The Harder They Fall (13 page)
Read The Harder They Fall Online
Authors: Gary Stromberg
So what’s happened for me in the seventeen-and-a-half years since then is that I’ve had a child. I’m a single mother. I learned to trust that all of my needs would be provided for, although all of my wants would not be granted. And that God was not some cosmic bellhop, and that God was the source and the relationship upon which I can most depend, and to whom I need to turn in order to remember who I am—which is an alcoholic and drug addict. Somebody who was dangerously close to dying and who is given a daily reprieve based on the healing in community that goes on with brothers and sisters who are on the same path.
I know that no matter what, I don’t pick up a drink. And if my ass fell off, I call somebody else who is sober and who is working a spiritual path, and they help me get through my crisis, without picking up a drink or using.
My best friend died a couple of years after I got sober, and I thought that was the end of the world, ’cause she was sick with breast cancer. But I had learned this way of life where I could show up for people. It’s like Woody Allen said, 90 percent of life is just showing up. I was taught to show up and listen and for everything not to be
The National Annie Lamott Crisis
Hour
, but to bring some healing and some quiet and some faith where I was needed and to be there. That laughter and confidence and crying and just being together would be its own healing. So I was finally able to be the kind of friend I’d always wanted to be, but couldn’t.
It took me a long time to get my career started again after the devastating failure of my third book. It took me awhile to be able to write again. So I just started again and ended up with this incredible career. My first sober book,
All New People
, is one of my most favorite, favorite books. It was kind of small in scope and sold steadily. It wasn’t a big success to the world, but it was a gigantic success to my soul because it was finally the book I wanted to write. My windows felt like they were washed and very clean, and I had a new perspective on the world.
I always felt that I couldn’t write without alcohol and a little bit of dope, because I relied on the myth that most of the great writers were alcoholic and many of them drank when they wrote. Many of them started out
the day hungover, and many, many were alcoholic. My father was a writer and all of his friends drank a lot. It just seemed like they went hand-in-hand with each other, and I wasn’t sure I could unlock my unconscious and subconscious to tap into that dreamscape and soulscape and memory bank that you need to in order to write without alcohol. My mind was damaged by all the drugs and alcohol, and it took awhile of just health. When I was living on the houseboat taking lots of walks and trying to eat better, it was like an ambulatory psych ward, and I couldn’t be expected to bite off much creatively.
Then this thing started forming in me. This piece of work, the prologue to
All New People
, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. I let it form and bob up to the surface. It was kind of a lava lamp moving slowly, but distinctly, and I just started getting thoughts down, but didn’t have any confidence in myself, especially because I had just gotten the shit kicked out of me with
Joe Jones
. It got devastating reviews and people thought it might end my career, and I believed it to some extent. All of a sudden, again I don’t know why, I knew that when I got up that first sober morning, I was going to go for a run, take a hot shower, have a cup of coffee, and get back to work.
It came flowing out, but it also took me a long time to get my chops back. So this one piece, which is probably twenty pages, which I wrote for Bill Ryan, who was an editor at
California Magazine
and a very dear friend of my dad’s—it was just wonderful. It was exactly what I always dreamt of writing and it remains one of my favorite pieces. What happened was I took out enough gunk and slime from the fifty-five-gallon drum that I could now see these creative visions that come to me.
There’s a priest who once said that he believes heaven is just a new pair of glasses. By then I really loved being sober and I felt like I could see again. I could understand myself in a whole new way. That I wasn’t “better than” or “worse than.” That there was this terror and grief and rage inside me from my earliest days.
It must be this feeling of deprivation and self-loathing that led me into this journey of self-destruction, and I tried to medicate the pain. Little by little, as I was rediscovering parts of myself that were sealed off because I
couldn’t manage that much pain or disgrace. So lots of the prologue of
All New People
is recovered memories, like Christmas ornaments.
People started teaching me that amazing lesson that you didn’t think your way back to healing, you didn’t think your way back by dealing with your alcoholic mind, and you couldn’t solve your problems
because
of your alcoholic mind. It was like opening up boxes that were sealed off like in an Edgar Allan Poe story. Understanding why my parents had done or hadn’t been able to do what I had been so starved for. It was wonderful.
It was like those Chinese gift boxes, where you open it and there’s lots of beautiful shredded paper or newsprint, and then you come to a ball and you open it with anticipation and very attentively, and find this funny little thing in it. It might be a beautiful thing. Might be a gag thing. It might trigger your memory. But you’re attuned to it ’cause you’re not obsessed with drinking or getting the next batch of methedrine. You can pay attention. I started writing everything down and then I’d go to the next Chinese gift box, and it would be stuff about my childhood or be stuff about these new dreams I had of having a life with a family and a child.
All that crying I did in therapy and feeling things and getting it down on paper softened my heart. I’d always had a tender heart, but I had a tender
drunken
heart. Now I had a heart that became a tide-pool where I could take in more of life and just be with it. Deal with it spiritually or creatively. The tide-pool would flow back out to the visible world and maybe into other people or people who were trying to get sober. Give them a little bit of water with a little algae and nutrition and love and breath and whatnot. I was much more permeable, much more honest, because I started telling my secrets.
So those are the most important things about being creative. The softness of heart, taking the walls down, watering the ground in which we’re growing new seeds. Learning to pay attention and learning to tell the truth. How exhilarating the truth is.
