Long Past Stopping (36 page)

 

I
STAYED THERE
for another four months, slowly trying to make connections and set up a safety net back in San Francisco. I did whatever they told me to do. Underneath it all, I was as anxious and uncomfortable as ever, and I wanted to get high so fucking bad.

My weekly meetings with Eileen were depressing. She had told me they had been expecting a challenge, and instead they got a piece of silly putty they didn't know what to do with.

“So are you talking to your sponsor?” she asked.

I had asked this musician from San Francisco to be my sponsor, and I was calling him every day.

“I can see that you're going to meetings,” she said, glancing over my attendance card. “Are you making any progress with the steps?”

“I'm working on them,” I answered.

“Honestly, I don't know what to do with you. We've tried everything, and no matter what we come up with, you just do what you're told.”

“Isn't that a good thing? Isn't that what I'm supposed to do?”

“Yes and no. Sure, it makes our job easy if you just say yes to everything, but…I don't even know how to say this…. We're concerned that this person who is going around following suggestions and doing all the right things is not really you. I would expect you to change a little after what you've been through, but you're almost unrecognizable. We want to work with that hardheaded, stubborn, obnoxious, charming, charismatic Oran because—and both Barry and Jan agree with me on this—that's the guy who's going to keep you clean. If we can't bring that part of you out, we have nothing to work with.”

“I don't know what to do about that. Believe me, I wish I could.”

“Hey, are you still doing that
Artist's Way
book I gave you?” One of the books she had given me was a workbook with different exercises designed to trigger creativity. Eileen and the whole staff, including Jan, had changed their minds since the last time I was there. They had decided that the key to my staying sober involved getting back into music and reconnecting with my old friends. She hoped the book would help.

“Yeah. I'm writing every morning, and going to the city to see music
on the weekends.” One of the exercises was to experience some kind of culture, art, or nature once a week. I had even started sitting in on a film-making class back at the Art Institute.

“Good. What about the affirmations?”

I was hoping she wouldn't bring those up. “Um, I can't do the affirmations,” I said, waiting for her to tell me how important they were.

“Why not?”

“Honestly, because I think they're bullshit.”

“I'd like to hear more about why you think affirmations are bullshit, Oran. I mean, they seem to work for an awful lot of people, including myself. But for some reason, you think they're bullshit?” she said.

I should have just lied. I didn't want to argue about it, but since she asked, I answered, “Yeah, I do think they're bullshit, and here's why. They're based in fantasy. Standing in front of the mirror and saying ‘I'm pretty and people like me' doesn't make someone pretty or likable. If it affirms anything, it's that they're ugly and people hate them. I mean, who else would say something like that? I'm sorry, but I can't do the affirmations. I refuse to look at myself in the mirror and tell lies. I already hate myself enough as it is.” I got a little worked up.

“Okay, Oran. The next staff meeting is tomorrow, and I'm going to recommend that we start working on an exit plan,” she said.

“You're going to kick me out because I won't do those fucking affirmations?” This was bullshit.

“No, no, no. I'm going to recommend we release you soon. This is what we've been waiting for. I finally got a glimpse of the old Oran.”

What the fuck? I didn't understand what had just happened. “I have to admit, I cannot figure you guys out for the life of me,” I said.

“That's a good thing, because if you could, we wouldn't be able to do our job,” she said with a grin. “Listen, that was good work today. I'll let you know what happens at the meeting. And one more thing, Oran…”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Promise me you won't do those affirmations.”

 

A
FTER MY RELEASE,
I stayed on at the sober house, did outpatient treatment three nights a week, and had even started a band called Dig That Body Up, It's Alive, with a guy named John Dwyer. I had met him at a place called Adobe Books, in the Mission, where a lot of my old friends congregated.

I wasn't having any luck finding a place to live, though. As much as
my friends were starting to warm up to me, no one seemed ready to give me a set of keys. It was still going to be a few more weeks before I was released from outpatient anyway. The rehab still wanted to see my relapse prevention plan, and I could tell they were watching to make sure my outburst wasn't just a onetime thing.

