Taking it into my work was another way of saying I want it around me always. I don’t want it to be hidden; I don’t want it to be closeted away. By putting that sign up, that was my way of letting go of the secret within my work environment, and that gave me the chance to have support at work. I’ve told people, if you can get an ally at work, get some support at work, do it. Because it will save you.
My fear was public humiliation. Now the first question I have when I work with someone new to recovery is, “Did you get a DUI?” And often they go, “Yeah,” and I’m like, “Great! Did you get a picture?” They’re like, “Yeah,” and I say, “Oh, fabulous! First thing you get to do is go get it.” They’re like, “What are you talking about?” I say, “Go to the police department, thank them for arresting you, and ask would it be possible to get a copy of your mug shot. Then frame it and put it in your kitchen, put it in your bathroom, put it next to your liquor. Every time you see it, remember that that’s what your better thinking got you.”
I am not a deep spiritual being, but I know that there is some accep tance of God in my life, without a religion attached to it, without a face or a look. I couldn’t do this before, and now I can, and I don’t know why. To me, it’s the pro cess of elimination. It’s like, “Well, what changed?” and I believe my answer was God. See, I don’t know what changed. I can look at the perfect- storm elements. I can look at my yearning to change, my openness to the possibility of change, and then this potential stream of the drug, which I knew was dangerous somehow—all of that is included. But I still can’t tell you why one day I didn’t call this guy, the one sober guy I knew, and why the next day I did. I believe that that’s where God showed up. I don’t have a picture of him, her, it . . . what ever. I just know something changed. I’m a different person today.
It’s New Year’s Eve 1999. I go back to the same place for the holiday. I am now ten months sober. We all get together and we open the bottle and we pull out all the little scrolls of paper we’d written the year before that had our names on them—“Jamie, here’s yours.” I was thinking, “Oh, this will be interesting.” Of the five things that I wished for myself, the first thing I wished for was sobriety.
I have that on my desk. I don’t have a mug shot. I don’t have a letter from my husband saying, “Sweetheart, I love you but I am leaving.” I don’t have a letter from my child saying, “Mummy, why are you killing yourself?” I have what I wished for myself.
So it was already in my head. I knew I wanted it, I just didn’t think I could get it. You have to remember, that was December thirty-first. I still went six more weeks of being sick and tired of being sick and tired. It’s there in black and white, that’s what I hoped for in the New Year. It wasn’t even a resolution, it was a hope. A resolution is white-knuckling your way through not drinking. Hope is the possibility of change.
Earl Hightower
Like Velvet Mangan, Earl has made recovery into his life’s work. He’s an inspiring speaker and a skilled and sensitive interventionist, as well as a generous presence in the L.A. recovery community. I’ve known Earl for years, but until we sat down for this interview, I’d never heard the details of his story. I was moved by the cataclysmic events he survived on his journey, and the thoughtfulness with which he revealed them.
W
hen you’re an addict, there’s a shroud of denial that’s per sistent and ongoing, an inability to be aware of other very viable options. A kind of not-knowing. I’d been an alcoholic for
sixteen years, I was close to dying, and I had just tried to kill someone when I got to the end of my not-knowing. It was the blink of an eye, coming out of that blackout. Just a quick scan of the horizon and starting with the not-knowing—“It’s not my alcoholism, it’s not my addiction, it’s not my heroin, it’s not my cocaine, it’s not my barbiturates . . .”—and then surrendering to the knowing—“Oh yeah? It is. It’s all of those things.” There it is, and that’s that.
Suddenly a consciousness beyond my own has entered into my life, in this moment, and I’ve been offered a choice. I can continue to attempt to blot out the intolerable nature of my existence. Or I can accept this newfound consciousness—which is really an unavoidable truth. I call it the “bitch of enlightenment.”
This is what nobody tells you. Once you use that stuff, you’re stuck with it. There’s no going back; once you know, you can’t not- know any- more. You can load up the syringe, or uncork the bottle, or chop up the lines, but it’s no good. “Will this work?” “No. That got disqualified already, remember?” “Is this going to work?” “No, that’s not going to work either.” “Shall we try that other one again?” “You can if you want, but it still isn’t going to work. And you know it.”
I got sobered up in 1980; I pretty much missed the seventies. I had no anchors, nothing that required me to hold tight to the reality of my youth. I had no family; my family was dead. I had no friends, I had no career, I didn’t have a wife or children, I didn’t have any goals or aspirations, I was just a flat-out crazy addict. I was in flight, and I’d been in flight since I was twelve years old. I’d been alone so long that I didn’t even know I was lonely. Madness kind of creeps up on you. The drunken lunacy, the violence, the acting out was way above the radar. Having to be detained, the police being called regularly, the ambulances coming.
The day I had my moment of clarity was a Thursday, and the last thing I remembered was the Monday before, but I’d gotten used to Monday immediately becoming Thursday. I was standing at the corner of Twenty-eighth Avenue and Ocean Front Walk in Venice, California, in a parking area just off the boardwalk. It was during the day, there were lots of people scurrying around. I was coming out of a blackout, so I was unaware of what had come before, but there’s a commotion, an intensity in the air. There’s the police, there’s an ambulance, there’s emergency medical technicians. The girl I was living with at the time, she was there but I can’t recall her name. There was this older Jewish man too, his name was David Luboff, and I gathered from the conversation around me that I had just tried to beat him to death.