At that point I started writing incredibly truthful books. My first books were really truthful but these were sober truthful books. I wrote a journal about being a mother, a sober mother. How crazy and what a mixed grill it was. So I could offer my experience, strength, and hope to other sober
mothers. And fathers. To say it’s okay to be angry a lot of the time and really bored. Here’s the solution: leave the room or call a friend. Then I started writing books that were total, radical truth-telling, because I was so exhilarated. All these people would tell me the truth of their sobriety or their drunkenness, and it would give me life.
I wanted to give people permission to tell their own truth and to live in it, and to let those deep wounds in us be healed and shred and cleansed out instead of just sealed over with more scar tissue.
The last five books I’ve written, the work of a sober writer, are just huge gifts of my sobriety. I had a gift, a certain gift, not a huge gift, but a good gift, and it was just being poisoned by alcohol and self-loathing and narcissism. I still have all those things, except I don’t have the alcohol, so I can use the narcissism and all the mistakes I make and self-doubt. I either use it as creativity or to help other people stay sober. It’s like alchemy. It goes from dross to gold.
Call it iron discipline. But for months
I never took my first drink
before eleven
P.M
. Not so bad,
considering. This was in the beginning
phase of things. I knew a man
whose drink of choice was Listerine.
He was coming down off Scotch.
He bought Listerine by the case,
and drank it by the case. The back seat
of his car was piled high with dead soldiers.
Those empty bottles of Listerine
gleaming in his scalding back seat!
The sight of it sent me home soul-searching.
I did that once or twice. Everybody does.
Go way down inside and look around.
I spent hours there, but
didn’t meet anyone, or see anything
of interest. I came back to the here and now,
and put on my slippers. Fixed
myself a nice glass of NyQuil.
Dragged a chair over to the window.
Where I watched a pale moon struggle to rise
over Cupertino, California.
I waited through hours of darkness with NyQuil.
And then, sweet Jesus! The first sliver
of light.
—Raymond Carver, “NyQuil”
Give me my whisky, when I be frisky
Give me my rye, when I be dry
Give me my reefer, when I be sickly
Give me my heaven, my heroin, before I die
—“Junko Partner—Traditional”
(musician)
D
R
. J
OHN, THE
“N
IGHT
T
RIPPER
,” sashayed into my life at an after-hours party in Los Angeles sometime in the late sixties. Musical wizardry is what we were told to expect, and the good doctor didn’t disappoint.
The club was packed with music-industry insiders, all filled with great expectations, when all of a sudden bells, whistles, and sundry other rhythm noisemakers joyously announced the band’s arrival. Its magical leader was decked out in a floor-length black velvet robe adorned with small bones and other odd trinkets. On his head he sported an enormous multicolored feather headdress. His face was eerily sprinkled with patches of sparkling glitter. Light up a joint and let this party begin!
Fronting a group of New Orleans exiles, Dr. John performed a rich gumbo of blues, cajun, funk, and dance hall, seasoned with Caribbean rhythms; music based on voodoo myths of the Crescent City. Gris-gris they called it. Weird, spooky songs with psycho-voodoo chanting that created images of imaginary places. Dr. John, strutting and in command, appeared like some kind of hip, exotic medicine man.
They call me Dr. John
I’m known as the Night Tripper
Got a satchel of gris-gris in my hand,
Got many clients that come from miles around
Runnin’ down my prescriptions
I got medicines, cure all y’alls ills,
I got remedies of every description
—“Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya”
Dr. John’s arrival in the psychedelic sixties was right on time. Unfortunately, heroin addiction was his closest companion and refused to leave the party.
A decade or so later, I met up with Dr. John (the “Night Tripper” name had been abandoned some time earlier) at a recording studio in New York. I had recently been hired to handle his public relations, so I thought I’d drop by and see how he was doing. One thing led to another, and when the conversation turned to drugs, as it always did in those days, I informed Mac that I was newly clean and sober. He mentioned that he too was trying to clean up, and I told him that he could call me if he ever wanted some help or just to talk about it.
Over the next couple of years, we spoke a few times about sobriety, and I heard rumors about his attempts at getting clean. It was very good news to one day learn that he had finally had enough.
According to Joel Dorn, my friend, “Mac is the most complete musician I know, a student and teacher of New Orleans tradition. He’s one of a kind. Our generation’s Louis Armstrong.” I couldn’t agree more. It’s hard to imagine that his musical gift almost died from drug addiction.
I interviewed Mac at his remote log cabin home, located up a long and winding dirt road overlooking a beautifully placid lake near Woodstock, New York. It reminded me faintly of bayou country. An old hound dog greeted my knock at the door with half-interested howling, but no one answered. Finally, after what seemed like several minutes, Mac stumbled to the door, mumbling apologies for having overslept. It was just past two in the afternoon!
He finally got his bearings, fixed a pot of coffee, and we went outside. Surveying the panoramic view of the lush countryside, we
pulled up a couple of rocking chairs on his front porch and began the interview.
I’ve never heard anyone speak as Mac does. He has a unique vocabulary and speech pattern, and similar to Mark Twain, is known for his creative use of language … “Mississloppy River.” He says things like “edjamacation.” You always have to be aware of his underlying humor. “Tigerette syndrome,” for instance, is a play on Tourette’s syndrome, and “bisexual polar bear” is Mac’s way of saying bipolar. I once reminded him of something he told me on the telephone, to which he responded, “I wasn’t aware that I wasn’t awake the last time we spoke.”
During the course of the interview, I tried to stay out of his way as much as possible, as he had such a great rhythm going. Regarding his references to treatment, Mac is very vague about time. He doesn’t delineate chronology. For some reason, I enjoy this interview more with each reading, as I pick up new insight into his wondrous psyche. I hope you will find it as compelling.