I didn't go crazy, but I allowed myself some room for what I was hoping would be interpreted as a bit of healthy cynicism. Not just to convince them the old Oran was coming back, but because it also made me feel better. I had been clean now for a record of four months, but nothing seemed to help with my anxiety. The best I could do was to try hiding it.

Unable to find a room in San Francisco, I ended up moving in with a trombone player named Chad I knew out in West Oakland. I didn't know him that well, but I told him what I had been going through, and he didn't seem to care too much, probably because his place was a shithole and there was nothing to steal anyway. Nothing. No TV, no pots and pans, no stereo, and aside from the food and water bowl for his cat, there weren't even any dishes. I even had to buy a spoon at the thrift store, when unable to stand the anxiety for one more fucking minute, I found myself in the Mission buying heroin again. When the euphoria faded, I found myself in my bare room, sitting on the piece of foam I used as a mattress, once again wondering how the fuck I had let myself relapse again. I had no idea what led up to it, and my despair and self-loathing was beyond anything I had experienced in the past. Once I started, though, there seemed to be nothing I could do to stop, and a few hours later I was back in the Mission buying more.

It didn't help that it was Christmas, my least favorite time of year, and even though Mom was only a couple of miles away, I hadn't spoken to her since those orderlies tackled me in Santa Barbara over a year ago. Kyle, who was caught in the middle of our relationship, was hanging out with her. I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas day alone at the house—more depressed than I thought humanly possible—shooting speedballs and cuddling with Chad's cat. I knew intellectually that there was a window of opportunity to stop before I got physically addicted, but as always I pushed through that window and rode out the binge for as long as I could.

Because I had sold my drum set, Dig That Body Up, It's Alive had to rehearse at a studio that rented out drums by the hour. I still had my cymbals, though, and Dwyer figured out exactly what was going on when I showed up to rehearsal without them.

“Fuck. I must have left them in Oakland. You got a few extra bucks so I can rent some?” We always split the cost right down the middle, but this time he had already paid for the whole thing. I had been doing such a good job at staying clean that my trust managers had agreed to help out by sending me a thousand dollars a month until I got back on my feet, but I was still always broke.

“You mean you left them at the pawnshop?” he asked me. “Let's go,” he said before I had a chance to respond. While driving to the pawnshop, he asked me what I planned to do.

“I love playing with you, man, but it's not going to work out if you keep selling your cymbals for dope.” It was funny coming from him, because I wasn't so sure he didn't have a problem with drugs himself. Unlike me, though, his “problem” always seemed to result in having fun and getting laid. My problem led me to hiding out by myself on Christmas Eve trying to figure out how I had become such a miserable piece of shit. Although I didn't know what the hell I expected them to do for me, Dwyer convinced me to go back to Redwood City.

 

I
MEAN, REALLY,”
Barry said to me in his office a few days later.

“What the hell do you expect us to do for you?”

I didn't say anything. All my focus was going into not letting the floodgates burst. A few tears came out anyway despite my valiant attempt. It hadn't even been close to my worst relapse, but given a few more days, I'm sure it would have been.

“I'm sorry, Oran. I'm not saying this to be condescending or patronizing,” he continued. “I've been there, and I know how hard it is, but I just don't think there's anything we can do. If you can think of anything, I'm all ears.”

I couldn't think of anything. I had tried it all so many times that I figured the best thing I could do now was just try to accept that I was doomed to failure.

“Thanks anyway,” I said, getting up to leave.

“Sit down a minute,” he directed me. “I want you to call this woman, Dr. Mash, in Miami. She's running a program out on a Caribbean island with an experimental hallucinogen called ibogaine. Her work appears to be having positive results.”

He handed me a number copied out of his Rolodex.

“Give her a call and find out when the next session is. In the meantime, try to take it easy on yourself and let us know if there's anything we can do to help.”

I gave the woman a call. Her secretary said they had a session coming up in three weeks and gave me a list of things I needed to do if I wanted to take part. First I had to convince my trust administrators to pay twelve thousand dollars for the treatment and fly me to the Caribbean so I could take this highly illegal drug. I also had to go through another physical and get my heart checked out because there had been a couple of deaths related to this drug. On the off chance that I could get all that shit together, I needed a passport. Last but not least, I knew I wouldn't be able to get any of this done if I was dope sick. That's what I told the rehab psychiatrist anyway, and he gave me a prescription for a month's supply of methadone. I took it straight to the pharmacy, where my co-pay was a shocking eleven dollars. I'd been going about this whole thing wrong from the start.

