond, a great affection, which we still enjoy. It was like day two of my recovery, and she had been away from me now for forty-eight hours straight because I was in the hospital.