Authors: Joe Putignano
My housing was in La Jolla, and almost daily I drove down to the La Jolla shore cliffs overlooking an army of sea lions playing and barking. By the cliff on a park bench I meditated, visiting my sanctuary, a place on the inside where no one could touch me, almost like heroin. Meditation helped me cope with a very difficult, arduous, and lonely tour. I used to laugh at all those self-help, New Age gurus, but here I was, walking in their footsteps. Everything I judged in life I later had to walk through.
I was beginning to understand my touring life as a spiritual path, since I was constantly forced to grow, accept, and change. It was a quest I wanted to end, because I still couldn’t find where I belonged within the group. How do we find ourselves when we are truly lost? I looked ahead, knowing what city was next, and tried to figure out how I was going to cope with it. We were headed for Boston. While most artists would be excited to go to their hometown, I was terrified. I had escaped for a reason, and had no plans of returning. How could I go back there? If I returned, would I become the same broken boy who had left? Would those old wounds reopen, letting the darkness back in?
Weeks later I found myself standing at the Long Wharf overlooking the harbor in Boston, watching sails slice through a pink sunset blossoming up from the horizon. These were my iconic waters, the waters that had cradled the dead, and not just any dead, but my dead. I had buried my warrior here many years ago. I had wrapped him up in iron chains and sunk him miles down into the Atlantic Ocean, never to return to the surface. I stood watching the sea in a trance as tourists walked behind me.
I returned to my apartment to unpack, the old cobblestone streets of Boston awakening the memories in my bones, biomechanically melting the ice, thawing out what used to be. We can leave our homes to become new people, but what happens when we return? Do we take on our old forms to fulfill our destinies as though we had never left?
I walked all of Boston, carefully examining my territory, and ended up in Kenmore Square. I was slightly oblivious because I was focusing on opening night and the perfection of performance. As I looked up, I noticed I had walked over the bridge on Brookline Avenue and sidestepped onto Lansdowne Street. I’ll never forget that place, and though it had changed a lot, I was flooded with images from the past. There I stood in my old, dirty raver clothes, pupils as black as midnight, loaded on benzodiazepines and coke, swaying in a long, crooked line into club Axis, which had been resurrected into the House of Blues. I stood under a giant mechanical parking lot where I had once crashed my mother’s car three times trying to get out.
That street was the birthplace of my addiction. My old ghost still stood in line, waiting for something. What was he waiting for, and why couldn’t he see me? It killed me to see myself looking like that. He was confused, terrified, desperate for love, but doing the exact thing that would never achieve all that he was after. His anger chained him to that line and he would forever remain there, searching for the key that only existed inside his bones. I left before that ghost could possess my new flesh, and made my way back to the Green Line station. The catacombs of Boston still had the smell of old, rotted iron, heavy, oxygen-stealing soot, and loud, screeching wheels from the subway car sounding like a band of banshees.
Boston had changed tremendously since I had left. Many of the graffitied streets I knew had been repainted. Old, broken neighborhoods were rebuilt, and what I remembered as sad was now a new, exciting, and thriving city, full of enthusiasm and hope. Not only did the landscape change, but the people transformed with it. My brother and sisters had had children who were becoming teenagers, and everyone seemed to shed their old, uncomfortable
cocoons, emerging into the beings they were meant to be. I tried to embrace the change, but the powerful energy around my past still filled me with dread.
I walked down to the Seaport, where the Cirque du Soleil tent stood. The pungent smell of the ocean drifted in, and though I had traveled to many shores, no other seawater was this intoxicating to my senses. The scent of salt reminded me of something I wanted to keep forgotten. Was it the rotting corpse I had left on the ocean floor?
My mother, sister, and two nieces were all coming to tonight’s dress rehearsal. It was always difficult for me to perform in front of people I knew, even though they tend to be the least likely to judge. We had almost reached our 800th show and I knew my track inside and out, but I was a nervous wreck. I wanted tonight to go perfectly, because I wanted my mother to see how much I had changed. I wanted her to see the boy she once knew—the boy she had held while he overdosed and trembled from seizures—come down from the grid covered in thousands of shiny objects, reflecting all the changes his recovery represented. I wanted my sister, who had sat there in court trying to save my life while I was shackled and handcuffed, see me finally break free of my chains of addiction and move on to something good and pure. I wanted them to finally see the man I had become. I meditated twice before the show, feeling dizzy and nauseous. I wanted to control the situation and have it play out exactly as it did in my head.