 

A
S IF TO AFFIRM
what a complete fuckup I was, I waited till the day before I was supposed to leave for the Caribbean to go to the passport office. I stood at the counter, stunned, as the passport clerk told me there was no way she could verify my information that quickly.

“Listen, lady. I'm in a whole lot of trouble, and I need to get on that plane,” I said as calmly as I could.

I had given them all the paperwork, which included a letter from Dr. Mash explaining that I was going to be a test subject in a drug rehabilitation experiment. Even without the paperwork, one look at me should have conveyed a lot. I was sweating profusely, smelled awful, and was back to my regular active-addiction weight of a hundred and twenty-five pounds.

The clerk looked at me, then looked at the paperwork and said, “Come back tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. You should still be able to make your plane.”

C
OLLEGE DIDN'T REALLY
agree with me. I picked what was possibly the worst school at which to be a controversial artist. It was hard to get attention at the San Francisco Art Institute, without either threatening your own life or someone else's.

Even getting naked had lost its shock value and was considered a legitimate genre. I saw naked people yelling at their parents. Naked people rubbing themselves with meat. Naked people sewing their fingers together. Naked people laughing…crying…masturbating…giving birth to Hello Kitty dolls…Anything you could do while naked that hadn't been done before. At first it made me uncomfortable, but when that wore off, I found myself annoyed at how predictable it all was.

Because I had zero interest in getting naked or threatening people, I decided the next best thing might be to actually learn how to draw and paint. My technical skills were extremely limited, but when I asked for help, my teachers were hesitant to offer it.

“Is there a trick to drawing hands I don't know about?” I asked my drawing teacher while I struggled with a sketch of what appeared to be the offspring of a squid and a lobster claw, coming out of a shirt cuff.

“There are techniques, but if I showed them to you, your hands would look like everyone else's. Now, what makes your drawing so amazing is that I can guarantee you will never see another hand like that. I
could show you how to draw a hand, but I think it would be more valuable to keep following your own path,” he said, moving on to the next student.

Fucking lazy bastard,
I thought to myself.

With few exceptions, I encountered the same attitude among most of the teachers.

“What I find most intriguing about these paintings is that none of the subjects are showing their hands,” my painting teacher said to me during a critique. “All of them are hiding them in their pockets, behind their back, or off the canvas, which raises an intriguing question. What are they trying to hide?”

“That I can't paint hands,” I answered.

“Perfect. Does everyone see how Oran was able to use his limitations to make an otherwise uninteresting portrait a work of art?” she asked. As far as I could tell, the only thing they were teaching us was the art of the underhanded compliment.

 

F
OR THE FIRST
couple of years, I lived in Berkeley with Eli and some other friends, and commuted to San Francisco at six in the morning to sweep up the school halls for ten dollars a day. At night I delivered pizza, or drove a limousine, often not making it back home till two or three to get a few hours of sleep, then waking up to do it again. Jack was helping me out with eight hundred bucks a month, but tired of the painting instructors, I had switched over to photography and film, which used up all of the money he sent me.

What little free time I had between work and school was spent messing around on a drum set that one of Eli's coworkers had donated to the house along with an electric bass. On the occasion that Eli and I were home at the same time, we would attempt to make something resembling music. Playing the drums was the only respite I got from the endless running back and forth between work and school.

At school, I mostly kept to myself, talking only to Aaron and only if there wasn't anyone else within earshot. I would have liked to make some new friends, but I had no idea how to go about it. I had been hanging out with the same group of people for so long that we almost had our own language.

Aaron wasn't very good at this business of meeting people either, but he was better than me. Through his efforts, we collectively made one new friend, Sam. According to Sam, who was from Baltimore, he had
been a full-blown alcoholic since he was twelve. We met him when he was trying to cut down on his drinking by taking acid every day. He was basically an eighteen-year-old white version of Redd Foxx, and, like me, he didn't need to use big words when critiquing art.

“That shit is wack,” he'd say, looking at yet another self-portrait of some kid glamorously shooting heroin.

