The Harder They Fall (38 page)

I work in a place called the Center for Grieving Children and Teenagers and watch the recovery process with seven- or eight-year-old children who have recently gone through the death of a parent. We watch the process by which they return. This happens much more rapidly with children, and it’s amazing to watch. Sometimes they come in and they’re really regressed. Then sometimes by the end of the first day, they’ll be running around playing with all the other children, because it dawns on them, just as it does on somebody in active recovery, that they’re in the one place in the world where everyone else knows what they’re going through.

It’s the same model as for me. You leave the company of others in recovery and you enter a world where people don’t care, or if they care, they don’t understand, which is equally bad. Centers like this are springing up all over the country. This is the only one for the large area of New England and is getting more and more families. We have some 9/11 families now. It’s the most astounding experience. Engaging with children who are going through this kind of crisis is the most incredible thing I’ve done in my life. I had to go through a long period of training in bereavement issues that I knew nothing about except for my own experience. Then I realized I was doing it because my father left us when I was about that age. That hadn’t really occurred to me. After I was at the center for a while, I
was seeing myself as an eight-year-old. I had an opportunity—never having had children of my own—to see just how fragile and delicate and easily crushed an eight-year-old boy can be. It was terrifying for me. I was quitting every week.

Making a commitment to relate to these children was completely the result of my enthusiasm for being in recovery myself. Every single thing that’s happened in the last four years, including your being here, the Pulitzer Prize, my wife’s being with me, every single thing is a result of getting sober. And it’s been an amazing thing to watch in others. People come back from that long underworld experience, which can go on and on. Some people go there and they just stay there forever. I mean, I spent enough time in that state, clinically. I’ve been hospitalized five, six times for depression. The last time was in McLean Hospital and Mass General in ’97, ’98. I was in a psychotic depression, and the prognosis was that I was never going to get better. It was drug- and alcohol-induced partly, but I’ve also been diagnosed manic-depressive, suffer from post-traumatic stress, and so forth. So I have the combination. And I was in it for two years—that was the longest I’ve spent. Never believed I would come out of it. I was incapable of getting out of bed for sixteen hours a day. I didn’t leave my apartment for three months at a time. I attempted suicide. The hospitals didn’t work. That’s where drinking and drugs led me finally, and it went on for long enough it seemed it would never end. I mean, I was a dead person. I wasn’t a functioning person anymore. And it didn’t help to go to the hospital anymore.

Until I was seven or eight years old, I believed that most adults were crazy. I was born in Vienna in 1953, where my parents lived during my father’s Fulbright fellowship. We returned to Seattle, where my father did a doctorate at the University of Washington, studying under Theodore Roethke. Our next home was Minneapolis, where he taught at the University of Minnesota, along with John Berryman. There was a lot of trouble between my parents when I was young, leading to their divorce in 1961 when I was eight. There was no way my father could stay there, my parents’ relationship having deteriorated to the point where one of them was someday going to murder the other. I witnessed a lot of violence from earliest childhood. My parents didn’t turn it on me as much as themselves.
My mother took me and my younger brother to San Francisco. She remarried when I was eleven: a Hungarian refugee. He was more violent than my father. My stepfather had fought on the side of the Nazis. He’d been put in Siberia, in a slave-labor mine somewhere, by the Soviets. Then he got free and ended up in San Francisco where we were. And unerringly, my mother, who never had much luck with men, found her way to him. He turned out to be insane. He beat us, my brother and me. After about a year, he became very violent. Right on schedule, every six weeks, he would beat the shit out of us. We almost knew when it was coming. The rest of the time he was utterly silent and hostile. This was from when I was eleven to eighteen. We grew up feeling very isolated and afraid of the world. It wasn’t being beaten. That didn’t bother me so much as feeling constantly fearful and humiliated. So, later, I got the diagnosis in the eighties of manic depression and post-traumatic stress, along with the bipolar disorder I may have been born with. And I think that contributed a lot, although alcoholism runs in my family. I’m one of those people who has a dual diagnosis. I’ve led groups in mental health clinics with people who have that problem: who are mentally ill and addicts both. A more devastating form of affliction is hard to imagine. But if you drink, forget it, because you’re utterly lost! Drinking and drugs actually work for a long time, years, to cover your terror of life and to enable you to function socially.

My father also remarried and moved to New York. We remained close despite … I loved and do love my father. We corresponded from the time he left until I was in my twenties. When I was fourteen, I began to write poetry. One morning I got up and wrote a poem. I was so elated I sent it to my father, who replied with a very brief letter. He wrote, “I’ll be damned. You’re a poet. Welcome to hell.” I have the letter today.

When I discovered drinking as a teenager and in college, I was happy for the first time in my life. I loved it. Now I see I was an alcoholic. I never even drank socially. Right from the start, I used it as a drug, and people right away would look at me and say, “You know, Franz, you’re going to get drunk,” and I’d say, “No shit. Like, why do you drink?” It never occurred to me you would drink for any other reason. It was a door out of the world—my world—which I perceived as a hostile, nightmarish place, where I
couldn’t function very well. From the moment I had a drink … which maybe means I was born with it, but it hardly matters, it’s an addictive substance and I used it addictively, so I became an addict or was born one. And for five years, it worked. I was able to talk to people, write. I excelled at school. One of the most sinister things about addiction is that it actually enables you to function for a while. If it made you horribly sick from the start, who would do it? The reason you do it is it literally improves your life for a number of years, and then you reach a point where it slowly dawns on you that you cannot function without it. So then you’re fucked! But up until then, it works. In some ways, it was the happiest time in my life.