Unsurprisingly, I failed. I was so terrified that I could not connect with the music or with my own muscles. To my family it was all right, but that performance did not come from the place it could have come from.
I went home defeated and began thinking about my life story, not just in segments but as a whole—it was an odd cycle of birth, death, rebirth, and all the elements I’d survived. The words from the psychic repeated in my head: “You have two large holes in your heart that you have to heal.” I had listened to every self-help book on my iPod, prayed, and meditated, but the truth was that I was falling apart. I had done so much work to surrender, and when I removed my ego’s fortress brick by brick with spiritual principles, I discovered a
terrified, angry little boy who had run out of options. There was so much deep-seated rage and self-hatred that I didn’t know where to begin. I lay perfectly naked, absolutely defenseless to the world.
I knew I had clawed my way through a self-made hell, and I wanted to live a new life where I no longer identified as a victim. I dropped all my defenses and stood where I was—birthmarks, scars, ugliness, jealousy, hatred, despair, grief, and my debilitating lack of self-acceptance. I had no idea that the real work began here, and that my drug use had been part of a huge fortress protecting this naked being. The only way for me to change was to continue walking, bare and exposed.
Every day, my ego tried to come back with a new weapon of defense, a new way to cover my nudity, but I continued to be vulnerable without shame. Every time I went for a weapon, I stopped myself and thought, “I no longer need this; put it down, accept what is happening to you.” A few weeks after we opened, my father and twenty other family members were coming to the show. I hadn’t seen many of them in over fifteen years and felt a sense of shame because of who I had been in the past. I knew they were coming to see me perform, not shoot drugs, but I didn’t want a repeat performance of the dress rehearsal. I knew I couldn’t control what would happen, and as my body began to feel anxiety, I did my best at feeling it. I had to perform in the place I stood. It was going to be either good or bad or somewhere in between. I would continue to do my best, but ultimately there wasn’t much I could do about it.
I had learned to perform in humility earlier in the tour, but somewhere along the way I had forgotten it. The most powerful spiritual principles that worked were the ones I had to continue to learn over and over, and they seemed to change form. I hated that, and was tired of always thinking,
Haven’t I already done this?
But the truth was that I would have to relearn them again and again, for the rest of my life.
It was time I stopped hating myself for what I was not. For a long time my perception had been directed at what I didn’t have, but if I looked closely I would see I had everything I needed. There had always been
a huge support system in my life, and I had to start listening to those supportive forces instead of the constant insecurities in my own head.
I remembered a few years ago being possessed by the chronic blackness of addiction, unable to stop shooting heroin. I relentlessly prayed, asking God and the universe for one thing: “Please help me stop shooting heroin.” In that moment, right then, I was living that prayer, so what was I really depressed about? I had everything I ever asked for. Was this the missing puzzle piece to my soul?
My father texted me a hundred times the day of the show. I knew I had his support and love, and did my best to push the fear back into the realms of my past. Robert was also there in the audience, which helped me relax, knowing I had a true friend witnessing my triumph or defeat. I walked over to climb the ladder and saw my friend backstage, and he whispered, “Stay in your spirit, not in your head.” I kept those words close and climbed the ladder to the grid.
My father was in a wheelchair because he had had a series of operations on his ankle that would not heal. The outcome was likely to be amputation, and I would later accompany him to one of his surgeries. On the day of that surgery he had achieved two years in recovery, a miracle I never thought I would see in my lifetime. As he lay on the bed, I remembered a horrible memory of the two of us. I was on a hospital bed as he stood over me; I had just tried to kill myself, completely intoxicated. I had never seen my father look so scared. Now I had the honor of standing next to him on his own two-year anniversary as a son in recovery, and my eyes filled with tears of appreciation. We spoke about the difficulties of being human and of losing a limb, asking ourselves whether we clung to our bones only out of vanity. He looked scared before his surgery, but knew he would be all right.