“Yup, that shit sucks,” I agreed. Sam and I understood each other just fine without using
didactic, juxtaposition, tension, balance, referential, color temperature….
Like Sam said, the shit was fucking wack.

After getting into an irreparable argument with one of my roommates in Berkeley over my inability to do the dishes, Sam and I started living together in San Francisco. If Sam was Redd Foxx, then I was an eighteen-year-old Walter Matthau, and our apartment was like a spinoff show of
The Odd Couple
and
Sanford and Son
. Sam hung a couple of pieces of cardboard from the ceiling of the living room to give himself the feel of having some personal space, and I took the room in back with no windows.

Living with Sam, who was far more of a mess than I ever was, turned me into more of the Jack Lemmon character. I was constantly nagging at Sam to do the dishes, clean his room, stop drinking so much, and eat something besides ramen and Cheetos. I'd never seen real alcoholism before, and I hadn't read much into the fact that Sam had turned down three much nicer apartments because the corner stores had carded him.

Partly to set an example for Sam, and partly because I was so broke I was eating oatmeal three times a day, I rarely drank. The limousine company I was working for was shut down by the city for operating illegally, and I was lucky I hadn't been arrested myself. The boss rented out the cars for seventy dollars a night, and we would drive around the city trying to lure customers by offering them a bottle of wine, or by under-cutting the cabs. The penalty if caught was a two-thousand-dollar fine, and two months in jail. Eli found the job first and warned me of the possible consequences, but when I made three hundred and fifty bucks my first night on the job, I decided it was worth the risk. Unfortunately, that night had been a fluke, and afterward I rarely came away with more than forty or fifty dollars. When that ended, I was so exhausted from hustling all the time that I decided to stop working and went down to the welfare office and got on food stamps. To cut down on art supplies, I invested in a pair of bolt cutters and started breaking into the Fotomat Dumpsters, where I found far stranger pictures than I could have ever come up with on my own.

At this point, Jack had just bought a three-million-dollar mansion. I took a perverse pride in the fact that I was now technically a welfare recipient, and I relished the irony that my dad's books were not only on the bestseller list for almost two years running, but that they were in the self-help category.

Chronic destitution didn't agree with me, and I became a depressed hermit, spending days at a time in my windowless room. My only human interactions were nagging Sam to get his shit together.

The hermit's life came to an abrupt end when summer came and I was cut off from Jack's money. Instead of looking for work, I usually let Eli do the job hunting and then I would use him as a reference. This time I followed him to a little building downtown where they handed me a walkie-talkie, a bright orange helmet, and a moped, and sent me around the city delivering packages. It was demeaning work since we got shit on by everyone, from the doormen to the mail clerks to our dispatchers, even the bike messengers treated us with disdain. The moped they assigned to me was so loud that it set off every car alarm I passed, and at least two times a week I would get pulled over and handed tickets for noise pollution.

The bike messengers did seem a lot cooler than us, and after a few months I bought an old Schwinn cruiser, which wasn't very functional as a means of taking packages around the city, but it was hipper than the moped. For the first six weeks I rode my bike nine hours a day, slept for twelve, and woke up so sore I could barely move. After getting through that, I found that I had more than enough energy to work, practice my drums afterward, and go out drinking till two in the morning, which I could now afford. I hadn't done anything in the way of physical exercise since I was thirteen and was amazed at how much it helped my mood.

Eli was now living in a gigantic loft space in the Mission District with a bunch of artists and musicians who didn't mind if we played music there. We picked up where we had left off with our funk jams, and a couple of his roommates decided to join in. Before I had any business performing for an audience, these guys set up a show at a café and I found myself playing in front of a few hundred people. The show was much more fun than any art opening I had been to, and I met twice as many people as I had in the, by now, two years I'd attended art school.

That band ended after only one more show, but Eli and I found two guitar players and started doing a weekly Sunday-afternoon gig at a bar called the Chameleon. The two other guys were virtuosos, and Eli was a quick learner, but I was out of my league and began losing interest in
school, as my focus shifted to practicing drums. We went by a different band name every week until settling on Sparkle Cock. Our shows were always hit or miss, since the concept was that we didn't write songs or rehearse. We also asked other musicians to sit in with us, including my mom, who had no idea what she was in for when she came to check us out. Mom, who had started playing piano again, was enrolled in classes at a community college in Oakland with Pharoah Sanders, who had played with John Coltrane back in the day.

