The Harder They Fall (40 page)

When you see that and go, “Hey!” you get some experience in feeling like “I can get as high as I ever was using drugs from this sober way of life.” I realize that I never even needed to do that in the first place! Some people have a harder time, where you can see they’re just dying for their drug, their alcohol, whatever. They miss it, but I don’t. I can honestly say that being sober is better than getting high. No question about it. And I consider myself an especially blessed person because I have all this proof of it. Having a recovery program that works is a miracle as astounding as healing the blind or crippled, or walking on water, or raising the dead. It’s more miraculous to me personally because I know I was gone. That person was not going to write that book. So to me recovery is a miracle, and I have proof.

As I’ve said elsewhere, Elizabeth realized she could let me court her because I put my desire to meet her in a letter. She had seen me unreliable but could trust my written words. To me, even at my most disturbed and deranged, there was always something sacred about the written word. Paul Valéry said that poetry is the voice of someone happier, more profound and intelligent,
and happier
than any real person, and I always take that seriously.

I don’t find myself inclining to the old manipulations with my wife that I was known for when stoned. When you do, you know you’re doing it, and you know that when you do other things to get high that don’t involve substance abuse—another way like sex, but there are a million ways to get high and still have the exact bad behavior as if you were using. But if you’re in recovery, you immediately have a conscience about it. You know that the sense of joy that you have of being in the light when you are in real
recovery is darkened immediately when you lie. The minute you use another person for your own benefit, the moment you stop seeing other people in affliction that you want to help, and see them as objects that you want to use and manipulate, the whole universe gets dark again just as if you had a hangover. Then you go, “Oh shit!” and you do something about it. Otherwise you go back to being—without using drugs, without drinking—you go back to the same state of mind you were in when you were drinking and using drugs. So it’s not hard to tell. If you have any honesty at all, it happens immediately … the whole world gets dark again! You feel scared, paranoid, remorseful, terrified. Everything you feel when you use comes flying back, and you go, “Fuck, I have to do something about this,” and then you try to do something about it. And you go back in the light, for a while. It’s not spiritual perfection but spiritual progress. You make progress, fall down, get up, fall down, and get up. That’s all there is, because we’re not going to become saints. Most of us are not saint material. We’re material to be, like, psychopathic criminals! And yet we have this chance to live a normal life.

Think about what alcoholics went through for thousands of years, being put in a cellar somewhere and have the key thrown away. Right up until the fifties and sixties, they put you in a mental hospital and threw the key away. Now people have another opportunity. This is why I say access to a recovery program has saved my life. It has enabled millions of others to be sane and lead normal lives, and therefore is of the same significance as any other medical breakthrough in the twentieth century. Somebody should get the Nobel Prize for this! I understand Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was actually in line to receive it but made it clear that in keeping with the principle of anonymity he turned it down! Recovery is as unbelievable and incredible as the development of antibiotics, just that it works in a mysterious, spiritual way.

Walt Whitman said somewhere to spend time with powerful, uneducated people. I always read that and thought, “What a fine idea.” Having lived my whole life of addiction with a sense of entitlement, being, like, “I’m this special person who has this special gift, and I should be treated differently,” I go to my recovery program here in Waltham and know I’m a
regular person and always was. I’m a human being among other human beings for the first time in my life. I wasn’t that special or lower than everyone else, which is the corollary of being better than everyone else. No, I was the same. That was the central big relief in my life. I go to my recovery program that is filled with working-class people, or people who do not have jobs, sometimes do not have a place to live or enough to eat. I go to meetings with people for whom recovery is a matter of life and death, and over a period of five years, it’s just kicked the shit out of all sense of being different. I have come home, and I feel freer to exercise the talent that I do have. If I wrote ten poems in a year in my previous life, when I was drinking, when I got into recovery, I was able to finish ten poems in a month. And they are better poems. So I have that proof too.

(musician)

There’s a whole bunch of alcoholics on both sides of my family, but they function in the sense that everybody kept their jobs. There were no divorces, except for my grandmother, but she’s not an alcoholic. She was just a wild child like I was. Our alcoholics all kept their jobs and stayed married.

In their generation, you just drank. Everybody’s parents drank. There were no question marks anywhere about it. Some were better at it than others. As a little kid, I remember being amused by the mother of one of my friends. She kept on her chenille bathrobe all during the day, and her eyes were so puffed up that they were slits. She always wore her bathroom slippers, and she was puffy. Not that she ate too much, but puffy from too much alcohol. Her husband was skinny and away more than he was home. That mother was spooky, ripped all the time. So I knew there were varying degrees to handle drink.

My own father was an alcoholic, but he was never mean. He just sort of drank a little bit all the time. He was a peaceful kind of go-to-sleep-at-nine-o’clock drunk. I’m a periodic. I detested being drunk all the time. I didn’t like being foggy. Yet I didn’t see myself as sober all the time either.

My parents and everybody else’s of my youth asked why we took those drugs. Didn’t they notice when they were reading to us? Some of the children’s classics our parents read us alluded to chemicals, but the parents didn’t notice this. Before I was five,
Alice in Wonderland
was read to me, and Alice takes at least five different chemicals. A mushroom has psychedelic properties. Round things say, “Eat me.” God knows what they are. Alice gets literally high and too big for the room. She has to take another drug to come down and get small. One says, “Drink me.” She goes around Wonderland taking drugs.

Then there are the opium poppies in
The Wizard of Oz
. Dorothy and her companions all fall asleep in a field of poppies and wake up and see the magical Emerald City. Then you sprinkle some dust on yourself in
Peter Pan
, and you can suddenly fly and have adventures. As a child, I understood that the chemicals were going to make it so you have these magical experiences. It wasn’t conscious, but when you hear these stories, you take that in. Chemicals can change you instantly! I thought maybe the parents weren’t paying attention to what they were reading. So the song “White Rabbit” was actually addressed to the parents … “One pill makes you larger, one pill makes you small…. But the ones that Mother gives you don’t do anything at all.” I wrote the song at a red piano that was missing ten keys, and I was trying to tell my parents’ generation that this wasn’t open to interpretation, it didn’t have to be figured out, but was right there in those books.

I had a
Leave It to Beaver
childhood. My parents didn’t fight and stayed together. There wasn’t any stuff that I was trying to get away from. There’s no whining going on here in my adulthood about my family circumstances: “When I was little, my parents did such-and-such to me.” In my case I believe the alcoholism is genetic, but also environmental in the sense that drinking too much is what everybody did. So, if you have it genetically, and you start in, boy, you’re screwed!

In high school, we would go out and sneak beers or gin or whatever, pretty much like everyone else we knew. College, the same thing. I was a little racier than the others though. I’m from California, and I went to Finch College in New York City. Now the deal with Finch College was that it was a bunch of rich girls who didn’t have the grades to get into Vassar, Wellesley, or the Cliffe, so they went to Finch. Finch basically teaches you which fork to use and how to get a Princeton boy, or Yale boy, or Harvard boy. It was also a suitcase school, and we would go to Princeton or Yale on the weekends.

I remember one time this friend of mine, who eventually married John Huston, the movie director, she and I went down to Princeton, as we usually did on the weekend. She was dancing around with her clothes on. She wasn’t doing anything weird, but she was dancing by herself. I was singing
and playing the guitar. Singing a Chaucerian folk song that had dirty lyrics.