Before my descent to the stage, I thought of my father. I thought about his fear mixed in with my own. I thought about how proud I was that he had entered recovery, as I had been a witness to his destructive disease. My eyes were welling up, despite the fact that I would frequently say, “I don’t cry in recovery, because there is nothing more to cry about.” Having had such a tortured history,
I believed I had shed every possible tear. But I was about to cry. The preshow announcements were made, and I took my father’s fear, along with my own anxiety, and ate them. Picasso once said, “In art one must kill one’s father.” I’m not sure I completely understand what he meant, but for me, I absorbed all the incredible parts of my father and used them.
The show was amazing. I tried to give my family a special wave at the end during my bow, but those damn tears kept returning.
Afterward, my family and Robert were going out to dinner at the Seaport. I was nervous to see everyone, but couldn’t avoid the gathering. As we walked to the restaurant my brother, who I didn’t even know would be at the show, came darting toward me. He was excited to see me perform. I would silently thank my brother every time I saw him, for it was he who had propelled me forward in gymnastics by always creating new objects for me to flip over. We continued to walk, and the fear inside me grew stronger. I felt I had to apologize for who I was, and couldn’t figure out why. Why was my family here to see me? I walked into the restaurant, and as we settled into the evening I was blown away by both how much everyone had changed and how much they still looked the same. Yes, all were older, but everyone still had their vital beauty.
Throughout history and in various mythologies we see the role of the father portrayed as that of the protector—his job is to keep the family safe and together. In Norse mythology, father Sigmund’s sword is shattered in battle and his son, Sigurd, ends up with a reforged sword with which to finish the task that his father couldn’t. Similarly, over time and the course of our lives, my father’s sword had been broken and smashed by his own enemies, and the pieces became the scattered lives and broken relationships in our family. Our family, who usually only gathered for funerals, came together for that show; by pursuing this recovery path, I had wielded the broken shards of the sword, piecing them back together to continue where my father had left off.
A giant shield was mounted on the wall at my parents’ old restaurant, above the lobby door. On the shield was a unique design: the Putignano family crest. I thought of that crest as we sat at the table, reunited
with all our addictions, demons, and ugliness, but together at last under our family’s coat of arms. I saw the unusual way in which life strips us down to rebuild us the way we are supposed to be. Over the last year on this tour I had been slowly beaten by depression, fighting an endless battle that pushed me ever closer to the ground. Finally, I had at last admitted defeat and stripped myself of my old weapons and armor, realizing the tools I used no longer worked for me. I found myself naked and vulnerable, and I could finally see why I had gone through this transformation. It was necessary to give up my old weapons in order to receive what truly belonged to me. There I sat, watching my family eat, realizing that I now carried the family crest’s shield and sword. Had I not been broken down the way I was, I wouldn’t have been ready to accept those weapons, passed down from generation to generation.
I left feeling protected, knowing I had real people who would show up for me and that all my fears were projections from the past. The following day Robert and I walked around Boston, traveling down ancient memory lanes. I was no longer afraid, knowing I had a true friend beside me. Afterward, I took the ferry over to Hull, across my funeral waters, as ferryman Charon brought me to the other side.
I walked down to the beach and was struck instantly by a feeling of power, as if two worlds had collided, as if a circle had just been completed: a beginning and its ending. I stood on the soft sand that pushed through my toes. Those archaic sands had created me, a human sand castle that eventually eroded and washed away to sea. I now stood on my past, my present, and my future. In the distance, I saw the ghost of my youth doing endless backflips in a row, up and down the beach, obsessed with his God-given path and determined to live out his dream. To the left of him, another one of my ghosts ran past me. He was a skinny young man, addicted to Klonopin, trying to outrun his anxiety. He fell to the ground, detoxing and having seizures, writhing in the sand that smeared all over his body. He was alone, terrified, and sick. Then there was the last ghost, whom I had not seen before. He shone like the sun but wasn’t painful to look at. I followed that strange image to the end of the beach, where the giant seawall overlooks Boston Harbor. The stench of red tide strangled
the air around me. That ghostly figure full of light climbed the wall and walked behind the massive boulders protecting the houses on the cliff. I climbed the rocks covered in dark, slimy seaweed with tiny periwinkles peeking out, tasting the salty, humid air on my lips.