“You mean he's teaching the class?” I asked her when she told me about it on the phone.

“No. He's a student. You've got to get down here, man. I mean, how often do you get to see your mom play with Pharoah Sanders?”

When I went to her next class, I was surprised to see that the drummer was a kid named Tre Cool, whom I had gone to hippie camp with. He was now playing in stadiums with his band Green Day. It was pretty impressive watching my mom keep up with those guys, so I knew she wouldn't have a problem keeping up with us.

“Are you kidding? What do you expect me to do up there?” she asked when I told her she was going to join us for the second set.

“You know. Do that Cecil Taylor shit. Go nuts,” I told her.

“But I hate that stuff. Anyone can do it,” she responded.

“Then do it,” I said, grabbing her by the hand and leading her up to the stage.

Before we even had a chance to start, she began banging on the Chameleon's decrepit, upright piano as hard as she could with her fists. When we joined in, she moved on to using her forearms and knees, and by the end of the set, she had climbed up on the piano and was jumping up and down on the keyboard.

 

D
EPENDING ON HOW
one looked at it, I either had amazing or terrible luck with girls. Considering I never approached them and ran away whenever they tried to talk to me, it was something of a miracle that I got laid at all. Of course, it had only happened once in the three years since I'd been in high school. Just like the first time, the girl took all the initiative, and I had been drinking enough to go along with it. That ended after our second date, when she locked herself in my bathroom and was screaming at the top of her lungs that she was going to slit her wrists. I had just worked my first day as a bike messenger and, exhausted, kept falling asleep while we were messing around in my room.
The next thing I knew, Sam was shaking me awake, and she was yelling and crying from the bathroom. We had moved from our basement apartment to a second-floor flat in the Mission. After failing to reason with her, I climbed out on the fire escape and scaled the side of the building to see if I needed to call 911, but she had apparently just done the whole thing to get my attention. If anything, that experience only made me more afraid of women, and I continued avoiding them for a while after that.

There were, however, two girls I was able to talk to. Joan, whom I had been roommates with in Berkeley, was nonthreatening because she had a boyfriend. The other was Joan's friend Jibz, the first girl I had ever had a crush on, when I was at summer camp. The first time I saw Jibz again I recognized her immediately. She looked almost exactly the same as she had when we were kids, except that she was two and a half feet taller. I had tagged along with Joan, who was going to meet her for coffee. I had barely managed to introduce myself when she said, “I remember you! You were that amazing juggler kid who was too cool to talk to anyone else.”

I didn't know what to say to that. Just seeing her again made me so anxious I couldn't think straight, so I just nodded dumbly and asked her if she still kept in touch with any of our old camp mates. It was amazing to see how little I had changed since I was nine, at least when it came to interacting with girls. I was still attracted to the same one, and I was still hiding my nervousness by acting too cool and aloof to talk to her. My side of the conversation was so forced and awkward that I assumed she must have thought I was an idiot, and probably hated me.

“Well. Hey, it's good to run into you,” I said as we were leaving.

“Yeah. It's really great to see you again. We should hang out again soon,” she said.

“Sure” was all I managed.

Unfortunately, I was only able to get over my fear of talking to her after she started dating Eli, at which point she no longer seemed as scary. When she broke up with Eli a year or so later, I got nervous again, until she started seeing another guy. By that time I had convinced her she should go to the Art Institute, so we were hanging out almost every day. When she broke up with that boyfriend, I decided that for the first time in my life, I was going to take some initiative.

I just didn't know what taking initiative meant. I had been told as a kid that opening doors for women was sexist. That pulling out chairs, waiting for them to get out of elevators, and paying for dinner were all sexist customs. From these lessons I inferred that asking a girl on a date or even having sexual thoughts was sexist, and I believed that if I so
much as touched a girl, let alone leaned in for a kiss, she would produce a whistle out of nowhere and I would be branded as a predator for the rest of my life. It was a tricky situation, and the only option I could think of was to win her over with reason.