People were deciding what to do, and I understood immediately that I was not included in the decision-making pro cess. Apparently I had already said my piece, so I just sat there with my broken hands. The police were deciding whether to arrest me and charge me with attempted murder, or just let the ambulance take me to the hospital, because they could tell I was dying. My thyroid had shut down, my heart, my kidneys were shot, my liver was really angry. . . . Just standard, run-of-the-mill, late- stage alcoholism.
Finally they decided to throw me in the ambulance, because it wasn’t a case the DA was going to file. They just said, “Let the ambulance take him to the hospital so he can die there instead of in jail.” As I’m being strapped into the gurney, David Luboff—the guy that I had tried to kill, for no apparent reason—screams at me, “You don’t understand the ramifications of the situation!”
I remember thinking, “You know, he’s right. I don’t. I don’t understand.” It was just a blink of an eye, a heartbeat, and I thought, “I’m here as a direct result of my drinking.” That consciousness could not be denied any longer; it asserted itself. I felt an overriding sense of calm, and the calm was the surrender.
I had no idea that was coming. For sixteen years, from age twelve to twenty-eight, I had fought, wrestled, attempted to control and to manage, battled my demons, did what I could, and then there was that moment when I opened my eyes. You don’t decide to have that moment; it just happens, and you’re done. All that was left for me to do was acknowledge it.
Could I have drunk again? I don’t know. All I know is that I haven’t; for twenty- six years, I haven’t had a drink, I haven’t used a drug. I’ve been absolutely clean and sober and have had no desire to drink the entire time.
I’m thinking of a moment I had years ago, when what I perceived at the time as clarity was really a series of interpretations, or decisions, born of my emotional condition. I got s
hipped off to boarding school at age twelve, and I’m the youngest and smallest kid there among two hundred and fifty boys from all over the world. They’ve scoured the earth to find the brightest, most disturbed young men they could find, and I’m the youngest and the smallest. I’m fodder. I’m fighting all through the first week, and at the end of the week I call my mother. I’m a twelve-year-old boy, a child, calling my mommy and saying, trying to say, “Get me out of this. You couldn’t have possibly meant to send me here. If you knew what was here, you would rush to my aid immediately and get me out of here.” And I hear my father in the background saying, “Hang up. He’s fine.”
I felt such a sense of abandonment, a sense of betrayal. . . . My family, who knew me better than anybody in the world, had thrown me away, and I didn’t know why. What did I do? And something shut down inside of me, my ability to trust, my ability to connect to other people, a willingness to try. I thought at that time, and for years afterward, that that was my moment of clarity: “You don’t get any help in the world; it’s every man for himself. So steel yourself and get to it.” Not the kind of thinking you want to encourage in a twelve-year-old child, but there it was.
Forty-two years later, at fifty-four years of age, I look back on that twelve-year-old, and I go, “You know? He was right, and he was wrong.” Was it a moment of clarity? For the boy . . . yes, absolutely. Did it impact my entire youth? Yes. But I can also look back on that moment and say, “Well, I understand . . . but I’m not going to act anymore based on the decisions of that twelve-year-old boy. I have a lot more experience; I have had other moments along the way. I can leave that one behind.”
That’s one of the great gifts of recovery for me, the knowledge that if I feel confused, undecided, lost, unsure—if I use my meditation, my ability to be still and to quiet the mind, the answers will come. If my own house is in order, if I’m available and open for it, then I can tap into consciousness beyond my own in any given moment.
Before that moment of clarity, the thing I was most desperately afraid of was love. I was afraid of loving, I was afraid of being loved, I was terribly afraid of losing love. I was in a plane crash in 1974 and I lay there on a mountain in Mexico and watched my mother and then my father and then my little sister bleed to death right in front of me. Right then I renounced God. Any god that would let my little sister die like that . . . I had no interest in a god like that. Now I see that that’s such an incredibly limited view of God. God in my own image, ruled by my emotion. Is it God up there going, “Okay, kill that one . . . save that one”? I don’t think so.
Then some guys scavenged the wreck, took my money, and left me there to die, so I renounced any connection to other human beings. After that, I was out of the game. I was broken in every way: physically, emotionally, spiritually . . . just a shattered human being. I’d already been an addict for ten years, and I came out of the hospital in Santa Monica in late 1974, early 1975, renouncing God, renouncing any connection to other people, absolutely certain that life is nothing but pain and suffering. Later I discovered that this really isn’t far off the mark, but the question is, what do you do with that? The Buddhists’ first noble truth is “All life is suffering”—once you accept that, then being in pain doesn’t mean something is wrong. That allows you to define the path toward happiness. I’m a firm believer in that.
We live in a country that very, very methodically goes about the business of ignoring the fact that we’re all going to die. “Don’t talk about that. Just consume effectively, and you’ll be fine.” It’s lunacy. No, you won’t be fine. You’re still going to die.