In the late sixties and through the seventies, it was very difficult to tell if you had a problem with compulsive and addictive substance use because everyone was using drugs socially. I went to high school in northern California, the mecca for all of this in the years 1967 to 1971. How would I not have been exposed to drugs and drinking! In high school, I was having these euphoric flights. I was on an exchange program in Europe for a year, but my immaturity and instability cut that short. I worked at a gas station in Berkeley for a while, then got accepted in the middle of the year at Oberlin College, which saved my life. This was the early seventies. Oberlin was a great, rigorous school, filled with fantastic scholars and artists of all kinds. It was also a sheltered environment where it was perfectly normal to use LSD. Everyone else is doing it around you. Then your friends all get to the point like, they’re thirty and “Okay, I’ve got to stop,” and they stop. And you’re like just getting started! And that was me.

I will do any substance that alters my mind and mood, and have done them all. There is no drug I have not used and abused. They don’t exist. I’ve used everything from opiates (all of them) to cocaine to amphetamines to benzodiazepines to marijuana. And drank with it. They always went together for me; I didn’t do one without the other. That was my way of life for twenty-five years until I got sober. It made me sick periodically, and I would lose jobs. Then I would feel better and start doing it again. I often did my writing during these in-between periods. This went right on until my final illness in 1997, when I became so ill that I literally was too terrified to leave my house to walk to a liquor store. I wasn’t even drinking. I
was in bed for sixteen hours a day. I was trying to commit suicide. I was trying to jump off the Tobin Bridge. I tried to electrocute myself in the bathtub. I tried to hang myself. I tried to overdose with opiates and alcohol. I bought that book about how to kill yourself, put the garbage bag around my head and all that. But for some reason I did not—it was not for lack of trying. There was some reason for that not to work….

My problem was I genuinely believed from the time I was a teenager until going on five years ago that I couldn’t write without drinking and without drugs. I was really fortunate. Some people come out of that and they really can’t write. I have friends who got sober and they couldn’t write for a year. Then they did. Poets I was around as a young child—Anne Sexton, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, et cetera—were big unregenerate drinkers, a very bad example. But right away, as soon as I got serious about the fellowship of the recovery program, not only did I start to write again but I wrote ten times more than I’d ever written, and it was better. It resulted in the last five years in
The Beforelife
,
Walking to Martha’s Vineyard
, and my new book. So in five years I wrote three books and they’re my best. I would have written something without sobriety, but it would have been the old stuff. Or I wouldn’t be alive. Or I’d be permanently deranged. None of this progress toward a more human and light-seeking poetry would have happened. I’m a person who can definitely say that I would have nothing of worth. It’s not like I have to go to meetings of my program. I love going. It took four years to make these bonds with people here, who are now closer to me than anyone in my family ever was, yet often I don’t even know them personally. It really does work, and I consider myself an example of someone for whom it does work.

I now understand that whatever gift I may possess does not have anything to do with drugs—that it is here in me already, and only needs health and a sense of well-being in order to flourish.

Those poets who drank still continued to function but then they died earlier than they might have, and often their writing became progressively an illustration of a sick mind at work. You can do it. Robert Lowell is the perfect example: a manic-depressive who was an alcoholic. The biographies make a big deal about his madness without mention of his drinking. I know
he was a serious classic alcoholic. I know people who’ve been to parties with him who would watch him when he was manic, self-medicating. He would be drinking what appeared to be tall glasses of water one after the other. Then they would get close to him and see these were tall twelve- or sixteen-ounce glasses of vodka or gin, which he was drinking as if he were a thirsty person drinking a glass of water on a hot day, one after the other, with no apparent effect on him. Enough alcohol to kill a normal person quickly. He would be so manic that it would medicate him, very temporarily, against the more florid symptoms of mania, then—like gasoline thrown on fire—make them even worse, until he started expounding on Hitler’s virtues and so forth. And I saw my father do it. He would drink and drink and drink, and he would become more lucid. And
then
he would become psychotic, hallucinate, and cry.

But up to the point you can learn how to function. There are many high-functioning alcoholics and drug addicts. But you are never yourself if you are drunk or high, and these men were never themselves. Many writers drink quite heavily at times but aren’t alcoholics. I don’t believe Theodore Roethke was an alcoholic, for example, despite his bravado on the subject. Drinking contributed to his premature death, but he was a manic-depressive. Ginsberg was not a drug addict either. He could use drugs. Then one day he went, “I don’t need this anymore,” and he didn’t have to do it, although he still did a little. This is a totally different thing from addiction. I know people who can drink heavily who don’t have a personality change, who can stop at a certain point and don’t have blackouts. An alcoholic has a personality change, blacks out, and does awful things he would never do as his real self. Somebody like Lowell never got to be his real self. Although he produced a beautiful, incredible body of work, we can only imagine what it would have been like had he received the benefit of recovery. Same thing with Faulkner, Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, any number of prominent American writers. They wrote these magnificent bodies of work, but what might they have done if they had got into recovery? They might have become Shakespeare. They had genius to be as great as anyone who ever lived, and in some ways still were, but you mourn what they might have been. Everyone insists, “Oh,
they needed to drink.” People don’t understand if they think that. They suppose it’s a Dylan Thomas drama—that the writers needed to be like that, and that this made them writers. No! It’s always the case that they wrote in spite of tremendous suffering from a fatal disease. Then they died. Dylan Thomas died when he was thirty-nine, and Hemingway blew his brains out. They still produced a body of work, they functioned, but they can only have been terribly miserable.