I had one guy say to me, “I have enough money to live like a king for a hundred years”—and believe me, he wasn’t exaggerating—“and the idea of getting up and getting dressed and going out into the world today is more than I can bear.” I was there because the people around him knew his life wasn’t working for him, that he was on the point of ending it. It’s interesting to tell a guy, “Okay, you have hundreds of millions of dollars, you are a captain of several industries, you’re famous, all the world’s illusions have been made available to you—so how are you feeling?” And he just starts crying, because there is the illusion and there is the real world, and his real world is a mess.
In situations like that, I go in and try to help bring them to a consciousness beyond their own, which might work or it might not. You can create environments within which people can come to these things. But all you can do is make space for it. You help them let go of stuff that doesn’t work. The rest is up to them.
People say to me, “How can you know this stuff? Where did you get this?” I just tell them I’ve been clean for twenty- six years now and I can guarantee that anything of value in that twenty- six years has absolutely nothing to do with “as Earl sees it.” There’s none of Earl’s best thinking in it. That’s the beauty of it. All my information—all of it—is from others who walked there before me. I embrace that, and I constantly place myself in the company of those who walk ahead of me, and I listen. They create little voids in me, they create little opportunities for that consciousness to come in. The poet Robert Sward said that “God is in the cracks.” God is in the fissures. Right on, man! That’s such a beautifully poetic way of saying it. When I heard that I went, “Yeah, give me that. I’m going to put that in the bag.”
Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk, is such a profound teacher and he says things so simply. He talks about spherical things in a way that linear people can hear it. He has a book, The Miracle of Mindfulness, that makes you gasp when you read it. He doesn’t talk about peace, he talks about being in peace. He talks about taming the tiger within—not getting rid of the tiger, embracing the tiger. Thich Nhat Hanh is like one big giant moment of clarity who’s walking around, blowing people’s minds.
And I love the guys I see all the time who are just so enthusiastic, they want you to have this information, this insight—“Check this out!” They start tripping on these concepts and ideas, tripping on life and the living of it. Then, two years later, I’ll be at a conference and I run into that guy, I go over to him and say, “So good to see you! Remember two years ago, you were talking about this stuff, and it was just really an interesting perspective for me.” And he goes, “Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . never mind that, check this out!” I love that thinking, like the excitement of a child. We’re all trying to get back to that wonderment, to be able to marvel in the ordinary.
I’ve completely accepted death; occasionally I’m mildly curious—what’s it going to look like? But I’ll just wait and see, because I’m not fully cooked, you know what I mean? There are still pieces of me that need work, places I fall down, but I know how to deal with that now. Pick the spots, man. Pick the spots. Where’s the hotbed of opportunity? Not to get your thoughts and your ideas in, not to spread the gospel according to Earl—but to just simply, effectively, consciously interact. Participate, be a part of it. Connect.
I’m an elder now. That was a shocker, the first time I realized that. “Me? I’ve never been an elder at anything.” And when people say, “Dude, how did you do that?” I know they’re going to hate the answer. I say, “You already know. One day at a time, man. It’s true. Just one day at a time.”
What’s beautiful is, “one day at a time” means one thing at ninety days and something profoundly different at twenty-five, twenty- six years. And that guy asking the question, he just might find that out. It’s possible. It’s always possible.
Chris Mecham
The Internet has created new ways for people to connect with other people, put their thoughts and feelings out in the world, get support and encouragement—in other words, build a community. I don’t think blogs and chat rooms can replace face-to- face relationships, but they do seem to be a good way for people in recovery to find additional sources of support. That’s been the case for Chris, and I’m glad because it gave me the chance to find him and his story. I found his blog, The Last Chance Texaco, when I was looki
ng for people with interesting stories to tell. I admired Chris’s honesty in talking about the difficult issues we all face—loneliness, feeling isolated, worries about money and jobs. When I asked him to participate, he was newly sober, and I have to admit, that made me pause. But I decided that his voice and his story were both unusual and universal enough to include. Since then, I’m glad to say Chris has continued to walk the recovery road, one step and one day at a time.
I
’ve always loved Patty Griffin’s music, and I happened to get sober on Martin Luther King Day, so her song “Up to the Mountain” is especially meaningful to me. This particular song is about having a mission and being called to that mission by a power greater than yourself. When I think I can’t do it anymore, I remember that it’s not about me. It’s about performing God’s will in the world.
I’m the last guy most people would ever suspect would have a problem with drugs or alcohol. There’s a family picture taken in probably 1971 and I swear my little sister and I look like we’re sitting in the laps of the most optimistic young couple in America. We were LDS—Mormons—living in Idaho and Utah. I earned money delivering the newspaper, mowing lawns, and shoveling snow. I got reasonable grades, though my test scores indicated that I should have done much better. I was an Eagle Scout.
I was also hopelessly unhappy, terminally unique, and, I see now, doomed to look for a solution outside myself to the problems I had inside. Everything worked to a degree. I liked pot. I liked to drink. I smoked crack one time and knew I had better never use it again because I could see it becoming a problem. And then I did a line of crystal meth.
Moments of Clarity Page 18
